If you have been following along with my posts, you know I am a big fan of encouraging hosts to be themselves. For hosts to give an authentic hosting experience that they feel best suits their values, their space and their lifestyle. You don’t need to be everything for everyone as this will guarantee you to be on the fast track for burnout.
Hospitality Burnout is real. People pleasing the wrong people is the cause.
The best way to avoid this is to focus on your Ideal Guest by creating an Ideal Guest Avatar.
So today, I want to talk about your ideal guest – the guest who will love your space and your neighborhood as much as you do. These people are like kindred spirits who bring the magic to your home. Their appreciation of your space transcends the financial transaction and brings joy to your world. These guests become repeat guests and also tell their like minded peers who also bring the same magic into your orbit.
I know this all sounds woo-woo and a bit over the top for a simple hospitality business and perhaps it is. But let me share some of my story of when I started hosting.
Originally, I simply thought of hosting as a side hustle. Setting up an apartment for somebody to stay and hoping they would like it and pay me some pocket money. However, what I discovered was there were some guests who really lit me up and brought me joy. These guests really appreciated my efforts and showered me with gratitude that made all of the hard work worth it. It doesn’t happen with each booking but when it does, it restores your faith in humanity and reminds you that there are many great people in this world that we are yet to meet. This is when I started to really appreciate the hidden benefits of hosting, the satisfaction of a job well done and learning which guests were the ones that I wanted to serve.
(If you want to read more of my story, I have more detail here.)
So how can we find these mythical unicorn guests? Well first we have to identify who they are, what is important to them and where they live and spend time so we can attract them to us.
When I work with my consulting clients, the first thing I do with them is to construct their ideal guest avatar. Really get personal and construct a vision of who you want to see in your space and who will appreciate your hospitality.
Task- Creating Your Ideal Guest Avatar
Focus on one person – they can be real or imaginary. This could be a past guest that has really been the perfect guest that has really clicked with you. Or if you are early in your hosting journey, who do you see yourself serving?
For this person, what is their:
- name
- age group
- family history
- job
- income level
- hobbies and pastimes?
Dig right down into their personal story:
- their hopes
- their dreams
- their fears.
Flesh them out to a complete person:
- favorite color
- favorite food
- where do they like to go shopping?
- How many people in their family?
- Do they travel with their family?
- How often do they travel?
- how much money do they spend when they travel?
- What do they need when they travel?
For bonus points, find a magazine picture or construct one using a collage. Print this picture and have their image taped to your wall next to your desk. Or even save this as your screen saver.
If you a visual person, go all out and make a vision board to put on your wall. When you can see your ideal guest avatar, you can keep them at the front of your mind. You can remind yourself who you are speaking with when you are creating your listing copy or doing your social media marketing.
“Why is all of this work important?”, I hear you ask.
As a host it is often easy to forget who we are serving and why we do what we do as we get stuck into the details of cleaning schedules, home maintenance, paying the electricity bills and the like. Sure it is a business and we get paid for the work, but for hosts like you and I, this is more than just a job. The pleasure we gain from providing comfort and support to weary travelers is the joy of hospitality work. We want to maximize this joy and to do that we need to attract these ideal guests.
When we have our ideal guest avatar, everything we then do is to serve them. The way we set up the house, the things we include, the things we don’t need to include, the way we write the listing description and the branding we use on our social media is all for this one purpose.
Knowing who we are speaking with helps with the writers block when it comes time to write the listing page, the welcome emails, the house compendium as we are talking to a real person and not just an abstract stereotype.
It isn’t just all woo-woo. There is also a financial benefit. Marketing ROI’s are significantly improved when the target market is clearly identified.
Intimately knowing your ideal guest makes it easy to spot people who are NOT your ideal guest. These are the guests who are likely to cause you headaches, heartaches and wind up costing you money.
When these people make inquiries, it will be obvious that these people will not be suitable and so you can allow them to move onto a different host and a different listing that will be a better fit.
I will delve into that a bit more in another post but I also do a deep dive into this in The Wholehearted Host Club. This private club is a place where you can share with me and other hosts about your experiences.
The relationship between your perfect guests and The Wholehearted Host is where the magic of the sharing economy resides.
Welcome to the exclusive opportunity to chat with Tracey Northcott, a seven-figure Airbnb host. Spend an hour bouncing ideas, brainstorming, and picking each other’s brains to help elevate your short-term rental business.
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