How to build a guest email list from your vacation rental site

Why a guest email list is worth having

Think about the last guest who found you on Airbnb, had a lovely week, and left. If they want to come back next summer, where do they go? Back to Airbnb. They search again, they see twenty other places, and even if they pick you, the platform takes its cut a second time.

Now imagine you had their email. In March you send a short note: the garden is in bloom, these weeks are still open, here is a small thank you discount for returning guests. They book on your own site. No commission, no competing listings, no algorithm deciding whether they see you.

That is the whole idea. A list of people who already like your place is the cheapest marketing you will ever have. We wrote more about the bigger picture in how to get direct bookings. This article is about the practical part: how the signup on your site actually works, step by step.

What a guest sees on your site

Near the bottom of your property page, just above the footer, there is a section called something like “Stay in the loop”. It has a short line of text, a field for the email address, a field for the name that they can leave empty, and a checkbox.

The checkbox matters. Next to it is a sentence that says the guest agrees to receive occasional emails from your property and can unsubscribe at any time. They have to tick it themselves. This is the consent that European privacy law asks for, and it is also plain good manners. Nobody ends up on your list by accident.

You can change the title, the text, the button label and the wording of the consent sentence in the editor, the same way you edit any other section. You can also hide the section entirely if you do not want it. We put it on every site because most hosts tell us they want it and then never get around to adding it.

The confirmation email

When a guest clicks Subscribe, nothing lands in your list yet. We send them one email with the subject “Confirm your subscription to” and the name of your property. Inside is a single button. When they click it, they are in.

This extra step is called a confirmed signup, and it does three useful things for you.

• It keeps the list clean. A mistyped address never gets confirmed, so you are not paying your email tool to send to addresses that bounce.
• It keeps pranksters out. Nobody can put a stranger’s address on your list, because the stranger would have to click the button.
• It gives you proof. If anyone ever asks, you can show that the person agreed and then confirmed it. In Germany and Austria this kind of double confirmation is what courts expect to see.

If the guest never clicks, the address is deleted after seven days and you never see it. If you have set a booking email on your property, replies to the confirmation go to you, so a guest who hits reply reaches a human.

Where the contacts show up

Open your dashboard and click Subscribers in the menu. You get one card per property with everyone who confirmed: their email, their name if they typed one, the day they confirmed, and the day the contact will be deleted. Contacts that are about to go are marked with a little “soon” badge.

Each card has a Download CSV button. A CSV is the simple spreadsheet file that every email tool can read. Open it in Excel or Google Sheets, or import it straight into Mailchimp, Brevo, MailerLite or whatever you already use. The file also includes an unsubscribe link for each contact, which brings us to the next point.

Your side of the bargain

Once the list is in your hands, you are the one responsible for how it is used. Three simple rules keep you on the right side of the law and of your guests.

• Only email them about the place they signed up for. If you have three properties, a guest who signed up on one should not hear about the other two unless they asked to.
• Put an unsubscribe link in every email. Your email tool adds one automatically. If you write emails by hand, paste the unsubscribe link from the CSV, which is unique for each contact.
• Do not overdo it. A note before each season and the odd special offer is plenty. The guests who signed up want to hear from you, not from you every week.

The monthly email

On the first of each month we send you an email called “Monthly guest list”. For each property it tells you how many people are on the list, how many are new since last month, and how many will be deleted before the next email. There is a Download CSV link for each property that works for seven days.

If you only ever read that one email and download the file once a month, you will never lose a contact. You can turn the email off under Settings, Notifications, but we would not recommend it.

Why contacts are deleted after two months

This surprises some hosts, so here is the reasoning. We think of our side as a hand over point, not as your mailing list. You collect the addresses on your site, we hold them long enough for you to pick them up, and then we let go. Two months and a week means every contact appears in at least two monthly emails before it goes, with a bit of slack for the month you are busy.

Holding your guests’ data for as short a time as possible is also simply the right thing to do. If a guest ever asks what we know about them, the honest answer is “very little, and not for long”.

If you forget to download for two months straight, the contacts from that period are gone for good. That is the one thing to remember from this whole article: when the monthly email arrives, click the link.

What guests can do

Every guest can unsubscribe with one click from the link in your emails, and the same page has a button to delete their address completely. If they unsubscribe, they vanish from your next download and the record is removed after a month. If they delete, it is gone right away. You do not have to do anything in either case.

Keeping bots out

A signup box on a public website attracts automated junk, so there are a few quiet protections behind the form. There is a hidden field that only robots fill in. There is a short wait after the page opens before a signup is accepted, because scripts submit instantly and people do not. There are limits on how many signups one address or one network can send in an hour. And if a property gets an unusual burst of signups, we pause its form for a day and let you know.

You will see a notice on the Subscribers page if that ever happens, with a button to switch the form back on. In practice, because every address has to be confirmed, junk signups never reach your list anyway. The protections exist so our email sending stays healthy.

Free and Pro

The signup box is on every site, free plan included, and every signup is stored and confirmed no matter which plan you are on. The free plan shows you the first new contact of each month per property. The rest are counted but not shown. Pro shows all of them. If you upgrade, everything still inside the two month window appears on the spot, so nothing is lost by starting free.

A simple routine

Here is what we suggest, and it takes about five minutes a month.

1. When the monthly email arrives, download the CSV for each property.
2. Import it into your email tool. Most tools skip addresses that are already there, so you can import the whole file every time.
3. A few weeks before each season, write one short, friendly email with your open dates and a reason to book direct.

That is it. Over a year, a modest list of past guests who book directly will quietly pay for your site many times over. For ideas on what to write, see how to market a vacation rental.