Missing In Action!

We’ve been off the radar a little over the past few weeks, and with good reason too. First we had a long overdue trip to Ireland with the kids to catch up with every one back home. It was the first opportunity we had and thanks to our good friend and fellow Airbnb host Charles who looked after our guests and check-ins whilst we were away. The second reason is that we have some great news.

After such a successful year with Airbnb and with it taking up most of our time between hosting, blogging and the forum we thought why not add to the work load and bring on not one but two new apartments to Airbnb! They both came about within a few days of each other and even though we are in our low season here in Barcelona, we thought what better time than now to launch 2 new places.

First up we have an apartment in the same block as our existing 3 bedroom apartment which we know will do exceptionally well. Not only is it the same lay out but it has an amazing 200 m2 terrace. To quote our latest review of this place.. “You can land a plane out there it’s so huge, and beautiful on top of that!” For those of you who do not know Barcelona, a terrace/garden is a rare thing to find let alone one as large as this. We are really excited to see how this one does on Airbnb. We have a few more bookings already between now and Christmas, so it looks like this one wil keep us busy.

The second apartment is up in the north of Barcelona in the Gracia Quarter. This is less touristy and more the local part of the city. Whilst still close to everything its a village within the city, with its own unique vibe. The owners have restored the apartment keeping all the original fixtures and fittings. This is just our style. We have had a few bookings on this one so far and look forward to welcoming the guests as staying here will be a real treat.

So with all this going on I have also been busy developing a new site for our apartments. Let me introduce PhilonaRooms.com

We’ve had a basic site up and running for a while now and have had a few guests find philonarooms website on google and then made a booking!  In fact one of guests never even heard of airbnb and only through philonarooms was directed to airbnb. We felt it was time to grow the site and start to promote it.

We do require anyone making a booking to go through Airbnb’s site for booking. This way the guest and we are covered and we have a middle ‘man’ incase of any problems. It’s worked well so far, but we would love to see Airbnb provide their booking engine for our properties by way of an iFrame on our site..That would be ideal!

So there you have it, its been manic to say the least. We’ll still loving Airbnb and hosting and look forward to what lays ahead for us.

Cheers,

Phil