How to beat your local market.
September and October are brutal in Miami. Occupancy, revenue, and average daily rates all bottom out.
Yet guests are still booking. Even in September 2025, two in 5 Miami listings got booked. All you have to do is make sure yours is one of them. While you can mitigate a slow patch by optimizing your listing, many hosts overlook the biggest growth lever: advertising in more places.
Take a look at the average occupancy in the northern Miami Market (the shaded bars) and compare it to the blue line, which represents occupancy for our listings. Now imagine the red line was the sole source of our revenue. That line represents guests who booked us through Airbnb, and no, the blue line is not missing at the beginning of 2024; our listings were advertised solely on Airbnb until late summer. Everything between the red and blue lines is the extra revenue we make compared to the 80% of Airbnb hosts who only list on that one platform.
Notice how the red line mirrors our early timeline, while the blue line completely outperforms the shaded Miami Market average once we expanded across channels.
Here's the exact breakdown of how that diversification happened: what started as a single red stream on Airbnb evolved into a multi-channel STR machine fueled by Vrbo, Booking.com, direct booking websites, and partner channels.
Listing on multiple channels not only increases the chance of your listing being seen by potential guests, but it is also the foundational footprint required for AI search engines and answer engines to crawl, recognize, and recommend your home. As an added benefit, it reduces your dependency on a single channel for the health of your short-term vacation rental business and increases your revenue. Ours went up over 80% in year one.
If you look at where our bookings are coming in from in Q2 of ‘26, less than a quarter of our guests find us on Airbnb. We constantly evaluate new advertising partners to list on; currently we’re on 20 channels, with 5 more coming online in the next week or so.
We aren't saying you should plaster your property across 20 channels while ignoring the fundamentals. If you are in a market like Miami, make sure you clear this slow-season checklist first:
1. Dial in your settings: Optimize minimum-stay rules, select the right cancellation policy, and know when to ease up on restrictions. Pay close attention to your booking window so you can use powerful last-minute discounts and custom promotions effectively.
2. Master the fundamentals: Dynamic Pricing, spotless reviews, great photos, compelling descriptions, perfect amenities, and top-tier hospitality are non-negotiable. If you are missing any of these, slow season is the time to fix them.
3. Leverage platform badges: Guest Favorite and Loved by Guests status can make a real difference. Understand how Airbnb’s new fee structures affect your net rates, and decide whether to opt into newer discount features, like Top Guest on Airbnb, and marketing features like advertising on VRBO.
4. Keep your calendar wide open: Make sure your calendar is bookable for the next year. I saw a listing this week that was only open three months out, which is a massive mistake. Our Christmas-to-New-Year's week got booked in May, a full eight months before check-in.
Finally, without a robust Property Management System, managing multiple channels is nearly impossible. We use Hostaway as the nerve center of our short-term rental business. True, it is a business expense, but it helped us increase revenue by over 80% in the first year alone.
Once you have finished the checklist, stop relying on a single source for your guests. Start looking for the channels that can put your listing in front of entirely new audiences.