Can You Automate Your Airbnb?
Yes, you can automate certain tasks required of you as a vacation rental host.
Even if you only oversee one property, Airbnb hosting can feel like a full-time job. That’s why there is extreme benefit in automating various aspects of your hosting duties and Airbnb property itself.
Automating your Airbnb duties saves you time spent communicating with guests, scheduling professional cleaners, and more. Below, learn more reasons to automate your vacation rental hosting day-to-day tasks.
5 Reasons to Automate Your Vacation Rental Business
Being a host on Airbnb can be hectic because you have to juggle many roles to ensure that everything runs smoothly and your guests are happy.
If you own multiple vacation rental properties, it involves even more work and keeps you constantly busy. It can get extremely overwhelming at times, so you are always looking for ways to streamline your operations and save time.
The good news is that you don’t necessarily need to hire a property management company. Rental software can help you run your business with ease. Keep reading to learn the 5 top benefits of short-term rental automation software.
1. Flawless Communication With Guests
Communication with guests is one of the critical elements of your success as a host. It plays a crucial role in their overall experience and helps in establishing better relationships with them. Excellent communication makes guests feel cared for and enables you to get more 5-star reviews and more reservations.
You should proactively communicate with your guests before, during, and after their stay. They also expect prompt responses to their messages, so it’s one of the most time-consuming tasks you as a host have to deal with daily.
Short-term rental software lets you automate most conversations with travelers using message templates and applying shortcodes to make them personalized. You can schedule automatic messages, such as booking confirmation, and be sure that your guests will receive them at the right time.
The best thing is that Airbnb automation tools never sleep and allow you to interact with your guests when you’re physically unavailable to do so. This way, your guests can get perfect customer service 24/7.
2. Save Time on Routine Operations
Time is your most valuable asset, so it’s critical to use it wisely. You should look at it as an opportunity to do more to achieve your goals.
Spending time manually assigning tasks to your team and managing routine operations over and over again is unlikely to help your business reach its full potential. You can achieve much better results if you automate daily operations and repetitive tasks.
Vacation rental management software saves time, allowing you to focus on the most important aspects of your personal life and on activities that will help you scale your business. And don’t forget that it is much cheaper than hiring a property management company.
3. Manage All Listings From a Single User Interface
If you have listings on several vacation rental platforms, manually keeping your calendars and availability in sync can be a nightmare. If you fail to do it properly, you may end up with double bookings that can seriously damage your reputation.
Rental management software allows hosts to connect multiple accounts on different channels to manage them and update pricing in one place. With instant calendar sync across platforms, you’ll be protected from double bookings and won’t lose any reservations.
4. Get More Positive Guest Reviews
Good reviews are vital in attracting more travelers and getting more bookings. Unfortunately, many guests are reluctant to leave reviews, which means you need to encourage them to do so. The easiest way to get positive reviews is to leave reviews for your guests, but doing it manually can be a daunting task for a busy host.
Rental management software solutions allow hosts to request guest reviews and publish theirs automatically. They can also help you manage bad reviews from guests by publishing your negative reviews at the last moment before the review period is due to expire.
5. Rental Software Is Smart
Rental software solutions are constantly evolving, and some of them use artificial intelligence. This helps adjust communication with guests to ensure that you provide them with relevant information.
Communication can be adjusted according to the type of travelers or a certain condition like calendar availability. For example, information about playgrounds will only be included in messages for guests who travel with kids. Or, you can set up your Airbnb automation software to offer your guests late check-out if your property is available.
Some tools are also capable of detecting questions on common topics in guest messages and instantly sending personalized responses. Your guests are sure to appreciate it if you answer their questions faster.
Airbnb Automation Ideas to Increase Efficiency
There are multiple ways to automate the duties of an Airbnb host. Keep reading to learn automation tips to make your hosting responsibilities simpler — and check out the end of the chapter where we provide top recommendations for Airbnb automation software.
Automating Guest Communication
Guest communication doesn’t just occur when a guest checks into your property until they leave. A 5-star guest experience requires you to communicate with potential and booked guests any time of day, answering a plethora of questions within a reasonable time.
If you’ve managed a vacation rental before, you’ve likely received countless questions about the same handful of topics: the WIFI password, check-in and check-out instructions, early check-in or late check-out requests, and the list goes on.
What if there was a way to automate your responses to these frequently asked questions? Guest communication automation does just that. With this type of technology, you can autoreply to common questions, schedule routine messages applicable to every guest, and customize your communication templates.
There is some work required upfront to set up your automated communications, but you’ll save hours per week in the long run.
Automating Check-In and Check-Out
Automating this aspect of your vacation rental goes hand-in-hand with automating your guest communication. Specifically, you can utilize technology to automatically send check-in and check-out instructions to future and current guests. This will save you time and extra trips to your property to help guests check-in.
There’s also another aspect of check-in/check-out automation that you can employ: keyless entry.
Keyless entry, which involves the use of smart lock hardware and software, means that your guests can automatically check into your rental whenever they arrive at the property without you having to be there. It also means that you’ll no longer have to deal with lost keys and re-keying costs.
Smart locks use custom, temporary codes so that you’re always able to control who can and cannot enter your property. All you have to do is provide guests with their unique codes before they check in and let automation do the rest.
Automating Pricing
Vacation rental prices are a lot like gas prices or the housing market — they change nearly every day. If you’re charging the same nightly rate for your Airbnb every day of the year, then you’re probably leaving money on the table.
Keep in mind that Airbnb provides a Smart Pricing tool for hosts, but since a primary concern of the company is to keep prices low for guests, using this tool may not be in a host’s best interest.
This is where dynamic pricing automation comes in. Dynamic pricing tools use various criteria and insights to provide you with a data-driven pricing strategy. You’ll be able to automatically increase prices when demand is high and lower prices when you’re at risk of a vacancy.
Top pricing automation software seamlessly integrates with Airbnb, Vrbo, and dozens of other channels and property management systems.
Automating Bookings
Many Airbnb hosts, in time, decide to start listing their properties on other online travel agencies or even accept direct bookings on their own websites. This can be a great way to cast a wider net and boost your revenue. The downside, however, is the risk of double booking.
In instances of double booking, someone always gets let down. The Airbnb guests whose reservation must be canceled or rescheduled may decide to look elsewhere for vacation lodging or even leave you a poor review. You can prevent this through automated channel management software.
Channel managers ensure your calendars from all booking sites are organized and compiled into one, easy-to-use interface. You’ll be able to manage all your listings from one place, synchronize your calendars, and organize messages from guests across multiple OTAs.
Automating Vacation Rental Cleaning
When running a vacation rental, not only do you want to book guests to stay at your property as much as possible. You’ll also need to be sure to book cleaning and property maintenance services on a regular basis.
Finding a reliable cleaner or service provider, however, is no easy feat. You’ll have to search for local cleaning teams and assess their credentials and reviews to see if they’re a good fit for your property. You’ll also need to send them numerous messages before, during, and after the turnover process to provide instructions and answer any questions.
Luckily, there’s a way to automate your vacation rental cleaning so that your rental is always clean and ready before the next set of guests arrives. Cleaning automation software ensures that you always have a professional ready to handle the clean-up of your property whenever you need them.
Top software options like Turno also make it easy to find local, experienced cleaners in a pinch.
Automating Reviews
Just like you can send automatic responses to guests’ questions, you can also send automatic guest reviews upon check-out.
According to Mashvisor, “posting a review about your guest encourages them to leave their review of your place in return. And the more positive reviews you can get, the more likely you can attract guests to book your Airbnb.”
If writing reviews for your short-term rental guests is so important, why not let review automation software handle the legwork and give you back hours of your time? After a guest checks out, you can use automated messaging to schedule their positive review to be published after a certain amount of time. If you need to leave a negative review, software makes it easy to do so.
Enhance the Guest Experience With Airbnb Automation
Airbnb automation software is a powerful way to improve the efficiency of your operations and increase ROI without increasing costs while eliminating the tedious manual work that comes with hosting.
It can help you with many responsibilities and will give you the time you need to focus on ways to scale and grow your business.
Written in part by the Hospitable.com team
Hospitable.com is a short-term rental automation software trusted by hosts and managers of 290,000+ properties in 140+ countries. It can take care of 90% of guest communication, save you from double-booking, and help you manage your team.
