Airbnb Automated Messages: How to Take Your Guest Messaging to the Next Level

Establishing good communication with Airbnb guests via messages is crucial to ensure they enjoy their stay at your vacation rental home. You should build rapport with guests while providing them with the necessary information because it will help you get 5-star reviews and repeat bookings.

Writing the same welcome message or other messages repeatedly and sending them to guests manually is very time-consuming, especially when you have many listings. But by using the Airbnb scheduled messages feature, you can automate your guest communications and run your SRT business more efficiently.

Find out how to optimize your communication with guests and ensure a personalized experience using Airbnb automated messages.

Airbnb Scheduled Messages

Available to all hosts, Airbnb scheduled messages feature helps streamline their communication with guests. You can use it to share the routine info your guests need after booking your home.

You can create templates for sending your guests the same helpful information about staying in your space, for example, house rules, directions to your property, check-in and check-out instructions, etc. After that, you can schedule to send such messages automatically based on such triggers as a new reservation, check-in, or check-out, selecting the time before or after the trigger.

You can personalize your Airbnb check-out message and other scheduled messages by adding shortcodes. These are special tags that act as placeholders. They gather information from a guest’s booking (such as their name and check-in date) and your listing details (such as your city, address, and house rules) to fill in the blanks. Currently, there are 34 shortcodes available. 

Airbnb scheduled messages is a useful feature that saves time and simplifies communication, but it has its limitations:

• There are only three trigger events (a new booking, check-in, and check-out).

• You can’t schedule messages for last-minute bookings or short stays where the trigger time is greater or equal to the lead time.

• If you list your property on Vrbo or Booking.com, you’ll need additional messaging services for those channels.

So, if you want all your guest messages to be relevant, personalized, and centralized in one intuitive app, you need the flexibility of vacation rental software tools like Hospitable. With Hospitable’s Guest Experience functionality, you can ensure fast and clear communication with your guests.

Airbnb Automated Messages: How Hospitable Can Help You

Hospitable removes the labor-intensive process of manually responding to your Airbnb guests and makes it easy to automate messages at all customer journey stages, from booking inquiries to check-out and beyond.

You just need to develop a list of message templates (or use ours) to cover every stage of the message flow and apply shortcodes to personalize them for each guest (there are 50+ shortcodes available). Then, you can set up message rules for each of these stages. Events that can trigger an automatic response are:

• New inquiry

• New pre-approval

• New request to book

• New reservation

• New cancellation

• Expired pre-approval

• Inquiry/booking denied

• New special offer

• New payment issue

Messages that reply to an event can be sent immediately or delayed for up to 60 minutes.

You can also create scheduled message rules that plan a message in advance—when a reservation is made, before or after the check-in or check-out of your guests, or on a day of the week. You can schedule messages that include check-in instructions, access codes, follow-up messages, check-out instructions, review requests and reminders, and re-engagement (sent after check-out).

Scheduled messages can be sent to guests who book last minute. If the guests have booked their stay within three days from the check-in date, they can receive a booking confirmation message that includes check-in instructions and house rules. The system will skip the scheduled check-in message to avoid sending several messages coming one by one.

AI powers Hospitable’s system that recognizes questions from your guests on more than 20 common topics and can answer on your behalf almost instantly, using your pre-written responses. Hospitable can also send messages to guests when relevant, considering specific criteria. For example, if your listing is available before or after the reservation, Hospitable can automatically upsell an extra night or late check-out.

Hospitable has integration with ChatGPT that can help you quickly craft answers to unusual questions. Go to the guest conversation in your Inbox and select the magic wand. Once a draft response to your guest’s question is generated, you can edit it before sending it to your guest.

Hospitable works for Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com listings, making it easy for you to communicate on all platforms. You’ll be able to manage all your messages in one centralized inbox and will never miss any booking request or a question from your guest. 

As you see, Hospitable’s Guest Experience functionality is more advanced than the Scheduled Message feature on Airbnb. And Hospitable is not limited to only guest messaging. Our system can automatically send notifications to your cleaners to let them know they have a job to do, even if it’s for the same-day turnover. We can also help you get more positive reviews by automating review follow-ups with your guests.

Hospitable is all-in-one vacation rental software with comprehensive features that can help you automate 90% of repetitive tasks, saving you a lot of time. You can use our direct booking website builder to drive repeat direct bookings. As a vacation rental channel manager, Hospitable can help you efficiently manage bookings on multiple channels from a single dashboard and be protected from double bookings. Our tool will help you put your STR business on autopilot.

Bottom Line

Airbnb scheduled messages feature allows you to automate your booking, check-in, and checkout communications and add a personal touch using shortcodes, but it has limitations. A much better solution is to use vacation rental software like Hospitable, which offers a comprehensive system to automate all your conversations with guests and your team.

With Hospitable, you can stay on top of your guest communication and run your short-term rental business on autopilot. It saves you time to focus on providing exceptional guest experience and marketing your property and scale faster.