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 have a positive experience during their stay at your vacation rental home. You should build rapport with guests while providing them with the necessary information, as this will help you earn 5-star reviews and secure 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, the 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 to send your guests the same helpful information about staying in your space, such as 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.

You can also set up quick replies in the Messages tab—short message templates that contain pre-written answers to frequently asked questions. You can create them ahead of time to address topics such as availability, directions, transportation, WiFi, early check-in, and late check-out, so you don't have to write them from scratch when chatting with a guest.

The Messages tab utilizes AI to comprehend a guest's question and automatically suggest a quick reply to address it. The suggestion appears in your conversation with your guest, but only you can see it. Then, you can edit the quick reply before you send it or write a different response.

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.
• Although AI recognizes questions from guests on a limited number of topics, it only suggests your pre-written responses, which you need to edit and send manually.
• 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 our STR super app, you can automate 90% of your guest communication on Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and your Direct booking website with the help of AI.

Airbnb Automated Messages: How Hospitable Can Help You

Hospitable streamlines the labor-intensive process of manually responding to your Airbnb guests, making 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—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 at the last minute. If guests book their stay within three days of 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 prevent sending multiple messages one after another.

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.

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 at every stage of the reservation journey, using your pre-written responses. Hospitable currently detects questions about WiFi, streaming services like Netflix, parking, pets, discounts, early and late check-in, late check-out, air conditioning, and more. You can find a complete list of question categories in our help article.

Our system utilizes AI to enable you to quickly generate a draft response to any guest message. Just open any guest conversation in your Inbox and click the 'Suggest with AI' button. Hospitable will draft a response to your guest's last message in a few seconds based on the conversation with the guest so far, booking details, previous replies to similar guest messages in the past, and any information you have added to the Knowledge Hub.

Once a draft response is generated, you can review it and make any necessary edits before sending it to your guest. You can also select the 'Improve with AI' button to rewrite a message. Just provide some bullet points as guidance, and Hospitable will craft a personalized reply.

You can create a digital guidebook and upload it to the Knowledge Hub to educate the AI about your properties. Then, our AI will instantly answer your guests' questions if the answers are in the guidebook.

Watch the video to learn more about Hospitable's AI features that can take your messaging automation to the next level.

Hospitable works seamlessly for Airbnb, Vrbo, Agoda, and Booking.com listings, as well as your direct booking website, making it easy for you to communicate across all your channels. 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 can see, Hospitable's Guest Communication and AI functionality is more advanced than Airbnb's Scheduled Messages feature. And Hospitable is not limited to only guest messaging. Our system can automatically send notifications to your cleaners, letting them know they have a job to do, even if it's for 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 short-term rental software with comprehensive features that can help you automate 90% of repetitive tasks, saving you a lot of time. As a connectivity provider, Hospitable is an Airbnb Preferred+ Software Partner, which signifies that we have exceeded Airbnb's technical, foundational, and performance requirements.

You can also 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 short-term 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 with the help of AI and run your short-term rental business on autopilot. It saves you time to focus on providing an exceptional guest experience and marketing your property, allowing you to scale faster.