Airbnb Automation: 11 Ways to Streamline Your Business

Many hosts start their Airbnb because they want passive income and location freedom—the ability to earn money wherever they are despite not being physically present at their property. However, running an Airbnb business is like any other part-time or full-time job, and it's no wonder many hosts are considering automation to cope with the workload.

Being an STR host is a rewarding experience, but even if you manage only one listing on a single OTA platform, it may get extremely stressful and overwhelming. As a host, you are responsible for many tasks, from marketing your STR property to communicating with guests and coordinating cleaning and maintenance.

Airbnb automation can help remove the stress from the equation and give you more free time to focus on providing exceptional guest experience and increasing profits or spending this time on things you care about.

By automating your short-term rental management, you can save up to 90% of your time on your routine operations. To help you get the most out of your efforts, here are some tips you may find helpful when automating your Airbnb business.

What Is Airbnb Automation and Why Invest in It?

Airbnb automation streamlines routine operations to improve efficiency and minimize costs associated with managing a vacation rental property. These daily and recurring tasks include

• Communicating with guests
• Updating booking calendar
• Adjusting pricing
• Writing guest reviews
• Handling check-ins and check-outs
• Coordinating cleanings, etc.

By automating as many tasks as possible, you won't have to do them yourself. Then, you'll be able to focus on the bigger picture and have more time to market your Airbnb business and make it more competitive. That means you need to use automation software with a comprehensive set of features, like Hospitable. Our tool will help you turn your real estate side hustle into a lucrative business.

Automating your Airbnb will cost you money, so you might wonder whether it will be worth it. Here are key reasons why you should use automation as an Airbnb host:

• You'll save time doing routine tasks, such as optimizing your nightly rates and updating booking calendars, and have more time to focus on the most critical aspects of growing your business.
• Automation tools give you comprehensive control over your properties, so you can become a remote host and manage your Airbnb rentals from anywhere.
• Automation can help you get more things done, increase productivity, and meet all your business needs. Then, you'll have time and energy to list and manage more rental properties.
• Automation enables faster replies to booking requests, which can increase your occupancy rate and overall revenue. Travelers are more likely to book with you if they hear back from you quickly.

What Aspects of Your Business Can You Automate?

Many tools and software solutions can help hosts automate different aspects of rental property management, including guest messaging, calendar synchronization, and creating tasks for your team. So, how do you choose the right one for your Airbnb? What things should you automate to make your business more efficient? Let's find out.

Communication with guests

Effective communication with travelers is one of the critical elements of your success on the platform. Airbnb always considers the response rate when giving hosts the Superhost status, which adds credibility to their listing. Moreover, responding fast to prospective guests can help you win more reservations and increase your occupancy rate. Communication is also important for providing a great guest experience and making them feel cared for.

At the same time, communication with guests is one of the most time-consuming tasks for short-term rental hosts. Replying to your potential guests' inquiries and sending messages to your current guests before, during, and after their stay can take up to 75% of your time. So, guest messaging is the first process you must streamline to keep your response rate high and your guests happy and get more time for other activities.

To save time, many hosts create message templates corresponding to the major stages of the booking process and standard replies to FAQs, which are saved as Google Docs for quick access. However, vacation rental software with a guest messaging automation feature can help keep your time spent on guest communication to a minimum.

For example, Hospitable offers many helpful features and can take your guest messaging to the next level. With Hospitable, you won't have to copy and paste messages whenever you want to communicate with your guests.

Hospitable users can take advantage of the best templates preloaded from the start. You can customize them using 50+ shortcodes and various conditions and triggers and keep your guests updated by sending personalized messages on preset dates and times.

Hospitable makes it easy to create a personalized message flow for each guest after a new booking is confirmed and to provide all guests with the necessary information in small digestible chunks exactly when needed. You need to create message templates and set scheduled message rules to plan to send automated messages in advance on the critical stages of the customer journey, including

• A thank you message to confirm a reservation (to be sent shortly after booking)
• A welcome message with directions to your property and detailed check-in instructions (to be sent two days before the trip starts)
• A check-up message to check how your guests are doing (to be sent the morning after check-in)
• A check-out message to remind guests of check-out times and give them further check-out instructions (to be sent the night before your guests are set to leave your STR property)
• A post-check-out message to thank guests for their stay and remind them to leave a review

Moreover, with Hospitable, you can schedule messages to be sent on a specific day of the week, for example, when you want to inform your guests about a weekly event like a market day or remind them to take the trash out.

Hospitable also has a unique question auto-detection feature to help you answer your guests' questions faster. Our tool uses Artificial Intelligence to recognize questions on more than 20 common topics and can send answers to them almost instantly using your pre-written responses.

There are situations when you need to write messages to guests manually, for example, when they ask you some unusual questions, or you need to address booking concerns. Then, you can take advantage of Hospitable's integration with ChatGPT and save time. Open a conversation with your guest in your Hospitable Inbox, and click the 'Suggest with AI' button.

ChatGPT will draft a response in just a couple of seconds based on your guest's most recent message and property details, including its location, amenities you offer, and guest information. You can review a generated response and edit the message before you send it to your guest. You can also type some details to provide guidance and select the 'Improve with AI' button to rewrite a message.

Pricing

One of the critical points of a successful Airbnb business is a reasonable pricing strategy. If you set your prices too high, you'll most likely turn away potential guests. But it's not a good idea to put your nightly rates lower than your competitors, hoping you will be able to attract more reservations. Even if it happens, you may still earn less than your competitors. So it's vital to balance keeping up with your competitors and making the maximum possible profit.

By setting the optimal prices, you'll attract potential customers and ensure the sustainability and longevity of your Airbnb business. You can achieve this goal using a dynamic pricing strategy based on market-related data. Still, analyzing relevant market metrics to optimize your daily rate manually requires much time spent on market research. Fortunately, there are dynamic pricing tools that don't require you to do anything because they use AI to gather data to determine the best price.

For example, Hospitable integrates with top dynamic pricing tools that give Airbnb hosts and owners of other similar rental properties accurate pricing estimates in their respective markets, helping them generate higher revenue. These tools have built-in algorithms that analyze historical and booking data to develop pricing recommendations and suggest new prices every 24 hours.

Dynamic pricing tools recommend prices based on factors such as market supply and demand, seasonal trends, holiday predictions, and the number of days left to book. They also offer customization options to give hosts control over their pricing strategy.

Check-ins and check-outs

If you live far from your rental property, going there almost every day to ensure check-in for your guests is inconvenient and time-consuming. But you can automate your check-ins with smart locks, making things easier for you and your guests. You won't have to drive to your rental, and your guests will enjoy a smooth experience when getting into your place.

Smart locks eliminate the hassle of dealing with keys and make the check-in process contactless and straightforward. Installing a smart lock on the gate or front door, you can offer your guests self-check-ins and check-outs, giving them an opportunity for needed privacy after a long day on the road.

Smart locks are very convenient and offer better security for your Airbnb because each guest gets a unique access code that expires after their stay. Moreover, popular smart lock systems have an easy-to-use access management dashboard that gives you total control over your rental space. With smart locks, you can manage and monitor all property access from your smartphone or internet browser.

Cleanings

As a host, you're responsible for providing a perfect stay for your guests, so you must always ensure that your rental property looks spotless whenever a new guest arrives. Guests expect hotel-quality cleanliness, so it's unlikely that you will clean your Airbnb yourself. Besides, making your rental space look spotless can be highly time-consuming, so you need to find a reliable cleaning provider to work with.

It can be a professional cleaning company or hire individual cleaners. You must also ensure that your cleaners are where you need them at the right time. This will leave you extra work if you don't consider automating your cleaning management using vacation rental cleaning software.

Hospitable can help you assign tasks to your cleaners based on booking information. It also has integrations with tools that help hosts hire vacation rental cleaners and schedule and pay for cleaning services. With features like auto-scheduling, in-app chat, auto payments, and quality assurance tools, vacation rental cleaning apps can help simplify and automate each step of the turnover process, making it efficient and hassle-free.

Team management

Building a successful Airbnb business is impossible without proper rental property maintenance, which should always be performed on time. Regular rental property maintenance helps avoid costly repairs and keeps a safe and pleasant living environment for your guests.

That means that you need to perform a regular inspection of your rental property to ensure that everything is okay. This way, you'll be able to keep emergency maintenance requests from your guests to a minimum.

But if maintenance issues happen, it's essential to take action immediately, so you may need to hire a team (a co-host, a plumber, and an electrician) to help you maintain your rental property. Gathering a team will ensure that anything broken will be fixed immediately.

As a host, you are responsible for managing your team and assigning tasks to them. But you can automate this aspect, too, using vacation rental software with a task management automation feature. Using tools like Hospitable, you can set rules, and the system will automatically assign tasks to your teammates. Our system will also email or SMS your team members about new tasks.

Channel manager

If you list your property not only on Airbnb but also on Vrbo and Booking.com, you'll be able to reach more travelers and improve your occupancy rate. However, you should also be aware of the risk of double bookings that could cause unhappy guests and bad reviews. Updating your listings on different platforms manually every time you get a new booking is challenging. Hence, automating this aspect of managing your business also makes sense.

Vacation rental software like Hospitable allows you to manage all your listings and accounts across different platforms from one dashboard. It makes keeping your calendars and pricing updated across all your channels easier. Hospitable will protect you from double bookings and overbooking with instant calendar synchronization.

Review management

Positive reviews written by guests are very important for your reputation on the Airbnb platform. That means you should always provide exceptional service to make your guests happy and encourage them to leave you a review. You can do it by asking them to write a review for you in your check-out messages and leaving reviews of your guests within a 14-day window after their stay. Then Airbnb will send them a prompt to do the same.

Automating the review management process with vacation rental software like Hospitable makes things easier, especially if you manage more than one STR property. With Hospitable, you can send automatic review requests and automate 5-star reviews for your Airbnb guests using review templates. If you prefer more personalized reviews, you can take advantage of the feature called AI review suggestions.

Hospitable can help you reply to guest reviews submitted to Airbnb within 14 days after the guest's checkout. You'll see the review as part of the conversation you've had with the guest in your Hospitable Inbox and will be able to submit a reply to this review.

When Hospitable receives a new guest review from Airbnb, our AI crafts and suggests a reply, considering the review's tone and other contexts related to the reservation. You can see this reply as a draft by default, and you can edit or send it as it is.

If you want to publish a bad review for one of your guests, Hospitable will give you tools to protect your listing from a possible negative review that a guest may want to post in return. If you mark your review as a 'Bad review,' our system will reschedule it to 20 seconds before the review period expires.

Guest experience

Today's travelers choose vacation rentals because they want to stay where they can feel "home away from home," but they have high expectations about the level of customer service. Guest experience software for vacation rentals can help you elevate guests' stays and give them the experience they deserve using cutting-edge technologies.

Hospitable integrates with digital platforms that will allow you to create digital guidebooks and guest portals to provide your guests with detailed information about your property, amenities, surrounding areas, self-check-in instructions, house rules, etc. Hospitable will share a link to your digital guide in your messages, and guests can access it online when it's convenient for them and find answers to their questions without bothering you.

Another way to deliver your guests a personalized experience is by offering them add-on services and amenities they would be interested in at an additional fee. Hospitable has integration with The Host Co, a web-based platform that allows hosts to create digital stores for their listings and automate the upselling process. You must share a link to your store when guests book your property through the shortcode in your messaging rules.

Repeat direct bookings

Although it's essential to maintain a strong presence on Airbnb and similar sites to attract a broader audience, you can't rely only on OTAs to maximize your occupancy and revenue. You need to build a direct repeat booking strategy. You should focus on creating a memorable experience for your Airbnb guests so they want to come back again and then encourage them to book directly with you.

For example, you can collect guest data for direct bookings through WiFi marketing using StayFi. This solution enables hosts to create custom-branded WiFi splash pages and collect the email addresses of all guests who log in to their vacation rental's WiFi, not just the booker.

Then, you can use your email list to send regular emails with news, updates, info about local events, or behind-the-scenes insights to remind guests about your property and build relationships with them. Use email marketing to offer your guests incentives to book directly with you (discounts, personalized gifts, etc.) and share a link to your direct booking website, which you can easily create using Hospitable.

Analytics and reporting

In today's competitive landscape, all business decisions should be based on data, so vacation rental software with analytics and reporting features is an important tool for your growth and success. It can provide you with critical insights into your business performance to help you make data-driven decisions and proactively make adjustments to optimize your strategies.

For example, Hospitable users have access to the Metrics Dashboard, where they can view and analyze vital KPIs to assess and monitor the performance of their short-term rental properties. You can view raw financial data in one place, filter them, and save filtered dashboards as "views" for easy access and sharing with your team. You can also export your data for offline analysis.

Noise monitoring

Excessive noise is one of the common reasons for Airbnb neighbor complaints that can cause serious obstacles to your vacation rental business. That's why you should be proactive and do everything to prevent them from happening and keep your neighbors happy.

Using a privacy-safe noise measurement system will allow you or your teammates to receive automated alerts if the noise levels inside your home go above the norm. Such devices don't identify specific sounds and don't record them, so your guests can still keep their privacy during their stay. You can monitor the noise level in your rental property online via a mobile app or website.

Remember that Airbnb allows hosts to have noise monitors only in common spaces of the listing's interior. Hosts are also required to disclose the presence of noise decibel monitors, adding them as safety devices to their Airbnb listings.

Final Thought

Managing a vacation rental property involves many responsibilities for hosts and can sometimes feel overwhelming. And if you have several properties listed on more than one OTA platform, managing your listings can become a real headache.

Luckily, Airbnb automation can make your life easier. It's a great way to streamline daily or repetitive tasks that are important for your short-term rental business but are also very time-consuming.

Vacation rental software like Hospitable can help you automate different aspects of your hosting routine and put your business on autopilot. Then, you'll be able to focus on more critical aspects of your business and scale it faster.