By The Hospitable Team
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. But 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 at times. As a host, you are responsible for many different 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 spend this time on things you care about.
By automating your short-term rental management, you can save up to 70% 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 checkouts
- 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.com. Our tool will help you turn your real estate side hustle into a lucrative business.
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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 important 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 and save them as Google Docs for quick access. But vacation rental software with a guest messaging automation feature can help keep your time on guest communication to a minimum.
For example, Hospitable offers a great scope of 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 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.
Have conversations with your guests even when you sleep
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 set 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 important to balance keeping up with your competitors and making the maximum possible profit.
By setting the right 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, PriceLabs gives Airbnb hosts and owners of other similar rental properties accurate pricing estimates in their respective markets, helping them generate higher revenue. Its in-built algorithm analyzes historical and booking data to develop pricing recommendations and can suggest a new price every 24 hours.
PriceLabs recommends prices based on factors such as market supply and demand, seasonal trends, holiday predictions, and the number of days left to book. The tool also offers customization options to give hosts control over their pricing strategy.
Check-ins and checkouts
If you live far from your rental property, going there almost every day to ensure check-in for your guests takes a lot of time and is inconvenient. 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 can make the check-in process contactless and straightforward. Installing a smart lock on the gate or front door, you’ll be able to offer your guests self-check-ins and checkouts, 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 like RemoteLock have an easy-to-use access management dashboard that gives you total control over your rental space. With RemoteLock, 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 you can hire individual cleaners. You also need to 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 tools like Turno (formerly TurnoverBnB).
Turno helps 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, Turno 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 important 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 as soon as possible.
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.
Take your team management to the next level
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. But you should also be aware of the risk of double bookings that could cost you unhappy guests and bad reviews. Updating your listings on different platforms manually every time you get a new booking is challenging. Hence, it also makes sense to automate this aspect of managing your business.
Vacation rental software like Hospitable.com 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 also protect you from double bookings and overbooking with instant calendar synchronization.
All you need from a channel manager is here!
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 like NoiseAware 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.
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.com 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 important aspects of your business and scale it faster.
Airbnb Messages: Communication that Builds Rapport
There are some very practical steps you can take to make sure your communication is on point.
So what can you do to build rapport more effectively and improve your chances of getting good communication reviews? Let’s find out, shall we?
Airbnb Host Checklist: Setting Up for Airbnb
Planning to start a short-term rental business on Airbnb and are looking for an Airbnb startup checklist? In this post, you’ll find an Airbnb host checklist of essential things you will need to invest in for the greatest experience for your guests.
Tools for Airbnb Hosts: Best Apps to Save Time and Boost Performance
As an Airbnb host, you juggle many responsibilities even if you have only one rental property. Luckily, you don’t need to do everything manually. Let’s look at top tools for Airbnb hosts that can save you time, boost your business efficiency, and give you more freedom to focus on growing your business.
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