Airbnb Automation Archives - Turno

Sending Automated Messages on Airbnb: 6 Best Practices

Hospitable — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 23:21:01 +0000

Best Practice 1: Respond Immediately

The average guest spends 2-3 minutes scanning a listing to decide whether or not to book a stay. So, responding to their questions within 24 hours isn’t enough — you may miss your opportunity to convert your lead into a booking before they start looking elsewhere. You need to respond instantly.

Use automation software that responds to guest messages to generate human-like responses to inquiries. This can save you dozens of hours each week while also ramping up your booking rates.

Guests that get responses before they’ve moved on to the next listing are more likely to book your rental as you’ve quickly answered their inquiries and started building a rapport with them.

Best Practice 2: Personalize Your Communication

Make your communication more personalized so your prospective guests don’t feel like they’re speaking to a robot. Many software tools allow you to use tags for your guests’ names and other information, giving the impression someone has taken the time to read their message and personally respond to their inquiries.

As you answer their questions, tailor your upsells based on their queries and make sure your tone is polite and welcoming throughout the entire interaction. Guests expect to feel welcome from the start. A cold response to their inquiries may deter them from booking your rental.

Find software that allows you to create responses that match the way you prefer to converse with your guests and your tone. You can apply shortcodes, conditions, and triggers using templates to customize your automated responses for content, tone of voice, and language. Make the inquiry process feel authentic for guests who are none the wiser.

Best Practice 3: Use Canned Responses

Create canned responses for frequently asked questions. This saves you valuable time and brain work while improving your response time within that crucial 2-3 minute window. Use a system that can take response automation a step further by allowing you to embed your property, reservation, and guest details in your responses when you want to, automatically.

This allows you to personalize the interaction with your potential guests even in your sleep! An automation platform can expertly use tags to identify your customer by name and give specific details when responding to them.

Guests will be delighted to receive a warm, personalized response — especially if they’re making queries at unsociable hours.

You can set up your desired response timeframe for each inquiry or let an automation platform hold the responses so you can review them before they’re sent. This allows you to further personalize your responses if needed.

Best Practice 4: Manage Your Reviews

Request reviews after your guest has completed their stay. Your reviews directly impact your booking rates, as 90% of consumers scan them before making a purchasing decision. But it also follows that a bad review can have a lasting negative impact.

We all try to avoid it, but there may be times when you encounter a guest who doesn’t have a good experience. You’ll be able to determine early on if they’re unhappy if you’re communicating with them throughout their stay. Some signs that they aren’t enjoying your property could include them complaining about its conditions, not adhering to the house rules, or flat-out being rude when they communicate with you.

Some providers allow you to automatically delay bad reviews if you want to. Since Airbnb provides guests with a 14-day limit for leaving their reviews, you can save pending reviews for guests you think have had an unsatisfying stay.

This delays the review to the last minute, making it too late for your guest to leave their review.

Best Practice 5: Remarket to Previous Guests

Encourage previous guests to book again by remarketing to them via the OTA and your email funnel. But do not do this immediately after their stay. Instead, target your previous guests closer to the time they’re likely to book a vacation.

Your guests won’t be ready to book another vacation a week after their stay, so sending them marketing emails and messages through your booking platform will more than likely land you in their spam folder.

Instead, send out your marketing messages at least 60 days before the one-year anniversary of the last time they visited your property. This is just around the time guests usually start planning their next vacation.

For example, use an automated messaging platform that can send your previous guest a personalized message highlighting an exclusive offer. This guest will be targeted by your marketing strategy and feel as though their business is valued since you took the time to personally reach out to them with an offer.

Best Practice 6: Fill Gap Days in Your Calendar

When available, offer your guest a discounted rate on gap days in your calendar if they choose to stay an extra night. This allows you to generate income with minimal effort while providing additional value to your guests — a more affordable stay and an extra night.

Some tools offer a calendar management feature that protects you from double bookings across multiple booking sites, but you can also use it to fill those gap days with an automated message to your current guest. The application will check for availability, verify which guest is currently staying at your property, and then generate the discounted offer message and send it to them.

Depending on your guest’s response, the platform will help them schedule the extra night and alert the booking sites of the discounted stay rate.

Automate Your Guest Communication to Save Time

Automated Airbnb messaging removes the labor-intensive process of manually responding to your guests. It also dramatically improves the response time, which directly impacts your booking rates.

To ensure your automated guest communication runs smoothly:

Respond immediately to consumer inquiries to avoid them bouncing from your listing within minutes
Personalize your responses with a friendly tone and key information
Use canned responses to speed up your response time
Use predetermined strategies to prevent bad reviews
Strategically remarket to previous guests to promote return bookings
Fill gap days using a calendar management system

Short-term rental automation platforms like Hospitable run your short-term rental on autopilot while offering all the personalized guest communication best practices mentioned above.

The post Sending Automated Messages on Airbnb: 6 Best Practices appeared first on Turno.

How to Scale Your Airbnb Business With Automation

Beyondbnb — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 21:41:02 +0000

What Does It Mean to Scale an Airbnb Business?

Scaling a short-term rental business involves mastering the day-to-day tasks that come with hosting one Airbnb property — and then applying these skills and techniques to multiple rentals with the utmost efficiency.

When scaling a vacation rental business, one primary goal is to increase profits while minimizing time spent organizing turnover schedules, communicating with cleaners, and accommodating guests at all hours. It’s easy to get caught up in these daily operations, however, whether you have one property or 20.

In addition to the endless to-dos, running a successful short-term rental business also requires providing an exceptional experience for guests. So, how do you simplify time-consuming operations while still offering a top-notch stay for your guests?

One way is to move beyond manual routines to achieve an automated, high-performing vacation rental business. Keep reading to learn how the Founder and CEO of Beyondbnb, Ryland Nelson, mastered the nuts and bolts of scaling his many vacation rental-related responsibilities.

How Beyondbnb Founder and CEO Went From 1 to 100+ Properties

Imagine operating numerous successful Airbnb rentals, ultimately generating more and more revenue with each passing year. It may sound unrealistic and daunting, but the truth is, it’s achievable with less effort than you’d expect. And it’s exactly what Ryland of Beyondbnb did over time.

Ryland started working in the property management industry during his high school years before pursuing an education in Tourism Management at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. After his schooling, Ryland developed an online booking website for local hosts within his community of Fernie, British Columbia. And this was before Airbnb even existed.

In 2010, Ryland became one of the earliest adopters of Airbnb when he started renting out a room in his condo. As his short-term rental business took off, he began operating numerous properties as an Airbnb Superhost.

Given his software development knowledge and his experience successfully scaling a vacation rental venture, other hosts started turning to him for advice. Because of this demand for hosting mentorship, Ryland established Ferniebnb. This business helped short-term rental hosts leverage their resources to improve efficiency, reduce frustrations, and manage more Airbnb listings.

Ryland’s top advice to hosts striving to scale their rental business:

“Make sure you have your systems in place. Don’t try to do everything yourself. That is the definition of scalability. Don’t try to do all your own cleaning. Get everything done by other people as much as possible so you can focus on growing your business. If you are finding that you’re having to do everything yourself, it’s not going to be scalable.”

Ryland eventually established Beyondbnb to help short-term rental managers and owners increase revenue as they grow. Beyondbnb’s innovative solution provides rental management services that include inventory replenishment, guest communications, cleaning and laundry, pricing, and maintenance coordination.

From managing one single Airbnb in 2010 to managing over 100 listings, Ryland’s secret is to implement process automation early on. He considers this the key to maximizing bookings and mastering running a successful vacation rental.

“Having all of your systems in place and running smoothly is key. Even if you have two or three properties, it needs to be well set up.”

– Ryland Nelson

Using Automation to Scale Your STR Empire

Nowadays, almost everything can be automated — including the ins and outs of running a short-term rental business.

When you automate your hosting tasks, you’ll be able to focus on acquiring new customers, prioritize financial freedom, and have confidence that your business is running smoothly.

Discover some of the most significant automation tools you can use to scale your short-term rental business.

Pricing Automation

Setting a great vacation rental pricing strategy requires a lot of experience or, at least, attention to detail.

You have to take into account that pricing fluctuates depending on several factors. For example, you can price your property higher on the weekend rather than on weekdays. Additionally, you might want to offer discounts to incentivize people to book more days and fill gaps in your calendar.

It is critical that you set rates just right — not too high, and not too low — so you don’t fail to take advantage of earning more revenue.

To get your rates right without missing out on bookings, you can utilize pricing automation tools to help you make lucrative business decisions. Vacation rental pricing software can set a specialized pricing plan based on your listing and other various factors. This ensures that you don’t overestimate or lowball your nightly rate.

Some of our favorite pricing tools for short-term rentals include Rented, PriceLabs, and Beyond.

Guest Communication Automation

Staying in contact and having excellent communication with your guests play a crucial part in your success as a host. That said, sending responses to guests is one of the most time-consuming hosting tasks.

Luckily, you can automate guest communication, helping you establish better relationships with guests while saving time. Top guest communication automation software includes Hospitable, Hostfully, and Host Tools.

By automating guest communication, you can proactively connect with guests before, during, and after their stay. This is done by using automated templates and triggered messaging. This method enables you to schedule personalized and unique messages to guarantee guests receive them at relevant times.

Best yet, it allows you to interact with guests when you’re physically unavailable to do so or if you’re in a different time zone.

Turnover Automation

Whether you clean your own property or hire a professional cleaning service, ensuring a spotless and disinfected property for each set of guests can be demanding. Scheduling and facilitating the cleaning process even just for a single property requires full attention and effort.

Automating your turnover cleaning process can help you achieve a top-notch vacation rental turnover experience without draining your energy. Tools like Turno help hosts put their cleaning on autopilot. This way, they won’t have to manually carry out cleaning procedures or worry about unreliable cleaners or last-minute cancellations.

Multiply Your Bookings and Revenue

To effectively scale your vacation rental management business, you need to implement automation tactics that will help you multiply your bookings and ultimately increase your revenue.

Streamlining your daily operations through automation can eliminate the common stress of performing repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your short-term rental venture. Once you automate your hosting routine, you will be able to scale faster and more effectively.

The post How to Scale Your Airbnb Business With Automation appeared first on Turno.

How to Automate Airbnb Cleaning

The Turno Team — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 04:07:00 +0000

What Is Vacation Rental Cleaning Automation?

You can spend thousands on fancy vacation rental cleaning robots and gadgets so that your property essentially cleans itself. Or, for a more accessible option, you can hire experienced cleaning professionals to handle your turnovers all at the touch of a button.

Cleaning automation software like Turno streamlines the process of cleaning an Airbnb property. This saves you time and money by freeing you up to handle other tasks.

With this platform, you can find trusted cleaners in your area or work with professionals you already know and love. You’ll receive automatic notifications when the cleaner starts and finishes the turnover and if they have any questions along the way. You can even automatically schedule each cleaning and pay your cleaning crew.

Once you have your cleaning process down to an automated science, you can focus on Airbnb business growth strategies and more.

6 Easy Steps to Automate Airbnb Cleaning

Below, learn how you can use automation software to make your vacation rental cleaning easier than ever.

1. Hire a Professional Cleaner

There are several ways in which you can find a cleaning professional in your area. For example, you can utilize online tools such as:

Craigslist
Facebook Groups
Google

The problem with these methods, however, is that you may not know whether or not the cleaner is reliable or does a thorough job until it’s too late. Instead, you can use a dedicated cleaner marketplace like Turno to find an experienced and vetted cleaning professional in your area.

Turno connects you to local cleaners and allows you to assess their rates and reviews before selecting one to perform a cleaning job. Once the cleaning project is done, you can submit your own rating and review for the cleaner and decide whether you’d like to continue working with them in the future or try someone new. Software like ours simplifies automating your Airbnb cleaning.

Looking for a professional vacation rental cleaner?

Get Instant Quotes

2. Share Your Booking Calendar

Perhaps you use your Google Calendar to track your bookings. Or maybe you’ve been in the game for a while and use a project management system. No matter where you keep track of your guest bookings, you can share this calendar with your cleaner so they’ll know exactly when to be at your property for each turnover without all the back-and-forth texting, emailing, or calling.

Platforms like Turno can automatically sync with your booking calendars on Airbnb, Vrbo, and other OTAs. This means that whenever someone makes a reservation at your rental, it will automatically populate on your unified Turno calendar. You can share this calendar with your cleaner to ensure everyone is on the same page.

3. Create a Checklist

Cleaning a vacation rental differs from a regular cleaning. There are countless overlooked cleaning spots in an Airbnb, such as baseboards and ceiling fans, that must be wiped down to ensure a spotless and dust-free property.

How can you make sure that your rental is cleaned to your — and, ultimately, your guests’ — standards? Checklists. An Airbnb cleaning checklist is an essential tool to help you make sure that every nook and cranny of your vacation home is squeaky clean and sanitized.

If you use Turno for scheduling, you can also take advantage of the checklist feature. It allows you to create your own custom checklist or choose from a vast collection of checklists made by experienced vacation rental hosts. You can share your checklist with your cleaners, and they won’t be able to complete the cleaning project until every item is checked off.

4. Keep Track of Inventory

Similar to the checklist feature on Turno, the platform also offers an inventory tracking system. That way, you can always be confident that your property is well-stocked with the essentials.

Simply determine how many items you want available at your property at any given time. For example, you may always want to have at least three rolls of toilet paper stocked. Then, your cleaner can let you know when an item is running low.

This system is beneficial because it’ll save you from having to make extra trips to your property to check inventory yourself.

5. Schedule Recurring Deep Cleanings

A vacation rental cleaning is already fairly thorough, but there will also be times when your property needs a deep cleaning. Say you have your busy season in the summer. You may choose to schedule your deep cleaning after these back-to-back guest stays.

A turnover automation platform like Turno allows you to schedule incremental deep cleanings to keep your property in the best possible condition. You’ll be able to continue with your normal day-to-day operations while your deep cleanings are automatically scheduled and performed without you having to lift a finger.

Ensure your rental is always guest-ready with Turno.

Find a Cleaner

6. Send Payments Instantly

Did you know that short-term rental hosts spend around 40 hours per year sending payments to their cleaning staff?

Automation tools help you instantly compensate your cleaners once they complete a turnover. Taking the manual work out of paying your cleaners will cross one more thing off your to-do list and free up your valuable time.

Try Software to Automate Airbnb Cleaning

Automating your vacation rental cleaning routine allows you or your professional Airbnb cleaning company to complete each turnover efficiently and to a high standard. Consistent cleanings allow your guests to enjoy a welcoming and comfortable environment and allow you to rack up those 5-star reviews.

The post How to Automate Airbnb Cleaning appeared first on Turno.

Choose the Right Airbnb Automation Software for Your STR

The Turno Team — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 18:56:51 +0000

Pricing Automation Software

The purpose of pricing automation software is to take the guesswork out of dynamic pricing for your short-term rental property. This type of tool will give you helpful market insights while automatically setting your nightly rate based on numerous external and customizable factors.

Some of the top pricing automation platforms are detailed below.

Wheelhouse

Wheelhouse is a dynamic pricing tool designed for new hosts, vacation rental owners, and seasoned property managers.

The platform offers custom pricing recommendations to help you begin crafting your pricing strategy. You can then preview the potential impact of this strategy and make adjustments as you see fit.

Settings you can configure on the platform include:

Minimum price
Maximum price
Seasonality adjustments
Last-minute discounts

As your short-term rental business grows, Wheelhouse makes it easy to track your progress and make continuous improvements.

Beyond Pricing

Beyond Pricing offers demand-driven pricing insights for short-term rentals, allowing new and seasoned hosts to maximize their revenue without the tedious guesswork that comes with determining nightly rates.

This tool is unique in that it provides a health score for your property, meaning you can see how your rental is pacing relative to the competition.

PriceLabs

Why do thousands of short-term rental owners and property managers use PriceLabs?

One reason is that they integrate with over 50 channel managers and PMS’. This means that it’s quick and seamless to begin automating your pricing with PriceLabs, no matter what other software you use.

Also, the flexible and customizable tool is available globally and has no geographic limitations. You can get top pricing insights anywhere in the world.

Scheduling and Booking Automation Software

Running a vacation rental requires scheduling mastery. Not only do you have to organize bookings across multiple OTAs, but you also have to schedule cleaning services in between each guest stay, property maintenance, and more.

Turn to some of the most popular booking and scheduling automation tools to simplify these processes.

Turno

Many new Airbnb hosts choose to do their own turnover cleaning, but as you scale, this becomes a huge time suck. To save time and energy — so you can focus on other aspects of your business — consider hiring a professional Airbnb cleaning team.

Turno specializes in scheduling automation for vacation rental cleaning. With the easy-to-use Host App, owners and property managers can sync their rental calendars and ensure a professional cleaner is scheduled in between each and every guest stay.

You can use the Cleaner Marketplace to find experienced, professional cleaners in your area, or you can invite to the platform a cleaner you already know and trust. Regardless, with Turno, you’ll never miss a vacation rental cleaning again.

Zeevou

In addition to automating your cleaning, you’ll also want to consider automating your booking processing. This is where Zeevou comes in.

This hospitality business community offers world-class training and support, as well as easy automation tools to ensure a seamless booking process. Their 5-Step Booking Confirmation Process ensures that booking is simple, payments are secure, and guests are vetted.

Booking Automation

Booking Automation is for hosts who feel like their bookings come with too much manual work. With this tool, you can instantly publish listings on all major OTAs while consolidating your bookings to one single calendar. This will help you maximize your potential earnings while preventing double bookings.

Booking Automation also helps you get direct bookings right to your website. And if you don’t have a website, this platform makes it easy to build one.

Check-In and Check-Out Automation Software

When you’re the host of just one property, it may not be too much of a hassle to meet guests on-site whenever they’re checking in or out. As you scale your vacation rental business, however, making numerous trips to your Airbnb properties each week can eat up time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Learn about time-saving check-in and check-out automation tools below.

Host Tools

Automated messaging ensures a hands-off check-in and check-out process. The Host Tools automated messaging feature sends the right messages to the right people at the right time.

The feature is fully customizable, so you can make sure your guests are in the loop and on the same page when they arrive at your property and after they leave. Save hours of time spent facilitating guest check-in and check-out so you can focus on growing your business.

RemoteLock

Not only can you automate your check-in and check-out communication. You can also utilize smart technology to allow guests to enter your property without you having to be there in person.

RemoteLock is a universal access control software that works with your smart lock to provide safe keyless entry to your vacation rental property. You can create access schedules for your guests and cleaners, and they can use a unique, self-expiring code to enter your property when you choose.

The technology works with any Airbnb smart lock hardware, so you can develop a custom solution that fits your needs and budget.

KeyNest

KeyNest is a key exchange tool that allows guests to access your property without you having to be there in person to let them in. All you have to do is leave your property key at one of the 4,000+ KeyNest stores worldwide, provide your guests with a unique collection code, and they can pick up the key from the store’s shopkeeper while you go about your day.

The platform will notify you whenever your keys are picked up and dropped off, so you never have to worry about where your keys are.

Guest Communication Automation Software

Numerous automation tools exist for guest communication to help reduce the volume of tasks that hosts encounter on a daily basis. Find out more about these software options below.

Hospitable

As you begin hosting, you’ll likely find that you receive numerous questions from guests about everything from the Wi-Fi password to airport directions. Hospitable offers guest experience messaging to help you take care of guests’ needs automatically.

You can choose from various templates and customizations to answer guest messages with ease and in no time at all. And you can automate these conversations in your own voice — so you won’t sound like a robot.

RueBaRue

Awarded the 2021 VRMB Keystone Award for Best Vacation Rental Property Management Software for Guidebook and Guest Apps, there’s no doubt that RueBaRue is one of the top guest communication tools on the market.

Their communication automation software helps with:

Digital Guestbooks
Guest SMS Messaging and SMS Automation
Guest Reviews and Surveys
Local Area Guides
More

Enhance guests’ stays and simplify your host responsibilities with this automated guest communication tool.

Guesty

If you feel like as a vacation rental host you’re always on call, Guesty can help with that. Their auto-messaging feature allows hosts to message guests through email, SMS, or a booking platform at any stage — from pre-booking to after check-out.

With Guesty, not only can you receive all of your messages from various booking platforms in one single inbox, but you can also save hours of your time automating the routine messages you send out at every guest’s stay. Their automation capabilities ensure you save time, build credibility, maximize profitability, and reduce the risk of human error.

Reviews Automation Software

Host reviews, whether positive or negative, are very important to guests. Future travelers use reviews as selection criteria when booking a particular property. Not only that but booking platforms like Airbnb favor listings with numerous positive reviews. In other words, the more 5-star reviews you have, the higher your property will appear in search results.

So, how do you get more positive reviews? One way is to review your Airbnb guests after their stay, and you can easily streamline this process through automation tools.

Uplisting

With Uplisting, you can review each guest instantaneously after their stay — without lifting a finger. You can automatically send gleaming reviews after a positive guest stay, and in case of a poor guest experience, you can easily customize an unfavorable review.

iGMS

The iGMS review automation feature helps hosts receive up to 50% more reservations. As stated, more guest reviews mean higher rankings on booking platforms.

iGMS makes it quick and simple to write guest reviews and, in turn, get more reviews back. What’s best? You can submit your reviews right through their platform without having to be logged into your various booking sites.

Hostfully

With Hostfully, you can create message templates that are automatically triggered after some period of time following a guest check-out. You can customize the amount of time you want to pass before publishing the automatic review in case you’d like to leave a manual review.

The feature allows you to create multiple templates so that they’re sent out randomly and you avoid sending out the same review each time.

Make Airbnb Management Easy By Automating Your Airbnb

In addition to automation software, there are numerous other products that can make your job as a host easier and more efficient. Not to mention, they’ll also enhance the guest experience for those who book with you.

The post Choose the Right Airbnb Automation Software for Your STR appeared first on Turno.

How Hosts Can Automate Airbnb Reviews

The Turno Team — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 18:40:14 +0000

Is Automating Reviews Even Possible?

Automating reviews is absolutely possible. To help you scale your Airbnb business, there are many vacation rental software options that can ease operations. This includes the automation of writing and submitting guest reviews.

All the time you’re spending writing reviews is time you could be spending focusing on growing your business.

To help you submit personable and efficient reviews, it’s vital to use an automating system that will allow you to set up and manage multiple templates. Ultimately, this will help build trust, improve guest experience, and save time.

How to Automate Vacation Rental Reviews

The best way to automate vacation rental reviews is to use automation software. If you’re not ready or unable to invest in this type of software right now, there are easy ways you can streamline your review process. Follow the steps below to get started.

Create message templates that are based on the reviews you usually write to your guests. If you are uncertain about what you can write, simply check out other reviews hosts have posted on Airbnb.
Set a reminder on your calendar to synchronize the check-out times of your guests and the time you have to post reviews. That way, you don’t miss out on doing it within the 14-day review period.
Copy, paste, and submit the text in your templates. Make sure to fill in the guest name in the shortcodes where appropriate.

Airbnb Review Guidelines

1. Reviews Should Follow Airbnb’s Policy

Airbnb Content Policy states that reviews should not contain the following:

Advertising or commercial content, including company logos, links, or company names
Spam, unwanted, or disruptive contact
Sexually explicit, violent, threatening, or harassing content
Discriminatory content
Impersonation of another person or entity, including an Airbnb employee
Content that violates someone’s intellectual property rights, privacy rights, or other rights
Content that reveals someone’s private information or the location of a listing

2. Reviews Should Be Unbiased

Reviews should not attempt to incentivize other individuals to post positive reviews and exploit compensation. Second accounts that are used to leave a review for yourself are not also allowed.

3. Reviews Should Be Relevant

Reviews that include the following are not acceptable:

Remarks about a person’s social, political, or religious views
Profanity, slurs, and inferences about a person’s character or personality
Any commentary that does not relate to the listing, host, or guest you are rating

Top Review Automation Software

Short-term rental review automation software can help you simplify your processes for building review templates, receiving notifications, and submitting reviews. Below, learn more about some of the top software to make automating your vacation rental reviews a breeze.

1. iGMS

iGMS is an all-in-one Airbnb automation tool. Their auto-review feature allows for effective automated messaging and reviewing. The feature also uses gender-neutral terms to avoid gender bias and can delay a review to give you the chance to check any issues at the property after check-out.

2. Hospitable

Hospitable is also a great automation tool to centralize most of the mundane tasks an Airbnb host faces every day. Their review automation software allows you to customize your review templates. It will also randomize them as they’re submitted so they sound natural.

3. Guesty

Guesty offers end-to-end solutions that simplify hosting operations, helping hosts focus on growing their business. Guesty’s review automation allows you to delay, pause, and customize ratings and even use your own templates. If you don’t have a template set, Guesty will create one for you.

4. Hostaway

Hostaway’s automation capabilities allow you to automatically submit and respond to reviews on a centralized platform. Hostaway provides template-based automatic positive reviews as well as negative reviews. Their automatic negative review function can be sent out 20 seconds before the review window closes to avoid guest retaliation.

5. Uplisting

Uplisting’s review automation software has a double-blind functionality. This means that guests will get a notification when they receive a review from you. But in order to read it, they must leave one for you too. If not, there is a 14-day waiting period.

Start Automating Your STR Business Now

There are many hosts who miss the opportunity to increase bookings and avoid bad guests because they don’t respond to reviews or write guest reviews.

It can be very repetitive to manually reply to and review your guests. As you scale your business, it can seem impossible to keep up with the workload.

By automating Airbnb guest reviews, you can still create personalized guest experiences through authentic review templates and get reviews in return. This process will help your listing get traction and make guests feel confident about booking your property.

The post How Hosts Can Automate Airbnb Reviews appeared first on Turno.

Understanding Airbnb Automation to Save Time and Effort

The Turno Team — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 18:17:00 +0000

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.

The post Understanding Airbnb Automation to Save Time and Effort appeared first on Turno.