Are you looking for a way to increase your bookings and guest satisfaction? Do you wish there was a way to spend less time messaging your guests and managing their stays?

If so, don’t miss Episode 31 of the Host Coach Airbnb Podcast with Miles Hobson, the head of marketing at Hospitable. He shares ways you can use technology to save 16 hours a month on hosting responsibilities.

Read on to learn how AI is transforming guest messaging and Miles’ best advice for new Airbnb investors!

Topics discussed in this episode:

• The host problem Hospitable was created to solve
• How to use Hospitable to save time, improve guest satisfaction & be a better host
• How AI is changing the way hosts and guests communicate
• Why embracing new technology is key to success as an Airbnb investor

Host Coach Airbnb Podcast Episode 30 Show Notes:

Miles, for our listeners , who are new to the show, can you tell us what exactly is Hospitable?

Hospitable is the property management software founded in 2016. And essentially what we do is we're there to help Airbnb hosts automate some of the basics on the most time consuming elements of hosting. That's mainly by automating guest messaging, automating team notifications, messaging cleaners and making sure we don't miss a clean on a checkout. Hospitably also synchronizes calendars and pricing across different booking channels. So if you're hosting on Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com, you want those calendars to line up right.

We also help Airbnb hosts to build out booking websites and help them manage smart locks. Really we are the tool that's supposed to help them centralize and automate a lot of the hosting and admin tasks associated with that.

I can attest from our portfolio of 10 Airbnbs that automating as much as possible and syncing as much as possible really helps you as a host do a better job. It also helps your guests have a better time and just makes life easier.

So Miles, how many short term rental hosts approximately is hospitable currently assisting?

14,500 hosts at the moment. The majority of those hosts are in the United states, but we are available worldwide. So we have hosts in Canada, Australia, Asia, South America - pick a country.

The Key to Airbnb Growth

I think that 14,500 a really important number for people who are thinking about Airbnb and thinking that maybe it's too late or oversaturated. How many Airbnb hosts are there in the world? We're certainly talking millions of properties, right? Who we are more focused on as coaches and podcasters is those individuals that are fairly new to the market, the hosts that have one or two properties, that are basically looking to professionalize and take on that next step of growth.

The key to growth is professionalism. There's these million hosts, but only 15,000 of them have opted to use such a powerful tool to streamline their processes.

One of the things that I find about Hospitible - not only does it save me time, I'm not sure how I would go about the five star review process without the automation, the timing, and the quick response that hospitable brings as a service.

Something else I really appreciate about your platform are all of your training modules. Sometimes when you don't know how to do something, whether it's software or just something more basic, you're like, "Oh, I'm going to have to go comb through the internet and comb through YouTube to try to figure it out." Instead, you have so many great tutorial videos that are fun and interesting. And also to the point that I think that's a really interesting advantage. So that's what I think is a great value. And Culin believes your auto messaging is the biggest value.

The Value of Hospitable

What do you think the biggest value is that hospitable offers to Airbnb investors?

We're focused on saving STR hosts time and that's the really big value draw for us. The onboarding is supposed to be quick and easy. We have a two week trial so you can get started straight away in those two weeks. The idea is that you're fully set up and ready to go and you're automating a lot of your messages, because we're already building out those templates for you. All you need to do is adding a little bit of customization into the mix.

Has the company done any research on the amount of time that's saved on average per property?

It's estimated for each host on average - it's 16 hours per month that we're saving through automated messaging. .

That addresses a big concern of a lot of the Airbnb coaching clients that we speak to. Many say, "I see the opportunity here, but do I really have the time? Do I have that 16 hours a month extra in my schedule?" Hospitable provides a way to be a great host without spending that 16 hours.

We work with so many professionals who have a full time job and a family and want the financial freedom that comes from investing in Airbnbs, but time is a factor. So the savings of 16 hours, we used to have a name change company that saved 13 hours and felt pretty good about it, but that was a one time thing. This is every single month. That's a big chunk of time back into your life!

YIf you think about it, those 16 hours are for each host to decide how they want to use it. Right? So you can, double down on the investment property side and you can look at, "Okay, how can I turn those 16 hours into building my portfolio? How do I get another property?" Or maybe it's perfecting the guest experience even further to get more five star reviews and increase the nightly rate on the properties you currently have. Or maybe it's just more time with family and friends - getting some more of that quality time together.

That's what we all love, right? It really is. That's a win. We've talked about Hospitable in our Airbnb Tech Stack episode and explored the basics of how to create and automate guest messaging. Can you take us beyond the basics of Hospitable offerings?

AI Automation of Airbnb Host Reponses

What's great is our questions feature. So that's really using AI to be reactive to guest messages So AI is responding to booking requests. Responding to questions like, "What's the wifi password?" It's really important to get those set up, and get your answers pre filled because basically that's the rapid response time element and, you know, Airbnb and the other channels really focus on that. They even show it on your Airbnb profile, right? Host's time to respond - that's going to affect your ranking. So that's really important to get nailed down.

I'm really excited about that. Could you give an example of a question and an answer from AI? How would you set that up and how that would look for the guest?

A common question when guests are checking in is, "what's the Wi Fi password?" So the idea is that our AI is looking at any time a guest messages the host saying Wi Fi. It picks up that keyword and it knows that they're asking the question. Obviously, what we're going to do is we want to pre write an answer to that. So our AI can basically say, "Send that answer." as soon as it sees a question about Wi Fi. What we encourage hosts to do though, is think about all the different questions that may actually come up about Wi Fi, right? So it's not just what's the Wi Fi password, but. The wifi seems to be down. It doesn't seem to be connecting.

We encourage hosts to do is think about all those different scenarios and include those in their answer. So, Hey, if you're struggling to get the wifi password, here it is, but then also here's how to restart the router. If you're still having issues and the wifi password doesn't seem to be working, it's likely it just needs a reboot, here's the instructions of how to do that. So really it's providing all those answers to AI in advance so that you an Airbnb host don't have to be jumping in and doing any kind of manual messaging there.

Most Common Airbnb AI Answered Questions

I love it! Other than Wi Fi, what are a few of the most frequently used AI type questions and answers?

I think check in and check out time is always quite key. Questions around smart locks, and people forgetting codes, Also questions around extending a stay as well. So, some people might ask, "Can I stay on an extra night?" and it's critical to have some automation around that. To be able to check the calendar and send that upsell offer basically in one go.

Culin is the manual robot that does extension of stays in our systems. I have a feeling he's going to be training the AI robots on Hospitable to take care of that asap!

We're looking to expand that even further, so AI is really a big focus for us in the next few months. Those are just some of the basic questions that can be answered. We're really trying to go above and beyond that now. So we have an Airbnb chat GPT integration, which I know is the big buzzword at the moment. That allows hosts to generate responses to some of those more complicated questions. So if someone's asking a very specific question about what's the recommendation for an Italian restaurant nearby, you can click the chat GPT button and magically AI brings up a few suggestions, how far away they are and drafts a response for you. So you don't have to do all of that research of checking on Google maps and formulate a response.

That would be great for the common question, "Which entrance to the national parks, our cabins are near?" because each one is different. I actually have a Google sheet that has all of that information for each of our Airbnbs, so I can cut and paste it into responses. Which, would make it even easier to implement an AI response in Hospitable. Wow!.

Giving Airnb Investors What They Want

We've just talked about the new interesting things you're doing to make host life easier on your platform. What has surprised you the most about working at Hospitable?

I think for me it's probably the transparency and openness to feedback as well. Every two weeks we do town halls at Hospitable, and basically our town hall is our CEO, myself, and the product team jumping onto zoom and presenting: "Here's what we've delivered in the last two weeks. Here's what we plan to deliver in the next few weeks." and then doing 30 minutes of Q and A with the audience and taking feedback - live and unfiltered. With hosts just jumping on and say, I really love this feature. I love this, but this should be tweaked, or I really not a fan of how this is working. So, we're taking that feedback live, but that's really useful for developing our product and making sure that we're being STR host-centric and really using that feedback to build and improve the product. I think that's really rare to see in a company.

Miles, is that town hall open to all Hospitable users? It's open to everyone. That's something that we obviously push as an event to our Hospitable users, but any public person that sees the invite can can jump on as well.

Where would people sign up for that?

The best thing to do is check out our social media channels. So if you find Hospitable on Instagram or YouTube or Facebook, and you'll be able to see our invites there.

We're always telling our Airbnb coaching clients and listeners to review your reviews. What your guests are telling you in private feedback is so valuable to help you give them the experience they want. So it sounds like you're doing the exact same thing with the Hospitable users and asking the hosts what they want, what they don't like, and what they wish they had. So a lot of parallels!

Yeah, definitely. I think that self reflection and some reflection from your customers is very important to do.

Do you or any of the upper tier management have Airbnbs?

So I don't personally, but I intend to get into the game soon. I was fairly new to the industry when I joined the company, and it's been eye-opening experience. I think five or six of the team members do in fact have short term rentals themselves. In fact, quite a few of the team members were hosts that became hospitable customers and then they became employees of the team. They loved us so much they had to join the team and help us shape the product further!

I could definitely see that happening. That's really cool. So Airbnb and the short term rental market have evolved substantially over the last 10 years. Here's my two part question: Where do you see technology going and how do you see the overall market for short term rentals changing? Do you see it increasing, decreasing, or staying the same?

Where is Airbnb Technology and the STR Market Going?

Technology question first. I've already said AI, but AI for sure there's more to come, right? We're trying to build it in so that it really is kind of hands off and it has voice detection set up. So you could speak to Hospitable about, "I want to message all of my guests in the Washington D.C. area about an incoming snow storm." and basically it'll automatically do that for you. AI will go and ping those guests on your behalf. It'll identify who's staying in the area that weekend and do that messaging for you. So really, I think everyone's going to be moving towards that hands off approach and A.I. Is going to be doing a lot more for us.

Secondly, talking about the growth of the short term rental industry, I think it's going to continue to grow. It's already defining itself as a section of the market that's able to compete with alternative combination providers. I think really the change that we may start seeing is that more diversity in terms of where guests are searching for properties. We're starting to see Google Vacation Rentals come up as a platform for searching and comparing opportunities in terms of accommodation. And we're seeing Google surface short term rentals in the same way that they would hotels. And so I think that's going to really help short term rentals grow across the industry.

Thank you for sharing those insights. It's great to hear different people's thoughts from very different areas of the industry.

Airbnb Advice for New Investors

Do you have any advice for a new Airbnb investor who's just getting started?

Embrace technology is probably the best way to go. For me coming into the industry, I honestly didn't realize there were this many tools to help Airbnb hosts, and I think a lot of people coming into the industry don't realize that. I'd encourage you to do the research and think about what tools can help you improve and be more efficient and also earn more revenue.

Dynamic pricing, is a great example, PriceLabs is a great partner of ours. They can really help you make sure you're not leaving money on the table. Making sure that you're increasing occupancy at a higher average daily rate. And then of course, more and more automation from tools like Hospitable can really give you a lot of time back on administrative repetitive tasks and repetitive guest messaging.

I think that's a great wrap up, for the Airbnb investor that's getting started, what's going to be guaranteeing their success is finding the technologies and the tools versus the hosts that were out there a couple of years ago when everything was super easy and never found and implemented those tools.

Thank you for enlightening us and giving us things that we're willing to work on as soon as we're done recording this podcast.