Automating AirBnB and Vacation Rental Guest Engagement

Hosting guests at an AirBnB can be an incredibly rewarding experience. But it’s also an experience which can be endlessly time consuming, frustrating, and repetitive to the extreme. For many hosts, one of the most time consuming tasks is the constant contact and engagement they need to have with their guests. Guestbooks work some of the time, but most of the time they get thrown away, lost, unread, and ignored.

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The fact of the matter remains that guests and visitors want a way to engage, and they want an easy and intuitive way to get the information they need without really having to search for it. Going through email and text chains, guestbooks, and other informative material is simply too inconvenient for many guests, and they end up feeling short-charged because they didn’t get what they were expecting, or they constantly nag, contact, and engage with the host to get the information and content they need.

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Some of the things we hear most often are:

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“Yada seems like it’d help solve a lot of the problems I’m facing as I’m scaling out my operation.”

“Hiring someone to manage guests 24/7 is expensive. It’d be great to have and it’d make hosting so much easier, but I just can’t justify the cost at the moment.”

“I hate doing something, anything, and being interrupted by a guest asking a question which I must have answered at least a thousand times by now!”

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Industry trends are showing that AirBnB’s and vacation rentals are consolidating. More and more properties (over 50% in some markets) are owned by hosts who have 3+ properties. The reason for this is quite simple. Managing vacation rentals is quite difficult and time consuming, and is slowly being transferred from people who are doing it with their own units to people who are doing it professionally - they either own multiple units and manage it as their job, or they have a portfolio of apartments which they manage for other people.

However, unlike hotels, these managers don’t have as many of the resources at their disposal to engage with guests. Unlike a hotel, vacation rentals are by nature decentralized. There is no singular check in desk, and no easy-to-access support/concierge service. It falls to the hosts to do all of the guest engagement, and because they’re not dedicated just to guest engagement (they have to worry about cleaning the properties, checking guests in or out, accepting and managing bookings, and dealing with complaints), service can degrade over time, or hosts end up spending a disproportionally large amount of time doing something which is highly repetitive and not at all beneficial to the growth of their operation.

That’s where services like Yada come into play. In a nutshell, you’re giving guests an easy and intuitive way of getting all the information and support they need, without having to spend any time responding to it and taking care of it.

Software and AI like this can automatically respond to guest questions and problems, intercept and respond to messages you’ve already answered (so you don’t have to), and collect really valuable data which you can then use to improve your listing and get more bookings. You can also set it up to check guests in and out, work with whatever scheduling software you have, and act as an intelligent concierge for the support of your guests.

Because guests shouldn’t ever have to work for anything (they’re paying a premium for leisure and relaxation), we built Yada to be a platform which they can talk to, text with, and use across many different types of devices. Whether it’s a smart speaker, their phone, or the smart TV’s inside of living rooms and bedrooms, they have a wealth of services and information at their fingertips.

As you can see, AirBnB hosting and scaling an AirBnB business isn’t easy. You have to take many things into consideration when doing so, and really commit to running like a business and not a hobby. But with the right tools and the right automation, your life can be a lot easier and the hosting process will ultimately become far more relaxed and rewarding.

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