Since the Vacation Rental market exploded a few years ago and gave millions of people the ability to engage with and participate in the hospitality industry, the space has become increasingly more professionalized, and guest expectations have become drastically higher and more demanding.
Thousands of new rentals are getting listed every week, and the whole ecosystem surrounding short term and vacation rentals is becoming increasingly more consolidated and professionalized, prompting a very expected increase in the amount of demand for software and solutions which reduce the hosting and property management workload.
One of the biggest time-sinks when it comes to vacation rentals and AirBnB is the constant need to engage with guests. Whether it’s booking requests, pre check-in conversations, or the myriad of questions, requests, and inquiries a guest has during their stay, all this communication takes time. Consequently, hosts are shopping around and exploring all sorts of procedures and tools to help them reduce this workload.
Considering that up until now, there haven’t been any comprehensive solutions to this problem, hosts and property managers have resorted to a number of hacks, to a varying degree of success. Pre written messaging and content works, to a degree, but it’s just not smart enough and not dynamic enough to deal with all of the questions, concerns, inquiries, and problems which guests frequently have.
With the proliferation of chatbots and conversational AI, the Yada team has been striving to build something truly revolutionary and useful - something which can help hosts and property managers better manage their vacation rentals and AirBnBs. We had a number of core values which we stand by, and the most visible and important ones are our commitment to saving hosts time, driving as many 5-star reviews as possible, and helping our customers rank better and consistently be supremely competitive. Our mission is to make Yada the one-stop-shop for guest and patron communication and engagement of the hospitality and vacation rental/short term rental industry.
Here’s what makes Yada such an attractive product, and the number one hub for guest communications.
Yada was started by engineers, not business people. As such, everything we do is driven by a sense of perfectionism and dedication to building an awesome product. Our entire engineering team has a ton of experience and background in developing natural feeling automated conversations, and making this type of AI as dynamic and fool-proof as possible. Think of us as the Ford GT40 team who decided to build a world-beating race car!
We started by talking to thousands of guests, hosts and property managers in order to get a good baseline for how conversations and engagements in the hospitality space play out, and what sorts of events are most common. There’s a very relevant adage in AI and machine learning, and it basically goes as follows: Garbage In equals Garbage Out. By seeding our models with well defined examples, guidelines, and rules, we’re effectively able to avoid the “garbage in” phase, and make sure that any conversation we generate is relevant, informative, efficient, and natural.
Not many companies in the hospitality space are built around AI. A few might employ some sort of AI powered features down the road to stay competitive in a rapidly changing world, but we really live and breath machine learning and AI. It’s at the core of how we build our product and how we operate our business, and it ensures that we’ll always be one of the most competent, refined, and future facing products in the industry.
We also pay a lot of attention to design, and making the experience of using Yada as intuitive as possible for both guests and hosts. Our dashboard is designed to be easily understandable, and works across all platforms - desktop, tablet, and mobile, and is really, really beautiful.
Good, responsive, and expedient communication is at the heart of hospitality, whether that’s at resorts, hotels, boutique hotels, vacation rentals, and AirBnB’s. While larger establishments may have a leg up in staff and time available for guest engagement, you as a host or property manager probably do not. This is where we come into play. Yada, which is at its heart a voice and text assistant is available to your guests through a chatbot (they text with a number - no need to install additional apps or services), or as a voice assistant which sits on top of Amazon Alexa or Google Home.
Think of Yada as a virtual concierge - we’re always there, in-rental, or out of it, to assist your guests with whatever they might need, and to answer whatever questions they may have. Guests are really, really, bad at reading whatever instructions or guide we give them, and inevitable end up calling, texting, or otherwise reaching out to the host or manager. The average response time is over 30 minutes, which many guests find to be unacceptable. By automating these types of communications (disclaimer - we can’t deal with emergencies), we save our average host around 3 hours a week for each of the properties we are deployed in. In addition, getting the information to guests the moment they ask for it is an amazing way to reduce whatever friction they might feel, and go that extra step to ensure they’re satisfied enough to give you a five-star review.
Yada wasn’t built to solve just one, specific problem. We built Yada to elevate hosts and give them the tools they need to scale quickly and make sure they’re getting the absolute most out of their rentals.
We wouldn’t be much of an AI company if we didn’t make all of those insights available to you. Unlike an app or a website where every action is track-able, and able to be used to improve the experience, hospitality is different. Unless a guest explicitly says what is bothering them or what they don’t like, you as a host probably won’t have any idea what that is, and even more critically, you could be missing out crucial amazing reviews as a result of things you’re unaware of.
People are very communicative when talking to an AI. They don’t feel the need to hold back or avoid awkward confrontations. Because of this, they’ll often be far more forthcoming when talking to a platform like Yada. We anonymize all conversations that happen on our platform, but are able to pick up trends and topics really easily and make sure you as hosts and property managers can use these insights to quickly fix whatever isn’t working, and pinpoint exactly what you can do to make sure you get 5-star reviews all the time.
Yada’s mission is to encourage hosts and property managers to grow their operation while keeping workload as low as possible. Without reliable communication automation, there simply isn’t enough time for you to do everything you need to do to effectively manage your rentals.
Every great host understands that 5-star reviews across the board are one the most important factors in ranking your listing on platforms such as AirBnB, VRBO, HomeAway, and Booking. It’s also pretty well understand that a majority of guests never leave a review.
This is where sentiment analysis comes into play. Our AI does as really good job of understanding whether your guests are happy or not. That way, we can proactively engage with guests and get them to leave reviews if they are really satisfied, and not engage with the ones who were obviously unhappy. That way, you minimize the risk of getting a bad review as much as possible.
At the end of a stay, if a guest has not already left a review, we make a determination if they were happy or not with their experience. If we see that they were happy, we’ll prompt them to leave good reviews. While this feature is still new and continually being developed, it’s proving to be very effective!
At our core, we at Yada are a fast moving startup team. As such, we value any and all input from our users, and are committed to providing as amazing of an experience for all of you. We’re available whenever you need us to help with setup, deployment, and any bugs, issues, or service interruptions — we haven’t seen any service interruptions yet but if they do happen, we’ll be there to fix them as quickly as possible!
We understand that every rental is different, so we made sure that Yada is incredibly customizable and personal. However you decide to set Yada up, you can be sure that it’ll represent your brand, and your rentals personality.