If you’re an AirBnB host or property manager, then you know how frustrating it is to have to spend most of your time on guest engagement and communications. You also know how powerful it is to have repeatability in the processes and flow you typically set up. But truly smart automation is hard to come by. Many hosts struggle to scale beyond one or two rentals simply because guest engagement takes up so much time. And many hosts struggle to capitalize on happy guests, essentially losing a powerful marketing tool. Hosts and Hospitality Pros are looking at other industries where data is more easily accessible, and feeling the pinch because they haven’t got that same level of access.
Proper guest engagement - the kind with multiple touch points across multiple different categories, as well as the tracking of guest satisfaction through these engagements is a huge challenge. Hosts know that the most effective way to grow and positively impact a guest experience is through engagement and communication, but are usually unable to do so. They know that continuing to engage with a guest after they’ve left is the best way to build loyalty and drive growth by getting the guests themselves to become ambassadors. Rental businesses, especially as they scale, realize that engagement and communication becomes a huge time-sink, and unless managed correctly, can swallow any ambitions for rapid growth.
To solve these challenges we’re excited to announce Yada Chat - an ultra powerful chatbot and management suite built to automate all of your rental’s communications and messaging, provide you with incredible analytics, and keep your rental’s engagements humming along in the background while you focus on growing your business, providing your guests a better experience, and doing the work that matters.
More Time Saved, Less Time Spent
The most visible aspect of the Chat rollout is a bot which guests text & talk with directly on their phone. It’s accessible through SMS, WhatsApp, & Telegram. Each property, rental, or room that you manage has its own information, metrics, and analytics. You set them up once, and you never have to waste time on publishing that information again. For example, you fill out property details, answers to common questions, and any extra information you think is relevant, and Yada will take care of the rest. Your guests text with our AI, you only get involved if its something absolutely critical.
“Before these chat features, we were spending tons of time chatting with guests. We have our rentals in a really dynamic and interesting area, and our guests love that we’ve usually been able to help them soak up the local flavor. However, this used to take us a ton of time. We’d be giving our visitors advice all the time, and it became a huge burden for us. We got to play around with this chatbot when it was still being built, and we immediately noticed that the volume of email and text messages we were getting dropped a lot. We’ve been saving at least an hour a day in each of our AirBnB’s!”
Getting started with Yada chat is simple. Really simple. In fact, if you’ve already set up properties with us, the only thing you need to do is either a) send your guests a link which will hook their phone number up with the bot, and/or b) connect to your AirBnB, HomeAway, or VRBO profile. While ‘B’ isn’t available for everyone yet - we’re still rolling it out of alpha - getting guests connect to the bot is always going to be a one-step process.
That’s not all there is, though. We’ve known since day one that rolling out these chat features would enable us to open a ton of really promising doors for our users:
Satisfaction Analytics: Knowing whether your guests are happy or not is extremely important. And being able to pinpoint exactly what they did or didn’t like helps you improve your business in ways which were never before possible. We’re building in sentiment analytics into our chat to give you an accurate idea of how happy your guests are, and make sure problems don’t become public. If your visitors and guests are happy and satisfied, our AI will encourage them to leave public reviews, engage on social media, and spread the word. If they’re not, our AI will encourage them to leave feedback privately, resolve any issues they might have had, and make sure that one difficult guest doesn’t make an impact.
Growth through Engagement: Your best marketing is going to come from your guests. They’re the ones who are going to promote you on social media, talk about you to their friends, and recommend you when people ask for suggestions. However, this can’t happen unless you’re engaged with them after they leave. Keeping in touch manually is a lot to handle and a lot of steps which you’d need to keep track of, but automating it and letting an AI take care of it makes it much more manageable.
Experiences at Scale: We’ve written about this extensively in other blog posts because we believe that deeply in experiences and how they impact guest happiness. Give your visitors all the information they’d need to confidently explore and maximize their stay.
Problem Resolution: Resolving guest questions immediately and handling any issues in a timely manner is one of the things which most acutely impacts guest satisfaction. Turnaround time with a bot is usually less than a second - wildly faster than anything even the most attentive hosts are capable of.
More Time Saved, Less Time Spent
If you’re already a Yada AI user, all you need to do is send your guests the link to connect to the bot! And if you aren’t it only takes a few seconds to get started. Once you’ve set up your first property, you’ll be able to send all your guests an invite to connect to the bot. We’re also working on integrating the bot directly into our site so your guests can access it online as well!
Looking Forward…
Building the next generation of Hospitality products is in our DNA - and we’re constantly building in new features. Our chat related roadmap includes more dynamic content, automatically created local content, and smart analytics.
