Automate Your Airbnb With These 3 Tips
When starting an Airbnb vacation rental business, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of receiving your first few bookings. After spending so much time optimizing the accommodations and online listing, it’s a thrill to finally be able to welcome guests to enjoy your unique vacation rental.
As your Airbnb business evolves, hosts often realize that, as a host, there are an endless number of tasks associated with managing a successful Airbnb. To scale sufficiently, automation is key – which is why we’ve put together our top three tips for automating your Airbnb rentals:
#1. Streamline Communications With Guests
From vetting one another, to coordinating repairs and maintenance, Airbnb hosts could spend all day messaging back and forth with potential, upcoming and current guests. Taking the time to automate outreach and responses for the most common topics and situations can save you time and money:
Create a list of answers to some of the most common questions whether that be regarding your property’s included amenities, wifi speed, or nearby attractions. Save them in an easily accessible note for easy copy & paste later.
Share details on how the self check-in process works via an automatically triggered email. PS: More on how to set-up self check-in later!
Set-up an automated email to be sent a few hours after check-in to ensure all went smoothly. Consider including recommendations for nearby entertainment or weekly local events.
Put together a thoughtful thank you email to be scheduled upon check out with a casual request for review. Don’t forget to review them, too!
#2. Automate Check-In
This one is a gamechanger. The check-in process can be extremely time consuming for Airbnb hosts to manage. Paying a property manager to handle greeting and checking in guests can burn a huge hole in your profits. Investing in the tools necessary for an automated self check-in process can be a game changer for your rental property business, not to mention, many guests prefer this hands-off experience! Here’s how to set up automated check-in at your Airbnb:
Invest in a smart lock system like Akiles or Yale.
Set-up a system for ensuring new codes for each guest, which with such systems can usually be managed right from your mobile phone.
For security purposes, turn on notifications to be alerted when a guest checks in – this is also a perfect way to time your already created welcome message!
Never wake up in the middle of the night or miss a milestone event to check-in a guest as the process is now completely automated and off your plate.
#3. Build A Supportive Team
This one is huge. Establishing a team to support you as you scale your Airbnb business is what helps separate Hosts from Super Hosts. As one person, it’s almost impossible to optimize every aspect of a successful Airbnb. With a team of trusted professionals behind you, it’s almost effortless. Our suggestions for building a supportive vacation rental management team:
Hire a reliable cleaning team that will follow your cleanliness standards – even going above and beyond to ensure your Airbnb shines. Creating a checklist of your expectations for cleaning post check-out is a great way to further automate this process.
Let someone else haul away the trash. Hiring a trash removal team that specializes in vacation rentals, offering options like per-checkout trash removal, ensures you don’t have to rely on inconsistent city trash removal.
Invest in property management software or a dedicated property management team to fully automate your rental, allowing you to step away and begin building your next Airbnb property. Many service providers, such as vacation rental trash removal, even integrate directly into property management software, making it easy to automate and accelerate.
All in all, investing some time and money into automation initiatives can help you take your Airbnb rental to the next level, saving you energy and profit loss in the long run. Streamlining communications with guests, automating your check-in process and building a supportive team that will help you scale are just a few ways Airbnb hosts might automate their property. Can you think of any others? Shoot us a message and share your automation tips.