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 85 of the Host Coach Airbnb Investing 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 85 Show Notes:
Miles, who are new to the show can you tell us what Hospitable exactly is?
Hospitable is the property management software founded in 2016. And essentially what we do is we're there to help hosts automate some of the basics on the most time consuming elements of hosting. That's automating guest messaging. That's automating team notifications, cleaners making sure we don't miss a clean on a checkout. Synchronizing calendars and pricings across different booking channels. So, if you're hosting on Airbnb and Vrbo and Booking.com, you want those calendars to line up right. We also help hosts to build out booking websites and help them manage smart locks. We are the tool that's supposed to help them centralize and automate hosting, and a lot of the admin tasks associated with that.
I can attest from our portfolio of 14 that automating as much as possible and syncing as much as possible really helps you, as a host, do a better job. It helps your guests have a better time and just makes life easier. So Miles, how many hosts approximately is Hospitable currently helping?
About 14,500 hosts at the moment. The majority of those hosts are in the US but we are available worldwide. So we have hosts in Canada, Australia, Asia, South America... pick a country - I'm sure we've got a host or two there.
Is It Too Late to Start Airbnb Investing?
I think that's a really important number for people who are thinking about Airbnb inveting and thinking that maybe it's too late or oversaturated. 14,000 is a lot of customers, but how many Airbnb hosts are there in the world?
We're talking millions of properties, right? What we are more focused on is those individuals that are fairly new to the market - the hosts that have one or two properties. that are looking to professionalize and take on that next step of growth. There's absolutely tons of those in the US and across the world.
That helps make the point that I was just coming to, which is professionalism. There's these million hosts but only 15,000 of them have opted to use such a powerful tool. One of the things that I find about Hospitable is, not only does it save me time... but 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 come through the internet and comb through YouTube." And instead on your website, you have so many great tutorial videos that are fun and interesting. So that's what I think is a great value. And Culin really thinks your auto messaging is the biggest value.
What do you think the biggest value is that hospitable offers to Airbnb investors?
That's a good question. We're focused on saving 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 add a little bit of customization into the mix.
How to Be a Better Airbnb Host
Has the company done any research on the amount of time that's saved on average per property?
It's an estimate that each host on average saves 16 hours per month through Hospitable automated messaging.
That alleviates a big concern of our Airbnb coaching clients. A lot of the clients that we speak to 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 is a way to do that without spending that 16 hours. We work with so many professionals who have a full-time job and a family and they want the financial freedom that comes from investing in Airbnbs, but time is a factor. We used to have a name change company that saved 13 hours and felt pretty good about it, but that was one time. This is time savings every single month. That's a big chunk of time back into your life, even though you have an Airbnb investment.
If you think about it, those 16 hours are for each host to decide how they want to use it. 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 back. That's what we all love, right?
It really is. That's a win!
How AI Elevates Airbnb Hosting
We've talked about Hospitable in past episodes multiple times and explored the basics of how to create and automate guest messaging. Can you take us beyond the basics of hospitable offerings?
What's great is our questions feature. So that's really using AI to be reactive to guest messages so 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 that response time element that Airbnb and the other channels really focus on. They even show it on your profile, right? Time to respond and that's going to affect your ranking. So rapid message reponse is important to get nailed down.
I'm really excited about that. Could you give an example of a question and an answer and how AI plays into it? How you would set that up and how that would look for a common question.
When guests checking in ask, "what's the WiFi password?" The idea is that our AI is looking at any time a guest messages the host saying WiFi. It picks up for 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 question so our AI can basically send that answer as soon as it sees a question about WiFi. What we encourage hosts to do as they use Hospital is think about all the different questions that may actually come up about WiFi, right? So it's not just what's the WiFi password but the wifi seems to be down or 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. 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 providing all those answers in advance so that you don't have to be jumping in and doing any kind of manual messaging with guests.
I love it. Other than wifi, what are maybe four or five other most frequently used AI type questions and answers?
I think check in and check out time is always quite key, questions around kind of smart locks and people forgetting codes, and then questions around extending stay as well. Some people might ask, "Can I stay on an extra night?" and it's key to have some automation around that. To be able to check the calendar and send that upsell instantly.
Culin is the manual robot that does that in our systems. He's going to be training the AI robots on Hospitable to take care of that. That's fantastic!
Why Embracing New Technology Is Key to Success as an Airbnb Investor
We're looking to expand that even further. AI is really a big focus for us in the next few months. That's just some of the basic questions we're really trying to go above and beyond that now. We have a 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 click the chat GPT button and basically it magically gives 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 formulating a response.
That wouls be great when we get the question about which entrance to the national parks our cabins are near. Everyone property is different, and I actually have a Google sheet that has all of that information in it so I can cut paste it. Hospitable AI would make it even easier to implement this.
We've just talked about the new interesting things you're doing to make Airbnb hosts' lives easier on your platform. What has surprised you the most about working at Hospitable?
I think for me it's probably the transparency and that openness to feedback. Every two weeks we do town halls and basically our town hall is our CEO, myself, 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&A with the audience and taking feedback live. Hosts just jumping on and saying, "I really love this feature. I love this, but this should be tweaked or I really not a fan of how this is working." We taking that feedback live and that's really useful for developing our product and making sure that we're being host centric and really using their feedback to build and improve the product and I think that's really rare to see.
Miles, is that town hall open to all Hospitable users?
It's open to everyone, that's something that we obviously push It as an event to our hospitable users but any public person that sees the invite can jump on. The best thing to do is check out our social media channels. So if you find Hospitable on Instagram or YouTube or Facebook, you'll be able to see our invites there for town halls.
We're always telling our 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, what they wish they had. So a lot of parallels there.
Do you or any of the upper tier management at Hospitable have short term rentals?
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 an eye opening experience. I think five or six of the team do have Airbnbs themselves. In fact, quite a few of the team members were hosts first who 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.
The Future of Airbnb Technology
Airbnb and the short term rental market has evolved substantially over the last 10 years. Two part question: Where do you see technology going to aid hosts and what do you predict for the overall market for short term rentals? Do you see it increasing? decreasing? staying the same?
Technology question first. I've already said AI, but there's more to come, right? We're trying to build it in so that it really is hands off and it has voice detection set up. So speak to hospitable about, "I want to message all of my guests in the Washington DC area about an incoming weather front." and it'll automatically do that for you. It will go and identify who's staying in the area that weekend and do that messaging for you. I think everyone's going to be moving towards that hands off approach and AI is going to be doing a lot more for us.
Secondly, talking about the growth of the 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 the change that we may start seeing is that more diversity in terms of where guests are searching for a property. We're really starting to see Google vacation rentals come up as a platform for searching and comparing opportunities there in terms of accommodation. And we're seeing Google surface short-term rentals in the same way that they would hotels... 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.
Advice for a New Airbnb Investor
What is your best advice for a new Airbnb investor?
Embrace technology. For me coming into the industry, I honestly didn't realize there was 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. I think dynamic pricing is a great example. Price Labs are 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 tools like Turno for finding cleaners. That's another challenge that I'm sure many initial Airbnb investors face - finding a cleaning team. 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, which is the difference between the host that's getting started, that'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. Hospitable is a key part of our Airbnb tech stack that we like to talk about.
Thank you so much for your time, Miles. 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. We were excited to share your knowledge with all of our listeners. Where can our listeners keep up with Hospitable other than the website? What are some of the socials?
If you go to Instagram search hospitable_com and then also on YouTube we are hospital HQ so check us out there and we have lots of content educating you on the rental space and also our tool.
Should you need an Airbnb coach to help you find the right market, property, and help you set yourself up for success - feel free to book a free 30 minute coaching call with us. We LOVE helping new investors avoid pitfalls and find financial freedom through Airbnb investing!
