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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I love it. Other than wifi, what are maybe  four or five other most frequently used AI type questions and answers?

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?  

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?

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?

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.  

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?

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!