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 this episode with Miles Hobson, the head of marketing from Hospitable. He shares ways you can use technology to save 16 hours a month on hosting responsibilities.
If these questions sound familiar, you need to listen to Episode 31 of the Host Coach Airbnb Investing Podcast where we’re analyzing the latest Airbnb trends of 2025 and sharing the hacks you can immediately use to make more money and stay at the top of your market!
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 31 Show Notes:
Hospitable is a property management software founded in 2016, and essentially, what they do is they're there to help host automate some of the basics on the most time consuming elements of hosting. That's automating guest messaging, that's ultimate in team notifications, the 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? Hospitable helps hosts build out booking websites and help them manage smart locks. We added a tool that's supposed to help them centralize and automate a lot of the admin tasks associated with that.
I can attest from our portfolio of 14 Airbnbs 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.
Meet Hospitable: Supporting Over 14,500 Hosts Worldwide
For people who are thinking about Airbnb and thinking that maybe it's too late or oversaturated... 14,000 is a lot, but how many Airbnb hosts are there in the world? Certainly we're talking millions of properties, right? What we are more focused on is those individuals who are fairly new to the market, the hosts that have one or two properties that are basically looking to professionalize and take on that next step of growth.
There's absolutely tons of those in the United States and across the world, and that helps make the point that I was just coming to, which is professionalism. There's these million hosts, but 15,000 of them have opted to use such a powerful tool. One of the things that I find about Hospitable, not only does it save me time, I'm not sure how I would go about the five-star review process without the automation, the timing, the quick response that Hospitable brings as a service.
What’s the Biggest Value Hospitable Offers?
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. 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. 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 automated messaging. That's a big concern of a lot of the clients that we speak to is, "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 become an Airbnb investor without spending that 16 hours. Yeah. We work with so many professionals who have a full-time job and a family and 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 every single month. That's a big chunk of time back into your life, even though you still have an investment. Yeah, for sure. You think about it, those 16 hours are for each host to decide how they want to use it, right? 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 you have to spend with family and friends, getting some more of that quality-time balance. That's what we all love. It really is. That's a win!
Smart AI Messaging in Airbnb Listings
What's new at Hospitable? What's great is our question feature, so that's using AI to be reactive to guest messages: so responding to booking requests and responding to questions like, "what's the wifi password?" That's really important to get those set up and get your answers pre-filled, because basically that's that response time element and Airbnb and the other channels really focus on that and even show it on your profile, time to respond and that's gonna affect your ranking. So that's really important to get nailed down too.
A common question when guests checking in is "what's the wifi password?" So the idea is that our AI is looking at anytime 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 have pre-write an answer to that, so I can basically send that answer as soon as it sees a question about wifi.
What we encourage hosts to do is to use Hospitable is think about all the different questions that may actually come up about wifi, right? It's not just what's the wifi password, but the wifi seems to be down. It doesn't seem to be connected, right? So what we encourage host to do is think about all those different scenarios and include those in their answer.
For example: 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, it's providing all those answers in advance. So that you don't have to be jumping in and doing any kind of manual messaging there. Check in and checkout time along with questions around smart locks, people forgetting codes, and then around extending stay as well are all important to create.
Advice for New Airbnb Investors: Embrace the Tools
So some people might ask about staying 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 quickly Culin is the manual robot that does that in our system as Airbnb hosts. Right after this, he's going to be training the AI robots on Hospitable to take care of that for us!!
We're looking to expand that even further. So 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. So we have a chatgpt integration, which I know is a 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 chatgpt button, and basically it magically pulls up a few suggestions, how far away they are, and draft the response for you so you don't have to do all of that research of checking on Google Maps and formulating a response.
What has surprised you the most about working at Hospitable?
It's probably the transparency and that openness to feedback as well. So every two weeks we do town halls. 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, unfiltered with clients jumping on and saying, "I really love this feature. This should be tweaked or really not fan of how this is working." So we're taking that feedback live, that's really useful for developing our product and making sure that we're being host centric and really using that feedback to build and improve the product.
Town hall is open to all hospitable users. That'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. Where would people, sign up for that? 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 that.
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 definitely I think that, self-reflection and some reflection from your customers is very important to do.
Where Is Airbnb Technology Headed?
Two part question. Where do you see technology around Airbnb going in the next ten years to aid hosts, and how do you see the overall market for short term rentals? Do you see it increasing, decreasing, staying the same? Yeah, for sure. Technology questions first. I've already said AI, but AI for sure, and there's more to come, right?
We're trying to build Hospitable so that it really is hands off and it's voice to text setup. Speak to Hospitable about I want to message all of my guests in the Washington DC area about an incoming weather front. And basically it'll automatically do that for you. It'll go and ping those people. It'll identify who's staying in the area that weekend and do that messaging for you. So really, I think everyone's gonna be moving towards that hands-off approach and AI is gonna 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 really the change that we may start seeing is that more diversity in terms of where guests earching for 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.
Best Advice for New Airbnb Investors
Embrace technology is probably the best way to go. For me, coming into the industry, I honestly didn't realize there were so 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.
Dynamic pricing is a great example tool like Pricelabs 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, higher average daily rates and then tools like Turner for finding cleaners. That's another challenge that I'm sure many initial Airbnb investors face is 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 admin, repetitive tasks to repetitive guest messaging.
The difference between the host that's getting started that's gonna 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 the key part of the Airbnb tech stack that we like to talk about.
So there you have it. You now know the myriad ways you can use Hospitable to boost your hosting game, save time, improve your guest experience, and elevate your listing search rank. You also learned some of the ways AI is changing the way hosts and guests communicate, and why embracing technology is key to your success as an Airbnb investor. Remember, our joy is in your success.
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!
