If you are an Airbnb/VRBO/Booking.com or any short term rental host running and tired of doing endless stuff. Like managing bookings, pricing, responding to customers and hundreds of of other items, then you’re in luck. Today, we are going to discuss how you can use AI to transform your short term rental business and improve efficiencies. This will help you in growing your Airbnb, getting more bookings and staying ahead of your competition.
Why AI for Short-Term Rentals?
So why do you need AI for Airbnb? As you know, AI is revolutionizing how people are doing business and you can use this power for your Airbnb or short term rental business.
First, you can save time. There are a lot of tasks where you may be spending few hours,you can automate them using AI or make it more efficient.
Second is to save money. If you don’t have time to do those tasks, you will have to hire somebody, but if you use AI as an automated agent to do a lot of this work, then you will save money.
Finally, maximizing revenue. Some of these AI tools can do a lot of computations and predictive analysis and things which can help you in maximizing your revenue. Now, isn’t it easier for us to maximize revenue in current property than buying multiple properties which may need a lot investments.
AI for Pricing Airbnb/VRBO/Booking.com or any short term rental
First AI tool which you need is for pricing, I personally use price labs, but you can use any of the pricing software.
What these software do is that they collect data related to pricing, demand, and then they use AI on top of it to do all these predictions for you. Like how much price you should charge for a particular time period for your property.
If I set certain parameters, my pricing will be set for now and for next five, six months or one year.
I’ll share you example. When I bought a property, I thought that maybe this property will make $300 per night, or $400 or something like that. But when I started using this tool, there were few days where price for this property was set at $800 or more, and it actually got booked at $800 per night. And that was pretty surprising for me, because in doing it manually, one by one, I don’t think I would have predicted these prices.Same thing is true vice versa, there are certain low seasons where you may not be able to charge pricing which you want, but you have to reduce pricing to make sure that your property is occupied, and you make whatever money you can and minimize your losses.
Pricing plays a huge role on the amount of profitability you make from your property.
AI for Marketing and content generation for Airbnb/Short term rental
Next AI tool you need is for marketing and content generation. When you list your property, first thing which you have to do is to provide a description, provide some kind of a headline. I use ChatGPT to get all of these things done.
I provided certain prompts like my property is at Lake, these are the features and chatgpt provides a very nicely written description, which I can use for my listing, and you can use similar content for your marketing.
Secondly, when you are trying to market your property on social media channels, like Instagram, Tiktok, or if you are running Facebook ads, you need to create a copy for marketing. Again you can use chatgpt to create it.
You’ll need certain images which you can post regularly and for that you can use Canva. Canva has an AI feature built in which you can use to create different images or use any other, AI based software for creating images, videos and so many things.
If you’re trying to move into direct booking kind of a model, then you need to work on the marketing aspects of your Airbnb or short term rental business. Using AI tool can help you in reducing so much time. I mean, previously, I used to spend so much time creating these graphics, writing content, and I was not able to post regularly. But with AI definitely, you know, you can achieve that.
AI for Guest Communication /Message Automation for Airbnb
Third thing where AI can help you is for guest communication. So there are so many times where I receive certain messages from guests, and I use chatgpt to tell me how to respond to it, and it provided a very nice, empathetic response, which I was able to send to guests, and they were pretty happy with that.
Lot of times when you are in a rush you may type something which may not have the right tone, or, there is opportunity to improve communication. These AI based tools can remove that manual and emotional aspect, and make it something which is really professional, and your guests will like it.
Property management systems are embedding AI in their tools. I use hospitable, but there are tools like, gusty/hostaway where you can automate some of these messages.You can use built in AI to respond to messages. Currently, I am creating my own canned response using chatgpt and use these similar messages for future guests.Whenever there’s a new question or a specific situation I use chatgpt and and add that response to list.
AI for Research and Review Analysis to find what Airbnb guests want
I use AI to do review analysis and finding out what exactly guests are looking for or lacking in my property. One thing which you can do is, you can pull reviews out of Airbnb/VRBOand nay other system, and copy/paste it in AI tools like chatgpt. Now you ask chatgpt it to summarize what people are liking and what they are looking for.
It will provide you a summary of why people are booking your property and you can use the exact same thing in your description. This will help in attracting the right customers for your property, and even telling them what people like when they come to your property.
Second thing, which I generally do is when people are booking the property, I ask them why they booked this property, so I can know what are the amenities or features which attracted them. And I use this information to summarize through AI to find out, what exactly are the amenities or things they’re looking for? And in some cases, they ask for things which I may not have. And then I go back and improve my property by adding those amenities to make sure I’m able to stay ahead in my market.
Bookkeeping and Accounting with AI for Airbnb/VRBO/Short term rental
Last but not the least is using AI for bookkeeping or accounting . AI can help you in automating a lot of your accounting and bookkeeping activities. It can analyze, where you’re spending money and where there are opportunities to increase revenue and a lot of other things.
You can use HostBooks.AI for Airbnb/VRBO related bookkeeping and accounting. It is specially made for short term rental owners to improve efficiency and maximize profitability of your property.
Now imagine that you have a property which is making, say, $80,000 and you have $70,000 in expenses then you are having around $10,000 in profits.
Now if you are able to reduce your expenses by, say, $5,000 and increase your revenue by $5,000 then effectively you are doubling your profit.
AI can help you in finding right opportunities and literally double your profits.
Another way to increase $10,000 in profits is buying a new property, and the down payment for that property might be $100k, $150k or something like that. So you will have to spend a lot of money if you buy a property but by spending in a good big bookkeeping software you can maximize your profits without spending a fortune
Try Hostbooks.AI and make your bookkeeping tension free.
Hope you found this article useful. If there are any other tools or ways which you are using AI for Airbnb then please drop in a comment. Going forward, I’ll review specific tools in different segments and will go more deeper into each of these activities. And again, if you want me to cover any special topic related to AI, then you can let me know via comments.
See you next time.