Smart Home and Automation Technologies for Airbnb business

1. Smart Home Technologies for Airbnb Hosting
2. Automating Your Business
3. Why Is Automation Important?
4. Processes to Automate First

To remain competitive on Airbnb, it is necessary both to maintain the attractiveness of your offers and keep your labour efficient. These two aspects of the vacation rental business may seem like they don’t have anything in common, but that is where the technology kicks in. Implementing smart home and automation technologies may significantly improve one’s results on Airbnb. 

Many owners are either considering it or already implementing these technologies, making it important for other players to know the details. Today, we will elaborate on both of them, explaining how they work and highlighting their benefits.

Smart Home Technologies for Airbnb Hosting

Smart home devices like automatic lights have been around for quite a while now. After a short period of increased attention, they have been mostly considered a gimmick, but the situation has drastically changed during the past few years. The range of such devices and their features has increased dramatically, actually making them universally useful. The question is should you use them as well or it is not yet the time?

Benefits of Smart Home Devices

If you scroll through other Airbnb listings in your area, you will likely find many notes about smart home technologies in the descriptions. In such a case, it is logical to consider keeping up with the competitors. Otherwise, it is a great opportunity for listing the first smart home in your area. There are lots of other reasons to join the smart home party, so let us overview them separately. 

Security

There are lots of smart home gadgets that are aimed at increasing your property’s security. Have you ever worried your guests will copy their keys during their visit? And what if there’s a fire, and nobody can notify you? Smart home technologies resolve this and many other issues. Smart locks will prevent you from unwanted key-related events, smoke detectors will automatically notify you in case of a fire, and the outdoor smart cameras will keep logs of any unusual events in their area of sight.

And in case you are not worried that much about the safety, don’t forget to think about your guests. Many potential visitors would like to have their vacations at a secure place. At the same time, guests who are less careful will still not mind having the security gadgets installed, making them a win-to-win purchase.

Remote Control

With the Internet of Things opportunities, the gadgets don’t have to be autonomous anymore. The same smart locks will allow you to check your guests in or out remotely. After the check-out, you will be able to see the report and control all the connected devices, too. Excluding such routine actions that were previously done manually and in your presence will save you lots of time.

Next Level of Comfort

Having the smart home technologies implemented will surely bring the comfort of your guests to the next level. You will be able to grant them access to the features of thermostats, lighting, smart TV, video doorbells and other devices, saving their time on daily routine as well. In case your guests don’t have it at their homes, it will make their experience unique, while otherwise, it will be easy for them to adapt.

Easy to Set Up and Control

In the past, each smart home element used to be a separate autonomous device. You had to manually install and configure them, and when it came to changing the fixed preset, it was necessary to interact with them individually. 

With modern smart home ecosystems, all the devices are connected to one net and controlled via a single app on your smartphone. Moreover, they are easy to install as they are working like plug-and-play. Connect the new device to your app once, and you’ll be able to control it from the same app further on.

Which ones should you use?

The range of smart home devices available on the market is already vast, and it is constantly expanding. However, if you’re only starting to modernise your property, it is better to stick with the time-tested essentials. The possible entries of your starter-pack could include:

• smart locks;
• smart home security system;
• smart smoke detector;
• smart thermostat;
• smart lighting;
• smart TV;
• smart home assistant.

We have already mentioned all the gadgets except for the smart home assistant. In such a system, it works as the coordinator and the centre of all operations. Connected to the smart home app, it will allow you to control any piece of smart tech with your voice or even make presets of commands for specific situations.

Crucial Home Security Devices for Airbnb: Ensuring Guest Safety and Trust

Automating Your Business

Now that we have dealt with the basics of smarting up your home, it is time to think about making the business more efficient. No matter whether you are a beginner or a veteran of the vacation rental business, saving some time by automating your processes will never hurt. 

The previous section was mostly dedicated to hardware, while here, we are moving on to the implementation of software. Thankfully, there are entire systems of programs developed specifically for Airbnb rental business needs.

Why Is Automation Important?

The first and the main benefit is that automation saves your time. With the proper software, you will be able to cut out the most routine processes of your business, enabling you to focus on other tasks. For instance, it is possible to set up a messaging system that would eliminate the typing once and for all.

However, saving time is not the only important feature of automation. Like with any other business, in renting property, there are tons of matters you constantly have to resolve. In such a rush, it is easy to forget to leave your guest a review, change the dates in your booking calendar and do other small tasks. With software that is set up properly, all these actions can be done automatically with a machine-level of preciseness.

The flexibility of automation software has also reached incredible levels. You can build up entire algorithms that will perform the tasks exactly the way you need it. It was possible before, but now it has an unprecedented level of usability and user-friendliness. Instead of writing hundreds of lines of code, you may intuitively set up complicated systems that will adjust to the specified conditions.

Last but not least, all these benefits and features are available in one place. Just like with CRM modules for larger companies, you will be able to control and automate the process in a single multi-functional system. Setting it up may require some time and getting used to, but the amount of time, effort and stress it removes from your life is worth it.

Processes to Automate First

Just like with smart homes, Airbnb business automation technologies are capable of performing lots of features. There are dozens of small and useful tools built-in, but here, we will only focus on the essential ones. They are pricing, messaging, reviewing, publishing listings and managing tasks.

Pricing

It is a common practice at Airbnb to constantly adjust the prices for your property, depending on the demand. Most hosts at the platform check-up with their calendars on a daily basis, regularly changing the prices to ensure that as many days as possible will be booked. Most of them follow their own algorithms by dropping the price for a specific percentage when a gap appears on their calendar.

As you could have guessed, the process may easily be automated. With modern software, you just need to specify the gaps and percentages to work with, and the program will monitor your calendar and adjust the prices on its own. This feature will not only spare you from doing the monitoring and adjusting jobs every day but also make your pricing persistent and comfortable to analyse later.

Messaging and Reviewing

These two tasks are probably the most time-consuming ones, as they are necessary for every reservation. Most hosts who are not yet doing it automatically do a lot of copy-pasting or even manual typing when it comes to greeting the guests, sending them instructions and leaving reviews. 

Automation software is capable of both these tasks as well. Similar to the pricing feature, you can set up an algorithm of messages to be sent to your guests. You can configure the trigger, order, timing and, of course, the content of the messages. For example, you can have the system send a greeting message right after the guest books your property and a  message with detailed instructions two days before check-in.

For the reviewing, the capabilities of programs are also superb. They allow you to create many presets of five-star reviews that will be chosen randomly for every guest of yours. The reviews will be left automatically, eliminating any manual action. What is even better, it’s possible to set a delay before the review is sent out. Thus, you will be able to cancel it at any time, in case you don’t wish to leave a review to a specific guest.

Listing Publishing

Controlling whether your listings are visible or not isn’t probably the most common thing you do as a host on Airbnb, but having an option to do it automatically will probably change that. Adjusting the availability of your listing might be useful for meeting legal occupancy requirements, limiting the incoming messages at night and even targeting. 

Task Management

Last but not least, the software may even simplify the interactions with your team. In case you’re not doing the business alone, you are very likely familiar with the problem of having to assign the same tasks over and over again. For example, calling a cleaner every time the guests check-out or notifying a manager about new arrivals may easily become a frustrating routine.

With the same algorithms offered by modern automation software, you will be able to eliminate the need to do it on your own. All you need to do is to create a message template and set up the triggers to launch it automatically.

Discover easy ways to exchange keys with your Airbnb guests.