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For the past year I have developed (privately) a Chrome extension to help me save precious time managing my listings by automating many of the processes and create shortcuts into Airbnb.
Some of the extension’s functionality:
1-Click to leave a review directly from Gmail (including a Private Note) 1-Click to reply guest’s Public Response directly from Gmail. 1-Click apply Airbnb’s recommended price. Notes: Gather all of your listing info in one place to be accessed w. 1-Click 1-Click access to any of your listing’s calendar, settings, notes, and inbox. Increase amount of reviews from guests. Visually see who did not leave you a review, and recommendations on how to follow up.
No user / pass needed. If you are logged into your Airbnb, it works.
My purpose is to support and assist hosts to automate and reduce their daily tasks so they can focus on better guests experience, without compromising on their standards.
I am looking for 10 - 20 hosts that would use the extension for free and provide feedback. It is FREE and can be downloaded from the Chrome Store privately. You get an invite and can access it on the store.
So - if I don’t sound too crazy… who’s interested saving time managing?
One thing you should know is that applying “Airbnb’s recommended price” is something no experienced host would do. Airbnb’s recommended pricing is insultingly and absurdly low.
This makes no sense. Hosts can easily see if a guest left them a review, and Airbnb sends a notification that tells you when a guest has left a review. What are “recommendations on how to follow up” if a guest doesn’t leave a review? There’s nothing to follow up on. And I can’t imagine what you could come up with that would increase the number of reviews from guests that hosts aren’t already aware of. 85% of my guests leave reviews and I’m not about to bug them about it if they choose not to.
Absolutely correct. Though, I did find myself using it at times with a fair amount of success. It’s really not the gist of the extension so one doesn’t have to use it all. Should one really wants to do so, he can - easily.
Sure, if they go to the inbox one by one. The extension let’s them have a much quicker look through the calendar, that also opens directly
We all have different style of managing. I follow up, and always respectfully (with very specific templates that I wrote). Guests enjoy leaving 5-Stars reviews if you ask correctly - twice or three times. I have 97% guests leaving review since I started using the extension.
It was developed first for my 1 listing, it grew later so many here will find it useful. I mean, who would say no to leaving a full review w. 1 click…?
Thank you for your kind words and being generous with your time to reply here.
Your post might get flagged for selling something.
Regardless, I suspect that many hosts have systems in place via scheduled messages and/or quick replies that makes that aspect of your extension unnecessary. The review functionality might be helpful. The Notes functionality needs more explanation. Hosts here seem pretty frugal (and the ones who might have bigger budgets might be on OwnerRez or another channel manager).
My two cents (most of the frequent contributors are more experienced than I am).
What this does, when you get an email from Airbnb to leave a review it adds a button in Gmail and when clicked, it goes through all the phases of a review and populate the fields. No more copy / paste, no more ignoring the Private Feedback… it’s all there and done within a few seconds. Heck, you don’t even need to be on that tab if you don’t want to.
What could be a reason for a host to simply only use that feature to save so much time on leaving reviews? One click vs. how many clicks / minutes?
And this is how it looks on Gmail, simply intuitive:
This is a window that opens on any tab you’re on, where you can add to it any info related to your listing. What many uses in Excel or Google. This gives a much faster access to it, no loading needed.
I don’t understand this either. All what phases of a review? What cut and paste? I write reviews for all my guests, nothing is cut and pasted, and the whole thing takes me all of about 3 minutes. Amd any private feedback is right there to see.
After writing a few hundreds of reviews, when I had 1 listing, I found that I mostly repeat myself (unless a review is not 5 stars). More or less I’d write the same for each guests.
This is why I started it. The extension give me 3 versions (or more if needed) of reviews that I write (I can also personalize it w. the guest’s name, and emojis if needed), and when I press the Automated Review button it does the following:
Open the Airbnb review page.
Selects 5 stars for all the 3 criterias
Randomly select a review (from 3 pre-written ones), populate it in the review filed and goes to the next page
Adds a Private Feedback
Confirm I’d host them again
Submits and finalizes the process.
And this 3 minutes process, becomes less than 10. When it accumulates, it’s a decent amount of time saved. Plus, it can work in the background. I don’t even need to see it.
Indeed it might but the flag will be ignored. Oded is a longtime member here and when he first joined the forum he was a frequent participant. I take him at his word that he is offering this for free. If we find out later that there’s been a change, we can put him in contact with the forum owners and see what they want to do.
Does it ever occur to you that someone who only hosts a single guest seasonally has a different experience than someone who hosts hundreds of guests yearly? I’m not a fan of an automated review either but it’s better than no review which is what I’ve gotten from more than one host.
Thank you for your trust. Any moderator or the forum owners that would like a link to it to check that is free, are welcome to DM me. Thank you again KKC.
Sure it does. I was just picturing something like “Nice guests”, you know, those reviews which tell you nothing, that those with lots of listings post for every guest, which I completely discount. But I can certainly understand a host with hundreds of guests to leave reviews for, cycling between saved reviews that actually mention if the guest left the place clean, communicated well, respected house rules, etc., as Oded explained he does.
A really useful extension / automation that I would gladly pay for would automate an answer to a guest inquiry.
Something simple like “thanks for your inquiry”. Then I can sigh with relief when I am away from my phone, since I have then fulfilled the inquiry timetable and will not be penalized for not answering an inquiry promptly.
What do you mean penalized? It sometimes takes 8 hrs for me to answer an inquiry, if they sent it after I went to bed. There’s no penalties for that.
Seems like 24 hrs is enough time to answer an inquiry.
Smartbnb did that. The developer, @smartbnb.io, Pierre, used to post tons of helpful stuff here back when he started. It’s now called Hospitable. Full disclosure: he gave me a year subscription and then I subscribed a second year to pay back his gift. With my one listing I decided I didn’t really use what was offered that much but I was very happy with the customer service and options it gave me. I recommend it based on my experience of about 5 years ago.
Somewhere on the site it will say “Host usually answers within [fill in the blank] minutes/hours.”
So I think that’s what @Rolf is referring to. If a Host gets lots of messages when they’re in bed and responds, say, eight hours later, the average might be say, four hours, and that could be so off-putting to a guest looking for a quick reply.
@Oded Even better than an instant “Thanks for your message” would be an automated key word quick reply. So, for example, if a Host could anticipate a question on pets, baby playpen, early check-in, parking, etc., it would be cool if the automated reply could provide content on that and invite a follow-up if that did not answer the question – maybe that’s a 2.0 version of what you’ve put together.
1-Click to leave a review directly from Gmail (including a Private Note)
