Should I pay for a service that manages my airbnb profile, saving me time?

What’s your experience so far with this? How do you handle it?

No, I think you should do it yourself.

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You should not be a host if you don’t even have enough spare time to manage your profile.

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I personally don’t think it’s worth it.

When I consider hiring someone, I ask myself (1) Do I know how to do this myself or have the time and capacity to learn? If the answer is no, obviously I should hire them! Usually this turns out to be home renovations.

If the answer is yes, I know how to do this myself, I then ask myself (2) How much would it cost per hour to hire someone to do it for me? Though I live comfortably, I am not wealthy, and find I would rather clean, garden, and manage my AirBnB myself than hire someone else to do it.

Another thing too is that it takes a lot of time to initially learn the ins and outs of how just one site works, let alone multiple listing sites. I handle all the correspondence, bookings, etc. for all sites. If my partner took that over he would likely make a lot of costly newbie mistakes…with him assuming he just needs to answer guest questions and accept the booking.

I could see him getting conned into canceling on behalf of a guest - and he would have no clue how it would negatively affect the listing. He is a pushover and I could see him running into all kinds of over occupancy issues because he didn’t think it was polite to ask the guest too many questions…lol.

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I partner with my father on our listing, and I am constantly the bad guy. I’m pretty sure the guests would stay for free if he ran the place by himself. haha.

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If you can’t spend the time (20 minutes a day, tops unless you have multiple properties) to manage your listing profile, then don’t waste any time being a host. AirBnb is about being a personal business, not a faceless entity like Marriott.

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My experience is with being the one managing the listing and the whole operation and it was great… for awhile.

Then the owner decided that despite the Air-generated monthly reports of income, I was not being honest with him, called Air and cancelled 9 of my reservations, at a cost of $50 each… for me.

It’s been just swell and I am now out almost $1500 including those cancellation penalties.

It’s funny, I would have thought the owner was the dumb one giving up control but it turns out that I never had any in the first place - despite me doing all the work and all of the funds going to my bank account.

I would suggest having someone do the initial work of getting your listing photos and all the other crud done, like verifying IDs, etc., and then handing it back to you and you handling the bit of online traffic the listings generate.

In other words, don’t be like me… and don’t be like the ones who cheated me out of 3 months of really hard work. :slight_smile:

Not that I’m making this about me, or anything…
J