Smartbnb: Automated guest experience from inquiry to review, and more tools to make your Airbnb business a success!

Hello everybody!

My name is Pierre and this is my first post here!

I have launched last week a website https://smartbnb.io which is meant to give Airbnb hosts more powers than they have currently, based on my own experience as a host in Belgium.


So far, here is what it can do:

  • Auto-messaging

The objective is to get rid of the most repetitive communication you might have with a guest, and providing a maximum level of customization for a minimum effort.

It can react to events (for example a new booking inquiry) or schedule messages at key moments of your bookings (for example, a few days before check-in, the day after check-in, the even of a check-out…).

If you are living in an area where you host people speaking multiple languages (really important where I live, between French, Dutch and English), you also have the possibility of creating templates in several languages, and that template will be picked if it is a better match than the “fallback” English. It even comes pre-loaded with templates in French and in English!

Obviously, you can customize a template to each guest and stay with short codes (it is more authentic than the average copy-pasted/saved message), including the possibility of confirming the amount of a reservation in the guest’s native currency (really neat).

If you are not comfortable with sending automatic messages, there are also options to adapt this.

If you are, a reply will be sent within 30 seconds on average. In our experience, guests do not feel that it’s weird: in many cases, they actually complement the host (the probably haven’t even left the messaging window).


  • Auto-Update:

Would you book a place whose calendar was updated “2 weeks ago”? This fixes that by sending a signal to Airbnb that a listing is up to date. In some instances, this has had the effect of offering a small boost in search rankings.


  • Checkpoint:

I require guests to verify their ID, but there are many loopholes on Airbnb’s side that I have often considered turning it off.

For example, the guest has already paid when they are asked to verify their ID, and Airbnb does not tell the guest the reservation has been sent (it has) or that it blocks the calendar for up to 12 hours (it does). With this, you fix this situation: you are informed when a guest is booking your place, but has not confirmed their ID, and you can also send them a message to troubleshoot them.

Seems small, but I have 25 reservations that were dropped by guests just because they didn’t understand what was happening (a small fortune).


  • Daily ranking and pricing reports (Market)

Automated pricing does not always work transparently, so it often requires some tuning… on which basis?

With this component, you can receive every day a summary with the most important metrics for your listing (position in search rankings, your market’s rates, and the general number of listings available) for the next 30 possible stays.


I invite you to have a look at this on https://smartbnb.io, and I would definitely appreciate your views with this.

You can also see some public metrics of your listing by running a listing report. You might learn a few things.

There is currently a free trial for 14 days (irrespective of your number of listings), but feel free to send an email at hello@smartbnb.io to have an extension to a full month (before August 31, 2016).

I wish you all a happy hosting!

For the free waffles: It would be a pleasure to give you some if you travel to Belgium! (probably with a beer too!)

7 Likes

Thanks for introducing. Sounds like some great services. Would like to hear some user reviews.
Where do I sign up for free waffles?

That is just getting started, so I am just as anxiously waiting for user reviews :slight_smile:
As for the free waffles… could we maybe just skip to the beer ?

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Hello Pierre,

I signed up yesterday and received my first report this morning. I am glad to learn that I am the “marker leader” in my area :sunglasses:.

If i could suggest a thing, it would be great to be able to set parameters for the time window your website uses to build the report, which is 30 days at the moment. For instance in my market, most of the guests seem to book not for the next month, but between 30 to 90 days ahead, so a report analyzing this time window would be more useful for me.

Hey Barthelemy, nice to meet you :slight_smile: Notice your listing indeed, feels great to be #1. Lots of people coming to Disneyland hum :slight_smile:

As for the time window, this is not for the next 30 days, but for the next 30 stays (or hypothesis of bookings considering your own calendar’s requirements). If you are willing to explore further into the future, I recommend aligning the “maximum nights” parameter to your minimum nights requirements. That way, the algorithm will only look for the stay of the minimum duration, and then will skip to the next possible check-in date (and stay) instead of trying other check-out dates.

In any case, I have pushed your limit to 60 stays. Servers will burn, but they are meant to do that :slight_smile: If it works, why not 90 indeed…

Hi there!
I have just signed up! I am a lot interested in messaging automation, so I started paying around.
While trying to add a new message rule under events tab it appears that when I try to add a new language the relevant drop down menu is empty!

Can you please have a look at it?

Thanks Konstantinos! I have just sent you an email :). We are currently investigating what happened and I will you personnaly when it is solved.

The problem was solved an hour ago, so it works fine, in 28 languages, including in Greek :smiley:

So, I’ve been enjoying the daily reports. It’s very informative as I daily edit how many guests or market search terms so I can get different reports each day. If someone were to search my little town, I’m #1 consistently! But if they search the larger municipal area I sink down in the search results, down near 200+. It’s good to know though, I need to find some ways to make myself higher in the search results for people looking for places near the airport, etc.

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Thanks Sarah, it is a good use In an hopefully not too distant future there will be the possibility to monitor several areas and get more information than those simply in the emails. This is the basis for some proper machine learning, and hack those search rankings for good.

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Hi Pierre
Looks like a great app, and fills a lot of my AirBnB needs. I am looking forward to using this.
When I was setting up the autofills for messaging, a couple of points…

In your templates for the events messaging for inquiry, and new request to book, I also added the following…

“In order for us to improve your stay, I would also like to confirm the number of guests staying, relation to each other, age of any children, intended purpose for travel (business/ travel/ visiting relatives), and any special needs.”

Also when we are setting up templates, it may be helpful to have somewhere a list of quick short cuts on the same page.

Otherwise, look forward to trying it out…

Kind regards
May

Absolutely! My templates are just to get started. Some hosts wants to get it rolling as quick as possible, but others want to customize it to their style and personality, which is absolutely what I recommend.

I think you mean short codes. They are indeed accessible at the top of the editor, with some examples relevant to you. Just click on the “short codes” link.

Short codes are not always the same for each rule, depending on the information that is accessible, so the list of short codes may vary.

Thanks for clarifying Pierre. Will check out that short codes link!!

I finally checked out smartbnb. Have one suggestion. What about a guidebook option? Right now I am using coral guidebook. Only complaint is no automatic sent out option, looks like smartbnb has through about everything, what about a guidebook that send out automatically a few days before guest stay. Either can connect with coral guidebook or have you owner. That will be perfect!

Most Smartbnb users will include the link to their Coral guidebook straight in their Airbnb booking confirmation or check-in message. Just open the Reservations tab and edit the check-in messages that were prepared for you :wink:

Thank you so much. I added in the check in instruction.

Hi. Im very interested in your tool. Is there any APP to use the inbox with mobile device?
Thank you.

Hi Aaron!

We do indeed offer a fully featured inbox, which works with multiple Airbnb accounts and is accessible from the mobile website.

However, our value proposition is that you would only need our inbox to monitor Smartbnb’s activity with your guests and only intervene on a very occasional basis.

Thank you for the quick response. So there is no APP but a mobile website to use every function of smartbnb.
I actually have more than 30 places but want to test few of them first.
One more question, Is there any alert system for mobile?

It will be nice to know if you are still using the service and what was your experience like?