And do you account for your time and give yourself an hourly rate for managing your properties/making purchases etc?
No I don’t. Now that I have 5 properties my process has changed a lot but I’ve been in the throes of getting the new properties set up so have been working nonstop. I have hired a cleaning manager and am putting new inventory processes in place. So I don’t have a clear idea yet of what my daily time spent will be, especially now that I have smartbnb.io to help me with my messaging which will save a TON of time.
My hourly rate isn’t necessarily my highest priority though. I am a stay at home mom and so a huge benefit of doing Airbnb is the flexibility and that is very valuable to me.
Is this some sort of am AI? I mean, how does it reply to potential guest?
It would be strange if someone is asking you a few questions and it replies with “Yes, we’d loving you over.”.
Excellent question. I’d also be interested in details of how this works. I seem to recall there is some information about this on the smartbnb site, but it’s more interesting to hear it directly from a user. I don’t see how automated messages can do anything useful besides some equivalent of “we’ll get back to you shortly”.
Maybe the AD 3000 equivalent of Airbnb hosts will be able to use actual AIs to help with their guests (assuming the human race is around that long), but for now I feel that we’re stuck doing the dirty work ourselves.
That’s exactly how I feel about it. I have an otherwise empty guest room that I’m making money off of. Sitting on the internet answering questions is what I do half the day anyway. (Can I deduct my time spent of the airhost forum from my taxes? No? huh. )
Pierre used to spend time here answering questions but people started poaching his stuff and using it in their own programs. I’m sure if you contacted him and asked about it he’d be happy to explain it all after you subscribed to his service.
You can set up answers to frequently asked questions (like about pets, parking, early check in, etc) and if it detects those questions in a message it will input your answer. I’m sure it’s not a perfect system but I made my answers pretty general and I honestly do get asked those same things over and over. I imagine it will apply about 80% of the time and the rest of the time I will follow up with more information. I still review all of my messages to make sure all questions are addressed.
Ok, I see. It looks for keywords. I guess that would be useful some of the time. And it’s certainly true that people tend to ask the same questions. Often things that I’ve already answered in my listing. Though the most popular ones, by some distance, are about early check-in and late check-out. And those you cannot automate.
Actually, my automated response to early/late check in questions is that I will check with my cleaners to see if that is something they can accommodate and get back to the guest (which is what I have to do regardless of automated message). So it does save me typing a message and responds quickly to the question.
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