Enhancing Guest Communication: Airbnb Automated Messaging and More
Maintaining effective communication with Airbnb guests through messages is pivotal to ensure they relish their stay at your vacation rental home. Building a good rapport while offering necessary details can significantly contribute towards gaining 5-star reviews and recurrent bookings.
Handling identical welcome messages or other routine messages can take time and effort, especially with multiple listings. However, the Airbnb scheduled messages feature allows you to automate guest communications, leading to a more efficient Short-Term Rental (STR) business.
This article aims to help you enhance your interaction with guests, ensuring a personalized experience through Airbnb's automated messaging system.
Airbnb's Scheduled Messages Feature
Available to all hosts, Airbnb's scheduled messages feature aids in streamlining guest communication. After booking your property, it can relay routine information that your guests may require.
Templates can be created to provide guests with consistent, helpful information about their stay, including house rules, directions to your property, check-in, checkout instructions, and more. These messages can be scheduled to send automatically based on triggers such as new reservations, check-ins, or checkouts, with timing selected around these triggers.
You can personalize your communication by incorporating shortcodes into your Airbnb checkout message and other scheduled messages. These special tags act as placeholders, pulling information from a guest's booking and listing details to fill in the gaps. At present, 34 shortcodes are available.
While the Airbnb scheduled messages feature is time-saving and simplifies communication, it does have its limitations:
Only three trigger events are available (new booking, check-in, and checkout).
Messages cannot be scheduled for last-minute bookings or short stays where the trigger time is greater than or equal to the lead time.
Additional messaging services are needed if your property is listed on platforms like Vrbo or Booking.com.
For all your guest messages to be relevant, personalized, and centralized in one intuitive app, the flexibility of vacation rental software tools like MistrPM is crucial. MistrPM's Guest Experience functionality ensures rapid and transparent communication with your guests.
MistrPM alleviates the tedious task of manually responding to Airbnb guests, simplifying the automation of messages throughout all customer journey stages, from booking inquiries to checkout and beyond.
The system only requires the development of a list of message templates, with the option to use MistrPMs to cover every stage of the message flow. Over 50 shortcodes can be used to personalize these templates. Message rules can be set for each stage, with events triggering automatic responses, such as:
New inquiries
New pre-approvals
New booking requests
New reservations
Cancellations
Expired pre-approvals
Inquiry/booking denials
New special offers
Payment issues
Responses can be sent immediately or delayed for up to 60 minutes upon receiving these events. Additionally, scheduled message rules can be created to plan messages based on reservation, check-in/check-out timings, or a particular day of the week. These can include check-in instructions, follow-up messages, review requests, and reminders.
MistrPM's AI-powered system can recognize questions from guests on more than 20 common topics, providing almost instant responses using pre-written templates. It also allows for auto-sending messages based on specific criteria, such as availability before or after a booking.
MistrPM provides integration with ChatGPT to help craft answers to unusual questions swiftly. You can edit a generated draft response before sending it to your guests.
Working for Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com listings, MistrPM simplifies cross-platform communication. All your messages can be managed from a centralized inbox, ensuring every booking request or guest question is noticed.
MistrPM also extends beyond guest messaging, automatically sending notifications to cleaners about their jobs, and can assist in gathering more positive reviews by automating follow-ups.
MistrPM: Your All-In-One Vacation Rental Software
MistrPM is a comprehensive vacation rental software with features to automate 90% of repetitive tasks, offering significant time savings. With our direct booking website builder, you can drive repeat direct bookings. As a vacation rental channel manager, MistrPM can efficiently manage bookings on multiple channels from a single dashboard, offering protection from double bookings.
Conclusion
While Airbnb's scheduled messages feature allows automation of booking, check-in, and checkout communications with personal touches through shortcodes, it has its limitations. MistrPM offers a superior solution as a vacation rental software, providing a comprehensive system to automate all guest and team communications.
See also: Diving Into Vacation Rental Property Management.
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