As a vacation rental property manager, I’ve often struggled with balancing numerous tasks while providing service. One of the biggest challenges for me was finding a workaround to repetitive questions sent by guests or leads looking to make a reservation.
On one end, you want to be personable and warm. But on the other hand, these types of messages come in at any hour of the day. Switching between helping my kids with homework and helping a guest figure out how to enter the property has a cost. Once you’ve been distracted from one task, it’s hard to get back into the moment of what you were doing.
As the CTO of Hostfully, a big part of my job is figuring out how new software technologies can be added into our property management software (PMS). And as you may have heard in the last few months, the big one is AI. While I was skeptical about AI’s potential to enhance guest communication, I quickly realized that AI would be better suited in a semi-automated capacity. That is, the AI could help me prewrite the answers and wait for my approval to send.
And that’s what my team and I set out to build. This feature has not only sped up our response times but also reduced front office fatigue.
Here’s how we built it for Hostfully customers.
Imagine receiving a guest inquiry about late check-in options. Previously, crafting a personalized response took time. I had to stop what I was doing and focus on that. Not all my properties have the same check-in times so I’d have to check the PMS or guidebooks first. But with AI, the response is prewritten, drawing from our listings and reservations directly from the PMS, ensuring accuracy and personalization.
The outcome? For me, at least, it saves me minutes each day. But it’s more powerful than that. Those are minutes I save each day–FOREVER. In other words, that’s a time saver that frees up hours over the course of a year.
An added bonus is that the benefits go beyond productivity.
Reducing the manual load has noticeably decreased fatigue for myself and the people that help me manage properties. The repetitive nature of guest communication can be a grind, but with AI handling initial responses, our team stays engaged and motivated. They can now focus on creating memorable experiences for our guests, and have more time to deal with last minute emergencies.
Reflecting on the past few months of development, and real life testing, I can truly say that the cumulative impact of these small time savers is evident. By integrating AI into our guest communication process, we’ve improved efficiency and fostered a more positive work environment. The hours saved have been reinvested into enhancing services and ensuring unforgettable guest stays.
I’m not ready to say that Hostfully and other top-tier PMSs that offer AI solved guest communications. But we’ve definitely helped property managers in a significant way. And so with that said, we’re looking at other small time sinks that take up hours each year. Reach out to me if you have any suggestions on what we can tackle next.
