3 Reasons Why You Should Use Scheduled Messaging on Airbnb

Scheduled Messaging is probably one of the most important features for Airbnb Hosts.

Airbnb has recently added a feature where you can add pre-composed messages that you can schedule to be sent at any point in time of your booking cycle. As someone who is not a full-time host, I’ve actually been waiting for a feature like this, since it makes life a lot easier! Below I’m sharing some of the reasons why this is such a game changer:

1) It will definitely save you a lot of time!

As someone who loves their day job and spends most of their day working, being able to schedule messages is such a blessing. Even though I mostly work on answering messages on Airbnb in the evenings or in breaks, if a booking comes in, I can already pack most of the important information into one message and send it directly to my new guest. This is different from the saved messages feature, since those don’t get sent automatically. Saved messages are also a good feature to save time, but you always have to remember to actually go into the app, find the saved message and click send, which sometimes is harder said than done.

2) It can help you raise your star rating

The cool thing about the scheduled messaging feature is that you can include different messages for different purposes i.e. you can schedule them based on all stages of the booking cycle. This means you can schedule the messages before their arrival, during their arrival and after arrival, all within a timespan you prefer. So you can for example create:

1) Thank you message after they have booked (e.g. 5 mins after the booking was made)

2) A Welcome message upon their arrival (e.g. at the time of check-in)

3) A check in message during their stay (e.g.1 day into their stay)

4) A follow up message after they have checked out to remind them to leave a nice review (e.g. 1hr after planned check-out)

All of them completely automated!

By being a very active host who checks in multiple times on your guest, it shows you really care about their well-being and experience at your space. This will ultimately lead to you getting higher reviews on your property.

3) It makes you seem very responsive to guests

Everyone knows response rates are super important on airbnb. No one really wants to stay with a host who barely answers their messages or takes a really long time to get back to you. Having a few automated messages in your locker can work wonders, especially if you have a lot going on and might forget to get back to a future guest regarding directions to your place. Having that already drafted message going out 3 days before your guests arrival can safe a lot of headaches, especially when guests just arrived at the airport and are calling you non-stop about where to direct the Uber, just because you forget to send directions. Bottom line, scheduled messages helps to save you not just time, but also takes care of your response rate in instances where you might have a lot going on and can oversee the occasional message here and there.

One caveat though…

If you plan to be an avid user of the scheduled message feature make sure that you respond to individual queries in quite rapidly and let your guest know that they can expect automated messages that contain some useful info for their stay. If you don’t do this your guest might receive an automated message that does not make any sense based on the question they asked. This happened to me a few times and I ended up bombarding guests with messages because all my scheduled messages continued to send at the same time I was messaging back and forth with them.

Conclusion

I love them. As long as you can keep an eye on when these are sent and can make sure that they don’t negatively interfere with the correspondence between you and your guest, go nuts!