Summer rental season is in full force: Families are taking their summer vacations, millennials are looking for their next adventure, and couples are booking their yearly getaway. As an Airbnb host, it's an exciting time, but it's also overwhelming.
The more you can automate, the better.
Hosts all over the globe are trying to automate the most tedious tasks involved in managing their properties. In fact, we've had almost 2,000 people ask us to automate their Airbnb workflows. But until Airbnb—and other companies like VRBO, HomeAway, HotelTonight, Lodgable, and Wheelhouse—integrate with Zapier, we can still help you automate your property management.
Here are some tips on how to automate your Airbnb and other property management workflows, saving you time and creating a better experience for both you and your guests.
1. Send yourself automatic reminders
You'll get an email and SMS every time you have a new booking request or confirmation, but what if you want to get your notifications somewhere else?
With Zapier, you can watch for any message that comes in to your G Suite Gmail account and matches a certain label (for Airbnb, it might be any email where the subject line contains Inquiry for or Reservation confirmed). Whenever that happens, Zapier can send you a message wherever you spend most of your time. For many people, that's Slack, but you can connect this workflow to any of the thousands of apps that work with Zapier.
2. Automatically schedule your cleaning
Every time you have a new booking, you'll want to be sure you get the cleaning on the schedule. Time between bookings is tight, so there isn't much wiggle room.
If you do the cleaning yourself, you can use Zapier to automatically add it to your calendar immediately upon booking. If you use a service for cleaning, you can use their preferred app to let them know the date you need them to come. Send them an email, log it in a spreadsheet, or send it to their project management app.
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If you use Jobber, you can even track all of your cleaning invoices in a Google Sheets spreadsheet so your entire team can easily reference it. No need to manually update your reporting.
3. Manage your bookings from within your project management tool
Airbnb is a great channel to market your listings and get bookings, but it doesn't have everything you need to manage tasks for your stays and guests. If you go above and beyond for your listings—maybe putting together a welcome package with a note or even getting some breakfast items for guests—there are a lot of moving parts.
Zapier can automatically send your bookings to your preferred project or task management tool. From there, you can send your listing through a kanban flow to make sure all of the steps are covered: thank the guest for booking, get the cleaning scheduled, pick up supplies/groceries, follow up for arrival time and send check-in info, and so on. You might even include post-stay steps like checking the unit for damages and reviewing the guest.
Zapier can send all new bookings that come through your email to dozens of different project management apps. Here are just a few examples:
And you don't need to rely on notification emails to automate this process either. Scott Duncombe, Airbnb host and Zapier platform engineer, uses the iCal feed on Airbnb to create a Google Calendar event:
I use Zapier to send this Google Calendar event to Todoist, reminding me to flip the property two days before the guests are set to arrive.
Without lifting a finger, Scott is able to send his Airbnb tasks over to his preferred to-do list app, so everything's always in one place.
4. Use Zapier's Email Parser to further customize your automations
What if the information you want to pass to another app is buried somewhere in the email you receive from Airbnb? That's where Zapier's Email Parser tool can come in handy. It can scan an email, take out the relevant details, and then pass those along to the app of your choice, whether that's your project management tool, calendar, or anything else.
Here are just a few examples of what you can do with Zapier's Email Parser.
Zapier can scan your confirmation emails and pull out the dates of upcoming reservations. Then, we can send you a text message the day each reservation begins, so you can remember to confirm check-in and see if there's anything your guests need.
With that information, Zapier can also help you communicate important information to other members of your team. For example, Zapier can send your cleaning person a customized SMS reminder letting them know there's a new booking and that it's on the calendar.
Zapier can scan your emails for payout amounts and send that information to whatever database app you use. That way, you can track income dynamically to create year-over-year comparisons for things like which weekends book best and for how much.
With that same data, Zapier can send all payout information to your preferred accounting app to help you track that income without the manual copy/pasting. It can include whatever information you want—everything from the total payout to the service fee, or even the confirmation code for the booking.
Read our Email Parser guide or watch our how-to video for more information on how to make the most of it.
As you get ready for the onslaught of summer bookings, take as much off your plate as possible by automating your most tedious and repetitive processes. Sign up for Zapier and get started today.
