The BEST Channel Manager for Airbnb (2024)

(00:00) what’s up guys in today’s video I’m going to be sharing with you my absolute favorite Channel management software for managing short-term rental properties this is the exact tool that I use for managing my portfolio this is the same channel management software surprisingly that I used when I was managing my own property management company in a portfolio of about 35 other properties they’ve come a long way since then added tons of functionality and I just want to take a a video here to kind of dive into
(00:26) some of the best features in no way is this going to be a comprehensive overview of the channel management software because the reality is there’s just so many different cool features inside of hostway surprise um that I could show you it’s going to take a lot to really dive into this in detail so if you want to if you want me to put together more videos in the future diving into more of the different cool kind of features and things I love about hostway different use cases for it different ways you can use the tool then
(00:52) let me know in the comment section Down Below in this video I’m just going to be diving in showing you a brief overview of hostway and some of the best features that I personally think are the most helpful and some of the reasons as well that I just choose hostway because the reality is there’s a variety of different softwares out there um and all of them have their different little pros and cons and quirks and nuances uh so I want to share with you why I specifically like to use hostway so much um now if you want training on how
(01:23) to manage other people’s properties and earn a full-time income on Airbnb or invest in properties for short-term rentals or host your own space on Airbnb there’s links in the description down below for some free trainings to help you get started with all that with that out of the way make sure you check out those links in the description and let’s dive in here and show you through hostway first off let’s start on the overview page this is a page that honestly I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to if I’m being completely
(01:47) honest um it can be helpful when you’re running a larger profile just to be able to kind of see or a larger portfolio I should say once you just want to see kind of what’s going on at a glance in the business over the next few days as far as check-ins checkouts you want to see different metrics that could be really important to kind of track at this point with my portfolio I don’t really track a lot of this so I don’t spend a whole lot of time here where I do spend time is in the calendar tab so
(02:10) this is really helpful because at a glance you can just see which your properties are getting booked up which your properties are not getting booked up what’s going on with them um just add a glance at a high level here looking at the multi calendar so this is just basically all of our properties listed and you can see the calendar you can see where they have bookings where they don’t have bookings then when you wanted to dig into more detail on a specific property you can just click right into it and you can start to see okay who is
(02:35) actually staying at the property what are they staying for you can add a glance see how you’re doing for occupancy and see how your nightly rates are you can click into any one booking and it’ll tell you all the details about that booking in terms of how many people are staying there what the rate is that they’re paying what your total payout amount is all that kind of detail so um super super helpful there to be able to go in and do that now I don’t do any pricing updates in here because I do my
(02:58) pricing updates in uh in price Labs I’ve got a whole other video on this channel that we just put together diving into price labs in more detail so check that out if you want to know about pricing but if you’re not using a pricing tool then you can really really easily just come in here and adjust your uh your pricing for uh different nights of the year what you can also do is now come in and block off availability so that’s really simple and easy to do here and that’ll block it on any different
(03:23) platform that you’re hosted on so fundamentally the reason that you would use a channel management software is just to manage all of the chaos cost of having multiple properties on multiple channels so once you have your property list on Airbnb and vbo and maybe booking.
(03:39) com maybe you’re taking direct bookings as well it becomes pretty complicated and convoluted to try to manage all the calendars and availability and pricing and guest communication manually on all these different platforms so what a channel management software is meant to do and do really well the core functionality there is just to integrate that all into one place now this brings me to one of the biggest reasons why I choose host hostway over other platforms is because hostway in my experience um and based on their external validation is hostway has
(04:09) the best Integrations of any channel management software Bar None with Airbnb booking.com vbo they’ve got really really good quality Integrations and that is really important to me because what that means is that when someone books your property on one platform it is properly going to sync with VRBO therefore or with hostway and therefore syn out to the other properties so I honestly it’s been years and years and years since I have personally had a double booking happen on any of my properties while using hostway um it’s
(04:44) just not really an issue anymore or not really anything that actually happens anymore so and the reason because the reason that is so is because of the quality of the integration how uh how rare it is for the integration to be down or any of the Integrations to have any kind of bugs with them they’re just really really well done Integrations which you’d be surprised to know is not actually the case with a lot of other channel management softwares a lot of other softwares out there don’t actually
(05:10) they might have different like bells and whistles and features but their core product the core integration if it’s not done well which a lot of them aren’t then you end up having double bookings you end up having messages that don’t go through you end up having pricing that doesn’t update properly and I just don’t have those issues with hostway which is a huge part of the reason why I like them so much other people talk to me about like different you know bells and whistles and functionality that they get
(05:33) that they couldn’t get with hostway but that they get elsewhere and to me none of that is worth it if your integration fundamentally is just not actually that good so that’s a big thing for me like I said you can really easily just kind of block off dates you can add notes to them for like maybe maintenance going in there different stuff like that do all kinds of cool stuff just in the calendar right here so that’s really nice if you’re not using a pricing tool you can also just bulk update your prices in
(05:58) here by just highlighting a bunch of dates and then you can update your pricing uh manually very easily that way as well that’s the calendar at a glance um honestly the the monthly and the multi is really what I use I don’t really ever go into the yearly calendar but it is there I don’t know why you would use that but it is there um reservations is really just handy for looking up different reservations if you want to see like the booking activity that’s been happening have you been uh going through a bit of a lull in
(06:22) reservations have certain properties been going through a la and reservations it’s just great to see all your reservations in one place you can sort them and organize them differently by like when the reservation came through what amount it is whatever you might want to do um and so that’s just really handy so that you can kind of keep track of all the different reservations that are happening all right so like I said I’m not going to dig into all the functionality and all the features here I’m going to focus in this video on just
(06:46) the features that I actually use the most so if you want to know more about like the guest book functionality the coupons different stuff like that anything else you see here that you want to hear me touch on or explain or talk about more let me know in the comment section down below and if there’s not people that want it I can definitely put together another video going more into detail on some of the uh different additional features that hostway has cuz there certainly are a lot of them and I think that’s worth highlighting as well
(07:11) is that depending on whether you maybe have a couple of properties that you own whether you have a big portfolio if you’re managing for other people if you own them yourself um different types of properties you might have different types of guest staying with you all these different factors it’s really important to realize that different hosts have different need needs from a channel management software and so it becomes very complex for channel management software companies to actually cater to everyone effectively
(07:38) and I think that hostway has done a really really good job of building out the functionality and the features that are really really great for a variety of different types of host while also staying focused on the main thing and not getting distracted and building in a whole bunch of crazy auxiliary features that really just aren’t that useful while they detract from kind of the main core functionality I think that hostway has just done a really good job of that overall so that’s another just note about what I like so much about hostway
(08:07) now the inbox here uh what’s cool about it is you basically have just like one Unified Inbox here for every single every single reservation on every different platform for every single one of your properties it’s all in one place so that’s really really helpful because now you never have to log in and out of all kinds of different uh different places um and you don’t have to like set up your messaging templates or messaging automations in a bunch of different places and have like this huge kind of
(08:33) like Rat’s Nest of all this stuff going on you just do everything through hostway and again it’s one of those things where a lot of Channel management softwares have this it’s pretty core functionality but hostway actually does it really really well because their Integrations are so solid so messages actually get delivered they actually go through they fire all the time like all this stuff actually works that’s really important message templates and automations um I’m not going to go into
(08:58) detail they’re pretty self-explanatory I’m assuming if you’re watching this video that you get the gist of what those are and how they work again if you want me to go into more detail on that in another video just let me know in the comment section down below hey guys if you are an existing or aspiring Airbnb host investor or co-host who’s looking to level up your game and take your hosting to the next level make a whole lot more money on Airbnb and frankly just have a whole lot more fun then
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(09:49) going to be insane it’s going to be a total no-brainer we’re trying to make this as accessible to everyone as possible so that we can all join an incredible community of Airbnb hosts co-host and investors from all over the world and really help each other to level up our game there’s going to be all kinds of great trainings additional perks I’m going to be doing giveaways all kinds of fun stuff and you’re going to learn all about that when you sign up for the weit list down below so make
(10:12) sure you click the link in the description join the weit list it’s free to join and I promise you it is going to be incredibly worthwhile you are not going to want to miss this so again just check out the link in the description down below it’s going to be right at the top there make sure you join the wait list and I’ll see you in there ask is a pretty cool feature that um we we use at times quite a bit uh it’s really cool because you can basically uh create tasks for like maintenance for example
(10:37) and then assign them to different users there’s different user groups that you can create for different people so for example you can set up your maintenance team with a certain amount of access permission so they can’t go and like update prices or respond to guest messages but they can see the calendar see when people are in and out of there see uh the task list of things to do and then you can assign tasks to them how they get notified in the app how they get email notifications SMS notifications that kind of stuff so
(11:02) really really nice there again there’s all kinds of more robust stuff like checklist you can have for your cleaners you can create auto tasks as well so that anytime there’s a turnover it automatically creates a task for your cleaning team that’s not the way we do it we just have our cleaning team check the calendar and go in every time there’s a checkout they just know to schedule it in but again different functionality for different types of users so it is really helpful there uh reviews guest payments I’m not going to
(11:25) go in too much financial reporting um I mean financial reporting is cool it is really handy that you can just basically see where your listing’s at how well it’s doing you can look on a listing by listing basis you can look at multiple listings all grouped in you can get the kind of financial overview so this can be really really helpful um breaking down like Revenue per Channel book nights per Channel um all this different stuff uh like your occupancy rate your total revenue throughout the year all
(11:50) these different things bear in mind that some of the time it can be inaccurate if you’re if you’re taking like direct bookings outside of this whole platform so uh I’m going to talk about in a second here how you can set up a direct booking platform directly through hostway that makes it really really easy to take direct bookings before we had that set up we were just getting people to wire us or E transfer US money u e transfer for any of you Americans who are watching and have no idea what I’m
(12:14) talking about it’s basically venmo but basically that kind of stuff obviously doesn’t get factored into here so just be mindful of that but it is really great cuz for the most part you get like all your data in one place as far as just optimizing your Revenue um and then there’s all kinds of different you could do like owner statements detail more detailed Financial reports which become really really handy if you want to do greater kind of more in-depth Financial audits or if you’re managing properties
(12:39) for other people and you want to be able to give the owners certain statements that’s really helpful as well so that’s really great listings is really cool because you can basically now have all your listing details in one place so you can for example come into here you can update your listing in one place and it’s going to push out to all the different channels that you’re on whether it’s VRBO Airbnb whatever it might be if you add an amenity take an amenity away want to change your photos
(13:02) want to change your listing description your headline any of that stuff you just do that and it’s really cool cuz they also organize all of your uh your templated messages in here as well so it’s just nice and organized and in one place you can see it all right here pretty cool um channel manager um so again really core functionality this is just like a technical uh tab that you would use for mapping which properties are listed on which channels all that kind of stuff user management is where you manage all the different users and
(13:26) user groups in your property so again super super super helpful so that you can just basically manage the levels of access that different people have make sure everyone has the access they need um and then the last thing I want to show you as I mentioned you can set up a direct booking platform or a direct booking website you can see um ignore the fact that mine is not properly secured I have to have our our tech guide just kind of look into that and fix that up add the right SSL strip kit there but you can basically set this up
(13:51) and it literally only takes um like a couple maybe 15 minutes of work to maybe an hour of work to get this all set up and then bada boom people can automatically book directly with you you just integrate with a payment processor which if you’re listed on vbo for example you probably already have that and then people can now book directly in with you um and you can send them here it’s really cool it’s just like on Airbnb where they can see all your property details all that stuff and just select your availability it’s integrated
(14:17) with your calendar so they can see when you’re available when you’re not and then they can book directly with you you process the payment there’s no middleman you’re not paying any fees to another company like Airbnb anything like that so really really helpful there we use this a lot for direct bookings so that when people want to stay with us again uh I should say direct bookings obviously it’s for direct bookings we use this a lot for repeat bookings because obviously when people want to
(14:40) stay with us again and they’ve already stayed with us we know they’re good we know they’re good guests and we trust them we want to book with them and we don’t want to have to pay the additional percentage fee to Airbnb so we have a slight discount on here compared to what it would be if they booked on Airbnb so they get a bit of a deal and we avoid playing platform commissions so we make more money so that that’s really really easy to set up and do uh with hostway which is another really great feature so
(15:04) again I wish I could go into more detail on this and I certainly can in another video if you guys want to uh see that just let me know in the comment section down below like I’ve said a few times here um hopefully this video was helpful for you hopefully it was valuable to you um these are a few of the reasons why I love hostway as a platform and why I personally use them and recommend them to just about everyone that I work with I think they’ve done a really really great job building a robust tool set if
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