The BEST Channel Manager For Airbnb (Behind-the-scenes of mine!)

Hey what’s up guys, in today’s video, we’re going to be talking about channel management software. So for anyone here that is new, and doesn’t quite know exactly what a channel and shop management software actually is, I’ll give you a quick and simple overview of exactly what it is and what it does. And then we’re going to talk about my personal favourite channel management software. This is the one that I use for my short term rental properties. And I’m also going to talk about specifically why I really like using this software. Now, a quick disclaimer, I’m not financially incentivized to make this video by the software company that I am doing talking about, I do work with them really closely, and I recommend them to my members, but I’m not going to leave an affiliate link or anything in description down below, you can check them out, there’s all kinds of other channel management software’s out there as well. And depending on your unique situation, you might be better suited to one versus the other. This is just my personal favourite. And I think it’s really, really great for anyone that has over five properties, especially if they’re rural, I think there’s a couple tools that I really, really love for those types of properties specifically, that require a bit more maintenance tracking. But overall, I just really, really liked that software. So we’ll talk about in this video. Now to start off with let’s talk about what a channel management software software actually is otherwise referred to as a CMS. You’ll also sometimes hear people refer to this as a PMS, a property management software. But channel management is specifically for short term rental. And so let’s talk about what it is and why you would actually need one. So to start off with what it is, it’s basically just a back end software for anyone that is owning or managing other people’s properties, or owning their own properties that they’re operating as short term rentals, and that they want to track everything all in one centralised back end. So the reasons you would need this become pretty obvious as you start to scale. And so for example, if you have one single short term rental property, and you just listed on Airbnb, then Airbnb is backend platform is effectively your channel management software. It’s where you’re managing that one channel. And it’s where you’re taking care of all your guests medication, your pricing updates, all that sort of stuff. Now, there’s obviously some drastic limitations, like the fact that on Airbnb is back end, you can’t assign maintenance tasks to certain people you can’t, you know, set up different users with specific permissions on Airbnb, you can add a co host or primary host, it’s not quite the same thing. And there’s all kinds of limitations there. But that’s pretty simple and straightforward. If you’re just using one using one channel and one property, then that’s really all you need. But then when you launch onto a second platform, like say, VRBO, now you have an added complicate complication, or added level of complexity, where you’ve got to sync up multiple calendars, you’ve also now got to log in and out to different profiles. So it’s a bit of a pain, it’s a little bit tedious to do that. So there’s different software’s that can basically just integrate everything into one centralised back end. And at the level of one property on two channels, there’s solutions like IgM mass is like a pretty simple, straightforward solution that makes it really easy and is great for when you’re just starting out. But now multiply that imagine if you have that one property, and it’s listed on Airbnb, VRBO, and booking.com. And then you also add four more properties that you’re doing all that stuff with as well, suddenly, you have some different needs. So you probably want to have everything all in one centralised back end. But you might not actually want to have all those different properties listed on the same Airbnb account. Because then if you run into issues with one property and one account, it’s going to effectively impact all of your properties under that one account. You also might want to separate them out because you’re managing properties for other people that already have those properties set up onto their own existing account. And you want to keep on operating not one existing listing on an existing account. There’s all kinds of reasons why you’d want to have them separated. But you still want to be able to manage everything in one centralised backend, you probably also want to keep track of maintenance, you want to have a unified calendar and management, you want to have one unified inbox so that if you have a guest communication person, they’re not constantly logging in and logging out of different accounts and missing a whole bunch of messages. So there’s a whole bunch of reasons why you want to have that one centralised back end, and then a whole bunch of additional features that you would want along with that, like financial reporting, Owner Statements, all kinds of different stuff. So that is what a channel management software really is the most robust general management software’s like Hostgator, which is my favourite one are going to give you a whole suite of different tools that you can use that are really great for whether you’re owning your own properties and just own multiple of them that you list on multiple channels. Or if you manage other people’s properties, there’s a whole bunch of really cool tools for that as well. So let’s dive in. I’m going to show you some of the things that I really love some of the basic features and then also what I just really love about hosts way. So this is your Overview Dashboard. I don’t really use this that much. I’m not going to get too much into it, but it’s pretty straightforward. Next you got your calendar. Now this is what I really really like is you’ve got all of your calendars laid out in a linear fashion so you can see on any given day of all your properties, what the occupancy is looking like or their guests in or they’re not. And then if you want to, you can also go into one specific property, and you can see what your occupancy rates are looking like throughout the entire month. And then you can also look specifically into next month, it’s just a more normal way that you would look at a calendar here. Now, what’s really cool is that in either of you, you can very quickly and easily update prices. And they make it really simple to do so. So I’m going to go forward ahead to some, some dates when I don’t have a whole bunch of bookings here. And I’m going to show you why I really love this for anyone that’s manually updating their pricing. If you want to update your weekends, and your weekdays and have them be different prices, doing so on Airbnb is a really big pain. Because you can’t highlight an entire group of weekend dates like you can here and host way, what’s really great is that you can do that settle your weekend prices for the month, and then do the same thing with your weekday nights. And you can see I can select whatever dates I want. And then that way, you can update all your prices at the same time really, really efficiently. So I really liked that personally, I just think it’s a really clean way to update your prices. Now, host a does also integrate really nicely with other automated pricing tools, I’m gonna have a video coming out later, we’re just testing through a few of those, and really getting a feel for which ones are best, they’ve come a really long way since I last went through them. So I’m going through a few of the main popular ones, I’m going to be having another video on this channel talking about pricing software’s as well, that’s going to be later on. So that’s what I really like, as far as that I’ve actually never even looked at the yearly view. But this is cool that you can just kind of see an entire year at a glance for your property. Yeah, I quite like that. Pretty interesting. But honestly, something I don’t use too much. Next, you’ve got your reservations tab, again, pretty straightforward, just shows all your reservations, you can filter them, you can find specific rent reservations, you can see what the total prices are. So just really nice to be able to see all your reservations all in one place and be able to filter them and find something really quickly if you need to. You can also create guest books, there’s all kinds of different cool kind of features that you can that you can add in here as well. I don’t use this again, too, too much. There’s some stuff I do use some stuff I don’t use. And ultimately, that’s going to be the case with pretty well any channel management software that you use, because they’re built for not necessarily exactly you. So host toy, for example, is built really well for both investors and property managers, in my opinion. So some features are going to be really useful to property managers, others are going to be more useful to investors and vice versa. So next is your inbox. This is an absolutely anyone is going to use. And there’s some really, really cool, basically leverage points that you get when you use a channel management software like host way for your inbox. So right off the bat, this is a unified inbox. So it means that anyone that messages us on any one of our properties from any one of the platforms are listed on it all comes in here into this one centralised place. And that’s really great because we have guests communication, VAs virtual assistants, who take care of all of our guests communication, and we want them to be able to log into one specific spot to do all the guests communication hosts, it also has a decent app. So you can have notifications set up there. And it’s really easy then to make sure that no messages ever get missed. So I personally really, really like that. Now the leverage points that you get are pretty cool. You’ve got your message templates. So that’s really cool, because you have basically the equivalent of Airbnbs quick replies, where you can just have a commonly asked question that you’ve already got a template message out for. And you can also add custom fields in there that vary based on the property. And then you basically can just send those with a couple clicks of a button as opposed to typing it out again, and again. And again, the automations are really cool as well. So you can see here that we’ve got automations. And you can specify them for the individual properties, so that you can add property specific details to the automated messages. So I really liked that we can have a whole bunch of different messages for pre check in post check in saying the welcome guide, quiet times instant book and all those different things. So that again, just cuts down drastically on the amount of messaging that an actual human has to do, because most of it is just automated. Now tasks is probably the feature that I liked the most for more rural properties or any property that’s going to require more maintenance. If you have a condo, then really, there’s not going to be too too much maintenance, it’s going to be needed, it’s really just going to be cosmetic, and maybe replacing or fixing some furniture here and there. But when you have more rural properties, you tend to end up having a bit more maintenance to take care of whether that’s just fixing something on the outside yard maintenance, you know, caring for the actual core units in the home that you wouldn’t have in a condo to take care of like your AC unit, your ducting your plumbing, you know all that sort of stuff that typically a condo Corp would just take care of for you. You’re not going to have to worry about your heating there. But if you have a single family home you are so there’s just really really cool maintenance tracking that I really personally like. So what you can do here, I’m going to show you user management and a second here. You can basically have your maintenance team set up on this and your cleaning team set up on this everyone that’s going to be going back to the property and you can just basically create tasks and assign them to specific team members, they’re going to then get notified that task has been created. And then it’s a simple Kanban board where they can move it over to accepted show that it’s in progress. So that show that’s been done. So you can just track all the work that they’re doing really effectively, you can add notes back and forth, you can add pictures. So it just makes it really, really nice and quick and easy to successfully and like effectively keep track of all the maintenance that needs to be done at any given property. So I personally really liked that, you can also create auto tasks that create I don’t personally use those. But for example, if you want to have your cleaners set up and using this to manage their cleaning, you would create an Auto Task on every checkout is a task to clean a specific property and have that be assigned to a specific cleaning team. That’s a pretty simple way to do that. But there’s actually some really cool other ways to manage your cleaners that I personally prefer. Again, most of the other stuff in here, I don’t use too much. But the tasks, the main management of tasks, I really, really like reviews is pretty straightforward just for managing reviews on the property. Guest invoicing for if you are taking direct bookings. That’s something else that’s really, really great about hostway is that we’re going to personally, I’m going to be setting up in just a couple of weeks, our own direct booking sites so that people can book direct, because we’ve started doing a bit more organic marketing and marketing to our repeat guests via email and via Instagram. And so I’m going to be using our own direct booking platform to take those reservations, so that I can cut down on the fees that we’re paying to the platforms are listed on like Airbnb, VRBO, etc. Now again, that’s a whole other topic for a totally different video. And I will be talking about that in future videos on the channel. But all that to say that one thing that’s really great about host away is it within a couple of clicks, you can set up your own direct booking website directly through host away makes it really nice and easy. And you can basically have it show up really nice all that use all the pictures, let’s description everything without having to redo it. Because obviously host re already has all that information imported from Airbnb, and then you can set up your own your own merchant processing account to process payments, and do all that directly through host way. And then of course, also have the advantage of the calendar being synced up the messaging all being in one place. So just makes it really, really straightforward and easy to do. So I really like that financial reporting is something that we use all the time. And that especially as a property management company is really, really helpful to be able to use that. So that way you can see for different properties and for your business overall exactly how much income is coming in, you know, and all your different main stats, as far as like your occupancy rate, your average daily rate, your average revenue per stay all the important metrics, you would want to know, you can go to listing financials, you can go to an occupancy report, there’s all kinds of really great reports there. So I really liked that as an analytical person being able to see all the actual main revenue drivers, then next you’ve got Owner Statements, this is really helpful. I actually haven’t used this as of recently, because back when I was managing properties for other people, now I’m actually just managing my own properties internally. But when I was managing properties for other people, we actually had to have a custom solution for this that we created. Now, I don’t know, I haven’t actually used hostway solution for this. So I don’t know the degree to which it takes care of some of the little minut things that tend to get overlooked by software, which is why a custom solution can be really helpful. But having Owner Statements is at face value super, super helpful. Because obviously you have to do your reporting to your property owners if you’re managing for other people. So being able to do that in just a couple of clicks, set up a custom report that is super, super helpful. Then you’ve got your main listing pages, that’s pretty straightforward, you can then just basically edit any of the details for your listing. So again, super cool that you can edit the name, the listing, description, the photos, anything you can imagine, really from host ways you don’t have to be constantly logging in and out of all these different different platforms to make a little edits to your to your properties. channel management is really just pretty straightforward. That is for setting up on all these different platforms you might want to list on. Right now we’re only listed on Airbnb, like I said, people don’t believe me, people think that I don’t take my own advice. Really, I always tell people just master one platform first and then expand out to others. Now I have expanded out in the past with other properties to VRBO, to booking.com, to all kinds of platforms. And they do definitely have their pros and their cons right now with our portfolio properties that we own. We’re just starting to expand on to VRBO. And like I said, we’re just starting to launch our own direct booking platform. Because Airbnb has been really, really good because we’ve been able to really master it for our market. The market that I bought properties in is a different market from where I actually manage properties. And so I want to take some time to really get to know you know, a couple of years to really get to know the market that are fluctuations, the best pricing strategies. And so now is when we’re doing things like expanding out into different booking platforms, like using pricing optimization software, because ultimately you can do incredible numbers just really piling things in with one single platform, I really believe that. But as you expand onto multiple, it’s really helpful to have a software that helps you do that. User Management is super, super helpful. So a lot is is probably going to be blurred out to keep people confidential. But what’s really, really cool is, you’ll be able to see over here that there are some different different kinds of groups that people can go in different titles. And so basically, what you can do is create user groups and user profiles for different team members types of team members. So for example, you can create one group called maintenance and another group called cleaner, and another group called owners. And then you can see exactly, you can basically custom set exactly what permissions what group has. So your cleaners can’t see the financial data, but they can see the full calendar and see the tasks that are created. So then they can go in and look at the calendar, see, whenever there’s a checkout know exactly when to clean your maintenance people, you might want to be able to have them see the calendar and the tasks as well, maybe some other stuff. And then the property owners, you might want to have them be able to see the financials, but not all the financials, maybe you don’t want people to see Gas, gas communication, maybe you do. And so you can set all that up really easily under Group profiles. And then you can add different users to those different group settings. So they get those permissions. And you can also select exactly which listings they get that access for. So if you have one cleaner that only cleans a couple of listings, and then another cleaner that cleans another couple of listings, then you can very easily make it so they don’t either cleaner doesn’t see properties in their host way dashboard that they aren’t responsible for cleaning. So it just makes it really, really nice and easy. The rest of these settings, I honestly don’t use that much I haven’t explored them in that much detail. That’s some of the quick things I really personally like about host away. Again, the tasks feature is something that I think is just super, super useful for anytime you have a lot of maintenance you need to keep track of. And that’s really my thoughts on host way and why I love it so much. I am a big, big supporter of them. I’ve worked with them for years, and I just have grown to really like the platform. And honestly the improvements that they’re constantly making to it, make it even better all the time. So again, let me know your thoughts as well. If you have a different channel management software that you like, let me know in the comment section down below. Another thing I really like about host way is their pricing, I find it to be really, really fair and competitive. Some of the other platforms out there, like for example guests, I’m not naming any names, but guess it is very, very, very expensive. A lot of them charge a percentage of some of the guests charge a percentage of the revenue that you make from hosting and that ends up being exceptionally expensive. And what you get for that just isn’t really worth the money that you pay, in my opinion and in my experience. So again, let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below. If there’s a different channel management software that you really love, I’d love to hear about it hit the like button on this video if you did like this video if you got value from it. If you think that host raises cool tool hit the like button. Again, it just helps me out tremendously with growing this channel getting these videos in front of more people. So make sure you hit that and also hit the subscribe button so you can stay up to date with the two new videos we post every single week here on the channel. Other than that, thanks so much for watching. Have a great rest your day.