This 1 Trick Decreased My Guest Communication by 50%

What’s up guys in today’s video, I’m going to share with you one simple trick that I use to decrease my guest communication as a short term rental host by about 50%. Now this will save you a tonne of time and headache because as a host, whether you’re investing in properties on Airbnb managing other people’s properties or just hosting your own space on Airbnb, one of the most inconvenient parts of hosting is responding back to guests messages. Virtually everything else that has to do with hosting on Airbnb, can happen on your own schedule, you can schedule the cleaners when it makes sense for you, they have to go by at whatever time they have to go by. But as far as actually reaching out to them and scheduling them that can happen whenever you want. And things like pricing updates, you can do that anytime of the day. Just really whatever you want. Updating your listing, scheduling photographer, you name it, pretty much everything is relatively flexible to your schedule, with the really glorious, glaring exception of guests communication, if a guest messages you at 6pm, when you’re just sitting down for dinner with your family, you can’t very well just wait until the next morning to respond to that. You need to respond in a timely manner to your guests when they’re reaching out. And that’s problematic or challenging people when they have families, they have lives, they just don’t like to be on their phone like me. Or if you work a nine to five, and you can’t necessarily be doing personal messaging during work hours. And so what you really want to do is cut this down as much as possible. Now long term you can also outsource it hire guests communication person, all kinds of different ways you can do it. But one of the best things that I ever did was just decrease the volume of guests communication I was getting cut it about in half with just this one simple trick. And that’s having a really, really good guest guidebook. And this is basically going to be a guidebook that tells guests, all the stuff they’re going to need to know about your property answers any questions they might have. So that a lot of those questions that they would otherwise be messaging you for they have right at their fingertips easily accessible through the guidebook. Now, there’s a whole host of different tools out there that you can use for a guidebook, you can go super simple, low tech, and you can have just an actual written physical guidebook at the property, you can go somewhat higher tech, but still really straightforward and completely free. And you can just put together like a keynote presentation or a PowerPoint presentation, you can export that to a PDF if you want to and just send over a PDF or a slideshow. Or you can go a little bit more advanced. And you can use a software like host fully. Now the advantage of having something like hopefully, it’s just a lot easier for guests to use. It’s more user friendly and intuitive, and basically creates almost a website where they can go and click on different headings. And they can get taken to an exact page that shares them all the information they need. And and a really nice side benefit is that you can collect guests email addresses, by sharing with them and having them input their email address in order to access that guest. So really, there are pros and cons with the different options. But it doesn’t really matter what you use. If you go super low tech and you just use a physical guestbook, then the disadvantage there is that obviously that guestbook can get lost, it can get taken it can get damaged, things like that. And it’s just a hassle to update it. If things change at the property, a slightly more high tech one, like a PowerPoint or PDF, it’s great, it’s going to be easier to update easier to share, you’re never going to lose it, it can’t get damaged. But the downside is you’re not going to be able to collect guests email addresses when handing it out. And then the other obvious downfall of that is it’s just not quite as user friendly. It’s not quite as intuitive. And on hostfiti side of us something like that, then it’s really intuitive. It benefits from everything being virtual and digital, but just way more intuitive way more user friendly. And you can collect guests email addresses. The only downside of something like hopefully, is that it cost money. Last time I checked, using hopefully for your guidebooks was about $10 a month. So it’s pretty nominal. And for me, that makes a lot of sense because in addition to cutting down my guests communication by 50%, I’m also going to be able to collect guests email addresses, so I can really easily justify the $10 a month I’m spending but each their own what’s much, much more important than the tool you use to build your guidebook is what’s actually inside the guidebook. What I’ve found to work really well is just guys just want to take a quick break here to say that for those of you watching, you want to build cashflow and long term wealth by purchasing Airbnb and short term rental properties. There’s a link in the description right down below for a free training that will walk you through my exact strategy for investing successfully in Airbnb. Now if you’re not ready to actually buy properties and you want to get started managing other people’s properties on Airbnb the same way I got started and build a full time income managing other people’s properties. There’s actually another free training linked in the description down below as well. That will be a really great fit for you. So whether you want to invest in short term rental prop release and actually build amazing cash flow and long term wealth by acquiring the assets buying the properties themselves, or you’re looking to earn a full time income managing other people’s properties on Airbnb, we’ve got some awesome trainings that are linked in the description down below, it’ll definitely help you out. When you sign up for the trainings, we’re also going to send you a few other tools and resources completely for free just to help you get started. Again, the links to sign up are in the description down below. And both trainings and all the tools are completely free. 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Speaker 1 5:34
What I’ve found to work really well is just going and staying at your property. Or you can also look back over the guest messages that you’ve gotten over the years or over the months or however long you’ve been hosting. And just see all the questions try to anticipate all the questions that are going to come up that people are going to have challenges with and what you’ll want to do is document exactly what to do. And in addition to that, one thing I found that’s really helpful is inside of my hosts fleet guidebook, not only do I have specific categories for every different amenity at the property that’s going to answer all the questions they have. So for example, I’ve got a fireplace at the property, there’s going to be a tab for the fireplace. And once you go into it, you can see a breakdown of exactly how to use the fireplace, where to get the firewood, all these different things. Same thing with my projector. Same thing with the TV. Same thing with all the appliances. Same thing with all the other amenities there. They’re all broken down categorically. And then you’ve got your basic more general guidelines like how to check into the property, how to check out of the property, things to do nearby attractions, nearby restaurants nearby, all this cool stuff. But what I found even more helpful taking it to the next level is in addition to the written instructions that I provide to my guests, I also like to provide video instructions for certain amenities that I know constantly get questions from guests. So for example, I always get questions about the hot tub, I always have people reaching out saying I don’t know how to adjust it, I don’t know what I’ve done, blah, blah, there’s all these issues that come up with the hot tub. Because some hot tubs are a little bit less intuitive, less user friendly, you know, the ones we’ve got there, like four buttons. And if you press one and started blinking some couple of letters out, you don’t really know what you did, you don’t really know how to get back out of that menu screen, you just want to get back to adjusting the temperature, something simple, right. And so what I did is I put together a video that shows exactly what buttons to press in order to accomplish what you need to. And I also do some troubleshooting in that video. So if you accidentally press this button, here’s how to get out of it. If you accidentally press this one, here’s how to get back here, here’s when you should just wait Give it 30 seconds, it’ll go back to the main menu, all those sorts of things. And so all of that is included in the video so that way, number one, most guests are going to solve their own problems, because what’s going to happen is if they have an issue with the hot tub, they’re going to go to the guest book, go to the hot tub section. And they’re just going to find the solution to the problem themselves. Because that’s quicker than reaching out and asking support or asking our team. But the other thing is if they do reach out and ask our team, our team is going to have a pretty hard time generally, especially with less kind of techno friendly people guess it’s gonna be really challenging for our team to accurately troubleshoot the issue when they’re not there at the property in person. And so instead of doing that what our guests communication team does is they just go hey, did you check the guestbook? Did you watch that video, and they’ll sometimes just send them that link directly to the video. And I’ll say just go through the steps in this video. And that’ll help you solve it. So now we can have just a templated message that we send out to troubleshoot that issue, as opposed to having to have a whole bunch of back and forth for 1520 30 minutes trying to get the issue resolved. We’ve just already resolved that we’ve created a video, we can send that to them since one template message as opposed to 1015 and 20 messages back and forth with that guest trying to resolve the issue. I of course use a one single example of the hot tub. But for any of those kinds of trickier amenities that we have at the property. I like to put these videos together. So for example, our projector if you have anything like a video game machine, a video game console, anything like that, you have a sauna, if you’ve got maybe a space heater, or an air conditioning unit, or a thermostat that’s a little bit trickier, a little bit less intuitive, anything like that, you can just set these up for the you do it once and you will thank yourself for years to come because it really drastically cuts down on gas communication by having these video explainers. So that’s my big tip for you guys is put together a really, really robust user manual for your property, that’s gonna be the guide book, you want to put this together I find that a lot of hosts are reluctant to or they just put it off and they procrastinate actually doing it because it does take some time, it’s gonna take you a couple of hours to put together a really really good guestbook. But the thing is, yes, you’re gonna invest that time upfront, but you’re then going to cut back on the amount of time you’re spending long term. So long term it is going to save you a tonne of time. The other thing that you can do that’s actually like an expert level hack is you can just build it over time. So as guests reach out with additional questions, make sure you answer those questions that one time And then then catalogue and add it to that user guide so that now in the future, you don’t have to answer that question again. What you can also do, instead of going by the property yourself and recording these videos often now just have my cleaning team or my maintenance team go by and record those videos for me, so that when they’re there, troubleshooting any issue that might come up, they just record it and then we can add it into the user manual. Hope you found this video helpful. That’s my tip for really drastically cutting down I guess communication. Let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below. If you did get value from this video if you liked it, if it was helpful to you in any way, shape, or form, please take half a second and just hit that like button down below the video. It really helps me out tremendously with growing this channel and getting these videos in front of more people. And last but not least, make sure that you consider subscribing just hit that subscribe button again right down below the video there. 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