Harnessing the Power of AI to Enhance Your Airbnb and VRBO Listings

How to Use AI to Improve Your Airbnb and VRBO Listings

AI can be a powerful tool for short-term rental hosts looking to streamline their operations and enhance the guest experience. However, sometimes it feels like tools over promise and under deliver. Mostly, because they are thinking of Ai wrong.

A should not be a tool that you use to remove yourself from your guest, it should be used a tool to excited your guest about your property.
Hopefully it can also help you save time.

First... The Pitfalls of Using AI

While AI can be incredibly helpful, it's important to be aware of its limitations and potential drawbacks:

• We don't recommend using it for direct guest communication. AI models lack the specific knowledge about your listing to accurately respond to guests. Guests can often see through generic responses, and the risk of an AI saying something incorrect outweighs the time saved. Once trust is broken, it is often hard to get it back.


• Be cautious with pricing tools. While generally helpful, pricing tools can sometimes overlook special event dates.
  
  For example, our second year hosting we started using price labs. But, we live an Louisville, Kentucky and the Kentucky Derby is a make or break event for the year. Needless to say, price labs overrode our custom pricing for those days and our nightly rate went from $1200 a night to $200... They obviously have their benefits, but you do need to stay on top of your event calendar.

The Easy, Low-Hanging Fruit

Here are some simple ways to start using AI to improve your listings and guest experience:

• AI-powered itinerary builder: Stay Pilot offers an AI-powered itinerary builder that creates personalized day-by-day itineraries for guests based on their trip details and your recommendations. Additionally, guests can email these itineraries, allowing you to capture emails for marketing.
  
  This option is as simple as creating a guidebook and pressing publish. After that, your guests can build an itinerary in seconds.
  
  
  Itinerary Builder Example
• Improve your listing description: A detailed, personable listing description will always improve conversation rates. At Stay Pilot we built a description builder that takes seconds and is free to use. You want to break down your listing by it's amenities, its rooms, and all it's offerings. Don't hide it from guests, put it front and center. Also, Airbnb allows for a very long description, use it!
  
  Stay Pilot Ai Tools
• Enhance your image descriptions with testimonials: Improve your image descriptions. Testimonials are the #1 most important thing guests look for when books. Don't just leave them in the reviews section. Airbnb and VRBO both allow you to add descriptions to your images. Instead of telling them that they are looking at the living room, put a quote of your best reviews!
  
  This technique allows them to read a lot more of your reviews.
  
  The hard part: there are limits to characters allowed in photo descriptions. So, Stay pilot created a testimonial builder that automatically shortens reviews so you can quickly post them in your photos. And when we say it takes seconds... It takes seconds. Just copy and paste.
  Stay Pilot Ai Tools

More In-Depth AI Options

• Automated AI messaging: A great tool called Host Tools which is built for messaging and calendars actually allows you to use your OpenAI API key to respond to guests with ChatGPT. As mentioned before, there are times when this is not a good idea, but it might be worth checking out!
  Learn more at https://hosttools.com/blog/host-tools-updates/how-to-use-chatgpt-with-host-tools/
  
  
• AI-generated imagery: Tools like Midjourney can create unique renders of your listings which guests can find really interesting. At the very least, you can make a print and frame it in your listing. These should never be referenced as a real image, but they can be a great way to show off your listing's potential.
  
  Here is an example