Julian Sage:                         00:00                     In this video we’re talking about response timing and why it’s so important on Airbnb and your short term rental business. So stay tuned.

Julian Sage:                         00:07                     Vacation rental machine helps hosts just like you learn how to start, grow and scale your short term rental business. The show’s all about creating systems that help you automate your business, give any more time and money freedom. If you’re ready to start living the vacation rental life, then subscribe to this podcast today, come and join us on our Facebook group, the host nation where we’ll be talking about starting automating and scaling a short term rental business. Now onto the show

Julian Sage:                         00:34                     Hey what’s going on host nation?Jon is still at his unit doing the build out a. This is probably a number of 30, I think. So this is pretty crazy. But we were talking about response timing and why it’s so important for your Airbnb and short term rental business. So Jon, you are a passionate person about smartBNB, this is the product currently that we are using. Again, guys, we, we were talking about the products that we’re actively using in our management business and we’re being very transparent. Like Jon is using wheelhouse. I’ve been playing around with beyond pricing. I’m also trying out your Porter, but there are tools that work a little bit better. And what Jon has found is that smartBNB is one of those tools that really helps him automate his business and it gives some really cool metrics.

Julian Sage:                         01:20                     So in this episode we’re going to be showing you why response timing is so important and some of the cool things that smartBNB allows you to see. So Jon, why don’t you take this episode and roll with it and talk a little bit about response timing. What you were doing before and what you’re doing now? And some of those metrics that you wanted to show the host nation. So if you are listening to this, this is going to be one of those episodes that you want to go to YouTube and watch or in the host nation Facebook group, we always share episodes of vacation rental machine, but there’s going to be some cool metrics. And stuff like that. So if you are just listening on podcast format, definitely want to go and listen to this and watch it on video because we are a couple of beautiful guys, so you don’t want to miss that either. So Jon, why don’t you take this episode and roll with it and talk about response timing.

Jon Bell:                               02:02                     Response times in this business is very important. You got somebody pretty much on the hook. It’s just like fishing, right? When you fill a bite, you want to pull it and then wheel it on in, right? That’s exactly how you got to get these people to book with you. So your response time is very important. If you don’t, they’ll just take the bait and run, right? They’ll just go to somebody else and book with them just because they had a simple question that you weren’t able to either respond with an automation or even just a message like, Hey, give me a minute. I’ll respond to you in just a second. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes you just gotta be responsive. You got to stay by your phone. You gotta either answer it with some type of automation. I use smartBNB to answer a lot of my questions.

Jon Bell:                               02:47                     I use a lot of bullet points in my descriptions for the questions that the guests might have, so they’re not messaging me for the simple stuff. They’re messaging me for unique things. Sometimes it’s just a unique thing like, Hey, I need to have my child take a nap at 2:00 PM is there possibility I can get in there at 2? I do have an automation that responds to anything about early check-in, but because that’s such a unique situation, I can then follow up with that response and say something else, whether I could do it or maybe I can’t do it at all because I got somebody checking out. So how important is really responding back to guests? How fast should you really do it? You should be responding back to them within minutes. I typically try to do at least six to seven minutes or so.

Jon Bell:                               03:36                     They should get something; something from me, something from my automation, something. I don’t want to be super responsive. I don’t set my automations to go out instantly because sometimes that feels a little impersonal. I kind of look at mine and I just set it on as a small delay and it goes out and it just keeps people engaged. It gives me an also a few minutes to kind of come up with the response. How does that look in metrics? Let’s just, I’m going to share my screen. This is smartBNB. This is one of the tools that we recommend that you have. It’s not often that I say you gotta have something, but this is one of those tools that in my opinion, you gotta have, you can’t skip this one. You can’t use your PMs messaging system. You don’t get the same data, you don’t get the same output that you can look at for yourself and your guest experience doesn’t have the exact same thing.

Jon Bell:                               04:28                     So here’s what my metrics looks like. This is over the last 30 days. And if you guys could see my screen you see how I’ve done, technically, these are all my inbound messages, right? I got over 11, almost 1200 messages there and I’ve solved a lot of days with just my automation’s six days and 17 hours just with messaging over the last 30 days. This is why this was crucial to anybody’s business by AI or automated response has responded to over 272 messages, very key and look at my seconds and average response time just happens in zero seconds. Normally when they respond or it’s messaged me, ah, I’m resending something very quickly. Most times when somebody checks in, no matter where you put it, they want to know the wifi code, right? Even put it in a message that goes to them after check-in, somehow they still don’t see it, but they still ask the question.

Jon Bell:                               05:38                     My AI then sends the message to them very quickly. You see this piece right here, this conversion rate, this is what you want to focus on. This is why response times are very, very important. This is conversion of people that inquire, and then you convert them into a booking. So if I can convert 61% of the people that just asked me a general question, it’s because of my response time to them that allows them to feel confident enough to book a reservation with me. 100% we got to focus on this. The only way that I know to keep this number high is to automate a lot of stuff. Smartbnb made me hit above 60% here. Next category down here, this response times to events, this goes from inquiry to pending to accept it, right? So from when somebody submits an inquiry, roughly it’s six minutes and before it’s accepted, it’s five minutes or so on average.

Jon Bell:                               06:44                     So this again tells the exact same story. I’m responding to them within seven minutes. I’m trying to convert those people as fast as possible. I’m keeping everything below a seven minute threshold just to make sure that Hey, if I’m talking to you, I’m going to try to get you to book. You’re interested. You like my photos, you like something about it. You wouldn’t message me unless you did so because you’re on the hook. I want to go ahead and we’ll you in, you’re going to get a message back from me. I’m going to let you know everything that you want to know. And that is 100% important within this business is you gotta be responsive again. This kind of goes back to our previous video about just being a hospitable. At the same time, you can’t just leave people just hanging, right? You know, I tried to go stay somewhere out in the mountains with the guy, beautiful property photos had me like Aw.

Jon Bell:                               07:39                     And I was ready to book. I just had one simple question because he mentioned in his listing that, you know, it was off road and I’m like, Hey, I got four wheel drive car, will I have an issue trying to get there. It took him three days to respond and you know what I did, I booked with somebody else, wasn’t as great of a property, but just because he didn’t get back to me in a certain time, I just felt like, I don’t want to stay here. We gotta be quick, we gotta be responsive. We got to be responsive on all platforms; Airbnb, HomeAway, VRBO, booking.com. We gotta be on top of it. People want to book, they got questions 100% we’ve got to respond within a timely manner.

Julian Sage:                         08:24                     So smartBNB shows us a lot of data and I hope you all understand and realize just how important your response timing is. So I want to give you guys a little gift. So we’re going to be including a free downloadable where you can actually get every single type of message that you want to include in your smartBNB or in your automated messages. So if you are using something like your Porter, you still want to have these types of messages in your automated messages because Your Porter, smartBNB, these automated messaging platforms, they do have some templates already premade.

Julian Sage:                         08:54                     But we want to have you fully covered in all your bases. So I’m going to be including in the description of this podcast, a video link where you can go and download it. All the things that you want to hit in your automated messages and some of those also unique ones because there are things such as like if you have a smart lock, then you are going to want a certain type of message for that.

Julian Sage:                         09:13                     So with all that being said, host nation, keep on hosting. Hope you hosts found value in this episode. If you did, please go on over to iTunes and leave us a review that would greatly support the show. If you’d like to connect with Jon, the community, and I, then go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation, talk to you hosts in the next episode. Keep on hosting.