[00:00:02] Speaker A: This is Short Term Rental Management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Carl.
Short Term Rental Management. We are here to party. It's going to be a good time. I've got a couple of gentlemen who I've actually met in real life. I'm actually going to tell the whole story. So these two gentlemen came up to me at a conference about two years ago and they said that they were doing AI and I said, okay, cool. And then I kind of never really thought about it again because, you know, AI was super hot at the time. It's being talked about a lot.
But then you guys ended up on Avery's program about a year ago, the Short Term Show.
And then next thing I know, because of that, people in my circle started using your product and then I started using your product and I like the product.
So I wanted to catch up with you guys again. And be honest with you, this helps me because if I have somebody that comes through Short Term, Shop plus or whatever the case may be, and I say, hey, I've been using this, now I can refer them to this podcast rather than, you know, have to repeat myself a thousand times. So thank you guys for being here. I've got Sam and Jay.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having us, Luke. Appreciate it.
[00:01:22] Speaker C: Yeah, sad to be here.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: My pleasure. Where are we located in the world physically?
[00:01:26] Speaker B: San Diego, California. Both of us?
[00:01:29] Speaker C: Yeah. Jay lives about. Jay's about like 15 minutes away from me, so super close by.
Makes work life a lot easier being able to meet up in person and work on things.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Love it. And you guys kind of. I'll let you tell your story. But it started with property management. Correct. And then you found a need in the space, is that right? So can you break that property management story down for us?
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I can kind of start on the, the property management side of things.
Sam and I, I mean, we, we met back in, I think 2020.
We rock climbed together. So both had kind of similar interests. But I didn't know Sam for too long. I just knew that we both kind of wanted something more out of our, our lives. And we were both working desk jobs at the time.
And I came to Sam with the thought of let's rent out some airbnbs in San Diego. It's a great spot to do it. Everybody travels here and is more of a passive income strategy initially. It obviously is not a passive income strategy once you get into it. If you, if, if those listening understand the short term rental industry, you know, it's not Passive.
But our initial intent was just to get some money rolling and then see if we could start a business. And that's basically what we did. After about nine months just doing a rental arbitrage style management, we both quit our jobs, turned it into a full service property management business and then scaled up 30, 40 plus UN, went out of San Diego for a little bit into the Phoenix area. Came back in, kept expanding, and yeah, here we are with a new software on the market as of, I guess 2023. It's not so new anymore.
But yeah, I'll let Sam kind of take it from where host buddy kind of comes into play.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Yeah, wait, hold on. I have questions about the management company.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Because that's what we talk about here at Short Term Rental Management. So your story is not unfamiliar. It's actually a tale as old as time where people get into this and then the phone rings and then they realize after 20 or so properties, holy crap, this is hard work, you know? And where are we now with the management company? Are we still taking on properties? Are. What are the. Hold on, I got like a thousand questions.
Let's start with that one. Are you still taking properties on or are we done at 40, 50?
[00:03:48] Speaker B: We're slowing down for sure. It's more of like a maintenance phase for us at this point. Our last one that we took on was in August, so we're very, very selective when it comes to our properties that we take on now. And obviously most areas, most markets are getting more competitive. So we have to just make sure it's a great opportunity for us spending a lot of time focusing on our software. So we have a lot of people and systems and tech implemented in our, in our business on the property management side that's been letting it roll for a while.
So, yeah, really just kind of maintaining, but slowly growing because why not?
[00:04:21] Speaker A: I got you. Yeah. And this is very common. It's almost like you get to that 20, 30 property mark again, because if you're good at this, the phone will ring. There is no shortage of people looking for somebody to make money with their properties. Right?
And then one day you're like, holy crap, I'm a property manager. And like, you first. I'm not saying that's you guys, but a lot of times that we see that around here, we're like, I didn't even realize that that's what I was doing. I just thought Airbnb, you know, especially
[00:04:47] Speaker B: with us on podcasts and just posting a lot on social media, like there's just A lot of activity and, and people come to us because they expect us to be the professionals and take on their property no matter what. And sometimes it's the harsh reality of like your property isn't in the best location, it's not in the right condition for us to manage. You know, it's not right fit for us. But we can at least you know, provide people the resources that they need to, to move forward with that if they choose to.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: And just because this is the, the topic of this entire show is management. What is the, what does the brokerage situation look like in California? Are you guys licensed or do you have a brokerage or is it all co host style or how are we doing it?
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Yeah, so all of our, all of our rentals are short term, so less than 30 days.
We don't, we're not real estate brokers.
We haven't sold or bought houses. We're all just, it's what you would call co hosting. But I think what we would define it as is a little bit more full service of a property management business. We manage everything from single family homes to multifamily 10 plus units.
So our portfolio is a really big mix and our level of responsibility is quite high. So we like to make sure our owners are hands off. Developers that we work with are hands off. So yeah, kind of full spectrum of, of what we handle.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: And when you say multif family, it's
[00:06:10] Speaker B: a hotel, not zoned as hotel.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: It's an apartment that you're renting overnight.
[00:06:16] Speaker C: Yeah, we call it like apartment hotel or apart hotel. So it's like for example, we have one unit in San Diego or one building in San Diego where we manage the top three floors. So there's 16 units there and then the bottom half are all long term rentals. So yeah, it's kind of like a hotel setup. Although it's traditionally, I guess on the apartment side of things.
[00:06:36] Speaker A: And some, so some folks will hear that and get very excited that this is what they should do with the rest of their lives. But I just want to make sure that you guys agree here. It's not something you could do with just any building and it needs to be especially in the right location for something like this. I would get, I would assume.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And a lot of our multifamily buildings are in the downtown San Diego area.
We have another one that's a little bit inland as well. And we're just lucky that San Diego has so many great little neighborhoods and pockets where people want to come and visit. It's not like that in every city, in every market. So.
But you're right. Yeah, it's. It has to be in the right location and people coming in to go to conferences or whatever, like our, you know, baseball games. Like, everything's in downtown San Diego for people that want to come and travel for, like a weekend. We get a lot of traveling professionals, couples, things like that. But yeah, our company's called Select Stays, so we want to make sure that we're providing select experiences, select properties, and not just having, you know, every random property that we can grab onto our portfolio.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: And so at a certain point, you know, the phone's ringing, you're getting bringing properties on, you're starting to realize, hey, we're property managers.
And it sounds to me like that it was kind of a perfect storm of right time, right place, where you guys were like, okay, we gotta figure out a better way to respond to these people.
And also, we are maybe starting to realize that the property management thing is not our future. And so it just was there. Is that. Is that how it went down? Was there a lot of luck involved here?
[00:08:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's. It's kind of funny with, like, the concept of I want to build a passive income stream. And that was kind of our. Our initial intent where we're both working nine to five jobs. We're like, this is a way that we can maybe start bringing in some extra capital, start saving money, ideally be able to kind of get out of the rat race a little bit.
And then it took off to the point where we had enough units that we were overseeing that were bringing in, bringing in enough money, where we're like, hey, we can actually quit our jobs and just do this full time.
Yeah, it definitely comes to a point where it's not passive. And you are very actively running a management business. And that I think, for us was it made sense. We're like, yeah, this checks out. Like, of course, if we're going to scale to 40 units, like, it's going to require a lot of our time and focus.
But I think what we found was we didn't have time to do the things that we wanted to do outside of working on the business. So we were very much, like, working in the business, answering every single message that was coming in. Jay and I were like, cleaning units. For the first, like, seven or eight that we brought on, we had maintenance workers that we worked with. But, like, I was even going out, like, drilling stuff. Jay was drilling stuff in the units and fixing things that were broken by guests. So we found ourselves in this position of, like, we're running personally four or five different jobs for this management company, and we have no time for ourselves.
And that's kind of where Host Buddy came in, where we'd be working all day. We're exhausted, we're ready to go to bed or spend time with our family or friends. And all of a sudden you get that message at, like, 1:00am, 2:00am that's like, hey, like, how do I use the TV? Like, I'm gonna, like, cancel my stay if I can't get information that I need during my visit.
A lot of those, like, additional tasks and responsibilities that are 24. Seven that come with property management that we just couldn't figure out how to get off of our plate, led to us really looking for different ways to essentially take it off of our plate, leading to Host Buddy, which most people
[00:09:58] Speaker A: in your shoes, when they're building a property management company, would simply hire.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: And build the company out. But you guys, that wasn't good enough for you. Uh, we had to start a whole new company, which is brilliant.
[00:10:12] Speaker C: Yeah. And we. We brought on VAs. So we had two virtual assistants that were overseeing most of the daytime operations. And I think that's, like. We had so many different responsibilities that we were overseeing, where it's like, I'm not gonna respond to a guest during the daytime when I'm, you know, elbow deep trying to fix a drain at a unit, for example. Um, so, like, we'd have them working during the daytime, but then you have this coverage gap of, you know, 9pm through 8am where messages are still coming in, you're wrecked from working all day, and you just need to figure out how to, like, unplug a little bit. And I think, like, Jay and I got tired of putting our phones next to our beds and having it off do not disturb. And it's like, hey, do we want to hire someone to sit there and just, like, kind of babysit the nighttime hours? Or, you know, is there a better way of doing this?
And once AI Started really developing and advancing, we saw that as kind of the. The answer to that problem.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And I will add there, too. I think in 2021, when we started the property management business, the guests were.
I think the guests just felt more taken care of in general, and they're okay to show up to a property and, like, maybe wait a few hours for a response. And we started to see that kind of change. And then 2023, like, if people didn't get a response within Minutes late at night, like they're going to get really frustrated. And that started to impact our reviews if we don't want to be up answering questions. So the industry started to slowly kind of change and we saw that as well. And I think that's kind of what contributed to our, our need to try to automate that as best as possible.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, brilliant. So then we start the AI company. Do we have AI experience at this point? I mean, it's in 21, 22 or you just found a need that you were going to fix.
[00:11:59] Speaker C: Yeah. So at this point in time, I think we probably had out the gate about as much experience as anybody else for the most part. You know, ChatGPT came online. We started playing with that for like helping us draft messages or put together agreements or like, you know, make our lives a little bit easier.
So Jay and I, we played around with like creating essentially a chatbot link that we could send out to our guests. And it was just trained on some simple data around like, what the WI fi password is and how to answer questions around the property that are super generic.
And at that point in time, you know, I think we really saw that, like, this could be something that would help ourselves and also a lot of potential other hosts that were out in the industry.
So we partnered with our now cto, who's one of our other co founders as well. And he's kind of the brains of the tech. So he speaks AI pretty fluently or pretty fluently, I would say.
And he's a very talented developer too. So he essentially took like what was maybe 10% of the way and brought it to the 100% that we're at today.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: I mean, without giving away your secrets here, I'm not looking for that and not that anybody can duplicate it anyway, but what is it? What is it like? I mean, are you doing, Is it third party or are you like writing code or. I mean, I don't. I'm clueless.
[00:13:19] Speaker C: Yeah. So essentially, like, our backend is pretty robust, but we're channeling everything through different LLMs. So we use Gemini, Claude, GPT. We basically have connection to the different LLM systems and we use them all for different types of, like, scenarios and situations, for how we process things.
A lot of it's around prompt engineering. So really figuring out how you get.
It's almost like teaching like a person, like you are going to be someone that's responding to messages. For a vacation rental property. Here's everything that you could possibly need to know. And we're Basically training it on that data to be able to then provide responses for hosts. And then the hosts are able to go in and build out their own database of information within our application.
So that allows for that customization level that we really pride ourselves on. So we have the baseline work kind of created where it's like the AI understands what it's doing, what it's supposed to be accomplishing for each of the hosts, and then it's using their data, their directives to execute it on a level that's personalized.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: So is it a bit of. We were kind of, we were kind of first to the space and we're also working our asses off and that's how we're going to keep the competition at bay. Is that what's going on here from, from the start?
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Like, yeah, we were, when we, the reason we built it was because there was no other, other options on the market.
So we were like, because if, honestly if there was a really good tool for us to use back then, we probably would have just plugged it in and that would have been called it a day. We probably would have been at 100
[00:14:52] Speaker A: units in our portfolio plus fixing things.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Hopefully not. But yeah, from the very beginning we knew that like using it for our own property management business, we wanted it to sound the most like us. We wanted it to be able to problem solve and just understand the way that we think. And so we knew that if we put out something that didn't do that, people weren't going to like using the tool. Especially with how new AI was, the trust factor was so huge. By the time we released this, like fully launched it at the beginning of 2024, there had been a few other companies that had been working on their own AI tools as well. So now you have this ecosystem of different options within the STR space of AI tools that all are going to do something relatively similar. Our differentiating factor at the very beginning was the quality of the AI and the responses that it was going to give. So for example, if somebody goes and they're like, oh, this company's advertising that they're going to do full service automation AI for all of my guests on every platform, then they go and they plug it in and then the AI just completely starts making things up, sending people the wrong address, telling people that the place has a garage when it doesn't, stuff like that, they're not going to want to use it. So that was the issue where at the very beginning we took months and months and months to create the AI. And when I say we, it really was a team effort to figure out like trial and error. We ran it through our own property management company to, for our guests that were staying with us at the time. So over the course of months with all these guests, just to see how they were responding, how our AI was responding, how they're interacting with it. And so I think it's that because of that time investment that we took at the very beginning, that's what got us the lead out the gate compared to some of the other tools. And that's what continues to bring people back and, and drive signups for us
[00:16:39] Speaker A: and back to the competition thing. Now most of the management softwares have AI, however, it stinks. Right.
So is that a concern? You know, like from how I built this company kind of a standpoint, are we worried about that or we just have to be better than what they're offering?
[00:16:56] Speaker B: No, I mean it's, it's, it's our specialty. So, you know, property management systems are going to be focusing on a million different things and they want to show that they have some AI options and a lot of them just have like a draft option.
And we out the gate had ours available as full automation with no training wheels so that people knew that we're the real deal. Like this can actually automate all of your messages. So we continue to evaluate our systems and make sure that we're improving the AI over time and that's literally all we're focusing on. So. But outside of the automated messages, we've built out a ton of different features in our platform that make the entire hosting experience just so much easier and automated. And we do a lot of things that the property management systems don't. So that's just how tech is developing over time. In the SDR space, we're always going to be 10 steps ahead of whoever else is trying to implement AI into their existing systems. And it's always been a question where like, oh, like what if the PMS is doing it? It's like, well, PMS is not going to be able to offer what we're offering and they don't have that deep level of understanding of, of the problems that need to be solved. And they're always going to be a couple of years behind us. So that's how we view it.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Do you have any idea most guys in your space are very data driven. Are you?
How many people are like individual owner, operator, mom and pops I guess you would call them, versus, you know, 50 plus property management companies.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: The split on that our average portfolio size, that's what I'm looking for. Give you a good idea? Yeah, it's around 16.6 properties. It's around 17 properties right now. At the beginning of 2025 that was maybe like 13.
So it's growing and we're seeing, you know, that's just in general how kind of things move with smaller mom and pop versus the enterprise level, customers are going to take a little bit longer to implement new tech and things just take longer to move. But now that you know, you don't want to be the first penguin in the waters, you know, if you're a big, a big company that, oh, this new AI comes out and we're going to plug it in for a thousand properties but we don't know how good it is yet.
Now we're seeing a lot of those bigger customers come to us because it's, it's tried and true tested and all that.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: So yeah, I do see. I see again I deal with mostly owner operators. I see this is mostly larger enterprise type of folks.
But you know, like the 3, the 3 to 10 property person would be great too.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: And for sure, I think there's like there's two buckets of it too, right? So like there's that mom and pop where like you've always historically just done the messages all like just by yourself. And when you find this tool, it's like a game changer and you're like, wow, I don't have to answer any of these messages. And it's hard for you to give up that control because you never have to anybody else. But that's that first bucket of people where it's just like changes your life. Maybe it's not saving you money, but it's saving you time. And now you can scale. And then there's that other bucket of people that maybe they've already hired a VA to take over to messaging and they want to keep scaling but they don't want to hire more people or they just want to substitute the VA for AI in this moment and then maybe hire later. So it allows you to save money and then also continue scaling, increase your reviews and your revenue. Because maybe you didn't have the best support before and now you're getting better 24. 7 guest support. So there's a lot of factors that kind of go into it, but everyone's reason it kind of falls into those, those two buckets. I would say yes.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: And I have noticed that as I've started to talk about this in my circles there the, there's also the, the outlier. I would say the, the.
The person that has one, maybe two properties that has been doing it for, let's say 500 plus reviews rather than a period of time.
And they almost have.
This is almost like their identity, you know, like, this is their whole life is this damn house, you know, And I've, I've noticed a couple of those types of folks that were, that were like, are you crazy? Because it's like their whole life is to write the guests back, you know, like they, and I don't even think they enjoy it, guys. Sam and Jay, I don't think they actually enjoy it. I think that they just need it, you know, so. But again, I don't think that's, that's probably not who you're looking for anyway.
[00:21:18] Speaker C: You know, we definitely have some of those folks that like, they will eventually kind of come over to the dark side of AI and start using that for their business.
I would say, like, the vast majority of our customers are not going to really be that one to two property hosts.
But like, it does, I think for the person that's been doing it for the last five years by themselves, once they are able to get that off of their plate, like they realize how much of a pain it has been for them to be the person responding to every message.
I think, like, especially with that much data and we're able to bring in all the past conversation history and all that good stuff to like replicate the way that our AI responds to messages, they're always surprised by how much it actually does still sound like them. Like, even though they're not the one that's responding to the message, they're like, oh, wow, that does sound like how I would have responded to this message that came in.
But yeah, I think sometimes when you're just one or two properties and that's really been your focus for five years, it's a big adjustment to try to change that.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: That.
[00:22:14] Speaker C: And if it's not that much of a pain point, it's kind of hard to rationalize making the switch in the first place.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: The action items will also keep you in the loop too. So you don't feel like you're detached from the property. You know, you get, you get notifications when the AI needs help or it has. There's something where it can't respond to and you need to jump in. So it takes care of the easy stuff, right? So you don't have to worry about that. But if you really want to have that control, you can set it up to be that way where you just get a notification, you jump in, take care of it, and that's what it is.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Yes. And I'm in that middle ground. Right.
And it works great for me because then my employee who's in charge, we used to be in charge of the guest messaging. I have two of them, you know, different days of the week and things like that.
Now they can be freed up to do more important tasks, you know, so that's, that's been really great for us. This would be a good time to screen share. Can we see the product?
Yeah, totally.
[00:23:07] Speaker C: I will pull mine up here.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us. Here at the Short term shop, we help real estate investors like you buy and sell vacation homes.
We operate in over 20 true vacation markets across the United States.
If you have more questions about buying and selling, join us every week for a live q
[email protected].
that's strquestions.com.
all right, so let's take a look at this. There you go on the inbox there. Now hold on. If I'm looking at this for the first, I want to paint the picture for somebody who's looking at this for the first time. This almost looks like you're. You're suggesting that I do my messaging from here rather than from Guesty or hospitable. Is that the case? Yes or no?
[00:23:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:55] Speaker C: So I think it for us, like, I'd say probably 40 to 50% of our users are working out of our inbox, and then the other half are working out of their PMS.
Maybe like 3%, 4% are working out of Airbnb still, for whatever reason.
So I think it's really up to the user for, like, what they're looking for and what's easiest for them.
Yeah, we have our own inbox. So I like to kind of show this off because I think it shows what's going on from a standpoint. Of all the bells and whistles that we offer at HostBuddy.
Yeah, our inbox is really built around leveraging AI to provide information.
So we can see here in the far right side, we have sentiment analysis. So essentially every single conversation that's taking place, hostbuddy is running a sentiment analysis to determine is this guest having a good experience, are they having a bad experience? And I'll kind of dive into, like, how we can use that to help improve the guest communication experience.
And then we also have open issues on the bottom right here too. So hostbuddy at its core is primarily built to Respond to messages, Guest sends message. Our AI is analyzing what the message is and making sure that it's providing a good response back to that guest and answering whatever needs or questions that they have.
And then on the other side of things, we're making sure that the host is staying in the loop on things. So I think that's one of the hardest things when it comes to bringing in AI for your business is I am okay with having maybe someone else respond to messages, but I want to make sure that if there's something that's bad that's occurring, that I'm in the loop on that in particular.
So we have our action items, which are basically every message that goes through our system. If someone mentions a plumbing issue or the house is on fire, or they can't figure out how to use the tv, they're locked out.
Our AI drafts a notification and sends that out to the host. So Host Buddy will handle 85 to 90% of the communication that's going through a business. And then for those 10% of scenarios where you truly do need someone to actually take a look at it and help out with the situation, our AI then escalates that to the host.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Love it.
Show me the thumbs up, thumbs down that I actually have a question on that. Actually, hold on. Before we get to that, how do I connect this to my stuff?
[00:26:06] Speaker C: Cool. Yeah. So we connect to. I think we're at 15 or 16 different property management softwares today. So Hostaway, Guesty, Ownerz, hostfully, a bunch of different ones, more or less, but we connect to the OTAS through the property management system connection. So with those partnerships, we're basically able to bring in all of the messages that are taking place on Airbnb and VRBO and booking.com and your direct booking website, if it's plugged into your PMS and even text messages and emails, too.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: I just signed up for Host Buddy because I heard it on a podcast and I thought it was cool. I have no idea what it is or how it works. And show me how to connect it to. Let's say I'm using Guesty or Hospitable, whatever. How do I. How do I connect this thing?
How long is it going to take me?
[00:26:57] Speaker C: Cool. Yeah, it's a very good question. So when you first sign up with us, basically on the very first page, the properties page here, we have a connect to PMS button. So you'll click that button. It'll then ask for you to essentially log into your property management system. So we have OAuth for most of our integrations, you'll basically just put in like, your username and your password. It'll then connect to guesty. Since we have a partnership with them, we now have a connection between our system and their system. From there, then you're able to select the properties that you want to bring into Host Buddy to start automating the communication for.
So, for example, let's say I just want to bring in all of the properties for my property management company. I'll import those directly from Hostfully here and then they'll show up inside the Properties page.
[00:27:39] Speaker A: Once that's been done, click on Properties, then I go to import Properties, then I sign in with my pms, correct?
[00:27:46] Speaker C: Yeah, simple. And then from there, you're able to import all of your listings.
So you'll select the properties that you want to bring into Host Buddy and that you want to have HostBuddy turned on for.
Once you import those into our system, we're going to start doing a lot of the work for you. So we'll basically scrape six months of your past conversations that have already taken place on the different OTAs from your PMS. We'll also bring in all the listing descriptions, we'll bring in all the amenities that you've ticked on Airbnb, pretty much any data point that we can bring in from your property management system, we'll start using to train Host Buddy on your property that you're going to be having hostbody turned on for.
From there, you'll then start doing a little bit of manual setup where you're basically adding information into our system and providing directives to our AI. So I'll click into this property just as an example.
Here we'll see what we call the property profile. So this is the resources page. We can see the Host Buddy knowledge base. So all the information that we're bringing in from the PMS integration, that's the property details past conversations. We also bring in all of your availability and pricing, so this updates in real time. So when a guest sends a message and says, hey, is your property available for tomorrow night? We're able to recognize that the property is available, let them know that it's available, and even tell them the pricing if they want to extend their stay or book the property.
You can also upload things into our system for training the AI. So if you have like welcome documents or you have training documents for your team that you've taught to your VAS or other people that are supporting on the communication end, you can upload that directly into Host Buddy. Um, we also have some integrations. So if you have notion, you can integrate notion and basically connect your different pages to the property. So if you have like a notion page for one of your listings, you can just connect it directly into Host Buddy's brain, essentially for its database of information.
And then from there you can also add in manual information. So we basically take in an analysis of what data does HostBuddy need to respond to the vast majority of the questions that a guest may ask when they're at the property.
We've created like a templated space to add information in. So we have like location information you can add in the property, address listing details. So what are your cancellation policies look like? What are your check in and checkout times, how to access the property, backup access instructions? Basically a ton of fields pulling this
[00:30:13] Speaker A: automatically or I'm typing it in.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: We are both. So we can do what we call autofill. So we'll basically take all of your past conversations, we'll take all your listing details and descriptions from your OTAs, and we'll auto populate all of these fields for you. And then you can go through all of our fields that we suggest that you fill out and basically see where you have gaps in information. So for example, I click autofill on the resources page here. It fills out all of these different sections for me. And then let's say I go into listing details, for example, and we don't know what the cancellation policy is because your PMS didn't pass us that information.
You'll see this as blank. And then you'll know that this is an area of gap that we do not have information for. So that you can then go and fill that out.
I'd say most hosts just by connecting their past conversations and bringing in their PMS data are like 95% of the way there. It's really just like giving specific instructions like how you would to an employee for how to handle different types of situations.
So we have this SOP section and this is really like curating and training the AI based on what you want. So for Luke, for your business, you can go in here and basically give instructions for how to handle different types of scenarios. You know, what do you do if the guest shows up and the bed's not made and the place is dirty? Like, how do you want our AI to respond to that situation?
What do you, what do you do if a guest breaks something in the property? Or they say like, hey, I left something, like I left my kids teddy bear like at the property, and I already checked out. So basically here you can build out different types of scenarios and how you want our AI to handle that specific scenario as an instruction.
So I said this is probably the most manual part. Like, this is where most of our hosts are doing their setup process is the data, the information, it's already been sucked in from the pms.
And then you kind of need to go in and take time to think about how would I train an employee to handle different types of scenarios? So that way, when Host Buddy gets a message that it doesn't know how to handle, typically it can respond, as opposed to sending me notifications and requests for me to jump in. So basically getting ahead and training it before issues pop up essentially should be
[00:32:28] Speaker A: a little overwhelming for somebody who's brand new, doesn't even know what their SOP should be.
Any advice there?
[00:32:35] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. So we have a user guide that has recommended SOPs. We also have a really great support team. So if you have any questions around, like, hey, like, I need help setting up my SOPs, we can have someone hop on a call with you to essentially make sure that you're set up for success.
Yeah, I think the great thing about our, our system is that even if you just connect your pms, bring your data in and then turn it on, it's not going to mess things up. So we've really trained it to be, you know, host buddies, not saying things that it shouldn't be saying. And if it doesn't know how to handle a situation, it's not going to just make up something in response.
And I think that's like a big hesitation point for a lot of people is like, they're scared of what happens if there's a complex scenario that I've not taught it how to handle. And that's the hardest thing to feel comfortable turning on with our application in that situation. Let's say like a guest checks in and like, I don't know, the dishwasher exploded and there's water all over the floor. Host money is not going to be like, hey, there's a mop, like, in the, you know, cupboard, like, go ahead and mop it up. It's going to send a notification to you and your team, and then we have settings that you can set up within our system for how to handle scenarios it doesn't know how to handle. So Host Buddy can defer it. So it'll say something like, hey, let me bring this to my team and I'll get back to you. Or it can even just not respond to situations that it's not capable of responding to.
And then your team gets a notification, they can hop in where they need to.
Yeah, Host Buddy would be able to essentially be able to handle most of your communication just by the integration.
And then adding in additional information just helps it handle a higher percentage of conversations.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: I don't suppose there's any reason why I couldn't just chat GPT most of these SOPs.
[00:34:18] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, you could basically probably go on ChatGPT and start saying, you know, this is how I want different scenarios handled and have it be organized and upload a document into our system.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: It's a bit dangerous, I should mention. For if you're brand new and you're. I need you to understand, go ahead and, you know, take its advice or chat GPT or wherever you're getting operating procedure advice, take that. But understand that these operating procedures can be changed at any time, regardless of whether you're using Host Buddy or not. Because SOPs, to be honest with you, are really what's going to make or break a property management company.
If you're not handling the left behind teddy bear the right way, you're going to sink, like for real.
If you're not handling the busted ice machine properly, you're just not going to make it in his business. Because this business, that's what it is, it's busted ice machines. Let's be real. Right? So keep in mind that, yeah, let's start with, with zero and do what we can to, you know, get some systems in place here.
But as you go and these things are not working. I'm not even talking about Host Buddy right now. I'm just talking about your operating procedures. As a property manager, if, if you have something that didn't go well, it's probably not going to go well the second time or the third time. And this is when we need to tweak our procedure.
Just, just pointing that out there for anybody who's brand new. You can't. In other words, don't just let it pull sops out of its rear end or even ChatGPT or wherever you're getting them and then leave them like that forever. Because you will, you will hate this business. If you're having problems and you don't fix the, the operating procedure. Is that fair to say?
[00:36:00] Speaker C: Yeah, 100%. I think like what's nice about this type of system too is guest says something, our AI responds. Maybe your directive wasn't the way that it should have been, or maybe you're you change your mind for how that SOP should be structured, you can then go and just change that within our system. And I don't know, for me, like, we've had VAs that have worked with us. I myself sometimes forget, like maybe my own SOPs for how to handle different types of situations.
Our AI doesn't. So, like, once you change it and say, hey, this is how we're handling this situation moving forward, you can see how that change affects the next situation that applies to it and then keep on changing things at a micro level until you get it to the perfect 100% that you want it to be.
So that's definitely one of the great things, is you can kind of like ab test different scenarios and figure out like, how do I want to handle different types of situations? And was this the outcome that I wanted versus, you know, the outcome that I didn't want and get that perfect, perfect tweak, tweaking completed. For setting up Post Buddy, if you're
[00:37:03] Speaker A: brand new, do your best on operating procedures, whether you're automating them or not.
And when something doesn't go right, that's not necessarily an indication that the operating procedure needs to be changed. It could have been a one off with that guest. If it doesn't go right the second time, then we need to change it. All right, we'll leave it at that. Okay, now let's go back to the inbox, if you don't mind. Unless there's something else we need to show the beginner user on how to integrate.
[00:37:30] Speaker C: From like an integration standpoint, it's pretty straightforward.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: I'm not as scheduling probably as you guys are scheduling. Yeah, there you go.
[00:37:38] Speaker C: Yeah.
So, yeah, back over to the properties page.
Host Buddy is like an employee in the sense of it's working the hours that you want it to work. So every single property can be set up with a schedule. You can see for Jay and I, we have Host Buddy just set up for 24, 7. We want it responding to every single message that's going through.
We'll see. A lot of times hosts will say like, you know, maybe I feel a little bit wary turning on AI for communication. Let me just turn it on when I know that it's. I'm going to be asleep, for example, so they'll do like nighttime communication. Or maybe I know that I'm at my 9 to 5 job, so I'll turn it on from 9 to 5 when I'm not able to respond as quickly to my guests. So it's very customizable in the sense of it's only covering the hours that you want it to be covering, and you can essentially schedule it accordingly based on your own schedule.
We'll see a lot of people, like, they'll have like vas covering certain hours of the day, so they'll turn hostbody on for the hours that their VAS aren't covering. And then slowly they'll start realizing how strong it performs and they'll have it start covering more and more communication.
We also have a test property functionality. So before turning this thing on and having it start responding to messages that are coming through, you can basically go into this testing workbench and just ask a billion different questions to it to make sure that it's responding the way that you want it to.
This is great for running through those SOP situations. So like, did I explain how I want this particular hand situation handled correctly?
So for example, I can put in here like, hey, the door code is not working, for example.
And what we'll do here is we'll put together host, but it'll respond how it would respond to a normal guest. And then we also provide a conversation analysis. So here we can see that our AI is asking if they had a chance to try the specific code sent to them earlier. And then if it's not working, it's providing a backup lockbox location and the code for that. This is set to a current guess, so we know it's a current guess at the property and then we see
[00:39:33] Speaker A: a period of time for certain SOPs. In other words, if I only want the lockbox thing to send after hours, is that possible on one individual type of a message?
[00:39:44] Speaker C: From that standpoint, you could set in there directly in the SOP saying like, we only want to provide this information from 8:00am to 10:00pm, for example, host Buddy is going to be able to look at. It understands the time, it understands the day, it understands who the guest is. So in those SOPs, you can just explain it how you would to a normal employee that's on your team and it'll be able to differentiate.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: Beautiful. Go ahead.
[00:40:08] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. This conversation analysis, I think, is like one of my personal favorite things where you can really understand why our AI responded the way that it responded. So outside of test property in the messaging inbox, every single message that Host Buddy is sending to your guests, you're able to kind of drill into and figure out why did it respond the way that it responded. So that way, if it's not hitting the mark and responding the way that you expected it to. You can go and change information that it has access to.
So here it's basically pulling in our backup access instructions from the property profile, specifically our SOP section, and then it's giving all the information that it had access to when it was providing that response. So if I hate that, I can go into the property profile and then go tweak and change that information
[00:40:54] Speaker B: and
[00:40:54] Speaker C: then I'll hop back over to the inbox to kind of show you what that looks like in the inbox itself too.
Cool. So, looks like we have a most recent message that went out for us. This guest said, checked out. Thank you for the update. We're so glad we could host you for your work trip and hope you had a safe and pleasant journey home.
On my phone, I probably have a notification for this already. We have action items set up for Guest checked out. So we can even have this set up where Guest says, I checked out. It sends a message to your cleaner saying, hey, the guests at this property already checked out. Um, so it allows for your team operation.
[00:41:31] Speaker A: Text message, WhatsApp, how do we do that?
[00:41:34] Speaker C: Yeah, so we have a bunch of different notification channels. We have SMS, we have email, we have WhatsApp. We use Slack as well. So, like, that's probably my favorite integration for notifications. Our entire property management company works out of Slack, so those notifications will show up in a thread there.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: So we do as well. I have a question about that. So here's what we did. Because you guys only integrate with one Slack channel, is that correct?
[00:41:57] Speaker C: Correct.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: So what we did was we made it so that if a message comes in for a particular property that is a particular cleaning issue, we were able to make Slack redirect that message to the proper Slack channel. Because we have multiple markets and things. Right. So let's say it's a cabin in the Smoky Mountains and the message comes in and the Slack knows which properties go to which channel. And we, you know, they said that there was a stain on the sheets or whatever that goes directly to the Smoky Mountain Slack channel. But you got. It doesn't work that way from your end. We have to send it to Slack first and then Slack basically sorts it into where. Which channel it needs to go. Is that right?
[00:42:42] Speaker C: There's ways to do that. Yeah. So we, we have a partnership with a company called Chaser right now. So they've allowed for us to offer some of that, like separation for where the channels are going into and how you're tracking that for your team.
And then we have some updates planned for allowing for it to be in multiple different channels based on the property too.
[00:42:58] Speaker A: We actually were able to figure it out. Right on.
[00:43:00] Speaker C: That's awesome, though.
[00:43:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:02] Speaker C: I might need to see how you did that for the purpose of updating our user guide there. That's cool.
[00:43:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it was really cool.
I'd have to ask my team. I was there, but I wasn't in the meeting. I was elsewhere.
But we were able to make it work. And now anytime a Smoky Mountain situation comes in, it goes to that channel with that cleaner.
And Slack's doing that for us because originally we were looking into zapping it, which would also work, I believe.
[00:43:27] Speaker C: Yeah. So we do web hooks. So, yeah, Zapier works. You can basically have it getting shot notifications to anything that connects to Zapier if you're a user of that.
[00:43:35] Speaker A: But we were able to web hook it within Slack without using Zap Zapier. So I can't explain exactly how we did it, but it is working. I noticed when the messages come in, it goes to the right channel and I'm like, oh, cool. So it's, It's. It was actually pretty easy, so it can't be done.
[00:43:54] Speaker C: Yeah, I will. I'll follow up with you after this.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: For sure.
[00:43:57] Speaker A: I'll say that the multiple Slack channel option on Host Buddy would be easier.
[00:44:03] Speaker C: Yeah, a hundred percent.
[00:44:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:04] Speaker C: And we're. We're discussing that one. I think it's. It's an integration that, like, we set up early on.
We have a lot of people requesting that, so it's. It's definitely on our roadmap, for sure.
[00:44:13] Speaker A: I'll take it. I will take that. Thank you.
[00:44:15] Speaker C: Heck, yeah. I'll take note of this.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: But for those. For those folks that are, you know, complaining about it, let them know that Luke's crazy team over here, the Metalheads, we. We were able to figure out how to, you know, Slack is, Is. Is organizing that for us. Right, right. Within.
Within Slack with their own web web hooks, so.
[00:44:36] Speaker C: Nice. Yeah, that's cool. I didn't know that Slack had like a web hook.
[00:44:39] Speaker A: There was like, weirdest thing somebody on my team found.
It was like the most random checkbox deep in the depths of Slack that we had to click and then it would let us basically open up communication from one channel to the other. The only catch is that anybody on Slack can now join that channel. It's no longer private, which I didn't really care, you know, I mean, I have like a billion people on my Slack and also let's say, let's say you do have a billion people on your slack. Worst case scenario, you as an admin you could, you would know you would get a notification, hey, so and so tried to join this channel and if you don't want them in there, just boot them, you know. So that was the only downside. Is that it you had, you did have to make the channel public.
[00:45:24] Speaker C: Gotcha.
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I, yeah, I'll put together a user guide article on that for sure.
[00:45:30] Speaker A: You'll figure it out. It was something to do with like the web hook basically just took it from the one channel to the other. But in order to make that happen, the information had to be slack wide. It could not be channel specific. So we opened up the channels to public and then the webhook just delivered it to where it needed to go. Based on the name of the property, I think is how it went.
[00:45:48] Speaker C: Yeah. Cool. And I know we have I think maybe a couple minutes left here. I'll run through our new.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: We'll go over. Take your time.
[00:45:56] Speaker C: Cool. Yeah, I'll run through our newest release too. I don't know if you saw the email update around this, Luke, but we basically pushed this new update out to all of our users on Friday.
So this new feature that we have is called Journeys.
It's. And I'll kind of click into that to show what this looks like.
So for the longest time we've had something in our platform called Smart Templates and we've also had something called Upsells. So we basically had systems that were in place where we could have a trigger that basically sends out a message. So if you're on a property management system like Guesty or Hostaway or Hostfully, this is basically templated messages with AI built into it.
So guest books the property, they get sent their booking information. For example, what we had with Smart templates was guest books at the property. They get sent all of their booking information and then the AI personalizes it based on the conversation. So if they said, for example, you know, I'm coming to visit San Diego, we're going to be going to the zoo and I have three kids with me. So like hey, like thanks for booking. We're really excited to host all of, you know, you and your kids. Sounds like you have a lot of really great plans visiting the zoo in San Diego. Here's all your check in information. So basically personalizing the experience for templated messages and making it feel like it was less of an automated message going out to guests.
Our newest feature is called Journeys and essentially what it does is it creates automations throughout a guest experience and stay that allow for you to achieve different objectives. So I know that's a really broad term and it's meant because this product itself is very, very broad.
But essentially with Journeys you're able to create what we call triggers and actions. So guest books at a property, they then get a message. Guest books at a property and they message, you know, I'm planning to check in and I have a baby with me. We send a notification to your team based on that. So essentially creating automations throughout a guest stay that make your life easier and kind of direct them through a journey throughout their stay. So I'll kind of click into a couple examples here to show this off a bit too.
We have a journey marketplace which does a really good job of kind of showing how this operates.
So here we have things like post a gap net extensions. So this is like an upsell, basically having our AI look for, you know, if in your calendar you have one night that's open after a guest checks out, maybe it offers that guest the ability to extend their stay.
We have pre stay gap night. So if there's a gap in the calendar before they check in, it offers them maybe the ability to check in a day early or they can get an early check in, inquiry, follow up. So if a guest asks about your property and then they don't end up booking, we can basically check back in with them and periodically check in to make sure that we're driving them to actually book your property.
[00:48:45] Speaker A: Hey, why didn't you book my property?
[00:48:47] Speaker C: Yeah, it's like, what's going on? You, you asked these questions, I answered and you know, it sounded like you were going to move forward.
[00:48:51] Speaker A: I want to stay at the greatest place on the planet. What's up dude?
[00:48:55] Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah, and then we kind of kind of go a little bit more advanced too. So, you know, early check in, late checkout, upsell, seven plus day lead time, full life cycle verification, focused. I'll click into this one as an example. I think this is a good one to kind of show off.
So basically for this journey and how it's built out 15 minutes after a guest books, if they are a current guest, future guest or past guest, we're basically going to send them a message that welcomes the guests and confirms their booking and then explicitly states that to receive check in instructions, they must first provide the name of everyone in their group, an email address, a phone number and a photo of the primary booker's license. So here we can set basically host buddy to say, hey, we have verification steps before you check into the property. These are the things that we need from your group before you can check in.
And then what's great is we can set up conditions. So basically waiting in, waiting until a little bit before their check in and then setting a condition of has the guest sent over their verification information that we need from them. If they have not, then we can send a message basically following back up with them.
[00:50:05] Speaker A: Fair to say that this in essence could possibly begin to start replacing a lot of my auto messages and make them more tailor made.
[00:50:13] Speaker C: Exactly, yeah. So it's, it's essentially replacing all of your auto messages and it's also creating.
[00:50:18] Speaker A: Sorry, sorry to interrupt Sam. I will say that since I've been using the product, my, my, my canned auto messages that I've been using for years, they do now sound not that great anymore. You know, I'm like, it would be so much cooler if this auto message was saying, you know, yeah, we can't wait for, you know, personal things like you and your four kids or whatever that makes it sound like, you know, the auto message, it's just kind of. They're dry, right? They're, they're like a brick wall.
And so, and I'm not even saying, you know, I'm not even saying that I don't, that I'm concerned that the guest maybe knows that this is AI. I'm not, I don't even care. At this point in 2026, everything's AI, right? So who cares? But what I am saying is that the AI could be a little bit more professional, you know, so that's what we're doing here versus having the exact same with auto messages on your management software. The problem is, is that they're, they're in a box, they cannot come outside of the box. And with what you're saying here, we're basically setting up auto messages that have a personality.
[00:51:24] Speaker C: Automes with the personality and also purpose too. So like host buddies living in the conversation thread, it's able to understand like who the guest is, why they're visiting, you know, is there maybe an upsell opportunity based on what the guest is saying?
Do I have certain requirements that I need this guest to complete before they check in or during their stay? And have they completed it? Have they acknowledged my messages that I'm sending to them? So really like basically having an eye in the conversation that's sending them the information that they need. It's personalizing that information.
And it's also being cognizant to whatever your needs are as a host for your property to make sure that the guest is completing those. So whether that's like verification requirements or maybe they say that they have a dog and you need to ask for their dogs, like, you know, make sure that their dog is. Has its vaccines or whatever. If you have certain requirements, Host Buddy can be looking out for those things in that conversation for you. It can be looking to upsell things for you based on whatever you upsell at your properties and then also tailoring all the messages. So, like, it doesn't sound like we have an automated system. It sounds like Loop's the one that's sending the messages.
[00:52:26] Speaker B: And it I wanted to mention too, it can make sure that you're avoiding those situations where you are sounding so robotic that, like, it shows that you're not paying attention to the conversation. For example, if you have a scheduled message in Host Buddy on a journey for, for you to check in with the guest after they check in, same day, say, hey, hope you checked in. All right, Let us know if you need anything. But if you've already had a conversation with that guest that afternoon, they said, hey, we checked in and this bed is broken. Like, there's a stain on the couch. And they're already saying that they checked in and giving you all these things.
Our context checking AI awareness is going to make sure that message doesn't get sent out because it knows that they've already said they checked in, they've already reported these things. So kind of avoiding those situations too, where, like, it's still taking it a step further and making sure that you, you don't automatically send out messages that are just canned.
[00:53:16] Speaker A: I have three questions. Number one scale of one to ten, how difficult is this whole thing? Like, it's a little overwhelming if I'm just some random, you know, person that's looking at this is like 1 to 10. Like, how difficult is this for just an average Joe?
[00:53:33] Speaker C: I think that most people get stressed out before they start it and then once they start it, they realize how easy it is.
And I will say, like, we've done polls with our customers. We've heard a lot of feedback. And like, the customers that sign up and get going with things, they say that it's easy to use.
I think that it just can be a little bit intimidating sometimes when you have no idea where to start. So we have a lot of things that are built out within our application to make things easier for example, journeys, you can literally type to the AI and say, like, I want to message my guest when they first book, send them, check in information and check in on them during their stay and ask for review. After they check out, our AI will put together the entire journey for them. So we're doing a lot to automate things within our own system to make it easier. We have our autofill functionality to bring in all your data and basically fill out things for you within our setup process.
So I'd say, like, from a difficulty standpoint, like, it's requires a little bit of time and, you know, a little bit of practice and patience, but it's probably landing around like a three out of ten, maybe for difficulty.
[00:54:35] Speaker A: That's my next question. How much time should I spend? How much time, how many, how long until I have this thing to the point where I don't need to play with it anymore?
[00:54:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I think the first property that you set up on our system, that's where you should put the bulk of your time. So like, I would put, you know, an hour and a half in, get it set up for the first half hour, bring in the data, give it some directives around what you want it to do in certain types of situations. And of course, we have all those different options for like our recommended SOPs, for example.
And then the other portion of that should be like testing it. So, like, what are the situations that I deal with commonly at my properties and seeing how the AI responds, building that trust with AI, making sure that the response responses sound correct.
And then once you have that first property set up, it's a lot easier because you can copy and paste your sops over to all of your other properties that you have in your portfolio. Anything that's the same can be brought over into your other ones.
But yeah, I would say, like, most hosts probably are landing around two hours of like initial onboarding. And then if you have like a ton of properties, you know, obviously you should be spending some time with those to make sure that you're testing them too. So it does depend on your property count. But I'd say like, one dedicated day is probably going to get you in a pretty good spot.
[00:55:51] Speaker A: Can you go back to screen share, please? Yep. Two more questions.
Number one, can you show me the thumbs up, thumbs down situation versus go to. Go to one of those auto messages there?
[00:56:05] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:56:07] Speaker A: There you go. Okay.
Right there under the host buddy message with the thumbs up. Hit the thumbs up or the thumbs down for me.
[00:56:15] Speaker C: Cool.
[00:56:16] Speaker A: Okay, got it. Can you explain to me, the difference between entering the note and the property and changing the property profile. Do I need to change the property profile or will it listen to the feedback? Because it says it doesn't maybe listen to the feedback.
[00:56:31] Speaker C: Great question. Thumbs up, thumbs down is for us. So that goes to our tech team for figuring out, like, where people are saying this is good and this is bad so that we can work on improving our AI, essentially. So this is feedback that we're using for basically teaching and training our own system.
If Host Buddy says the wrong, how
[00:56:53] Speaker A: does that work for you guys at scale? Because aren't you getting a whole bunch of answers that are, like, contradicting each other? Like, this person likes it this way and that per. You know what I mean? Isn't that annoying?
[00:57:03] Speaker C: Uh, I mean, I think that's part of the maintenance process, right? It's like, yeah, all feedback is good feedback. If someone's not happy with something, like, we want to recognize that and maybe 99% of people are happy. So, like, you know, where do we weigh that at? We also can look at that too and say, hey, this user reached out and they said that this didn't respond the way that we wanted it to. Maybe we reach out and say, hey, it's an issue with your sop.
Here's our advice for how to change that. So I would say, like, my main recommendation is if you're not getting responses that you like, send it to our support team. They're very, very trained on how to set up your account to have it respond the way that you want it to.
It's very rare that somebody has an issue that can't be corrected by just changing something in the way that our AI is being instructed in their actual Host Buddy account. So most of the issues are thumbs up, please.
Cool.
[00:57:57] Speaker A: So if I really don't like what it said, the thumbs down, either one, then I need to go into Property profile and make a change. Is that right? Can you explain? Can you show, open that up, the property profile there? I know. Go back to the thumbs up. Go to it from that. Yeah, that's how it works in my brain.
[00:58:12] Speaker C: Cool.
[00:58:12] Speaker A: Yeah, right there.
[00:58:14] Speaker C: So, yeah, let's say I hate the response that it has.
It now brings me over to the property profile for this particular property and then I can go into like the SOPs and say, hey, like, maybe it didn't handle backup keys as well as I wanted it to. You know, maybe I add in here, like, only send the backup code from 10pm to 8am Got it.
[00:58:35] Speaker A: Otherwise, Click the Basics tab for me.
[00:58:38] Speaker C: Cool, cool. Basics.
[00:58:42] Speaker A: Go. Scroll down.
Isn't there like a section that's like, can you show me where like, to set the tone of the conversation, like, I need to do one to two sentences, three to four sentences. I want you to be firm, but blah, blah, blah.
[00:58:55] Speaker C: Yeah, so that'll live in messaging preferences.
Cool. So, yeah, this is our conversation settings.
And basically here is where you can at scale, kind of like customize Host Buddy to match your particular preferences. So we have deferred behaviors. This is like what happens if Host buddy doesn't know where the toaster is located at and the guest asks where the toaster is located at. So in this situation, it's going to say, hey, let me check with my team, I'll get back to you.
You can set it to just not respond or all of these other great options.
You can add a signature on. Here we have conversation closing preferences, AI transparency preferences if you want it to respond, im, AI if asked, for example.
[00:59:35] Speaker A: All right, Sam's pause. So we'll move over to Jay. But yeah, customized tone. Can you explain this one to me here briefly?
[00:59:41] Speaker B: Yeah, you can. I mean, this is a high priority item in our AI, so it's going to be able to allow you to do a lot of different things. We actually have, we have customers who have like themed Airbnbs. So they'll do like one that's like near Disney World and they'll make it sound like a Disney character or like from Interstellar. They'll have like certain characters in that movie if it's like space themed Airbnb and things like that. So you can really make it sound and have whatever language or dialect you want.
It's super cool, the different things that you can make it do. So that and it. But this is a, this is a place where you can also say like, you don't use these types of emojis or use this type of language always be shortened to the point, you know, be more, you know, direct, things like that.
Because, you know, it kind of depends on what type of host you are. If you're somebody who really wants to go above and beyond and be very detailed, then you can have it do that. Or if you're somebody who historically is going to be very much directing to the point you can make, do that as well. But we're also factoring in your past conversations to take that as, you know, a resource as well.
So it's going to be able to kind of follow that and do the same type of language. And emojis and things like that.
[01:00:54] Speaker A: Two more things briefly. Number one, if I want to continue to use my auto messages that I've been doing for years on management software, then I would simply put a delay on Host Buddy. Is that how we do it?
[01:01:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So are you saying auto messages as far as like scheduled messages, you know,
[01:01:11] Speaker A: like the auto response is like, hey, you just booked our property, blah blah, blah. Like if I want to, if I want to keep that message coming from Guesty or Hospitable, then I would let that send automatically from Hospitable and put a one minute delay on Host Buddy and then Host Buddy just won't send a message.
[01:01:28] Speaker B: Yeah, you don't even need the delay if it's already scheduled on your pms. It's going to just get sent through and then Host Buddy will see that message in the conversation and just use that in the future.
With that conversation. You can set a custom delay if you want. And a lot of times people do like three to five minutes, so kind of like feel a little bit more natural, give you that varied time between three and five minutes or three and 10 minutes, whatever you want to set it.
[01:01:52] Speaker A: I'm just saying in an effort to avoid having Host Buddy send a message and my management software send a message at the same time and then we got two messages on the same topic.
[01:02:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:01] Speaker A: How do I avoid.
[01:02:02] Speaker B: Host Buddy will only have messages sent upon booking or upon certain events if you set it up that way through the journeys.
So it's just, it's initially set up as a reactive automation and there's no outreach outbound messages going out.
[01:02:20] Speaker A: So in other words, back to the original conversation where we're basically redoing our auto messages on journeys so that they're, they have more personality, basically.
[01:02:31] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's one of those things where like you can set up all of your SOPs and everything for Hostbody to respond to any messages coming in. And then once you really want to take it to the next level, then you kind of start doing that migration. Some people just do everything at the same time. But there's nothing wrong with keeping your PMS automated messages going while you kind of get Host Buddy set up, it's going to respond to all the messages coming in. And then when you want to have that more AI focus or that, that AI touch kind of going in and personalizing things, that's when you can kind of convert things over. But yeah, you'd have to make sure that when you turn one on, you turn the other one off that way they're not receiving two, you know, double messages.
[01:03:08] Speaker A: And If I have 17 properties and I set up a journey on one property, I can push it over to all properties.
[01:03:14] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really cool part, too, is you can basically use the smart directive to essentially tell it what to do. So if you say, send the address and send how to. How to get into the property, send X, Y, Z, it's going to go and pull that information from each property. So there's one journey for all of the properties that you need, and it's going to go and grab that information and send it out in its customized way to each conversation.
[01:03:38] Speaker A: All right, last question.
Do you recommend we put a signature, I'm calling it a signature on the messages that says, hey, this was sent by AI. Or are you recommending we don't do that?
[01:03:49] Speaker B: Most people don't. I would recommend not just because I think the. The sentiment around AI is still sensitive to certain people.
Others, people like me. If I'm sitting in an Airbnb, I really don't care. And also, I love the fact that people, if they're using AI, I know I can get an answer at any hour of the day. That's fantastic. I don't have to wait for somebody.
[01:04:09] Speaker A: Probably a pretty sophisticated host. You can. Honestly, in my brain, I'm like, well, this house is probably going to be really cool, you know?
[01:04:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But it depends. I think we're moving into a landscape of that being more appropriate. Some people just have that response or have that signature. Totally fine. You don't even have to call it an AI. You can just call your assistant or something. That way, since it's pretty much indistinguishable, you can kind of have a little bit of separation, if that's what you want. We also have a setting there where if somebody asks if it's AI, you can have it set to share that information and say, yes, this is AI or not.
[01:04:42] Speaker A: Can I have these messages sent from any of my co hosts on my dashboard from Airbnb? You know, like, you can have multiple users. Do I get to pick which user sending the message it?
[01:04:51] Speaker B: So it depends which pms. Right now on Hospitable, we have that feature and we're working on getting that for additional PMS partners that we have.
But that ability for you to kind of change who it's. Who it's getting sent from right now, it'll send the same way that a PMS message is getting sent on a scheduled message, which would just be Whoever's the primary host in your account, if
[01:05:11] Speaker A: it's not hospitable with the multiple co hosts, is what you're saying.
[01:05:13] Speaker B: Correct.
[01:05:14] Speaker A: Okay. That's what I use. And I use it all. This is extremely rare that I send a message of any kind from the actual host on profile.
I just feel. I find that it works better, you know, psychologically with the guests to let them. It's almost like, hey, the person on the profile is busy, but he has these people that work for him and let them, you know, let's. It's just. I don't know, it's always worked for
[01:05:36] Speaker B: us, but yeah, and then when you do step in, it's like, oh, now I'm really talking to the owner.
[01:05:40] Speaker A: Like, this morning, I had a perfect example. I had a lady that was like, hey, we got engaged here three years ago and we're coming back for our honeymoon. And that's when I stepped in and I was like, hey, Luke, I run the show around here and I sent her 50 bucks, you know, so a perfect example.
In other words, the person on the profile needs to be the hero.
[01:06:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:06:01] Speaker A: You know, but anyway, it works well
[01:06:03] Speaker B: that way for sure.
[01:06:05] Speaker A: Well, how do I find you boys? Also, you do have a two weeks free going on right now and plug yourselves. How do we find it? How do we get hooked up?
[01:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, two weeks free for anyone who signs up. Right now we're running that. Um, and yeah, just go on our website. HostBuddy AI is how you get there. HostBuddy AI slash signup if you want to just use one URL, but there's a bunch of links on our homepage.
So that's. That's how you find Host Buddy. You can, you can follow us on social media too.
We're always doing little podcasts and posting all of the new features that we're releasing and different case studies and things like that.
So, yeah, Host buddy_ai is our Instagram and then J Underscore Ulrich Underscore is my social media handle.
[01:06:52] Speaker C: Sorry, guys. I guess my WI fi just like wink a bit mid presentation.
Yeah, my. My Instagram handle is sam_mays, which is M A Y E S.
And then I'm also very actively monitoring the Host Buddy Instagram alongside J2, so that works too.
[01:07:08] Speaker A: Killer. Absolute pleasure. You guys got a fantastic product. I'm proud of you. It wasn't. I know it wasn't easy and it's going to. It's going to be a journ from here on out, but it's it's really a great product. I love it.
And. And thank you. If you ever need anything from me, just let me know. And otherwise, just don't overthink it.
[01:07:26] Speaker B: Thanks for the opportunity, Luke. I appreciate it.
[01:07:28] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for having us on, Luke.
[01:07:29] Speaker A: All right. Later, Bo.
