HostBuddy AI Review: From Our Team of Superhosts

HostBuddy AI aims to help hosts and property managers prevent struggles with keeping up with guest communication, especially those whose portfolios are starting to grow. With the success of your vacation rentals come more and more customers looking to inquire and learn more about your business.

This constant influx of repetitive questions can be tiresome, especially if you alone are replying to the messages. HostBuddy AI uses the power of industry-leading AI technology to understand messages and reply to them with relevant answers based on information about your listing and past conversations you’ve had with other customers. HostBuddy AI can take over your day-to-day communication needs and free up your time for your other business needs.

However, how useful can HostBuddy AI really be? Today, we explore the platform and discuss its features, pricing, and more. Join us in our HostBuddy AI review and learn everything you need to know before subscribing.

Best HostBuddy AI Features and How Hosts Can Use Them for Their Airbnb

HostBuddy AI offers different features and tools built into their platform to assist in the day-to-day guest communication needs of hosts and property managers.

Smart Inbox

The Smart Inbox feature acts similarly to a centralized inbox that most guest messaging platforms offer. However, unlike the others, HostBuddy AI’s smart inbox stands out as it provides an intelligent communication management system. It automatically analyzes conversations, identifying critical issues and action items in real time. Hosts and property managers can quickly generate AI responses, view and manage guest issues, and see valuable insights provided for every guest.

Templated Messages

Templated messaging is a fantastic feature for streamlining guest communications while keeping the tone, brand voice, and messages consistent. HostBuddy AI allows hosts to create customized message templates for various scenarios, including check-in/check-out notifications, policy reminders, and early check-in requests. The AI automatically sends these messages based on your created rules, ensuring consistent and timely communication. This feature saves hosts countless hours of manual typing and helps maintain a professional, uniform communication style across all guest interactions. Property managers can easily customize templates to reflect their unique brand voice, property-specific instructions, and local recommendations, making each guest feel personally attended to.

Customizable Scheduling

The platform's customizable scheduling feature offers hosts a true "set-it-and-forget-it" communication solution. Hosts can create custom schedules that determine when AI will automatically handle guest communications, ensuring 24/7 responsiveness without constant personal involvement. This feature is particularly valuable for hosts managing multiple properties or those with limited availability. The AI can be programmed to handle different communication scenarios during specific hours, automatically taking over messaging during off-peak times or when the host is unavailable. This ensures guests receive prompt, professional responses at any time of day.

Issue Tracking

HostBuddy AI's intelligent issue tracking transforms how hosts manage guest concerns. The system can automatically detect and categorize problems raised in guest messages, creating actionable items for immediate resolution. Hosts receive real-time notifications and can delegate tasks to appropriate team members, often integrating with communication platforms like Slack. This proactive approach allows property managers to address potential issues before they escalate, improving guest satisfaction and preventing negative reviews. The AI's ability to prioritize and track issues ensures that critical guest concerns are never overlooked.

Cleaning Management Integrations

An underrated yet powerful feature, HostBuddy AI's cleaning management integrations streamline property turnover processes. The platform automatically pulls data from cleaning management systems, enabling smart decisions about early check-ins and property readiness. This integration helps hosts optimize their cleaning schedules, reduce downtime between guests, and provide more flexible check-in options. By synchronizing cleaning data with guest communication, hosts can automatically approve or manage early check-in requests, maximizing property utilization and enhancing guest experience.

Seamless PMS Integrations

HostBuddy AI offers Property Management System (PMS) integrations that empower hosts with comprehensive operational support. The platform directly connects with popular systems like BookingSync, Guesty, and Hospitable, providing one-click integrations and a test environment for messaging with the bot. These seamless connections allow the AI to access important property data, enabling more accurate and contextual guest communications. Hosts can synchronize booking information, automate responses, and ensure that the AI has the most up-to-date information about their properties. This integration reduces manual data entry and minimizes potential communication errors.

HostBuddy AI Pricing: How Much Does HostBuddy AI Cost?

HostBuddy AI isn’t a free platform. However, they are relatively affordable. They offer two different subscription plans, each applying discounts for the number of properties you use.

The HostBuddy Pro is a slightly cheaper plan that only costs $7 per property per month for 1-10 listings, $6 per property per month for 11-50 listings, and $5 per property per month for 51-99 listings. It provides unlimited access to all of HostBuddy AI’s messaging and automation features, including the AI bot, the dashboard, PMS integration, issue detection and notification, smart templates, review removal, and slack integration. We think it’s a great plan for beginners and those who aren’t keen on diving into the statistics and analytics of guest messaging.

On the other hand, HostBuddy Elite is their most premium plan, starting at $6 per month per property for those with 51-99 listings, $8 per property per month for those with 11-50 listings, and $10 per property per month for those with less than 10 listings. Aside from the aforementioned features, HostBuddy AI also allows users to view and send messages using the Smart Inbox, grants access to AI-driven analytics and dashboards and enables the addition of team members. We think it’s a great choice for those with larger business sizes and those who already have a team in-place handling their property management needs.

With regards to HostBuddy AI’s pricing, we think it’s perfectly reasonable and lines up with the industry standard when it comes to typical Airbnb guest messaging software. This makes it a great, if not excellent tool to add to a host or property manager’s arsenal.

HostBuddy AI User Experience

We’ve found that HostBuddy AI provides a pretty great experience, even for those without much knowledge of AI and messaging tools. We’ve come to love its dark user interface, creating a great contrast with the text and photos of your property, while being easy to look at for hours. Each individual property is laid out and has customizable settings unique to each listing. This makes it easy to configure and calibrate every feature according to your liking based on a property’s specific needs.

One thing we’ve noticed is that it’s pretty much a requirement to connect a property management system because it acts as the central hub of information that the AI will rely on to learn more about your business. Without it, interactions don’t feel as fulfilling and meaningful, and the AI will have trouble answering more complex questions that it otherwise would’ve easily handled.

Other than that, HostBuddy AI was pretty great. The test environment allowed us to play around with the AI and try to test its limits by throwing it different questions and messages for different properties. However, it handled it well and was able to provide responses based on the information it was provided. It can take a while to set up, but once you do, especially the scheduling, auto-responses, and templates, you’re left with nothing else to do but to monitor for more complex messages and be on the lookout for any potential issues that the platform discovers based on guest messages.

HostBuddy AI Reviews From Across the Web

Now that you’ve heard our thoughts about the platform, maybe it’s time to see what other hosts and property managers think about HostBuddy AI. So, we’ve gathered a couple of reviews posted on various review sites across the web.

• Grant M. had this to say: “I have quite a few short term rentals and many guests send messages late at night, most of the time redundant questions that are easy to answer. Hostbuddy solved my problem of having to reiterate the same proprietary information to every airbnb guest, allowing for my workload to focus more on the growth of the company.”
• Dylan W. says this: “My favorite part about Hostbuddy AI is how easy it is to set up and use. Can import properties from your PMS and integrating it is an absolute breeze. Its responses are very human like and is a great tool to have especially when you are not available to answer messages.”
• Tim U. claims this: “HostBuddy has helped make my vacation rental business become more passive since I no longer need to be available for questions and help 24/7.”

HostBuddy AI is still a relatively new piece of software and thus doesn’t have thousands of reviews publicly available yet, so keep in mind that most of these are from a very small sample size. With that being said, HostBuddy AI does score a clean 5/5 stars on sites like Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp. This is a clear indication that most users end up satisfied whenever they use HostBuddy AI for their businesses.

Most users praised HostBuddy AI’s human-like responses, easy set-up process, and great autonomy, relying less on human intervention and just handling communication on its own. On the other hand, some people have found the customization settings to be quite overwhelming and that HostBuddy AI pretty much requires you to integrate a PMS, or else its information would be incomplete, and its responses wouldn’t be as good. But, as a whole, HostBuddy AI delivers great functionality to its users.

Final Thoughts

Throughout our HostBuddy AI review, we found that it could greatly help manage guest communication as long as you supplied it with enough information and time to learn. Its pricing is on par, if not cheaper, than other messaging platforms, making it a great alternative solution for hosts and property managers. We highly recommend seeing if the site supports the current PMS you are using since it’s going to be a major requirement, at least from our perspective, when it comes to empowering HostBuddy AI to handle your guest information.

If you’re considering starting out your own Airbnb rental or just looking for a new addition to your portfolio, we suggest checking out our BNBCalc property analysis tool to give you an insight into properties on your radar. It can help you make data-driven decisions based on what active rentals are already earning, allowing you to get an idea of not only revenue but also expenses and paint a fuller picture of your potential investment.