The Best Guest Messaging Software for Airbnbs in 2024

As Superhosts managing numerous rentals across different areas, our team knows how challenging it is to deal with guest communication. It’s one of those things that needs to be locked in at all times because it’s one of the first steps in a customer’s journey. We’re always on the go, checking on our rentals and managing BNBCal, leaving us little time to do other things. Luckily, there are numerous reliable guest messaging software that can handle your guest communication without the need for human intervention.

We know we aren’t alone in our struggles of answering guest inquiries and replying to messages. So, today, we’ve decided to list our favorite picks for the best guest messaging software for Airbnbs. Hopefully, we’ll be able to help you decide the best one to use for your business.

Breezeway

Breezeway is a popular Airbnb guest messaging software with built-in operations and property care features. It helps streamline communication between hosts and guests, making it easier to deliver exceptional service and boost guest satisfaction.

One of Breezeway's standout features is its ability to automate messages based on reservation data. Hosts can set up triggered messages to send welcome notes, access codes, property information, and even a link to a digital welcome book. This automation saves time and ensures guests receive all the necessary information at the right moment.

Breezeway makes use of AI-powered messages to enhance guest communication. Since it uses AI, it can handle all of the incoming guest inquiries, regardless of time. Speaking of time, the AI also learns overtime, making it smarter and more capable of handling complex messages as it earns more experience.

Breezeway Key Features

• Automated Workflows and Task Scheduling: Breezeway automates operations from task creation to completion, streamlining check-in and check-out processes. Create custom workflows triggered by guest arrivals or departures, automating tasks like sending welcome messages and scheduling cleanings. While setup takes time, it ultimately reduces hands-on management.
• Smart Checklists and Mobile App: Ensure consistent quality with custom checklists defining task specifications. Staff can add comments, photos and track time via the mobile app, allowing for thorough monitoring even when you're not physically present.
• Inventory Tracking: Simplify inventory management with Breezeway's tracking feature. Create customizable supply sheets to monitor essentials like toiletries and cleaning materials. Easily export or print inventory lists, ensuring you never run out of crucial supplies.
• AI Messaging and Upselling: Breezeway's AI messaging system automates repetitive guest communications, providing quick responses and excellent customer service. It streamlines check-in/out processes, assigns cleaners, and intelligently upsells services or extended stays, enhancing guest experience and boosting revenue.

Breezeway Pricing Plans

There aren’t specific prices or plans on the Breezeway website. However, they do answer that hosts and property managers with four or fewer properties can avail of Breezeway for only $19.99 per property per month. Those with five or more properties would have to settle for discussing directly with the platform since they don’t publicly display prices for those situations.

We recommend scheduling a demo with Breezeway to learn more about the ins and outs of the site and get more information about custom prices for your vacation rental business.

Who We Recommend Breezeway For

With its solid features like unlimited SMS messaging, PMS and OTA integrations, bulk sending, scheduled messages, and engagement analytics, Breezeway proves to be one of the best guest messaging software for Airbnb. It’s also one of the few guest messaging software with a direct mobile app companion that helps busy owners manage their business on the go. As a whole, we think it’s a solid platform for those with any number of rentals and for hosts and property managers who prefer an all-in-one approach to their guest management.

Host AI

Host AI is a suitable platform for hosts and property managers looking to automate their guest communication process. From the name itself, we’re sure you can already guess that it takes advantage of AI capabilities to improve guest interactions and the overall guest messaging process for both parties.

A key advantage of Host AI is its multilingual capability. Support for multiple languages is something that not all guest messaging software have. Host AI can communicate with guests in their preferred language, breaking down language barriers and making your property more accessible to a global audience. We can’t really talk about how useful it is since it’s not really something we use, mainly because our rentals are mostly located within the US. However, we can definitely see it being particularly valuable for hosts catering to international travelers or for those with rentals in non-English speaking countries.

Host AI can also help improve your ranking on Airbnb by shortening reply times, potentially increasing your property's visibility and bookings. Additionally, the platform's ability to remember past conversations allows for more personalized follow-ups, encouraging guest loyalty and return visits.

Host AI Key Features

• AI Messaging: Host AI trains your AI-messaging assistant on your listing info, guidebooks, and conversations. It provides personalized responses about house rules, WiFi, FAQs, and local recommendations. You can edit or remove information as needed, ensuring accurate and tailored guest communication.
• Unified Inbox: Consolidates all message directories into one inbox, simplifying guest communication. Allows approval, editing, or rejection of AI-generated replies, streamlining the response process and ensuring consistent, accurate information for guests.
• Automated Upsells: Identifies gap periods and offers discounted rates for extensions to existing guests. Follows up on upsell messages based on preset rules, helping secure last-minute bookings and maximize revenue potential.
• Task Management: Identifies urgent tasks from customer messages or reviews and delegates them to appropriate teams. Integrates with messaging systems like Slack for timely notifications, ensuring efficient handling of guest concerns and property issues.
• Chat Sandbox: Provides a secure environment to test AI messaging responses. Allows hosts to simulate guest inquiries, ensuring relevant answers for common questions and testing the AI's capabilities.
• Urgency Filters: Complements task management by allowing creation of tags for specific topics requiring manual attention. Useful for sensitive issues like refunds, malfunctioning items, or unsatisfied customers, ensuring personal handling of critical matters.
• Voice AI (Beta): It’s a fairly new feature that learns from your communication style to answer phone calls. Provides call recordings and transcripts for review. Still in beta but promising for future implementation in short-term rentals.

Host AI Pricing Plans

Host AI has pretty straightforward pricing plans that’s based on how many listings you have. The more listings you have, the bigger the discounts they offer. However, all of their plans grant you access to the same features, it’s only the pricing that changes.

• Superhost: Costs $12 per listing per month and supports anywhere from 1 to 10 rentals.
• Property Manager: It is cheaper at $10 per listing per month for 11 to 50 listings.
• Enterprise: This plan is perfect for STR business owners with large portfolios, catering to those with 50 or more listings. This plan doesn’t have a publicly available price, but HostAI offers discounts for all of your needs. Make sure to contact them directly for more information.

At $12 per listing per month, we think that Host AI charges a reasonable fee. It handles most of your day-to-day conversations and eliminates the repetitive nature of guest communication, leaving only the more complicated requests for you/ your team to handle.

Who We Recommend Host AI For

Host AI is an excellent choice for a wide range of Airbnb hosts and property managers, primarily because of its affordable and user-friendly nature. It caters to small and large portfolios while still providing access to all their features across all scales. Its integration with popular property management systems like Guesty and Hostfully also makes it a versatile choice for hosts of all levels.

Enso Connect

Like the others on our list of the best guest messaging software for Airbnbs, Enso Connect uses the power of AI to digitize guest interactions and automate the entire process. The AI-driven messaging minimizes response times and allows guests to get near instant replies, leading to lesser chances of customers leaving and looking for another rental.

One feature that helps Enso Connect stand out from the others is how it monetizes every guest transaction. It personalizes every stage of the guest journey and even automatically provides upsells that can help boost your revenue.

While most Enso Connect features will take some time to set up, including custom rules and workflows, it’s one of those things that just works on its own once completed. The entire process is intuitive and made easy, so it mainly just requires a bit of time and effort to get it up and handling your guest interactions.

Enso Connect Key Features

• Digitalization: Enso Connect modernizes rentals with beautiful digital guidebooks, enhancing the presentation of essential information. It offers guest screening with ID verification, facial recognition, and customized rental contracts. The platform also manages security deposits and damage waivers, ensuring property protection.
• Automation: Enso Connect enables easy automation without coding skills using custom workflows based on "If this, then that" conditions. This feature streamlines processes like requesting reviews, ID verification, and offering discounts or upsells, allowing for scalable and creative business improvements without manual intervention.
• Smart Lock Access: Integrates with smart lock providers, offering temporary access codes through the Boarding Pass feature. Automatically changes codes post-checkout and provides notifications for lock access. Simplifies turnover process and allows easy access for cleaners and staff.
• Guest Communication: Utilizes Enso AI with GPT-4 integration for fast, personalized messaging. Recognizes guest tones and generates responses based on preset custom rules and rental information. Features a unified inbox for streamlined communication across channels. Phone call handling is in development, promising future AI-assisted call management.

Enso Connect Pricing Plans

The main thing that we don’t like about Enso Connect is how it doesn’t publicly display any pricing plans or structures. This makes it difficult to plan ahead and do any minor considerations before committing more time and effort into doing extra research about the platform.

Instead, Enso Connect requires curious owners and hosts to directly contact them for custom prices based on the number of properties you have. Enso Connect offers monthly, quarterly, or yearly pre-payment plans but only offers 1-year contracts with a 60-day notice requirement if you want to cancel, regardless of what plan you decide to move forward with.

Who We Recommend Enso Connect For

As a whole, Enso Connect still stands out, mainly for its personalized upselling features. While we may not completely like how it doesn’t publicly display its prices, we still think that there’s room for it in short-term rental businesses.

We think it can be a valuable tool for hosts and property managers with ten or more listings looking to scale their business and earn more revenue through monetization and upselling. It’s a great way to automate the upselling process and create more opportunities to sell extra services.

HostBuddy AI

HostBuddy AI is one of the leading platforms in the guest communication service when it comes to AI technology. It makes use of some of the most advanced AI capabilities available today, empowering your rental’s guest communication experience.

It seamlessly connects to your property management software and uses the information from it to extract information and learn the ins and outs of your vacation rental business. It takes into account the welcome documents, listing information, past conversations, and pretty much any other relevant items with data about your rental. This way, the AI becomes armed with the information it needs to handle your day-to-day communication.

One of the things we’ve liked most about HostBuddy AI is its authentic messaging voice, which helps make guest communication feel more meaningful and non-generic. Its eye-friendly user interface provides great contrasts and individually sorts out your messages by property has made our experience more enjoyable.

HostBuddy AI Key Features

Now, let’s take a look at individual features available on the HostBuddy AI platform.

• Smart Inbox - The Smart Inbox creates a safe environment for all of your guest communications in one convenient place. It allows users to generate AI responses and manage conversations.
• Templated Messages - You can also control automation features like check-in/ check-out messages, policy reminders, early check-in, and more by creating templates for each style. HostBuddy AI then automatically sends the message/s based on the rules that you’ve set.
• Customizable Scheduling - As part of more automation features, you can create a custom schedule that enables (or disables) automatic AI takeover for your communications. It’s one of those set-it-and-forget-it types of things that once you create a schedule for when the AI will handle messages, you’re never going to worry about turning it on ever again.
• Issue Tracking - The AI is smart enough to detect issues and problems raised by guests through their messages. It allows users to not only track but also manage these issues, ensuring quick resolutions to any problems that arise.
• Cleaning Management Integrations - This is an underrated feature that not all guest messaging platforms have. Hosbuddy AI made it easy to determine when early check-ins are available because it automatically pulls data from your cleaning management platform and uses it to approve early check-in requests when possible.
• Seamless PMS Integration - Finally, HostBuddy AI offers a handful of direct PMS integrations that empower the AI and inform it with the data it needs to reply to guests and handle your day-to-day rental communications. It supports popular platforms like BookingSync, Guesty, and Hospitable, with one-click integrations and a test environment to see if it passes your standards.

HostBuddy AI Pricing Plans

HostBuddy AI offers two different plans, whose prices scale depending on the amount of properties you have enrolled in the system.

• HostBuddy Pro - Features automated guest messaging, a user-friendly dashboard, PMS integration, smart templates, review removal, and slack integration. The prices start at $7 per property per month for 1-10 properties, $6 per property per month for 11-50 rentals, and $5 per property per month for those with 51-99 listings.
• HostBuddy Elite - HostBuddy Elite is equipped with all of the features found in HosBuddy Pro, but with added smart-inbox capabilities, AI-driven analytics, and team management systems. The prices start at $10 per property per month for 1-10 properties, $8 per property per month for 11-50 rentals, and $6 per property per month for those with 51-99 listings.

HostBuddy AI also offers larger discounts for enterprise-level clients with 100 or more properties. However, you’ll have to contact them directly to learn more about the details.

Who We Recommend HostBuddy AI For

Overall, we’d say that HostBuddy AI is a fantastic choice as a partner for handling your guest communication. Its industry-leading AI technology is hard to beat and with solid features like automated upselling, automatic review removal, and AI-driven analytics, makes it an easy recommendation for almost any host or property manager out there.

We think their plans are fairly priced, although we do highly recommend going with the Elite plan, mainly because of the extra features it gives you. The analytics and smart inbox are going to be worth the small premium if you’re looking to truly optimize your guest communications.

Final Thoughts

Those were our picks for the best guest messaging software for Airbnbs in 2024. Guest communication is a crucial step in the customer journey. Luckily, AI has evolved to a point where it can now be used to handle common inquiries and even more complex ones, without the need for human intervention. We believe that all of our choices do have a place within the STR industry, it just boils down to what your individual needs are as a business.

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.