If you’re a short-term rental owner or real estate investor looking to streamline your property management, you need to hear about Hospitable.com. In this honest review, I’ll walk you through how this vacation rental software has transformed my business. From its powerful AI-driven messaging system to collaboration tools that make working with cleaners and maintenance teams a breeze, Hospitable has helped me save time, improve security, and increase efficiency. I’ll also cover the pros and cons of the platform, so you can decide if it’s the right fit for your rental business. Watch the video to get a behind-the-scenes look at how Hospitable can help you run your short-term rental business smarter, not harder.
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An honest review of hospitable.com. Is it the ultimate tool for short-term rental owners? If you are somebody like me who owns short-term rentals as a real estate investor, you know how much can go into it. We have guest communication. We have issues that can come up at the house, right? We have logistics coordinating with cleaners and things like that, syncing your bookings across platforms so that it’s easy for you to be listed on multiple platforms.
There’s a lot that can go into it, both in terms of managing the people and managing the tech. So today, I’m going to give you an honest review of hospitable.com. It’s a vacation rental software that I use personally. So I’m going to give you my take on what I love about it, what I think sets it apart from some of its competitors, and where it may have some shortcomings so that you can determine as an investor or co-host for short-term rentals whether or not it’s a great platform for you to use in your business.
Let’s dive into hospitable.com. What sets hospitable apart from its competitors? Well, first, I would like to say that I think it does a really great job of making things easy and leveraging AI. That’s what I’d say: it does better overall than some of its competitors. So first, let’s talk about hospitable’s messaging system. They have a very intelligent AI-enabled messaging system.
So how I have it set up or what I have seen in my hospitable account is when a guest messages a question or concern, hospitable’s AI automatically gives me a potential response. And often, it’s really actually quite good. And so I have loved that. I think you might even be able to set it up where those send automatically. I don’t know, but I know for that I love how it sets up this automatic response that’s usually quite good and makes it just easier.
Now, they also have templates and other tools that competitors also have. So you can automatically send automated messages when certain actions happen. You can automatically have templates that you’ve saved in there, all those things that you can get on other platforms as well. I do think hospitable does that better too. And it also has this AI suggestion that I’m really loving.
Another thing that has set hospitable apart for me versus some of the other tools I’ve used in the past is its collaboration tools that allow you to easily collaborate with others on your team. It can really streamline getting task assignments to cleaners or maintenance teams directly through the system and send automated task reminders tied to bookings.
So whether or not your cleaner or other service provider is tech-enabled, hospitable is a way that you can work with them. Other competitors, I believe, charge more for similar features or require separate add-ons where this is integrated into hospitable. So one way that we use this is with our linen service.
So in a couple of our houses, they have so many beds that we actually have to use a linen service where the linen service provides the linens for every stay. So they provide the linens, and then the linens are also left at the front for them to pick up and go wash to provide for the next cleaning or for the next guest, right?
So let me give you an example of how these collaboration tools help me and my properties. I have a couple of houses with so many beds that we actually have to use a linen service where the linen service provides the linens for all of the beds as well as the towels and things like that. And with the hospitable, I’m able to have a setup where when somebody books a stay at one of these houses, the linen service is automatically notified, and then they’re also given a reminder a couple of days prior.
They’re able to integrate and see my calendar on their calendar, and they’re also able to get email notifications. So this was a really easy way that didn’t require any tech setup on my provider’s side, and we’re able to give them everything they need, have it all be automated so we don’t have to do anything ourselves. That’s one of the things that’s been really easy with hospitable that I didn’t have on a similar tool I was using before.
And then my third real personal pro that I think has set Hospitable apart from its competitors is the smart lock integration. It automatically creates a personalized, unique code for each of our guests to get into our houses with the smart locks that we have at the front. I don’t have to do it manually.
It all is done in hospitable. I was able to set up the settings. Here’s when I want the lock to start working with this code. Here’s when I want the lock to stop working for this code, based on the booking. So if you want the code to start right at check-in or you want it to start a couple of hours before check-in because you often allow early check-ins or however you want that lock to work, you’re able to set up these automatic rules and then hospitable for every booking just automatically create an anonymized code that starts and stops working based on the settings you have put in. I love this because it provides so much more security.
If we have a smart lock, we want it to be secure. We don’t want to have one code in there that is always good that you just give to guest after guest after guest, and we know that there are owners out there who do that, appalling as it is. We want every guest to have their own code that only works for their stay, and it’s really easy to have that totally automated and requires no manual input from hospitable.
Now, the other thing I would say is, let’s say that your standard is that it starts working at check-in and when you allow early check-ins, you want the code to start working early. It’s really easy and hospitable to go into that code section and to change it so the code starts working earlier, to change that time, or that starts working immediately. There is easy flexibility if you need to go in and adjust it manually, and yet, the automated way that it works is really, really easy.
Those are some of the features of hospitable that I really liked, that I felt set it apart. Let’s go over some general pros that may apply to you. First, I would say hospitable is pretty cost-effective.
It’s pretty competitively priced for all of the automation features that it has, especially when you compare it to some of its competitors, and for small to mid-sized portfolios. Now, the pricing can change based on the size of your portfolio and what exactly you want, so you would want to look at the hospitable website to see what the cost would be for you. I found that when I was looking to switch to hospitable, it was only a few dollars more per month, and it offered a lot more functionality and ease of use than my previous vacation rental software did, so I think for what it offers, it’s very cost-effective.
The second thing I would say that is really fabulous is how user-friendly it is. It’s designed for non-techy people, and you can really see that in the user experience. It is so easy to use, and along those lines, what I love is when you Google, how do I do X, Y, or Z in hospitable, it will pull up a very easy how-to that hospitable has put together.
You will find this webpage, and you can follow along step by step. No matter what I wanted to do in hospitable, I can Google, how I do X, Y, or Z in hospitable, and I get a how-to article that helps me, so very, very user-friendly and with a lot of resources for the non-techy people. And the third pro, if you’re someone looking to scale, that’s something that hospitable can help you do really well.
Some competitors will charge significantly more when you scale larger. Hospitable’s pricing model is much more scale-friendly than some of its competitors. All right, now, finally, there is nothing perfect.
Unicorns don’t really exist, so what are some limitations that you should be aware of with hospitable? It may not suit all property management needs, so one of the things is that it doesn’t really have a lot of financial tools in-house. It does have great reports where you can get data, and yet you might want to take that data and use something else to really evaluate it. It’s not going to have in-depth financial reporting, and I’m not using any bookkeeping integration with it.
I use a separate tool, like QuickBooks, for my accounting and financial information, and so realize you are going to need a separate financial tool more than likely even with using hospitable. The other possible limitation is that obviously it’s made for short-term rentals, so if you have multiple different types of properties, it’s really only going to be focused on your short-term rentals. Because there is a cost per property, I don’t put my long-term rentals into hospitable because I do not need all of its functionality or services there, and so it would be silly to have them in hospitable and pay for them in there every month when I’m not using it.
So realize that it’s mostly for short-term rentals, and if you’re doing short-term rentals, it’s zeroed in and it’s for that purpose. It’s not going to help you with other properties that aren’t short-term rentals