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Hospitality Short-term rental operator · 50 properties

The Always-On Host

Fifty listings, two cleaning crews, and a phone that never stopped buzzing. The operator was running the portfolio entirely from her thumbs—rebooking cleaners around late checkouts and answering the same five guest questions on repeat. We replaced both with custom automation and gave her ten hours a week back.

~10 hrs
saved per week
~80%
messages auto-resolved
50
properties managed

1 We Listen

A short-term rental operator running 50 properties across two cities. Every Sunday she lost 4–5 hours rebuilding the cleaning roster around the upcoming week's checkouts, late checkouts, same-day flips, and the inevitable last-minute Airbnb extensions. Through the rest of the week, her phone never stopped: WiFi passwords, parking instructions, "where are the extra towels," "can we check in early," over and over. Every interruption pulled her out of the work that actually grew the portfolio—pricing, new listings, owner relationships.

2 We Audit

We sat with her for two weeks of bookings and message logs. Three patterns surfaced. First, scheduling cleaners was a manual Tetris game played in spreadsheets and group chats—every booking change forced a chain of WhatsApp messages. Second, more than 80% of incoming guest messages were repeats of questions already answered in the welcome packets nobody reads. Third, the answers were never unique—they were just unstructured. The information existed; the system to surface it didn't.

3 We Design

Two custom micro-tools wired into her existing PMS and messaging stack. The first reads checkout and check-in times directly from bookings and auto-assigns cleaning slots based on crew availability, property zone, and turnover windows. The second is a guest-facing AI chatbot backed by a private RAG knowledge base built from her own welcome packets, house rules, and per-property FAQs—answers are scoped to the listing the guest actually booked, available 24/7 in the guest's language.

4 We Implement

Cleaning Schedule Auto-Pilot

  • Pulls bookings from the PMS in real time
  • Auto-assigns cleaners by zone, skill, and availability
  • Handles late checkouts, extensions, and same-day flips automatically
  • Notifies each cleaner via SMS with property, access code, and special instructions
  • Flags only true conflicts to the owner—nothing else

Guest Concierge Chatbot (RAG)

  • Private knowledge base built from welcome packets, house rules, and FAQs
  • Answers scoped to the specific listing the guest booked
  • Available 24/7, multilingual, plugged into the existing inbox
  • Escalates only the messages that actually need a human (lockouts, broken AC, complaints)
  • Knowledge base updates automatically when she edits a welcome packet

The Result

Sundays got their afternoons back. The cleaning roster builds itself and adapts on the fly. Guests get instant, accurate answers—often faster than a human could type them, in their own language. The phone stops buzzing for the things that don't actually need her, and the only messages that reach her are the ones that genuinely should. Ten hours a week, redirected from running the portfolio to growing it.