Since its inception, Abode has been an industry leader, offering hundreds of thousands of guests a seamless blend of home-like comfort and upscale hotel conveniences. As a long-standing Guesty customer since 2015, we’ve been committed to high-quality hosting standards. Our journey has unveiled critical challenges essential for any hospitality provider striving for success in this increasingly competitive landscape.
The onset of the pandemic triggered seismic shifts in hospitality trends. Hotel value propositions, such as gyms, pools, buffets, conference spaces, and daily housekeeping, were limited or entirely suspended during the pandemic. Guests began prioritizing social distancing and the ability to travel safely in groups, which increased demand for larger vacation rentals and alternative accommodations. Many of these guests were newcomers to our hospitality segment, bringing increased expectations. The surge in traditional hotel guests and a hyper-focus on cleanliness and safety created new challenges for hospitality operators. Due to the shifting landscape, obtaining a 5-star review became more challenging as guests’ expectations shifted significantly and more diverse needs emerged. In response to these challenges, we sought tools to identify trends and operationalize our response to synthesize our guests’ feedback and evolve our service delivery.
Similarly, platforms such as Airbnb began implementing more stringent hosting standards, even delisting hosts that failed to meet these expectations while prioritizing in search ranking those properties with the highest customer satisfaction scores.
With hundreds of listings across various accounts and multiple online travel agencies (OTAs), tracking feedback and trends in our reviews became strenuous. What were our guests praising, and where were the pain points?
Abode receives thousands of reviews annually, and the scale of our operations, combined with a deep desire to interpret our guest’s valuable feedback, led us to experiment with various solutions, including automation tools and integrations that combined off-the-shelf solutions to gauge sentiment, organize intelligence, and derive actionable insights. However, we found these setups clunky and lacking in delivering a comprehensive experience. Abode continued to struggle to manage its reviews using sheets and automation while logging into dozens of individual accounts for responses and trying to harness vast amounts of feedback, which led to considerable labor costs and challenges in interpreting subjective data at scale. Identifying patterns necessitated a streamlined solution, as our previous piecemeal approach involving cumbersome spreadsheets fell short. Recognizing these challenges, Abode worked closely with Sparrow Intel, a pivotal tool developed from extensive field experience, to simplify and enhance our review management processes. Sparrow Intel holds the potential to assist other companies facing similar challenges in managing large volumes of customer feedback efficiently.
Another obstacle we’ve faced is the timely interception of issues during a guest’s stay to mitigate negative reviews on Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) such as Airbnb. Sparrow’s review predictions have been instrumental in alerting our team about the likelihood of a guest leaving a positive, neutral, or negative review. This foresight allows us to proactively address concerns, turning potentially damaging experiences into positive ones and encouraging satisfied guests to leave glowing reviews.
Sparrow enhances our review management process through its review prediction feature and deep integration with Guesty, allowing us to automate actions based on predicted sentiments from the message history between Abode and its guests. These features help our team proactively increase positive reviews and mitigate potentially damaging ones. For instance, if a guest is likely to leave a positive review, we can proactively encourage them to share their experience and automatically enable auto-review for that guest in Guesty; conversely, if a guest encounters issues during their stay where a negative review seems imminent, we can proactively address their concerns and improve their overall impression.
In addition to guest feedback, promptly identifying and addressing cleaning and maintenance issues is crucial for maintaining high standards. Previously, this required manual review of guest conversations, an inefficient process prone to human error. Thanks to Sparrow Intel, we’ve automated this process, ensuring that any issues highlighted by guests are immediately identified and assigned to the appropriate team members in Guesty’s task management system.
Lastly, a significant factor in our pursuit of excellence is mitigating the impact of negative reviews, specifically those that violate Airbnb’s policies. Such reviews can severely affect a listing’s performance. Sparrow’s review removal tracking feature has been a game-changer, allowing us to monitor and address unwarranted negative feedback effectively, ensuring our listings remain competitive.
Here’s a clear example of how significantly removing a single 1-star review can impact your overall rating on Airbnb. Consider having 100 reviews with an average rating of 4.8 stars. Removing just one 1-star review that violates Airbnb’s policy would boost your rating up to 4.88 stars. As AirDNA points out, “listings with a 4.9 rating and above earned 9.7% higher occupancy, 7.7% higher Average Daily Rates (ADRs), and 18% higher Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR), controlling for various relevant factors.” This data illustrates the potential revenue increase from strategically removing just a few policy-violating 1-star reviews.
Additionally, managing reviews across multiple accounts on platforms like Airbnb, Booking.com, and Vrbo has been a logistical challenge, including logging into dozens or hundreds of accounts across various OTAs, a problem Sparrow Intel has effectively solved. Sparrow Intel’s unified review inbox has streamlined this process by consolidating reviews from all channels supported by Guesty into a single, easy-to-navigate interface, allowing hosts to read and respond to reviews from a single platform. This consolidation has significantly reduced the time and effort required to manage reviews, allowing us to focus more on delivering exceptional guest experiences.
In conclusion, our partnership with Sparrow Intel and Guesty has been instrumental in overcoming the challenges associated with short-term rental hosting. By leveraging their innovative solutions, we’ve maintained our commitment to quality, driven constant improvement, and increased guest satisfaction, solidifying our reputation as a leading short-term rental company.
Need assistance or have questions? Our dedicated support team is here to help. Reach out to us via email or live chat for personalized assistance and guidance in making the most of your Sparrow Intel experience.