Some tools that save vacation rental hosts the most time are the ones adopted last. Why?
Hostfully just put out a tech stack study (2,248 operators, 31k+ integrations) and it is packed with interesting findings.
The one we’re curious about is that Guest communication and AI tools save about 1.25 hours per listing per month - tied with cleaning software as the single biggest time-saver in the whole dataset. But adoption is the lowest of any category presented in the study: only 9% of small operators use them, and even at 50-100 properties, it's just 39%.
Compare that to dynamic pricing, which most hosts adopt from property one.
So operators are open to automating pricing on day one; they’ll bring in cleaning software the moment turnovers get painful, but the thing that saves the most time (communication) gets put off the longest.
We’d love to understand why. A few theories:
- It feels replaceable ("I can just answer messages myself")
- The setup is heavier than flipping on a pricing tool
- Hard to trust AI with guest-facing comms until you've seen it work
- It's a lower priority until you hit a certain door count
Disclosure: we’re obviously not neutral, but honestly curious what the actual blocker is for VRMs here. If you're not using any guest comms automation, what's the reason? And if you started late, do you wish you'd done it sooner?