How To Automate Airbnb Reminders To Your Cleaner

It’s a constant headache trying to keep your cleaner informed about each check-in and check-out for every single booking.

With new guests arriving randomly all the time, this workload that can soon rack up, and it’s super easy to forget.

If you rent your place out on a nightly or even two nightly basis, you could be looking at up to 14 messages a week!

My old method was to manually type each reminder message two days prior to check in, and 24 hours prior to check out.

It was a constant niggle in the back of my head. And needless to say, I forget more often than I’d like to admit.

F*#K!

Surely there’s a hack around this.

And there is 🙂

3 Ways To Automate Airbnb Email Reminders To Your Cleaner

1. Add your cleaner as a Co-Host to your Airbnb account.

Pro’s: Easiest to set up.

Con’s: Allows full access to all your earning details etc. to your cleaner.

2. Set up and sync a Google Calendar with Airbnb and schedule email reminders to their inbox.

Pro’s: Pretty simple to set up.

Con’s: Requires your cleaner to be a little tech savvy (unless you set it up for them), and needs them to be familiar with Google Calendar.

3. How to forward Airbnb reminders from Gmail to your cleaner.

Pro’s: Requires virtually zero setup work for your cleaner. Cleaner doesn’t need to be tech savvy at all, so long as they use email.

Con’s: Hardest to set up.

Step by step guides to setting up automated Airbnb reminders to your cleaners.

Add Cleaner as a Co-Host to your Airbnb account.

To add your cleaner as a co-host for your listing:

• Go to Manage Listings on your Airbnb dashboard.
• Select Manage Listing and Calendar on the listing that you are about to edit.
• Hover on the left side of the page to open the menu and select ‘Co-Hosts’.

And that’s it.

A word of warning with this setup.

You are giving privileges to your cleaner for virtually every aspect of your listing, from answering questions to setting pricing etc.

Pretty much the only thing they don’t have access to is the banking side of Airbnb.

This is why I don’t personally use this method.

I prefer to keep control of those areas of my business and keep my cleaner on a need to know basis.

But if you have a close relationship with your cleaner and think they could help out in these areas, then go nuts.

Set up and sync a Google Calendar with Airbnb and schedule email reminders to their inbox.

If you don’t already have a Google Calendar go ahead and get yourself set up.

Here’s a basic guide to get your Calendar set up if you’re having trouble.

Alright, so our Google Calendar is set up, you now want to sync it with your Airbnb Calendar to import all your bookings.

From your Airbnb dashboard, go to ‘Calendar’.

.

Then in the top right Click ‘Availability Settings’ then ‘Export Calendar’.

This will generate your unique URL.

Copy this URL and head over to your Google Calendar.

First up, Click on ‘Other Calendars’ down arrow.

Then ‘Add by URL’

This will then prompt you to insert a subscription URL.

Paste your Airbnb generated URL into the box and hit save.

That’s it.

Your Google Calendar is now synced up with your Airbnb calendar, and all future bookings will be synced too.

Next step is to share this Calendar with your cleaner.

Note* Your cleaner will need to have a Google Calendar set up in order to access the Calendar.

Click on the down arrow next to your new Airbnb Calendar on the left-hand side.

Click ‘Share this calendar’.

Add your cleaners Google Calendar email address.

Hit ‘Share’.

Done.

To finish this process off, your cleaner will need to set up scheduled reminders.

To do this, we need to follow very similar steps to above.  But this time we are going to click on ‘Edit Notifications’.

Set the notification schedule to ‘2 days before event’.

Save.

And that’s that.

A little bit complicated I know.  And this method does require your cleaner to be at least open to using a digital calendar.  But once your set up, you’ll be sweet.

How to forward Airbnb reminders from Gmail  to your cleaner.

OK.

So the third and final method.

Which happens to be my preferred method, as I have the most control this way (Uh, control freak…)

Go to your Airbnb linked Gmail account.

Click on the ‘Gear Icon’ top right, the click ‘Settings’.

From the settings page select ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’.

We are now going to add your cleaners email address to forward your reminders.

Then,

Click ‘Save Changes’.

Your cleaner will get an email requesting to accept your forwarded messages.  Once they have excepted this, we are ready to go.

Nearly…

The final step is to create a set of rules so that Gmail is forwarding the right messages to your cleaner and not just everything that comes to your inbox.

First up, go to ‘Filters and Blocked Addresses’ in your Gmail settings, and select ‘Create a new filter’.

We are now going to create the rules to filter exactly which messages to forward onto your cleaner.

We want every message with the subject line “Reservation Reminder” to be forwarded.

To set this up copy my steps exactly from the image below.

Alas, we are done.

It’s all a bit of a faff I know.  But it’s free, and once it’s set up you can forget about it.

As the saying goes “A stitch in time, Saves nine”.

Or something like that at least.

Have you got an even better method than I’ve outlined above?

Do you have any questions?

As always, chuck it in the comments below.

I answer each and every one personally.