Joining us is Jay, the CEO and co-founder of HostBuddy.ai, an automated AI guest messaging platform that integrates with your property management system and takes care of communication, upsells, and more—24/7. Whether you’re managing 2 properties or 200, this episode is packed with insights on how to save time, cut costs, and boost revenue using smart automation.
[00:00:00] Liam: Hi. Welcome to the Boostly Podcast. This is the podcast that gives you the tools, the tactics, the training, and most importantly, the confidence for you to go out there and get direct bookends. We do a spotlight series on this podcast where we talk to services and people who you need to know about as a host.
[00:00:16] Liam: The big thing at the moment is AI and how AI can help you as a host, and this is where we're gonna introduce you to a AI. Software that can really help you today. So do pay attention during this episode. Our guest today is Jay. He's the CEO and co-founder of Host Buddy ai. It's a AI guest messaging platform, uh, built by hosts for hosts, and we're gonna dive into exactly what that means.
[00:00:43] Liam: So welcome along, Jay. Thank you for joining me today.
[00:00:46] Jay: Thanks, Liam. Thanks for, uh, having me on to sit down and chat.
[00:00:49] Liam: No worries. So Jay, welcome to, to this and, uh, let's kick off with the, the big picture. What, what is host buddy AI and, uh, why should short term rental hosts in their busy days, uh, care about this, uh, this offering?
[00:01:05] Jay: Yeah, so Host Buddy AI is an automated AI messaging solution for hosts. So it plugs into your property management system and responds to every single guest that's coming, uh, to stay at your properties, whether that's through Airbnb, vrbo. Um, direct bookings, google booking.com, anything like that. Um, and, you know, we do a lot of other automations too that, that all have to do with, uh, with messaging.
[00:01:29] Jay: So we've automated a lot of the, the templates and, and upselling features to maximize your revenue and, uh, cuts down a ton of time and saves you a lot of money as a host for, you know, property managers of a hundred plus properties to host of a one or two.
[00:01:44] Liam: Nice. Nice. And I think one of the important things to pick up on is it's built by hosts for hosts.
[00:01:50] Liam: What specific pain points led you to, uh, in guest communication, led you to co-found this, this offering?
[00:01:59] Jay: Yeah, so I'll, I'll start back at, um, where I got involved in short-term rentals. Um, 'cause you know, it's really. Takes, takes over my entire life now, which I love. Um, but I was initially working as a civil engineer trying to get out of the nine to five workflow.
[00:02:14] Jay: Uh, wanted to start my own business, found short-term rental management as a way out of that. Uh, partnered up with, uh, my good friend Sam at the time. We both left our jobs after 10 months working at that company. Um, we had scaled up to nine properties and, uh, we decided just to, you know, go, go fully into short term rentals, um, as our career path.
[00:02:34] Jay: So since then, we've scaled up to 50 units, um, within, you know, the last four years. In the middle of 2023 though, we were really in that. Big growth mode where we just got a big management contract for 16 units in a building and that basically doubled our entire portfolio. Like it was, uh, a really great moment.
[00:02:53] Jay: Um. And a lot of the, you know, the things that allowed us to scale were the tools and the automations that we implemented into our business to allow us to focus more on going and finding these deals and focusing on maximizing our time and our team's time. Um, and making every dollar count, right? So we have these, you know, software that's, that's going to automate.
[00:03:14] Jay: Um, our cleaning tasks, uh, software that automates our, our door locks. We don't have to send codes to, to guests manually and set them every single turnover. You know, there's, there's all these things, dynamic pricing, uh, operations management software. So up until that point, you know, we'd all, we'd done all these.
[00:03:30] Jay: These things, right? And our business is growing. It's still growing today, which is great. I love being involved in the business. But there was one critical factor that was missing, and that was the automation of the guest messaging. Um, and that's a big task, right? Because every guest is different, every property is different.
[00:03:46] Jay: To handle an entire conversation with the guest is not an easy task. Um, which is why you have virtual assistants or other people that work on your team to assist with those tasks, but. Even paying them hourly, uh, to support you for 24 7 coverage is, is quite a lot to pay. Um, especially when maybe you don't get a ton of inquiries overnight, but you just wanna make sure that.
[00:04:06] Jay: Your guests are taken care of, right? Mm-hmm. So we looked on the market for something that could take care of this for us. That was an AI solution. There was nothing at the time. We decided to create it ourselves, uh, by partnering with one of our good friends who's a, a software developer. Um, and we've basically set out on the mission to automate the entire guest messaging process, uh, to improve the hosting experience and save them time and money, uh, launched in May of 2024.
[00:04:31] Jay: And that brings us to today and, uh. March of 2025. Um, not even a year that we've been released, but, um, you know, we have thousands of properties on our platform and, and everyone is, uh, you know, automating their, their guest messaging, saving a ton of time, a ton of money. So yeah, it's a big journey. But, um, that's kind of how it started.
[00:04:48] Jay: It was, it was in the need of some, something that we didn't have for our own property management business and decided to, to create it ourselves.
[00:04:55] Liam: What would you say when it comes down to. What's most important? Is it, is it the speed of responses or is it, is it able to do the, um, like we say, the tone and kind of that warmth that, that we're looking for?
[00:05:09] Jay: So when you connect your property management system into Host Buddy, it's going to pull in all the data that it can. So that's all of your reservations. Um, your calendar, your property data, so all of your listing information, the descriptions, all of your amenities, and it pulls in six months of past conversational data as well.
[00:05:29] Jay: So all of that is combined into a knowledge base that it uses to answer your questions, um, your guest questions. And so it's actually taking your past conversations and learning how to respond like you historically would, which is a really cool thing, like whenever we go into host accounts, um, to take a look at any of their conversations and, and track a lot of the, the data that's coming through.
[00:05:51] Jay: Every conversation is different because every host is different. If you respond with a specific emoji, it's going to replicate that a mirror it, right? And it's not just those things, it's the tone as well. So if you are typically a lot shorter, um, you know, a, a a bit more, um, you know, brief in your responses, it's going to.
[00:06:09] Jay: Reflect that as well. So it's really cool the the capabilities that it, that it has, and it's gonna continue learning over time. You can also customize the tone within host buddies settings so that if you want it to act a a different way, let's say maybe you had somebody on your team that you didn't really like the way they were responding before you.
[00:06:24] Jay: You're switching now to host Buddy, and you want it to be a specific way. You can customize that tone and type in exactly how you want it to sound. Give it very explicit instructions. You can give it all these different things like lockbox codes and backup, uh instructions and troubleshooting instructions and things like that.
[00:06:40] Jay: And it's gonna use all this information to provide the best service to your guests.
[00:06:43] Liam: What kind of real world impacts are you seeing from people using this? So is this helping people to, uh. Get better reviews. Is this helping people to get more revenue? Because we all want more revenue. And obviously, I've gotta ask, does it help in, does it drop the direct book message?
[00:07:00] Liam: You know, you, you need to book direct for your next day. And, and can it do all of these things that as hosts, we, uh, we'd probably do on a human level.
[00:07:09] Jay: Absolutely. Um, it can do all of those things. I think the, the biggest impact that people are seeing, and typically the way that I like to explain is it's kind of split up into a different, a few different, uh, buckets of hosts, right?
[00:07:20] Jay: So like, there's the, the property managers of like one to 20 that maybe they haven't even hired somebody before. They're still doing all this by themself. And so. They're thinking about hiring a full-time employee to come onto their team for thousands of dollars a month, or they can look at an AI messaging solution like Host Buddy that can go in and respond for.
[00:07:41] Jay: Six to $10 per listing per month, uh, which is a fraction of the price. I think it's over 92% in savings, typically on average. Um, and you can really put the money that you're making back into scaling your business. So that's those, those hosts where I'm seeing them just. Now start to grow and they're like, oh, I don't have to hire somebody right now.
[00:08:00] Jay: I can just employ host buddy. Or maybe they have one VA on their team and they're thinking about hiring more and now they can just use Host Buddy instead and make the VA do all these other amazing tasks that they can do. Um, because having VAs held up on doing the. The repetitive messaging within your company is not something that necessarily grows your company.
[00:08:18] Jay: It just sustains it. And if you can replace that with AI at a fraction of the cost, it's like a no-brainer, right? But now we have also property managers who are 50 plus properties, a hundred plus, 200 plus properties on our platform, who now they have a team of 10 plus VAs or something. They're able to cut that down by a ton and now focus out their VAs onto tasks like optimizing their listings, searching for deals, um, you know, doing.
[00:08:42] Jay: Amazing things that they're very capable of doing. We see people employ VAs, uh, switch them completely from doing guest communications to finances, like mm-hmm. There's all these things that you can have them do that take up your own time, that takes it away from you building the business that now you can focus on.
[00:08:56] Jay: Um, in addition to saving the time and the money doing that, we're also maximizing your revenue and your occupancy by doing automated upsells. So host buddy can detect when there's gaps in your calendar, um, created by a minimum night stay. So say you have a, a minimum night stay of two and there's a one night gap night, you can't necessarily fill that, right, because one night's stay wouldn't be able to be booked.
[00:09:18] Jay: But you could have the person who's checking out the day before extend for potential discount or the person who's checking the day after. Arrive early. Mm-hmm. Um, so there's these upsell opportunities where host be is gonna automatically understand that that's an opportunity to upsell and send a message out to that guest saying, do you wanna check in a day early at a 30% discount or whatever you set, you can completely customize it.
[00:09:39] Jay: And now people are making thousands of extra dollars per month. Just on that simple, you basically turn on a switch and write exactly what you want for a host buddy to send out. And it's gonna personalize it with AI too. So it keeps it personal and makes sure that. Um, it seals that deal, so it's like your extra little sales person in there as well.
[00:09:56] Jay: Um, that's a part that I really like and we're still gathering some data here to, to see how it's really impacting hosts, but people love it. Um, and, and to answer your question about the direct booking thing, you can absolutely have it reach out. Um, we have something called smart templates, um, that are also, so essentially an.
[00:10:13] Jay: You know, you could use it as an upsell, but it's, it's essentially what you'd see as a, as a custom template in your property management system. But now we've added another layer of personalization. So it's going to say, you know, I hope you had a great time, uh, celebrating your aunt's birthday at this location, at this time.
[00:10:29] Jay: Um, you know, if you'd love, if you'd like to come back and you really enjoyed this day, you know, you can, um, see the rest of our properties here and book direct next time. Save a lot of money. So I know there's kind of, um. Uh, you know, some communication risks there when saying that through the OTA. Um, but there's ways that you can kind of work around that as a host to make sure that you're, you know, getting those return guests and kind of creating a community around your property management business.
[00:10:52] Liam: Thank you so much. You've inspired me, Jay, to, to go and check out. So before we wrap up, is there anything we missed along the way or any last words of wisdom for our listeners?
[00:11:01] Jay: Uh, a couple things, um, that kind of came up while you were speaking too, that we, we, we track some KPIs for your company so you can see the average response time for host buddy compared to your team, um, which is really cool.
[00:11:13] Jay: Another big thing and a question that a lot of people have is like, what if host buddy can't respond to your guest? Question, what if it, what if it doesn't have the answer, right? Mm-hmm. And if it doesn't, then it's going to loop in the host by sending you a direct, uh, message over Slack or text, or email or WhatsApp.
[00:11:28] Jay: There's a ton of different communication channels that we can push out action items to. And then you can manage those all in an action items board, so that way your team can go in there, add notes of, Hey, I, uh, I'm gonna take care of this specific action item. You know, let's say that somebody needs extra towels, that needs to be coordinated with your team, right?
[00:11:45] Jay: You can also have these action item notifications categorized, and let's say cleaning notifications can be sent to your cleaning team. Maintenance notifications can be sent to your maintenance person. So it's really cool how you can kind of break these things down. 'cause AI is not gonna be able to go to your property and fix a leaky pipe.
[00:12:00] Jay: You know, there's still people that need to be involved. There's need, still need to be, be people that pick up the phone. Um, so ultimately, sometimes people think like. Am I saying fire all of your VAs and all the people on your team? No, absolutely not. Keep them, but utilize them for things that are gonna generate more revenue for you and allow you to scale.
[00:12:17] Jay: Um, and lastly, I would say there's a really big opportunity for people who are, uh, in the STR space, trying out new tech to influence the way that it develops. And that's one of the favorite parts that I have about being a CEO in the STR space. Of a software company is that people come to us that are exactly like me.
[00:12:38] Jay: You know, like I, I designed this product alongside of my, my business partner to work the best that it could for my property management business. And since then it's been just develop, developing it to be the best that it can be for everyone else. But you have such a good opportunity right now to provide your feedback and tell us what's the most important and what pain points you have.
[00:12:58] Jay: Because we're at such a cool turning point right now. We're able to solve so many things with AI and it's only gonna get better. So I'm super excited for that and hopefully I, uh, see people pop up on the, on the registered list that are listening.
[00:13:09] Liam: Yeah, this has been so fun. Uh, the link to come and find out more, just give us that one more time, and that will be in and around the audio or the show notes as well.
[00:13:18] Liam: Uh, where do we go? Host buddy.ai. Thank you so much. We'll, uh, we'll see you again in the future, I'm sure. Bye for now. Everyone having a blast. Gonna get it on the Boostly podcast. Bruce Lee. Let Bruce Lee 'cause it's so hard on the tea is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
