Airbnb added services. We are still doing the unglamorous part.
Airbnb shipped its 2025 Summer Release last week. The headline items: Airbnb Services, where guests can book things like chefs, massages, and photography during a stay, a rebuilt Experiences product, and a substantially reworked app (Airbnb, May 13, 2025).
It is a real expansion of what the platform is. Owners have asked me whether it changes anything for them, and my honest answer is: not much, yet, and not in the direction people assume.
What it means and does not mean for a Nashville owner
It does not add work for you. Services are booked by the guest, delivered by third-party providers, and do not require anything from the host. If a guest wants a chef in your kitchen, that is a conversation you can have if you want to, and ignoring the feature entirely costs you nothing.
It is a signal about where the platform's attention is. Airbnb is trying to become a broader travel product, not just a place to book a house. Over time that generally means more surface area, more ways to be discovered, and more ways to be ranked. Ranking has been keyed to the same things for years: reviews, response behavior, cancellation history, and listing completeness. Those are the same levers that decided who won a booking back when supply first started outgrowing demand.
It does not change what makes a guest leave five stars. Nobody has ever written a review that says the app redesign was excellent. They write about whether the house was clean, whether the lock worked, and whether somebody answered when they needed something.
Which is the thing worth writing about, so here it is in full.
The Boost part: the messaging stack, in order
Every home we manage runs the same sequence — the stack that replaced indoor cameras as a way of knowing what is happening in a house. It is not exciting, it is part of management rather than an upgrade, and it is the single largest contributor to review scores in this business.
On booking. An immediate confirmation that restates the practical terms in plain language — occupancy, quiet hours, parking, and pets if applicable. Restated, not linked to. Guests do not read house rules at booking, so we put the two that matter in the message.
Seven days out. A short note with the neighborhood context: what is walkable, what is a short drive, where to park, and anything seasonal about the street.
Three days out. The logistics message. Check-in time, exact address, what the entrance looks like, what to bring.
Morning of arrival. The door code, a photo of the actual door, the check-in time restated, and a direct line to a human.
The morning after check-in. One message: is everything right? This is the most valuable thirty seconds in the whole sequence. A guest who tells us the shower is slow on Saturday morning gets a plumber Saturday afternoon and writes a five-star review about how fast we fixed it. The same guest who tells nobody writes a three-star review about the shower.
Day before checkout. Checkout time and the short list of what we ask them to do. Short. Nobody strips beds on vacation and asking them to is how you lose a star.
After checkout. A thank-you and a review request, sent promptly.
And around all of it, 24/7 coverage. Automated where automation is honest — a code, a time, an address. A human where a human is needed. Me on escalations, any hour. A guest standing outside a house at midnight does not need a chatbot.
Response time is the whole game
Two numbers I would ask any manager for, including me.
Median first-response time to a guest message. Minutes, not hours. If your manager cannot produce this number, they are not measuring it, which means they are not managing it.
Time from problem reported to somebody physically at the house. For anything that stops a stay — no hot water, no power, no entry — that should be same-day, and in practice usually same-hour. The other half of that number is prevention: most of what stops a stay is the sort of thing a quarterly walkthrough catches before a guest is standing in it.
Every review disaster I have seen in ten years traces back to one of those two numbers being wrong on a specific night.
If you self-manage
Copy the sequence. Seriously — build those seven messages once, save them as templates in the app, and send them on every stay. It will take you an afternoon and it will move your review average more than any furniture purchase.
If you can only do one, do the morning-after-check-in message.
If you would rather not be the person answering at 11 p.m. on a Saturday — during CMA Fest, during a Titans weekend, on Christmas Eve — talk to Boost Rentals. Guest communication runs around the clock on every home we manage, and I am happy to walk you through exactly what your guests would receive and when.
— Chris Hetzner, Boost Rentals