25 Jun New Airbnb Feature: Airbnb Team

I’m a little late to write about this, but I thought better late than never! The new “Airbnb Team” feature has now arrived.

If you live in the States, then you are in luck because you get to test out this new feature before it gets rolled out globally.

In this blog post, I’d like to point out a few pros of using the new Airbnb Team feature.

Why the “Team” feature is going to work better if you have multiple listings

I think of Airbnb Team as the upgrade to the old Airbnb Co-host feature. Remember last year when they decided to end the Co-host program?

Well, this is the new and improved product feature to help those with multiple listings (ahem, property managers..).

It doesn’t make sense for you to use Airbnb Team if you only have one or two properties. It makes a lot of sense to use it when you have 3 properties or more.

Here’s what I mean.

Imagine you have 3 reservations coming in tomorrow and the time between checking in and checking out (the standard is between 11 pm to 4 pm) is 5 hours.

And your cleaner can only get to 2 properties to turn it over to the next guest, but your co-host who’s coordinating everything has time to clean the other property.

Now do you see?

Manage your Co-Host(s) and Cleaner(s) more efficiently.

It looks like Airbnb wants to get into the market of property management. But the only piece that is missing is the payment tool.

I remember when they stopped its automated payment for co-hosts, the co-host community freaked out, begged and cried to have it back.

Guess what?

It’s not going to come back. The real pain is paying your co-hosts and cleaners.

I’ll be getting into more details in a little bit. But first, let me show you how this Team feature works!

How to Set up Airbnb Team in Your Airbnb Hosting Dashboard

It’s easy because the permissions are listed out clearly. One important thing is that you’ll need to remove any co-hosts that you have under the property level.

I won’t go into details here, but here is how you can remove your existing Airbnb co-host.

You can literally add someone new in 2 clicks. I don’t want to go into permissions because you can just take a few minutes to read it through.

BUT, I do want to point out one beauty about permissions!

You can assign a different permission or clearance for each one of your team members.

For example, I give my co-host full permissions while my cleaner only the ability to see the calendars. My cleaners just need to know when to go and clean. That’s all I want them to know.

Now, back to the pain of Airbnb payout.

The biggest pain in Airbnb payout and the new Team feature

If you’re a host, then you’re enjoying the automated payouts once a guest checks in.

I love this automated payout feature. Now, it’s a little bit tricker to pay your co-hosts and cleaners.

Before this new Airbnb Team feature came along, I resorted to a highly manual process. Every week, I would have my co-host send me her invoice.

Each invoice would have the break downs of the % rev share + cleaning fees paid out to cleaners.

Here’s an example of what I mean. And yes, this is my process. I dread the first of the month because I hate manual and tedious work!

And what happens after she sends me the invoice?

I have to verify her claims with each one of the properties to make sure the cleans did happen and the rev-share % is correct, then head to Paypal to pay her out so she can pay out the cleaners.

Pro-tip: always subtract the cleaning fee if your co-host happened to clean the property as well. If not, then you are overpaying.

This process sucks because it’s highly manual on her end and on my end. I wonder if there’s a better tool out there to pay your co-hosts and cleaners without doing this tedious work.

If you know, please share it in the comment sections so I can go and investigate.