Author:
Bea Generalo
Epic Property Pros ran about 30 vacation rental listings, most of them booked through Airbnb. Veronica Gomez worked as the assistant to the owners, which in practice meant she handled the guests.
Every question, every cleaning complaint, every refund request, and every maintenance issue came to her. For 30 properties, that was a lot of messages for one person.
Veronica described the workload plainly:
“So with 30 properties, it was hard to keep up with all the communication, the issues, maintenance issues, cleaning issues, refunds, any adjustments, things like that, as far as for one person.”
Guest communication was where it showed most. In her words, “our biggest weakest point was communication to our guests, because we know that that’s important to them.”
Slow replies hurt reviews, and lower ratings hurt placement. The listings sat on the second, third, and fourth pages of Airbnb search results, where fewer guests ever scroll.
The properties weren’t the problem. The team managing them hadn’t grown at the same pace as the portfolio.
With one person covering communication for 30 listings, every guest issue competed with every other one. A cleaning complaint at one property meant a slower reply at the next. No one person can answer every guest quickly at every hour of the day, and in a business built on ratings, those delays add up.
Phillip Warrick, one of the owners, had been getting emails from Delegate and decided to try it. A dedicated Delegate team took over guest communication: calls, texts, platform messages, and the issues behind them.
Response times changed first. Veronica noticed it right away:
“They have helped… a lot as far as for communication. They have very quick responses… response time as far as if it’s phone calls. …They’re not afraid to get on the phone to call a guest, or if they need to text them, or… any issues that they’re right there and always available to help us at any hours of the day.”
When cleaning problems came up early on, the team handled them with guests directly and respectfully, including offering a discount when it was warranted, to protect the property’s ratings.
Faster, more consistent communication showed up in the ratings, and the ratings showed up in search placement. The team also helped adjust pricing so the listings were more competitive, and guests started coming back.
“We’ve been getting higher ratings and… definitely did see increase in bookings. So they have helped us in keeping our listings… at the top versus, you know, in the one through five… on the list versus 14 and 15 where we were on the, you know, maybe second, third, fourth page of Airbnb. And now… being on the first page, it’s catching people’s eye more.”
The listings had moved from the back pages of search to the top five. Veronica also noted they’d had return bookers. With the inbox covered, she was no longer the only person standing between 30 properties and their guests.
If your listings are slipping in search, start with what guests see first: reviews can quietly pull a listing’s rank down when nobody responds to them. And if overnight messages are where replies slow down, here’s how human assistants and AI tools can share guest messaging.
Phillip Warrick, one of the owners, told his side of the same story: how Epic Property Pros stopped losing listings to generic automation.
Book a discovery call to see what a dedicated guest communication team could look like across your portfolio.
