In a maturing short-term rental market, everyone’s got a website. Everyone’s on Airbnb. Everyone’s running pricing tools, responding to reviews, and emailing guests. The playing field is crowded and competitive, and there are only so many ways to stand out before everything starts to blur together.

But what if your technology stack didn’t just help you compete? What if it quietly, steadily made you better?

That’s what automation is really about. It’s not meant to replace the critical human side of hospitality, but it can, in fact, help create the space for it. When you free up the people on your team to do the high-impact work that can’t be faked—relationship building, creative problem-solving, and crafting can’t miss experiences—you’re not putting technology in between you and your guest. You’re actually getting it out of the way.

Let’s talk about how automation (done right) becomes a strategic advantage, and how TrackPMS is purpose-built to help operators put it into practice.

Automation 101: Triggers and Tasks

At its core, automation is just a chain reaction: When this happens, do that. In property management, those chains can be incredibly valuable when they replace repetitive, manual steps with predictable, consistent outcomes when you can’t afford to drop the ball.

For example:

• A guest books a stay: Trigger a confirmation email, area details and discounts, and a personalized welcome message.
• Housekeeping marks a unit as cleaned: Notify the front desk and release the hold in the booking engine.
• An owner logs into the portal: Trigger a push notification with their latest statement or upcoming reservations.

These are simple if/then rules, but they can replace hours of manual work per week. And more importantly, they reduce human error and create consistency that builds trust—with guests, with owners, and within your team.

TrackPMS can automate dozens of workflows like this and is capable of millions more. You can build out custom sequences across departments, set thresholds and conditions, and create your own logic without coding. It’s powerful because it’s practical and easy.

Beyond Efficiency: Elevating the Guest Experience

The guest journey is full of moments that are easy to overlook—unless you automate around them.

• Pre-arrival: Automated reminders with check-in instructions, local weather, or restaurant recommendations
• During stay: Scheduled touchpoints that check in with guests, answer FAQs, or offer upsells
• Post-stay: Follow-ups that thank guests, request reviews, and offer discounts for returning

Track lets you build these out with time-based triggers, tied to reservation data or channel source. That means you can create different messaging flows for a honeymooning couple vs. a family reunion, or tailor tone and timing based on when and where a guest booked.

That’s not just better service—it’s scalable personalization. And it works.

Owner Relations: Automation as a Trust-Building Tool

One of the least talked about, but most critical, uses for automation is owner communication. Most operators know that owner churn is expensive and that proactive communication builds confidence. But most don’t have time to manually reach out every week or chase down reports.

Track’s all-new Owner Portal and automated reporting flows take the burden off your team. Owners can self-serve much of the information they need through the handy mobile app while you can automate messaging around:

• Revenue and occupancy summaries
• Maintenance issues and work orders
• Market insights or seasonal performance

A certain reluctance to automate owner-related communications and processes is perfectly understandable given how important and subjective those relationships are. However, timely, accurate, and professional communication with owners builds trust no matter what’s driving it.

AI: What It Can (and Can’t) Do

The buzz around AI is loud, and for good reason. When applied smartly, AI can make automation more flexible, more responsive, and, ironically, even more human.

The large language models (LLMs) that generate text (like ChatGPT or Google Gemini) have been trained on trillions of data points related to written human communication. We only have our own experience to draw from. It’s also pretty safe to say that human writing hasn’t become more cordial, professional, and empathetic in recent years. In the right context, AI can relate to people in ways that many of us simply can’t, it doesn’t make grammatical errors, and it can connect to relevant data (such as in your PMS) much faster than we can. To most customers, these things still matter.

Track is beginning to roll out AI features like:

• Review response suggestions: Tailor your tone and reply quickly without sounding generic
• Dynamic content generation: Draft property descriptions or messages based on templates and guest profiles
• Smart forecasting: Help revenue managers see patterns and outliers faster than a spreadsheet ever could

But here’s the key: AI isn’t magic, and it doesn’t replace good ops. For now, it’s a tool that amplifies your strategy. Used well, it helps your team focus on the decisions that matter by removing some of the busywork that gets in the way. And if it can manage to be more attentive and “plugged in,” so to speak, than you can, then maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Automation You Might Not Be Using (But Should)

There are some lesser-known automation tactics that more operators should be using:

• Failure alerts: Automated triggers when something doesn’t happen (e.g., no housekeeping check-in by noon)
• Multi-system syncs: Use open APIs or tools like Zapier to connect Track to your CRM, email platform, or accounting system
• Owner satisfaction surveys: Automate post-season check-ins to gather feedback and gauge retention risk while adding another touchpoint
• Rate change thresholds: Alert your team if competitors undercut a key listing by more than 10%

Automation doesn’t mean autopilot. It means giving your team the flexibility and peace of mind to intervene only when it matters.

Keeping the Human Touch in a Tech-Driven Workflow

It’s worth repeating: hospitality still is a human business. Guests remember the kindness of a helpful host, not the backend system that sent their welcome email. Owners value transparency, yes, but also the personal relationship they have with your team.

That’s why the smartest use of automation isn’t to eliminate interaction—it’s to elevate it. By handling the routine and the predictable, automation creates the space your team needs to focus on the high-value human touches:

• Picking up the phone to welcome a first-time owner
• Following up personally on a special guest request
• Customizing a stay for a repeat visitor who deserves a little extra

Track’s goal with automation isn’t to make hospitality robotic or replace someone’s job. It’s to make your team more present, more available, and more responsive.

The caveat here is that you need a plan. If automation can save the time you’d ordinarily spend on menial or repetitive tasks, then how can you measure the time savings? What will you do instead and how will that serve your business goals?

Final Thought: Automate the Unremarkable

Not everything in hospitality should be automated, and there’s a lot that can’t. But the stuff no one notices when it works? That’s exactly what you can and should take off your team’s plate.

Track gives you the tools to do that across the entire lifecycle, from booking to review and owner reporting to internal ops. When used well, automation becomes a powerful edge behind the scenes that results in fewer errors, faster workflows, and better outcomes.

And in a market where everyone’s trying to outspend or outscale each other, a little invisible efficiency can be your biggest differentiator.

Let your team do what only humans can do. Let Track handle the rest. Reach out to us to learn more about what’s possible with Track’s killer automation features and start serving guests better than the place down the road.