Automate your short-term rental team's tasks

NOTE: this feature is in BETA but is fully functional!

When managing a short-term rental (Airbnb, Booking, etc.), one of your most critical responsibilities is handling your team: cleaning, maintenance, emergencies, and day-to-day operations. Very quickly, this can turn into a real headache.

You need to make sure a cleaner is available for every booking, that they clearly understand what needs to be done, and that the job is properly completed. Once the task is finished, you still have to ensure nothing was forgotten and that any issue discovered is reported.

A guest leaves the property dirty, a hole appears in a wall, bed linen is missing, or there’s no toilet paper left. You know how it goes. One small oversight is all it takes for the next guest to leave a bad review and a low rating.

That’s why having a perfectly organized workflow and flawless operational management is essential. With Nowistay, you can automate this entire process to make sure no task (mission), or check is ever forgotten—while still keeping full visibility and control over your operations.

How to enable tasks automation ?

Here are the steps to enable team and task automation:

1. Make sure your bookings (calendar) are connected and synced.
2. Set the check-in and check-out time of your properties (see here for more details)
3. Add your team members and assign them roles.
4. If needed, from the bookings section, click the "Create Missing Cleaning Missions" button. It will create all cleaning missions for past bookings that don't have one.
5. Add the checklists your team must go through for each task type.
6. Enable task automation (see the full article for details on how automation works).

What happens when automation is enabled ?

Once that’s done, here’s what will happen for cleaning tasks:

• For every new booking, a cleaning task will be automatically created and assigned to the cleaning team.
• If the cleaning team has only one person, they will be automatically assigned to the cleaning task and will receive an email/WhatsApp notification.
• If the cleaning team is composed of several people, each person will receive a message so they can take the task. They can accept or decline. It’s first come, first served: the first person to accept is assigned the task.
• Once the task is assigned, the person receives a morning brief for the day of the task summarizing the mission. It indicates the scheduled date, the number of expected guests, etc. Above all, they can indicate that they started the task bu clicking a button (n the WhatsApp or email message).
• When the task is completed, they must fill in a form asking them to go through the cleaning checklist you defined, take photos, and add a comment if necessary. Then they click “Finish task”. The task is marked as completed.
• After completion, you receive an email/WhatsApp confirmation with a link to view the task report (photos, etc.).

Of course, you can add, modify, assign, or cancel tasks at any time from the "Tasks" section.

You can create tasks of several types:

• Cleaning
• Maintenance
• Emergency
• Custom

Assigned team members will be notified and, as explained above for cleaning, they will receive a morning brief and can submit a report at the end of the task.

The only difference between cleaning tasks and the others is that cleaning tasks must be linked to a booking, and their creation can be automated by enabling automation from the "Automation" section.

Other task types can be linked to a booking, but this is optional.

How can I manually assign tasks if I have multiple team members?

If you have several members with the same role for a property, you can disable the "first-come, first-served" logic.

To do this, simply navigate to the Automations page and click the settings icon. Then, toggle the "Disable automatic assignment" switch to ON.

Once enabled, all automatically generated tasks will be assigned to you (status: Pending Host). You will then be responsible for manually assigning each task to a specific team member.