Last week, Los Angeles-based Jurny announced it had released a free AI-enhanced property management system (PMS) powered by GPT-4 on its platform.
As previously reported by dot.LA, the hospitality startup provides software and services to hotel and short-term rental operators in an effort to streamline their operations and make guest service available from a single dashboard.
“We realized that there’s power in owning the platform and the traffic,” founder and CEO Luca Zambello told dot.LA. “There's other ways that we can monetize versus if you look at our competitors, they make their product the PMS. Whereas, (for Jurny) PMS is within our product but we don’t want to make money on just the PMS because we want to make money on everything…It’s the ecosystem in which we will be making money.”
The former Airbnb host understands that property managers don’t just need a PMS, he said, “they also need tools for pricing and something to manage their IoT devices, which are all the components that we provide under a single umbrella.”
Since 2017, the startup has continued to provide hotel and rental operators the ability to automate pricing, cleaning services and monitor systems all within Jurny’s dashboard. Zambello said customers will now have access to the AI-enhanced PMS tools once they log into their dashboard which include Never Miss a Message with Nia, Jurny’s AI assistant.
The AI assistant was built to increase guest communications between the host and their guests and functions in three different ways. The first allows the host to create a message that Nia will then send to guests, the second is an assisted message generated by Nia. With this function, the host can modify the message before it is sent out to the guest. The last option is the fully autonomous mode which enables Nia to respond to guests immediately on behalf of the user or host's with no human intervention.
If the property manager selects fully autonomous mode, they are prompted to select between two options: Ready When You Are, where Nia will promptly reply to guests within a matter of seconds. And Brief Pause, wherein Nia will wait 5 minutes before replying to the guest's inquiry.
Zambello said the second option helps foster a more conversational rhythm between the guest and the host.
If users want more options aside from the free features, hosts can purchase the Plus bundle ($29) or the Pro bundle ($69). The Plus bundle includes Nia AI, PMS, Airbnb Connect, channel management, guest mobile app, website booking engine and an IoT hub. In addition to everything included in the Plus, the Pro bundle also offers a review tracker, pricing wheelhouse, guest screening and cleaning management.
“A lot of people have announced that they’re integrating AI into their platforms,” Zambello said, “but the reality is they are just getting started.” Unlike at Jurny, the startup implemented AI back in October of last year and decided to hold off on announcing because they wanted to ensure that all the kinks were sorted out and make sure it was good enough before sharing the news publicly. He said that the platform has since improved and
To date, Jurny has over 2,000 hotels and rentals on the platform and Zambello expects that number to increase with the release of the free AI PMS tools.
“What’s exciting for us is that now we can target a percentage of almost 70% of hosts that up until now have been kind of reluctant to jump on the technology platform,” Zambello said. “Mainly because they may have small operations and they have not been so tech savvy and they didn’t want to have this high barrier to entry with fees and long onboarding processes. This is definitely going to change the game for them.”