Why simplicity is the short-term rental strategy most hosts are ignoring
- Jun 7
- 5 min read
There's a pattern that Jannik Abraham, Managing Director of Smoobu, keeps seeing across the short-term rental industry. Hosts add a tool to solve one problem. Then another. Then another. Before long, nobody quite knows what each tool does, who's responsible for it, or whether it's actually working.
"Everybody thinks complexity is sophistication," Jannik told us on the Host Planet Podcast. "Which, to a certain point, is true. But from a business perspective, more ropes doesn't mean more power. If you have one or two ropes, you can pull much harder. Pull too many at once and they tangle around your feet – and you fall over."
It's a deceptively simple idea. And it's one that most hosts are getting wrong when deciding their short-term rental strategy. Catch the full interview on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple.
The STR industry has suffered from its own success
The short-term rental sector was under-developed for decades. Old-school operators in the UK countryside and coastal landlords in Germany – many were fully booked without ever touching the internet, let alone a property management system. Then came rapid acceleration: OTAs, dynamic pricing tools, automation platforms, channel managers, smart locks, guest apps. In the space of 10 years, an industry that barely had a tech stack developed thousands of tools competing for operators' attention.
The result? A market where complexity has become a proxy for professionalism.
"The STR industry has been a victim of its own success. The gap is widening between traditional operators and new ones who understand the tech game – and as that gap widens, the bubble gets louder. You should use this tool, you should use that tool."
But louder doesn't mean right.
The real cost of over-complicating your short-term rental strategy
When hosts keep adding tools without a clear strategy, two things tend to go wrong.
The first is a disconnect between the person who buys the technology and the person who actually has to use it day-to-day. A host with a background in tech implements a new system. Their cleaner, their co-host, their team on the ground has no idea it exists. The tool sits unused or half-configured – and the problem it was supposed to solve quietly continues.
"It's a classic problem in hotel operations. Procurement buys a shiny new software. Nobody in operations can actually use it. It breaks down."
The second problem is that each additional tool gets less attention than the one before it. When you're running five platforms, you don't optimise any of them properly. You patch things together. You assume it's working because nothing has visibly broken.
Jannik experienced this first-hand as a guest – which, as the Managing Director of a property management software company, gives the story extra weight. He checked into a property using a well-regarded check-in system. The guest guide was genuinely impressive – comprehensive, beautifully designed, everything covered. But he never received it. The check-in flow opened a browser tab with all the information. He closed it. The follow-up message with the guest guide link never arrived.
"I ended up having to ask where the Wi-Fi password was," he says. "I know from hosts how frustrating that question is. And I was afraid to have to ask it. But the message just never came."
The system worked. The guest experience failed. No individual tool was at fault. The gap between them was the problem – and nobody was watching it.
What "getting the boring stuff right" actually means
Jannik's advice to hosts isn't to avoid technology. It's to be deliberate about it.
"Be curious. Try new things. There's no shame in looking at the shiny thing. But be very conscious about what you add and how you add it."
Before reaching for the next tool, the question a host should ask is: have I got the basics nailed? That means automated check-in that actually works end-to-end. OTAs connected and syncing correctly. Guest communication that fires at the right time and lands in the right place. A clear picture of what each piece of software costs and what it's doing.
"If you've never been in the vacation rental industry, or don't know how to optimise your Airbnb listing, tens of thousands of hours of educational content exist. But how do you know which content to look at, and at which point in your journey?"
That question matters more than it sounds. A first-time host doesn't need to know what RevPAR is. They need to know how automated check-in works. How to connect their OTAs. How to write a listing title that gets found. Getting those things right, consistently, is what produces results. Adding a revenue management tool to a listing that isn't properly set up won't fix the underlying problem – it'll just make it more expensive.
Why education matters more than software
Smoobu's position in this conversation is worth understanding. Jannik isn't making the case for simplicity as a tech-minimalist. He's making it as someone whose job is to sell software – and who believes the software only works when the operator using it understands what they're doing.
"We're selling the shovels to get the gold out of the ground," he says. "But we also need to put the manual next to it."
For Smoobu, that means prioritising education alongside the platform – helping hosts understand the right tool for the right stage of their journey, rather than handing them something powerful and leaving them to figure it out.
This is also why Host Planet and Smoobu collaborated on a free e-book: How to Optimize Your OTA Listing. Jannik describes it as the most direct expression of this philosophy – a resource that's genuinely actionable for hosts at every level, structured so you can find the one thing you want to improve and do it in under thirty seconds.
"It's very simply written. Step by step. An entry-level host can go through it from the beginning. An advanced host can open it to the section on SEO titles and make a change in thirty seconds. You go in, you find the thing you want to change, you get it done, you're better off than you were before."
He admits he read it properly for the first time after it was published – and liked it even more.
The one thing most hosts should do first
Not all hosts are in the tech bubble. This is something the industry consistently underestimates. In the UK, around 20% of short-term rental bookings still happen offline. In Germany, the figure is closer to 30%. A significant proportion of operators have never used an LLM, have limited comfort with online tools, and are running successful businesses without knowing what a PMS stands for.
For those hosts, the answer isn't an AI agent. It's a well-configured listing, a reliable check-in process, and guest communication that works every time.
"Get the boring stuff right," says Jannik. "It would just make your life a lot easier."
And then, once the foundations are solid, add the next tool – deliberately, with a clear purpose, and with everyone who needs to use it actually trained to use it.
That's not a low-ambition approach to running a short-term rental business. In 2026, it's the high-ambition one.
Download the free e-book – How to Optimize Your OTA Listing – produced by Host Planet in collaboration with Smoobu. Step-by-step guidance for hosts at every level, built to be actionable from day one.
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