Hospitable adds dated owner transfers, and stops Airbnb overwriting your fees

Hospitable shipped a batch of changes on 25 September. Two of them matter to anyone running properties on behalf of owners, and one of them changes a default that guests see.

Owner changes now carry a date

Until now, reassigning a property to a different owner in Hospitable was a flat edit. There was no record of when the handover happened.

You can now assign or change property ownership from the Properties tab, and doing so opens a management agreement ownership period. The property gets a timeline showing who owned it when, including owners who take over in future. The same move can be made from the owner's own page, where you can see every property that owner currently holds, pick a move date and confirm the transfer before it commits.

For a manager with owner statements to produce, that date is the whole point. Revenue either falls in the old owner's period or the new one, and until now the system had no opinion about which. Anyone who has had to unpick a mid-month handover by hand will recognise the problem.

Airbnb fee edits no longer win

Fee changes made in Airbnb will no longer override the settings held in Hospitable. Previously an edit on the Airbnb side could quietly replace what the PMS held, which meant the fee a guest paid could drift from the fee the manager had configured.

This is a changed default rather than a new feature. If your team has been in the habit of adjusting cleaning or pet fees directly in Airbnb because it was faster, that habit stops working. The fee in Hospitable is now the one that stands.

Trip insurance now defaults to yes

Hospitable has reworked how trip insurance is presented during booking. The option is now set to yes by default, though guests can still choose either way. The company says the change is already producing more policy purchases.

That is an opt-out rather than an opt-in, and worth knowing about before a guest queries a line on their confirmation. Consumer rules on pre-ticked add-ons vary by market, so managers selling into the EU and the UK should check where they stand rather than assume the default is fine everywhere.

The rest of the release

Booking.com pricing is now applied automatically to far-future empty dates, following the same rules already used for availability. Existing prices are untouched.

Imported listings with empty photo tags get AI-generated tags, which Hospitable says helps listings match guest searches. Tags stay editable.

The Tasks app is now available in German and Simplified Chinese. You set a teammate's primary language when you add them, and they can change it themselves later. Secondary users can now switch on the daily digest email in their own preferences, scoped to whatever permissions and properties the primary user has given them.

What to do

The owner transfer tooling is the piece worth setting up deliberately rather than discovering later, because the timeline only starts recording from the point you use it. Historic handovers will not backfill themselves.

Check the Airbnb fee behaviour against how your team actually works, and take a look at the trip insurance default before your next arrival wave.