Home Assistant Airbnb Templates

You bought a Home Assistant Green box, plugged it into the back of the router at your beach rental, and after a satisfying hour the dashboard lit up with every smart device in the house. Then you stared at it for two more hours wondering where to start. Most hosts hit this wall — the platform is genuinely powerful, but the official docs assume you are automating your own home, not a property where strangers cycle through every three days. A set of Home Assistant Airbnb templates short-circuits the empty-page problem. You drop in YAML that already knows about check-ins, cleaners, and turnover days, then bend the parts that do not match your situation.

This page is the reference. It collects the automations, scripts, and dashboard cards that hosts actually use, in one place, in a form you can paste straight into your config.

Who this is for

Hosts running Home Assistant on their own hardware — a Raspberry Pi 4, Home Assistant Green, or Intel NUC — with at least a Schlage Encode or Yale Assure smart lock, an Ecobee Premium or Nest Learning Thermostat, and an iCal feed from Airbnb or VRBO already integrated. You should be comfortable opening the File Editor or Studio Code Server add-on and editing automations.yaml, scripts.yaml, and configuration.yaml. Beginners are welcome — just plan to read every snippet before pasting it in, swap entity IDs to match your setup, and run a trace before any of it touches a real booking. If you are starting from zero, our Home Assistant short-term rental starter setup walks you through the prerequisites first.

What this solves for hosts

Templates exist because everyone keeps reinventing the same wheel. The snippets here cover four jobs that almost every short-term rental host eventually wants:

Thermostat that follows the booking calendar with arrival, occupied, departure, and vacant modes — the core of our rental thermostat plan.
Smart lock that auto-rotates a guest code based on the reservation start and end. The Home Assistant smart lock for Airbnb walkthrough covers the lock side in depth.
Cleaner notification system tied to lock events and turnover days, paired with the cleaner notification recipe.
Host dashboard that shows the next three reservations, current setpoints, lock state, and any open alerts in a single glance — the structure is in our vacation rental dashboard guide.

None of these are exotic. They are the bones of a remote-managed rental, and once they are in place, your day-to-day involvement drops to handling exceptions rather than driving the routine.

Recommended setup or decision path

Before pasting templates, set up a tidy folder structure. Create a packages directory under your config, then create per-property package files like packages/cabin.yaml. Each package holds the helpers, automations, and scripts for one property. This keeps multi-property hosts sane, and even single-property hosts benefit from the isolation when something needs to be torn out and replaced.

Decide on naming conventions early. Prefix every entity with the property short name — cabin_thermostat, cabin_front_lock, cabin_calendar. Future you, six months from now adding property number two, will be grateful.

Step-by-step setup

Confirm prerequisites: Ecobee or Nest integration loaded, Schlage Encode or Yale Assure integration loaded, calendar integration with the iCal URL pulling reservations, and the Home Assistant Companion app installed on your iPhone or Android for push notifications.
Enable packages by adding homeassistant: packages: !include_dir_named packages to configuration.yaml, then restart.
Drop the helpers template into packages/cabin.yaml: input_booleans for cleaner_on_site and owner_blocked, input_numbers for vacant_cool, vacant_heat, occupied_cool_max, and occupied_heat_min, plus an input_datetime for cleaner_arrived_at.
Add the four core automations: arrival prep, departure recovery (covered in the checkout automation guide), cleaner arrival ping, and cleaner-done ping. Each is roughly 15 to 25 lines of YAML.
Add the lock code rotation script: a python_script or pyscript that pulls the upcoming reservation summary, generates a 4-digit code, writes it to user slot 7 on the Schlage Encode, and texts the guest the code two hours before check-in.
Drop in the Lovelace dashboard YAML: a single page with a calendar card, a thermostat tile, a lock tile, the cleaner_on_site state, and a notification log.
Run a manual trace on every automation. Create a fake calendar event 10 minutes ahead and watch the timeline.
Once green, repeat the package for property two by copying packages/cabin.yaml to packages/beachhouse.yaml and find-replacing the prefix.

Privacy, safety, and guest-experience notes

The templates here only deal with locks, climate, and calendar data. They do not touch indoor cameras or microphones, and that is intentional — HomeScript Labs editorial policy is no interior surveillance, and Airbnb has tightened on it as well. If you want any monitoring at all, keep it to outdoor doorbells like the Ring Battery Doorbell Plus or driveway cameras and disclose them clearly in your listing using the wording in our device disclosure guide.

Disclose smart device use in your listing. A simple line in House Rules — "the home uses a smart thermostat and smart lock that are remotely managed by the host" — is enough for most platforms. Comfortable bands, not hard locks, on the thermostat. Codes that work the entire stay rather than dropping out at midnight.

Common mistakes

Pasting templates without renaming entity IDs. Your YAML will load but every automation will silently fail.
Skipping the trace step. Templates work for the author's exact setup; yours has subtle differences.
Forgetting to enable packages in configuration.yaml. The files sit there doing nothing.
Sharing one giant automations.yaml across properties. It becomes unmaintainable past property two.
No off-switch. Always include an owner_blocked input_boolean so you can quickly mute the system during owner stays or maintenance.

Host checklist

Packages directory created and enabled in configuration.yaml.
Per-property package file holds all helpers, automations, and scripts for that property.
Every entity in the templates renamed to match your real entity IDs.
Each automation traced once with a test trigger.
Lovelace dashboard saved and pinned on your phone home screen.
Owner_blocked toggle visible on the dashboard for one-tap muting.
Off-site backup of the config snapshotted weekly.

AI Lab: adapting templates with Claude or Codex

Templates rarely match your house exactly. The fastest way to adapt them is to paste the raw YAML plus a description of your devices into Claude Code or Codex, and ask: "Rewrite this for my setup — thermostat is climate.beach_t10, lock is lock.beach_front, cleaner uses code slot 4, calendar is calendar.beach_bookings. Keep all triggers, conditions, and notification logic intact." Review the diff carefully — LLMs occasionally swap mode: single for mode: parallel or quietly drop conditions. Test in trace before letting it run on a live reservation. Treat AI as a co-editor, not an unattended deploy pipeline.

FAQ

Where do I store my templates as my setup grows?

Use the packages pattern from day one and put each property in its own file. After three properties, also start version-controlling the config in a private GitHub repo using the HACS-installed git add-on or just a manual Studio Code Server commit. You will eventually break something, and the rollback option is priceless.

Can I share templates between properties without duplicating?

Partly. Use Blueprints for reusable automation logic with per-property variables. Helpers and entity IDs still need to be unique per property, but a single thermostat-rental blueprint can serve all your homes if the variables are well-defined.

What is the minimum viable template set?

Two automations and a dashboard card. The arrival-prep thermostat automation, the cleaner-done notification, and a Lovelace card showing the next reservation and current lock state. Almost every other template builds on these two foundations.

Do these templates work with VRBO and direct bookings too?

Yes. Anything that produces an iCal feed will work. Combine multiple feeds into one calendar entity, or use multiple calendar entities and reference them in your automations. The downstream logic does not care which platform booked the night.

Where to go next

Use these templates as a starting point and dig into the specific recipes for the trickiest pieces. The full Home Assistant Airbnb hub ties them all together, and the cluster pages in Related reading above let you go deeper on whichever piece is currently breaking on your property.