This is not an easy side gig. It's more than a full time job, and I have been living in one of the units and only renting two and my SO helps out a lot. Bringing on a third unit and I am about at the point of needing one full time employee.
It is a never ending fight against entropy, as well as a not insignificant number of guests who will lie to get over on you.
You have to:
Manage bookings/field inquiries and sell property in these exchanges/make special offers to fill spots.
Accounting/legal/tax
Cleaning. This is very labor intensive. To properly clean a two bedroom apartment to hotel standards takes at least 3 hours and that's if guests left it clean. One stray hair in the wrong spot and you lose.
Maintenance. Decks/trim/walls need to be patched and painted each year. Things break. A very heavy-set guest will crack a toilet seat and it needs to be replaced in the 4 or 5 hour window you have between guests. You might get some animal infestation that needs to be dealt with.
Guest relations. Guests will forget things and want them mailed to them. They require handholding and strategies to keep review scores up.
People will constantly be trying to negotiate your price down, even though you offer 4 times the square footage for the same price as a nice hotel in the area.
I am working on automating and streamlining as much of this as possible, and there are gains to be made there. I have made gains with superior cleaning technology to save time as well.
FAQs and guides can help, but guests don't read them much of the time.
This is not real estate investing, its hospitality and meeting and greeting guests and chatting with the friendly ones is what gives you the good reviews where other less hands on places get the very critical ones.
Professional management is where this space needs to go in my opinion.
Vacation rentals have been a boutique industry for a long, long time. What was disruptive about AirBnB was the opening of it to spare bedrooms and the subletting of places people rent from others.
AirBnB has both made the space much more popular, and caused a lot of the ire and animosity we have seen towards the space.