Decor8 AI Review: From Our Team of Superhosts

As a Superhost, we’ve come to learn that the design and layout of your Airbnb are probably the most critical drivers of bookings. It helps you stand out from the rest, even if you have similar amenities, locations, and number of bedrooms/bathrooms as the competition.

Throughout our research, we’ve come across a nifty little platform called “Decor8 AI.” It’s interior design made easy through AI, letting you explore thousands of combinations, helping you find the right aesthetic for your blank room. So, today, we explore the Decor8 AI platform and find out exactly how useful it is for Airbnb hosts and short-term rental owners.

What is Decor8 AI?

Ideally, hiring a professional to do your interior designing for you is the best choice. However, professionals can get quite expensive, and while we still think they’re almost always worth it, especially in more competitive STR markets, sometimes budget restrictions just won’t permit it.

This is why most hosts go the DIY route. We are personally guilty of this. We do the interior design for our rentals. But you have to understand that we’ve been in the game long enough to know what works and what doesn’t. We also do a ton of research into specific markets we enter to find out exactly how we can strategically arrange our furniture to cater to the target guests.

We initially came across Decor8 AI, on a search for decor inspiration for one of our Airbnbs. After digging a bit deeper, we discovered that it allows users to take a photo of a room or area in their house and customize the space with different premium design styles or add furniture of their choosing using AI.

You can use specific themed presets to get inspiration and see what your space would look like. You can also mix and match different color schemes and generate up to 4 different ideas for each theme. However, the best feature would probably be the ability to search for each piece of furniture included in the photo and find the exact match, along with links on where to buy it. This makes your shopping experience way easier and ensures that you can actually bring the design to life.

It’s not primarily marketed for Airbnb usage, but we honestly don’t see anything wrong with hosts using it to decorate their rentals. It’s a game changer, especially for people who aren’t too creative when it comes to furniture placement.

You no longer need to browse thousands of photos on Pinterest to get new inspirations, you simply need to use Decor8 AI to visualize the space and see how each type of furniture transforms it before going out and buying them.

User Experience and Accessibility

Decor8 AI has four main features. Design Your Room, Fill Empty Room With Furniture, Create Idea Books, and Search Home Decor Products. Most of these are pretty self-explanatory. We’ve used all of them to test them out and we were pretty surprised with the results.

The Design Your Room feature is probably the one that’s going to be most useful to Airbnb hosts designing their rentals. Idea Books might be a close second since it can be used to compile your different designs. We spent a lot of time tinkering with the Design Your Room feature, and this is how everything turned out.

Overall, it was pretty simple to understand. It required us to select a room type (Living Room, Bedroom, Kitchen, etc.) and then asked to upload or take a photo, depending on your preference. We highly recommend taking a photo using your phone’s dedicated Camera app and then simply uploading for the highest quality.

We were pleased to see that there were a total of 35 standard themes ranging from Minimalist to Elven, ensuring that you’ll have something that fits your preferred decor. You can also match this with 21 selectable color schemes, further emphasizing your customization preferences.

Next, you can also choose Seasonal Decor. In our case, we wanted it to be a more long-term vision, so we opted to choose “None.” Once that’s all done, the final step is to select the number of ideas (the variations) that you’d like the AI to create. You can choose anywhere from 1 to 4, but each image will cost 1 credit. Click on “Create Design” and wait for your generated images.

The photos that Decor8 AI has generated were of fantastic quality. We’ve run a couple and they all stuck with the given theme and color scheme that we chose. It provided us with a couple of high-quality options, and was able to accurately place furniture based on the room type we’ve selected. We’ve really got no complaints when it comes to the general usability. It was fast, easy, and of excellent quality.

In terms of accessibility, we mainly played around using the desktop version, which we accessed via good old Google Chrome. We didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, and we didn’t have to wait too long to get our results. The main thing we needed was an account, which was made easy with their integrated Google or Apple sign-in options.

Decor8 AI is also available on the App Store and Google Play. While we didn’t spend as much time on our mobile devices, from the time that we did, we didn’t encounter any issues with loading or freezing. From what it seems, the two platforms share a very similar UI and design.

The search feature simply made use of Google Image Search. It allows users to select the specific item and leads to links to different retailers, making it easy to find the exact design and furniture included within the image. Although, it’s really not much different from using Google Image Search, and we’re honestly not too sure if that’s a good thing or a bad one. At the end of the day, it still gets the job done.

Overall, we can highly recommend the platform as it gives a flawless and easy-to-use experience while providing high-quality designs. It’s also a plus that you can access it on a mobile phone or a PC, making it available for pretty much everyone.

Pricing: Is Decor8 Worth it?

From what we were able to find, Decor8 AI doesn’t seem to offer any free trials. You also can’t really use their platform if you don’t buy any credits. We definitely get why they don’t offer free trials, but we’d definitely love to see at least an image generation or two for free.

However, their credits are relatively cheap, which might be the main reason why they don’t offer any free trials. In our experience, it only requires one credit per image generation, which we think is pretty fair. You’ll mainly be spending the credits for trial-and-error purposes, but if you already have a set theme in mind and are primarily looking for colorways, or vice-versa, then you can easily get a room design, spending only a few credits.

Here are the available Decor8 AI plans:

• Starter: Costs $19.99 and comes with 100 credits
• Standard: Costs $49.99 and comes with 250 credits
• Premium: Costs $99.99 and comes with 500 credits

Each credit comes to around $0.20 a pop, even at scale, which isn’t too bad. However, we’ve noticed that they don’t offer smaller credit purchases, so you might be stuck with either too many or too few credits at a time. We suggest just being a bit more cautious when you’re down to the last 20 or so credits and know that you’ll be doing a bit more design generations.

Decor8 AI Use Cases for Airbnb Hosts and Short-Term Rental Owners

After spending a solid amount of time exploring and experimenting with Decor8 AI, we can confidently say that there are two main ways Airbnb hosts can use the platform. The first one is to use it to generate fully decorated rooms with different themes and color schemes to visualize what they look like. We like to call it the “Trial-and-Error” approach, where you essentially throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It’s a cheap way to put all of these different designs in your rental and help you choose one moving forward.

The second way is to use it as a guide. Speaking from experience, we know how hard it can be to fully decorate a room, much more an entire rental, even if you already have a design in mind. Sometimes, things just do not go according to plan, and that’s all part of being an Airbnb host. If you already have a specific theme planned out, you can use Decor8 AI to bring your idea to life and use it as a starting point for your interiors. You might even want to use the furniture search tool to buy specific items found within the generated images. This approach is probably better for more experienced hosts or those with a more creative mind.

These are very realistic use cases for Decor8 AI, and while it’s not going to fully replace a professional designer, it’s still way cheaper than hiring one.

Final Thoughts

Overall, we’ve had a fantastic experience with the Decor8 AI platform. It was incredibly user-friendly and managed to analyze the photos we’ve taken using our phones. We also threw some random room images we found online just for fun, and it managed to handle those as well.

Decor8 AI is cheap, works well, and gets the job done. While it’s not going to be one of the top essential tools for every Airbnb host like a dynamic pricing tool or a PMS, it’s still a great piece of AI technology that can help hosts in just a few clicks. We can easily recommend it for those looking to visualize their new rentals better.