Perspective check on Airbnb and recurring profitability

I’m looking to sanity-check about Airbnb when it’s approached less as passive real estate and more as an operating business.

My husband and I are considering investing in a short-term rental with the goal of building recurring, repeatable profit, not just long-term appreciation. We’d be going down part time in our current careers and are prepared to run this as a hands-on business — actively managing pricing and occupancy, guest communication, experience, etc. The property is in The Bahamas, where my husband is from, and for the first year we would live nearby and be directly involved rather than managing it remotely.

Our professional background is in branding, social media, and content marketing, so demand generation, positioning, and guest experience would be central to how we operate.

What I’m trying to reconcile is the dominant advice here that real estate investing “isn’t for making money now” and should primarily be viewed as a long-term play. I understand that framing for traditional rentals and appreciation-driven strategies, but I’m curious whether that conclusion still holds when Airbnb is treated as a true operating business, especially in a tourism-driven market.

I’m not looking for shortcuts or guarantees — just trying to understand whether the skepticism around Airbnb profitability is about the model itself, or about how most people attempt to execute it. Perhaps I am missing something when crunching the numbers.

In your experience, is recurring profitability realistic when Airbnb is operated like a business? For those who’ve tried and found it didn’t work, where did the model break down?