January 20, 2022
Improve Your Vacation Rental Business
3 Ways to Improve Your Vacation Rental Business— For You and Your Guests!
There’s no time like the present to consider ways to improve your vacation rental management business. In the VRM industry, the best way to increase your revenue is to continue to improve the guest experience. Improved guest experience will have many positive impacts including positive reviews for the listing, word of mouth referrals, repeat (and direct booking) guests, and can impact your visibility on OTA search as well as your own website SEO. With all these benefits, and really no negatives, it makes sense to go into a fresh new year with a focus on the guest experience.
Here are three straightforward ways you can improve your VRM business by improving your guest experience. (Looking for ways to encourage guests to #bookdirect? Read this.)
Make Guests Feel (Extra) Welcome
Who doesn’t love getting that little chocolate on their pillow? As a guest, you might not care for chocolate, but as with many things, it’s the thought that counts. And while it might not be chocolates on your properties pillows, there are similar, thoughtful acts that show the intentionality to the guest. It’s time to revive this timeless tradition and make it work for your vacation rentals.
Today guests are on the lookout for signs that their hosts (or property managers) are ensuring efforts to make guests feel welcome.
Making your guests feel valued is a sure-fire way to improve your VRM business. Start with the basics: make sure to include a welcome message with your guests’ check-in information, and consider offering recommendations for nearby eateries or particular points of interest they may want to visit.
Inside the property, consider how you could add that extra sweet touch to your guests’ arrival. A fresh bouquet of flowers, perhaps? A bottle of local wine? Even a short, handwritten note can do wonders!
Hop on the Smart-Home Technology Train
Speaking of guest welcome books, do you know a great way of storing all that helpful information in one place? A smart device! Adding Smart Home technology to your vacation rentals is a great way to improve your VRM business by making your properties feel modern. Investments in things like keyless entry and in-home tablets with property information, maps of the area with nearby amenities highlighted, or an app with discounts to local eateries and shops also make guests feel cared for.
Devices like in-home tablets also offer an opportunity for you to collect helpful data about your guests for marketing retargeting efforts later: specifically, collecting their email address, and asking for a review. You can use these pieces of information to add to your website and add to your email nurture list.
Keep Your Booking Calendar Flexible
A key way to improve your vacation rental management business is to keep your booking calendar agile and your check-in and check-out policies as flexible as possible.
Let’s start with flexible cancellation policies. In today’s uncertain world, guests are looking for hospitality providers to understand that travel plans just don’t go as smoothly as they used to. This means that you have to find ways to encourage last-minute bookings as often as possible to keep your occupancy rate high.
Which leads to minimum stay requirements. In the early days of the vacation rental industry, minimum stays were considered a helpful tool to keep occupancy rates up and make more money. But in more recent times data shows that minimum stay requirements can actually turn your listings off to potential guests, and even harm your rankings on your OTA partner sites.
Relying on dynamic pricing tools instead of minimum stay requirements is one way to optimize your listings and keep your occupancy rate high, even for last-minute bookings, by adjusting prices based on the booking window, the market landscape as a whole, and other factors that may impact a guest’s decision to book.
If you’re looking for some help with dynamic pricing and revenue management, Rented can help! Their team of experts can offer guidance on when and how to adjust prices and minimum stay requirements in order to encourage last-minute bookings. And the Automated Rates Tool, or Art, makes making those changes as easy as can be. Reach out to an expert to see how Rented’s tools and a team of revenue professionals can help improve your VRM business now>>
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