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To remain a competitive, growing vacation rental business, you need highly efficient processes that you can easily repeat as your portfolio expands.
But how can you ensure the same quality of service and guest experience as you take on 5, 10, 20 new units or more?
In this article, we look at the vacation rental technology you need to sustainably manage and grow your business, so you can reduce your workload and stress, eliminate mistakes like missed cleans, protect your properties from parties and break-ins, and, through it all, give your guests an even better stay.
So, you’ll soon know:
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With a carefully integrated tech stack of property management software, you can improve your vacation rental business across four key areas:
For example, with scheduled messaging and a digital guidebook, you can provide guests with insights into their stay that help them enjoy your property and the local area. Also, though, these are communications you can automate, which saves you time.
And with that time saved, you make your operations more scalable, so you can grow your business without adding to your manual tasks—which would otherwise limit your ability to manage more properties.
Equally, vacation rental technology reduces the chance of human error that could lead to a double booking, can detect security or noise issues and automate a response, and can allow you to list more widely and price your rates more competitively.
With the seven tools we discuss below, you can:
See this list of vacation rental technology essentials—so you can maximize business performance, grow your portfolio, protect your properties, and reduce your workload—and VRMA (vacation rental manager’s anxiety!).
Your property management system (PMS) is your central hub for reservation management. When you start a short-term rental (STR) business with just a handful of properties, you probably don’t require a PMS.
But, as your portfolio grows and you begin accepting bookings from different platforms, it’s increasingly important to coordinate your latest booking information and take advantage of the various features that PMSs offer. These include synchronizing your listings, coordinating task assignments, and centralizing guest messaging.
However, as you continue to scale your operations past 20 units, you’ll probably need more specialist tools to efficiently manage your team, guests, and business—the most important of which we discuss below.
For a comprehensive view of Minut’s integration partners, see our integrations page.
While most PMSs perform the role of a channel manager by synchronizing your booking calendar across multiple OTAs, you may need a specialist solution to further expand the number of booking sites where you list.
As well as connecting you to dozens if not hundreds of booking channels—including major OTAs as well as niche sites for specific audiences (like digital nomads, vegans, hikers, or last-minute bookers)—channel managers make it easy for you to update your listings with property descriptions, images, and house rules, and align rates and availability.
Also, you can use channel managers to coordinate multi-unit properties, so whether you’re renting single units or the entire compound property, it’s easy to oversee unit assignment and avoid double bookings.
Smart locks can tell you when a guest has checked in but how do you know if they’re having a party at two in the morning, disturbing the neighbors, or smoking in the living room?
With a comprehensive noise monitoring system that includes occupancy monitoring and cigarette smoke detection, you can:
Using Minut’s standalone sensor as an example, the noise monitoring technology lets you customize thresholds by unit and time of day, so you’ll be automatically alerted when the decibel levels go too high for a sustained period (so you won’t be alerted for a single door slam in the middle of the afternoon, for example).
Equally, you can customize the crowd monitor to alert you if occupancy goes past your limit for a particular unit, and receive an immediate alert when cigarette smoke is detected by Minut’s unique machine learning AI technology.
With a multi-feature sensor like Minut, you can also detect hazards, reduce costs by monitoring temperature, and be alerted to break-ins or other security events.
To effectively manage dozens of units, though, you also need a way to automate how you manage guests.
So, Minut automates messages to guests when an issue is detected, lets you schedule messages like check-in or check-out information, and offers Call Assist and Guard Assist (Guard Assist is currently only available in the US and UK), which provide trained operators and security experts to manage guest communication on your behalf.
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Dynamic pricing tools connect with your PMS to automate and synchronize your rates based on market information from thousands of data points, including:
You can also use your dynamic pricing tool to set customized pricing rules so you never go below a specified base rate, to take into consideration the length of stay, or to offer discounts when there’s a single night available (orphan gaps).
Meanwhile, revenue management tools provide you with data for deeper insights into pricing trends and influential factors, so you can not only more accurately manage your rates, but also create quarterly budgets, better manage your costs, and generate predictive reporting for benchmarking and performance analysis.
As you can see, using these tools can take you into highly sophisticated areas of vacation rental business management, but the tools themselves are designed to be simple to use, so you don’t need to be an expert in data analytics to gain valuable insights from them and improve profitability.
On-the-ground operations are one of the most demanding areas of management in a vacation rental property business.
Some of the typical challenges you’ll face with housekeeping and maintenance is coordinating cleans with your latest booking information, communicating schedules and changes with housekeepers, tracking work done and unit status, and running inspections.
All of these challenges are intensified by having a growing portfolio of units and managing them remotely.
Housekeeping operations software resolves this by:
Modern guests expect streamlined, tech-enabled experiences throughout their customer journey. With the best smart locks, you not only get to meet that expectation, but also create a scalable workflow for property access that increases your visibility across your portfolio.
With the information and features an integrated access management system provides, you can:
With these solutions in place, there are virtually no manual processes to manage—so no waiting around to hand over keys, no need to replace keys when they get lost, and no need to respond to a call-out in the middle of the night because your guest got locked out.
To help guests enjoy an autonomous experience throughout their stay, provide them with a digital guide that you can share automatically as part of your scheduled message workflow.
In your guide, you can include essential information about the property and local area to help guests get the most out of their stay—and to minimize the chance of them having to reach out to you with any questions.
Here’s some of the information to feature in your digital guide:
The modern guest expects a fully streamlined, tech-enabled experience from booking to check-out. Fortunately, the same technology that gives guests the autonomy they want, also helps you make your operations efficient and scalable.
With solutions like Minut’s scheduled messages with auto-populated data—including guest names, access credentials, and WiFi passwords—and digital guides with local insights and recommendations, you can preemptively answer guest questions.
This saves you from handling dozens of messages and calls each stay.
Meanwhile, your PMS, channel manager, and dynamic pricing tools help you coordinate bookings, diversify your channel distribution, and optimize rates. Plus, you can connect your PMS to your operations management software to auto-schedule turnovers, and then use digital checklists to inspect each unit before check-in.
And, with an all-in-one noise monitoring system like Minut, you can prevent neighbor complaints, save properties from party damage, and be instantly alerted to environmental hazards and security events.
Crucially, all these STR tech solutions allow you to automate your processes, so you can improve business performance, grow the size of your portfolio, and host each guest with peace of mind.
