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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.
Per aiutare gli ospiti a vivere un'esperienza autonoma durante tutto il soggiorno, fornisci loro una guida digitale da condividere automaticamente come parte del flusso di messaggi pianificato.
Nella tua guida, puoi includere informazioni essenziali sulla struttura e sull'area locale per aiutare gli ospiti a ottenere il massimo dal loro soggiorno e per ridurre al minimo la possibilità che debbano contattarti per qualsiasi domanda.
Ecco alcune delle informazioni da inserire nella tua guida digitale:
L'ospite moderno si aspetta un'esperienza completamente semplificata e tecnologica dalla prenotazione al check-out. Fortunatamente, la stessa tecnologia che offre agli ospiti l'autonomia che desiderano, ti aiuta anche a rendere le tue operazioni efficienti e scalabili.
Con soluzioni come i messaggi programmati di Minut con dati compilati automaticamente, inclusi i nomi degli ospiti, le credenziali di accesso e le password WiFi, e le guide digitali con approfondimenti e consigli locali, puoi rispondere preventivamente alle domande degli ospiti.
Ciò ti evita di gestire dozzine di messaggi e chiamate per ogni soggiorno.
Nel frattempo, il tuo PMS, il channel manager e gli strumenti di determinazione dei prezzi dinamici ti aiutano a coordinare le prenotazioni, diversificare la distribuzione dei canali e ottimizzare le tariffe. Inoltre, puoi collegare il tuo PMS al tuo software di gestione delle operazioni per pianificare automaticamente i fatturati e quindi utilizzare le liste di controllo digitali per ispezionare ogni unità prima del check-in.
Inoltre, con un sistema di monitoraggio del rumore completo come Minut, puoi prevenire i reclami dei vicini, salvare le proprietà dai danni causati da terzi ed essere immediatamente avvisato dei rischi ambientali e degli eventi di sicurezza.
Fondamentalmente, tutte queste soluzioni tecnologiche STR ti consentono di automatizzare i tuoi processi, in modo da poter migliorare le prestazioni aziendali, aumentare le dimensioni del tuo portafoglio e ospitare ogni ospite in tutta tranquillità.
