How to Automate Your Vacation Rental
Automation For Vacation Rentals
In the early days of the vacation rental industry, many things were done by hand. Guest communication, calendar management, and guest check-ins, for example, were always handled by a human being. In the modern world, however, none of these tasks need the painstaking attention that they used to. It’s more and more common for just about everything in your vacation rental business to be automated, whether that’s pricing or setting up appointments for your cleaners and property inspectors to come by.
Wondering how you can implement more automation into your vacation rental business? In this blog, we’ll outline 5 ways that you can utilize the power of automation to save you more time, money, and energy spent on your short-term rental.
Impress Guests With Automated Communication
From the moment a guest books with you, their vacation rental experience has begun, and it’s best to make a great first impression. However, it can be a huge time sink to send a personalized message to every single person who books with you, especially if you are self-managing and don’t have any help.
That’s where automation comes in handy–rather than sending every guest check-in instructions, house rules, and other important information, there are plenty of auto-messaging systems that can help you to automate this process. There’s even a feature on Airbnb that allows you to auto-send this information to your guests, which you can set up to automatically trigger when a guest books or a guest checks in or out. You can go a step further than this and use software that integrates into your property management system to make things even easier.
Make Calendar Management Simple With Booking Automation
If you’re a savvy short-term rental owner, chances are that you already have your rental listed on multiple distribution channels, like Airbnb and Vrbo. But those who have to manage bookings coming through from multiple websites know that it’s no easy task to keep a tidy calendar. In fact, it takes tons of painstaking effort to organize it all by hand.
Yet again, this is where automation can save you time and energy. There are a ton of useful channel managers out there that can help you keep your bookings organized without having to lift a finger. Many of these sync all of your reservations automatically into your calendar, allowing you to take a hands-off approach while being assured that double bookings and other errors won’t occur.
Check-Ins Are a Breeze With Smart Locks
We’ve written about the utility of smart locks on this blog before, but it bears repeating in any conversation about vacation rental automation: smart locks and keyless entry make automating check-ins and check-outs incredibly easy.
Check-ins can be complicated to complete, especially if you are not located in the nearby vicinity to fix any problems that might arise, but purchasing a keyless entry system can cut down on a lot of potential inconveniences for both your guests and you as a host.
Smart locks typically connect to smartphone applications, and usually these include other automation features specifically designed for this purpose. These will allow you to send check-in instructions and any codes necessary to your guests.
Implement Automation Into Your Pricing
Static pricing is out; dynamic pricing is in. If you’ve never heard of dynamic pricing before, it’s similar to the way that airline tickets work–the price changes according to a number of factors such as demand and seasonality. Pricing by hand can be a tedious process, especially if you’re putting in the extra effort to analyze your competitor’s pricing and take other important market factors into account.
Instead of relying on static pricing to ease the burden of research off your shoulders, look into a dynamic pricing software to automate the pricing process for you. Or, if the setup seems too complicated for you, check out LocalVR. We use a proprietary dynamic pricing software that takes into account thousands of real-time analytics to set the best price for your vacation rental, every day of the year, with no effort required on your part.
Use Automation to Notify Cleaners and Inspectors
Finally, our last tip for automating your vacation rental business is to utilize software like Zapier (which can be used to integrate different applications together) to automatically schedule appointments for your cleaners and property inspectors to come by.
Once a guest checks out of your rental, auto-scheduling software can be pinged to create an appointment and notify your cleaning crew. Likewise, this software can be used to schedule your periodic property inspections as well as to notify the inspectors of their upcoming appointments. Not only can automation help you stay up to date with cleaning schedules and repairs, it can also ensure that you don’t accidentally forget to schedule a necessary appointment.
Streamline Your Vacation Rental Business With Automation
There’s not much argument that automation is the future, especially in the vacation rental industry. Although it can seem a bit overwhelming if you’re not especially technologically literate, automating your vacation rental business can save you a ton of time and money in the long run. You can start small by implementing automated guest communications or you can jump right into the deep end and purchase an automated pricing software to help you land more bookings.
If you’re not sure you want to implement all of this automation yourself, check out LocalVR, a property management service that’s always using the most cutting edge technology to enhance our services. For more information, take a look at our homepage.