Category: blog

Тhe days when guests’ positive reviews were built only on amenities are over!

Reality is now different targeting new and demanding audience – the passionate millennials.

Thus, property business needs to adapt to “having it their way” from attitude to travel, looking for booking options, staying in certain locations or their review scores.

Article published in Forbes in 2015, notes that the generation, born from 1981 to 1997, numbers 80 million and that they spend an annual $600 billion. By 2020, they could account for $1.4 trillion in spending or 30% of total retail sales.

Rules of the game for PMC’s have changed with these new guests, who basically also live online.

Hence, if your listings are not there, backed up with nice photos and quick response rates,  then you don’t exist and you’ll never be noticed.

So why do you need a PMS to increase the number of returning guests?

It can get your entire vacation rental business 100% online and upscale visibility

The right PMS enables all business and operations, including customer support and retention to step into the online space. There’s no physical dimension that can offer PM professionals to get all listings from various rental platforms and their calendars in a single dashboard.

It is really fast in dealing with your daily operations

For a PM, who mostly fills his day with answering booking inquiries, this might feel really handy. Watch this work for you when the timing gets crucial and listings get really busy. You will not only notice a difference but make it a tangible one!

It can help you maintain that extra personal touch in communication

Be proactive in asking for your guests’ feedback and find out what they liked or didn’t like during their stay. Assist immediately when some young couple had a change in flight or need of early check-in. Improve your service based on their feedback and make sure you ask for it! Never leave without expressing your gratitude with a nice “Thank you” message.

A good PMS will definitely offer a viable solution, ranging from answering machine feature, saved replies, message triggers, or customizable templates.

It gives you plenty of options to make communication sustainable

A PMS platform will help you out immensely in enhancing the number of returning guests by sending out special offers or discount offers to your most devoted and frequent guests. If you have a low season situation or perhaps a gap in occupancy for a top listing, you can quickly contact previous guests directly. Make them an offer they can’t refuse and create benefits for all parties.

Final Thoughts

If you want to secure your returning guests flow from millennials, you have to be equipped to strike back to their tech-savviness. Plan and organize all your listings and make sure calendars are sync accordingly, just as your abilities to be available 24/7. Invest in a PMS platform to help you deal with your guest’s constant online presence and be prepared for late night replies or emergency travel situations.

Learn to play their way and this will gain you the rest!

Presently, the impact of fraud in the single and multi-family rental industry is not only substantial but showing signs of expansion. This goes hand in hand with the fast growth of the vacation rental business enabled by the OTAs and the global reach they facilitate.

The argument is backed up with a recent study done in August 2018, commissioned by TransUnion and revealing there is a significant impact of frauds on property management companies. The study shows that every eight out of 10 property professionals have been affected by fraud, but due to the emerging nature of the problem they are not well equipped to manage the issue.

So what can be a potential remedy to this recurring issue?

Property managers who are facing fast growth are in need of better corresponding technology to flag any potential frauds from the first warning signs. As this is strategic to the success of any property management business, the facilitation of suitable online tools addressing it might be crucial to business sustainability.

And how specifically can it help you?

Having the ability to get ID/passport data and credit card details as soon as possible, especially in the timeline of an incoming reservation, also allows you to secure better your property from the potentially detrimental consequences of having tenants with shady intentions staying at your property.

You can secure the successful booking for each of your listing reservations, once you can receive instant credit card and ID card data and quickly verify its validity. And since this whole process is entirely mobile, there is almost seamless flow of data back to the PMS, without the need for extra conversations.

Check-in Wizard is the easiest way to make all the above possible in only a few steps. It is fully customizable and mobile and can be branded with your company’s logo.

If you’re curious to learn more on how Check-in form can benefit your specific listings just follow the link below:

Anticipate your guest needs, before they arrive with efficient guest communication and a little help from PMS automations.

“You had me at “Hello” is becoming the mandatory effect of guest communication for property managers. To achieve this, it doesn’t take that much of an effort, but rather a more insightful approach to the core essentials of communication.

What are the Essentials of Effective Communication? 

In any entity (academic, non-profit or even in a property management company) where active communication is involved, the mastering of several communication essentials is the key to its efficiency.

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Fostering warm environment – Guests, especially newcomers, might initially feel uncomfortable communicating online. It’s up to a good host to be outgoing and positive and to encourage an informal, conversational style to break this ice. It is useful to address guests by name or by nicknames they provide and engage them in small talk to help them relate to you as a person.

Personal touch – Use any information you get from as early as the initial inquiry. If the guest says they’re going to Eiffel Tower on Monday, make a note to follow up and ask about it. This shows you’re listening – and that you care, and it will leave the guests with the impression that will turn in a positive review at the end of their stay.

Extra attention to any additional questions/issues – Showing that you’re human and not a robot in your guest communication will eventually take you ahead of the tough competition. If you reply fast to a bathroom situation and fix it first thing in the morning, you’ll show you’re ready to go the extra mile. And as far as Universe statistics show – what comes around, goes around, too!

24/7 availability – If you respond quickly to a nasty emergency situation where a guest is being locked outside the building at 2 a.m because someone glued their lockbox, you’ll inevitably earn their respect and most likely win him as a returning client. Nobody said it would be easy, but if you do it, it will be worth it.

How can PMS automation help you with these communication essentials?

As the property management business experiences the rapid effects of digital transformation, more and more professionals will need the help of PMS to automate their communication processes. Everyone offers automation of repetitive daily tasks, but few offer the flexibility and customization you might want to address the almighty communication essentials.

Fast and useful replies made possible – Supercharge your responsiveness to guest communications with saved replies conveniently stored within each Listing’s FAQ section. Do some of your FAQs apply to more than one listing?  No problem! You can assign FAQs to multiple Listings.

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Keeping it personal – Keep the informal, conversational style and address guests by name, while you automate the process behind it and thus save time. Our Listing Management features allow you to create and store saved replies and access them directly from your Inbox! Make sure to follow up on guest communication especially when they share details like plans to go to the Eiffel Tower on Monday and ask how was it in just a few clicks as soon as you can.

Communicating tasks online, but offline too! – Our offline task management which works with Asana, allows you to call for maintenance or cleaning in no time directly from the chat box. Now you can easily assign any issues on-the-go and take the meaning of pleasant guest stay to another dimension. (add gif)

24/7 availability- We’ve seen thousands of reservations, so we know the questions guests ask the most. Complete our initial FAQ questionnaire, and let us handle the rest. With a dedicated team of former hospitality and property managers, expert communication is guaranteed!

To sum it all Up

All in all, establishing effective communication is an ongoing process, which needs constant attention and sometimes requires really fast and adequate reactions. It is an inseparable part of the daily hard knock life of property professionals and you might want to see it featured in your preferred PMS platform.

Dealing with an overwhelming amount of messages on a daily basis is a reality in the property manager work life. Each day tons of messages coming from different vacation rental channels are wasting at least 4 hours of your daily workflow. Why wasting this time switching between accounts and apps when you can unify them into one and access all of your messages at any time and on any device?

The solution? The Unified Inbox combines the messages you receive across the various vacation rental channels and accounts you’re using, and also your emails.

A Unified Inbox is a lifesaver for every property manager. If you’re still not convinced about it, discover these 7 benefits of having and using a Unified Inbox for your vacation rental business:  

Communication threads neatly organized in one place

Access your entire communication history with your guests in one place. No matter how many channels you’re using, or how many accounts you have, the communication thread with each one of your guests will be neatly organized in one system and you’ll be able to reply to messages without having to leave one platform.

If you have a dedicated team of people responsible to answer your messages and queries, the Unified Inbox will help each one of your team members or you keep track of everything that has been sent from all of your accounts across different channels.

Effective time management

Every property manager will understand the struggle of trying to manage your time between the increasing amount of platforms. By having a unified inbox, you’ll free up valuable time from jumping from one platform to another.

You can even save more time by setting up messages templates, automating messages, and creating saved replies.

Improve the response rate and response time

Nowadays, customers expect to get a response to their questions instantly. Improving your response time and lowering your response rate must be a priority for your vacation rental business.

P.S. Airbnb rewards hosts who reply to their guests in under an hour. Your response rate can impact your position in the search results and thus you can get more bookings.

Stay on the right track

Each one of your team members, including you, will always know how to continue the conversation with each guest. How? Everyone can see who was the person that responded to the previous message and if there’s something specific about it, you can all leave each other internal notes to make the communication process even better.

Increased productivity

You and your team spend unnecessary time switching between platforms and this extra effort often leads to reduced productivity. By having all of your messages stored in one place, you can all benefit from eliminating this time-consuming repetitive task.

Moreover, you and your team can make better & informed decision thanks to the fact that all communications are being searchable and available in a single place. Being up-to-date with the latest communication history is vital so you and your team don’t get messages and answers mixed up.

Make every guest happy

When you’re using multiple vacation rental channels, messages often slip through the cracks. You know, neglecting your guests’ questions won’t make them happy. To make sure that each one of your guests has been taken care of, collect them in just one place.

Deliver a better, unified guest experience

Providing a unified experience for your guests is the new way of doing a vacation rental business right. By having a unified inbox, you can store and use guests’ information to offer a personalized response to every inquiry, no matter where the interaction takes place.

Seriously, what are you waiting for? If you don’t unify your inboxes now, then when?

It’s all about efficiency, reducing stress, saving time and efforts and improving your overall quality of work and life. At FantasticStay, we offer you the solution to your needs. If you want to learn more about our Unified Inbox or any other feature, sign up here to get a FREE demo. 

Amy has 8 units in the same building. She advertises each one of those units individually. That way Amy’s listings are being shown in the search results along with hundred others answering the needs of the most common travellers’ groups – 1 to 4 people. Amy, however, wants to expand her reach and she wants to be able to advertise all of her 8 units as one.

Being able to simultaneously advertise all of her units as one listing that can accommodate approximately 32 guests, will get Amy’s reservations from a very low-competition segment of the OTAs searches. There is a big difference in the search results when you’re looking for accommodation for 2 guests, comparing to the results you get when searching for accommodation for 32 guests (see the example below). But how can Amy do that?

The Smart Calendar Rules allows property managers to manage their listings availability, automatically, while targeting a larger audience.

One property, multiple listings

If you want to be able to cast your net wider, you can set up a Smart Calendar Rule and advertise multiple listings for the same property. As for example, Amy can advertise her 8 units in the following ways:

• 2 listings with 4 units – each one able to accommodate 16 guests
• 8 individual listings – accommodating from 1 to 4 guests
• One listing for all 8 units – accommodating 32 guests
• …and so on and so forth

Always in sync

To prevent the chance of double bookings, your calendars, pricing, and availability are always in sync. If someone books 1 individual listing for 2 guests, then the calendar for the big listing that can accommodate 32 guests instantly becomes unavailable. And in the best case scenario of someone booking the big listing, all listings of units that are included in the big one are immediately synced to unavailable.

The good news is that you can create as many rules as you like and increase your chance of getting more bookings.

The more the merrier

When Amy set up her Smart Calendar rules, she’ll get ahead of her competition as she’ll be able to reach more people and different audiences.

Take a look at the difference between searching for a room for 2 guests and searching for 4+ bedrooms for 16 guests:

Smart Calendar Rules benefits for property managers:

Visibility

As you can see on the screenshots above, there are far fewer listings in the results when you search for 8 bedrooms, comparing to 300+ listings when searching for 1 room only for 2 guests. By setting up different rules, you increase the opportunity your listings to be shown in more results and therefore reach more people and get more bookings.

Increase in revenue

Well, that’s a simple math. Of course, you’ll make more profit with a reservation for 32 guests. Having full flexibility over your listings and how you advertise them is a real win when it comes down to the money you’ll make.

Efficient management

Who doesn’t love automations? The Smart Calendar is fully automated and you don’t need to manually update your calendars each time a new reservation comes in. You have all of your reservations data searchable in one place, always synchronized.

How to use the Smart Calendar Rules

Thanks to the Smart Calendar Rules, you have direct control over how your listings are linked to each other and making sure that your calendars are blocked appropriately.

• Combo listings – the listing that includes all units
• Related listings – all the listings that form the combo listing (in our example, those are all 8 units)

To sum things up: The calendars are tied together with the Smart Calendar Rules, regardless of how you set them up. If the combo listing receives a new booking, the calendars of all related listings will get blocked right away, automatically, so it will be impossible to get a double booking. If you receive a new booking for any of the related listings, the combo listing will become unavailable to accept bookings, while all other related listings will still accept new reservations for the same dates.

The Smart Calendar Rules are the ultimate property management solution for a boost in reach, growth, and profit.