If you have a spare room, you can turn it into a vacation rental home and capitalize on tourists that need short-term accommodation in your area. It can become quite a good side gig continuously bringing you some cash. Who does not love extra money? Still, running a short-stay rental property is not without its pitfalls.
Things get worse when you have a dozen vacation rentals that need adequate management and promotion across such booking marketplaces as Airbnb. Listing and managing vacation rentals can be daunting and energy-draining because the to-do list of an ordinary Airbnb host is always long.
From ensuring swift replies to inquiries and keeping the availability calendar synced across all sales channels to dealing with guest reviews and arranging cleaning and upkeep with all the imaginable errands in between– a typical rental homeowner is overwhelmed with responsibilities.
To make the life of busy hosts easier, IT companies offer comprehensive vacation rental software solutions that perfectly take over repetitive, time-grabbing operations and help rental entrepreneurs maximize their Airbnb occupancy.
The Essence of Vacation Rental Software
Short-term rental management software is basically a computer program (or a mobile app, or both) that is capable of managing your holiday rentals, so that you become a more efficient host and offer your guests a better experience.
Such a tool comes with an array of useful features that help put the entire rental business on auto-pilot, avoid human-factor mistakes, and win more bookings on the platforms where you advertise your holiday property, for example, Airbnb or VRBO.
With that software at your disposal, you can easily manage your rental availability, automate guest communication, maintain an optimal rate for your property based on the demand, and track your business’s KPIs.
Must-Have Features of Vacation Rental Software
The purpose of vacation rental management software is to simplify the work of property hosts and managers. That is why such tools offer features to address the primary needs of industrious Airbnb homeowners. For instance, Hosty is loaded with the following set of functions to make your hospitality business a success:
- Channel manager – this tool helps to list and manage your properties throughout different booking brokerage websites, including Airbnb, Expedia, TripAdvisor, VRBO, and others.
- Availability synchronization – this is a smart calendar that automatically blocks your property from booking on other platforms once it is booked on a particular website.
- Guest communication – this tool helps you set up automatic replies to prospects and clients without your direct involvement. That way, you have peace of mind that the questions and inquiries of your clients will always be answered, even when you are offline.
- Centralized Inbox – this helps you control all your guest communications from a single location. Read more on https://www.hostyapp.com/airbnb-central-inbox/.
- Multiple accounts – no matter how many accounts you have on platforms like Airbnb, you can easily access and manage them all from one dashboard.
- Booking management – this module allows you to view information about all current bookings from one dashboard. You can also accept and reject reservation requests as well as modify confirmed bookings from a single window.
- Team coordination – it allows you to connect your housekeeping and maintenance team members to the software to automate task allocation.
- Payment processing – this function allows you to receive deposits and payments from your clients in a secure and timely manner.
- Website design – this option helps you create beautiful and inspiring landing pages with a bookable calendar and payment processing function to ensure direct and secure bookings outside third-party sales channels.
- Reports – it helps you keep tabs on your business performance and identify potential bottlenecks and room for improvement in your Airbnb strategy.
- Reviews – it saves you from wasting precious time on writing reviews of your guests.
- Mobile app – you can manage your entire short-rental business on the go with a tap of your finger.
The list of functions offered by advanced holiday rental software tools does not stop at this. Many vendors include Airbnb SEO, tax processing, and many other nifty functions in their products. But you must realize that all nice things do have their price. The more possibilities you want to see in your Airbnb management software, the higher cost you are expected to pay for such services.
Problems Vacation Rental Software Helps to Solve
- Time wasting. This sort of software helps you streamline and automate time-consuming daily tasks that are inevitable in the vacation rental business. Managing your property and interacting with customers requires too much time and effort, and if you are running multiple properties, the number of responsibilities only goes up. The majority of tedious, repetitive tasks of an Airbnb host can be automated thanks to the implementation of the right rental management software.
- Lack of understanding. The best holiday rental software products come with an analytics engine. You can generate insights on your business performance and view your booking quality in one dashboard. All achievements and inefficiencies are always at a glance to be used for data-driven decisions.
- Wrong bookings. Effective calendar synchronization gives you inner calmness that your guests will never place double bookings and reserve unavailable properties.
- Poor reputation. As your rental business receives a powerful dose of automation, you will no longer be late to confirm a reservation request, reply to inquiries, or spruce up your space before the next check-in – all these and many other things get automated with the properly chosen rental management software. As you become able to deliver a better guest experience, your reputation and rating on platforms like Airbnb get dramatically improved. That eventually translates into an improved booking occupancy rate and greater revenues.
The Price of Vacation Rental Management Software
Like everything in this life, the use of short-term rental management software comes with its cost. Vendors generally offer two pricing models for their services. The first is a subscription plan. You pay a certain amount that will depend on the number of properties you want to include in the software and the features you want to exploit. The subscription plan also often assumes that you must commit for a certain period, say, for 12 months.
Another price model for such software is a commission model. It means that you only pay a certain fee when you have a successful booking deal. Such an approach helps you avoid money wastes when your rental business is not going on very well, for instance, during low seasonality. Reputable vendors like Hosty always offer a free trial period without obligations to help you test their software and figure out whether it fits your business without any investments.
