Published on July 29th, 2020 | by Sunit Nandi

What is Vacation Rental Software – a short and informative guide

What is Vacation Rental Software?

This category of applications is created to facilitate short-term property management of popular booking platforms, like Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO, HomeAway, and other popular websites. Vacation rental software is available for desktop computers and mobile devices and has different functionality and subscription options.

The main goal of this software is to shorten the amount of time hosts spend on repetitive mundane tasks, which shouldn’t require active involvement and which can be automated. With the help of Airbnb management apps, hosts and managers can get more control over the routine processes, as well as improve transparency and effectiveness of their business.

What is Vacation Rental Software

What are the key benefits of using vacation rental software?

Automation saves time on daily tasks and allows managing more accounts and properties at the same time and thus results in additional business opportunities.

What can be automated with the help of short-term rental apps?

You can set up automated messaging, using templates, autoresponders, or delegating the entire task to your team.
You can inspire guests to write positive reviews by being proactive and sending your reviews first: the software can help you create and store templates to save time.
You can schedule cleaning, automatically inform your crew about the departure of the guest to make the communication process more straightforward, fast, and transparent.
You can manage your listings and automate pricing: it means the internal app algorithms will analyze competitors and suggest the appropriate pricing to stay on top, never miss a deal, and get more profit.
Property owners or managers can receive statistics and reports to calculate the income, taxes, and expenses and get a clear overview for your business.

You can improve, facilitate or automate a lot more tasks – most of the digital products for vacation rental management have customized set of features included in various packages. Some of them are paid, while other solutions are free: such software can be available on a web site or as a separate web or mobile app. You can select the necessary one depending on the number of properties you manage, your primary goals, and cost expectations.

What are the most wanted features of vacation rental software?

Automated price suggestions

Short-term rental apps implement artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and predict the average price fluctuations and suggest users a successful pricing strategy to follow. It’s up to the host, whether to use it or to reject it, but dynamic pricing is a key to success on vacation rental platforms: such listings are ranked higher. Sensitive and analytical auto-pricing provides a chance to create a well-thought-out market strategy and improve the booking rate without missing the revenue. It can be achieved by using the proper rates depending on the demand and market situation.

Simple communication with guests

Such a feature is also based on AI and machine learning: with the help of software, hosts and managers can generate automatic responses, create and save templates with addresses, step-by-step checkout procedures, answers to frequently asked questions, and a lot more. Moreover, automated communication improves the response rate: STR platforms take that into consideration and rate you as a reliable host while moving your listings up to the top of search results.

Creating a unified account for multiple accounts on various platforms

In case you manage multiple properties online, it may be tough to keep everything in mind and switch between accounts. With vacation rental software you can keep all your profiles and accounts in one app and deal with tasks from there: communication, booking calendar, delegation, notifications, and a lot more.

Analytics and reports

Many hosts have already experienced the convenience of quick access to financial statistics, reports, and analytics. It helps to receive actual and helpful information about business performance, income, losses, taxes, and unpredictable expenses. It allows better planning, analyzing rates, and getting the most of what short-term rental business can provide you with.

Automated communication with the team and subcontractors

No need to set reminders to manually contact the cleaning crew – you can set up automated messaging at the right moment, schedule their visits conveniently, and get the job done as fast as possible. It allows better planning and possibly better pricing from your cleaning providers.

To sum it all up

As you are up to selecting the top Airbnb vacation management provider, analyze the most popular offers on the market, compare the fees along with features, and read reviews.

Tags: guide, holiday, vacation rental

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.