Bookings, Marketing, VA’s, and Landlords in the Short Term Rental Business Q&A
Robert Vocolla guest hosts the Q&A show with J today and they’re talking about some very important short term rental business questions. Find out about security processes, managing VA’s, marketing your business, getting out of problematic leases, and more.
Questions and Answers
- A question about processes around security technology
Rob uses a simple analog process to make sure his guests don’t run into issues with the security system in his units. He uses sticky labels on each panel that warns the guest not to tamper with it and has a basic template in Smartbnb that gets sent out that lets the guest know how to interact with the security system. This has drastically reduced the number of false alarms.
- I’ve got three VA’s covering 18 hours a day, seven days a week and they’re great at following SOPs but not so good at doing customer service work?
Hiring is always a major challenge, if you want to find someone that can handle managerial level tasks it’s going to take a lot of searching. You may have to review, hire, and fire a number of people before you will find that gem of a person that checks off all the boxes. For this particular caller, they have multiple units in multiple cities and that’s adding to the stress of working with his team.
A good rule of thumb is to be prepared to train someone for 30 hours for every hour a task would take you to do. A quick tip for your customer service manager is to look at what time of day your business is getting the most messages because that will inform what hours you should assign your team.
- What are the most important marketing KPIs to track?
There is a whole set of metrics around leads, around customer conversion, and average order and frequency. All of them should be measured and tracked and each one can have a compounding impact on the growth potential of your business.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of your marketing on Airbnb is about working with the algorithm correctly. Make sure you have the right pictures with good descriptions because your search position in the rankings will determine your success on that platform.
Tools like Smartbnb are crucial to understanding the most important metrics in your business. The only way to have metrics to look at and measure is to gather data.
- What is the difference between Basic and Pro in Lodgify and Smartbnb?
The biggest difference between the two is one uses and API to communicate with other apps and the other uses the older iCal method. Since the caller is using Smartbnb, they should just stick with basic because they already have a built in sync feature that makes Pro unnecessary.
- What are you guys doing to get more bookings from booking.com?
Getting guests on booking.com is similar to the other channels even if it feels like it’s more work. One of the secrets is to have every single field filled out for your listing and setting your prices correctly with Lodgify. Keep in mind that guests from booking.com may be more seasonal as well.
Mirror the same types of policies on booking.com that you have on other channels to keep everything consistently.
- How do you guys do your messaging for booking.com?