VRM Intel Magazine Spring 2019

The Transformation of the Vacation Rental Industry

What’s Going On With Google

Revenue Management and Asset Management for Second Homes Safeguarding Rentals

from the Unexpected

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HOMEAWAY TRENDS REPORT: WHAT VRMS NEED TO KNOW IN 2019 98

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

Contents

42

On the Cover

32 HomeAway Trends Report: What VRMs Need to Know in 2019 37 The Transformation of the Vacation Rental Industry 49 What’s Going On With Google 60 Asset Management vs Property Management: The Lines are Blurring 64 Next-Level Revenue Management 76 Safeguarding Rentals From the Unexpected

Business 22 The Power of Giving: Coconut Condos 25 Coaching Soft Skills vs Training Hard Skills 29 Rethinking Communications for Smoother Operations and a Better Guest Experience 42 Who are We? VRMs are Operating on a Changed Playing Field 48 Google Adds Vacation Rentals to Hotel Search 66 How Company Culture Impacts Hospitality 84 Sykes Cottages Acquires Major Stake in Bachcare 10

86 Sea to Sky's Heidi Stuber Running for City Council 90 Inaugural Pioneer Award Recipients Honored in New Orleans

Marketing 19 Pairing Vacation Rentals and Experiences 55 Girl, Fix Your Website 57 Expanding the Radius of Your Brand 59 Guest-Centric Digital Strategies 62 So Much Data, So Little Time 68 Your Friends At The Beach: Direct Booking Case Study 70 How to Start a Podcast 72 Using Google Analytics for Greater Success

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

Secure access meets smart home automation.

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Contents Property Care

Technology

76 Bedbugs, Block Parties, and Broken Bones

64 Next-Level Revenue Management

89 Ensuring Subcontractors Meet Brand Standards

78 Is Your Guest Wi-Fi 5 Stars

Education 92 Scenes from the Vacation Rental Women’s Summit

80 Trust Accounting Fundamentals 83 Carolina Retreats Embraces Smart Home Technology

94 Calendar of Events

64 32

72 14

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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Dear Readers, First, thank you to all who attended and supported the first-ever Vacation Rental Women’s Summit in February, and special thanks to the Vacation Rental Management Association for joining us in sponsoring the conference in New Orleans. It was a truly special experience in many ways, but, to me, the most impactful was having the privilege of honoring three women who paved the way in the vacation rental industry with inaugural Pioneer Awards: Rae Sloane Cox, Bert Feinman, and Sheila Hodges. You can read more about this on page 90, and you can check out some photos from the summit on page 92.

The first quarter brought a lot of changes to the vacation rental industry. HomeAway rebranded VRBO.com, asking consumers to now pronounce the company name as “ver-boh” rather than by its acronym. Following its acquisition of HotelTonight last month, Airbnb confirmed that it invested in India’s OYO—a startup that manages budget hotels and other stays. Wyndham Destinations announced that it is looking for alternatives for Wyndham Vacation Rentals, and Google made a big splash with its public announcement that it is adding vacation rentals to its Hotel Search.

And the news isn’t slowing down. In the second quarter, we expect to hear about a major Gulf Coast acquisition by Vacasa, get more information about where Wyndham Vacation Rentals will land, see how Airbnb will add hotels to its marketplace, learn more about Google’s platform, and hopefully hear from Greater Sum Ventures about its plans for the technology rollup they’ve been working toward. I also believe we will see some policy shifts at Booking. com that will have a significant impact on vacation rental providers.

Business models are still up in the air, and consolidators and aggregators have yet to settle on monetization models and policies, trying to find ways to beat out the competition. For example, Airbnb stealthily added an exclusivity requirement to its Plus Program’s terms and conditions which reads: ”By applying to the Plus Program, you agree that, for as long as your Listing is still participating in the Plus Program, you will not use any online booking service or platform to book or promote this Plus Listing.”

VRM intel magazine Editor-in-Chief Amy Hinote Director of Design and Production

Donato Berbelja Copy Editor

Kelly Mutual Contributors Heather Bayer

Simon Lehmann

Susan Blizzard

Angela Leone

Jodi Bourne

Tony Melillo

Ali Cammelletti

Jennifer Perez

Michael Driedger

Vince Perez

Jeremiah Gall

Heather Richer

Mike Harrington

Betsy Taylor

Ann Marie Houlihan

Jinnie Templin

Vanessa Humes

Megan Ueland

So we expect rapid change to continue throughout 2019. This spring issue is full of articles that discuss the “why” behind industry dynamics and market changes. There is a lot of information in these pages, so I recommend taking some time on this one and sharing what you learn with your team. There are also several howto articles that are pretty creative. As we move forward in 2019, one of the things we will look for in this second quarter will be booking pace for the summer. Last year saw mixed results with some destinations, like the Florida panhandle, which was really struggling to fill in its peak season. Will we see a rebound, or more evidence of a change in consumer behavior? It will also be interesting to watch revenue managers in action during the high season and see how their activity will affect overall ADR and stay value. And now we have comparative data sources that enable us to see a much broader picture of what is going on in the industry across destinations.

1222 Chicago Avenue, Suite 604, Evanston, IL 60202

There are a lot of conferences this spring, so I look forward to seeing many of you over the next few weeks.

To subscribe to VRM Intel Magazine to request additional copies, contact info@vrmintel.com or go to www.vrmintel.com

Durk Johnson

Advertising Amy Hinote, amy.hinote@vrmintel.com

Address VRM Intel Magazine LLC

Thank you again for reading and hope to see you soon.

Sincerely,

Amy Hinote

Editor-in-Chief

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

© Copyright 2019 VRM Intel Magazine LLC. All rights reserved.

We cannot accept responsibility for any mistakes or misprints.

Reproduction in part or whole is strictly prohibited without written permission from the publisher. We cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs damaged in the post. Material sent on speculation, unless enclosed with a stamped addressed envelope, will not be returned to sender. VRM Intel is not responsible and will not be held liable for the opinions expressed by contributing authors. VRM Intel Magazine LLC reserve rights of ownership

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Increase Your Revenue

by Pairing Vacation Rentals and Experiences

T

he vacation rental market is crowded, and as a vacation rental property management company, distinguishing yourself from your competition requires a creative approach. Although you may be providing your guests with luxury finishes and world-class amenities, this is still not enough to truly stand out from the pack.

Today you have to transcend the norm by offering guests a full in-destination experience that goes beyond luxury accommodations and gives them an experience they’ll remember!

When you partner with Xplorie, you give your guests added value, and best of all, there’s no catch, trick, or hidden cost. We are the nation’s largest free-to-guest activity program, and we’ve been

Altering your business plan to pair rentals with experiences can give your property the edge you’re looking for.

The Benefits of Combining Vacation Rentals and Experiences Inspiring your guests with recommendations and ideas on the best your location has to offer can give your brand an edge and help you stand out from the crowd. Customer service is the key to building long-term relationships with guests, and helping your guests get the most out of their vacation is excellent customer service.

Developing Experience Packages Building effective experience packages for your guests requires a level of personalization. You’ll need to tailor your guests’ experiences to them. Of course you will often have attractions close by that everyone will want to see, but each guest is different.

Start by gathering information about your guests’ interests during the booking process and analyzing the data you collect through marketing efforts. The more you know early in the game, the more relevant and personalized your suggestions will be, and the better their experience will be.

To truly stand out in your market, you need to create best-in-class activity programs that not only offer value to your guests but also are easy to understand and manage.

Here at Xplorie, that’s exactly what we do for our property management clients. We build partnerships to provide them with free activity and experience programs that resonate. With Xplorie, your guests receive daily free activity and attraction programs every time they book a stay.

helping vacation property management companies grow their businesses for over 20 years. Our vacation specialist call center ensures there is zero work on your end, and your guests receive consistently awesome experiences.

The key lies in creating experiences that can move your guests emotionally and let them see the world in a different way. By going beyond providing luxury accommodations to position your vacation rental property management company as a trusted guide that will provide guests with experiences at a quality level that they won’t find elsewhere, you can help differentiate your business. At its heart, this is about working closely with your guests as cocreators of their experience by gathering information throughout the early stages of the process, from first contact through booking. Today, your guests are seeking out new experiences. Fulfill that need, and you will grow your business and define your brand.

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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VRMs Give Back The Power of Giving Back

By Angela Leone, CEO, Coconut Condos

Why Give?

Giving is what we’re called to do as humans: to use what we’ve been given to help others in need. Making giving a core part of our mission at Coconut Condos has made all the difference in terms of employee motivation and job satisfaction, our reputation in our community, and, most of all, knowing that what we’re doing day in and day out has more meaning beyond our daily grind.

At Coconut Condos, our business giving plan evolved over time to include three main tenets of giving. We started giving locally to our Habitat for Humanity chapter as a percentage of proceeds. But after a couple years of just writing checks at the end of the year, I realized there was more I wanted to do and began to strategically set up our plan to include local, national, and international giving.

Local Giving

A

milcar is a sweet, intelligent sixth grader who loves technology and math. He wants to be a dentist when he grows up and has dreams of visiting Mount Everest.

He lives in San Salvador, El Salvador, in one of the deadliest neighborhoods in the country, among the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. Amilcar’s father is a shoe repairman but doesn’t have much work. He walks Amilcar to school every day to make sure he is safe. Amilcar is one of the children that our company, Coconut Condos, sponsors in partnership with Compassion International. Our family had the opportunity to meet Amilcar this summer as part of Compassion’s custom visit program.

By sponsoring Amilcar through Compassion, he has access to his local Compassion center, which provides a safe haven from the deadly gangs. He receives after-school tutoring, a daily meal, home visits to ensure his family has enough food and resources, and workshop trainings to teach him functional skills to help him get a job. Compassion will help facilitate a path for Amilcar to higher education to help him break the cycle of poverty. This, to me, is the power of giving.

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

Local giving campaigns can be the easiest place to start because the needs are generally right in front of you. Look around your local community, and you’ll see needs. In Maui, we’ve found that homelessness and the cost of living go hand in hand, so we’ve chosen to focus on those issues in particular. These are some specific ways we’ve found to help our community:

 Food BankS We’ve partnered with the Maui Food Bank to donate food our guests leave. We leave a reusable bag and a sign with instructions on the property. Our inspectors bring nonperishable food back to the office and keep it in the Maui Food Bank bin in our warehouse, and the Maui Food Bank picks it up regularly.

 Homeless ShelterS Our staff serves monthly dinners at our local homeless shelter.

One of our team members picks up 16 pizzas and breadsticks, which we serve to the people at the shelter. We have arranged a discounted order with our local Pizza Hut.

 Habitat for Humanity We donate a percentage of our profits and used furniture to our local Habitat for Humanity chapter and recently participated in a build-a-thon for a local family.

 Linen Donations We keep a bin of our damaged and stained linens from which we give a monthly donation to the homeless through a group called A Cup of Cold Water. The group provides us with a quarterly count of our donated linens, and we’re able to share this number with our owners.

National Giving Once you’ve established a local giving plan, it’s time to look nationally. What are the needs in your country that you’re drawn to or passionate about?

The national organization we’ve partnered with is Dream Foundation (www.dreamfoundation.org); it’s similar to Make-AWish but for terminally ill adults wanting to take one last vacation with their family. It’s such an honor to be part of these Dreamers’ lives when their days on earth are numbered. We receive a request for a dream and then reach out to our owners for a condo donation.

Our team then finds out what the Dreamer is interested in doing here on Maui, and we contact fellow business owners to plan the trip of a lifetime. I require one of my staff members to personally meet each of the Dreamers so he or she has a personal connection here on Maui and because of the profound impact these meetings have had on each of us. We keep the donor information in a spreadsheet for easy tracking. We hang photos of our Dreamers on

canvas prints in the entrance to our office as a beautiful reminder of their lives and how they intersect with ours.

International Giving In his book, Start Something That Matters, Blake Mycoskie, founder of Toms Shoes, challenges businesses to consider what their One for One® is, to follow his business model that helps a person in need with every product purchased. In January 2017, Coconut Condos embarked on the international tenet of our giving plan with Compassion International. We committed to supporting one child in poverty for every property we manage. We currently sponsor 60 children in 24 countries. Each employee has six children whom they write to, and we have quarterly catered letter-writing parties following our staff meetings. We provide information in each vacation rental about the sponsored child so guests know that their stay is helping support a child in need; the information is also on the Mission page on our website. We have a world map hanging in our office with all our children’s photos pinned to their home country.

In the summer of 2017, my family and I had the opportunity to go to Ecuador and meet two of our Compassion families. After that amazing experience, we committed to meeting all our sponsored children. Last summer we traveled to El Salvador and Honduras to meet six of our sponsored children, including Amilcar. This summer we’ll be visiting ten children in Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. We’ve also committed to taking our staff on child visits, so this summer we’ll be taking our COO with us to Thailand.

Giving Challenge?

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we, as vacation rental managers and small business owners, could pledge to be world changers and make using our businesses as social enterprises a best practice? It is my hope and dream that this would become a growing movement in our profession and part of what we do as an industry. I encourage you to start with a commitment to one cause or organization in each of three areas: locally, nationally, and internationally. To get started, answer the following questions:

B C D E

Where is the need in your world?

What are you passionate about?

Where do need and passion meet?

What will you commit to?

I’d love to hear your stories. Please contact me if you have any questions or would like additional information on any of the organizations listed here. If you’d like to follow our travels to visit our sponsored children, follow me on Instagram at @msangieleone.

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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Why Coaching Soft Skills Is Different from Training Hard Skills

A

ccording to LinkedIn data, 57 percent of senior leaders feel soft skills are more important than hard skills.

Interviewing candidates on hard skills is easy, whereas interviewing on soft skills requires questions prompting candidates to give examples of how they’ve applied such skills.

It is fairly simple to train a newly hired candidate on hard skills, which are eminently teachable and easy to quantify. For example, a trainer shows the new employee how to navigate technology platforms such as the property management system, company website, lead management system, and phone system. The new employee then navigates the systems as the trainer watches and assists when the new hire gets hung up on the next step. Sometimes there are short quizzes at the end of the day to test the employee’s knowledge on hard skills as well as documents to reference during the first few months until system navigation becomes second nature. I recommend training on hard skills first, so the new employees feel confident in their day-to-day routines, and then introducing soft skills.

Soft skills are people skills or interpersonal skills.

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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I am a fan of relationship-building skills focused on empathy, compassion, personal connection, and drawing a visual picture to emotionally connect experiences. I have found the best way to build these skills is to dig deep into their meanings and how to communicate them. Reading articles or watching videos as a baseline to assist with such skills is helpful. Listening to company sales and guest service call recordings and viewing email and text communications can help new employees learn how these skills are being practiced. And these internal examples are beneficial when identifying opportunities to communicate in a way that makes the guest feel understood, supported, and excited.

Empathy One of the most challenging soft skills to coach is empathy. Some data say you either are born with it or you are not. We know that the prefrontal cortex in the brain houses the ability to have empathy, and that can be compromised in many ways, such as head injuries, many years of drug and alcohol addiction, lead poisoning, and incarceration. With that said, I watched an employee develop empathy over a two-year process with consistent coaching as well as breaking down personal barriers and experiencing a difficult life experience. After all, how do we know how to empathize if we have never experienced pain or grief ? These soft skills do not appear overnight; they take time and patience to develop.

I also recommend not mixing soft skills coaching with hard skills or human resources topics. Soft skills take real focus and processing. When they are mixed with other areas, the content can get lost and not be as effective.

Collaboration and Adaptability Collaboration and adaptability are other sought-after soft skills.

We need to be able to pull from others’ strengths and not assume we have all the answers. This plays into teamwork and respect for the knowledge others have that we may not. Adaptability complements collaboration. Our world is constantly changing with the amount of technology we rely on and its continual upgrades. To keep up in business we have to adapt and be open to change; if we aren’t uncomfortable, we aren’t growing.

Time Management Finally, I will discuss the skills involved in time management. I have yet to coach a leader who hasn’t asked for tools on this subject.

The industry of hospitality fosters a heavy workload, and the new day and age of quick responses is at an all-time high. I watch people suffer with anxiety from such pressure, and I find myself talking a good amount about being in the moment to relieve the anxiety and be present with one’s self as well as relationships. It is up to us to manage our time so we don’t find ourselves spinning because we can’t live up to the quick-response world. We need to create healthy boundaries so we can be present with our relationships.

Hard Skills

Out of 25 hard skills that companies are most looking for, a few of my favorites that are most applicable to the hospitality industry include people management, that is, the idea of coaching and em26

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

powering instead of commanding and controlling; sales leadership, which seems to be more challenging to find these days; and customer service system management.

One unsavory tweet can ruin your business, so how will you keep your company on top of service levels? These three areas speak to understanding trust-building, both internally and externally, and how our world is different from when we were being groomed in business more than 20 years ago.

Coaching Soft Skills Trainingindustry.com pointed out in January of 2019 that “not only does soft skills training help when it comes to succession planning, but it also improves motivation across the entire organization and creates a more harmonized, cooperative working environment.”

They recommend focusing on the following topics: communication, leadership, time-management, problem-solving skills, teamwork, and change management. It is beneficial to offer such training to every employee in the company.

Different types of situational learning can assist with growing soft skills.

One is having a mentor in the company.

The mentor can help guide and support new employees until they feel confident in specific skills. This also helps build skills in negotiating time availability and commitment for each person involved as well as the overall feeling of support in a new working environment. Other companies offer apprenticeships with mentors and good teachers. This process assists with internal company dynamics of working with peers who are open to learning interpersonal skills.

Another great team-building method to assist with soft skills is offering group activities. This can look like a leadership development program in which you provide blended learning with classroom topics, reading, and homework, followed by ongoing group activity assignments. Each leader can present to the group and receive an evaluation by peers and instructors. Peer evaluation can speak to developing transparency as well as vulnerability in an organization. Bringing in situational learning opportunities will help make soft skills feel easy to learn and not as challenging as some may perceive.

“

“

According to LinkedIn, the most desirable soft skills for employees in 2019 are creativity, persuasion, and collaboration. Creativity assists in conceiving solutions. We know solution-based thinking is always valued in any company. Persuasion speaks to sales skills and getting people excited about a product.

They aren’t called soft skills; they are called courage-building skills.

—Brené Brown

Ali Cammelletti of Cammelletti Consulting brings over 30 years of experience in the hospitality industry.

Cammelletti has served in many capacities within the industry, from working as a frontline restaurant and lodging employee to building and owning a successful event-planning business and running a consulting company. She currently coaches and trains frontline staff as well as managers in growing their leadership skills.

Visit www.cammelletticonsulting.com for more details.

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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Rethinking Communication for

Smoother Operations and a Better Guest Experience W

By Jeremiah Gall

i th the push for quality and rising expectations of property owners and guests, vacation rental managers are working harder than ever. The job requires managing not only properties but also these elevated expectations. Managers who rethink the way they communicate with their field staff and guests will be able to take on more work, elevate their brand, and provide memorable guest experiences.

Managing service expectations is a demanding task for vacation rental property managers. As noted in HomeAway’s 2019 U.S. Vacation Rental Trends Report, 33 percent of vacation rental managers feel that managing property operations to meet guest expectations is their biggest challenge. This stems from the fact that vacation properties are larger and more unique than those in other hospitality verticals, which creates logistical risks and increases the chance of error.

As we all know, generating rental income in the vacation rental industry is a multidisciplinary endeavor. Growing a rental business requires targeted marketing to attract guests and organized operations to deliver an excellent rental experience.

Internal Workflows and Communication

Vacation rental management requires fulfilling two main objectives: protection and maintenance of the assets, and generating rental income.

The job of property management is a series of operational tasks to ensure the achievement of these objectives: the properties are well-maintained, guest-ready, and on-brand, and the needs of guests are met.

These are not the guests of yesteryear who happily brought their own sheets and toiletries for the week. Rather, these guests view vacation rentals as interchangeable with hotels and have high expectations for what the property looks like, its level of cleanliness, and the amenities included. Similarly, guests expect concierge services and speedy resolution for any issues that occur. Success means meeting this growing operational burden and effectively communicating a high level of service to guests and owners. This is the difference between a two-star review and a glowing recommendation and repeat rentals.

So how can managers communicate effectively with field staff and guests for smoother operations and fewer guest issues?

First, let’s walk through the internal communication flow among staff and service partners. Then, we’ll turn our attention to in-stay guest communication.

Optimizing the workflow starts with clearly defining tasks and communicating assignments in advance. With many moving pieces and a staffing model that’s typically filled with a mix of seasonal and contracted service partners, communicating assignments is a challenge. This often means that the housekeeping schedule is not set until right before a busy weekend turnover, and in many cases, it’s communicated to the team the morning the work needs to get done. By scheduling in advance, team members can accept and confirm that they received their assignments. Your team will be prepared for their work, which is particularly important for service partners and contract cleaners. Leveraging a process for staff to accept or decline an assignment helps ensure that a cleaning doesn’t fall through the cracks and positions the manager to communicate any last-minute adjustments.

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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After training personnel to the manager’s quality and brand standards, the manager needs to consider the context and urgency of the task. Is this a back-to-back departure/arrival where the unit needs to be prepped for children or an early check-in? Is an owner coming to the property that requires your team to rehang that offbrand painting that is usually kept in the basement or owner’s closet? Did staff confirm that the tricky skylight is functioning and that the remotes are placed next to the correct TVs? Although these may seem like small details, they make all the difference—particularly because vacation rental guests are more fluidly switching between rentals and hotels (these issues don’t arise in a hotel room).

Communicating exactly what needs to be done for each property becomes more complex when the requests become personalized.

The uniqueness of each task exponentially increases, as does the logistical risk. Vacation rental managers can create an environment for success by ensuring that every team member knows what needs to be done with every property task.

Investing in getting the work done right, and on-brand, is what differentiates the best property managers in the industry.

dominate messaging method, which will lead to faster resolution times and happier guests.

“

“

With property care assignments scheduled, the manager now needs to communicate exactly what needs to be done. Sounds simple, right? Anyone who’s managed multiple properties is keenly aware that this isn’t a walk in the park.

Guests are not looking for a pen pal on vacation, so communication with the guest should be focused on actionable tasks.

Owner Relations: More than Money, It’s about the Work

Don’t overlook the changing dynamics that are coming to owner relations. Historically, managers have handled owner relations through monthly account statements and direct outreach. Many companies, such as InvitedHome, Exclusive Stays, and Coastal Home and Villa, have put a significant premium on quality home care and asset protection services. Communicating with status reports and results from preventative maintenance adds an additional layer of professionalism and eliminates surprises. Establishing a pattern of detailed information sharing strengthens the relationship with the owner and builds trust in the manager’s ability to care for the property.

This is the reality of property management: the best plans will need adjusting. As work progresses through the day, new issues are reported, and new service requests are received. Active status updates are needed to make these adjustments. Take stock of your property operations workflows, and consider these status updates as part of the team communication.

Very simply, the future of property management is one with deeper service engagement driven by deeper technology. Tying guest communications to your internal operations platform will enable managers to create automatic service requests from a guest interaction. This will create massive efficiencies for property managers, eliminate manual data entry, and close gaps in your team’s communication.

Guest Communication Experience In-Property

Takeaways

We all know the importance of guest communication, from the reservation confirmation to pre-arrival messages and post-stay engagement. In-stay communication has typically been reactionary— leave the guest alone, and be ready to respond as needed.

In an industry with rising guest expectations and heavier pressure on property operations, it’s now of utmost importance to adopt better processes to communicate with staff and guests.

Proactive outreach to guests during their stay not only demonstrates a level of care and attention but also helps the property manager get in front of potential issues. This is particularly relevant for vacation rentals, where the guest is often surrounded by unfamiliar appliances, HVAC systems, and entertainment and smarthome devices. Even if there are no issues, chances are high that a simple question-and-answer conversation could improve the instay experience. Additionally, a lack of reported issues provides a good record for the property manager to use when disputing any chargebacks or end-of-the-trip refund requests.

 Rethink the way you facilitate your team communication

That is no longer the case—the expectation is now proactive engagement during the stay.

When there is a concierge or service request, communicating resolution time or task updates back to the guest helps manage expectations. Guests are not looking for a pen pal on vacation, so communication with the guest should be focused on actionable tasks, which is why it’s important that messages are tightly tied with operational activity.

A timely message the day after check-in will be standard operating procedure across all hospitality verticals by the end of 2019.

Similarly, expect new systems to communicate automatic updates of each service request, making it easier to keep the client informed of the work’s progress. Deep machine learning will drive the pre30

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

What can you do today to build better processes for your vacation rental company?

Communication goes well beyond the emails and messages you exchange with your team. Organized communication includes the flow of scheduling and assignments, each interaction of property care, and the constant stream of updates between service partners and supervisors.

 Proactively engage with your guests to better meet expectations Guests will have a better experience at your property when you stay ahead of potential issues. Smart communication and service updates will help keep your guests happy and drastically reduce the chance of negative reviews and refunds.

Jeremiah Gall is a serial entrepreneur and vacation rental market veteran with a history of delivering great products to rental managers.

Jeremy cofounded FlipKey.com in 2006, which grew into one of the largest vacation rental marketplaces in the world and was acquired by TripAdvisor in 2013. Jeremy cofounded Breezeway in 2016, which provides intelligent software to help property managers automate their property care and maintenance programs and deliver the type of quality experiences that guests and owners demand.

BUSINESS CONSULTING | ACCOUNTING SERVICES | BUY / SELL ADVISORY SERVICES

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Ben Edwards, President WeatherbyConsulting.com

Ben@WeatherbyConsulting.com

(888) 304-1405 VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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HomeAway Software Trends Report Reveals What Vacation Rental Managers

Need to Know in 2019

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

O

ver the past two years, the vacation rental industry has continued to evolve rapidly. HomeAway Software, a leader in the industry, recently published its 2019 US Vacation Rental Trends Report providing new insight into the state of the market. According to Ryan Hutchings, general manager of HomeAway Software, “As vacation rentals continue to go more and more mainstream and competition increases with hotels, meeting growing traveler expectations will be the name of the game.”

The vacation rental industry is steadily growing. US revenue hit over $13 billion in 2018 with a projected annual growth rate of 7.2 percent.1 The latest data from HomeAway Software indicates that property managers are feeling optimistic. In fact, over 80 percent of respondents felt “extremely positive” or “very positive” about their company’s overall business outlook in 2019.2 Five major themes emerged, ranging from building trust to incorporating emerging technologies. HomeAway Software talked to its partners about cost-effective ways to fulfill traveler expectations in 2019.

Instilling trust remains a priority Building traveler trust has never been more important. In the vacation rental business, that means consistency, credibility, and safe transaction processing. Overwhelmingly, property managers said that websites needed to incorporate more advanced trust signals.

Properly CEO, Alex Nigg, elaborates: “Trust is the biggest issue for the vacation rental industry right now. Travelers feel like they never know what they’re going to get when they stay in a vacation rental.”

Accurate information builds trust, encourages repeat bookings, and saves costs by reducing the number of customer contacts.

In addition to the appearance and features of the property, Paul Hanak, director of digital marketing at ICND, says that your “About Us” page is a great place to use more trust signals: “Team photos, smiling faces, guest reviews, and community involvement are all great examples to instill trust in your visitors.”

Chris Carnicelli, CEO of Generali Global Assistance, shared a 2018 study revealing the top three decision-making factors for where US travelers will stay: location (63 percent), value (57 percent), and online reviews (33 percent).3 HomeAway also cites data from a 2018 survey showing that going from zero reviews to just one review can increase conversion by 40 percent.

Share experiences and in-destination solutions to delight guests Vacation rentals have a real opportunity to capture experience-focused travelers, and “content is king” still rings true. According to Peter Scott, president of Bluetent, it’s a good idea to “Expand your strategy to include informational content based on search queries for activities, events, and things to do in your area.” By leveraging your local expertise, you can grow your brand and accelerate website traffic.

However, websites aren’t the only opportunity to highlight the experiential elements of your property offerings. A recent Forbes survey found that more than 40 percent of people under 33 prioritize “Instagrammability” when choosing their next holiday spot.4 That means property managers should remember to market the destination and surrounding areas on social media just as much as the property itself.

While pre-trip experiential marketing is paramount for drawing in new customers, delivering on quality experiences post-booking is equally important. As Scott explains, “With higher expectations to vacation like a local, the experience is just as important as the inventory, if not more important.”

Put traveler safety first, from safe stays to safe transactions When asked what safety amenities were “must haves” in vacation rentals, 58 percent of US travelers selected smoke detectors, 44 percent selected fire extinguishers, and 42 percent selected carbon monoxide detectors.3

Travelers need reassurance that vacation rentals are properly equipped to keep guests safe, and we can expect to see these amenities become greater factors in booking decisions in 2019. It is important to make sure things like fire extinguishers are kept near where they are needed, that smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are in good working order, and that guests are clearly informed about what safety amenities are and how to use them.

Data protection remains top of mind for customers. With big players like Facebook, Google, and Amazon making headlines over privacy concerns, it’s no wonder data concerns are playing a greater role in purchasing decisions. Travelers need reassurance that data provided in the booking process and beyond will be respected and protected. In a Hubspot survey, 82 percent of respondents said they will leave a website if it is not secure.”5

While many online travel agencies have already taken pains to ensure compliance, it’s up to property managers to keep their own websites up to snuff. Partner with web experts who prioritize safety and security to protect traveler data, and highlight your commitment to security with certified badges and transparent policies.

Simplifying operations continues to drive efficiency A recent survey from Breezeway found that 33 percent of US property managers believe that managing property operations is their biggest challenge.6 Jeremiah Gall, founder and CEO of Breezeway, explains, “Property maintenance and care requires a level of detail that puts an immense amount of stress on property operations, and managers will need to adopt intelligent technology to maintain growth.”

Yan Zang, owner at EZ Inspections, says that housekeeping is a good example of how automation can help streamline operations.

“Technology can be leveraged to auto-create cleaning and inspection jobs based on checkout schedule, auto-assign specific cleaners and inspectors based on the property location, and even notify front and back offices when cleaning and inspections are complete via mobile apps.”

Breezeway’s Jeremiah Gall highlights the development of data-driven tools like chatbots and workflows as well as the importance of building operational programs that deliver on the brand promise. That promise could be luxury, accessibility, or a multitude of brand attributes: “Brand standards–—a comprehensive playbook that decides how all small details should be handled—need to be leveraged by staff and service partners to ensure consistency. Detailed property care programs will be critical as private accommodations and vacation rentals enter the next phase of maturity.”

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Incorporate emerging technology for a competitive edge According to Richard Lang, vice president of sales at Dormakaba, “As consumers increasingly rely on smart-home technology, they will seek the same comfort and convenience when they travel.” That means technology will become a bigger factor for travelers when booking.

Today’s market has plenty of solutions designed to help property managers outfit their properties with the latest and greatest in smart-home technology. Property managers who prioritize smarthome amenities should highlight these benefits in their marketing and consider increasing rates accordingly.

HomeAway Software expects mobile apps and voice-based searches to significantly accelerate in 2019 and beyond. Bluetent’s Scott notes that “Voice queries are the future of guest experience and search engine optimization strategies. With voice assistance, guests can receive instant answers about vacation rentals—everything from check-in/out instructions to FAQs and information on how to contact the property manager.”

According to Deloitte, integrating immersive technologies like virtual and augmented reality are about to become the new gold standard for shopping. In fact, a study by Google found that business listings with a virtual tour generated twice as much interest online. Plus, over half of respondents (67 percent) say they want more businesses to use this modern marketing material.8

The vacation rental industry is taking note. In 2018, HomeAway announced a large investment in virtual experiences. “The barriers to entry for virtual technology have never been lower,” says Ben James, senior product manager at HomeAway. “Given that each one of our vacation rentals is unique, being able to walk through a property before booking helps travelers make informed decisions."

Conclusion As vacation rentals reach a wider audience, rising traveler expectations are inevitable. Forward-thinking property managers are already starting to reap the rewards. Three out of four HomeAway Software customers grew their revenue over the past 24 months, and the company expects that number to rise in 2019.

With an in-depth understanding of the industry and recommendations from some of the top software partners in the industry, HomeAway Software’s 2019 US Vacation Rental Trends Report gives new insight for the road ahead. By taking steps to establish trust, prioritize experiences, promote safety, operate efficiently, and adopt new technology, property managers have a real opportunity to both meet and exceed expectations.

Hutchings says that 2019 offers property managers a chance to provide unforgettable experiences: “At HomeAway Software, we see the proof every day that vacation rentals have the ability to deliver unique, personal travel experiences that hotels and other traditional forms of lodging just can’t match.”

RESOURCES: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Statista, “Vacation Rentals - Highlights, U.S. Region,” 2018

TechValidate, Survey of HomeAway Software Customers, 224 respondents, Sept. 2018 “HomeAway U.S. Traveler Amenity Collections Survey 2018”

Andrew Arnold, “Here’s How Much Instagram Likes Influence Millennials’ Choice of Travel Destinations,” Forbes, Jan. 2018

“Is Your Website Secure?” Hubspot, 2017 Breezeway 2018 Survey

Deloitte, “Immersive Technology No Longer in the Future, It’s Here Now for Retailers,” (May 3, 2017)

Viz360, “360-Degree Photos and Virtual Tours are Worth, Says Google Stats,” 2018

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

Combining deep property data with robust field management, Breezeway’s intelligent platform gives property managers the most comprehensive toolset to ensure every cleaning, maintenance and inspection task is done right. Learn more at breezeway.io.

Schedule and Track Tasks to Keep Teams Organized

Leverage Mobile Apps with Offline Syncing so Reps Can Work Effectively

Verify Work with Photos and Custom Requirements per Unit

Share Tasks and Coordinate with External Service Partners

Capture and Leverage Property Data to Drive Predictive Tasks

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

The transformation of today’s vacation rental industry

What is going on out there?

By Simon Lehmann

I

f you can keep track of everything that is happening in our fast-transforming vacation rental industry, then you are a genius.

Let’s face it, for all of us in the industry, staying abreast of all the changes and keeping current with innovation and technology solutions entering the ecosystem has become a huge challenge. It is a good challenge to have, but a challenge nonetheless.

The big question for us to ask ourselves is whether we even know anymore how to differentiate our product from all the other different hospitality products out there. Are we still confident about what makes vacation rentals unique and what sets our offering apart from other lodging options?

Concurrent with all the wider industry transformations, property managers still need to run property management businesses. We are challenged daily to deliver the best possible guest experience and, at the same time, to look after our hosts and owners by ensuring we deliver the best possible service and returns.

Outside of individual property management businesses, looking at the wider picture, we are being confronted with a convergence in hospitality. All products have become one. The OTAs have mastered the distribution of our products, and consumers can choose, at any time, the kind of accommodation they want, expecting to book it instantly.

Along with the challenge of convergence, the industry is facing margin compression and increased competition. For property managers, it is getting harder and harder to make a reasonable margin.

Although we are trying to find solutions and remedies for our challenges, we are increasingly exposed to more complex circumstances, requiring us to make choices and decisions that are not part of our core business.

However, to succeed, it is vital that we keep in mind what our core business is. Our core business is to deliver the best possible guest experience and to provide exceptional service for our owners. Our business rests on making sure that the guests coming into our homes have the time of their lives and enjoy their holiday or business trip with the least amount of friction.

Our business also depends on ensuring that our owners and hosts are satisfied with the services we provide, that their properties are

being looked after, that occupancy is at its maximum, and that the delivered rent is the best achievable.

While not forgoing our core business, we are also challenged by increased distribution costs and have become more and more dependent on third-party channels for leads. At the same time, the brand equity we once built is diminishing. Repeat customers are VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

37

slowing down; booking windows are getting shorter; and our guests are demanding more choices, greater freedom, and better value for their money. These are tough realities to accept, but accept them we must.

at ease, knowing everything is okay with the property?

nesses barely have the time to come up for air, let alone think strategically about what is next on the horizon or how to improve their business by making things easier for everybody involved.

We are all consumers; we all want choice and we all want convenience. Home automation, a seamless booking process, and, above all, free choice can deliver the right results for the guest and host of tomorrow.

Being faced with operational issues on a daily basis and being pressured to deliver a superb guest experience, while also making sure your owners are happy, means vacation rental management busi-

Perhaps it’s time for a collective step back and some reflection on the questions around what is happening in the industry—what is now expected of us, and what can we do in the professional vacation rental property management industry to ease our worries and make improvements that are not just knee-jerk reactions?

There are, of course, many solutions out there to support the transformation of a property management business. But we do need to be incredibly smart about our choices.

Our first priority must be to create the best possible hospitality experience for our guests—making sure that everything, from searching to booking to paying and having a great time while enjoying a vacation rental, is as seamless as possible.

This we can do. We are professionals, and we know exactly what our guests want and how we can make their stay an incredible and unforgettable experience.

It’s time to stop talking about blunt knives and insufficient basic accoutrements while staying away from home. (Stay a night or two in one of your own properties, and you will quickly understand what needs improvement.)

Whether we like it or not, or whether we think this is important or not, every property manager needs to master these basics and improve at communicating our value proposition. There is still a massive pool of potential customers who have never stayed in a rental, who are used to the conveniences of hotels, and who we could potentially convert to our offering.

Besides investing in branding on the property level and making sure to have the right mix of distribution channels, today’s property manager needs to think about the future.

What is the next opportunity to make choosing a vacation rental an even better experience for the guest, as well as putting our hosts 38

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

From both an industry perspective and an individual business perspective, the next big thing to transform our offering is home automation. Being able to deliver the very best experience to our guests when they stay in our properties is the core solution of home automation.

Automated locks are a small start. Not everybody wants to be greeted by the host and have their ears chewed off about the latest fishing trip they went on! Many guests just want to get into their properties, relax, and make them their own. Aside from locks, home automation offers much more opportunity for transformation.

Although as an industry we are facing massive challenges to maintain our margins and are under high expectations to deliver bestin-class products to our stakeholders, we are also under the pressure of operational and distribution costs that are killing us.

It is imperative that we look for alternatives for maintenance of our operational profitability as well as make sure our guests are satisfied and our hosts are getting maximum occupancy.

Adaptation to future technologies will enable us to circumvent many of these real and present challenges. However, we need to be ready for this transformation and be open to the opportunity of being the first adopters. But if we do, home automation will be transformative both at an industry level and at an individual operational level.

Applying smart home technology will enable forward-thinking property managers to handle all processes around each property simultaneously. This will inevitably result in a better guest experience, lower operating costs, and more data to run your business even more efficiently. And this will lead to better and more profitable businesses.

Simon is the cofounder and CEO of AJL Consulting LLC. AJL is a boutique consultancy that specializes in the international private accommodation and vacation rental industry, working with property managers, technology providers, start-ups, and other businesses within the space. Simon is also a regular speaker at industry conferences and sits on the advisory board of various vacation rental and travel industry organizations. www.ajl-consulting.com

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Who Are We? The scope of the vacation rental industry has broadened, forever changing the playing field for property managers

By Amy Hinote

R

ecent articles about the vacation rental industry have used descriptors such as “fast-changing,” “dynamic,” and “rapidly-evolving.” It is easy to get overwhelmed with an industry that appears to be in chaos. For thousands of vacation rental managers (VRMs), keeping up with new technology options, business model changes at OTAs, emerging competition, and changing guest expectations is beginning to seem impossible. What’s more, if it is this difficult for professional managers, how must homeowners feel?

Increased Circumference of the Category

Industry analysts point to fragmentation, lack of standardization, and legacy technology as the reasons for the confusion, but there is more to it. The playing field is changing right before the industry’s eyes, and VRMs are finding themselves navigating a new world of private accommodations.

Airbnb entered the scene in 2009–2010, providing a marketplace for shared spaces and creating a platform for residents to rent out rooms in their homes as a way to make extra income. Consequently, the short-term rental category slowly grew to include shared spaces, urban apartments, and residential homes.

If it seems like the industry is getting more complex, that is because it is.

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In the early days of the industry, consumers knew short-term rentals as vacation home accommodations in leisure destinations. In most cases, these rentals were privately owned properties in which no one was a primary resident.

The category was already diverse, including private homes, condos, cabins, and townhouses; and vacation rental reservation agents and marketers worked hard to educate and define the differences in property types and manage guest expectations.

The mouthful term alternative accommodations began circulating as an attempt to lump all these short-term rental options into one category differentiated only from hotels. As a result, consumers—as they always do—found an easier way to define the broader category activity as simply staying in an Airbnb. In a similar way, consumers used Uber as a verb, calling ride sharing activity taking an Uber, whether or not they were using Uber, Lyft, or another service.

Phocuswright introduced an even broader definition of the category with its 2017 study, “A Market Transformed: Private Accommodation in the U.S.,” which redefined the category private accommodations “as ‘home­like’ accommodation made available to rent on a short-term basis for travelers.”

Category Definitions

Later in 2017, Phocuswright’s European analysis included the following lodging types under private accommodation (“Private Accommodation in Europe: 2010–2020,” Phocuswright 2017):  Home and flats/apartments

 Shared space (renting a room in someone's home)  Holiday park accommodation

 Timeshares where the inventory is entered into the rental pool  Specialty lodging types (such as villas, chalets, and castles)

Consequences of Broadening the Category The mass grouping of property types had a significant effect on the industry’s trajectory, creating further fragmentation among rental suppliers, propping up revenue projections for startups seeking investment, and creating confusion with municipalities over how to regulate this evolving sector.

Second Home Owners, Primary Residents, and Residential Landlords

Private Accommodation An umbrella term encompassing all forms of rentals, including traditional vacation rentals (homes, condos, cabins, etc.), urban apartments and homes, and shared space rentals. Private accommodation includes the renting of second homes (typically associated with vacation rentals) as well as primary residences to travelers on a shortterm basis.

Shared Space A room or space within a home made available for rent.

Vacation Rentals A subset of private accommodation that includes the renting of secondary residences to travelers, typically in leisure destinations for vacation travel. Vacation rentals include homes, condos, cabins, villas and timeshares when timeshare exchanges, vacation ownership, fractionals and other forms of exchanges are excluded, except when that inventory is made available in the rental pool and money changes hands in a rental transaction.

Source: “A Market Transformed: Private Accommodation in the U.S.,” Phocuswright

It is difficult to understate the changes to the industry that have resulted from grouping second home owners and primary residents into the same category, largely because the motivations for renting differ between the two supplier segments.

Second-home owners are motivated by the following:

1. Realizing an appreciation in the value of the home as an asset

2. Maintaining the property as a vacation home for personal use 3. Maximizing rental income

In contrast, primary residents typically rent part of their home for extra income, for social interaction, or during area events, such as festivals, conventions, sporting events, or concerts. In many cases, primary residents who rent their homes are not home owners themselves but are long-term renters with little concern for the long-term value of their property, neighborhood, or destination.

Additionally, most primary-resident renters live in residential locations—in contrast to leisure destinations in which vacation rentals are commonplace.

To add even more complexity, the income that Airbnb provided was attractive to residential landlords who found they could often make more from short-term rental activity than by renting to longterm tenants.

New Regulations and Confusion among City Officials Adding these new private accommodations in residential neighborhoods, apartment complexes, and communities in which people live full-time caused disruption to the entire industry.

Full-time residents were uncomfortable with having an influx of short-term renters in and out of the homes in their neighborhoods and apartment complexes. Security concerns arose, and noise, trash, and parking complaints from full-time residents began to flood the inboxes and phone lines of city officials.

In addition, with workers migrating to city centers, affordable housing in premium neighborhoods was already an ongoing problem for municipal officials. And the hotel industry began to see travelers opt to stay in Airbnbs instead of in expensive city hotels.

In 2016, the American Hotel and Lodging Association initiated a campaign to take on the short-term rental industry, saying, “We support the rights of property owners to occasionally rent out a VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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room or their home, but commercial operators within the shortterm rental industry should not be allowed to operate outside of the law.”

The convergence of voter complaints, lack of affordable housing, and a powerful hotel lobbying effort brought forward a popular and seemingly easy solution: Ban short-term rentals in cities.

Airbnb brought these short-term rentals into residential neighborhoods with its marketplace, and now it had an obligation—and need, to ensure its future viability—to work with municipalities to make them legal.

Airbnb began investing in working with city officials and found an easy way to work with them by proposing that—if a primary resident occupied the home—then rental activity should be legal.

This alternative gained steam because it eliminated “illegal hotels” (aka whole-home short-term rentals) and assured neighbors that the primary resident would be there to ensure that short-term guests acted appropriately. Adding friction in the private accommodation industry, Airbnb supported regulations that limited rental activity in nonowner-occupied homes to stays over 30 days.

At first, the traditional vacation rental industry was largely unaware of and unengaged with Airbnb’s battles in city centers.

Airbnb was only beginning to catch on as a distribution channel for traditional leisure destinations, and no one believed that traditional vacation rental markets would see any regulations that would limit rental activity in destinations that relied on revenue from rental tourism.

Few saw the storm coming.

Simultaneously, as baby boomers hit retirement, many gravitated to the leisure destinations they once enjoyed for vacation to establish permanent residences. Once they were there, these retirees wanted to shut the door behind them.

As the contagion of short-term rental regulations spread, these residents discovered a trend toward banning—or limiting—shortterm rental activity and became emboldened to complain to city council members, inundating these officials with calls complaining about parties, excess trash, and parking problems they believed were caused by short-term renters. There was little data from police reports to back up their complaints, but, in leisure destinations that have few full-time residents (aka voters), city officials were unaccustomed to the trouble and had little understanding about the revenue and destination value that the vacation rental industry provided.

Fast forward to 2019, now both urban cities and leisure destinations across the world are embattled with cumbersome—and often nonsensical—short-term rental regulations.

In the United States alone, in leisure destinations from Florida to Washington to California to New England, NIMBY (not in my backyard) fever spread across the country. Vacation rental meccas such as South Lake Tahoe and Orange Beach, Alabama, were hit hard, with city councils who were incapable of understanding the issue because of the whirlwind of calls for bans and illogical regulations with which they were faced.

Currently, regulatory battles have escalated to the state level: 19 states have proposed legislation related to short-term rentals. For example, in Florida, a state that depends on tourism, vacation rental providers are fighting proposed regulations that require any owner or manager who advertises or accepts payment online to register as a “hosting platform” with the Department of Business and Professional Regulation and that require compliance with existing 44

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

local vacation rental ordinances that are difficult to navigate—and sometimes impossible to satisfy—according to FVRMA executive director Denis Hanks.

Other Impacts from a Broadened Category Definition In addition to a changed regulatory environment, the grouping together of all non-hotel lodging options created disruption across the industry.

1. Venture Capital and Private Equity Investment in the Industry Armed with research that broadened the category from vacation rentals to private accommodations, startups were able to boast inflated industry growth as they looked to investors. The result was an inpouring of investment capital to fund new management and technology business models. On the management side, Vacasa and Turnkey Vacation Rentals have raised just under $280 million to support their growth; furthermore, with its marketing model, Evolve has raised almost $100 million. Among urban short-term rental managers, Sonder has received $135 million in venture capital, and Washington-based Stay Alfred has raised $62 million to expand into additional markets.

In the vacation rental software sector, Guesty has pulled in over $59 million, and Greater Sum Ventures is in the middle of a private equity rollup of multiple technology providers, including Streamline Vacation Rental Software and CiiRUS. Channel management providers have also benefited: BookingPal has raised a reported $22 million, and RedAwning has brought in over $40 million.

Other technology providers such as VacayStay, Transparent, Properly, HelloHere, Breezeway, and Key Data have also received millions in outside investment to build solutions to service the private accommodations industry.  Note: by the time of publication, some of these company funding numbers will have increased based on early reporting.

Overall, the verdict is still out over whether these investments will pay off or whether these recipients will have a positive or negative effect on the industry.

2. Awareness of Private Home Accommodations and Increased Difficulty Managing Guest Expectations However, the broadening of the scope of the vacation rental industry has not been completely negative. According to Phocuswright, “the private accommodation segment, long described as ‘alternative’ lodging, is now mainstream. In 2015, nearly one in three U.S. travelers used private accommodation, up from fewer than one in 10 in 2010.”  Note: When looking at the growth in awareness, it is important to note that the 2010 numbers did not include shared spaces and urban short-term rental apartments, which were included in the 2015 results.

In addition to a broadened category definition, a key reason for the increase in awareness is that OTAs and listing sites, including Airbnb, Booking, Expedia, and TripAdvisor, have done an excellent job in providing marketplaces that reach a broad consumer base.

Now, private accommodations are listed alongside hotels and bed and breakfasts in search results on OTAs; however, with a larger number of consumers who are staying in a short-term rental for the first time, the need has increased to communicate and manage guests’ expectations as they plan for their stays. It is unfair to assume travelers know the difference in property types and under-

stand what they have booked.

As a consumer, would this message seem sketchy to you?

In a March 2019 reservation for a short-tern rental booked on Booking’s Priceline.com, the term hotel was used four times in the email confirmation.

3. Inability to Create Uniform Standards and Best Practices

Even industry professionals have a difficult time knowing what they are booking on an OTA. Is there a front desk? Keyless entry?

Room service? Coffee? An elevator?

To make it even more confusing, for this same reservation, the property manager included the following information in its checkin instructions:

The increased awareness of a broader category definition for shortterm lodging has created a more critical need to educate travelers and communicate with them effectively prior to their stay.

Industry experts, analysts, and tech companies label the private accommodation industry as fragmented, pointing to a lack of organization of the industry as a challenge that will soon be overcome by aggregation. But is it possible to consolidate an industry that includes dozens of property types in one category?

VACATION RENTAL CONFIRMATION FROM PRICELINE

HomeAway’s Property Types  House

 Barn

 Cabin

 Chateau/country house

 Apartment/condo

 Boat

 Cottage

 Castle

 Mobile home/caravan

 Resort

 Bungalow

 Yacht

 Chalet

 Guest house

 Lodge

 Mill

 Villa

 Tower

 Townhouse

 Hotel

 Estate

 Bed & Breakfast

 Studio

 Houseboat

 Farmhouse

Important Note: "In case you have booked in "AIRBNB" — Please do not mention it to the Front Desk Staff. Just say that you have booked with **** and they will give you the keys."

With the larger scope in regard to the types of properties—and property owners/residents—the broadened industry is struggling to establish and guarantee common standards and best practices for property appearance, included amenities, and booking policies. The rapid increase in the number of nonprofessional rental providers in residential locations is contributing to the challenge, and regulators are making it harder by encouraging rentals in private residences that are not professionally managed instead of working with property managers who can offer the security, safety, and consistency that meet owner and guest needs.

The unfortunate fact is that rental suppliers in this broadened category are offering little industry consistency to assure guests that VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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For many years, professional property managers have had to piece together multiple software systems, to make up for incomplete, difficult to use, legacy technology. It's what you had to do. But not anymore.

We listened to your challenges, we heard your pain, and we believed you deserved better. So while you've been working hard, building the future of the vacation rental experience, we've been working hard, building the future of the property management software experience.

A premium experience, for those that appreciate the finer things in life. trackhs.com 46

VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

the “private accommodation” they are booking is adequate with secure access, clean linens, HVAC, reliable Wi-Fi, and 24/7 access to service. This is especially true on aggregated sites that provide the consumer little information before booking.

It is baffling that city officials, when debating regulations, did not consider requiring professional management for short-term rentals to ensure a level of standardization, security, and round-the-clock service for issues when they arise.

Yes, the industry is fragmented, because the category is fragmented.

Can the Private Accommodations Industry Be Consolidated?

“Lodging is lodging” is the mantra among marketplaces and managers looking to further consolidate the category. Their argument is that, at any point, a traveler who may stay in a hotel for a short trip will look for a private home for a family vacation and search for an apartment rental for an extended corporate trip or medical-oriented stay. Aggregators such as Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb seek to provide lodging options for any stay a consumer may be seeking. Additionally, Google, which is entering the category with its new booking platform, will add an interesting dynamic.

Segmentation of the category and education for the consumer is likely necessary. However, there is little current industry leadership working on a consumer-facing solution to educate consumers. The Vacation Rental Management Association is still focused on traditional vacation rentals, and other emerging industry associations have yet to gain traction.

The Role of the 2019 Vacation Rental Manager in the Evolving Industry Grouping traditional vacation rentals into a larger private accommodations sector has consequently amplified the industry’s complexity. VRMs are playing on a more challenging field and, as a result, professional VRMs are adapting.

1

Understand the market dynamics in play, including the category’s broadened scope

By understanding the industry’s evolution, VRMs can filter out the noise and focus on what makes their destination, company, and properties successful. Define the company’s competitive advantage, and ensure that employees, contractors, and stakeholders can articulate the unique sales proposition or unique selling proposition (USP).

2

Work with city officials, get to know the mayor, and communicate with candidates in the municipal and state election cycles

The entire industry will benefit from VRMs proactively working with current city and state officials and supporting candidates who support vacation rental-friendly policies. VRMs need city officials who understand the vacation rental industry and appreciate the dollars, jobs, destination appreciation, and community involvement that VRMs bring. Educating candidates while they are running for office will go a long way in protecting the industry against senseless regulations.

3

Educate guests about property types and set expectations

In the absence of any industry-wide coordinated PR/education initiative for consumers, the job of educating guests falls to each of us. VRMs can help the entire industry by focusing on their core feeder markets. Working with regional magazines and news outlets is a manageable way to begin guiding education for travelers. Tips about how to book a short-term rental, articles about choosing a property type, and articles about how to plan a stressfree vacation are popular subjects for consumer-facing publications.

Plus, there is an added benefit to helping a VRM establish itself as a trusted source and thought leader.

4

Educate owners about new models and changes to the industry

As difficult as it is for VRMs to understand the industry’s changes, it is even harder for homeowners. Taking the time to provide insight and information for homeowners will help them understand the “why” behind company decisions, strengthen the trust relationship, help them to see the company as an expert and thought leader, improve retention, and help owners update properties to provide better guest experiences. Educate homeowners about regulatory issues before they arise, and solicit their help in engaging with city officials.

5

Do due diligence when selecting technology companies, channel managers, distribution channels, and service providers

VRMs need tech and service providers. These companies are partners and contractors and are extensions of the brand promise.

Longevity and industry understanding matter. Does the company recognize the broadened scope of the category? Does it have experience in the property types under management? Does the company’s service reflect your brand promise?  Note: Companies that rely on funding have split their attention between meeting client needs and meeting investor expectations.

Obtaining references from like-minded VRMs will help in selecting providers.

6

Use OTAs and listing sites wisely

Using OTAs to find guests whom internal marketing efforts would not otherwise reach is smart—with a caveat.

Bookings from guests who mistreat homes, guests who arrive with false expectations of what they are getting, and bookings that result in senseless refunds offered by the OTA cause harm to both the VRM and the homeowner. Moreover, channels that provide brand amplification are more beneficial than sites that hide the brand. Be proactive in working with channels and channel managers to make sure listing information and communications inform guests and promote the company brand. In addition, when travelers book directly with a VRM, they have a much higher likelihood of understanding what they are booking than when they book on a third-party site. VRMs will profit from adding a communication layer to reservations originating from an OTA to ensure that guests plan appropriately for stays.

Create a comprehensive guest retention plan for each OTA that includes gathering email information for all adults staying in the property, establishing a relationship with the guests before and during the stay, and remarketing to them after. The cost of distributing properties on OTAs is rising, so increasing the lifetime value of the guest is the smartest way to maximize ROI from these channels.

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Google Adds Vacation Rentals to Hotel Search

G

oogle has officially jumped into the vacation rental industry, leading to both excitement and trepidation among rental providers.

To be quite candid, much is unknown. In the following article, Susan Blizzard, president of Blizzard Internet Marketing, a RedAwning company, provides some background on Google’s Hotel Ads, outlines how VRMs can expect to work with Google’s Hotel Ads to promote their properties, and explains what they should look for in the future.

Here is what Google’s Pratip Banerji, product manager, Travel, had to say on the company’s blog:

In 2018, we redesigned our mobile and desktop hotel search experience to help you find hotels by price, location and ratings and began including vacation rentals in hotel search results. Now, to give you a broader set of choices for lodging, we’re expanding the hotel search experience to include a wider assortment of vacation rental properties worldwide.

Starting with our mobile experience, you can see and book vacation rentals from a variety of partners including Expedia, HomeAway, Hotels. com, NextPax, RedAwning, Rentals United, TripAdvisor, VRBO and more. In the hotel search experience, you can surface vacation rental properties—be it a cabin in Lake Tahoe or a beach house in Sydney—by applying the vacation rentals filter or clicking on the vacation rentals tip.

You can narrow your search with price and amenity filters, plus browse photos, read reviews and see rates and availability of the vacation rental property. When you’re ready to book, click “Book” to complete your transaction on the travel partner’s page. All property information and bookings are provided and done by the travel partner. In the next month, we’ll bring the vacation rentals filter to the Google Hotels desktop experience as well. We hope this helps travelers make fast, effortless decisions—and with more choices on where to stay, your perfect vacation is just a few clicks away.

Google’s metasearch platform for vacation rental booking is the most significant, and potentially disruptive, advancement in the vacation rental market to date, and VRMs have questions, including the following: 1. Will my company be able to afford the cost?

2. Will Google’s booking platform cannibalize my organic search results?

3. Will the results drive consumers away from my brand and even further to OTAs?

For professional managers, there are a few key advantages to the news, at least in the short term. First, professionally managed inventory has an advantage over owner managed inventory because property managers are more likely to already be working with channel management companies or software companies that are integrating with Google.

Second, it appears Google is working to push back on the broadened definition of the industry to include shared spaces. Instead, Google’s initial rollout focuses on whole-home vacation rentals; and as we read from Google, Airbnb is not currently on the list of partners.

“This absence might be due to Airbnb’s variety of accommodation types, which includes individual rooms, something that does not fit 48

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By Amy Hinote

Excerpt from best-selling author Seth Godin’s blog post “Clearing the Table” discussing Google’s dominance among consumers (Seths.blog).

If there are 20 search engines delivering traffic to a wide variety of sites, diversity will come from that competition. But when there’s just one, then the human decisions about what gets traffic and what doesn’t (largely based on what makes Google a profit and what doesn’t) change the very nature of what we see and interact with.

This centralized control gives Google the power to absorb most of the profit of businesses that have no better option than to advertise on Google. The powerful model of their ad auction is simple: if it’s worth $100 to your organization to get a new customer, and it’s worth $100 to your competitor to get that same new customer, in an auction, you’ll eagerly bid up to $99 for that click.

Like a landlord who owns every building in town, Google can’t lose.

A successful business in the online ecosystem is one that has a few dollars left over after giving the rest of it to Google or Facebook (or Apple). In the short run, the convenience and reliability of centralized control lull users into a happy compliance. It’s a miracle. It works. What’s the problem?

But in the long run, where the long tail has fewer chances to thrive and where the powerful magic of choice disappears, we stagnate. If a centralized government authority decided what news and content we saw, filtered our incoming mail and regularly bankrupted competitors it didn’t like, there’d probably be more of an outcry.

with Google’s vacation rentals concept,” said Skift’s Isaac Carey in Google Adds Vacation Rentals Feature to Evolving Hotel Site. “Plus, the homesharing company frequently finds itself tangled up in lawsuits over illegal listings, although HomeAway likewise isn’t immune from such litigation. However, by focusing on entire homes instead of individual apartments or rooms within an apartment, the tech giant may be trying to skirt the issue entirely.”

Third, professional property management companies know how to work with Google and have committed already-sizeable budgets to the channel through AdWords and search engine optimization strategies.

“We’re looking forward to what Google has to offer,” John Banczak, cofounder and executive chairman of TurnKey Vacation Rentals said in a Phocuswright panel moderated by VRM Intel.

“HomeAway has made it harder over the past year. If you think about how Google operates, it is very clear how to work with Google. If anyone’s ever managed any type of Google campaign, you really know how to manage it. . . . You don’t get that from the HomeAways or the Airbnbs of the world. It’s hard to manage. For us, to the degree a channel makes it hard for us to understand how to drive revenue through it, then you naturally have to look for another channel. . . . Once the Google ads launch in the way we expect them to, I expect that to be a sizable dent into what we get from HomeAway.”

During the same panel, Steve Milo, founder and CEO at VTrips, said, “Remember, there is no rate parity requirement for alternative accommodations. We can always have the lowest price on our website. Google is going to be the equalizer here. The OTAs have to start to execute or they are going to be the rearview mirror for Google.”

What’s Going on with Google

and Vacation Rentals?

By Susan Blizzard, Blizzard Internet Marketing, A RedAwningGroup Brand

What if the only website you ever needed for travel booking was Google.com?

B

elieve me, I run a web-based travel agency, and I'm not advising that you ditch your website. However, Google is positioning itself as the only website you need for anything, including finding a place to stay. Let me explain with a bit of history.

History of Google Hotel Ads More than seven years ago, Google introduced the Google Hotel Finder, which today is called Google Hotel Ads. Google Hotel Ads are a type of ad users can create on Google. For those familiar with Google AdWords (now called Google Ads), Google Hotel Ads were never an option. Hotel ads had only been available via the Google Hotel Ads dashboard and not on the regular Google Ad dashboard. These ads display on Google Maps like this:

Hotel ads can be highly productive for participating hotels. Instead of paying Google per click and hoping clicks turn into enough bookings to justify the amount spent on ads, hotels can pay for these ads based on a percentage of bookings. That means hotels pay only for the bookings they receive. We see clients paying up to $3,000/mo. to Google for traditional Google ads, plus the amount that they pay to someone (employee or agency or both) to manage these ads. The question is, which of these options is better:

Pay

Receive

Pay $3,000/mo. to Google + pay for Uncertain number of bookings someone to manage the ads.

10 percent of booking

$10 in bookings for every $1 spent

The answer lies in how well your Google Ad campaigns are producing now (keeping phone bookings and assisted conversions in mind) and how much risk you want to take that you get those bookings in the future.

Google Hotel Ads highlight hotels in an effective way.

Of the 385 million Google results for Orlando hotels, only 304 hotels are listed with Google Hotel Ads. In other words, the list of results is narrowed down by 99.99 percent.

Here’s what that looks like today. In most cases, when a traveler clicks Book a Room, they are presented with booking options from multiple online travel agencies (OTAs).

Hello, Book on Google The user experience of showing multiple OTAs was not the goal for Google. According to Phocuswright, “Google does not want to be yet another price-comparison site but rather the main searching, decision-making, and even booking point.” (Source: PhocusWire, Google plunges deeper into hotel search: It’s all about rooms, By Diego Varela – Mirai, Sept. 19, 2018)

For this reason, in 2016, Google launched its Book on Google option. Book on Google is a program that allows a traveler to book a hotel without ever leaving Google.

That means that the traveler doesn’t go to a separate website such as the hotel or an OTA website.

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This is what it looks like:

What About Vacation Rentals?

LET'S LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

For years, our vacation rental clients at Blizzard have asked us how to get their vacation rental properties onto Google Maps, just like hotels. However, it is not simple to do. It requires tech work to send accurate hotel room prices for certain dates used in the ads.

Additionally, Google prefers to work with extremely large sources of data over large geographic regions. That means that the only way for anyone to participate in Google Hotel Ads, at least in the beginning of the program, was to do that via an OTA like Expedia or Booking.com.

Even if a vacation rental company had used an OTA, the differences between vacation rentals and hotels was so large that getting vacation rentals onto Google Hotel Ads was not a viable prospect.

For one thing, a hotel has multiple rooms available at one geographic location. Google Hotel Ads were not designed to have only one bookable property per geographic location. For another thing, rates for vacation rentals often were by the week rather than by the day. This made pricing a challenge. Also, many vacation rentals cannot be booked for shorter stays. The length of stay requirements at vacation rentals made booking with the Google Hotel Ad program difficult.

Regardless of whether a booking is made directly on Google or through an OTA, the main things to accomplish from Google’s point of view are as follows:

CHANNEL DISTRIBUTORS

WHO CAN PLAY ON GOOGLE?

MULTIPLE PMS SYSTEMS

INDIVIDUAL WEBSITES

INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY RATES, by date, filtered by availability OTAs ( EXPEDIA, BOOKING.COM, VRBO, AIRBNB+)

B Ease of Use C Accuracy D Efficiency E Connections with as few sources as possible (which helps achieve points 1–3 above).

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Required: EASY for travelers ACCURATE FAST - One step booking = best google connects to as few sources as possible

From a bird’s-eye view (or from Google’s point of view), the data that Google displays is housed in different sized collections. The smallest collection is the data for an individual property. Data for several properties are available on a property manager’s website.

Next, there is customer data housed on a property management software company’s website. However, the amount of data stored on an OTA like Expedia, listing sites like VRBO.com, or global marketing engines like RedAwning, is a collection larger than any one property management software company holds.

Present Day That brings us to the present day. Google has been extremely clear that it is interested in getting vacation rentals onto Google Maps via the Google Hotel Ads platform. In fact, Google launched vacation rentals as bookable choices in Paris and Rome more than a year ago. As Google likes to do, this was done as an experiment.

If you go to Google and search for “Paris vacation rentals” you will see individual rentals with prices per night that you can book.

However, the experience is not so great. When you click “book,” the site shows you multiple OTAs you can book through, with prices, just like they are shown for hotels.

If you click on a rental property’s website, in most instances, you are directed to the main company website where you must search again for the unit you had already chosen from the map.

Since launching bookable vacation rentals in Europe, Google has been actively working on a new, better way of booking vacation rentals in the US. While this program is still in beta form, we can say a few things for sure. Google will focus on the things that make the traveler’s booking experience as easy and fast as possible. That means Google is not likely to get property data from your website.

Instead, Google will connect to a large data source such as an OTA, a channel manager, or possibly a multistate or multinational vacation rental company. As with all things Google, the companies that can provide travelers with an easy booking experience are likely to do the best with this new type of Google Ad.

What Does the Future Hold?

What the future holds is the most interesting question of all.

Because OTAs already get a significant amount of bookings from the billions they spend with Google, will this just be another type of Google Ad for them? Will that increase their overall ad spending with Google, or will they simply redirect a portion of their budgets to this new form of ad? Because there will be more companies competing for these types of ads, and because the ads are likely to be helpful by showing the location of the rental property on Google Maps, will this increase the overall amount spent on Google Ads for each of the companies that participate? If the amount that is spent with Google increases, who will pay the additional price? Will the traveler pay the price, will it be passed to the property manager, or will there be enough competitive pressure that OTAs decide to absorb the extra cost?

The answers to these questions will be revealed over time. However, there are a couple things we know for certain. One is that Expedia is not comfortable with the direction in which Google is going.

(Expedia’s Barry Diller Calls on Google to Be Regulated [Sean O’Neill, Skift—Oct. 16, 2018 5:58 p.m.]) Another is that this additional “Google channel” is bringing new opportunities to vacation rental managers that were not previously available. It’s a time of great change in the vacation rental industry, and 2019 is destined to be yet another interesting year.

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Join the most powerful marketing engine in the industry.

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Girl,Fix Your Website

By Vanessa Humes

L

ike thousands of ladies across the world, I thoroughly enjoyed Rachel Hollis’s book, Girl, Wash Your Face.

If you’ve never read the book, it really has nothing to do with washing your face, but it’s a catchy title. It is about the lies we tell ourselves and the actual truth we should listen to. We often get stuck hearing mixed messages or believing ideas about marketing that are biased or misinterpretations of reality.

This article explains certain marketing tactics with a new approach in a way that we feel confident to change that belief or behavior.

Who doesn’t need some self-help when it comes to marketing your vacation rental website?

The title “Girl, Fix Your Website” came about when these concepts were first presented at the Vacation Rental Women’s Summit. This article isn’t all about fixing your website (any more than it’s targeted toward just women). It’s a holistic view of your marketing, a summary of misconceptions you may believe about how you should mix your marketing, and a pep talk to make you feel fearless in approaching different strategies.

Misconception #1—You Can’t Compete with the 800lb Gorilla Websites

An OTA is an online travel agency or an online travel aggregator. OTAs combine all the vacation rentals, hotels, villas, and other properties into one website that travelers can use to search for their destination and dates and find available rentals all in one source, rather than going to individual websites. For the consumer, it is easy to have all the choices readily available to shop price, pictures, and amenities and to book directly through one site. A convenience fee is added to the check-out page that the consumer pays on top of the rent, taxes, and other fees. It’s a lot of work and investment to provide this service to consumers, not to mention it requires huge marketing budgets. Expedia Inc. spent $5.3 billion dollars in marketing and selling fees in 2017 according to PhocusWire and is rumored to have spent upwards of $5.7 billion in 2018. I don’t know about you, but my marketing clients don’t give me those kinds of budgets.

Many individual vacation rental companies advertise or list their properties on OTAs to get their inventory in front of the many visitors to the OTA websites. Whether you have 50 properties or 1,500, vacation rental marketers feel like their efforts to get to the top of the search engines, both organic and paid, are inadequate compared to the big marketing budgets; however, what OTAs lack is the ability to optimize for local search. Because they don’t have a local address, local VR companies’ have a greater opportunity to get ahead in the map pack of local search. Google has given us the upper hand by keeping local search map results limited to businesses that have a physical address in the area. That means when people are searching for “Panama City Beach vacation rentals,” your company has the opportunity to beat out the OTAs. In fact, Google is now trying to be an OTA by quickly introducing their “local hotel map pack” designed for “destination + vacation rental” keyword phrases.

Many hotels have to go through distribution channels to get their inventory up on Google results through the hotel map pack. Right now, though maybe only for a brief time (Google changes things before I can even get stuff published), you can get a link to your website. So, make sure you have pages built out on your website for your individual rentals (optimized property detail pages) and also any resorts/condominium complexes for Google to link to.

Another area to focus on is branded campaigns. Branded campaigns are set up in Google Ads or Bing Ads as pay-per-click (PPC). For instance, if your company name is “The Best Breckenridge Lodging Company,” you would want to set up an ad campaign to show an ad to your website every time someone searches for your company name. Yes, you should show up on top organically anyway, but if you don’t bid on it, eventually, someone else will—including the OTAs. Your cost per click will be much lower than that of your competitors because your quality score (the factors Google and Bing put into how much to charge someone on a bid) will be higher. The higher the quality score the lower the cost per click.

Surprisingly, most destinations aren’t as saturated with competition as the hotel industry is at this time, but I see it coming. Lock in your placement now.

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Misconception #2—Repeat Guests Are Going to Book with OTAs No Matter How Hard You Work to Get Them to Book Direct You may think because your company is small and fairly new that people won’t remember your company to book direct. That can be true if you don’t take the right steps to ensure your guests will return and book with you.

When guests stay with you, make sure you communicate that they can save by booking direct on your website and avoid paying the fees most of the OTA sites charge. VRM Intel was awesome enough to recognize the power and best interest for guests to return and book direct, so they created #BookDirect day. But, let’s face it, this should be more than just one day a year.

Along the lines of saving money by avoiding paying fees, you can save guests even more by offering your past guests a discount to book again, especially if they book early. Every vacation destination has a period of time when people often book early (or they used to). Often, this might happen around tax time or at the beginning of the year when many families just spent the holidays together.

Because accommodations pricing trends have trained the consumer to wait to get the best deal, many reservations now come in at the last minute. Offering discounts earlier in the booking season allows you to fill the books early and not have to slash pricing in a desperate move to fill dates. The best way to promote this is through guest history emails.

Use this and every email as an opportunity to put your brand and tagline in front of the guest. From confirmation, pre-arrival, duringstay, and post departure, I hope you are using branded emails with a ton of information about the destination to brand your company and show your expertise in the destination.

Same with your website—the more local area information you have that others don’t (or the bettered organized) through blogs, events, or things to do in the area to help your guests plan their vacation, the more they will use your website and your company for this vacation and the next.

Misconception #3—You Have to List Your Inventory on OTAs I’m not saying you should yank all your listings from OTAs tomorrow, but I am saying you should work toward less dependency on them. I hear it all the time: “Vanessa, I’m a small company; I have to put all my inventory on the OTAs. They book all my inventory up.” To that, I tell the story about working with the major hotel groups in Myrtle Beach a decade ago. These hotel groups were the biggest, the best, and the most innovative in the area. They were among the first in the country to have websites and online booking engines to get direct bookings. But when Expedia, Priceline, and Travelocity promised to grow their shoulder season, fill their summers, and maximize “heads in beds,” these major hotel groups jumped quickly on the bandwagon. They soon realized they were

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giving away their loyal repeat business and now competing organically as well as through PPC with the OTAs. Their marketing costs were increasing, and their commission was decreasing because they were now sharing it with OTAs. Sound familiar? The point of telling this story is that if you are in a market where you don’t have to advertise with the OTAs, keep it up. If you are in a market where you need to, work on digital marketing.

Many OTAs do not offer discounts through their sites, so make sure to on your website. Use promo codes that consumers can enter at booking, so they can get their discounts online.

Make sure your specials aren’t call-in only. It can even be a “Book-Direct Special”: enter promo code BookDirect at checkout and save $25 off your first rental with us. It’s always important to give anyone the ability to book any stay from your website direct—any day, any time.

Speaking of websites, when it comes to decreasing your dependency on OTAs for bookings, you should start by creating a website that will drive conversions. If it’s just a website to have a website, you should analyze it to make sure it’s easy to book with no barriers to booking. This aspect is so important, I could break down a list of misconceptions based on your website. Bottom line? You need a website that makes it easy to search and book and from which you can quickly build out content on your own and track conversions.

That’s a good place to start.

Next, I recommend PPC. Not just any keyword phrase but keyword phrases with intent. There is a funnel when it comes to consumers searching for a vacation. Intent means that the search is focused further down the booking funnel such as “oceanfront Destin vacation rental” or “Breckenridge lodging with hot tub.” Think destination + rental/lodging + a popular feature/amenity. Google Keyword Tool will help you figure out these keyword phrases and show what the volume is.

These keyword phrases go hand in hand with PPC because you are going to want to have landing pages to direct your ads to. As you look at your conversion rates from your PPC, you know which searches you should also work on to rank organically and put the most effort into.

In addition to email marketing to stay in front of bookings from the OTAs, use social media remarketing, match up those emails, and show specific ads to follow and direct back to your website.

This reinforces the brand and can lead to the next booking. Social media in general does give the social validation to help consumers choose your company. Consumers will get a chance to see your tone, how often you post, and what other consumers thought of your company through reviews.

If you were able to catch my session at the Vacation Rental Women’s Summit, I want to say thank you. There were so many wonderful sessions to attend. I’m honored to have had you listen to mine. I hope that the session and this article help empower you, as a manager and/or marketer, to work on your marketing strategy and include or improve your book-direct tactics.

The Future of Brand Marketing

Expanding the Radius of Your Brand with Like-Minded Brand Amplification

By Vince Perez

A

s we close out the first quarter of 2019, we are seeing continued changes that will shape our industry for years to come. The most recent is the flurry of acquisitions and investment of more than $150M in new and existing players in the space.

The strategies are not much different from past years: acquire weaker players, buy market share (inventory), and let property managers and travelers stand on the sidelines as they fight it out for supremacy. I imagine this is a pattern we will continue to see until investors start asking for returns. In the meantime, professional vacation rental managers and hosts must continue to make adjustments and find ways to build on the value they have created over the years.

What Is Now Clear The economics for the “rent by owners” are untenable. They will be squeezed for every commission dollar possible. If they refuse to play. . . they will go to the back of the line. We are seeing trends in our local market of owners who would not have considered professional management in the past openly embracing the model as a clear alternative.

Regulatory issues continue to bog down the industry. Although some might blame politics, the housing crunch, and NIMBY, the reality is that these regulations are market forces at work. The heavily bankrolled companies are at risk equal to that of the independent operator; the scorched-earth approach of the past is no longer the answer.

Consolidation Is Opportunity Further consolidation of property management companies and software vendors will shape our industry for the next level of growth. The traveler has had a front row seat to the rapid changes and creation of our “cohorts” for the future. I have been talking

about fragmentation for the past three years in our industry, and I believe that it is now happening with the vacation rental traveler.

I recently spent time with a C-level executive from a small boutique hotel group (one of the hundreds that exist). His hotels are in highly competitive markets and have carved out a unique brand and reputation. When asked about what keeps him up at night, he answered, “To continue to stay true to who we are and what we do well and make sure we remind our guests that they are why we do what we do.”

The vacation rental industry has thousands of unique independent brands and hundreds of thousands in a unique inventory. As we see this consolidation take many forms, the running theme is that everyone wants to be an OTA. Be it the regional niche operator, mega property management company, or property management system, as the pie grows, everyone wants a bigger slice. As independent operators, you hold the golden ticket in the form of inventory control.

How you position your brand in the future will dictate how that inventory will be distributed.

One of the big advantages that hotels have had with the OTAs is brand amplification, that is, linking the unique attributes of each destination to the brand for maximum reach. A traveler in California could be visiting the Hyatt site for a trip to New York in November. However, that same traveler could be looking at a trip to Los Angeles in two weeks. Brand amplification allows the traveler more options to book without conducting another search.

The same is happening in the vacation rental industry at a micro level. Although the brand amplification happens within the “radius” of the brand, it does not travel any further; distributing through multiple channels does not change that. If you are an independent with a strong micro presence, your marketing costs will only increase; it will be more expensive to compete against yourself because you will have no brand amplification on the channels. No amount of SEO spend will solve this problem.

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Brand Value as Currency Brand value in relation to vacation rentals is not what social media think it is; far from it. Brand value in our industry starts with the experiences that have been delivered over generations. The biggest brand asset value is our DNA. This DNA begins at the owner level and spreads into the organization, but it does not stop there.

It forms the basis of trust, which includes our relationships with guests, owners, and vendors, that is hard to break. What is now proven is that money does not buy trust. Owners and travelers recognize the value of this DNA, to Wall Street’s consternation. It’s reassuring to hear podcasts and stories of independent vacation rental operators thriving in this market.

This success has not been without challenges; for some, it has come at a high cost and involves making strategic decisions that they would never have considered in the past. These decisions could never be made without the confidence in their brands and their ability to execute (DNA). Google places a high value on your brand—just do an organic search for your company name. OTAs do not, and for good reason. The traveler recognizes your brand and wants to #bookdirect.

Independent Brands 2.0 Let’s start with the premise that this is a human business, which is easy to forget when all you hear about is technology. For many years, the OTAs have done an incredible job of separating independent vacation companies from each other. In fact, it was a top sales tactic: “Your competitor down the street just joined us.”

This may have worked in the early days of “free,” but not anymore.

Independent brands are now forming robust professional marketplaces that engage the traveler at the planning (intent) stage. They are using the collective strength of their brands to bring the vacation rental traveler the best overall value while delivering something both covet—transparency between vacation rental managers and the vacation rental traveler. These regional networks consist of brands that have been in business an average of 12 years. With this type of longevity comes trust: Trust from owners that their property will be maintained and kept to the high standards expected by our guests.

Trust from our guests, knowing that we offer the best vacation rental experience possible and that they will always receive the best rate guaranteed when they book direct.

Trust from our partners, from the local plumbers to laundry service and everything between.

Trust from our communities that we promote, protect, and provide economic benefit.

Trust from our respected network partners that refer guests to other regions and share the same values and respect for the vacation rental traveler as we hold.

These networks not only create viable alternatives for travelers who want to engage with the brands directly but also provide opportunities for these networks to explore partnerships that would never be available to them as a stand-alone vacation rental management company.

The Trust Flow What 2.0 represents is monumental change in the way independent vacation rental managers view their path to success. They have always understood the value that their individual brands possess at 58

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a local level, and, in a significant shift in thinking, these brands now understand the power of linking these well-respected local brands at regional, national, and soon-to-be global levels. In September 2018, the Northwest Vacation Rental Professionals (NWVRP) launched NorthwestStays. The performance of the combined brands, coupled with members’ participation in promoting the brand to their respective guests, has proven a welcome alternative to the OTAs.

For vacation rental managers, the ability to amplify their brands beyond their local reach will prove to be an effective model that will support their book-direct initiatives for years to come. In January, the NWVRP extended its reach by launching CaliStays to serve the California market, further strengthening its network on the West Coast. Most recently, the announcement of NortheastStays by the Vacation Rental Professionals of Maine (VRPOMe) was made. Although on different sides of the coast, the leaderships of both organizations recognize the value of working together. These combined networks (and others coming online) form a “trust flow” that travelers deserve and expect. We find that travelers are calling the brands direct when interacting with the marketplaces. Keep in mind that they engage the site at the point of planning, not at the point of booking. The advantage is that, because the travelers have interacted with our brand before and talked to our agents, there is a greater chance of their coming back to our site to #bookdirect.

Spoiler Alert: Travelers want to book directly with our brands.

In its first quarter, the NorthwestStays brands generated 70 percent of its leads directly, which represented 40 percent of its bookings.

This is significant because the OTAs no longer promote their respective brands; they hide information until the booking and continue to frustrate the traveler with promises they can’t keep. Despite these challenges, the network is expected to significantly increase the direct traffic, with a knock-on effect on direct bookings. As those numbers increase, closing the gap on the bookings will be a function of training and yield management.

The network also shows a reduction of 30 percent across the board of members not renewing their inventory on HomeAway/VRBO; some have even taken the drastic step of delisting their entire inventory. This bodes well for Airbnb and Booking.com in the short term. However, once guests stay with one of our network partners, service and education will provide them with alternatives because many of these properties will not be listed with any OTA. For these established businesses, the OTAs have forced innovation and a positive shift in the value of investing in themselves.

How Do I Find These Marketplace Networks?

While these marketplaces are membership only, the common thread that links them is the leadership behind state and local associations that recognizes that a higher level of value must be attained to keep the membership engaged and proactive, rather than reactive. The groups form a hub of education, business modeling, mentorship, standardization, code of ethics, and true networking that will form the future of how independent vacation rental managers can thrive in this ever-changing environment.

On the traveler side, these marketplaces provide transparency that mutually benefits both stakeholders. Our network members continue to be the face of the industry and are looked upon as the experts in vacation rental experiences. Travelers will benefit not only at a local level but also by being connected and referred to other like-minded vacation rental professionals throughout North America.

Guest-Centric

By Jennifer Perez, Production and Content Manager, Bluetent

Digital Strategies for 2019 S

pring is a time for renewal, and there’s no better time to freshen up your digital strategy. Tom Kenyon, Vice President of Product at Bluetent, has words of advice to help focus your strategic efforts. “2019 is the year for guest-centric features, not bells and whistles. Reviews, reviews, reviews, and some fresh photos. It’s ironic [that] with so much talk around cutting-edge technology and features, reviews and photos are still what matter most to your guests.”

With that in mind, here are five areas of digital strategy you might consider refreshing this season. Providing your guests with a better brand experience builds traveler loyalty and ultimately increases bookings.

Photos As you’ve likely heard over and over again, you only have one opportunity to make a first impression. Your photos do the bulk of the heavy lifting in this regard, so a professional photo portfolio is a must.

A good photo not only introduces travelers to your destination, but it also lets travelers imagine themselves in the scene. You can use simple staging techniques to create scenes that invite viewers in. It’s as easy as placing a glass of wine and an open book next to a chaise lounge. Close-ups and detail shots are also important, so be sure to highlight the special details of your property that will make a traveler choose your rental over another.

Reviews TripAdvisor found that 53 percent of travelers won’t commit to booking until they’ve read reviews, and that 80 percent read between 6 and 12 reviews before booking. Simply put, it pays to have good reviews.

If you’re not getting enough reviews, try automating your review-generation process with email. The benefit is twofold: you show your guests that you care about their experiences, and you get reviews that help generate more bookings.

Once the positive reviews start rolling in, leverage them! Highlight them on your blog and share them on social media—even build a landing page around them. Use reviews to build loyalty and generate interest with potential guests.

Another way to build confidence in your brand is to quickly and thoughtfully respond to all reviews. Responding to the good, the bad, and the ugly shows guests that you are genuinely concerned about their experiences.

Security and Accessibility Two ways to continue building trust with travelers are to address security concerns and accessibility issues. If your goal is to generate more direct bookings through your website, make sure your website is secure. Give guests the confidence they need. For example, include a PCI-compliance badge on your checkout page, as well as any other security logos or badges you’ve earned. This will help travelers feel confident about the safety of their data.

Just like brick-and-mortar businesses offer their customers ADA-compliant experiences, online storefronts should try to do the same. You can increase your audience by providing text alternatives for any non-text content, allowing that content to be changed into forms such as braille.

Using high-contrast images and text can also make a positive difference in a viewer’s experience with your site.

Mobile Booking Google Consumer Insights found that 48 percent of smartphone users are comfortable booking on a mobile device. Thus, it’s more important than ever to make sure that your site is ready for mobile booking. A mobile website without a mobile checkout process leads to cart abandonment at worst and decreased trust in your brand at best. Increase your conversions with mobile-booking functionality.

Content Your successful digital strategy depends on content. Content communicates your unique strengths in an increasingly competitive market and is the foundation of your marketing efforts. Leverage the fact that you are the expert when it comes to your destination.

Become your guests’ trusted advisor. Think about creating content that travelers will want to consume—the kind that makes them want to dive further into your website. Make time to add content on a regular basis. Consistently creating high-quality content increases your visibility in search engines and helps drive qualified traffic to your website.

About Bluetent For 16 years, Bluetent has provided digital solutions to vacation rental companies of all sizes. From our suite of direct-booking Rezfusion websites—designed specifically for the needs of vacation rental professionals—to digital marketing and channel management, we assist vacation rental managers in developing well-rounded digital presences that inspire travelers, build emotional loyalty, and accelerate reservations and revenue. To speak with Bluetent about guest-centric digital strategy, contact us at 970-704-3240 or visit www.bluetent.com.

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Asset Management for Second Homes Are you an asset manager, a property manager, or both?

W

e often think of real estate asset managers as managing commercial real estate portfolios. However, the true definition of asset management is not a profession but rather a process that refers to managing investments on behalf of others with the dual objective of appreciation of the client's assets over time while mitigating risk.

The functions performed by real estate asset managers are looking increasingly similar to the services provided by professional second-home property managers (PMs), especially those with real estate offerings and a deep understanding of market and economic dynamics.

“In the past decade, the property management profession has made some remarkable developments,” says Michael T. Lanning, CPM, senior vice president at Cushman and Wakefield.

“Property managers today do more than manage tenant relationships. They take a holistic approach to managing an asset, including the operations, financials, and tenant engagement. A number of external factors have influenced this change, and as a result there is a greater alignment of the property and asset management disciplines than ever before.”

This void is creating an opportunity for real estate-oriented vacation rental managers to market the asset management services they are already providing to second-home owners.

Second-Home Investor Profile

ASSET MANAGERS

PROPERTY MANAGERS

Maximize returns and property value for investors.

Handle day-to-day management activities of a property.

Property Acquisition Operational Oversight Strategic Management Budgeting Market Forecasting Inventory Analysis Transaction Management Financial Analysis and Reporting Market Research

Tenant Relations and Retention Contract and Vendor Management Lease Compliance and Administration Client Accounting Risk Management Engineering and Maintenance Sustainability Construction Management Due Diligence

While investor profiles differ among second-home owners, they are generally motivated by the following: 1. Realizing an appreciation in the value of the home as an asset

2. Maximizing short-term cash flow through rental income and cost management 3. Managing risk

4. Maintaining the property to enjoy as a vacation home for personal use

Professional PMs are wellversed in maximizing shortterm cash flow, managing risks associated with vacation rentals, and servicing owner stays, so let’s look at several of the functions of increasing the value of the home.

Increasing the Value of a Vacation Property

When examining an asset manager’s role in increasing the value of the home, according to Sean Source: “Asset Management v Property Management,” Cushman and Wakefield Ross, founder of Free Lances Ltd. in his article “The Role of Asset management professionals do not readily admit it, but the an Asset Manager in the Real Estate Market”: “Asset managers lines that divide asset and property management are blurring, and tend to specialize in particular types of property, regions or operthere is an undefined, detailed description of a true real estate asset ations. A very large role of the asset manager consists of market research, data analysis, and revenue forecasting.” manager.

Asset Management versus Property Management

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PMs who view the vacation rental property as an investment are performing asset management analysis, forecasting, and reporting, and they are proactively working to increase the value of the home.

They are able to set themselves apart from management companies that are solely focused on maximizing rental income in the home.

Looking solely at increasing the selling price of the home, there are many PMs who are already proactively working to:  Increase the popularity of the destination among buyers most likely to invest in area homes  Increase the value of the neighborhood or complex community within the destination  Increase the value of the home within the community

 Multigenerational appeal  Optimal mix of accommodation types and full-time versus part-time visitors  Shopping and dining development, acquisition, and retention  Events, conventions, festivals, and groups in shoulder seasons

 Pro Tip: Communicate what you are doing to ensure destination appreciation to owners, and find ways to engage them in your programs and activities to promote the relationship.

Neighborhood and Complex Community Appreciation In resort destinations, many vacation homes are located in neighborhoods and complexes which improve the value of these communities as a key factor in increasing the value of the home. Providing association management services is one way that PMs work to grow the value of neighborhoods and condominium communities.

By managing the association, PMs have an increased ability to control and improve:  Financial management  On-site amenities  Security and safety  Common areas

Increasing the Value of the Individual Home The objective in increasing the value of the home is to create a property value that is at the top of the market in a community that is also at the top of the market in a destination that is at the top of the market among competitive destinations.

Having a strong rental history is important, but implementing systems that provide professional financial reporting and property history can increase the speed of a sale.

In addition, using comparative data tools and reporting that show how the property is performing in relation to the market can also help a buyer complete a quick transaction.

Destination Appreciation Leisure destinations go in and out of favor with travelers. Assetmanagement minded PMs are proactive in finding ways to ensure real estate values and guest activity steadily grow in the destination.

Here are some examples of initiatives that engaged PMs support to grow the value of the destination:  Improved airports and more direct flights  Sustainable and smart growth, development, and city planning  Year-round activities  Government policies and regulations that are pro-real estate, pro-busi- ness, pro-guest, and pro-destination  Traffic solutions that meet the needs of the destination at its peak visitor times  Public transportation, available taxis, and ride-sharing  Safety and security

Investing in a process to provide fast, professional, easy-to-read buyer packages, complete with reports, forecasts, and area trends, demonstrates to buyers that the PM is a savvy asset manager and is an effective tool in persuading a new buyer to allow the management company to continue to manage the property after a sale.

Moreover, property care is expected to make up a much larger part of the PM’s role in the months to come, and technology products are being developed to help facilitate proactive home care and preventative maintenance. Offering design services and uniform, upgraded kitchen packages are also ways to impress buyers (and guests). Smart home automation can help in security and managing costs, and having a process to vet and manage guests and provide 24/7 response is also a service that improves the value of the home.

An enormous opportunity exists for real estate–minded property management companies that view vacation homes as investments, are functioning as asset managers, and are concerned with both increasing the long-term value of the property and maximizing short-term income to differentiate themselves from the competition. Second-home owners/investors are seeking—and are willing to pay a premium for—these services.

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So Much Data, So Little Time Using Data to Drive Bookings

By Jinnie Templin, Digital Marketing Sales Specialist, Bluetent

A

s a professional vacation rental manager, you likely have a multitude of data at your fingertips. But with so much data available, how do you know whether you’re using the right combination to develop a comprehensive data-driven approach to your digital strategy?

Knowing which data sets to review can help you gain valuable insights into guests’ online behavior and ignite business growth. You may think you already have a firm handle on your guests’ preferences, but assumptions aren’t always accurate once the data is analyzed.

Ignoring key performance indicators can cost money, both upfront in marketing/advertising costs and later through missed revenue from lost bookings.

There are thousands of ways to build an effective digital strategy from the various accessible data points. In this article, we’ve outlined a few high-level concepts to get your wheels spinning and help you continue to improve on your own success.

DEVELOP A DATA-DRIVEN WEBSITE STRATEGY WITH GOOGLE ANALYTICS Analyzing website visits is crucial in building an effective direct booking strategy. Start by using a tool like Google Analytics, offered as a free service by Google and easy to install on most website platforms. This tool will help you better understand website visitors and how they interact with your brand online.

More important, ensure that ecommerce conversion tracking is set up correctly on your direct booking website. Although Google 62

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Analytics provides rich information about your website visitors, being able to tie website visitor behavior to conversion metrics is the best thing you can do for your online business. How can you optimize your website strategy if you can’t tell which visitors are actually booking?

If you’ve ever looked at Google Analytics, you’ve probably noticed that it contains a wealth of data. It can be challenging to decipher the best way to leverage that data to improve your website performance. We recommend starting with the following questions to analyze your website visitors’ behavior:

 What information are my guests looking for?

it’s important to create email content that feels personal to your guests, it’s also important to build a strategy that’s “personal” to your business goals.

 What search filters are being used most often?

CREATE RELEVANT CONTENT BASED ON GUEST SEARCHES

 Which pages or sections of my website are being viewed most often?  Are my guests viewing the information I want them to view?

 Are there pages on my website that contain valuable information that aren’t being viewed?

 Why are people coming to the site and not booking? Where are we losing them?  Which properties are performing well and which could use attention?

The takeaway? A user-centric website drives more bookings. Use tools like Google Tag Manager to help identify which property amenities to highlight. Be sure to showcase features that drive conversions. The content you want visitors to see should be easy to find—driving potential guests back into the booking funnel. Figure out where website visitors are dropping off and try to capture their information before they leave. Retarget those visitors via email, social media, or other paid advertising platforms and get them back to your website to book.

USE RESERVATION DATA TO CREATE BETTER EMAIL STRATEGIES Take a look at reservation data and your property management software’s available reports to discover more about how and when guests book. Use the information to get in front of guests at the right time: send more personalized, highly targeted emails, resulting in both an increase in revenue and a decrease in cost per email campaign.

Tap into reservation data to help identify specific goals. Do you have last-minute availability you’re trying to fill? Are there properties of a specific size—or with certain amenities—that need to see an increase in occupancy? Use your areas of need to set goals, and then consider how best to reach those goals using the guest data available.

If a potential guest has dropped off your website before making a reservation, use a strategy such as cart abandonment emails to reach out with a reminder about their interest. If the property they first searched for is now unavailable, suggest other properties with similar features that are available during their search dates. Managers looking to fill last-minute availability may consider sending an email to guests within driving distance. To increase occupancy for larger properties, consider sending an email to renters who have placed a reservation for more than X guests in the past. Use data such as guest location, booking windows, property location, and amenities to build a targeted audience for your email campaigns.

Thoughtful emails produce strong results. When building your email marketing strategy, we recommend creating email content that feels personal to your guests. An alternative way to leverage reservation data is to automate a series of stay-cycle emails. Use these emails to encourage the purchase of post-booking add-ons, based on booking and arrival dates.

As you will quickly see, there are numerous ways to tap into reservation data to develop an email strategy that converts. Although

Where are website visitors coming from and how are they finding you online? To identify which online marketing channels are bringing in business, use website traffic reports from Google Analytics or ask your guests at the time of booking. Then, develop a content strategy that enables you to meet guests where they are booking, providing content that is tailored to the audiences on those channels.

When looking to increase your website’s visibility in search engine results, look at keyword position data for other travel sites with a presence in your region. Analyze this competitive data to identify which keywords your website can rank highest on, and then build a content strategy to boost your organic search traffic.

Although driving traffic to your website is certainly an important factor in building your content strategy, focus on content that actually helps you convert website visitors into guests. An effective content strategy isn’t just “set it and forget it.” It’s vital to analyze not just which content drives visitors to your website, but which content attracts visitors who make reservations. Adjust your approach based on the results.

Good website content can help you stand apart from your competition, both in search engine results and brand awareness. Showcase what you know best by sharing your local knowledge and area expertise. You know your guests—and now you’ve got data to back it up—so speak their language by creating content that resonates.

USE DATA TO OPTIMIZE THE OTA STRATEGY Use third-party booking sites to grow occupancy by reaching guests you usually wouldn’t reach. Look at reservation data to identify things like direct booking pace, seasons in the most need of occupancy, and individual unit performance. Leverage what you find and make adjustments to the distribution strategy to increase otherwise “hard to get” reservations.

Connecting your properties to a channel partner such as Airbnb or Booking.com through a channel manager can be a much more efficient way to handle property data. Using a channel manager means you can spend more time enhancing guest experiences and less time maintaining consistent listings across different channels.

First, ensure that listings are complete and accurate for each property. Although users of third-party booking sites likely have different search behaviors than visitors to your website do, you can still leverage your website behavior data to properly highlight features that convert lookers to bookers.

Other strategies to consider:

 Discount last-minute bookings and gap weeks to incentivize travelers searching on third-party sites.  Set up blackout dates for stays 180+ days out. You still have the opportunity to make those direct bookings without paying a commission.

 Make data-driven adjustments to your listings to appeal to the right clientele on each platform, stay competitive in your market, and get more bookings.

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Next-Level Revenue Management A Hotel Veteran’s Perspective

A

fter working in the boutique hotel world for over 15 years with a specific focus on revenue management and distribution, I was excited to make the transition to the vacation rental space as CMO at RedAwning Group last year. This is an exciting space with enormous revenue management opportunity. Vacation rental property managers have been practicing revenue management for a long time (just having seasonal rates is a form of revenue management). With more technology and resources becoming available in the space, vacation rentals are ripe for next-level revenue management. If revenue management is done well, there is also a greater opportunity than ever before to steal market share from hotels.

The Revenue Management Cycle and Top 3 Revenue Management Principles The Revenue Management Cycle is something I learned about a long time ago. Simple and to the point, it comprises four elements: 64

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By: Heather Richer, CMO at RedAwning Group

FORECAST

OPTIMIZE

CONTROL

MONITOR

1

2

3

4

Understanding demand with predictive analytics: Human or system generated

Deciding on the strategy: generating demand over low periods or maximizing over compression dates

The levers available to bring strategies to life: OTA, PMS, overall system capabilities.

Watching pickup reviewing success of campaigns: Was desired outcome achieved?

(e.g. discount 10% if unsold 14 days out)

Forecast, Optimize, Control, Monitor (F.O.C.M.). Starting with an accurate, day-by-day forecast for your portfolio and then following the steps continuously, you can make a solid revenue management strategy come to life. The next step is to understand the revenue management levers available to you: PMS capability; channel promotion capability; packaging, policy, price, or stay restriction capabilities; external market data input; or automated rate tools.

Once you’ve got the basic revenue management cycle up and running, you can start testing strategies around some core principles.

These principles are applied to revenue management in many industries: restaurants, parking garages, retirement homes, and even toll roads. Here are the Top 3 Revenue Management Principles to take your revenue management to the next level:

Understand Your Price Elasticity

1

The most important aspect of an accurate marketing strategy is ensuring an accurate forecast. A high-yield unit will be elastic, meaning that a small change in price has a large impact on conversion and volume of bookings. A low-yield unit will be inelastic, meaning that rate changes will have minimal impact on conversion.

For example, in markets like Orlando, there are clear high-demand time periods over special events or holidays. Because this is a highly competitive market with significant supply and both business and leisure travel demand, this is a high-yield market, and the opportunities are endless. Let’s take a medical convention demand period as an example. It’s important to understand the demand length of stay, booking window, traveler type, distance of your units from the venue, and where travelers may be shopping for their accommodations. In this example, where the market has an influx of individual traveler demand, it’s the perfect opportunity for a studio or one-bedroom unit to compete with hotels. For this event, these unit types may be even more price elastic, meaning a price of $200 per night may not sell, but a price of $185 will. A small change in price can have a large impact on volume. Obviously, the goal is to sell every unit for the most nights at the highest price, and understanding all these factors will ensure you maximize your revenue per rental unit.

In contrast, a few luxury units in a limited demand market may be inelastic. This means even a large price change won’t impact how many nights the units are occupied. There may be enough demand to achieve only 35 percent occupancy, whether that’s at $500 per night or $600 per night.

The beauty of global distribution is that with additional merchandising and target marketing, there is an opportunity to generate more demand in either example. The distribution capabilities, tech functionality, and third-party data are all areas where you can add revenue management levers to your toolbox.

Apply Rate Strategies

2

You can apply several different strategies to price, and knowing what is appropriate for you and each of your unit types is key. Shadow, rational, and anchored and decoy pricing are several options you can consider. Additionally, you may find you need to select an approach based on day-ofweek or seasonality patterns.

Shadow pricing: When you can forecast your demand with more

certainty, this strategy can work well. You are confident in in the market’s behavior, and you set your strategy to follow competitors.

Rational pricing: When there is uncertainty in a market and you have shorter booking windows, sticking to a price vs. fluctuating too frequently can be the best approach.

Anchored and decoy pricing: The human brain tends to make judgments based on contrast. I find this a fascinating strategy.

Comparing the same unit with two different prices, but attaching different policies or inclusions (for example, prepaid nonrefundable vs. flex cancel) could work well here. If the customer perceives value, this can drive conversion. In restaurant revenue management, there is a concept of putting three burger options on a menu. If there is a low-, mid-, and high-priced burger, you are more likely to sell the middle option than if you offered just a low- and midpriced burger. The third, higher-priced option is intentionally on the menu, but the chef doesn’t expect it to be a top seller. This is decoy pricing. It creates contrast and drives customers to select the mid-priced option.

Understand Unit Type Dynamics

3

Understanding larger trends across unit type is related to policy, price, merchandising strategy, and booking trend data. If you are a property manager with many different unit types, it’s critical to understand the demand curve by type. Your pricing strategy may need to differ by unit type.

Obviously, your goal is to sell every unit every night. If a studio has a booking curve of 7 to 21 days, this is the sweet spot for maximizing price and length of stay. These types of units may do well with more flexible cancel policies, as you have opportunities to resell units closer to arrival. Homes with eight or more bedrooms may have a booking curve of 90 to 120 days, and if the property is unsold in that window, it will be harder to fill.

What I love about vacation rental revenue management is that for every unit, you are either 0 percent or 100 percent occupied on any given night, but you can also optimize your portfolio as a collection. With rep-level inventory, even overbooking strategies can come into play! So many different strategies can apply, but no matter what the unit type mix of your portfolio, there is a next-level revenue management opportunity.

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The company, she said, couldn’t have excelled in the last four years to become a leader in the vacation rental industry without creating an environment that promotes success among its employees.

HOW COMPANY

CULTURE IMPACTS HOSPITALITY A

lmost five years ago, Hannah Lau Zarley had the opportunity to transition from the multifamily side of technology to the vacation rental industry. Her eventual decision to make the leap from an established housing vertical to one that was up and coming may seem like an odd move to some.

Zarley took on her new role at Kigo by using not just the business and technology experience that got her there but also her ears. By listening to those around her—whether leaders, peers, or employees—she blended into the culture of passion and empowerment that Kigo has successfully adopted in its five years since being acquired by RealPage. Now vice president of operations for Kigo, Zarley strives to keep that culture alive as Kigo and others in the short-term rental and vacation rental industries forge ahead.

Creating an Outstanding Company Culture “Listening to our employees is one of the first things we did at Kigo when we inherited the organization,” Zarley said. “It’s putting people in a position where they feel passionate and they have an opportunity to make a difference, getting them on board with the mission you’re creating as a company. Listening to an employee can have an immediate impact on the organization.”

“We’ve focused on building a culture that empowers our team fully and effectively,” Zarley said. “Utilizing the strengths and weaknesses, and bringing that empowerment to the table, is what we’ve found brings us the most success.”

It’s No Longer about “Me” but about “Us” With growth comes responsibility, and even difficulty, to maintain missions and mind-sets.

Most vacation rental property managers started their businesses alone or with business partners, and many fail at transferring passion and vision to their staffs when business booms. This can create a poor experience for the guest.

How an operator treats guests is not necessarily how employees will treat them unless the mindset has been established inside the organization.

It’s also important to demonstrate hospitality to your employees because they own your company’s brand and need to feel genuinely welcome as well.

Give the team the confidence and courage needed to execute and lead. Culture begins with the leader, but then it’s about the group of individuals who are focused on delivering a great experience for guests.

Putting the “Why” behind Your Business But establishing that welcoming mindset takes more than just a few warm greetings throughout the day. The culture should be built around storytelling and asking the right questions. Mentorship and training that emphasize teamwork further embeds belief in the mission.

Building a culture around storytelling bonds an organization when employees feel they are a part of the pages. That creates an emotional link between them and your business. It opens the eyes and ears of employees to see what the emotional impact looks like to the guest.

Asking the right questions to determine what motivates employees and discovering their true desires determine whether they are capable of carrying out the mind-set. Desire trumps passion every time.

Hiring people who believe in the message means they are more likely to convey that message to guests and carry out the mission.

Promoting Success, Regardless of Gender

Taking Charge of Your Company Culture

In “Company Culture: Technology, Autonomy, and Accountability Not Sold Separately,” Zarley shared how everyone from the top down is responsible for executing the vision of a memorable guest experience. One way is to invest in a staff that personally conveys this message with technology to support it.

Property owners and managers can’t always control outlying factors such as competitors and the economy, but they can manage conditions within an organization. Leaders make the choice to implement a culture that welcomes and values both guests and staff.

Zarley has been a key player at Kigo in its development of an allin-one property management platform that creates exceptional experiences for vacation rental managers and guests.

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Care is at the core of every service initiative. Staff should nurture people and take great pride in extending hospitality to guests. If employees are happy, it’s only natural that they share a warm smile or pleasant greeting that is more than skin-deep.

Lexicon Named Best Performing North American Vacation Rental Channel Manager in Booking.com 2018 Connectivity Partner Program.

Based on a proven track record of consistent, high quality listings that rank among the highest performing, Lexicon Travel Technologies has been recognized as the top performing Vacation Rental Manager in Booking.com’s prestigious Connectivity Partner Program for their work on behalf of property managers in 2018.

“Lexicon is one of only 6 Connectivity providers across the entire Booking.com Eco-system worldwide to receive this recognition for top performance in the program”, according to Joel Inman, Founder and CEO at Lexicon Travel Technologies. “We’re elated the investments we’ve made in technology, channel best practices, and relationship building are paying dividends for our clients. Higher quality listings are also higher performing listings, delivering the bookings property managers seek from our partnerships.”

To learn how you can benefit from Lexicon’s channel management expertise, visit lexicontravel.com or call us at 453 631 2391

Transparency Transparencia 透明度 ‫ يفافش‬Transparence прозрачность ् िता Accountability Responsabilidad 説明責任 ‫ةلئاسملا‬ Transparenz पारदरश Responsabilité जवाबदेही Partnership Asociación パートナーシップ ‫ةكارش‬ Partenariat партнерство Partnerschaft साझेदारी Quality Calidad 質量 ‫ ةدوج‬Qualité Качественный Qualität गुणवतत ् ा VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019 67 Performance Actuación 性能 ‫ ءادأ‬les performances

By Ann Marie Houlihan

Direct Booking Case Study

How a Destin VRM Reduced Dependence on the OTAs by 52 Percent in Only Eight Months

These Vacation Rental Managers Are Winning against the OTAs!

N

ancy Fox and Larry Synder have a strong sense of their brand, their guests, and what they need to accomplish their business goals. Nancy opened Your Friend at the Beach in 2005 with a handful of condos that she owned. Over time, she and the team grew into a vacation rental management company with over 30 properties.

About Your Friend at the Beach:  Brand: Grounded in friendliness

 Destination: The Gulf Coast of Florida (Destin and 30A)

 Demographic: Caters to visitors who seek an upscale, highend, and family-friendly condo with unparalleled customer service and attention to detail  Goal: Growing revenue while reducing dependence on OTAs

Set Your Goals for 2019 What percentage of bookings do you want to be direct? Be realistic. It’s easy to say 100 percent, but is it easy to accomplish? Most people will still rely on OTAs for some shoulder season or weekday bookings. What do you want your ratio to be? A good goal is 70 percent direct and 30 percent from OTAs. Now, what are you willing to invest to achieve that? Keep in mind that you will likely have to invest in OTAs and marketing at the same time until you turn the tide in favor of direct bookings! Look for the areas in which you can grow: More repeat guests, average daily rate (ADR), and actual numbers of bookings are a great place to start.

Fix Your Website!

Here are the steps you can follow to do the same for yourself:

Your website isn’t a business card, it’s your number one tool to drive direct bookings. Don’t let it be an afterthought. The website should tell your unique story and set you apart from your competitors. A fresh design that captures your brand is essential. Make sure you’re encouraging the desired next step. If you want them to look at properties, create a pathway. If you want them to book direct, ask for it, and support it with the necessary promotion. Bookings from mobile devices have doubled in the past year, so make sure your website is designed for mobile first.

Understand Where You Are Today

Increase Organic Search (Google Traffic)

It’s time to dig into your data. Determine what percentage of bookings comes from third parties. You’ll need to get those revenue dollars from other sources. Find out what your top-performing channels are and how much revenue you get from each. Typically, the top five sources of website traffic and revenue are Google organic, direct traffic, Google AdWords, email marketing, and referral traffic. After identifying the top sources of traffic, look at the conversion for each. From there, it is a matter of simple math to understand that if you assess traffic from each of those sources and multiply by conversion, you’ll see how much activity you need to do to replace the traffic from the OTAs.

Remember that research you did at the start? You probably noticed that Google Traffic is a major contributor to your overall direct online bookings. So go after more of that! For Q4Launch customers, we see 40 percent of traffic and 50 percent of direct bookings originate with a Google search. Think beyond “your destination vacation rentals” in your SEO efforts. Are you located in an area with great hiking? Have content about the top 10 hiking trails in the US and make sure the trail near you is on the list! In addition, there are variables that help your quality score with Google and thereby help your rankings. One of those variables is when a person fills out a form on your website; how can you take advantage of that?

The result after eight months of strategic, integrated marketing?  Percentage of OTA bookings reduced by 52 percent  Direct bookings increased by 121 percent

 Overall revenue increased by 21.44 percent

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Invest in Google or Bing Ads We have a kind of love‒hate relationship with AdWords. We love it because our customers see 10x‒20x return on ad spend. It offers predictable results, and you can turn it on/off as needed. However, it’s not long-lasting like an investment in SEO and a content strategy. So know that when you turn off the funding, you turn off the traffic. In contrast, strategic content can drive traffic to your website for years to come. Still, Google Ads is a valuable weapon in your arsenal for driving direct bookings.

Make Repeat Guests Your Favorite Guests We hear all the time about how people don’t want to pester their past guests with emails. We don’t think you need to worry about that. If you’re emailing your database too frequently, the unsubscribe rate will let you know about it quickly. We send thousands of emails on behalf of our customers and don’t see the unsubscribe rate spike. So let’s look at this another way. Past guests already know how amazing your properties and service are, and they’re highly likely to book again. You can reward those individuals with special offers to encourage them to return. At the end of the day, email produces the highest ROI, but it’s the most underutilized. If your goal is to reduce dependency on the OTAs, email marketing will be a powerful and cost-effective tool!

Use OTAs for Guest Acquisition and Develop a Direct Rebooking Path If you must use the OTAs, you may as well get something out of it. You can create a rebooking special offer or value-adding offer

at checkout. Create an OTA rebooking life cycle email campaign.

Finally, always signal the benefits of booking direct on your website and any communication with a guest who booked via an OTA.

Lead Generation This is about turning unknown website visitors into known visitors who can be nurtured for a future booking. Consider the Five Stages of Travel:

DREAMING | PLANNING | BOOKING | EXPERIENCING | REMEMBERING How are you engaging the folks who aren’t ready to book? Think about why they aren’t ready. Maybe they don’t know the size of their bonus or their kids’ travel schedule. For some reason, they simply can’t book yet, but they are interested in your destination (if they weren’t, why would they be on your website?). Don’t let that website visitor go away without getting their email address and a chance to stay at the forefront of their mind so that when they are ready to book, you’re at the top of their inbox! You can use valuable content that is gated (that’s how you get their email) and then create a nurture campaign of three more emails over the next 10 days that are designed to get the booking for your property and not someone else’s! If you do this right, you will start to develop trust with the prospective guest and establish a nice digital relationship where you are providing useful and helpful information.

Your Friend at the Beach had 165 Vacation Guide downloads in 2018. That translated to approximately 30 bookings it might not have gotten otherwise!

In summary, if you start with data and realistic goals, there is a proven pathway toward more direct bookings and less fees to the OTAs.

Your Statewide Vacation Rental Managers Association The Florida VRMA represents the professional management of vacation homes, condos and resort units throughout the state of Florida. We are your statewide vacation rental management industry association dedicated to supporting and protecting the $31,000,000,000 per year economic impact realized through the Florida vacation rental industry.

The new Florida VRMA continues to deliver the educational programs, legislative advocacy and member benefits to help you to grow your segment of the industry throughout the state of Florida and beyond.

Explore what our new regional chapters can mean for your business as a professional in the Florida vacation rental industry. The Florida VRMA is the largest statewide association in the US market today supporting property managers with tens of thousands of vacation rental units. From major Florida attractions to local supporting tradesman, the Florida VRMA has various participation levels for all businesses and industry partners.

Find out what the new Florida VRMA canVRM doIntelfor you at Magazine | Spring 2019

www.fvrma.org or call us at 407-218-6600

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By Heather Bayer, CottageBlogger

How to Start a Podcast

Boost Your Influence with a Travel Podcast

A

round 48 million Americans listen to podcasts every week. By any measure, that’s a lot of listeners. As a comparison, approximately 20 million people watch NFL Sunday Night Football, which is routinely among the highest-rated television programs. And, in 2018, 6 million more Americans listened to podcasts weekly than in 2017. If that wasn’t enough to get you thinking that this is a medium to get into, try this one: Podcast listeners are more likely to have high net worth—that is, they are your target audience.

To add to the lure of creating a podcast, travel is one of the most underrepresented genres in the field, and the opportunities are huge to be the first to create a travel show for your area. You would have the chance to showcase events, attractions, and places of historical interest and to speak to tourism reps and local people who can talk about places to go and things to see. It’s a niche that needs to be filled.

The statistics are pretty good, and they alone could be enough to start you off on this path. But with so many other social platforms competing for your attention, why should you give your time to developing another that requires far more technical expertise and development time? Although it’s true that it will take resources to get a show set up and published regularly, the reasons to do it far outweigh the additional work required. Here are a few that might convince you:

It is not a competitive platform Travel is one of the most underserved niches in podcasting, with the field wide open to launch a location-specific podcast that promotes an area through information on local attractions, events, history, and anything else that might entice a listener to visit.

More people are consuming information from podcasts It’s not just the general podcast consumption statistics that favor looking in this direction. When you drill down into the stats, you can see which listeners are your target audience. Affluent, educated, loyal, and regular travelers—they are the ones most likely to be researching locations online and basing their decisions on the resultant information.

You become a local influencer The opportunity to be seen as a local expert, and to broadcast that expertise to a wide listening audience, can elevate a podcast brand to an influential resource for travelers. Once you’re established, it’s tough for anyone else to capture your niche, so providing you continue to deliver quality information in an entertaining fashion, you have control over it.

Your business can be the sole sponsor A podcast shouldn’t be seen as an overt marketing tool for your business; it’s simply an information resource delivered by a local expert. However, you have complete control over who sponsors the show, and if you choose to have your business as the sponsor, the traffic will flow.

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It’s fun Few podcasters will tell you it’s a chore—the frequent and consistent publishers enjoy the process and take great satisfaction in their download statistics and the relationships they make along the way.

The success of any podcast lies in knowing your audience and talking their language.

For example, if you are targeting family travelers, you’ll want to bring them relevant information that will make their trip enjoyable, safe, and memorable, while a podcast that focuses more on urban travel might home in on specific places, restaurants, and local vibes.

For example, Beyond Bourbon Street (beyondbourbonst.com) host Mark Bologna shares his knowledge of New Orleans to help visitors make the most of their time in the city. Recent titles include “18 Questions about New Orleans” and “Marie Laveau, a New Orleans Voudou Priestess”—an interview with the author of a book on the role Laveau played in the early 1800s in the city.

(Incidentally, this is a great podcast to listen to before your trip to VRMA in October.)

Bruce Fisher is the host of the Hawaii Vacation Connection Podcast (www.hawaii-aloha.com/podcast) and produces short episodes that offer a wealth of tips and recommendations for anyone traveling to the islands. The show covers topical issues such as whether the government shutdown would affect Hawaiian vacations, advice for specific travelers such as family groups and honeymooners, and the best way to travel between the islands. The podcast lives on Fisher’s Hawaii Aloha Travel site, so any listener visiting the show notes can easily access the rest of the site to purchase travel products and accommodations.

The newest podcast on the local travel block is the Inside Vermont Show, launched by the owners of The Nest Chalet (thenestchalet. com/inside-vermont). Julie and Keith describe their show as “a non-Vermonter’s guide, sharing why we started coming to Vermont and what keeps us coming back.” Each episode features a lightning round with their guests asking about their favorite places to eat, drink, shop, and see.

What stands out from all these examples is the relaxed style that makes the hosts seem more like friendly guides to the locations— people who listeners might like to meet and get to know. It’s a great form of engagement, and once travelers see you as an influencer, they are much more likely to turn to your recommended resources when booking their next vacation.

If this has got your creative juices flowing, it only takes a few more steps to get a professional podcast out on the airwaves, and although they might seem overwhelming at first, once you are set up and in a pattern of recording, editing, and publishing, it becomes routine.

You can find help online from a variety of sources, from done-foryou services to courses that give step-by-step instructions on buying the right equipment, creating artwork, uploading to hosting services, and marketing.

Podcasting Setup Checklist Equipment and Software

There’s a lot of equipment out there, but it’s surprisingly easy to create a simple but effective system. If you want to be mobile, you’ll need portable equipment that’s easy to set up while you’re out on the road, so before you buy, be clear on how you plan on recording episodes. My tip is to always record into a digital recorder onto an SD card rather than directly onto a computer. You will need:  A good microphone—ATR2100  Quality headphones

 Audio interface such as Focusrite Scarlett  Mid- to high-end XLR cable  Pop filter

 Audio recorder

 Recording and editing software—Audacity (free), Adobe Audition  Podcast hosting account—Libsyn

Intro, Outro, and Artwork

Creating a podcast is more than just talking about a topic and uploading the file. A professionally produced show will have intro and

outro music and probably a voiceover that describes the show and the host. Don’t try doing this yourself—it’s inexpensive and easy to get one done, and a good one will last for years.  Voiceovers and artwork—Fiverr.com

 Royalty-free music—Premiumbeat.com, Audiojungle.com

Recording and Editing

You have a choice of whether to record directly into your editing software on a computer or to use a digital recording device and have all your audio material safely held on an SD card until you process it. You’ll need to learn the difference between .WAV and .MP3 files and how to convert one to the other, but it’s a relatively simple process and can be done easily on iTunes. If recording interviews, Skype is probably the easiest method.

The free editing platform Audacity is the most popular choice among podcasters. It is simple to use and has enough features to create a professional-sounding result. Other platforms include Garage Band, Adobe Audition, and Hindenburg.  Recording—Skype with Pamela, Zoom, Zencastr.com  Editing—Audacity, Garageband, Hindenberg, Adobe Audition

Marketing your Efforts

Creating your podcast is just the beginning. Unless you want it to hang out in an audio wasteland, you need to find ways to promote the fact you have a show about your area. Teaming up with your tourism authority would be a great place to start, as would promoting it to all your vacation rental guests; whatever you choose, you’ll need a targeted strategy to get the listeners you want and to find sponsors.

 Creation of a separate website or adding a page to an existing site  Podcast plugin for WP sites—Powerpress plugin by Blubrry

Podcast Training

There can be a steep learning curve to getting a podcast show off the ground, and although you can do it yourself using free tutorials online, it may be worth the expense to get a good education in the meantime. Several excellent courses are out there that give you a solid foundation in podcasting techniques and publishing methods.

Here are a few:  Entrepreneur on Fire—John Lee Dumas & Podcaster’s Paradise  Smart Passive Income—Power Up Podcasting  School of Podcasting

I know it can all seem overwhelming, but there is a mountain of online help available from forums and Facebook groups to public training and private coaching. Podcasters are passionate people and super helpful to anyone who wants to get into the medium, so there is always someone available to help. And if you really get into it, there are a wealth of conferences too, the largest of which is Podcast Movement in Orlando in November, where two thousand avid broadcasters get together and share their experiences and knowledge. Maybe I’ll see you there!

Heather Bayer has been podcasting for four years as the host of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, a show with more than 450K downloads and 280 episodes.

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Online ROI Rescue Using Google Analytcs for Greater Success Data. Analytics. Conversions. Oh My!

I

f you are walking precariously along the yellow brick road of vacation rental marketing, these words are as scary as the unseen dangers hidden in the woods of Oz.

Data, analytics, and conversions require forethought, measurement, analysis, and strategy.

These concepts are probably more important to your vacation rental business than any other—except of course, the number: How much am I making?

And, just like in The Wizard of Oz, once you get to know what’s hiding in the trees, it’s much easier to navigate knowing that on the other side lie sunny skies, rainbow ponies, and a full rental calendar.

To put it more clearly, when you start to set marketing goals based on data and make marketing decisions based on trends in your data, you’ll see an improvement in the numbers you care about—bookings and revenue.

You may already be thinking, “This is too much for me,” but it isn’t, I promise! Just a little knowledge goes a long way, and sometimes just seeing what is hidden in the numbers is enough to give you an idea of some simple changes that could make big improvements.

Using data tools such as Google Analytics, you can get a snapshot of key data points today and then watch over time as you make changes to your website and marketing efforts.

If you are like most online business owners, when your website is ready, you have your website person set up your Google Analytics account. You log in once or twice. Look at it. Click a tab or two.

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Close it and forget all about it.

Or, you may find a couple of reports you feel are useful, like traffic channels, and you watch the numbers go up and down.

However, there are a few Google Analytics reports that can give you actionable information to help you quickly and easily see problems.

Be sure to look at these reports over a longer time frame by changing the date range in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen.

Look at three or six months, or more if this is your first time viewing the data. After you start making changes, you’ll want to look at more recent time periods.

1. Audience Report  Mobile Overview

This report shows you the number of users who used various devices to view your site and, overall, how they behaved on your site on each device. The bounce rate indicates what percentage of users left your site without any further action. A high bounce rate means a higher percentage of your users leave your site without engaging with your content.

Action items:

If your bounce rate is higher on mobile than on desktop devices, you need to determine why and make changes to your site now to help your users consume the content more easily on mobile. Use Google’s mobile-first tool and check a few pages; check your site speed via Pingdom, and learn more about how to segment traffic by device in Google Analytics so you can dive into how specific pages are performing.

2. Acquisition Reports  Search Console If you are working hard at ensuring your site is optimized for search engines or if you want to start implementing an SEO plan, you will definitely want to view this report and keep track of your performance. Note that if you do not see any data here, you need to add your Google Search Console data to the Google Analytics property. If you already have the search console, this is easy to do. If not, you will need to sign up for it first. The data will take a while to populate.

If your property or booking pages are getting a high clickthrough rate but have a high bounce rate, this will directly affect revenue. Investigate to see what issues could be causing the problem. Is the page taking too long to load? Does your booking form load properly? Does your page’s meta description (Google Snippet) match the content on the page?

If bounce rate is low and page views per session are also low, you need to look at changing your navigation on your website or creating more links to additional content on the site to encourage visitors to investigate further. In the example above, 4.2 pages per session is great. This page actually leads people to additional resources on the site, including a booking page. It is responsible for nearly half of this client’s direct bookings per year.

3. Acquisition Reports  All Traffic  Channels & Source/Medium The channels and source/medium reports are good overview reports on how your marketing efforts are working to bring traffic to your website. As you look at these reports over time, you need to watch how your traffic increases in relation to your bookings. If your site is working to convert bookings, as your traffic increases, your bookings should increase, too. If that is not the case, there are most likely issues on your website that need to be addressed before you start changing marketing tactics, because the point of marketing is to bring more visitors to your site.

The channels give you an overview of the sources of traffic to your site. You can create your own channels to add to this list and see them in your reports. Be sure and click on each to see a breakdown of social media and referrals. Note that there could be a bit of fake data in the referrals report unless you have set up filters, so don’t be alarmed if you see weird websites sending you a few users.

This report shows you which pages of your website are getting the most views from Google’s organic search. You can see how many times each page was included in the search results for the terms, how many times your page was clicked on, and the average results position (rank) at which your page is located for the search term.

The report also shows your bounce rate and pages per session as well as goal completions if you have conversion goals set up.

You then can drop to the queries report, just three tabs lower in the acquisition report, to see some of the top queries through which users are finding your site.

In the example above, you can see that the top landing page (a blog post) received 455 page views and had a very low bounce rate. An average of 4.2 pages were viewed per session.

Action items:

To rise in Google’s rankings, you need to have great content that engages your users, so bounce rate is important. Work on making the content on your top pages more engaging so that people will read it and scroll down to look at images or videos. You also want to make sure the content on the page reflects what users are searching for.

Questions to ask:

 What is your biggest source of traffic right now?

 What is the bounce rate, page view figures, and time on page for each source of traffic?  From what social media sites are you getting traffic?

Any surprises?

 Are you getting referrals from the listing sites or CVB sites on which you are paying to appear?  If you have set up goals, how do conversion rates differ among the channels?

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The source medium report breaks down the channels report and is especially useful for comparing all sources of traffic at once.

As you get more experienced at tracking your traffic and start using many different sources to get traffic to your site, you may want to use UTMs to tag your traffic from each specific ad, post, email, and so on. A UTM code is a simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name.

This enables Google Analytics to tell you where searchers came from as well as what campaign directed them to you. I encourage you to learn more about UTMs, especially if you are using any type of external advertising.

4. Google Analytics  Behavior Reports Another report you’ll want to look at is the behavior report. This section of Google Analytics will show you what your users are doing on your site. If you have a lot of traffic but few conversions, this is where you can break down each page of content and really dive deep into the problems your site might be having.

 If your traffic is high, but you have high bounce rates and low page views, you probably have a website problem. In this case, you may need to look at page speed and mobile views or get a website review, but first, try to rewrite some content or get better images.  If your organic search traffic is low and your site is at least a few months old, you should make sure your site is listed with Google’s Search Console and look at your meta descriptions and meta keywords.  If you don’t have much traffic at all from any sources, you have a marketing problem. Learn the different marketing strategies that work best for you and your audience. Social media ads, especially on Pinterest and Facebook, can work quickly to get you some traffic.  If you have high traffic and engaging content and still have low booking rates, look at your property-specific pages. Do you

Check the “All Pages” report to check which pages have the highest page views, bounce rates, and exit rates.

have well-placed booking forms and calls to action? Are your images professional? Do your booking forms work? Is there a way for visitors to easily find your contact info? Does your listing copy entice them to book your property?

Examine conversions (bookings) on the individual property pages.

If you don’t have good conversion rates now, you should be testing the site design, listing descriptions, images, and more.

As you can see, there are a lot of details to be found within your Google Analytics dashboard, and it should be clear that this is a tool you need to use to learn more about what is going on with your website.

Using Your Data As you start looking at these different numbers and familiarizing yourself with the various reports and ways to filter data, you will discover many ways in which you can use the data to make changes.

The biggest mistakes people make at this time are making the wrong changes and making too many changes at once.

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The keys to making money in any online business are to learn how to use different strategies and marketing tactics correctly to bring more traffic to your website and to use the data you see to make informed decisions that work for you and your business.

By Jodi Bourne

You can use the search bar to type in the URL extension to check individual pages or groups of pages.

stop wasting time o n t u r n - o v e r d ays !

INTRODUCING...

fly by SUPER STATUS CHECKER

connect . brand . collect SiliconTravel.com | 800.459.2256 | VacationAttendant.com

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Bedbugs, Block Parties, and Broken Bones

By Tony Melillo and Megan Ueland

Safeguard Your Short-Term Vacation Rental Business from the Unexpected

W

ith the growing number of vacation rental insurance options available today, it can be difficult to know which policy will provide the appropriate coverage for your property and your business.

Before you purchase a policy, make sure you know these basic facts and which essential components to consider when making your coverage decision.

Comprehensive Coverage “Comprehensive” insurance refers to vacation rental policies that cover the vacation rental home and its contents, commercial general liability, and business income. This policy is the most complete coverage available for vacation rentals. It is considered an all-risk policy, covering perils such as fire, theft, and vandalism; wind/hurricane, hail, and water damage; and many others.

Additional highlights of a comprehensive policy include personal and advertising injury (e.g., libel and slander), medical payments, and personal liability insurance (when your vacation rental is also your primary residence).

Comprehensive policies with optional coverages specifically designed for risks associated with owning a short-term vacation rental business are available. In addition to property and liability coverage, optional coverages include:  Bedbug Cleanup Expense

This pays for the reasonable and necessary cleanup and removal resulting from bedbug nesting or infestation at the insured premise.

 Higher General Liability Limits

Particularly important for higher value homes, this broad coverage protects the insured from financial loss if liable for property damage or bodily injury to a third party.

 Additional Living Expense

Used for vacation rentals that are also primary residences, this coverage reimburses the insured for comparable standard-of-living costs following a covered loss.

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 Condominium Loss Assessment

This pays your share of an assessment charged to all unit owners by the association for physical damage to property by a covered cause of loss.

 Building Ordinance Coverage

This provides coverage for undamaged property that must be destroyed as a result of a law or ordinance that regulates construction.

One of the least understood components of the CBIZ policy, for example, is the limited liquor coverage. Vacation rental hosts often leave a welcome gift for their guests, which may include alcoholic beverages. The CBIZ policy allows the host to provide a bottle of wine or champagne or a six pack of beer for guests to enjoy. This coverage does not limit guest consumption of alcohol on the premises. Under this policy, guests may enjoy alcoholic beverages as they would on any other vacation; the policy simply limits the amount that a host can provide.

Commercial General Liability vs. Personal Liability Many vacation rental business owners believe they can rely on their standard homeowners or landlord policy for protection. Although these policies provide property and personal liability coverage, they typically exclude business activities, which means liability claims arising from rental activity will most likely be denied.

Commercial general liability (CGL) is the essential liability coverage for a vacation rental business. Keep in mind that as soon as a home is advertised as a vacation rental, the home becomes a place of business, and the risk to the property and exposure to liability claims substantially change. CGL insurance protects against claims arising from your business operations as well as advertising and personal injury liability. Business income coverage provides financial relief while your property is being restored after a covered loss.

CGL also extends to guests’ use of amenities such as docks, pools, special events, hot tubs, bikes, and some types of boats; this coverage includes off-premises use.

Policies That Cover Property Managers Too The CGL insurance, through CBIZ for example, also covers property managers and property management companies. This means you’ll be covered if a guest is injured on the property and implicates your company for negligent property maintenance (soap scum, loose handrails, burned-out light bulbs, carpets that are not secured, tripping hazards, etc.).

This policy also features commission income protection. If there is a contractual agreement between the vacation rental owner and property manager, the policy will cover lost business income in the event of covered property damage during the time the home is not rentable.

As a property manager, it is beneficial to not rely on your professional liability for full protection. Require your clients to carry a commercial package policy. Professional liability policies aren’t designed to cover bodily injuries that occur on property owned by others; the coverage afforded by those policies ends at the doorstep of managed properties. That is why it is essential to require your clients to carry a policy that provides comprehensive coverage.

What If I Lease the Property?

Not all vacation rental properties are owned; some are leased by the business owner. Before you offer your leased property as a shortterm rental, check with the property owner to secure approval and learn the owner’s insurance coverage requirements.

Next, carefully review your lease agreement. It must state that short-term rentals are acceptable. Check the lease to determine whether the building and contents coverage will be your responsibility or the owners, and how loss of income coverage applies. If coverage is your responsibility, the property owner will be added to the policy as a loss payee for property coverage and an additional insured for liability coverage.

Rates and Pricing Savvy insurance shoppers know that rates will vary by company and product. Many factors determine insurance rates, including zip code, construction type, age of the house, number of bedrooms, amenities offered, and coverage limits.

The comprehensive vacation rental policy is not the cheapest insurance option available, but it’s the only one that will offer you the most peace of mind and the best value for your money. The adage “you get what you pay for” also applies to vacation rental insurance.

Since this type of policy is intended to replace your current annual plan, it reduces the hassle and expense of having multiple policies.

Safety Checks and Risk Mitigation: Your Best Defense Against Claims Depending on the size of your home and the amenities you offer at your vacation rental, the list of actions you can take to protect your property from damage and your guests from injury can be extensive. In addition to obtaining a written and signed rental agreement (physical or electronic) for each guest stay, here are the “must-do” recommendations to keep your property and guests safe and sound:  Include waivers for the use of amenities such as hot tubs, pools, bikes, and exercise equipment.  Install and regularly test smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

 Consider installing monitored alarms for fire, theft, and noise.  Conduct post-stay inspections after every rental period to check the general property condition. During these inspections, check for water leaks, make sure amenities are in good working order, and lock doors and windows.

 Turn the water off when the property is unoccupied for long periods, especially during the winter. Water damage is one of the most common insurance claims. Consider installing a leak detection unit that will alert you if leaks are detected while you’re away.

 If your property has a pool, make sure water depth markers are installed and visible, safety rules and “swim at your own risk” signs are posted, and life-saving rescue equipment is readily available in the pool area.  Place fire extinguishers in all cooking areas and near all fireplaces.

What We Don’t Cover: Knowing what your policy doesn’t cover is just as important as knowing what it does. The CBIZ vacation rental insurance policy, for example, offers the most comprehensive vacation rental insurance coverage available in the marketplace. Nevertheless, we don’t cover the following:  Home-sharing or single-room rental situations: The property must have its own entrance with no shared spaces between the property owner and guests or between guests not traveling together  Long-term rentals (more than six months at a time)

 Casual workers (your neighbor’s teenager mowing your lawn, for example)  Old wiring, including aluminum wiring and fuse boxes  Zip lines and trampolines  Diving boards and slides

Bedbugs, block parties, and broken bones are just a few of the potential nightmare scenarios faced by today’s vacation rental business owners. Fortunately, the insurance industry has responded to vacation rental business owners’ growing needs for protection by offering a variety of insurance options. Comprehensive vacation rental insurance is the only coverage recommended by CBIZ because it provides the best protection available. Doing your research and discovering the facts before choosing a policy is the only way for you to ensure you’ve made the right choice for you and your vacation rental business.

Tony Melillo is the sales manager for the CBIZ Vacation Rental Insurance Program.

He has five-plus years of experience in managing the CBIZ day-to-day sales operations. Megan Ueland has been an insurance professional with CBIZ Insurance Services, Inc., since 2012. She has helped thousands of clients secure the right coverage for their short-term vacation rental businesses. You can reach Tony, Megan, or any member of the CBIZ Vacation Rental Insurance sales team at 888-883-5696 or vacationrentalsales@cbiz.com.

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Is Your Guest Wi-Fi 5 Stars?

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e pretty much expect great Wi-Fi wherever we go these days. Sitting on an airplane at 30,000 feet?

Better be able to watch online content! At a café working for a few hours? “What’s your Wi-Fi password?” The backbone for most smart-city initiatives is a free Wi-Fi network even while residents are waiting for a bus.

Free Wi-Fi is the bare minimum, with the new expectation being that the Wi-Fi is high quality. I recently stayed at a lovely vacation rental where the Wi-Fi speed was less than adequate. In fact, it was so inadequate that my guests and I needed to go off the Wi-Fi network and onto the LTE/4G network to use the DoorDash app to order takeout. Going back and checking the reviews of the unit online, guess what was the number-one thing that led to less-thanstellar reviews? You guessed right: poor Wi-Fi. No one seemed to notice there were four pillows on the bed because they were too busy stewing over their phone’s poor connection.

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It’s All about the Hardware

While hotels are using enterprise-grade hardware (with names like Cisco and Ubiquiti), most vacation rentals are still running off of a free-with-your-plan router from cable companies or internet service providers (ISPs). It should come as no surprise that these modems are the cheapest money can buy and that their performance is greatly inferior to what your guests now expect when they are staying in a vacation rental property.

That’s not to say that you need to go out and get an enterprise- or hotel-grade Wi-Fi modem, but you’d be amazed by the improvement in Wi-Fi performance you’ll get from a roughly $100 WiFi modem. You can even get your ISP to recommend something pretty amazing and include it in the monthly cost because they likely also supply hardware for businesses (technically, your rental is a business and not a residence). If you are budget conscious, you

could even consider upgrading your speed and hardware plan and ditching a premium cable package. You’re not likely to get a bad review for not having premium cable, but you will if you don’t have premium Wi-Fi.

If you decide to replace the free-with-your-plan modem from your cable provider and you switch companies, they will likely want their $20 modem back. Technically, you are leasing it from them, and if you recycle it, they will charge you much more than its actual $20 value. Also, keep in mind that you don’t have to use their integrated router/switch access point bundled with the device. You can upgrade to an enterprise-level access point—but more on that later.

Welcome!

Your Wi-Fi Password Is #07&OlT5@ Ever spent five minutes trying to connect to Wi-Fi because the network name and password are still the default from the provider? Is that a zero or an “O”? Changing the password isn’t just an opportunity to make your guest’s life easier but an opportunity for you to make the password some version of your company’s name.

The ability to create guest networks is built into most routers. With a little bit of technical savvy, you can allow guests Wi-Fi access with a user-friendly password (but you should always have a password).

You can even do phrase-based passwords like “great-guest-vacay,” increasing your security. Guest networks don’t let users see what else is attached to the network and access other devices, which is important in a world of increasingly connected devices.

If you aren’t technically savvy enough to change the network name or password, then get your local installer to change it for you.

Literally don’t let them leave until they change that terrible default password to something that is guest friendly.

We Don’t Have the Bandwidth for That Today. . .

Have you ever been on a network that slows down later in the day?

Or perhaps a full coffee shop where the free Wi-Fi is basically useless? What most people don’t realize is that most modems can support no more than twenty devices being connected to them at any one time on a single service set identifier (SSID).

Although that doesn’t sound like it should be a problem for your vacation rental, think hard about what might be connected to your Wi-Fi and what your guest might connect. In a three-bedroom rental, each guest is likely to bring two connected devices each (a phone and either a laptop or tablet), which gets you to six connected guest devices. If you have internet of things (IoT) devices like Alexa, Roku TV, Wi-Fi thermostats, guest tablets, a noise sensor, Wi-Fi smart lock, Sonos speakers, and a host of other smart devices, you might be getting close to twenty. Business-level access points, on the other hand, can handle over sixty simultaneous connections.

The real value of IoT devices is that they can help you know what is going on at your property at any time (especially if you also use a smart lock), with many of them also functioning as guest amenities (like a Sonos speaker). To not only bring the guest experience you offer to the next level, but to also improve your management of the property, you’ll likely want to start thinking about your Wi-Fi not just as an amazing guest amenity but as the thing that also lets you know what is going on in the unit, with smart door analytics and noise monitoring.

However, remember too that not all devices will require the same amount of bandwidth from your network. A smart lock will require

almost nothing, whereas a Sonos speaker will take much more.

Also, devices on other smart home frequencies won’t count toward the twenty- or sixty-device maximum. At Operto, we recommend either adding smart devices on a frequency other than Wi-Fi or upgrading to an access point that can handle sixty devices.

IoT and Frequencies IoT is currently a hot topic. Its proliferation with devices like Roku, Chromecast, Alexa, and Google Home mean that the big players in the world of technology are only going to be growing. Increasingly, guests expect that they can get these amenities they have at home in your home away from home.

One of the first challenges you are going to likely face is that many of these new devices will only connect to the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi range. You may know that Wi-Fi right now can be either 5 GHz or 2.4 GHz, but most people don’t know why there are two versions.

The 5 GHz band was added because it can handle more bandwidth.

That means it’s great for your guests’ devices and anything else that needs a lot of bandwidth (think Netflix viewing), but it has shorter range.

The growth of home automation has come with even more frequencies than just Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. There are a range of great low-cost sensors and monitors on a range of frequencies that can control smart locks, thermostats, leak sensors, and so on. To make use of these, though, you will need a hub (or bridge) to manage all the frequencies. Samsung is the first to create a device that can manage all these frequencies while also acting as your Wi-Fi router.

Samsung has two versions: one called the SmartThings Connect Home (lower bandwidth capabilities) and the SmartThings Connect Home Pro (higher bandwidth capabilities that might be more appropriate for your property). They are also user-friendly for changing the Wi-Fi password through the SmartThings app.

Conclusion Although it may seem like a challenge to address your unit’s Wi-Fi, it’s becoming something you can’t ignore if you want to maintain outstanding guest reviews. High-quality Wi-Fi has quickly become an expectation of your guests.

It’s not just millennials who want to be connected wherever they go. Even my ninety-year-old Mennonite grandmother wants to Skype the grandkids whenever possible. She’s learned to use video conferencing to see the kids but has skipped past learning to use a smartphone.

I can’t imagine her feelings would change just because she goes on vacation. Even a nice grandmother like her isn’t going to give you a good review if her call with the grandkids is cut short because of your bad Wi-Fi connection.

By Michael Driedger, CEO of Operto Michael is the cofounder and CEO of Operto Guest Technologies, a property-operating system improving the guest experience and operational efficiencies for hotels, vacation rentals, and serviced apartments. Prior to founding Operto in 2016, Michael had more than two decades of experience in architecture, building design, and construction and has a passion for energy efficiency, sustainability, and intelligent systems that are designed to improve our overall quality of life. www.operto.com.

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By Betsy Taylor, Trust Account Specialist, Streamline VRS

Trust Account Fundamentals

Trust Accounting is not Just for North Carolina Vacation Rental Managers

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hen people hear the terms trust or escrow accounting, their first thoughts may be “that does not apply to me” or “I am not regulated by a real estate commission.” Although these statements may be true—as most states do not have a real estate commission that regulates reporting rules—using trust account software is still a best practice and will give you peace of mind, and the reporting provided will assist vacation rental profesionals keep accounts in balance.

What Constitutes a Trust Account?

A trust account, or escrow, is an account into which trust money (and only trust money) is deposited. The four primary features of a trust account are the following:  Separate They contain only money belonging to others.  Custodial They are held in name of a licensee or real estate company.  Available on demand Funds may be withdrawn without prior notice.  Secure “Trust” or “Escrow Account” must appear on signature cards, bank statements, deposit tickets, and checks.

What are Trust Account Records?

Each state determines what and how trust account records are to be maintained. Most reporting guidelines require a clear audit trail, including the following:  Deposit tickets  Cancelled checks  Check stubs 80

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 Journals  Property ledger sheets

Trust Account Reports In software applications, such as Streamline’s StreamTrust, your property management software likely provides the following reports to keep your trust account in balance:  Trust Account Summary This report provides a comprehensive view of all transactions within a date range and a breakdown of owner balances, advanced deposits, operating accounts, security deposits, and tax accounts.  Property Trial Balance As reported by individual properties, this report shows the total amount of each account.  Property Ledger Summary Report This report provides all transactions for an individual property within a date range, broken down by each account and fees.  Bank Deposit Report This is a reprint of each bank deposit that includes all relevant information and individual totals.  Guest Advanced Deposits Broken down by each reservation, this report shows all the money for past or future reservations that should be in your trust account.  Security Deposits Held This report shows all the security deposits you currently have on hand.

Frequently Asked Questions

your state, I recommend you play it safe.

Q: Can I allow bank service fees to be charged against the trust account and reimburse the account after the fact?

A: If you are in a trust account state, the answer is NO! This would cause a deficit in the account. Work with your bank and have any bank charges or credit card fees debited from your operating account.

Q: Can I allow commissions, interest, or any other earned fee to stay in my trust account beyond 30 days?

A: If you are in a trust account state, the answer is NO! This is considered commingling. If you are not in a trust account state, you may leave the funds in the account, but it is recommended that you clear out the funds due to you at the end of each month to make balancing easier.

Q: Can I pay for owner repairs for a unit that does not have enough money to cover it?

A: If you are in a trust account state, the answer is NO! In Streamline, for example, StreamTrust uses “held invoice logic,” so if the owner does not have the funds available, the invoice is automatically held. Depending on your company policies, you can pay the bill; however, this will cause a deficit in the trust account.

In summary, to date, everyone has a different perception of what trust accounting entails. Although it is critical to check the laws in

People are enTRUSTing you with their money. I have seen many companies have hundreds of thousands of dollars in their trust bank accounts and make payments that did not truly have funding.

The moment all the money was due to vendors, owners, and the property management companies, that trust bank account went to zero very quickly.

Using a property management system that is well-versed in trust accounting helps in simplifying the process by: 1. Making sure you know how much money you have and who it belongs to.

2. Ensuring you know whether the owner paying an invoice has the money to pay.

3. Reconciling your bank account daily (this sounds tough but it’s easier to find discrepancies in smaller sets of data).

4. Paying owners and vendors while tracking how money is moving.

At the end of the day, you should feel comfortable knowing you can run an audit report and compare it to the balance in your bank account to give an accurate justification of why your company is in trust. It is a great feeling!

An auditor can come along in any state at any time. Don’t make that a stressful moment. Just follow a daily, weekly, and monthly routine, and your company will pass an audit with flying colors.

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PointCentral Q&A with Mike Harrington

Carolina Retreats Embraces Smart Home Technology

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e asked PointCentral customer Mike Harrington, CEO at Carolina Retreats and past president of VRMA, about his experience with smart home technology and PointCentral. Mike’s candid responses are both informative and enlightening and should help other vacation rental managers who are investigating smart home technology. We thank Mike and the team at Carolina Retreats for their cooperation in the development of this article.

What Was Your Motivation to Look at Smart Home?

Mike Harrington (MH): It was really sort of a no-brainer on our part. I saw things progressing from lockboxes with a physical key to the keyless locks, which were more analog. When PointCentral came out, there had been some Wi-Fi-enabled systems before that, but in these vacation rental homes, Wi-Fi can be very spotty. I knew that was a problem from the very beginning. With PointCentral, I was really intrigued with the mobile operating system that works on cellular technology—which was way more reliable from the get-go.

No Key MH: I’ll never forget my first summer as the new owner and president of the company. I got a call at 11 o’clock at night—someone can’t get in. I drove 30 minutes to the office to meet the people. I get into the office, go to the key box and it’s locked, and I don’t have the key. I eventually was able to unlock the box and give them their key, then drive all the way home. I told myself, I’m never doing this again. We immediately started the process of implementing smart home technology.

No Problem MH: Our Topsail operation is now 100 percent on the PointCentral system. We’re getting ready to convert our Carolina Beach operation to PointCentral as well. It took very little convincing for homeowners, and our staff were elated, as were guests. We fund the hardware costs, and we pass along the software costs to our guests, which made it a lot more manageable for everyone to accept.

How Has Going Keyless Impacted Your Operations?

MH: From a sheer efficiency standpoint, we’ve basically cut out check-ins at the office. Everything is handled pre-arrival. Nobody wants to come to an office and stand in a lobby to get a key. We know when the home is clean and ready. We know when the prop-

erty is ready for occupancy and when the guests check in and check out.

Did You Integrate Smart Home with Your Work Orders?

MH: Absolutely! We rely on multiple vendors who have their own codes. We know when they enter the home and when they leave.

For example, Hurricane Florence was a very big problem for us.

Smart home allowed us to better prepare our homes before and after the storm—which was just awesome! We didn’t have to deal with keys. It was so much more efficient and really helped to make our jobs easier.

Did You Position Smart Home as a Guest Amenity?

MH: In the beginning we highlighted smart home in all of our marketing. I think now it’s become an expectation and less of a competitive advantage. If you don’t have smart homes, it’s a bit of a letdown for the guests; it’s so prevalent now.

Regarding ROI, Where Have You Seen Your Biggest Returns, and Did Any of Those Surprise You? MH: The biggest return is on the operations side for us—reacting faster when things come up, not having to go to a home late at night, etc. I refuse to put our people in that position. It’s a safety concern. If we didn’t have smart home, our jobs would be immensely harder.

One of the surprises was that it was easier to implement than I thought. We had about 150 homes that we wanted to implement out of the gate, and I thought that might be too many. But it was a very smooth and seamless process converting those homes. It was a lot easier than I expected.

What Guidance Would You Offer to Other VR Managers?

MH: I wouldn’t get too hung up on the upfront cost. There are lots of ways to defer those costs. I would advise contacting people who have done this in the past, and get their take on how they did it.”

“And don’t get too caught up on a few of your homeowners who may not like it. You shouldn’t let a small percentage of your homeowners dictate what the large percentage want to do. I would just do it and ask forgiveness later. We just told our homeowners this is what we’re going to do. There were a few who didn’t want to do it, but by the second year, they had all signed up—100 percent.

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UK’s Sykes Holiday Cottages Acquires Major Stake in New Zealand’s Bachcare

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n March 2019, UK holiday rental firm Sykes Holiday Cottages acquired a major stake in Bachcare, New Zealand’s largest vacation rental management company.

Since 2003, Bachcare has been helping holiday homeowners and travelers “find your happy place,” the company’s tagline and mission. Bachcare manages over 2,000 holiday homes across 150 locations and welcomes over 150,000 guests to its properties every year. Bachcare employs 50 people at its support office near Auckland and works with approximately 100 contracted holiday managers across the North and South Islands. They hosted their one millionth guest in 2018 and have seen holiday homeowner inquiries about their full-service management grow by 25 percent in the last year.

Sykes Holiday Cottages employs more than 500 people and last year served more than 1.5 million guests from its head office in Chester. Sykes is the six-time winner of the British Travel Awards’ Best Large Cottage Company (2013 through to 2018) and one of The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work for 2019.

Graham Donoghue, chief executive of Sykes Holiday Cottages, said, “It has always been our ambition to scale into new markets, and working together with Bachcare will enable us to take our first step toward further international growth. Staycations are a huge and growing part of the leisure sector in New Zealand. Bachcare has grown to lead that market through its laser-like focus on delivering an excellent experience for holidaymakers—from the moment they land on the website to leaving the property at the end of their holiday.”

Donoghue added, “There is huge respect for the business Leslie has built over the past 15 years, and by learning from each other’s expertise, we are confident that Sykes Holiday Cottages can continue growing in the UK, that Bachcare will maintain its growth in New Zealand, and that together, we can enter other new markets around the world.”

“Competing with large multinational companies has helped make Bachcare what and who we are—an honest, independent business that is absolutely committed to giving our holiday homeowners and guests the best, full-service experience possible. Having Sykes with their shareholding is great for our business, as it ensures our interests are aligned,” said Leslie Preston, the chief executive officer of Bachcare Holiday Homes, who will remain at Bachcare’s helm. “They are making their 25 years of experience, people, intellectual property, processes, and technology available for Bachcare. They will be a true partner for Bachcare, something that was not accessible to us in 84

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New Zealand, and for that, we are very fortunate to have them on the team with us.”

“It will undoubtedly take our guest and holiday homeowner experience to a level never seen before here in New Zealand,” Preston added.

Preston Offers Insight into Her Decision to Partner with Sykes Those who have attended any of the recent conferences in which Leslie Preston has presented, including the 2019 Vacation Rental Women’s Summit, are likely as surprised as we were by this move.

Preston runs a successful business that is experiencing high growth.

The company has a great brand, supportive shareholders, and strong projections.

“So why take on the Sykes investment and take on Sykes as a shareholder?” Preston asked, echoing our question. “There are so many reasons why it’s such an awesome idea! As the majority shareholder of a family-owned business, you make decisions with a conservative lens. While growing to managing 2,000 houses over 15 years is great, what could be possible if you took a less emotive frame of reference and a more unattached independent decision-making framework of a bigger company? Handbrakes get taken off and the rocket ship goes faster!”

The Importance of Scale “The holiday home industry has become global and uber large scale, yet property managers have yet to follow suit,” said Preston. “This is not sustainable if you want to remain masters of your own destiny.

With Expedia/HomeAway, Airbnb, and Booking.com each listing millions of properties, there is a growing imbalance with the highly fragmented nature of holiday home managers. We believe in controlling our own destiny and not being reliant on anyone. And we believe scale at the property management layer will ultimately win.”

Preston continued, “It’s crucial that you have enough scale at the local level, national level, regional level, and global level to be masters of your own future and drivers of your own ambitions and drivers of your own economic success. Bachcare has always believed in scale and has always believed in the benefits scale brings to our owners, our guests, and our teams. We absolutely have achieved our own scale, and quite successfully. But it’s no longer just about local scale or national scale to remain relevant. It’s about global scale.

Partnering two best in class very strong and successful national scale organizations brings exponential possibilities and exponential outcomes.

“Great is good, but amazing is even better! Why settle for being great when you can be amazing?” Preston asked. “Having an external perspective outside of just our New Zealand lens brings new insights, new approaches, new ideas, and access to alternative perspectives. I have always strived to be the best we can be, and given our current scale and size, bringing in a larger company that operates with the same ethos and ethics with the same focus on amazing owner and guest experiences was too good an opportunity to pass up. We still remain and will remain the largest scale player in our region, and we will only go from strength to strength, getting better and delivering more value to our owners, our guests, and our teams along the way—all while still having a heap of fun.”

“We have so much opportunity in front of us, just in New Zealand.

Removing the family-owned capital structure frees us up to grow even faster and bring more value to our ecosystem.”

What Changes Can We Expect to See at Bachcare?

The move gives Bachcare access to the technology, tools, people, and insights of Sykes, one of the UK’s largest independent holiday rental agencies, with almost 14,000 properties across the UK and Ireland. It also supports Sykes’s ambitions to grow internationally, with this being its first investment outside of the UK and Ireland.

Bachcare will continue to target the domestic New Zealand market, operating under its existing brand.

“Nothing changes in what we are doing, and we will stay true to who we are,” said Preston. “Our brand DNA is such a part of who we are, and how we do what we do. In Sykes, we have a partner who is very culturally aligned and supports our way of being.”

Bachcare is a significant scale player in its own right, as it is the largest full-service management company in New Zealand, Australia, and the South Pacific.

“We are a fully integrated company, with all core functions inhouse, and we don’t see any of that changing,” said Preston. “There is no need to; what we already have works really well for us. But we are thrilled that we will now have access to the resources, IP, knowledge, and decades of experience of Sykes to apply to Bachcare as we feel appropriate to enable Bachcare to deliver even more for our owners, our guests, our holiday managers, our employees, and the communities in which we operate.

“Sykes is best in class in our industry with respect to a number of key metrics, such as guest NPS, owner NPS, and a number of other core operating metrics. While we think Bachcare is pretty good in key metrics, it’s fantastic to have access to industry leaders to take our great performance to best in class. We look forward to learning more about their secret sauce that we can apply to our business in New Zealand.”

What’s Next for Leslie Preston?

“I remain as fully committed as ever to Bachcare, am full of passion and commitment for our next phase, and am firmly leading this business now and into the future,” said Preston. “There is no way that I would be leaving now, just as we are about to get started on this exciting journey! I remain the CEO, I remain on the board, and I remain a shareholder. My leadership team remains in place.

I’m only just getting started! I am so thrilled to have this amazing opportunity to lead Bachcare to even greater heights.

“We all knew consolidation was happening, and we’re glad to be at the forefront paving the way! The strong align with the strong and get even better!”

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Sea to Sky’s

Heidi Stuber

is Running for Seattle City Council

H

eidi Stuber has officially thrown her hat in the ring for a position on Seattle’s City Council. Stuber is the strategic director at Sea to Sky Rentals in Seattle, Washington, where she oversees strategic planning, finance, and acquisitions. She has over 15 years' experience in business leadership with a focus on organizational change, as well as an MBA from Seattle University.

Amy Hinote (AH): Why did you decide to run for City Council?

Heidi Stuber (HS): I’m running for City Council because I believe in

the future of Seattle. Over the last several years, I’ve watched City Council lose its way and become disconnected from the needs of everyday Seattleites. We need a strong voice at City Hall to speak for regular Seattleites: families, students, small businesses, and someone who has the ability to stand up to the ideological agendas that don’t represent the majority of Seattle. What colleagues in our industry may not know is I started my career as an educator and I’ve been very involved with advocacy for education and Autism awareness, outside of my work in our industry to advocate for small business rights. So I bring a diverse background in education, advocacy, and business leadership to this campaign. As the only mom of school-aged children in the race, the only businesswoman in the race, and the only candidate with both a deep, personal understanding of social justice and advocacy combined with the working experience to know how to get things done, I am uniquely qualified to bring a balanced, action-oriented approach to City Hall.

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AH: In Seattle, what is the state of the regulatory environment for short-term rentals?

HS: In 2017, Seattle passed common-sense short-term rental reg-

ulations that go into effect this year. I was very involved with the Seattle Short-Term Rental Alliance to influence this legislation to be fair and balanced for all parties. Because of our advocacy, City Council rewrote the legislation to ensure small businesses weren’t shut down, and we are proud that our work created an additional revenue stream for affordable housing which enables the shortterm rental industry to be a part of the solution to affordability in Seattle. Actually, my work as a member of the Seattle Short-Term Rental Alliance was a big part of what motivated me to run for office. I saw that city government works when the needs of individuals and small businesses are taken into account and considered along with the long-term strategic plan for the city. We got to a reasonable regulation because the city listened to individuals and small businesses, was willing to rewrite the legislation based on feedback, and multiple stakeholders came together to identify shared values. It is a model for the sort of collaborative, balanced, and strategic approach I would take in office.

AH: We hear so much about owner-occupied properties versus second home/investment homes. Why are so many cities favoring owner-occupied homes over professionally managed second home rentals?

HS: I think there’s a misunderstanding both about how shortterm rentals are managed and about secondary home owners.

First, many cities think only owners living on property can ensure short-term rentals will be well managed. This leaves out the role of professional, local property managers who work very hard to maintain high-quality homes on behalf of owners, communicate clear expectations to guests, and do everything possible to be great neighbors in the community. Regulations need to focus on removing the occasional bad apple, rather than assume only owner-occupied homes can be well managed. Further, secondary home owners are often members of the community where they own a second house. There are many reasons to maintain a second home in a city you care about such as having children and grandchildren in the area, moving away for a job and keeping the home

AH: For others in the industry considering running for a municipal office, what advice can you offer?

you plan to move back to, or purchasing a home for your future retirement. Most homeowners are neighbors too and rather than leave houses empty when they are not there, it is safer and more sustainable to fully utilize these homes in the downtime when the owner is not onsite.

raising money and knocking on doors. And don’t forget to make sure you have a plan to balance your job and personal life with your campaign. When it’s all over, you may be elected or not, but your friends, your family, and your dog will all still be a part of your life —don’t neglect them along the way.

AH: Outside of vacation rentals, what are the other big issues you are hoping to address if you are elected?

AH: How can your vacation rental family support you in this election?

HS: In Seattle, our number one need right now is an action-oriented

approach to reduce the homelessness crisis. That is the most pressing issue to my constituents and creating one, coordinated city organization that emphasizes transitioning people into housing will be my top priority in office. Cost of living is on the rise in Seattle, so we have to address affordability both in terms of thoughtful housing density and expanding resources like low-cost Orca cards for middle class families and individuals.

As a Mom, I care deeply about the health and education of the next generation and will focus on ways city government can support students and teachers by providing wrap-around services in schools, improving our mental health care system, and insisting our state legislature fully fund education. Finally, traffic and carbon emissions are intrinsically linked in Seattle, and I will be looking at transportation and clean energy solutions that help protect our environment and create a more livable city.

HS: If you want to run for office, get involved with your local civ-

ic organizations early, well before you plan to run. Join your local party, attend City Council meetings, volunteer on someone else’s campaign, and network with other people that care deeply about your city or town the way you do. There is no substitute for knowing the history and key players in your local political arena. Before a formal run for office, make sure you have volunteers, donors, and campaign staff ready to jump in so you can hit the ground running.

It’s harder to learn on the job and takes precious time away from

HS: It’s a great act of bravery to run for office, especially in our indus-

try, which is not always understood, and also for a working, single mom with a special needs child like me. All the hard work, dedication, and strong advocate’s voice I’ve put into this industry is exactly the tenacious, brass-tacks approach I will bring to office as an elected leader. Having a businesswoman with a common-sense approach in office in Seattle has a ripple effect on other municipalities that look to the big cities for ideas on how to lead, so my election benefits those outside Seattle as well. Running a successful campaign takes money and it takes volunteer time and our vacation rental family can support me in both ways. Online donations help me access the resources I need to run a great campaign and be successful in being the first vacation rental pioneer in office in Washington State. I would also love to hear from members of our community in Seattle: you can send me your Democracy Vouchers and introduce me to others in your community who share our values.

To be support Heidi Stuber’s campaign, sign up and donate now at electheidistuber.com.

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VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

Assisting our members in measuring and delivering their collective economic impact in the local markets they serve Develop and introduce training programs that provide uniform messaging and that enhance the sales and service levels and the profitability of the membership Minimize the number of suppliers in any product/ service category translating into more significant long-term relationships with OPMA onsite managers

Working with subcontractors Setting expectations and ensuring subcontractors meet brand standards

C

By Durk V. Johnson, Industry Consultant and Executive Director,VRHP

ontracting out your cleaning can be a daunting task. An individual or company is essentially handing over their brand to a third party. The third party is responsible for how the property looks when the cleaning is completed.

The amount of trust placed in contract cleaners is immense! They have the company brand in their hands.

To ensure the subcontractors are performing to the company’s standards, there are specific documents that must be in place for the contractors to succeed and for the business relationship to flourish.

The documents are an agreement or contract articulating standard property appearance and service standards.

Agreement or Contract The agreement or contract outlines how the two companies will interact. The agreement should include the following information:  When invoices are due

 When payments can be expected

 What happens if there is a cleaning deficiency

 If applicable, what the workers’ compensation insurance minimums are  That the cleaners are responsible for providing their own equipment  Reference to Standard Property Appearance  Reference to Service Standards

Standard Property Appearance This document shows and articulates how the property will be left when the cleaning is completed. Here is a short list of what the document includes:  Pictures of where the remote controls go

 How and where the guest amenities are placed  How the towels are hung  How the beds are made

This document is all about the details. The more pictures with explanations, the better. This document sets the standards the cleaners are held to. Without accountability, they will do what they feel is best—and that is not always best.

Service Standards This document outlines the different services performed by the contractor. There is a difference between a deep clean, mini deep clean, and a departure clean. Service Standards outlines these differences.

With these documents in hand, the next step is to help the contract cleaner know and understand your standards. The best way to accomplish this is by meeting with them at a property.

Stage a Property or Properties Stage a property or properties exactly the way you want them when the contract cleaner has finished their cleaning assignment. Include a mix of properties, such as an older property, a middle-aged property, and a brand new property.

Meeting at the Staged Properties Meet the contract cleaner owner or designee at each staged property. Provide a copy of the Standard Property Appearance if they didn’t bring it. Then, go from room to room and talk about how the room should look. Point out trouble areas and encourage the contract cleaner to make notes on the Standard Property Appearance and to take additional pictures to train their staff.

When working with contract cleaners, it is important that the contract cleaner is never, ever, construed as an employee. This means the contract cleaner never wears the property manager’s uniform, the property manager never dictates what cleaning products to use, and the property manager never dictates how the property will be cleaned. The only thing the property manager can do is say how the property should look when the contractor finishes cleaning.

Working with contract cleaners can be the best of times and the worst of times. Following the recommendations outlined above will move you toward the best of times.

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Inau

n t e a R l n W o m e n ’s S u o i t a c a V l a mm gur

it

Rae Slone Cox, Bert Feinman, and Sheila Hodges HONORED with Pioneer Awards

T

he 2019 Inaugural Vacation Rental Women’s Summit was held in New Orleans this February, and we had the honor of presenting the first Pioneer Awards to three outstanding women who have played integral roles in building the vacation rental industry: Rae Sloane Cox of Sloane Realty Vacations in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina; Bert Feinman of Sand ‘N Sea Properties in Galveston, Texas; and Sheila Hodges of Meyer Vacation Rentals and SH Enterprises in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

Vacation rentals are now mainstream lodging options, but that wasn’t always the case. When these pioneers founded and established their businesses, there were not many families choosing to stay in rental homes for vacation. As real estate boomed and the industry grew, all of these founders excelled in change management, building successful businesses and working with the destinations and the larger industry to provide vacation home accommodations to generations of families.

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Rae Sloane Cox Sloane Realty Vacations, Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina In 1955, Rae and her husband, George Sloane Jr., decided to move to Ocean Isle Beach and never turned back. Rae and George, the only residents on the island, raised their four young children on fish from local fishermen and produce from her mother’s garden while selling oceanfront lots for $500 and receiving a commission of $10 for each lot sold. They began renting the only other home on the island and the downstairs of their own home to travelers the following summer, and by 1957, they had built a small motel. Rae laundered and ironed sheets for the

managed accommodations every night and communicated with guests by postcard and the only phone on the island (which was four miles away). The ferry operated until 1959, when a swing bridge was completed across the Inland Waterway. Throughout the 1960s, Ocean Isle Beach gained much-needed infrastructure, including streets and water and sewer lines.

George was tragically killed in a car accident in 1971, leaving Rae to fend for her children and herself. Despite her immense grief, mounting mortgage payments, and businessmen who believed she couldn’t run a business on her own as a woman, Rae persevered, and Sloane Realty Vacations exploded.

Rae and her family helped mold the entire island community.

Today, Sloane Realty Vacations has 35 year-round employees and manages over 150 long-term rentals and 375 vacation rental properties from Ocean Isle Beach to Sunset Beach. The company is coowned by Rae’s children, Tripp Sloane and Debbie Sloane Smith.

Debbie is also now serving in her 14th year as mayor of Ocean Isle Beach. Pam, the youngest of the siblings, no longer works with the company, but she still lives locally and is married to Robert Yoho, Ocean Isle’s fire chief. Most of Rae’s 15 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren still live in the area, as well. Three of her grandchildren also work in the business: Whitney Sauls (general manager), Chris Bryan (sales manager), and Leah Peterson (accountant).

“Everywhere I go, someone is hugging me. I just love people,” explained Rae. “I’ve always just loved people. I worked hard, but I enjoyed what I did. I’ve had a good life.”

Bert Feinman Sand ‘N Sea Properties, Galveston, Texas One day in 1974, Bert Feinman’s husband, David, a developer on the West End of Galveston Island, turned to her and said that the only way a potential buyer would purchase three homes from him was if she managed them as vacation rentals for the buyer.

That day, she started Sand ‘N Sea Properties.

“We were doing everything back then. We tried an ad in the Houston Chronicle—it didn’t work at all, so we put signs on the houses. No one in our area had done that before. We also placed some advertising on the radio in Houston. This helped, and then word of mouth spread.”

Anne Reiswerg, Bert’s daughter, joined the company eight years later to help with the ever-expanding vacation rentals side of the business. At the time, they took reservations by hand, and they marketed homes by printing, stapling, and mailing property lists. Since then, she and her team have taken property management to a new level. The company even owns and operates its own Housekeeping Service Center, which houses a commercial laundry and provides linens to the vacation rental properties.

Fast forward 20 years, and Claire Reiswerg, another of Bert’s daughters, joined the firm, bringing a new emphasis on technology and marketing. Sand ‘N Sea played a leading role in forming the Galveston Association of Rental Managers and worked with community leaders to create an ordinance that works well for both residents and tourists.

Today, Sand ‘N Sea manages 150 vacation rentals and engages clients and guests through cutting-edge technology that manages every aspect of real-estate sales operations, property management, and the guest experience. The family remains heavily engaged in promoting the vacation rental industry and the destination, supporting dozens of associations, community organizations, and events.

Sheila Hodges SH Enterprises (Meyer Vacation Rentals) Gulf Shores, Alabama Sheila began her vacation rental career as a sales agent for Meyer Real Estate in Gulf Shores, Alabama, in 1978. Six years later, she decided to use all of her savings to become an owner of the company. Her first challenge was to bring the company into the modern world by switching the rental department from paper to computer and then bringing in a switchboard as opposed to the six phone lines used previously.

Unfortunately, those challenges were only the tip of the iceberg for Sheila.

Hurricane Ivan, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, economic recessions, and Hurricane Katrina put Sheila’s strength and tenacity to the test, but each time a new struggle presented itself, Sheila overcame the barriers and continued to find opportunities that could have been left behind. For example, Sheila recognized the need for a large-scale laundry facility to service their rentals and founded South Alabama Commercial Laundry, which has since become Starr Textile Services, the largest commercial laundry provider between the Texas and Florida coasts.

Sheila is widely recognized as a community and industry leader.

Throughout her 30-year career, she has been named to countless boards, committees, and appointments and has received awards including being the first woman to earn the prestigious Walton M. Vines Free Enterprise Person of the Year award.

Meyer Vacation Rentals now manages community associations and more than 1,100 rentals from Perdido Key, Florida, to Fort Morgan, Alabama. Together the companies of SH Enterprises employ 600 team members.

Rae Sloane Cox, Bert Feinman, and Sheila Hodges were given the first Vacation Rental Women’s Summit Pioneer Awards based on their innovation, dedication, hard work, and perseverance to help create the vacation rental industry as we see it today. We owe these women a debt of gratitude, and it was an honor to have the opportunity to celebrate their achievements at the inaugural Vacation Rental Women’s Summit.

You are an inspiration to all of us.

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For videos, search "Vacation Rental Women's Summit" on vimeo.com VRM Intel Magazine | Spring 2019

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MAY

MAY

MAY

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 Palm Springs, CA  Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel  https://software.homeaway.com/

MAY

MAY

MAY

MAY

 Salt Lake City, UT  Falls Event Center Trolley Square  utahvacationrentalmanagementassociation.com

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 San Diego, CA  San Diego Marriott Mission Valley  https://software.homeaway.com/

UVRMA SPRING CONFERENCE

MAY

APRIL MAY

MAY

 London, England  The Tobacco Dock  https://forum.skift.com

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 Park City, Utah  Park City Mountain, Vail Resorts  www.theopma.org

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OPMA SPRING EXECUTIVE SUMMIT

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0810

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NORTHWEST VACATION RENTAL PROFESSIONALS SUMMIT 2019 CONFERENCE (NWVRP)

MAY

2325

MAY

APRIL

APR

Calendar of Events 16

VRHP HOUSEKEEPING SEMINAR

 Orlando, FL  Location TBD  www.vrhp.org

 Rancho Palos Verdes, CA  Terranea Resort  www.vrma.org

SEP OCT

OCTOBER

SKIFT GLOBAL FORUM

OCT

OCTOBER

JUNE

SEPTEMBER OCTOBER

OCT

1820

STREAMLINE SUMMIT

 Scottsdale, AZ  The Phoenician  www.streamlinesummit.com

0506

VACATION RENTAL WORLD SUMMIT

1316

VRMA INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

 New Orleans, LA  Hyatt Regency New Orleans  www.vrma.org

2428

VR MASTERED BOOT CAMP

 St. Louis, MO  Union Station Hotel  www.VRMastered.com

NOV

VRMA EXECUTIVE SUMMIT

1819

HOMEAWAY REZFEST

 Lake Como, Italy  Teatro Sociale  www.vacationrentalworldsummit.com

GUESTYVAL

NOVEMBER

0405

1618

2427

 Las Vegas, NV  Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa  https://www.homeaway.com/l/rezfest/

SKIFT TECH FORUM

 New York City, NY  Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall  https://forum.skift.com

SEP

 Miami, FL  Ritz-Carlton Coconut Grove  https://software.homeaway.com

JUNE

JUNE

JUNE RISE AND SHINE WITH HOMEAWAY

27

 Tel Aviv, Israel  Venue TBA  www.guestyval.com

SEP

04

SEPTEMBER

JUNE

 Victoria, BC  WorkLink Employment Society  www.vrhp.org

RISE AND SHINE WITH HOMEAWAY

 San Francisco, CA  Fairmont San Francisco Hotel  https://forum.skift.com

SEP

VRHP HOUSEKEEPING SEMINAR

SEPTEMBER

29

06

 Fort Meyers, FL  Sanibel Harbour Marriott Resort & Spa  https://software.homeaway.com

SKIFT FORUM ASIA

 Singapore  Equarius Hotel  https://forum.skift.com

MAY

MAY MAY JUNE JUNE

27

JUNE

 brattleboro.com/short-term-rental-summit/

SEPTEMBER

MAY

VERMONT SHORT-TERM RENTALS SUMMIT

 Brattleboro, VT  Downtown Brattleboro

MAY

MAY

1920

1921

THE PHOCUSWRIGHT CONFERENCE

 Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood, FL  The Diplomat Beach Resort  www.phocuswrightconference.com

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