VRMA Arrival > Guest Relations

Why Direct Booking Is All the Rage with Operators but Draws Blank Faces from the Public

By Rebecca Ward | 12/1/2025

Until we make a real effort to inform the average Joe and Jane why booking direct is so positive, direct booking will never reach its full potential.

Hospitality vs. Service: What It Really Means in the Vacation Rental Industry

11/17/2025

Hospitality goes beyond clean linens and fast replies—it’s about creating meaningful, memorable guest experiences. In this feature, industry leaders share what sets true hospitality apart from standard service and how technology can help operators deliver it at scale.

Reclaiming the Guest Connection: The API Revolution in Short-Term Rentals

By Saber Kordestanchi | 9/15/2025

Communication in short-term rentals (STRs) has undergone a remarkable transformation, though this transformation has arrived more gradually than many realize.

2024 VRM Company of the Year Award: Hallson Hospitality

7/21/2025

The VRMA Excellence Awards celebrate and recognize the incredible work, contributions, and impact that vacation rental professionals have made in the past year. We are highlighting each of the 11 award recipients in 2024, continuing today with the 2024 Vacation Rental Management Company of the Year Award: Hallson Hospitality.

Practical Steps for Securing More Direct Voice Reservations

By Douglas Kennedy | 7/14/2025

Despite the predictions of its demise, the voice reservations channel is alive and well. For decades now, pundits have predicted the death of voice as a booking channel.

Train Your Employees, Please Your Guests

By Hal Conick | 7/7/2025

Short-term vacation rental managers can improve their training and hiring practices, helping to please guests and ensure employees are the smiling, welcoming faces of the business.

Automation Was Just the Beginning

By Pierre-Camille Hamana | 6/2/2025

The vacation rental industry is currently in a state of rediscovery. For years, the sector has been defined by the sprint toward automation, refining every touch point to create the most frictionless stays possible. And it worked. Nearly every stage of the guest journey now runs with automated precision — queries are answered in seconds with AI-driven personalization, pricing, and availability adjust in real time based on demand, and upsells are seamlessly surfaced at just the right moment to maximize guest convenience and host revenue.

Fluff Makes the Difference: How Hospitality Creates Lasting Memories

By Douglas Kennedy | 5/12/2025

There is one timelessly proven way to outperform your comp-set, and that is to “out-people” them! And what can your people provide for your guests that means more than anything else? Fluff! Truly, it is the fluff that creates happy memories for all humanity.

How to Be a Lightning Rod and ‘Ground’ Guest Negativity

By Douglas Kennedy | 2/11/2025

As part of our pre-training preparations for vacation rental clients, I get to look at the various service recovery training that our clients have in place, and I find they nearly always focus on showing empathy and apologizing. The ability to empathize is a big component of emotional intelligence and is surely a good quality to look for in candidates for guest-facing jobs. No doubt, showing sincere empathy before offering an apology helps defuse tense guest encounters, whereas a lack of empathy and a scripted apology can ignite guests’ anger.

How AI Is Set to Transform the Way We Interact with Guests

By Pierre-Camille Hamana | 1/21/2025

In an industry as guest-centric as short-term rentals (STRs), communication is the key to shaping positive guest experiences. Yet it has always been one of the industry’s biggest pain points. The necessity of addressing every guest inquiry almost immediately before, during, and after a stay has historically been a huge burden on hosts.

It only makes sense, then, that once the STR industry began adopting artificial intelligence, enhancing guest interactions was a top priority.