Do Your Vacation Rental Leaders Truly Understand the Difference Between 'Hospitality' and 'Guest Service?'
By Douglas Kennedy | 1/9/2024
My job as a hospitality industry conference speaker and training facilitator affords opportunities to speak with lodging industry leaders from a broad spectrum of clients. Besides the over 200 vacation rental companies I’ve personally trained over the past few decades, I also get to work with hotel management companies, brands, and independent/boutique hotels. Based on my observations, I think there are a lot of leaders, including some with decades of experience, who do not fully understand the difference between “hospitality” and “guest service.”
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Does Your Reservations Call Scoring Criteria Need to Be Updated?
By Douglas Kennedy | 12/5/2023
To truly give callers the experiences they want and need, the most important call criteria is to encourage agents to ask the right questions to “unmask the story” behind the caller’s plans and to discover where they are in their decision-making process. Unfortunately, the criteria used by a lot of companies have a strict requirement to use “open-ended” questions, so agents obsess on that rather than on the discovery process.
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Raising the Bar on Vacation Rental Quality
By Annie Holcombe and Keven Wishard | 10/23/2023
We often hear the saying “quality over quantity,” but what does it really mean for vacation rentals? And how can your company raise the bar? While attributes like a clean, well-designed, or extremely luxurious home play into the definition of quality, quality is something more. It’s an experience—an experience that inspires more travel while delivering high standards that guests come to trust.
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Podcast
Curated Experiences with Kim Lalande
5/30/2023
In this episode of the podcast, VRMA Arrival editor Alexa Schlosser talks to Kim Lalande, founder and CEO of KEY, about the biggest concierge/experience trends she is currently seeing in the industry, how KEY partners with vacation rental managers, and more.
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Data Tips: How to Make the Most of Guest Demand
4/17/2023
Sponsored by Key Data Recent years have given rise to a short term rental “boom,” as more and more guests choose alternative accommodation for leisure vacations, business trips, a mixture of the two (known as bleisure or blended travel), digital nomadism, and more.
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The Holy Grail of Customer Service
12/15/2022
Times are changing, but the customer’s expectations are not. A large percentage of Homes and Villas by Marriott Bonvoy guests are very seasoned travelers. They spend many nights in our various Marriott hotel brands.
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Little Things, Big Impact
By Michael Norde | 11/22/2022
When the couple celebrating their 20-year anniversary first arrived at their vacation rental in Maui, they were already filled with great anticipation.
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