From Guests to Superfans with Brittany Hodak
By Brittany Hodak | 9/24/2024
Brittany Hodak, a customer experience expert and keynote speaker at the 2024 VRMA International Conference, has made a career out of helping brands turn customers into lifelong advocates—or, as she calls them, “superfans.” With a background in entertainment and a deep understanding of fan loyalty, Hodak brings a fresh perspective to the short-term vacation rental industry.
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Improving the Guest Experience
By Hal Conick | 9/3/2024
There’s a movement of vacation rental industry professionals who have grown tired of the industry’s reputation of inconsistency. They’ve heard from guests who have been disappointed by short-term rentals and believe that the future lies in providing guests with thoughtful, unique experiences during every stay.
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Are Guests Getting More Difficult These Days? Or Is it Just Rosy Retrospection?
By Douglas Kennedy | 8/13/2024
As I make the rounds as a vacation rental industry conference speaker and trainer, and as I monitor vacation rental groups on social media, I often hear and read people commenting that today’s guests are more difficult, rude, angry, and conniving than ever before. In recent years, these comments are also attached to a statement such as “Ever since the pandemic ….”
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Train Your Vacation Rental Team to Use the Language of Hospitality
By Douglas Kennedy | 5/14/2024
I believe most of us would agree that interpersonal communications is always a challenge, especially for anyone who is married, engaged, or who has a domestic partner, significant other, boyfriend, girlfriend, parent, child, siblings, or roommates! (In other words, basically anyone you live with other than a dog, because we all know that dogs are great listeners and never judge.)
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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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