VRMA Arrival > Guest Relations

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.

Reservation Reconfirmation Calls Present Opportunities to Build the Brand and Cross-Sell

By Douglas Kennedy | 1/14/2025

As online bookings increase, the number of reservation inquiry calls decreases over time. Yet when you spend time in the reservations office, the calls continue to ring. Why? Many of those who book online still call directly to reconfirm their booking, especially if they originally booked at a third-party online travel agency (OTA) website and have managed to track down your company’s phone number. Inbound reconfirmation calls happen a lot more when guests are celebrating special occasions or booking larger homes (and thus travel with large parties), and/or when guests travel long distances to get to their destination. However, they also happen surprisingly often everywhere.

Reimaging the Guest Journey with a Hospitality-First Mindset

By Koryn Okey | 11/19/2024

As vacation rentals have become the accommodation of choice for many travelers, property managers find themselves shouldering ever-growing responsibilities while working tirelessly to deliver five-star guest experiences with a hospitality-first mindset. For many, the term “unreasonable hospitality” has taken on new meaning since Will Guidara spoke at Amy Hinote’s DARM conference in December 2023.

Podcast

The 95% Rule: Elevating Guest Satisfaction with David Angotti

10/29/2024

In this episode, David Angotti, chief evangelist at Guesty, discusses the evolving landscape of the vacation rental industry.

Customer Hospitality Is Bigger than Guest Service

By Douglas Kennedy | 10/14/2024

In the lodging industry, we tend to think of our customers as “guests,” reflecting a foundational concept that many of us were mentored on long ago, which is “Treat our guests as you would those visiting your own home.” However, customer hospitality is the philosophical concept on which we should build our entire company culture, as this concept reaches far beyond our guests. Why?

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.