VRMA Blog

Imagine the situation: A potential guest comes to your website, searches for a property for specific dates, proceeds to book, and on the final screen, leaves your site. It's far too common. In fact, research in 2015 by Adobe showed that only 2.4 percent of people who browse for hospitality and travel-related products make a booking. This article is the first of a series that investigates reasons why visitors leave, and what you can do to help convert them into guests.

Homeowners who are the only ones sleeping in their beds may not be as concerned about mattress protection and hygiene as vacation rental managers. As a VRM, you can never be too careful about protecting your mattresses from human contamination, bedbugs, dust mites and other pesky problems. Protecting your mattresses from bodily fluids — including blood, urine, perspiration and what isn’t easily seen on the mattress — is necessary to ensure good mattress hygiene.

Besides providing reservations sales training and telephone mystery shopping for the vacation rental industry, many companies have hired me to do consulting regarding their overall sales and service levels. In this case, I often place calls directly to the reservations rental sales agents.

Replies to guest reviews can boost your brand
Writing a response to both positive and negative guest reviews and testimonials has been shown to be a valuable use of time in influencing new customers to purchase from a company, and to encourage repeat purchases from existing customers. Some vacation rental companies may consider negative guest reviews to be damaging, but as long as the majority of reviews are positive, an occasional negative review can actually prove beneficial.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This couldn’t be truer than when it comes to the regulatory issues that are affecting vacation rental managers across the country. There are several steps you can take to inform public officials about your business and the industry as a whole.