Webinar: Clean, Clear, Convenient

Webinar: Clean, Clear, Convenient:
3 Pillars to Boost Guest Trust, Loyalty & Revenue

In today’s competitive short-term rental market, guest expectations are higher than ever, and meeting them requires more than just a great property.

Watch the replay for a practical, insight-packed session as we explore the three essential pillars of a successful guest experience: Cleanliness, Clarity, and Convenience.

 

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With expert input from Bookster and Turno, this webinar breaks down how optimising your booking process, guest communication, and property care can directly increase your conversion rates, improve reviews, and drive repeat bookings.

You’ll learn how to implement proven strategies using tools you already have, or can easily adopt, to create memorable, trust-building stays that keep guests coming back.

Takeaways: 

• Strategies to simplify the booking journey and improve conversion rates, with real data insights from Bookster.
• Guest communication tactics that build confidence from the moment of booking to check-out.
• The impact of cleanliness on guest satisfaction and reviews, and how Turno helps streamline property care to protect your reputation. 

Script

Cristina Vascil, Turno: 
Good morning everyone. 

My name is Cristina Vascil. I am the Director of Partnership here at Turno. We've been in the industry for eight years at this point. 

I've been consulting globally with host and property managers around the world. I am very passionate about this industry and I'm actually based in Dallas, Texas, here in the States. 

As I'm doing this webinar, I get to watch the sunrise. It's pretty exciting. 

Yeah, for those of you who do not know who Turno is, we are a cleaning operations platform. We completely automate the turnover process from start to finish. 

Everything from scheduling to paying out cleaners, even helping you find new experienced local cleaners in your area. We actually have an application for not only the host side, but the cleaner as well. 

Kelly Odor, Bookster: 
For those of you who have not come across Bookster or perhaps you've not been to one of these webinars before, let me first of all just introduce Bookster is a marketing software and we specialise in providing tools and services, just for the holiday rental or vacation rental industry. 

So we're looking at how to attract those bookings for your company. 

Behind our marketing software, we're all backed up with our in-house property management software and that really is designed to help you manage all those tasks that you have with your kind of day-to-day bookings and then also how to make your guests happy. 

So Cristina and I have been talking a lot over the last few months and what we really wanted to do was to provide an event where we're focusing on positive changes that you can make to your business, backed up by real research that's happening right now that's going to help you create and grow happy guests. 

So today's session, it breaks down the latest research on guest reviews and guest demands and it's going to provide you with this practical advice on making happy guests. 

So let's start first of all, Cristina is going to look at guest reviews so for that I'm actually going to pass over to Cristina and you let me know when you need me to move the slides. 

The importance of reviews

Cristina Vascil, Turno:
Yeah absolutely. Alright so we're going to break down the importance of reviews. I think we all know that reviews in general are extremely important but really understanding the depth of the level of impact it can cause for your business should help us prioritize and see them in a different perspective. 

When it comes to travelers and how they book vacations based on the reviews that are left about a property, we see that 36% of those travelers will actually book based on the reviews that they're seeing. 

There are five main contributing factors to how a guest thinks about the value or even the rating of the review that they plan on leaving. 

Cleanliness and maintenance

So the first one is going to be cleanliness and maintenance which I'll dive a little bit further into here in a bit but when it comes to this they are expecting a spotless and very well maintained property that match the images they saw from the moment they booked your property. That's what they're looking for. 

Communication and responsiveness

The second one is going to be communication and responsiveness. Timeliness in your response is going to be the bare minimum here but also a very clear check-in and check-out instruction as well can contribute to that. 

Accuracy of listing

Third one for accuracy of listing is something that was advertised about the property in your description or the images that you have on listing isn't available or true upon the arrival. 
The guest is actually more likely to leave a negative review and a really great example of this is think of like a cozy winter cabin. 

Sometimes people will display that there's a nice fireplace and a lot of guests will actually book based off that one specific feature and if they arrive at a property and it's not working or it's not actually there or not script it's not positioned in a way that it was advertised online. Another negative review is prone to happen. 

Amenities and comfort

This is kind of a bonus when it comes to reviews that are left. If you have extra perks for your stay like maybe a wine bottle upon arrival or you have like a fun coffee tea bar area or you do like personalized notes or just amenities that all that really cater to the guest this can help kind of boost up the review even if one of the other sections was a negative feeling. 

Guest experience

And then this last one is all about the experience a guest has with your stay. If you can support them in helping them find a hole in the wall restaurant or attractions or even events that are happening in your area, like maybe there's a really fun concert happening that can help. 

And we really see this with millennials and Gen Z specifically because we're seeing the trend that they're really booking based on experience rather than the location. 

On this slide that first review that is left is this is an actual property that I grabbed on Airbnb was a random one.

The first review from Claudia we're gonna see how it actually connects to the five points that I just mentioned. 

She says the home was great, everything was clean and functional. That ties to cleanliness and maintenance. 

Sarah was prompt and responsive - ties to communication and responsiveness. The listing was accurate. The beds were very comfortable which is very important to me that ties to the accuracy of the listing. 

So right there in that first review you're already seeing three points. And so I encourage you to maybe like with your properties to go back to your reviews and just kind of see how things connect. 

All right we can go to the next slide. 

Cleanliness Scores

All right so the first component that we saw with how reviews are left we just learned was cleanliness and maintenance. 

And so cleanliness scores really matter because it does impact your rating on Airbnb platform but also other OTAs that you might be on. 

It can also contribute to the reviews that are left about your property leading to your reservations or even damaging your reputation. 

And once your reputation is damaged it's very hard to build that back up. 

So we actually did a study to see what average cleanliness scores were with Airbnb users who weren't leveraging Turno. 

And at an average we saw that was at 4.69 percent which you'll see on the image on the top and orange. 

And then we reviewed our user base on the same exact channel and we actually discovered that Turno users were seeing a higher cleanliness score of an average of 4.83 percent. 

So we actually have a partner that we work with that had a really great blog article about the impact level of these ratings and how a 4.8 can actually result in 22 percent more reservations. 

Competitiveness using cleanliness

And this isn't just on Airbnb this is your own. Maybe you have a direct website, maybe you list on other OTAs like your cleanliness score really does contribute to that. 

Aside from Airbnb, another channel I like to point out is the Vrbo. 

The image at the very bottom I was looking for a property in Nashville Tennessee if you're not familiar with Nashville Tennessee since it is based in the States it's a great place for country music listeners. 

It's very country. It's a fun time but it has a very large supply of vacation rentals. So when I typed in my dates and everything that I was looking for I received over 300 properties and so they actually have a filter on Vrbo for cleanliness. 

So this is a really great way to stand out especially if you have a high cleanliness score because it dropped it from 300 to three properties. It's a really great way to stand out on that OTA as well.
 
Okay so through our partnership with Bookster we are able to support all the cleanliness means that I just mentioned just to help you guys boost the guest satisfaction with your review specifically. 

There's different functionality that we do offer that includes auto scheduling so the way the integration works is all of those reservations and property information will come into turn on we can automatically schedule your turnovers for your cleaners to get the schedule of that. 

We provide photo checklist functionality especially time stamping if anything were to occur with the guests. 

This is just general practice. Being able to go back to the guest and saying hey here's some images confirming we did X, Y and Z and here's the date and time stamp. We'll really protect you as a host. 

Another thing that I really love is actually our quality center. 

This provides a ton of data for you to see how your properties are performing in areas of improvement. 

We bring in all of your reviews from Airbnb and we tie those to the cleaners based off that reservation so you can see I got a five star review because Cristina was attached to that cleaning and she did a great job. 

Here's a couple of other things or maybe I got a three star review. 

Here are areas of improvement of things I should add to my checklist or maybe this is a recurring thing. Maybe it's time for me to find a new cleaner who can help me boost that cleanliness score up. 

So we provide as much data as we can so you can make decisions moving forward. Inventoring management, tracking your inventory for your property. 

We provide that functionality as well in app chat functionality. 

We see a lot of hosts who leverage different areas. 

They'll use WhatsApp, email, text message, phone calls and it just makes the communication overall very chaotic.

Being able to centralize that into one area can not only help you with your peace of mind but it can reduce the level of frustration with cleaners just making sure they receive all the information in one place. 

Another thing I like to encourage is you can leverage that to maybe show your owners that they need to replace something within their properties. 

Auto payments paying out your cleaners and do that after every single turnover. 

Our cleaner marketplace again is our database of vetted industry experienced cleaners where we help you find new ones and then finally your cleaners whether you use ours or your own they can troubleshoot problems within Turno giving you immediate notifications for real-time solves. 

Kelly Odor, Bookster: 
Could I ask you a question about the photo checklists? 
You said that they are there's photos and their timestamps. Can you do videos as well or is it just the photos? 

Cristina Vascil, Turno: 
It is just the photos I believe I will double check. 

Kelly Odor, Bookster: 
And is there a function when the cleaner has been to the property so you provide them with photos? Can you provide them with photos of how you want it to be and the cleaner will provide photos of what they've done. 

Cristina Vascil, Turno: 
Yes, so you can make it mandatory, you can make it optional, you can add your image of how you like it to see before they leave or you don't have to, it's completely up to you that's customizable. 

Kelly Odor, Bookster: 
Okay thank you I can see we've got other questions but we'll leave them to the end we'll have a look and see what else we've got. 

I have some research as well which is actually quite similar to the research that you have and which was talking about reviews and the kind of importance of reviews. 

This came from PhocusWire, and they asked, when somebody is choosing between two short term rental properties of a similar size comfort and cost what services and amenities would influence the decision to book one property versus the other property, and this is why I think there's a similarity here because the number that they've produced is 35% and it's the reviews and the ratings.

That's a huge amount of people really who are looking at those reviews and will make a choice about whether to book that property based on those which is just super, super important. 

I also was having a look at the reviews, what is it that people were talking about, and Cristina you have highlighted some reviews there, that talk in general and which points it covered. 

In my first slide we're looking at communication and responsiveness - Guests expect this higher standard of communication than ever before.  

And you can see here in this PhocusWire research, it's saying that guests now expect higher standards and communications and prompt responses to any issues that may arise, comparable to the service level that's typically associated with hotels. 

In the research, they asked questions of people who typically stay in holiday rentals, people who typically stay in hotels, and then combine that information and contrast it to see what people are looking for. 

What we can see apart from anything else is that the hotel industry and the holiday rental industry are just coming closer and closer together.

And people who stay in holiday rentals are looking for the quirks and the fantastic perks of staying in a holiday rental that they are still expecting this amazing service that they would stand to expect with a hotel, so I found that really interesting. 

And generally, PhocusWire research report was so interesting, so I've picked out parts of it today, but I'm going to share it with you. 

I really recommend you take time to have a look at it because it will give you ideas of what guests are looking for and it might inspire you to do something else that we're not covering today.

You can see that guests, their expectations are always changing. 

I had a look at the Airbnb reviews and you can see that these five star reviews, they're all for different hosts and they all mention the communication that that host has provided, whether it's information in advance, whether it how quickly that information was received, or whether it's information while they were at the property.

And actually these were fairly consistent, I had like so many options I could choose from because people over and over were saying you know, Bruce, Bruce is on a win because he is so good at being responsive and communicating really well with the guests, and people love it and they talk about it and they recommend him as a direct result of it. 

So those expectations, they do change over time, and sometimes that is like a slow gradual change and sometimes as you saw during COVID, you know that change can happen very quickly, but ultimately I would recommend, well I would say, that no matter what you can think about the future, guests are going to want more and more and more from you, so you need to be looking at this research and thinking okay, well what can I do, that's gonna make me stand out? 

As Cristina said, what's gonna make me different?, because ultimately if you're not your competitor is going to be.

I actually remembered when I was thinking about this presentation, how I booked accommodation when I was in my twenties to go to this apartment in Spain. 

I had to telephone to make the reservation and following that I received no communication, nobody called me, I didn't even have email, I didn't receive a letter, there was nothing until that moment when I arrived at the property, went to the cafe next door, and found the lady with a key. And then I didn't see her again for the rest of the stay, and at the end of the stay I went back to the cafe and dropped off my key and that was it. 

If you imagine that now, there would be outrage at that lack of communication, so it's just an example of how times have changed and will continue to keep changing. 

Cristina Vascil, Turno: 
I feel like someone would have canceled the reservation at this point today, just because they wouldn't have thought of it, they'll have thought it was a scam or they are just really annoyed that nobody had got back to them. 

Kelly Odor, Bookster: 
Yes, expectations very different, so we can see guests want clear communication, they want timely communication, and it's not just about providing that information that they need, it's about providing the confidence, you know that they're not a scam and that all begins with 
the booking confirmation. 

I'm going to show you how you can do this in Bookster but if you're here and you don't use Bookster that's fine, what I would recommend you do is you have a talk to your property management software or your marketing software or whatever tool you're using, get in touch with that company and ask them about the services that they offer that are going to help you improve your communication and improve your responsiveness, because it's going to make a big difference. 

There's three areas that I'm going to very briefly cover about Bookster before I move on to the next topic. 

Automated notifications

The first one is automated notifications. This is about being responsive, as soon as something happens, like a guest is due to make a payment or the booking has been made or the guest is due to make a damage deposit, there is a communication that's going out to your guests automatically with your logo on saying this is something that you need to do you need to pay attention to this. 

Okay they're very brief, they have your logo on it and the guest knows exactly what action they need to take. 

If you are using a software, I would really recommend you come up with a process that's going to enable this to happen automatically, because it makes a big difference to that guest confidence that they know they've received this booking confirmation for a booking that they've made. 

Email Marketing

The next slide that we look at is our email marketing, now email marketing it covers a range of different ways that you can communicate with a guest. 

I'll cover one which is about a seasonal newsletter. 

A seasonal newsletter is something you could send every week, every month, every six months. 

Something that's really building confidence with your potential guests, where you're talking to them about what's coming up, and attracting them to book, or you're contacting existing guests and you're telling them about something that's going to be happening during the month of their stay, and that's really going to build confidence in their fantastic experiences that they're going to have your accommodation. 

So there are other ways that you can use email marketing and if you ever want to talk about those getting in touch with me I'll be delighted to talk about that. 

Unified Inbox

And the third way that I would talk about responsiveness in particular, not just communication, when a guest contacts you, whether that's through the channel like an OTA like Airbnb or they contact you directly, you need to be responding quickly. 

In particular, if you think about Airbnb and probably booking.com, it will affect your rankings where you are positioned in comparison to your competitors if you do or do not respond quickly to your guests, because they're measuring this behind the scenes. 

If you are slow to respond, you could expect your position to slowly slide down the page whereas if you're responding quickly then that's going to go well for you. 

Within Bookster we have created what is known in the industry as a unified inbox but it's a place within Bookster where you can view the messages that have come to you through Vrbo, booking.com Airbnb or directly. 

You can respond to them in the same place, so you're not having to log into lots of different systems, you're not having to worry about your passwords, you're just in Bookster and you can reply straight away and you get a notification within your dashboard to do that. 

These are three areas that I would really recommend you have a think about and as I said if you're talking or working with another software company get in touch with them and ask what they can do as well. 

Local experience: Selling extras

Now the next topic really caught my attention when Cristina was looking at her research was about local experience so I went and had a look at the booking.com research on the extra services that can help you create a really good local experience for your guests. 

This research is from 2024, 2025 isn't available yet, and this survey asks 32,300 respondents to share what additional services they would be willing to pay more for during their stay. 

What they're really looking for, that they want to pay for, and you can see here almost half said they would be happy to pay more in order to have breakfast at their accommodation and you can include my husband in that, because he will always seek out accommodation that has a breakfast included including last week. 

26% of people want to have tours and activities available around the accommodation and 25% were interested in spas and treatments which I thought was really interesting, actually demonstrating a change in mindset really. 

But this means that you're going to benefit from happier guests and better reviews if you can provide these extra services that guests really want, that the guests look for. 

And I know that there are going to be some people here listening today some thinking, well I can't provide breakfast, I don't have a kitchen, I don't live nearby, I wouldn't be able to provide a local tour and that's fine, but this is really where your partnerships and your collaborations with other members of the community is going to come in. 

Because if you're working with external companies who would be able to support your guests, whether that's a cafe nearby that can make or deliver a breakfast or a local tour company or a private masseuse that will come to your property then that's going to really add value. 

I'll just go to my next slide here, short story, when I stayed in Miami a few years back my rental I specifically chose it, like my husband, because it included breakfast at the cafe next door, just on the first day, but for me this was perfect because I knew on that first day I wouldn't have to go and find breakfast. 

I didn't need to think about where there was a good place, where was clean, where was safe, I had it all sorted so that was good. 

From my perspective it was good for the cafe because their breakfast as you can see it was so good that I went back for that breakfast every single day, so they earned revenue from me, and it was great for the host because they made a happy guest, I'm talking about it to you, and they probably earned a kick back from the cafe as well, so I for me this feels like an absolute win. 

Cristina Vascil, Turno: 
I actually just based off your stat on the last slide about spas and massages. I have a really great story there also about a local experience. 

I was staying at a property in Arizona and the property partnered with a local massage place that through the partnership you could book a massage if they would come to the property and set up at night so you could do stargazing and while you're doing a massage and one of the coolest experiences ever, but the host takes a percentage of that profit and it's just so that stat is very accurate. 

I was one who actually did it but I'm looking at some of the places that I see some of the attendees are based out of, I would absolutely add that, just I can't imagine (how good are) the views and the night sky in some areas that's absolutely beautiful. 

Kelly Odor, Bookster: 
Yes, that sounds lovely. 

If I just move on to my next slide you can see again if you're working with another PMS you need to talk to and your PMS to see what options they've got. 

Within Bookster you have numerous options really, where you can sell extra services or when I say sell, you could offer them for free, or you could offer them for a price. 

Guests can reserve them at the time of booking or if it was after booking then you could organise that too. 

It was interesting the story you're telling me there, so one of our clients I was looking at her website the other day, and she's really dug into this. 

She has the option for having an in-house private chef and she works with a really nice company that will organise that, she works with a local tour company so you can organise tours, there is a bag storage company because obviously you want to drop the bags on the day leaving and just go off on their local tour, or a private show for and actually she has others as well but these are the ones that really kind of call my attention. 

Because what makes this a win for her is that she doesn't offer any of these services herself, this is not part of her own repertoire, she has partnerships with really good external companies and they provide the services and presumably she gets a kick back off those sales. 

The opportunities here are really endless and they are completely bespoke to your business, from the welcome baskets to mid-stay cleans. 

There's a lot of posts right now talking about occasional decorations so if somebody is having a honeymoon or a babymoon or it's somebody's birthday, people want to pay extra in order to have their place decorated, so that's an extra service that you could offer and then earn a little bit of revenue from it as well actually. 

Increasing revenue: Use a great booking engine

Thinking about revenue, I know Cristina touched on revenue earlier but this is the last section is focusing on the booking process there's a start here from Baymard Institute this is not the 2025 data, it's a year or so old, but I can't imagine it has changed too much or certainly won't have gone down. 

It highlights that 18% of buyers abandoned their carts when they're purchasing online because the checkout process took too long or it was too complicated. 

Interestingly, let me just move on to my next slide, you can see I've got a quote from Capterra and so they're saying that 28% of consumers will expect that checkout process to happen within two minutes or less, which for me feels quite a frighteningly short amount of time but actually when you are doing making a purchase online two minutes is actually a really long time to be sitting filling out your details, adding information. 

My recommendation if you're looking to grow your revenue first step have a look at what that booking process is. 

How many steps are there, how many loops are you expecting your guest to go through, how many questions do you ask and how many of those questions can actually be left until after the booking is made?

Every single time that you're asking a question, you are statistically reducing the chances of that person making the booking, so it needs to be nailed down to the essentials and you get the rest later. 

I know when I talk to Robin our CEO, he often talks about how, when you are filling in forms and you're asking for information that maybe is not to hand, eg, you want to know how your bed layout is going to be for your guests, which is really important no doubt about it, but you don't need to have that information at the time of booking, you need to gather information afterwards. 

Because if the person who's booking the accommodation doesn't know, did he want singles, did they want twins, did they want doubles?, they're going to stop that booking process there and then to go and find the information and they just may never come back - they may go to Airbnb, they may change their mind.. you want them to make the booking. 

So we worked really hard to do this in Bookster and we have these three minimal steps with the process. 

So you can see, first of all, they will choose what dates they want, the second step is, they will add just the basic information that we can ask them, and then they click to make the booking so they put their payments information in, and they've made the booking. 

But if you see now, whenever you make a purchase online, or you're making a booking, have a look and see how many steps you have to go through, like how do you feel when you're going through those steps.

If you look at companies like Amazon, they'll ask you almost nothing, they have you already in their system and they keep you in their system, and when you're ready to make a purchase you literally press one button and you can have that purchase sent out to you. 

Because they know every click is losing their revenue and they don't want to lose the penny. 

So that is my section on revenue, so I would recommend you do a bit of research on there. 

Summary of the points raised

Before we go into the questions, which I can see we've got some questions there which is fantastic thank you and let's just do a little summary of Cristina's information and mine. 

Cristina showed there are five majorly important points that are going to influence guest reviews and we know guest reviews are the number one influencer on whether guests book with you or not. 

Cristina broke down cleanliness and how you can improve this in particular if you're working with Turno and I looked at your communication and responsiveness, specifically looking at local experiences using extra services and how you're going to build revenue from reviewing your booking process.