Smashing your goals with Holiday Rental Software: Guests needs

  • Episode 9
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  • Kelly Odor
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Manage guests' needs using online booking calendars and cleaner tools with holiday rental software.

In this episode, we cover how holiday rental software can help you manage your guests' needs using online booking calendars and cleaners tools. 

In the Podcast Pointer, we look at the Feefo partnership to help you attract direct bookings.

For more information on how Bookster holiday rental software can help your business, check out https://www.booksterhq.com/

The important bits

● [00:00] - Intro 

● [01:53] - Support your guests' needs to understand your holiday home availability using availability calendars. 

● [05:05] - Support your guests' needs to arrive at a clean holiday home using cleaner tools. 

● [9:01] - Podcast Pointer - Feefo Partnership for guest reviews. 

Key takeaways

● Holiday Rental Software will help you to manage your guests' needs:

They need information about your holiday home, and when it is available. They need confidence that when they arrive your holiday home will be there,clean and ready for them. They need to know that if they need help during the stay, that someone will help them. 

Your business is built around guests needs, and the more you can meet your guests needs, the happier they will be, and that becomes a virtuous circle, as they leave you good reviews, and you get more bookings.

1. Holiday rental software can design and provide calendar tools for your website that show when your property is available. 

Each software will do this differently to some degree, but they will have the same overarching goal. 

2. A lot of holiday rental software build tools to help you coordinate the cleaning of your properties with your cleaners. 

The complexity to which the software can achieve your guests' needs varies, but most software will have some tools in place to achieve this.

● The Bookster partnership with Feefo helps you to attract direct bookings, as Feefo, an independent company, can obtain and display your guest reviews. These can also be displayed on your Custom Website.

Next Episode

In the next episode we’ll be returning to look at how to manage your business needs. 

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Transcript

How can holiday rental software help to support your guest needs? Guests needs, really, when you think about them, they're pretty fundamental.

They need that information about your holiday home and when it's available, they need the confidence that when they arrive at your holiday home, it's going to be there, it's going to be clean, and it's gonna be ready for them.

They need to know that if they arrive
Minute 1
and they need help perhaps during their stay, that there's going to be somebody who can help them.

So your business is going to be built around meeting those guest needs.

And the more you can do this, the happier your guests will be, and that becomes this virtuous circle.

'cause as they're happier, they're going to leave you better reviews.

You'll then get more guests.

You'll look after those guests.

They'll then recommend you to other people.

It's a win-win.

Did you know there are often tools built in to holiday rental software designed especially to help you meet your guest needs, even exceed your guest's expectations, but what the pitfalls of doing it wrong and the key steps you should follow? That's what we're going to discuss today on smashing your goals with holiday rental software.

But before we get started, I'd like to share with you an article to help.

If you're not using holiday rental software yet,
Minute 2
or you're thinking of changing software for your holiday rental business on our website, booksterhq.com, you can view the article called Questions to Ask during a Haldy Rental Software demo, or you can download it from here from the show notes.

But now on with the show today we're covering how to support your guest needs.

The two needs that I'm going to cover today are knowing when your property is available so they can book it and knowing with confidence that it will be clean when they arrive.

So let's start with knowing when your property is available.

So it is absolutely essential for helping your guests through the booking process.

We've spoken a little bit about that before, but it's so important that they can really quickly and clearly see when your property or your properties are available to book.

Minute 3
If they can't see this information, they have a couple of options.

They can contact you directly by email or your form on your website or by phone, and they can ask what dates are available to book or they can leave and they can find another property that shows availability much more easily.

So to help your guests, and therefore actually by default it's going to help you holiday rental software, can design and provide calendar tools for your website that will show when your property is available.

Now, each software will do this differently, but they all have this same overarching goal.

So it could be if you have one property that you simply use a calendar from your software that shows when your property is available and when it's booked, your guests can see what dates are available, what dates they can check in.

They can click on the dates that they want to book,
Minute 4
see the price, and start that booking process.

If you have multiple properties that are quite similar or they're in a similar location, you could display calendars of each property side by side.

And this is really handy if your guest wants to stay specifically with you or specifically in your location, but isn't as concerned about which property they're going to book.

So I see this a lot for companies who have pods that are very similar or perhaps similar sized cottages in a very similar location.

Another option is to add a tool that allows the guest to enter the dates that they're looking to go away for and the number of guests and perhaps the destination and the tool will display the properties that are available for those dates.

There's lots of different styles, but they all follow more or less the same concept
Minute 5
with some subtle differences perhaps in the layout or uh, the type of questions that they're asking for.

And you'll see these if you log into booking.com or Airbnb, one of the first things you'll see at the top of the page is an area where the guests can put in their dates and the number of guests.

Now, there will be other calendar solutions out there, but these three give you an idea of how software companies are thinking in order to try and help you meet that guest need to find availability.

Let's move on to another guest need, which is to arrive at your holiday home and find it clean and welcoming.

So how can software help you with this? A lot of holiday rental software, build tools to help you coordinate the cleaning of your properties with your cleaners, the complexity to which the software can help you to achieve your guest needs.

It really varies, but most software will have some sort
Minute 6
of tools to help you achieve this.

So let's cover some basics.

Some softwares will build tools that will provide your cleaners with their own secure login.

And I can't stress enough how important it is for each member of your team to have their own secure login with their own access rights.

There's lots of reasons behind it.

It's all security based.

It's super important that that happens.

So with just a few exceptions, your cleaners and your maintenance employees should have their own access with a limited view.

And the reason behind that is you don't want to be giving out or providing your guest data or your payment data, for example, to your cleaners.

Your cleaners have a different need and therefore that should be reflected in their access.

However, what those cleaners should see are the arrivals, the departures of your bookings, any notes that you've left for them.

Minute 7
So for example, you might have left a note to say that the beds need to be made up in a certain way, maybe two singles instead of a king size and perhaps any extras that the guests have requested or paid for.

So that could be a cot or a highchair, and the cleaners will be able to see this and understand how the property is has to be left.

And once your cleaners have cleaned the property, they can update your software informing you that your property is clean and ready for your guests.

So that gives you the confidence that it's ready.

Some softwares have created more complex tools and moving more into the specialist cleaning and maintenance arena, and I'll cover this briefly here as well.

There are really amazing cleaning and maintenance software tools that provide even more services.

So if your software company doesn't provide the tools
Minute 8
themselves, they may have partnerships with some of these incredible tools that are out there.

These specialists could allow you and your cleaners to chat.

Perhaps either one of you could upload photos or videos.

You could monitor your stock levels of items like toilet paper or towels or cleaning materials, and they could allow you to allocate tasks.

For example, you wanted a certain cleaner to go to a certain property to do a certain activity, and they could allow you to pay your individual cleaners or your individual maintenance team.

I mean, there's actually a lot more that they could do.

And if you're running a really complex operation, perhaps you have hundreds or thousands of properties, then using one of these specialist companies may be a huge time saver for you.

If you have a smaller or a less complex company, then one of the simplest leaning tools in your holiday,
Minute 9
your rental software may work perfectly well for you.

Let's take a moment here.

I'd like to remind you that if you'd like to try out Bookster and the tools that we offer, you can register on booksterhq.com for free, and you can check out some of the great tools that will help you run your short let business.

Moving on back to the second part of the podcast podcast pointer.

Each session will look at one solution within BTA to help you overcome a problem.

Today, Robin, our CEO has selected the partnership with fifo, an independent company that collects and displays reviews for lots and lots of different types of industries.

This links back to the session from episode eight where we looked at trust signals because guest reviews are a big part of building rapport
Minute 10
and trust with your guest.

The partnership with FIFO is important because these reviews will be displayed on the FIFO website as well as the option of displaying them on your own custom website.

Having that independent place that displays your reviews demonstrates that these reviews are completely legitimate, providing even more reassurance to your guests.

This in turn can help you attract more direct bookings, which are a win for your business because then you have to pay the commission to the marketing channels like Airbnb, for example, for your booking in Bookster.

The partnership with FIFO is available in pro and max packages, and you can add those reviews onto your custom website with Bookster.

We'll be covering managing your business needs in the next session.

So I hope you can join me then.

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Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Smashing Your Goals with holiday Rental software.

If you liked the episode or you know someone in the holiday rental industry that would enjoy it, please leave a review on pod chaser.com, apple Podcasts or wherever you download and listen to your podcast.

If you've got any questions, please do get in touch.

You can contact us on our Facebook page, which is booksterhq, or you can contact us through our website and there's more information there.

And you can ask for a demo on how bookster can help you at booksterhq.com.

And remember, we believe that experiences matter.

So whenever you are choosing a software service, make sure you choose one that considers your needs and the needs of your team and your guests.

More Episodes of Smashing your goals with Holiday Rental Software

  • Episode 9 - Manage your guests' needs with holiday rental software - Test "Manage your guests' needs with holiday rental software" and Episode 9 and the Bookster logo.

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