Four Seasonal Questions Vacation Rental Managers Should Ask Themselves

Vacation rental managers! Depending on the seasonality of your destination, this slower time between Thanksgiving and Christmas can be incredibly valuable. These next few weeks are a great opportunity to evaluate, strategize, and organize! Here are a few ideas:

1. Is your tech stack working for you, or are you working too hard with your existing tech? Look, there will never be that "perfect" tech stack that requires zero intervention or involvement on your part. However, if one of your systems is giving you grief, now is a good time to shop around and see what else is out there. More than likely there is another option that will eliminate your pain points. Often the fear of switching systems is worse than the actual switch, so changing an element of your tech stack probably won't be as bad as you're imagining!

2. Are you driving off-season occupancy and revenue? The off-season is a great opportunity to drive incremental revenue. Are your rates attractive enough to convert off-season demand? Evaluate your floor rate for each of your properties. Don't know what the floor rate is? Floor rate = you'd rather the property sit empty than drop below $X/night.

3. 📈 How does your 2023 marketing plan look? Is this something you are tasked with, or someone else on your team? Set a meeting to review what's in the plan and on the calendar, and familiarize yourself with when different campaigns are going out. Bonus points if you're including homeowner acquisition efforts in your marketing plan. Bonus bonus points if you're also reviewing your 2022 marketing plan and the results of your various campaigns. Are you iterating on what worked/didn't work this year?

4. Do you know your % of direct bookings and are you working on growing it? Arguably, this could be a sub-bullet of the above, but this is subject matter that I feel very strongly about While I believe you should have a solid distribution strategy, I also believe that if some of the giant OTAs (not naming names) went away tomorrow that many vacation rental managers simply would not have a business. Brainstorm what you can do to increase your guest bookings, grow your guest email list, and ultimately hopefully reduce your cost of acquisition while growing the lifetime value of your guests?