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Vacation Rental Software Buyer's Guide
Table of Contents
Vacation rentals offer more flexibility with lodging when compared to hotels. There are more rooms available at an average in the apartments, houses, and villas worldwide than there are in hotels. This creates a big market opportunity for vacation rentals. However, vacation rental becomes difficult when it comes to booking availability, which you can do easily with the vacation rental software.
» What is Vacation Rental Software?
Vacation Rental software enables you to start your online website or app for online accommodation booking. You can customize the software for other businesses, including home rental, apartment rental, hotels, villas, and lodges. The software helps property owners, bed and breakfast owners, vacation rental managers for automated booking, availability management, and increase their revenue.
» What are the Features of Vacation Rental Software?
Vacation rental software enables your vacation rental business to run and automate with ease. It allows property owners to create their marketplace for online room booking and reservations. The software eliminates the uneasiness of your routine vacation rental business life, with its built-in feature-rich tools.
Whether you are a startup or an established entrepreneur, you can take full advantage of the vacation rental property management software. However, you need to keep an eye out for key essential features of the software.
› Channel Manager
This feature is a must for any vacation rental software with multiple listings on multiple booking platforms. The integrated channel manager tools sync calendars across all the channels and when a booking is made, it reflects on other channels' calendars eliminating the risk of double bookings.
› Centralized Calendar
This feature provides property managers the ability to view all reservations including the past, present, and upcoming, all in one location, regardless of how or where they happen.
› Unified Inbox Tools
The purpose of this feature is to make guest communication easy by centralizing all messages in one inbox. This also supports messages from other channels to your inbox.
› Automation Tools
This is one of the important features to look for in vacation rental management tools. The feature allows vacation rental managers to automate their routine operations like creating and scheduling tasks for personnel, adjusting prices as per rules, sending important information to guests regarding their journey, responding to inquiries, and activating payment methods.
› Reporting Tools
These tools help managers to organize data into clear and comprehensive reports with customizing options. You can share these reports later with relevant parties such as homeowners and staff members.
› Task Management Tools
This feature facilitates the generation, assignment, and monitoring tasks for staff that include maintenance, cleaning, reception, and more.
› Payment Processing
Your chosen software should be capable of securing the payment processing for reservations that come from outside online booking channels.
› Mobile App
A mobile app linked with the software should allow property managers to utilize most of the functionality of the software during on the go.
› Booking Site Builder
Your chosen software should build a branded website for your business, where you can independently process bookings from online travel agencies. The system should be able to pull all the client listings from its database and drive them to the direct booking site.
› Owners Portal
Home rental owners can view relevant information about their property on a separate dashboard. This feature also includes reservation schedules and bookings made on specific dates for them to use their properties.
» What are the Benefits of Vacation Rental Software?
When it comes to selecting, implementing vacation rental management software into your business, you need to consider the benefits against the costs. The software helps you grow your business by adding more properties and running reports to see how you are performing. Here are some of the key benefits of using quality vacation rental software:
› Generate More Bookings
You can integrate your bookings and availability calendars into your website to provide guests the ability to view and book with you immediately.
› Run How You Want
You can run your calendar either in manager-centric or guest-centric mode, allowing guests to send requests or book for themselves.
› Saves Admin Time
With several customizable options available, the software empowers you to view all the details and overall status of bookings. This saves your time and effort.
› Effortless Booking Process
With the vacation rental property management system, you can track and view the availability, send quotes, bookings, contracts, payments, check-ins and outs, returning deposits, asking for reviews, who owes you money, and which properties are ready or cleaning, all you can handle seamlessly.
› Manage Multiple Users
Your software provides your managers, staff, and agents with special logins to view certain information on designated properties to do their jobs with ease.
› Easy Communication
One of the best benefits of using the software is, you can use its professional email templates to provide guests the required information of when, where, and how much quickly and automatically. By setting reminders, you can send automated emails to guests, cleaners, owners, and vendors regarding check-in instructions, reviewing the property, driving directions, and other instructions.
» What is the Cost of Vacation Rental Software?
People prefer vacation rentals for more comfortable accommodation within their budget. This has increased the rate of booing from various customers and online booking providers with different accommodation options at different price ranges. Sometimes this creates troubles in bookings and availability. However, you can put an end to these troubles with the vacation management software. With its features and many benefits, it is worth using vacation rental software for your business.
You can use a free trial version for a limited period to use how the software works and to determine if it is beneficial for your business. The price of the vacation rental software varies from vendor to vendor and also depends on your business needs. By doing some research you can choose the best vacation rental software from the pool of software products available in the market. The cost of the software starts at $30/month/property and $90/month for multiple properties.
» Conclusion
The vacation management software is a great benefit for property owners and vacation managers, as it helps them to keep up with their routines of property management. With all the benefits this software offers, you can shop for one for your business needs. However, consider taking time to define your needs, budget, and software available in your place. There will be no value for your money, time, and effort if your chosen software cannot give you what you want.