By Shelby Clements, guest columnist As a vacation rental manager, your goals are pretty simple, right? You want your homes to be fully booked out while raking in the five-star reviews, and you want to be at the top of the list in your location for any potential guests.  But the past few years have been crazy with constant changes and cancellations. Health regulations and restrictions keep updating and guests keep canceling or changing their reservations— for one reason or another. It takes what seems like endless effort to reach those who want to rent your vacation property. What you need ..read more

Do you have a plan in place to boost your off-season bookings? It’s no secret that tourism is cyclical. Even tourist meccas like Orlando, Florida, or Las Vegas, Nevada have their seasonal ebbs and flows. Here are a few ideas for vacation rental owners and property managers to boost their low-season bookings. 1. Reduce your rates. I know— duh, right? But offering steep discounts is the quickest way to fill up your home fast. Make sure you’re getting your awesome offers out there on social media. 2. Lower your minimum stay. Consider bringing the minimum night stay all the way down to one or two ..read more

There’s a right way to grow your property inventory. You want to grow your vacation rental property inventory— but you keep attracting the wrong type of homeowner. You want to attract high-quality properties to sign with your management company, but you don’t have a solid plan in place for how to make it happen. To make matters worse, your current roster includes too many of the wrong kinds of short-term rental homeowners. There’s the one that uses their house all the time— making it nearly impossible to rent. Then there’s the homeowner with the amazing house that only wants to rent it out in ..read more

Your what? Your vacation rental blog. Your... vrog. As a vacation rental copywriter, I look at dozens of VRM websites every day. Without a doubt, the one thing I come across the most is the dusty, forgotten blog page. The poor thing. It was last updated in 2017 by Debbie in Accounting. She wrote about the pizza place that her family went to over the weekend. The pizza place got a rave review. The blog got zero hits. And then it fell quietly into the dark recesses of the site. And your mind. If you want to generate more traffic and more direct bookings from your website— and what vacation rent ..read more

For more info, email me at wendyrobinbixby@gmail.com. You may also like…   ..read more