If you’re managing properties for short and mid term, known as vacation rentals, and you’re looking to learn what features you should be looking for to help you improve, evolve and be ahead of trends and competitors, you’ve landed at the right place.
I will start with this: with Rental Ninja’s in-house technology you can eliminate SO much hassle, time spent on extranets and internal costs, you’ll be reluctant to believe. But trust me, if you try you’ll convert, and you won’t go back.
So many hosts started working and relying solely on Airbnb, building their business around it. That has its pros but also its cons.
I won’t go into detail listing them -there’s already a lot of content out there you can find about that. But what I know is, when you want to take control of your business and your guests, expand your portfolio and operate as a real company, it’s a must to start publishing your listings on many other Booking Channels. And doing that without a Channel Manager becomes a living hell.
That’s when the synchronization and automation features come into play.
You will centralize, automate operations and bring harmonious synchronicity to all players involved, all done from a single Platform. Sounds dreamy, but it’s not.
We’re talking about a software built behind an idea that goes far beyond an All in One Property Management Software.
With a Channel Manager, identifying the best Booking Portals for your business and managing multiple bookings in real-time, across various OTAs, becomes easily and quickly achievable, at a vertiginous cheap cost.
For all beginners in this industry, an OTA is a platform on which we can open a rental to sell for short or season stays, with its rates and availability, characteristics and photos, amenities, cancellation policies… so that it can be booked online.
To enhance your visibility online it is fundamental to open your properties to sell on the main OTAs of your region. It is true some OTAs operate globally (like Booking.com, Vrbo, Expedia or Airbnb), but there are many booking portals that have a particularly strong visibility in certain countries, regions, or for a specific collective or offer type (such as Plum Guide). These are the ones that can help make a difference.
It is key to identify the selling portals that benefit you the most, to attract the kind of guest you have in mind, maximize your occupancy, and find your market niche to boost your revenue.
Having the possibility to attract and handle direct bookings, providing a payment method to your guests is another game changer. It tends to become a really big and expensive project. But if work is done correctly, it should pay off.
Knowing what it implies, it is a huge added value if your Channel Manager can offer you a way to achieve that.
Once we are listed everywhere, open to get bookings from guests globally, the second big challenge is not letting success drown us with unbearable workload.
To handle this intense workload, with the particularity that in our industry, vacation rental operations are often decentralized and very much fragmented among different people, we must provide ourselves with the right tools to work alongside us.
Thus, if we want to have our calendars booked and make a real business out of this, the 2 main challenges are 1) to be as visible as possible online to compete in this increasingly crowded industry, and 2) make sure we can sustain the workload this implies.
It is easy to list online, but it is not easy to be a reliable and efficient host or property manager.
The biggest challenge is to stay alive over time, make a name for yourself, and positively differentiate from the competition.
For that, we strongly believe in Channel Management, directly linked with the right set of features to cover the entire logistics ecosystem of your business.
A Channel Manager is a software, which helps you centralize, automate and run all the activities concerning confirmation, modification or cancellation of a reservation. From rates and availability updates in real time on all the OTAs you chose to list on, to pictures, descriptions and amenities for each listed property.
This could be an endless growing list, the more you opt to increase the amount and quality of your services and attention to your clients.
When a real situation comes up, you’re suited to face it and deliver a positive outcome for everyone involved, with almost no time dedicated to it.
All the listed above, that consume a humongous amount of time altogether, will start to happen and synchronize automatically, ensuring efficiency, optimal workflow, and freeing your time to dedicate to what adds more value to you.
That means A LOT.
Let me summarize on a very high level:
What’s cool about this is, that besides centralizing and simplifying your life with everything BEFORE guests book, you’ll also be able to make use of an endless list of automations tailored for the work that comes AFTER a booking is confirmed :) That means, you can also make use of advanced technology for your Guests’ benefit, but also organize, automatically schedule, assign and inform your Team of the workload.
What’s else to ask? Well! Automating 90% of your financials; revenue documentation; invoices; and payouts, is also on the menu!
With this wide range of software products, anyone with the right attitude and structure can become the Host of the year and scale their business up to their dreams’ limitations.
BOOK A DEMO If you want to see it with your own eyes
At the end of the day, it turns out there is a holistic tool to help us keep Guests and Rental Owners happy and of course, yourself and your operations team 🫶
Joyful hosting!
The Rental Ninja Academy
Here wegh are, both physically and digitally. We give you a few ways to reach us, we will solve your doubts, or at least, we will surely try to do it
