Ensuring success in the vacation rental industry

Just like receiving a report card in school, managing a vacation rental business requires regular reviews to assess how well you’re performing. The anticipation and nerves you felt as a student awaiting your grades parallel the process of evaluating your rental’s performance. While grades in school provide a snapshot of your understanding and progress in each subject, performance metrics in your rental business offer a similar overview of how well you’re managing your property and meeting guest expectations.

Just as a report card provides feedback on various subjects through letter grades or percentages, your rental’s performance can be assessed through metrics such as occupancy rates, guest reviews, and financial performance. These indicators help you understand how effectively you’re managing your property, just as grades reflect your grasp of academic subjects.

Regularly reviewing these performance indicators helps you identify areas of strength and opportunities for improvement, ensuring that you continue to provide a high-quality experience for your guests. Much like refining your study habits based on your report card feedback, adapting your strategies based on these reviews can lead to better outcomes and continued success in the vacation rental industry.

So how can you get an unbiased opinion on how well you’re doing?

For starters, we may sound like a broken record by saying this again, but guest opinions do matter. They’ve stayed with you before, and if you want them to be a repeat customer, it is in your best interest that you find out how good your service actually was. By asking the past guests their opinion in the form of a survey (make sure the questions are unbiased) and by offering a discount for renting again, you can make sure you actually get responses. 

If you don’t feel like asking previous guests, ask one of your friends to stay at one of your properties. Don’t change anything in your host routine and ask them to be completely honest with their review. 

The most crucial part of this process isn’t actually getting feedback, it’s actually how you respond to it. If you take the feedback with a grain of salt, you really haven’t learned anything and will continue to do things the way you’ve already been doing it. If you are proactive and make changes to what you do, you’ll have a much higher success rate.