5 things to get ready for the new season!
While much of Europe is still struggling with the snow, ice and heavy rain – you should be preparing your vacation rental for the new season! Here are some tips to help attract more bookings and make your guests feel welcome:
- Renovate
The paint on your walls is no longer fresh? Bits have fallen off the walls and windows have cracks? Now is the time to replace, renew and freshen up the “bones” of your holiday home.
- Upgrade your style
Think quality: wow your guests with the type of furniture and decoration that you would appreciate and feel comfortable with, in other words: the more high-spec and personal your décor, the more it will be appreciated. So out with tired furniture and appliances, in with quality material. Ditch the plastic chairs on the terrace and invest in some funky wooden or fibre outdoor furniture. And while you are at it: give your property a style makeover – review colour schemes and fabrics – it is easy to make an impression with new wall colours and matching cushions & throws.
- Spring clean
This seems obvious but it is essential to ensure that your property is super clean – it does not only apply to the inside but extends to all external areas such as your terrace, garden and pool, so scrub, polish and weed!
- Showcase your property with professional photos or video walk-thrus
It helps to regularly add new pictures or videos to your holiday rental online gallery, especially if you have up-styled or renovated. Every upgrade and improvement in your rental should be showcased and is testimony to the fact that you care about the property and your guests!
- Go digital and interactive with your rental home guidebook and manual
Your guestbook is tired, tatty and needs a thorough update? Why not go digital? Use the HOSTISSIMO interactive guidebook to give your guests access and insight into the “inner workings” of your vacation rental (such as directions, Meet & Greet, access and wifi info), a guest manual (to explain how your appliances and other features work) and personal recommendations (local attractions, shopping, restaurants and important contacts such as nearest doctors, hospitals or embassies). And you don’t need to set up a website – HOSTISSIMO has done that for you: all you have to do is copy and paste the information from your guestbook into the digital guidebook and then publish. Send your guests a link in advance so they can prepare for their visit and it will help them in case of questions and even emergency situations. In addition it is linked to google maps and gives directions and can be accessed in different languages.
- Published in blog
Why video will give you the edge
Who can resist the pull of a short video? This is the simple premise that youtube’s fortunes are built on and businesses all over the world have built impressive video libraries because it is so much easier and effective to package up a message or a description or instructions visually. Even more so if those videos are entertaining, funny or have emotional appeal.
It is only recently that the vacation rental community has cottoned on and now video is seen as the new frontier where images have previously ruled. Of course!! Videos are the perfect vehicle to showcase a vacation rental property – either as an animated slide-show with images strung together to create greater visual impact or fully-fledged videos featuring all aspects of the property. These range from a video itinerary to a fly-over with a drone and on a more mundane level short instructions on how to re-ignite the boiler or how to use the various remote controls of your entertainment system. These latter ones are certainly more effective than a lengthy write up in a guestbook.
But who is using video and how widespread is this? The reality is that few platforms who promote holiday rentals offer video uploads or are just beginning like homeaway, who allow you to add a URL. While the big players will pave the way on the vacation rental promotional side, there is an opportunity for smart rental owners to differentiate themselves by using video to help their clients acquaint themselves with the property before and during their stay. This is where the video itinerary comes in: It not only helps where a property is difficult to find, it can also serve as an “appetizer” to showcase the drive up to a property. And of course video is very helpful for instructions within the property which you would not upload to Airbnb or other platforms – this type of information is relatively sensitive and therefore the perfect place for this is a digital guestbook. Making your guestbook interactive in this way lends a whole new quality and dimension to the guest experience: by offering short video insights your guests can familiarize themselves with the property and its surroundings and it not only helps them with planning, it also creates a sense of anticipation and reassurance – and helps with to connect emotionally to their holiday.
If you thought this means going on a course to learn how to create professional videos – knock yourself out! But in my own experience, your average smart phone makes it easy to shoot and create sufficiently high quality footage. So have a go, start with a short, simple video, get some feedback from your guests and build a small library from there – the easiest way to present these is of course through the digital guestbook.
- Published in blog, hostissimo