Assessing your needs

Now before you jump in with both feet and purchase vacation rental software right away, you first need to understand where your business needs support. This is so that when you do review software options, you have a better idea of how they can best help you, and if what they’re offering will actually solve your most urgent issues. 

Your business is your own, and there are a lot of things that only you can know or understand about how it runs. That said, we do have a lot of experience helping property managers through this process, and so we can at least point out a few things that you need to prioritise. 

When it comes to vacation rental software, there’s four things you need to think about:

• Channels: what bookings channels do you need to be on?
• Quality: how reliable and feature-rich do you need it to be?
• Cost: how much money are you willing to spend?
• Scalability: how much will your business scale in the future? 

These are the four things you should be considering when choosing a vacation rental software. 

Vacation Rental Channels

Finding the perfect vacation rental software starts with reviewing the channels that the platform supports.

Common channels include Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com, but if you’re hoping for more niche booking channels like Google Vacation Rentals, then you’ll want to choose a solution that supports such an integration.

This step shouldn’t be rushed; nor should it be taken lightly. The channels you choose are part of your go-to-market strategy (which is the strategy you’ll use to bring your short-term rentals to the market) so your decision will have a direct impact on how your properties compete with the myriad of other properties. 

Quality

Not all vacation rental management platforms are created equal—some have invested a considerable amount of engineering and technical dollars into creating high-quality user experiences. These platforms feel like a joy to use because they often have visually pleasing aesthetics, easy-to-use features, and robust integrations that never create double-bookings for you (which is a nightmare in and of itself). 

If having a quality experience both for you and your guests is important to you, you’ll want to evaluate the market from this lens as well.

For example, if you’re only managing two properties and don’t plan on growing much beyond that, then using a platform that isn’t as pretty and occasionally has a few bugs probably won’t be as much of a bother to you since it’s a relatively low-lift to get things back up and running.

You might not also mind if it’s not the prettiest or doesn’t feel modern—either to you or your guests. Perhaps saving money is more important to you, so you’re willing to compromise on quality in favour of price. These are totally fair trade-offs to make based on your needs, so it’s important to decide what actually is important to you.

Cost

While more expensive isn’t always better, you do have to accept that a vacation rental software is going to require some investment—both in terms of money and time. 

Later on in this guide, we’ll cover some different options for software and their corresponding costs. These tools can come at a wide range of price points, payment options, and tiers of service. This is ultimately a good thing: it means you have a range of options to choose from and you have a better chance of finding something that fits your situation.

But you should also be mindful of the potential cost on your and your team’s time. We’re talking about the time it takes to set up, the time it takes to learn. The faster a software can be set up (and the fewer obstacles in your way), the faster it can start bringing value to your business. 

The same thing applies to learning the tool. Learn it quickly and you can start getting the most out of it right away. A software that is hard to set up and harder to learn will drain time and resources and may not be adopted. 

Also, don’t just focus on the cost. Also think about how much profit the vacation rental software could generate for you.

For example, some vacation rental software options let you experiment with rental prices such as dynamic pricing. 

According to our 2023 Short-term Rental Trends Report, STR operators who update their prices on at least a weekly basis or use dynamic pricing are among the most profitable. 

Reports and analytics can also help you uncover new opportunities. For example, you may discover that all your properties in a certain area get booked often at a certain time of year. Upon investigating, you discover a niche local event that draws enthusiasts, which is a new audience for you to target. 

Scalability

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t discuss scalability. When you think about your STR business, what are your goals? Do you want to grow as much as possible? Do you have dreams of managing properties all over the world and entertaining guests in exotic or remote places?

Do you dream of having steady side-income as an additional revenue stream? Does having 100+ properties sound attractive? Or would you rather have only five? 

Answering these questions will help you determine if you need a platform that’s going to scale with you and your business as you grow, or if you just need something to keep the wheels turning with a small amount of properties.

There’s a fine line between platforms that can scale as you grow and those that were designed to manage a smaller amount of properties. You can tell whether or not a platform is designed for scale because of the presence of features that help automate functions like guest messaging and pricing, the breadth of the challenges it can help you solve, and the quality of its integrations. 

Efficiency is a big component of scalability. A task that takes five minutes by hand may not sound like much, but if you have to do it multiple times in a day across 20+ properties, that will add up to literally hours of extra work. Not sustainable if you’ve got a deep portfolio.

Look for the pain points in your process. If there are tasks that you or your team don’t like doing, try to identify why they’re so unpopular. This might help unlock the root cause of the problem and give you a better idea of how to solve it.

For example, you might have listings on four different booking platforms: Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and Agoda. A booking request comes in on the Airbnb site, which you accept, and a day later you get another request on Agoda. It isn’t until later that you realise both bookings are for the same property and for the same dates. 

Automation and process digitalisation can greatly help you address these pain points. These are features commonly found in vacation rental software (more on these later), and are one of the biggest reasons why property managers purchase them.  By shortening (or even totally automating) tasks with vacation rental software and working faster, smarter, and more effectively, your STR operation will be able to do more with less.