Automation and API Make Tasks Painless
Automation has achieved something of a buzzword status when it comes to software and technology, but there’s a reason why it’s so popular — and why it’s such a benefit to property owners.
Automation can take some of your job’s most repetitive and manual parts and do them quickly and consistently.
Say you want to update the availability of a particular property. Normally, you would have to update each and every booking channel by hand — including your own website. This could take an entire afternoon, depending on how many properties you’re updating and how many platforms you’re on.
With automation, you only need to update once. Your change automatically gets pushed out to every single booking channel, which allows you to perform multiple updates in a single sitting.
A PMS can also automate a process and make it run without human intervention, such as cleaning a property in between bookings. As soon as a guest checks out, the PMS can immediately schedule a cleaning crew to do a changeover — all without you lifting a finger.
All this is possible thanks to the platform’s API — a piece of software that allows different apps to talk and send each other instructions. It’s like having an extra set of hands!
Create a Quality Guest Experience
As you probably know by now, a good “guest experience” doesn’t just cover their stay at your property. It also includes every interaction they have with you, whether that’s online or offline.
This means having an attractive website. It means a smooth and painless booking experience. It even means regular and helpful communication with your guests.
Remember the automation we mentioned? You can send out automated messages to guests at designated points of their stay — right after they book, before they arrive, and on the day of their departure. This is super useful if you want to send them important reminders.
Guests will know where they need to go, when they need to get there, and what they’ll need to do (and not do) once they arrive. You remove all confusion and uncertainty from this part of their stay so that they can focus on enjoying themselves.
Yes, you can certainly accomplish this on your own, but a lot of things could happen. You could get busy or forgetful, or you might mistakenly send the wrong details to the wrong person. It’s just added responsibility that you don’t need to take on.
More Efficient Operations
A short-term vacation rental business covers more than just listing properties and booking guests. If you’re going to be successful, you need to get good at every aspect of managing a property’s operations, from clean-up to marketing to team performance.
By leveraging the capabilities of a property management software platform, you’ll be able to:
- Increase housekeeping efficiency: Automate cleaning tasks and use an online calendar to manage job schedules. Communicate with crews online and make it easy for them to track jobs and update you when they’re complete.
- Keep all your data in one place: No more swimming through paperwork. All of your business data can be kept in a single virtual space, where it can easily be searched, updated, and referenced at any point. And if you do happen to need a hard copy, no problem — just export and print.
- Improve customer data management: Do you want to know what else you can do with all that data? Learn more about your customers! Dig deeper into who your best guests are, how much they’re earning you, and what you can do to attract more like them.
- Enhance employee productivity and engagement: By automating your booking process and other aspects of your operations, you’ll be able to pull employees (and yourself) away from time-consuming, low-value tasks. They’ll have time for the more important work, and have a greater impact on the success of the business.
Increase Revenue Growth
Guest bookings may be your main source of revenue, but they’re not the only way you can increase your bottom line.
A PMS excels at introducing operational efficiency and improving guest experiences in ways that will dramatically improve your short-term rental profit margins.
Get Listed on the Biggest Booking Platforms
Many of the best property management platforms have existing partnerships with the biggest booking platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, which make it easy to get your properties in front of thousands of potential travelers. Posting on multiple platforms is a snap and, thanks to automation, very easy to keep up-to-date.
Accept Direct Bookings
Third-party booking sites are great for getting in front of guests, but this advertising comes at a pretty steep price. Their fees can take a significant chunk out of your profits.
Fortunately, you always have the option of creating your own independently-hosted website and accepting direct bookings. A PMS like Uplisting can help you accomplish that thanks to a no-code interface that is easy to set up and get running — with no commission fees.
Strong Data Security
In today’s privacy-focused society, it’s ever more important for you to protect your and your customer’s data from malicious hackers and identity thieves. But what if you don’t have a dedicated IT team — or even a security-savvy employee?
That’s all right. You don’t need an IT budget to protect your data because a PMS will protect your data for you. Many of the top-shelf property management platforms have the equipment, software, certifications, and expertise required to protect crucial data from bad actors.
Of course, you and your staff still need to behave responsibly when it comes to being secure, but your PMS partner can take care of data protection on their side.
What Most Hosts Encounter Without a PMS
Over the course of speaking with hundreds of hosts across different regions, maturity levels, and company sizes, we’ve discovered some common challenges that property managers encounter when they don’t leverage a PMS. Learn more about these pain points below.
Managing a Rental Business Dominates Your Schedule
Short-term property rental is a multi-faceted business with many moving parts. It can be challenging to run smoothly, even while employing full-time staff. Without any sort of management software to assist, it can easily take hours to perform a single task.
Take managing your different booking apps and listings, for example. You’ve got properties listed on Airbnb, Flipkey, Booking.com, and Vrbo just to name a few. Any single update you make to one of your listings has to be applied across every single one of those digital platforms.
Basically, you’re doing the same task multiple times.
The same can be said for juggling resources like cleaning crews. Which job are they on? Have you told them about their next job? How many jobs do they have pending? Coordinating all of this by hand is a nightmare (and may even lead to nightmares).
Manually Updating Bookings Leads to Errors
A single booking by itself doesn’t contain that much information: customer details, property details, and the booking schedule are generally the extent. So it’s not a huge lift to update your records and calendar by hand.
It’s a different story when you multiply that by all of your other properties. Updating your records and consolidating all of those bookings into a single updated spreadsheet (even a digital one) becomes a juggling act — and you may eventually fumble.
Double-booking a property is the most common mistake. This happens when you record a booking for a property in one spreadsheet or document, but neglect to do the same to another.
This can easily happen during peak seasons or when dealing with needy or fickle travelers. You’re preoccupied and in a rush, and bouncing between different platforms, apps, and documents doesn’t help. The additional complications just add to the chaos and lead to more mistakes.
Mental and Physical Fatigue
As we already mentioned, manually listing your properties on multiple channels can take a physical and mental toll. If you repeat this inefficient cycle day in and day out, you’re not going to get better at it. On the contrary: it’ll just get worse.
Tension and fatigue are going to build up at the same rate as your backlog of tasks. Your day will become more unorganized, and your tasks and priorities will become more scattered. You may end up feeling lost and unsure of what to do next and feel increased frustration as a result.
Any mistakes you make during this period or additional workplace crises will only increase your stress levels. Without intervention or assistance, you might even burn out. And who wants that?
Inefficiency Inertia
Many property owners and managers are trapped in something we call “inefficiency inertia.”
This is when you know that a process is obsolete and inefficient, but you stick with it anyway even though there are better options.
There are a few reasons why you might decide to stick it out: maybe you’re already used to the old way and think it will be more effort to learn the new system. Maybe you’re skeptical of the new system and don’t believe it will do the job properly. Or maybe you think upgrading to a technological solution will be prohibitively expensive.
Whatever the reason, you recognize that it’s time to find a streamlined process that improves your operations, but you can’t or don’t move past your current state.
Save the Headache and Grow Your Airbnb Business With a PMS
If you’re looking to increase your productivity — and your revenue — then a property management software platform may be just what you need.
Any hosting inefficiencies you’re already working through will become much worse as you get more properties, more inquiries, and more channels to manage. You’ll become even more burdened with managing your business and sink deeper into the quicksand of disorganization.
And this is how things will be — unless you make a change.
Luckily, with some elbow grease and help from automation and management software, you can grow your business and build an Airbnb empire.
