6 Best Guest Communication Tools for Vacation Rentals

Vacation rental guests are notoriously demanding as check-in approaches, looking for immediate answers to questions about their arrival, property access, and use of amenities. And during their stay, they may have issues with the cleaning or need information about the local area.

If you struggle to get back to your guests within even a few minutes, you could receive a poor rating that affects your future occupancy rates. So the pressure is on to give guests exactly the information they need, when they need it—and make them autonomous throughout the guest journey.

You can minimize your guest management workload and provide guests with a better stay by implementing specialized vacation rental technology, but understanding the differences between platforms requires intensive research, and busy property managers simply don’t have the bandwidth.

To address this issue, here’s a breakdown of the six best guest communication tools for vacation rentals. You’ll find out about their pricing and benefits, and see their key features—so you can make an informed choice on the best platform for your business.

The most important features of a guest communications tool

Guests look for independence and privacy in their vacation rental stays, yet they expect you to be their own personal front desk 24/7 with immediate responses to their questions and requests about arrival, property access, amenities, and the local area.

This places an enormous burden on you and your team, and takes you away from higher-level business concerns, like creating new ways to improve operational efficiency, drive revenue, and grow your business.

To address the issue of time-consuming and inefficient guest communication, you need your vacation rental tool to:

• Make guests autonomous by providing them with the information they need
• Reduce your workload with automation and streamlined processes
• Consolidate solutions to avoid having redundant software

Some of the features that will help you achieve these objectives include:

✅  A centralized location for all your guest messaging
To easily track conversations and avoid missed questions and requests
✅ Integration with your property management system (PMS)
So you can pull in data on guests, properties, and bookings
✅  Integration with task management
So your cleaning and maintenance ops are synced with how you manage guests
✅  A digital guidebook
So guests have a go-to resource they can always turn to first
✅  Personalized templates
To make your messaging fast and to facilitate automated comms
✅  Automated messaging
Including scheduled messages and message triggers
✅  Bulk messaging
So you can reduce task complexity and save time
✅  AI integration
So you can quickly formulate unique responses

6 Best guest communication tools for vacation rental management

These guest communication solutions enhance the guest experience with automated technology, including templates, scheduled messaging, gap-night messaging, AI, and guidebooks.

1. Breezeway: Fully streamlined guest comms and ops

Breezeway has a user-friendly dashboard for guest messaging.

Breezeway’s messaging natively integrates with the platform’s digital guide and multiple operations solutions, which allows you to centralize all your communications with guests and team members. This makes responding to questions and requests highly streamlined, since you can create work orders and track task completion from your guest management dashboard.

Breezeway connects your guest messaging with your team operations, which makes it easy to handle last-minute and in-stay requests.

By integrating with your PMS, Breezeway pulls reservation details, allowing you to automate personalized data within your pre-built message templates. You can use these templates for your scheduled messages to guide guests through their stay. Also, you can use them to make responses fast and simple.

Breezeway’s bulk messaging tool lets you alert multiple guests to emergencies like weather warnings as part of a quick, single task. Meanwhile, the platform’s automated gap-night messaging is a way to generate increased revenue with a hands-off solution that makes sure you never leave money on the table.

You can use Breezeway to automate gap-night offers with customized rules and personalized templates.

In addition to Breezeway’s multiple messaging solutions, you can use it to create stay-specific digital guidebooks with arrival information, property access credentials, WiFi passwords, and local recommendations. With this in place, guests can enjoy independence throughout their stay.

To have fully scalable guest messaging, you can use Assist, Breezeway’s professional guest management service. With this activated, Breezeway-trained hospitality agents are on call 24/7 to take guest messages and calls, so you can grow your operations without compromising on efficiency or the guest experience.

Breezeway key features

• Central portal for guest messaging and task management
• Pre-built templates personalized with shortcodes
• Bulk sending and scheduled messages
• Automated gap-night messaging
• AI suggested replies
• Digital guidebook
• Professional hospitality management
  

2. YourWelcome

YourWelcome Advance includes automated messaging features, branded emails, and check-in with guest data collection.

YourWelcome uses property-synced smart tablets to provide an interactive guidebook and two-way messaging for vacation rentals, serviced apartments, and ski chalets. With YourWelcome Advance, the system includes customized email workflows and additional features for contactless check-in and automated messaging.

The automated workflows schedule messages to be sent to guests at key stages in their guest journey, such as on the day before arrival or on the morning of check-out, which allow guests to independently handle their ID verification and payments.

As well as personalized recommendations for their stay, you can use the digital guide to promote upsells, like food delivery and guided tours, and to drive direct bookings by incentivizing guests to sign up to your mailing lists and take advantage of your referral programs.

YourWelcome key features

• 12 or 24-month recurring subscriptions with tablet and software
• Digital guide
• Guest check-in
• Chat
• Customizable automated email workflows (with Advance)
  

YourWelcome pricing

$240 per property per year, including an 8-inch tablet, tablet stand, and extra-long cable, and free replacement for damaged tablets upon return of the original tablet. Advance pricing is available on request.

3. Enso Connect

Enso Connect’s guest messaging solutions include streamlined check-in via a web app.

Enso Connect's guest experience platform, Boarding Pass, provides a streamlined web app for guests to manage their stay, offering ID verification, digital check-in, access to guidebooks, service requests, and 2-way comms with you and your team.

The platform includes a single inbox, simplifying message management. Here, you can categorize, assign, and respond to messages efficiently, without the need for multiple communication tools.

Also, the platform utilizes AI to suggest responses based on sentiment analysis. For example, if the software detects that your guest is unhappy or frustrated, it can automate a discount and message based on your customized triggers.

Enso Connect key features

• Centralized messaging
• AI-driven predictive responses and sentiment analysis
• Scheduled messaging and review management
• Data collection
• Digital check-in and ID verification via web app and third-party integrations
  

Enso Connect pricing

Fill in the online form for a quote. Note that the minimum package is $100 per month, there’s a 5% fee charged to guests for upsells, and there are additional costs for using third-party software, such as Autohost or Superhog for guest screening. Also be aware that Enso Connect is only available as a PMS integration.

4. Hospitable

Hospitable allows you to create detailed template customizations to automate responses to common questions.

Hospitable offers an integrated automation platform so you can increase response time and minimize your manual tasks. It merges scheduled messaging, customizable message templates, and intelligent responses, all designed to enhance interaction with guests while reducing manual effort.

With shortcodes. detailed rules, and triggers, you can ensure guests receive personalized information at every stage of their stay, which not only improves guest satisfaction but helps you operate far more efficiently.

Among Hospitable’s key features is ChatGPT for generating replies to unpredictable questions, and a unified inbox that aggregates communications across different channels.

Hospitable key features

• Unified inbox
• Message templates with shortcodes
• Scheduled messaging
• Canned responses to common questions
• AI responses
  

Hospitable pricing

Hospitable starts at $40 for up to two properties per month and there’s a 14-day free trial.

5. RueBaRue

RueBaRue’s text messaging feature is available as part of a bundle package with the platform's digital guides.

With RueBaRue's digital guestbook, you can compile property-specific guides that provide guests with important details about their stay, from arrival to check-out. For example, the platform includes a smart lock feature that allows you to generate and share unique door codes with your guests, streamlining their check-in process and ensuring their stay begins smoothly and securely.

As well as practical information, including how-to’s about appliances and amenities, you can use RueBaRue’s integration with Google Places to create local recommendations that automatically update themselves.

As well as the guidebooks, which guests access using a link, the platform includes scheduled message templates, text automation with a unified inbox, and a gap-night messaging solution.

RueBaRue key features

• Digital guestbooks
• Text automation with shortcodes and messaging
• Local recommendations via Google Place integration
• Extended stay messaging (part of a standalone module)
• Review management messaging
  

RueBaRue pricing

RueBaRue’s pricing per property depends on the size of your portfolio. For example, the bundle package, which includes the guestbooks and text messaging, but not extended stay messaging, is $9.99 per property per month for 10 properties, $7.59 per property per month for 25 properties, and $6.79 per property per month for 50 properties.

6. Duve (formerly Wishbox)

Duve’s branded mobile app includes automated messaging and mobile key functionality.

Duve provides guests with a branded digital guide that’s focused on streamlining check-in with features like scheduled messages for sharing pre-arrival information and digital keys. The platform has mainly been developed for hotels, but its solutions are still effective for vacation rental property management. 

For example, aside from the platform’s online check-in capability, you can use Duve to centralize all your guest communication across multiple channels, create message templates to upsell services, and create canned responses for commonly asked questions.

Also, Duve collects guest data, which you can use as part of your direct booking strategy to drive repeat stays and referrals.

Duve key features

• Branded guest app
• Unified inbox
• Scheduled messages
• Canned responses to common questions
• Automated upsells (Premium package)
  

Duve pricing

Duve’s Pro package is available for $7.50 per unit per month, at a minimum of $150 per month.

Automate guest messaging for better ops and ratings

The best guest communication tools don’t only improve the guest experience—they minimize your manual tasks with user-friendly solutions that scale as your business grows.

Especially, you should look for a guest communication platform like Breezeway, so you can:

• Create and schedule personalized templates
• Send messages in bulk
• Automate gap-night messages
• Easily manage special requests and in-stay issues
• Make guests autonomous from pre-arrival
  

With these solutions in place, you can achieve your key objective, which is to be more efficient as you add to the guest experience.