Automation is an essential strategy for a growing short-term rental business, allowing you to save time, minimize errors, and improve key areas of your customer service and business performance.
But if you invest in the wrong tools, you could experience costly downtime, platforms may struggle to share important data, and you could end up negatively impacting the guest experience, occupancy rates, and your ability to scale operations.
This is why you need your tech stack to consolidate solutions, be user-friendly, and reduce the complexity of your operational processes.
In this article, you’ll see where in your business you can replace manual tasks. You’ll also find recommendations on the best vacation rental automation tools in the industry, plus see what to look for in those solutions. You’ll be able to make informed choices about what software to implement, and you’ll have a clear understanding of their benefits.
Here are the different kinds of solutions this article discusses:
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Property management systems (PMS) are your command centers for managing short-term rentals (STRs) while minimizing your manual tasks. These systems enable and streamline automated processes by centralizing your property, booking, and guest information.
Some features to look for include:
However, it's vital to recognize that while a PMS offers a broad suite of automations, its capability in specialized areas like task scheduling, team coordination, or detailed channel management often won’t replace dedicated software solutions. Integrating specialized software for these tasks will become increasingly important to efficiency and service quality as your portfolio expands.
Therefore, when selecting a PMS, prioritize one that not only scales with your business growth but also boasts robust integration capabilities. This adaptability ensures your PMS can seamlessly work alongside other specialized tools in your tech stack, supporting cohesive and efficient operations as your business evolves.
The best PMS for your business will depend on details like the size and structure of your operations, your property types, your target market, and your preferred tools. Explore our integrations page to see which PMS most align with the features and compatibility you need.
Channel managers help you maximize the visibility and occupancy of your vacation rentals by distributing your listings across multiple booking channels. They ensure real-time synchronization of availability and rates, preventing overbookings while optimizing revenue.
The most important features to look for include:
As your STR business grows, the ability to manage multiple channels efficiently becomes crucial. A channel manager can save you hours of work in this area, but it's essential to select one that integrates well with your PMS, so all your tools are working with accurate information, from your task scheduling software to your access management system.
Two of the leading channel managers in vacation rentals are:
Operations management software coordinates, communicates, and verifies the work and service that goes into making your properties guest-ready. For example, Breezeway automates various time-intensive tasks, allowing you to:
Here are some of the automated processes you should expect from your operations management platform:
In addition to these core areas of ops automation, Breezeway lets you store and manage property profiles, so you can easily access and share information like when the boiler was last serviced, what the WiFi codes are, or the location of the circuit breaker panel. Also, Breezeway has robust owner reporting and guest messaging software.
By integrating these with your day-to-day operations management, you can spend less time coordinating and communicating with property owners, easily track billables, and improve the guest experience.
Automate your operations with Breezeway |
Without an automated solution for managing guests, responding to common queries about directions, parking, property access, WiFi, and maintenance issues can become daunting. In fact, because it’s so easy to miss a question or response when you’re also overseeing your operations, manually messaging guests can even end up harming your reviews and reputation.
So, you need a solution that offers guides, templates, and consolidation with your team coordination, so you can minimize guest questions, be more responsive, and cut down on the effort guests require from you.
Here are some of features to consider when automating guest communication:
Breezeway provides all these features, natively integrating its messaging software with the platform’s work coordination tools so you can manage all your guest and team messaging in one place.
The digital guidebook is fully branded and user-friendly for guests and is a great way to elevate their experience. Also, you can increase efficiency with Breezeway’s AI feature, which analyzes incoming messages to generate a suggested response.
Pro tip: Breezeway Assist is a hands-off solution to guest messaging you can implement to ensure high responsiveness, personalization, and problem-solving, even in the middle of the night. |
Automation tools process vast amounts of data in real time, adjusting your pricing to demand, competition, seasonality, and other key factors without your direct involvement. This helps you optimize rates for profitability and occupancy without the need for constant manual oversight.
As well as keeping your vacation rentals competitively priced, automating pricing and revenue management:
Some of the features you should consider in a dynamic pricing and revenue management tool include:
Three pricing solutions you should consider are:
By implementing a thorough guest screening process, you can minimize potential risks, like property damage or chargeback fraud, which can lead to a loss of revenue and impact your brand image.
Automated guest screening works using instant background checks, analyzing previous host feedback, and verifying personal information against set criteria. With this information, you can be alerted to any red flags and see an objective risk analysis, allowing you to make an informed choice on whether or not to proceed with a booking.
This is especially useful for direct bookings since these don’t come with the in-built protections of an OTA.
Three platforms you should consider are:
Noise monitoring in vacation rentals is a proactive approach to managing disturbances and ensuring guests comply with your house rules. These devices respect guest privacy by not recording actual sounds but by measuring decibel levels.
By implementing noise monitoring devices, you can receive real-time alerts if noise exceeds your customized thresholds, enabling timely intervention to prevent potential complaints or issues with the authorities. Some systems also allow you to automate a message to guests—making them a highly scalable solution to protecting your properties and community relationships.
Two noise monitoring tools to consider are:
STR automation allows you to streamline your property management processes, effectively saving time that can be redirected towards more strategic tasks, like developing personalized upsells or marketing your services to prospective homeowner clients.
Automating key managerial processes also reduces human error, such as scheduling cleanings and maintenance. Automated systems can ensure these tasks are assigned promptly and tracked through to completion, minimizing the chance of a missed turnover or sending two cleaners to do the same job.
By using specialized vacation rental software to replace manual tasks like optimizing rates and messaging guests, you can also drive revenue, improve your reviews, and cut down on staffing costs, including recruitment and training.
However, you should build your tech stack carefully—be sure to factor in compatibility, consolidate tools where possible, and turn to user-friendly solutions for both managers and in-the-field staff.
Save hours of work, avoid human error, and have no more missed cleans |