Ensuring success in the vacation rental industry
Having been through the public school system, you will undoubtedly have received a report card. This time of the school year would bring nerves, excitement or pure fear — depending on how you were doing at that time. But with every report card you were given some sort of progress update of how you were doing and how well you understood each course through the process of a letter grade or a percentage. Yes, marks may not provide the whole story but you get the point. Just like school, operating a vacation rental is also something that has to be reviewed every so often so that you know how well you’re doing.
So how can you get an unbiased opinion on how well you’re doing?
For starters, we may sound like a broken record by saying this again, but guest opinions do matter. They’ve stayed with you before, and if you want them to be a repeat customer, it is in your best interest that you find out how good your service actually was. By asking the past guests their opinion in the form of a survey (make sure the questions are unbiased) and by offering a discount for renting again, you can make sure you actually get responses.
If you don’t feel like asking previous guests, ask one of your friends to stay at one of your properties. Don’t change anything in your host routine and ask them to be completely honest with their review.
The most crucial part of this process isn’t actually getting feedback, it’s actually how you respond to it. If you take the feedback with a grain of salt, you really haven’t learned anything and will continue to do things the way you’ve already been doing it. If you are proactive and make changes to what you do, you’ll have a much higher success rate.
