Your Property’s Best Features
When listing your property on an online travel agency (OTA) one of the first things you should be thinking of is maximizing the best aspects of your property and minimizing the less enticing aspects (there are no bad ones as each rental is different). However, figuring out which features are inherently the most attractive to potential guests can be a struggle to figure out. Once you figure out what features guests like the most, you can then shift your listings’ focus to those aspects and cater to the needs of your guests.
To figure out what aspect(s) of your listing guests like the most, you’ll actually need to ask them. The one downside of asking your previous guests, or potential guests about why they booked with you is simply low response rate. Like many other facets of survey research, low response rate can greatly skew the results. By asking guests midway through the stay or just afterwards, you have the guests near full attention. If you currently don’t have any bookings or recent past bookings, giving your past guests an incentive can help with response rate. This incentive could also trigger more future bookings as it will remind those guests of what a great experience they had.
Once you determine what features of your listing the guests prefer most, you move onto a couple of things. For starters, you can optimize your listing better, and secondly, depending on the feature, you can display or make it more prominent in your listing. Updating listing pictures and descriptions can increase the visibility of the features in question. If the guests mention that it wasn’t a physical feature of the listing but more of the service you provided, then continue to invest in yourself and whatever necessary to keep giving that same great service. Potentially ask your guests if they would be okay to use their name for a quote!
Maximizing your listing or determining what to include to get better results will always be a trying game — but it doesn’t have to be guess work. We’ve said it before, that asking your guests for their opinion can greatly improve the potential for more bookings as well as increase the quality of stay. There’s no harm in asking!
