Pocono Rentals & Management

What sets you apart from the competition?

The reason we’ve created the business is to craft remarkable vacation experiences, while helping homeowners maximize their rental revenue. 

• We have the infrastructure, the maintenance and cleaning teams.
• We know the properties like our own homes. We’ve probably stepped into every pitfall in our locations.   
• We provide a remarkable experience, resulting in better reviews, return guests and great reputation.

Pocono Rentals & Management is a seasoned professional property management company, leveraging technology to create outstanding guest experience and streamline operations.

What matters the most in your day-to-day operations?

The most important thing is to arm guests with all the information they need

Whether guests are commuting to their stay or stepping foot in the home, we want their expectations align with the reality. Thant’s where Enso helps considerably.

We were looking for all-in-one partner in order to provide rental agreements, security deposits, home guides, everything of this sort. That is what Enso does. This was a clouds parting Eureka moment for us, because Enso Connect really hits on everything we were looking for.

What are your plans for the near future?

We’re excited for the new office space, not only as a place to meet clients, but also a professional branding asset. It also will be an efficiency driver in the business. We store materials in the office, keeping them on hand if we’re short on something. Now there is a set up process instead of Amazon orders that take a week, because of our remote location.

Our focus is on finding ways to increase revenue and create better experience. We fell short on an Airbnb Superhost status for the last year and a half, but we’re very close to it. It will be great to achieve this status again.

Going with upsells outside the standard early check-in and late checkout. Maybe there’s a romance package we can offer with two bottles of wine and chocolate. We can set that up in advance and drive some additional revenue per guest here. We need to think through the things like who delivers that, how much do we uncharge, does it create a logistical nightmare. Our vacation homes are spread out, so we need to make sure we’re not spending too much time on the road.

Course on expansion. We’re managing about 75 properties now and we’re looking into opportunities to double this number in the next 18 months. We’ve got a decent amount of leads for properties in other areas of Poconos and there are great opportunities in New Jersey. They are too far away for us to support right now, but we plan to get there very soon.

Why were you looking for guest experience software? And why did you choose Enso Connect?

We began searching for software that could simplify operations and enhance guest experience, to uphold the standards of professional hospitality.

The off-season is an opportunity to focus on processes, which is why we were exploring potential solutions at that time.

Pocono Rentals and Management works with Hostaway as a central property management system. We checked various solutions that integrate with the PMS. The challenge we faced with was the abundance of vendors, providing partial solutions to our needs.

We started talking to companies that provide insurance and security deposits. It felt disconnected, as we would end up with four different solutions that partially address the issue, without much integration.

There were other companies that offered a solution through a downloadable app. This was out of question, as people won’t keep the app on their phone even if they download it once. It needs to be a URL and it’s non negotiable. Nobody is wasting their phone space on an app.

Enso Connect checks all the boxes for us:
it’s one URL
you don’t need a separate device (like an in-property tablet)
security deposit seamlessly included in the guest journey

What is your vision of a great guest experience?

The great guest experience is the one where the guest doesn’t ask us any questions. And it’s not because we don’t want to be involved. We just know that about 90% of the questions are coming from a pain point. This can be about what can guests do in the area when it’s raining.

We can put this information in front of the guests, where they know how to find it, they don’t need to wait for us to respond. It’s just at their fingertips.

Or how do we get to the lock box? It is in the check-in instructions, in the link we provided you. If they still ask this question after they have the link, it’s on us to make sure they know that that information is in the link or time our automated messages to them better.

If guests come in, check out and don’t ask any questions – they are happy 🙂

It’s all expectations VS reality. What we’re trying to focus is that the reality meets guests’ expectations. If reality doesn’t meet expectations, guests are upset. So some of our homes that provide an “economy offering”, we advertise them accurately. We try to over-inform and set up the expectations before guests arrive.