You made it. You successfully set up and advertised your short term rental property and you are ready for your first guests. The day has finally come and all of that hard work is about to pay off. You are slightly nervous though since you know just how important the initial reviews to any STR can be. The guest arrives and… they can't get it! Even though you sent them the carefully laid out check in instructions, created a unique digital lock code for them, and were there for them every step of the way.
They just can't, for whatever reason, get the lock to open. Let me save you the trouble of guessing why… user error! Yes, as simple as it is to use digital locks these days they are all different and STRs attract guests of all ages and nationalities and sometimes our guests just can't seem to enter the codes right. Leaving off a digit. Not entering a pound sign or hitting an unlock button. Trying to open the door before it's actually unlocked causing the "smart" lock to jam up.
From the tens of thousands of guests my team and I have managed in my own personal portfolio I can tell you that lots of reasons pop up that could lead to a bad guest experience. The entry example just happens to be the most common reason a guest will call you. And worse… sometimes they call you a bit frantically because they have been traveling long hours, they're exhausted, and it's late at night.
So… things happen. Whether you are self-managing your property or you have a team helping you, you have to be prepared for anything and most importantly you have to know how to handle it.
The better we manage our properties the better our guests' experiences will be and the more money we will make.
As we kick off the 3rd episode of this 4-part series, this week we will be going in depth on all things you or your property manager SHOULD be doing during your guest reservation, from arrival until check out.
What happens if there is an emergency? What if the guest wants to change their reservation? The guest can't sleep because the neighbor is being too loud? The best way to respond to a guest? We will cover all of that this week as well as:
Guest management tips during the reservation
Handling common issues
Monitoring home security
Following up
Upselling reservations
Altering reservations
Involving OTA support when needed
Effective communication
Robot Response Vs. Human Response
Response times
Keeping it written
Knowing your property
Making informed decisions
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ensuring that our guests have the best experience ever when they say in our short-term rentals is really the name of the game if they don't they're not going to leave a good review and the performance of our short term rental is really going to suffer and so are our pocketbooks so this week we're going to talk about what you should be doing or what your virtual assistant should be doing or what your property manager should be doing for you while your guests are at your short-term
rental stay tuned let's Jump Right In welcome to short-term rental riches we'll discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to acquire manage and scale your portfolio I'm your host Tim Hubbard welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast here we are in the third part of our management series if you missed the first part talked about why I think virtual management is the future of all Property Management in the second part we talked about everything you should
be doing before your guest checks in and if you are working with a property manager everything they should be doing this week we're talking about everything that kind of comes up while your guests are in your property and how you should be handling your reservation so again it's going to be like a rapid fire podcast to make sure that you're not missing any steps and if you're looking for help managing your property that you know which questions to ask so once we've got our reservation we
advertised our property effectively with good pricing we had good communication and they're showing up to the property the first thing we got to do is make sure that they can get in right so of course we need to have good check-in instructions but we monitor our remote locks and our cameras and all the properties to make sure that our guests do check in so when a guest shows up for example we get a notification that they used their code for the first time so we need
to be avail available for them there at first whatever reason they can't get in and there are a lot of reasons from user air to maybe there's an issue with the lock in fact we did another episode on eight issues that will happen with your guests while they're visiting your property the longer you do this I guarantee you they will happen that's episode number 98 go back and check it out and while we'll touch on just a little bit of that episode here we're not going
to get into the details we're just going to talk about sort of the high level picture here and the things that you should be doing of course we're going to send a follow-up message to make sure they did get in okay if your follow-up message is automated well you will want to make sure that it doesn't go out before your guest actually checks in right so uh we used to do it that way what we realize that we can go in and edit the time that
our message goes out we don't want to check in on a guest at 3 30 PM if they're not going to show up till 8 PM that just doesn't look great right that's not good Hospitality that doesn't have a good Personal Touch to it so I know automations are fantastic I love them and so are some of the artificial intelligence things coming out now like chat GPT and I gotta confess I've used this a few times to help me write just basic messages where I was
having a drawn a blank and I couldn't think of the right words to to say or to write so check out chat GPT I think there's going to be a lot of use with that the short-term rental future I do not think that it's going to take the place of true Hospitality however but it could help you or could help your virtual assistants to help better craft some messages so we're going to monitor our messages that are going out we're going to make sure that the
guests did not show up with extra guests that were not on the reservation we're going to make sure that they didn't show up with pets when they weren't authorized to show up with pets and and we can do all that by monitoring our exterior cameras now sometimes our guest travel plans change right and they were supposed to show up today but they need to make an alteration so that's another thing that's going to come up that you need to know how to handle the guests might
want to cancel their reservation and so you need to make sure that you follow your cancellation policies but of course there's a lot of communication that goes into that as well if there should be some sort of issue if they break a rule or a neighbor says they smell smoke or whatever it happens to be you might need to get in touch with Airbnb or VRBO and that is not always fun but there is a science to it sometimes a guest asks for additional towels or
extra toilet paper or extra coffee or whatever it happens to be even if you've put in the appropriate amount sometimes emergencies pop up and we just need to know how to handle them and so my team and I have managed a lot of gas hundreds of thousands of messages literally and so we've come up with our best way for communicating with guests to make sure that we earn really high reviews I've got a quick checklist that I want to go over that all of our receptionists
use and I think you should use as well just to name off a few of the things that we're confirming each time a guest shows up to our property after we've got our reservation we need to confirm if the guests wanted to really check and if they did did we receive payment for it are they asking for a late checkout if they are did we receive payment for it is there some sort of alteration that needs to take place if so we might need to do
an alteration request which means that we need to change our lock access if changing the length of time for the reservation if this was a booking that we took outside of Airbnb well we're going to have to make sure that we charge them appropriately we use stripe to handle all of our direct bookings and all the bookings to come outside of Airbnb did the guests have any issues when they checked in is there something they needed are they having problems with the Wi-Fi or Netflix or
did they show up with a pet when they weren't supposed to how are we going to respond to that first of all we just want to make sure that the communication is really quick right we're going to be doing that in less than five minutes we've got any special notes or requests saved for our guests in our property management system and we coordinate any special requests or anything that we need to do outside of Airbnb using a program called slack and so we have some checklist
items in here for that as well if the guest is asking for a late checkout we'll need to make sure that that's a possibility for them if it's not we'll kindly let them know and if it's a really late checkout it might be something that we charge for which means we need to accept that payment as well if there was some sort of issue with the guest did we need to involve VRBO or booking.com if we did well we're going to want to make sure that
we don't have a great review going out for the guests or we're going to put notes on that to make sure that they get added to our Blacklist and then we report them to Airbnb hopefully the guess is great and they're really enjoying their stay and if it happens that we have a little bit of vacancy after their checkout where we're going to reach out to them and ask them if they they would like to extend their stay and we often do that with a discount
to try to fill more days on our calendar we want to make sure that we're available for them 24 7 by phone and text message although we do do most of our communication through the platforms or through our property management software making sure that we're always available on the phone is something that is in our checklist as well and it's something that our whole team can see if a guest sends a message it gets sent to our internal communication system so those are just a few
of the things that are going to happen that are going to come up while I guess is theirs by no means comprehensive but just want to make sure you're not skipping any steps and if you're working with a property manager that they're not skipping any steps that they have this Hospitality approach behind all of the management because it really does affect your performance we're going to talk next week about all the things that you should be doing or your team or your manager should be doing
at the checkout so at the property turn and post checkout so in terms of marketing and things that you want to keep in mind to try to get more repeat bookings coming back so there's a lot to it we've learned a lot we are managing other properties and so we'd love to chat with you if you are interested in that you can go to midtownstays.com that's my management at company website midtownstays.com you'll see there's a property management button there you can also view some of the
properties in my personal portfolio or you can go to Str riches.com and you will see the property management button there and you'll also see all of our past episodes over 170 been doing this for over three years so it's really exciting to be able to offer this uh now now that we have a team that's that's really grown same team that manages my property so hope you found a little bit of value in here in this episode and that it helps you make better informed decisions
on who you're working with or it helps you just revisit how you're managing your properties make sure you're not missing anything and until next time I hope you have a fabulous week and I'll talk to you soon want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals what all starts with the properties you acquire but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that there is
no charge it's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to restmethods.com that's r e s t methods.com
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