As a vacation rental manager, advertising your homes on various OTAs (online travel agencies) is the most effective strategy to ensure you obtain the most reservations. After all, the more OTAs you use, the more people you’ll be able to contact. You’re restricting your pool of possible bookers if you just list on Airbnb, and the same is true if you exclusively list on any other booking site.
However, promoting your vacation rentals on numerous booking sites comes with its own set of difficulties.
Listing on Multiple Vacation Rental Channels Has Its Drawbacks
To begin with, maintaining listings across different OTAs takes time, particularly if you have many properties on each.
You must add images, create a description of your listings, describe your house rules, indicate which facilities you provide, decide your price, and select the minimum number of nights travelers may book to post each of your listings on each platform.
The job isn’t done yet. Property managers that want to maximize their earnings must alter their price for each listing on each channel frequently to match demand.
They must also engage with prospective visitors and respond to questions received via various media.
Another important worry when listing on numerous OTAs is the chance of duplicate bookings, which occurs when a property accepts two reservations on the same day. What’s to stop two guests from renting your apartment on the same night if one books via Airbnb and the other through HomeAway? Because canceling a reservation results in poor reviews from customers and severe penalties from most OTAs, property managers must stay on top of their reservations and manually block off booked dates on every channel they list.
Listing on Multiple Vacation Rental Channels: The Solution
Fortunately, there is a method for vacation rental property managers to benefit from marketing their homes on many channels while avoiding difficulties.
A channel manager is software built exclusively for property managers that want to market their properties across many channels. It’s a single dashboard where vacation rental managers can post all of their homes’ data, including images, descriptions, and rates, and then distribute it to the online travel agencies of their choice.
Property managers may change their listings at any time and then post them to their channels in a matter of seconds.
Best of all, a channel manager would automatically block off dates booked via any channel, preventing passengers from booking the same item across several channels.
Some vacation rental software has a consolidated inbox, which makes connecting with prospective guests across many media simpler and more efficient.
Property managers don’t have to restrict themselves to just one or two channels with the correct technology and can fully maximize their reservations.
Fortunate for you, Lodgable has a unique no, cost channel manager. This allows you to be able to utilize the power of a channel manager to increase your revenue while not accruing additional costs. Sign up for your free account today!
