How Your Virtual Assistants (or manager) Should be handling Your Short-Term Rental Bookings (Part 3)

Ensuring that our guests have the best experience ever when they stay 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. 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. 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 at 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 available for them there if for whatever reason they can't get in. And there are a lot of reasons from user error 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 an 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 we used to do it that way. We realized 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 3:30pm if they're not going to show up till 8pm 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 ChatGPT. And I gotta confess, I've used this a few times to help me write just basic messages where I was having a draw on 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 in 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 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 guests, 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 an early check in. 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 it's 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 that 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 WiFi 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 all, 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, well, 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 Dot? 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, and 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 guest is great and they're really enjoying their stay. And if it happens that we have a little bit of vacancy after their checkout, well, we're going to reach out to them and ask them if 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 247 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 guess is there is 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 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 Strike 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 now, now that we have a team that's that's really grown. Same team that manages my properties. 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, 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? Well, it 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 dot com.