Should You Still Provide Netflix in Your Short Term Rental?

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I'm happy you're here again. Today we're talking about a fun topic, I would say, because streaming services have opened our eyes to all of the entertainment throughout the world at our fingertips, right? Like YouTube has done. But watching movies on Netflix and Disney, this has made things so accessible. It's really, really awesome. We can watch them on our tablet devices, even on our phones, whatever it happens to be. And of course we can watch them in our short term rentals as well as our guests. But do we actually need these services? That's what I want to tackle today. First thing is let's kind of just talk about these services in general. Overview. What are the options? What might people want in your property? The first one, and by far the most popular, at least in my opinion, is Netflix. And Netflix has come a long way, right? And they actually have multiple subscription costs now too. So we'll get to that in just a second. But Netflix itself, if you haven't already seen, has quite a few series on short term rentals. So go check those out. We can never learn too much, right? So there's one called Stay Here. There's another one called World's Most Amazing Vacation Rentals. You can just simply search in the search bar Netflix and find a few of those for some good entertainment. We also have Hulu, definitely less popular than Netflix. We have Disney, definitely more popular among our younger crowd and our families, right? Families that have children and they also have a ton of good entertainment on there. They also have all the Marvel and the Pixel movies, so they do a really good job. We also have YouTube TV now, which is a little pricier, but that does provide a lot of good options. We have Apple tv, so we have quite a few options out there. But should we actually be offering these services in anymore? Well, let's look at some of the challenges before we sort of decide with this. And I would say maybe one of the first challenges is that the amount of devices we can use on one of these Netflix services has decreased a lot. So I remember when I started adding Netflix to a lot of my properties, I think we could have like five people watching simultaneously. They've considerably decreased that. At the time of this recording, it's down to like two. Which means if you have a larger portfolio, you gotta have a lot more subscriptions or you might have multiple people in your home, multiple TVs, maybe it's a bigger home with five TVs and only two of them are going to work. So that's Sort of. The first challenge is that you might be advertising this and it's not actually available when the guest goes to log in because it's being used elsewhere. The second challenge is in regards to prior viewing history. And so you may not have had this happen to you yet, but my team and I, we've managed tens of thousands of reservations and a lot of my properties and now our partners properties, I'm happy to say we, we've been growing our management portfolio a lot, working with a lot of awesome properties and a lot of awesome partners across the nation. So if you're interested in chatting with us, see if we might be able to help, you can just go to striches.com there's property management button there and I'd be happy to chat with you personally. We've had an issue come up where we've had guests check in and maybe they have their little ones around and they open up the TV and there's some prior history that shouldn't shown to little ones, you know, so pornography, this was a claim, honestly from a guest. So of course we don't have any pornography subscriptions or anything like that on, in, in my properties or in our partner's properties. But if we're advertising these services that we're offering them and something inappropriate comes up, it's possible that your guest could, could call you out on that. Right? And so that is one thing we all know that we've checked into a place, we've subscribed with our YouTube subscription or ne Netflix and we forget to log out. Right? And so the next guest that checks in can see your prior history. Now I know a lot of those much more graphic things like pornography, those aren't available on Netflix and stuff like that. So I don't know where these comments came from. But the reality is, is that we do have prior viewing history on there. And if it's not totally appropriate for the next person checking in, it's not really a good experience. Right. And it's not even that it's not super appropriate, but it might just be something totally different topics, totally different than someone's used to see. And we don't want to remind our guests that we had other guests staying in the property. So when someone checks in and they're seeing a bunch of prior history, it's reminding them of guests that were there before them. That's not a good mental experience. Right. We like to think that this is a clean slate just for us, even though obviously it's not. So that's one challenge, and that goes right in line with people not logging out of their existing subscriptions. Right. Which also means that you're going to have more simultaneous devices. Using it makes it a little harder to track subscriptions sort of across the board. The next challenge that might come up is if you advertise, yes, we have Netflix, we have YouTube TV, we have Hulu, but the guest shows up and it's not actually working or it's not logged in, well, this just creates another operational piece, right? You have to share the username and password with them. If they plug it in and it's still not working, it's possible that maybe that got shared on other devices and now you just kind of have this back and forth operational piece, which isn't a huge, huge deal. But as you're building your portfolio, if you're managing lots of properties, it does become a bit of another operational piece and it's not a good experience for the guests. And so if we don't advertise any of that, knowing that a lot of people have these services already and they just simply log in with their own, sort of takes that piece out of the puzzle. So the next challenge that a bit of a challenge. Although the subscription cost for these services are really, really, they're very reasonable. Of course, if you're using a whole bunch of them at each property and you have a whole bunch of propert can certainly add up. So the financial costs now that these services have decreased, the amount of devices you could use, that could be a serious consideration as well. Before we get to whether or not you should consider keeping these services in your property or just go ahead and get rid of them, I just want to bring up a couple more points, and that is that most people have these services, right? Or at least one of them, or if they're traveling with a group of people, someone in that group is very likely to have one. And the bigger our property is, the more guests that sleep. If we have a property that sleeps 15 people, for example, I guarantee you that one of those guests has a subscription in these services so they can simply log in with theirs while they're there. So I don't think it's really expected anymore. Even in hotels, they ask us to log in with our own subscriptions. I think a lot of people have them. The costs have come down considerably. And the more guests staying at a property, very likely that someone already has one. With that said, the nicer your property is, the more luxurious it is, the more expectations a guest is going to Have. So this is one situation where I might just consider leaving it. If your nightly rate is $1,000 a night and all of these services cost you just, you know, a few hundred dollars a year, then you definitely don't have the financial worry there. Right? You still have the operational one, but if you only have one property, for example, that operational piece is much easier. Right? We just have to make sure that our housekeepers are hopefully checking to make sure that those services are activated and they're logged in so when your guest shows up, they don't have to do that part themselves. So the bigger, the nicer, the more expensive your property is, the more people are going to expect. This does bring up the question of sports, too. So a lot of times people are asking if you have or offer sports. Again, this is an amenity. This is something that not all properties need. But the nicer your property is, the more these things that you should be providing your guests. So with all that said, it really depends whether you want to keep the subscription or not. If you're concerned about keeping it and it's not a big financial issue for you at all, then definitely just keep it. But I would guarantee that the more time that passes, the less and less we're actually going to need these services. And so, in fact, I've taken them out of most all of my properties. Now, I've kept a few Disney subscriptions in some of my larger homes, but Netflix I've pretty much taken out for a lot of the reasons that we just mentioned. One last point before we jump off, whether you decide to keep the services or not, we still have to do a really good job at setting our guest expectations. So if we're not keeping the services, we can simply inform our guests in our listing copy. So online in our digital guidebook, in our photo caption. So this is an important one where you have a living room and there's a nice big screen tv. You probably want to add in your little photo caption there that it's set up for you to stream your streaming service, but ours is not included. You decide on how you want to word that. Remember, ChatGPT can definitely help us reword things if we're struggling to come up with how we want to actually explain to a guest. So just make sure that these, that it's very clear that your guests are either not going to have these services available or that they do have them. One last place that you might want to include it is in a simple one page in your property. We've talked about these in the past, having what we call a one pager as your most important information. Your house rules about your property. You may have a little note in there that says we do not provide traditional TV or cable services. Or yes we do, and it should be logged in automatically for you on all the devices. But if you have any challenges, just send us a quick message. So in a nutshell, streaming services are amazing. That's exactly why most of us have our personal subscription already. There are a few challenges offering them in our properties. One is viewing history might be the financial cost, although I don't think that's a big burden for most of us. The actual logging in is probably one of the more important pieces that sometimes it gets logged out prior viewing history. So I just don't think it's as important anymore. As I mentioned, we've taken out of most all my properties, aside from maybe Disney and a few of my bigger properties. And you might want to consider some of these subscriptions that people don't have anymore. People have Netflix, but maybe they don't have Disney, so that could be a benefit. The nicer your property is, the more amenities you need, the more expectations your guests are going to have. But either way, whether we're offering it or not, we just want to make sure that we're really clear with our guests. So I hope that gave you a little more insight. I hope you've been enjoying all of your favorite Netflix series. I know that I go down a rabbit hole from time to time. And until next week, I hope you have a fabulous week.

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.