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Ready to welcome guests to your property? Learn how to set up your rates, add amenities, and more with this checklist.
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How to enhance visibility and boost vacation rental bookings
Understand how travelers search for vacation rentals and how Vrbo host
tools can increase visibility and drive bookings.
Every traveler is searching for something a little different, whether that’s the perfect beach house for a warm weather getaway or a property big enough to host an entire family reunion. To help ensure your vacation rental gets the consideration it deserves, it’s important to understand how to improve your property’s search performance. Your search position is influenced by a number of factors, including:
- The quality of your listing content
- The competitiveness of your rates
- Your history of accepting and honoring bookings
- The quality and quantity of your property reviews
Read on to learn more about what tactics you can use to improve your vacation rental visibility and drive bookings.
Optimize listing content
According to our Path to Purchase research, vacation rental bookers take longer to plan trips — spending 44 days researching and planning, compared to hotel guests who spend only 37 days¹ — so optimize your property’s listing to ensure it stands out and catches travelers’ attention.
Update your listing with recent, high-quality property photos, as well as an eye-grabbing headline and well-written property description that highlights your property’s best features and amenities. This includes cleaning and safety practices to help build trust and show travelers you are ready to welcome guests responsibly. To showcase the curb appeal of your property, consider creating a virtual tour to bring your property to life in an inviting and highly engaging way.
Establish competitive rates
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that getting the best prices on travel is the top consideration in booking decisions for vacation rental guests.² Setting a competitive rate for your vacation rental property shouldn’t be complicated, however, and that’s where MarketMaker™ comes in.
MarketMaker for vacation rentals helps you make informed rate decisions, improve performance, and boost revenue. By using this tool, you’ll be notified of any market changes and stay up to date on pricing opportunities. This will allow you to set a competitive rate that not only reflects current supply and demand, but also supports your revenue goals.
“To be most successful with managing rates, you need to make sure that you’re looking at the right set of competitor rental properties.”
Expand your booking window
Another way to boost your property’s visibility is by opening your booking window. Some travelers plan trips a year or more in advance of their actual vacation dates, so by using our calendar tool, you can expand your booking window and set your pricing ahead of time to capitalize on early bookings.
Accept and honor bookings
Your acceptance rate — or how frequently you accept bookings compared to how often you decline — is a key factor influencing your property’s search visibility. A high acceptance rate indicates you’ll likely continue to welcome travelers to your property in the future, providing a positive booking experience.
Enabling Instant Booking helps boost your acceptance rate by automatically accepting all new booking requests. This translates to a quick and seamless booking experience for travelers, as it removes the need for a 72-hour manual approval period and allows the booking to be made on the spot. Even with Instant Booking enabled, all travelers must agree to your house rules before booking, allowing you to increase your acceptance rate while still attracting the right guests to your property.
Partners who use Instant Booking see nearly 35% higher conversation rates and 25% more net revenue than those who don’t³
Another way to ensure your acceptance rate remains high is by using calendar syncing to prevent double bookings. This feature allows you to sync your calendars across multiple platforms, adjust your booking window, and import any blocks on your calendar when your listing will be unavailable to travelers. Using both Instant Booking and calendar syncing together is a powerful combination: partners who enable Instant Booking and sync calendars see 60% more bookings.⁴ Review this one-pager to learn how to keep your calendars synced.
Maintain consistent communication
One simple but sometimes overlooked consideration to capture bookings is prompt communication. Whether a traveler is asking a question or making a booking request, always try to respond quickly to messages in your inbox. This not only helps secure the booking, but also gives travelers confidence you’ll provide them with a great experience during their stay.
The Vrbo mobile app can help you stay connected with travelers and manage your listings from anywhere, with real-time notifications to help you reply to inquiries and manage bookings on the go. You can also sign up to receive alerts about inquiries or booking requests via SMS in addition to standard email alerts so you never miss an update.
Communicate with travelers promptly to help secure bookings.
Positive reviews can encourage future travelers to book with you.
Drive positive property reviews
Property reviews and ratings are also a top consideration in booking decisions for vacation rental guests. Whether it’s getting recognized for providing a great guest experience or getting feedback about how to improve, reviews are important for ensuring you’re meeting guests’ expectations.
To get more reviews, follow these tips:
- Send friendly reminders. Let’s face it: people are busy, especially during the post-stay period. To help you out, we'll send two requests on your behalf for guests to leave reviews.
- Make it easy. In your post-stay email, remind guests that they should have received a link post-checkout that they can click to leave a review.
- Stay connected. You can use the owner mobile app to prompt travelers to leave a quick review.
Reviews also go both ways. Just as travelers can leave reviews for vacation rental owners and property managers, you can also leave reviews for your guests. One benefit of reviewing guests is that it often prompts them to leave a review for you. While you don’t always have to be the first to leave a review, it can be a good way to get the process started.
Questions to think about when reviewing your guests:
- Did they follow your house rules?
- Did they leave your property in good condition?
- Did they follow your check-in and checkout guidelines?
Become a Premier Host
In addition to increasing your property’s visibility among potential guests, maintaining a high acceptance rate and receiving positive reviews can also help you qualify for the Premier Host program.
Premier Host program benefits include:
- Premier Host badging on your profile and every listing in your portfolio
- Improved search position for your full portfolio
- Increased visibility as you’ll be pulled into the Premier Host filter for guest searches
Understanding what drives travelers’ booking decisions and what factors impact your property’s visibility in search is the first step to driving more bookings. Unlock your vacation rental's potential by updating your listing and leveraging our host tools.
Update your listing
Log into the Vrbo owner dashboard to make updates to your listing and maximize your property’s visibility.
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Alfredo Arcos
Director, Account Management Vacation Rentals
Alfredo Arcos leads the Owner VR business at Vrbo focusing on driving growth and optimization for our partners. He brings more than 20 years of experience in account management for multiple industries, particularly in tourism and tech all over the US & LATAM. Alfredo understands our hosts’ needs because he is one! Before his role in Partner Success, he led the Conventional Lodging business in Mexico for Expedia Group.
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¹Expedia Group, Path to Purchase Research, 2023
²Ibid.
³Booking dates from January-December 2022, Expedia Group internal data, 2023
⁴Ibid.