Vrbo Property Management: Maximizing Efficiency
Vrbo property management involves overseeing numerous tasks. Find out how the right tools can help you simplify your workload and maximize efficiency.
Listing your vacation rental on Vrbo is a great way to reach millions of travelers worldwide who prefer private accommodations over hotels and increase your property’s booking potential. But being a host on Vrbo is not as simple as creating a listing.
Running a successful vacation rental property on this popular OTA platform requires time and effort. The key to success is an effective Vrbo property management strategy that helps you stand out from the competition. You also need the right tools to manage your property efficiently and ensure a memorable guest experience.
Vrbo Property Management Best Practices
Here are some of the essential aspects of good Vrbo property management you should focus on to succeed on the platform:
Manage your guest experience—respond to all guest inquiries promptly (ideally within one hour), proactively communicate with guests before and during their stay to provide them with important information, simplify check-in and checkout processes, and address concerns quickly.
Set competitive pricing—research local market rates, use dynamic pricing tools, and adjust rates based on seasonal demand and peak seasons to optimize revenue and occupancy.
Prioritize cleanliness—coordinate turnover cleanings and schedule routine inspections and regular maintenance to keep your Vrbo rental guest-ready.
Optimize your Vrbo listing for search rankings to increase visibility—regularly update your calendar and encourage guest reviews.
As you see, managing Vrbo properties involves overseeing numerous tasks, so mastering Vrbo property management requires dedication and attention to detail. Still, there is a way to simplify your workload and save time—you can use Vrbo property management software to automate repetitive tasks. Tools like Hospitable can help you streamline operations, making your business more efficient and giving you more time to focus on growth strategies.
Vrbo Property Management Software: Key Features
Vrbo property management software is designed to address common challenges that STR hosts face and help you keep your rental business running smoothly with minimal effort. Tools like Hospitable automate and streamline various aspects of property management, from guest communication to calendar synchronization to managing cleaning schedules and beyond.
On top of that, vacation rental software acts as a centralized hub that lets you manage all your listings across multiple booking channels from a single dashboard, making hosting much easier.
Not all property management software tools are created equal. So when selecting Vrbo property management software for your vacation rental business, it's essential to consider your specific needs and budget, and to look for key features that automate repetitive administrative tasks and support your growth objectives.
Automated guest communication and AI
Clear, prompt communication with Vrbo guests is essential to making them happy with their stay, which can lead to great reviews and repeat bookings. Still, it’s one of the most time-consuming aspects of hosting, and Vrbo doesn’t provide a fully automated messaging system.
To help hosts save time, comprehensive short-term rental management systems like Hospitable offer advanced messaging automation and AI tools that let you put guest communication on autopilot. With Hospitable, you can ensure that your guests feel cared for without extra effort.
You can build an effective automated Vrbo message flow using templates that cover key touchpoints in the guest journey. Just set your messaging rules, and Hospitable will take care of the rest to ensure each guest receives the necessary information at the right time.
Our system uses AI to recognize guest questions on more than 20 common topics and sends tailored responses automatically using your pre-written responses.
You can use AI tools to quickly draft and correct detailed, personalized responses to unusual guest questions.
You can help the AI generate more accurate responses by uploading your guidebooks to the Knowledge Hub, and the AI will use these bits of information when generating answers to guests’ questions.
You may even turn on Auto Reply and set up times when the Inbox AI can automatically reply to guest messages without your review, so that you can relax.
Hospitable’s AI scans guests’ messages for mentions of issues like broken locks, noise, or leaks, and it will notify you to step in when help is needed by highlighting the urgent conversations in the Inbox.
Task automation
If you manage several vacation rental properties, scheduling cleanings between stays and sending reminders to your cleaners can be challenging, but Vrbo property management software can help you with that. Tools like Hospitable let you automate turnover cleanings, ensuring your rental space is spotless after each stay.
You just need to set task rules once, and our system will generate and assign cleaning tasks automatically every time you get new bookings. Hospitable will keep your cleaning team informed about new jobs by automatically sending reminders via email or SMS.
Take this automation one step further with the Marketplace Cleanings feature. When enabled, our system will search for a reliable cleaner based on your booking calendar. Watch the interactive demo for details.
Unified Inbox
Listing your Vrbo property on other OTAs increases the number of potential guests who see your vacation rental, typically leading to higher occupancy rates. But cross-listing also adds more work when managing guest messages across platforms. That’s why short-term rental management tools like Hospitable centralize communications from different booking channels in one place.
Hospitable allows you to send and receive messages from various booking channels in the Unified Inbox, so you don’t have to switch between multiple websites. You can respond to guest messages directly from the Hospitable Inbox, and your replies appear on the guests’ original platforms.
Centralized calendar
This feature lets you view all reservations across all listings on all connected platforms and manage all your listings’ calendars in one place. This way, you can ensure your pricing and availability are consistent across all the places you list.
The right software can also help you avoid double-bookings, which lead to cancellations that negatively impact your property’s rankings. Tools like Hospitable can help you keep your calendars, pricing, and availability in sync across your platforms.
Dynamic pricing
Pricing your Vrbo rental appropriately is crucial for attracting bookings and staying competitive. An effective way to set competitive rates for your listing is to implement a dynamic pricing strategy that automatically updates nightly rates based on real-time market conditions and historical data, maximizing revenue and occupancy.
While Vrbo offers a built-in pricing tool called Rate Automation, it’s limited to Vrbo listings, so if you list your rental on multiple OTAs, controlling your prices to ensure parity can be very challenging. Therefore, most STR property management software, including Hospitable, integrates with third-party dynamic pricing tools.
Leading third-party dynamic pricing tools use advanced algorithms and can help you optimize rates and keep them consistent across all booking platforms. Still, it’s important to remember that they can be rather costly. Some Vrbo property management systems also offer built-in dynamic pricing tools, but hosts must pay an additional fee to use them.
Hospitable really stands out with its built-in Dynamic Pricing solution, which is included in the Host, Professional, and Mogul plans at no extra cost, saving you money on third-party pricing tools. You can enable this feature for some or all of your properties, and our pricing engine will adjust your prices daily based on demand fluctuations, competition, seasonality, and your settings. Hospitable will update your rates automatically across Vrbo, Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda, and your direct booking website.
Smart devices automations
Vrbo guests now expect a seamless, tech-enabled experience, especially when it comes to convenience and comfort. So investing in smart home tech, such as smart locks and smart thermostats, is one of the best ways to upgrade your Vrbo property and enhance guest satisfaction.
Managing smart locks and smart thermostats in your Vrbo rentals won’t be a problem if you choose vacation rental software with a smart device automation feature. Many property management systems for short-term rentals offer smart lock management as a paid add-on. Still, with Hospitable, this feature is included in the Professional and Mogul subscription plans.
Hospitable integrates with many smart lock brands, including Schlage, SmartThings, August, Yale, Nuki, and IglooHome app-connected smart locks to help you ensure a stress-free automated self-check-in. If you connect the supported smart locks to your Hospitable account, our system will automatically create unique access codes for each booking and send them to your guests via messages.
Our STR super app also integrates with Honeywell and Ecobee smart thermostats, so Hospitable users can connect the supported models to their accounts to automate temperature control in their vacation rental properties. Hospitable will sync your smart thermostats with bookings and will adjust the temperature automatically to save energy while maintaining guests’ comfort. Hospitable stands out with its smart thermostat automation feature, which most of our competitors don’t offer.
Guest verification
While Vrbo awards the Verified Identity badge to guests who complete a verification process, it’s optional, and guests are not required to confirm their identity to use the website or book a property. And currently, there’s no way for Vrbo hosts to require a guest to confirm their identity before sending a booking request.
This means that to reduce the risk of dealing with problematic guests and scammers, you should take extra steps to vet guests and verify their identity before they check in. The good news is that you don’t have to screen your guests manually—with the right software, you can automate the process.
Hospitable allows its users to verify any guest who booked their properties and confirm each guest’s identity without extra work. You can request an ad-hoc verification for any accepted reservation on any platform, including Vrbo, Airbnb, Booking.com, and Direct bookings.
Then, your guests will receive an email or SMS with a secure portal link to complete the required steps. Guests will need to upload a photo of their government-issued ID, take a selfie, and confirm their contact information.
With Hospitable, you can also ask your guests to sign their Vrbo rental agreement after their ID checks, ensuring they adhere to specific policies. You can create agreement templates for general rental contracts and for additional services, such as equipment rentals. Hospitable will automatically populate an agreement template with the guest and booking details for each new reservation and add it to the Guest Portal as a registration task.
Upsells
Offering extra services and amenities to your Vrbo guests for an additional fee lets you enhance their stays and boost your listing’s profitability. So it makes sense to look for short-term rental management tools like Hospitable, which offers an Upsells feature natively within the app, so you don’t need any additional external software.
With Hospitable, you can offer paid upsells to your guests in their Guest Portal with zero extra workload.
Just create your upsell catalog and include early check-in, late checkout, and extra offerings unique to your vacation rental property.
Send your guests the link to their guest portal—our system creates it automatically for each booking.
Your guests will be able to see all the available offerings in their guest portal and purchase what they like.
Hospitable will take care of handling payments and payouts for you.
Analytics and reporting
Smart business decisions require reliable data, so Vrbo property management software offers analytics and reporting tools that provide insights into occupancy rates, revenue, expenses, and overall performance of your properties to help you make data-driven decisions.
For example, Hospitable makes it easy to see how your properties are performing in real time with the Metrics Dashboard. It’s an advanced analytics system designed to give hosts and property managers greater flexibility, insight, and control.
Metrics centralizes your performance data from all your connected channels and calendars, allowing you to organize multiple insights into a single view. With Metrics, you can
Explore the pre-built dashboard for quick performance insights
Build and customize your own dashboards
Add pre-built widgets from a searchable library
Apply filters to focus on specific slices of your data
Share the link to the dashboard with stakeholders without forcing them create an account.
With Hospitable, you also get Copilot. It’s your AI assistant that has access to your booking data, task info, calendar activity, guest reviews, and more, and can help you understand what is working and what is not. You can ask Copilot simple, conversational business-related questions, and it will provide you with instant, detailed answers tailored to your data.
Copilot analyzes data in your Hospitable account to identify trends and highlight what is working and what can be improved, helping you take strategic action. You can ask Copilot to check occupancy rates, revenue, length of stay, and booking trends; compare your property's performance across time periods; or find out where your guests are coming from. Copilot remembers the context of the conversation, so you can ask follow-up questions to get more details.
Direct booking website builder
While listing your property on Vrbo allows you to reach a global audience, you can’t rely only on OTAs if you want to build a more sustainable business. You also need a direct booking website that lets you build relationships with guests, accept repeat direct bookings, cut OTA fees to boost your profits, and grow your brand.
Comprehensive vacation rental software solutions like Hospitable provide no-code website builders with professional templates tailored to short-term rentals. With Hospitable Direct, you can quickly launch a beautiful, mobile-friendly direct booking website with built-in tools for payments, property protection, guest screening, and full-stay automation.
We’ll publish your properties on Google Vacation Rentals, so people can discover them when they use Google platforms to plan their trips. If travelers decide to book your property, Google will redirect them to your Hospitable Direct site, and you’ll get direct bookings without paying high third-party fees.
Integrations
Vrbo property management software doesn’t work in isolation; it integrates with other tools to extend its features and capabilities. So you should look for solutions that integrate seamlessly with tools you already use, such as smart locks, accounting systems, or marketing apps.
For example, Hospitable offers integrations with numerous platforms and tools designed to help hosts and property managers streamline operations and improve customer service:
Smart locks allow you to ensure a smooth self-check-in process for your guests.
Smart thermostats allow you to automatically control your property’s temperature and reduce energy costs while ensuring guest comfort.
Noise monitoring systems can help you prevent parties that can lead to property damage, avoid neighbor complaints, and comply with local laws.
Cleaning management apps can help you simplify and automate cleaning and maintenance operations.
Accounting software can help you automate your bookkeeping and ensure accurate financial reporting.
Final Thought
Managing a Vrbo property can feel overwhelming at times, but it doesn’t have to be. There is a solution. Whether you are managing one property or the portfolio of vacation rentals, investing in technology can help you simplify Vrbo property management, unlock efficiency, and take your STR business to the next level. Vrbo property management software with a comprehensive set of features can be a game-changer for hosts looking to optimize their operations, enhance the guest experience, and maximize their rental income.
