Vrbo Tips for Owners

Looking to make money on Vrbo as a vacation rental owner? It’s one of the largest platforms in the industry, featuring over 2 million properties across 200 countries. With more than 3 million monthly visits to their website, listing your property on Vrbo is a great option for you if you want to maximize the potential of your vacation rental business.

However, as more people invest in vacation rental properties, the competition has become increasingly intense. So if you want to attract travelers, you should do your best to stand out. Here are practical Vrbo tips for owners to help you do just that.

You may also want to check out our article comparing Vrbo vs. Airbnb to get a better idea of key differences between these popular OTA websites.

5 Must-Know Vrbo Listing Tips

To rent out your property on Vrbo, you need to create a hosting account on the platform. Then you can use your Vrbo owner login to create a listing for your vacation rental property that will appear in search results.

When your listing is new, securing your first bookings can be challenging, so it's essential to optimize your listing with travelers in mind. Here you’ll find some Vrbo listing tips to help you stand out from the crowd and attract potential guests.

Create a catchy title. Keep it brief and focus on the unique features and selling points. Highlight your rental property’s best features, for example, breathtaking views or its ideal location. Use specific words that appeal to your target audience.

Add an enticing description. Showcase what makes your space special to encourage bookings. Write about things that make your rental a great place to stay, and be honest with potential guests. Don’t exaggerate or inflate guest expectations.

Include perfect photos—they play a significant role in whether or not guests book a stay. Ensure you have photos of every room of your property—shots of entire rooms and close-up details. And don’t forget to show outdoor spaces, amazing amenities, and the scenery of the surrounding neighborhood.

Create an accurate list of amenities that your property offers. Include all amenities available to guests, from Wi-Fi and laundry facilities to luxury perks such as a hot tub, a complete kitchen with high-end appliances, outdoor living spaces, or a game room.

Optimize your listing for search. Use relevant words and phrases in your property title, description, and amenities list. These terms will help your listing appear higher in Vrbo search results. They will also help you attract your ideal guests, increasing the chances of a booking.

Remember: the key to a high-performing Vrbo listing lies in the details. By providing accurate information about your rental space and its features, you can attract more guests and maintain high occupancy rates, setting your listing up for success. And if you streamline your operations using short-term rental software like Hospitable, you’ll have more time to focus on providing a great guest experience and building a profitable vacation rental business.

Vrbo Tips for Owners: Master the Art of Hosting

It’s easy to get started on Vrbo, but getting the most out of this competitive platform requires planning and employing strategic tactics. Here are some best practices that can help you maximize the potential of your Vrbo property.

Set competitive rates that allow you to make a profit

Travelers care about cost, and for many of them, it is the most important factor influencing their booking decisions. A great tactic to secure the first few bookings is to offer a slightly lower nightly rate than your nearest competitors. It will help you gather first reviews, and potential guests will be much more inclined to choose your rental property.

Remember: you should be strategic with your pricing strategy, so you can’t rely on guesswork. Your rates should never be fixed if you want to maximize your rental income while staying competitive. The vacation rental market is dynamic, and your Vrbo pricing strategy needs to adapt accordingly.

You need to implement a dynamic pricing strategy, which involves adjusting your nightly rates based on real-time market conditions. The easiest way to do this is to use a dynamic pricing tool. Although Vrbo offers a basic in-platform rate automation solution, it may not be the best option for you. It focuses only on Vrbo’s internal data, works only for Vrbo listings, and prioritizes bookings over host income because Vrbo charges a fee for each booking completed on the platform.

A better alternative is Hospitable’s built-in Dynamic Pricing feature that is included in Host, Professional, and Mogul subscription plans at no extra cost. If you activate this feature for your property, Hospitable will automatically adjust your rates every 24 hours based on market demand, seasonality, and other factors to help maximize your revenue and maintain optimal occupancy. Our Dynamic Pricing solution will push all recommended nightly rates to all your connected booking channels, including Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Agoda, and your Direct booking website.

Be responsive, helpful, and professional to build trust

As a host, you need to be proactive in your communication with guests to provide them with the necessary information at the right time. It’s also crucial to respond promptly to all messages from travelers, whether they are booking inquiries or requests. It’s common for guests to ask a wide range of questions. If you keep a speedy response rate, your guests will appreciate it and will be more likely to be interested in your property.

They will see that you are an attentive and caring host, and will be more likely to book with you again and leave positive reviews. All these things can improve your listing rating and increase the visibility of your Vrbo listing in the search results.

Effective communication with guests is the easiest way to keep them happy. It’s an essential aspect of being a successful Vrbo host, so you should do your best to get it right. With Hospitable, you can automate personalized conversations via messages with the help of AI, minimize your workload, and enhance your guest experience.

With Hospitable, 90% of guest communication runs on autopilot. You can also utilize AI tools available in your Inbox to save time when manually messaging guests. You can choose Suggest with AI, and Hospitable will generate a draft response to your guest’s message based on the booking details, your conversation with the guest so far, and past replies.

You can also create a digital guidebook and upload it to the Knowledge Hub to educate the AI about your property and policies, thereby improving its accuracy. Then the AI will use this information when generating draft responses to guests’ messages.

You can select the Improve with AI button to rewrite your own message and make it warm and professional. Just provide some bullet points as guidance, and Hospitable will create a personalized reply.

Once you’re confident with our AI’s performance, you can opt for a complete autopilot with Auto Inbox. In this case, we will respond to guests’ questions without your review. Watch this explainer video to learn more about these and other Hospitable’s AI features.

Offer extras to meet your guests’ needs and make more money

Providing a unique and memorable guest experience allows you to receive great guest reviews, which may attract more attention to your rental property and, in turn, help you earn money on Vrbo. You can make your guests’ stay memorable by providing professional and friendly customer service, as well as offering clean and sufficient amenities.

One more way to enhance the guest experience (and increase your income) is to offer additional guest services for an extra fee. You can offer your guests many things that add value to their stays and suit their preferences, such as early check-ins, late checkouts, mid-stay cleanings, bike rentals, and kid-friendly amenities.

The good news is that with Hospitable, you can offer paid upsells to your guests automatically without being pushy. Just build a catalog of your offerings and send your guests the link to their guest portal. Guests can find all the available options in their guest portal and purchase them there. Refer to our help article for more detailed information.

Keep your calendar updated

Update your calendar regularly to reflect upcoming bookings, as an outdated calendar can lead to double bookings and cancellations. This will frustrate and irritate your guests, and your listing will start to slip down in rankings. Keeping your availability accurate will help you get more bookings and maintain your good reputation as a host.

If you list your property on multiple platforms to reach a wider audience, it’s crucial to synchronize all your calendars. Doing it manually can become exhausting because you’ll need to keep track of inquiries and bookings across many listing sites. But with Hospitable, you can sync your listings’ calendar on Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and don’t worry about the calendar clash, double-bookings, and penalties.

Use accounting software to keep your finances in order

Operating Vrbo properties is a business, and you have numerous accounting tasks to manage, including recording income and expenses and filing taxes. Maintaining your finances is crucial to your profitability and long-term success, so it's best to avoid using spreadsheets.

Instead, you should consider making accounting software a part of your tech stack. There are many accounting software tools specifically designed for vacation rental businesses. They can help you automate your bookkeeping, simplify your accounting, and ensure accurate financial records, making it easier to prepare for the next tax season.

QuickBooks is one of the most popular options because it’s easy to use and offers robust accounting features that cover practically everything you need. Hospitable users on the Mogul plan can now integrate their accounts with QuickBooks to automate and streamline accounting processes, ensuring accurate real-time financial reporting.

Take measures to mitigate the potential risks of dealing with problem guests

Vrbo encourages guests to earn the “Verified Identity” badge by providing information about their name, physical address, date of birth, email address, and mobile phone number to help build trust within the community.

However, this process is optional, and it involves basic identity verification rather than a comprehensive background check, so it cannot prevent troublesome guests from submitting a booking request. That means you need to take additional steps to thoroughly screen your guests before you accept their booking—check their Vrbo profile and search for further information online.

We also recommend that you request ad-hoc guest verification, made available to Hospitable users through our Partnership with Autohost, an AI-driven guest screening platform. This way, you can add an extra layer of protection on top of your own research. Learn more in our help article.

Ask your Vrbo guests to sign a rental agreement. Creating this legally binding document is worth your time and effort because it will help establish clear expectations and protect you and your guests in the event of any disputes. The good news is that with Hospitable, you don’t need to spend your precious time writing a new agreement for each reservation.

You can create a templated agreement, and Hospitable will automatically populate it with guest and booking data for each unique reservation, adding the generated agreement to the guest portal as a registration task. Your guests will be able to sign the agreement digitally after verifying their identity.

Final Thought

Making money by renting out your property on Vrbo depends on understanding guest needs and expectations, setting up an appealing listing, and charging competitive rates. However, the most crucial aspect is offering a high-quality, memorable guest experience and ensuring your guests' happiness.

That will result in positive reviews, enhance your listing rankings on Vrbo, and help you get more bookings. If you follow the Vrbo tips for owners mentioned above, you can succeed.

Wondering how to earn “elite status” on Vrbo and boost your performance on this channel? Check out our post to learn about the advantages of the Vrbo Premier Host Program.