Short-term rental owners who want to grow their businesses often face the challenge of how to automate their vacation rental business cost-effectively. While you want to increase your occupancy, it should never be at the cost of guest satisfaction. After all, working in the hospitality sector means that the guest experience should at all times be your number one priority.
The solution? An all-round property management software for short-term rentals, such as iGMS, can help you to grow your business, while at the same time boost the guest satisfaction. The automation capabilities offered by iGMS is so powerful that you can virtually put your entire routine on autopilot.
What is iGMS?
iGMS is an intuitive cloud-based vacation rental management software solution that can help hosts and professional vacation rental managers to manage and automate various routine tasks like cleaning management, messaging, and calendar synchronization. What sets it apart from similar vacation rental automation tools is that it boasts deep integration and messaging features for Airbnb and HomeAway and Vrbo family accounts.
As a matter of fact, the founders of iGMS have been in the hosting industry for about a decade. This background gives them invaluable insight into the actual needs of hosts and property managers. As a result, iGMS is a host-centric product. Features are created by giving considerable thought to the expectations and requests of users. This means that new functionalities and updates are introduced regularly to complement its already comprehensive set of features.
Channel Manager
One of the main reasons why hosts decide against not listing on multiple sites is the fear of double-bookings. By investing in iGMS, this becomes a worry of the past as it boasts native integration with HomeAway, Vrbo, Airbnb, and Stayz. Also, if you list your property on another third-party rental website, you have the added option to use iCal to synchronize your calendar data.
Automated Messages with Native Smart Messaging
Replying to inquiries promptly is key if you want to offer a five-star guest experience. iGMS collects all your inquiries and dialogs which makes guest communication much easier. For example, you can create templates and customize your message with the help of template variables and set up automation for specific templates. This way something like sending an Airbnb welcome letter, for instance, one day before check-in becomes a breeze.
iGMS has also recently introduced a new feature that allows hosts to contact guests who booked a property directly via their business website, Facebook, messenger or any other medium
Team & Cleaning Management
With iGMS, it’s really easy to stay up to date with scheduled tasks. iGMS offers a Tasks section where you can see all the assignments for a specific day along with their statuses.
One of the major benefits of using iGMS for cleaning management is that you can automatically assign normally repetitive tasks. Since the same cleaner usually cleans the same properties, you can also automate the process of cleaner assignment. Then, once a cleaner has been assigned, he/she will get a notification about the new upcoming task as a text message, an email, or via the iGMS mobile app.
Financial Reporting
If you do not have access to your numbers in an easy-to-understand format, you will never really understand just exactly how your business is currently performing. When this happens, you will not be empowered to make strategic decisions.
To help hosts stay up to date with their numbers at all times, iGMS offers four different financial reports.
For an idea about the general financial flow, there is the Payouts report. Here, hosts can see how much they have earned by using specific filters to search for the income data.
For more detailed information about specific reservations, the Reservations report will come in handy.
To work out the number of nights for a specific period, hosts can use the Monthly Revenue report.
Last, but not least, it also offers a Tasks report that has the total jobs or number of hours worked that takes the hassle out of working out their payment.
Guest Reviews Management
Gathering more five-star reviews from previous happy guests is one of the ways that you can boost your property’s ranking on Airbnb and other platforms. Though, juggling reviews along with all your other daily tasks do call for a lot of time.
With the help of the iGMS review management toolset, you can create personalized review templates that the system will send automatically on your behalf after, for instance, a three-day delay, giving you enough time first to check that nothing has been damaged at your property.
Conclusion
How to automate a vacation rental business does not have to be a draining or expensive exercise. iGMS is easy-to-use which means that you can get down to increasing your occupancy rates and profit as soon as you’ve connected your properties. Whether you prefer to use your desktop or mobile app, you will be able to access the same functionality, empowering you to keep a pulse on your properties wherever you are.
