Never Miss a Guest Message: A Guide for Vacation Rental Owners & Managers

Promptly responding to messages from guests is the backbone of providing a great vacation rental experience. It shows that you’re attentive, engaged, and available whenever they need you. At the same time, forgetting or neglecting to respond can sour the guest’s experience, resulting in poor reviews, low loyalty rates, and less chance of you reaching Superhost status.

As the messages from guests pour in, it’s important you have a sure-fire strategy to ensure each one receives a speedy and sufficient response. In this article, we delve into some best practices to make sure you never miss a message. But first, we’ll look at just why keeping on top of every communication from guests can be so difficult…

There are many reasons why staying on top of every message can be challenging. Here are some of the most common:

At any given time, you’re likely fielding messages from three main sources:

These messages are likely to come from multiple platforms. Add to that any busy seasons or special occasions when inquiries surge, and it can start to feel like handling messages is a full-time job in itself!

Your team’s responsibility is to respond to all messages promptly, which becomes complicated when your guests are in different time zones. Although in-house guests are more likely to be on the same schedule as your team, prospective guests could be sending inquiries from anywhere – at any time. There’s added complexity involved if you’re managing vacation rentals from another country with a different time zone. It’s inevitable that a significant proportion of messages are sent when your team is off the clock – or even asleep.

Depending on your distribution channels, you likely have bookings coming in from a number of different sources. This includes your direct channels (such as telephone or your website) and your OTAs. As a result, guests will be messaging you from a range of booking and communication platforms – and your job is to keep track of all of them.

Keeping on top of messages from multiple sources brings its own challenges, such as constantly toggling between different extranets. For example, if you receive messages from one guest on Airbnb, another on Vrbo, and a third from a direct booking – all simultaneously – you may need to log in and out of three separate channels to address every message. This only prolongs the process of replying.

It can be difficult for even a large vacation rental management team to respond to every message while dealing with all their other day-to-day operational tasks. While delayed responses can impact both guest satisfaction and booking rates, busy team members will sometimes have no choice but to prioritize other tasks over answering that phone call or email.

Nobody’s perfect, especially busy vacation rental owners or operators with numerous responsibilities. Common errors made when dealing with guest inquiries include overlooking messages and miscommunication. Unfortunately, the consequences of these errors include lost bookings and negative reviews.

While missing even one message can result in guest confusion and dissatisfaction, using the right tools will help you keep your guests happy and save time on messaging.

We recommend having a comprehensive strategy in place to ensure you answer every message in a timely manner. Use as many of the best practices below as possible, and you’ll have the foundations of an all-encompassing solution for your communication.

A unified messaging inbox lets you manage all your messages from various platforms in one place. With one login, and all messages displayed on one screen, you’ll save time spent toggling between various extranets. Depending on which channels the inbox integrates, you’ll see all guest queries that come in from leading OTAs like Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo and Expedia.

To make sure nothing is missed, look for a unified inbox that clearly displays whether you’ve replied to messages. Ideally, it should let you filter to see only the messages you haven’t read or replied to yet, so you can find and attend to them faster.

Many guests contact their accommodation provider to ask questions about their booking. If you answer these common questions before guests even have to ask, you’ll reduce the volume of questions you receive, meaning fewer messages to manage.

Aim to schedule automated messages to send to guests before and during their stay. This allows you to provide important information in advance, such as check-in/out instructions, directions to the property, or your payment collection process.

Keeping your website updated with informative, accurate, and easy-to-navigate content can also pre-empt common inquiries. This gives guests more opportunity to find answers to their queries online, before they reach out to you directly.

We recommend setting up an FAQ (frequently asked questions) page on your website. Make sure you populate your FAQ page with answers to the queries you receive most often from guests. Learn more about how (and why) to create the ideal FAQ page for your vacation rental.

No one human can be available 24/7, but a well-deployed, AI-powered assistant can answer questions on your website round the clock. Chatbots and other online assistants allow travelers to contact you at any time before or during their stay. They’re especially useful for addressing inquiries that prospective guests have when they’re researching their trip. In fact, 64% of travelers have already used AI to research or plan travel.*

By instantly answering the inquiries that come ‘before they book’, your AI-powered assistant increases the chances you convert researchers to bookers – while enabling you to focus on responding to in-house guests. 

Make sure your online assistant draws its responses from your website and other sites you’ve given it permission to ‘crawl’. This helps you ensure that travelers receive accurate and appropriate responses to each query.

If you’re one of the world’s 4.88 billion smartphone users, you’re likely already using a mobile device to message loved ones, check personal emails, and post on social media.**

Why not find ways to centralize and access your guest messages on mobile too? This allows you to respond to messages, wherever you are.

A robust PMS should allow you and your team to manage guest messages from your mobile devices. Look for a PMS that comes with a free mobile app enabling you to access and reply to messages from guests. You should also research the third-party providers that your PMS can integrate with. Through these integrations, you may have the option to set up a customizable guest app or text messaging system for effortless communication via mobile. 

While using different tools and technologies to message guests on your behalf is useful, don’t let it replace human interactions entirely. Paying guests deserve and expect the human touch of hospitality from their vacation rental provider.  

Therefore, prioritize using tech like chatbots to deliver instant answers to inquiries from prospective guests. This will free you (or your team) to deal with messages from in-house guests in person. As a result, you’re more likely to respond to all messages in the manner that best suits the inquirer – an instant ‘high-tech’ response for prospective guests, and a personalized ‘high-touch’ interaction for in-house guests.

To learn whether your responses are hitting the mark, it’s a good idea to collect feedback from guests regarding their experience of your communications. Set up automated post-stay emails to request feedback from every guest. Use that feedback to improve your communication processes and practices going forward.

No matter how inundated you are, you can respond to every message you receive from guests. More than that, the process doesn’t have to be a time-consuming ordeal. Focus on creating a comprehensive strategy that incorporates: 

eviivo’s Guest Manager feature set can help you implement all these best practices from one PMS. Its comprehensive tools include an AI-powered Concierge for your website, email automation for each step of the guest journey, and the first inbox to integrate every message from Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Expedia, and your direct bookings (plus reviews)! Get set up now and never miss a guest message again.

*Matador Network survey of 1,200 travelers, 2023
** Statista