All Forum Posts by: Dale Bertrand

@Robin Simon  I’m curious where you are investing in the northeast (NY and NJ). I’ve got two STRs in Massachusetts and it’s hard to make the numbers work around here.

I'm curious what you guys would do in our situation. We have an AirBnb renter for a STR who hosted a gathering at our house. We explicitly told him no parties or gatherings of any kind. We found 300 beer cans in 8 garbage bags in the side yard the day they left and it needed a deep cleaning.

I'm conflicted because they didn't do any damage to the house. The unexpected cost to us will be about $400 for a deep cleaning, trash removal, and some towels they destroyed. 

Since we just listed this house recently, all I care about is 5 star reviews. So I don't want jeopardize a 5 review rating by asking for compensation and I'm happy to eat the extra costs for a 5 star review. We rent this vacation house for $4,500/wk so the $400 isn't a huge hit. It just makes me mad, honestly.

What would you do in this situation? Should we request compensation through AirBnb?

My current plan is to leave a negative review, but I'm not going to try to recover the $400 to avoid getting a negative review from the renter.

- Dale

We have a PDF for each of our STRs that we send out a few days before guests arrive. In the future, I'd like to move this guest info to a digital version so I can send one URL to guests with all the info they need. We primarily list on AirBNB and VRBO.  

I'm curious if anyone has created "digital guidebooks" for their STRs?  I'm using iGMS so it would be convenient if it allowed us to create a digital guidebook for our rentals.

- Dale 

@Luke Carl Thanks for your insight. I'll try the Encode next time.

I'm curious if any channel manager software will automatically create door lock codes for guests?  We have Yale/Nest door locks on our vacation rentals.

Thanks in advance for your help.

- Dale

Does anyone have a short-rental contract/agreement that I can borrow for a 3 month single-family house rental?  

Thank you in advance for your help!

- Dale

@Luke Carl @Bruce Woodruff Very helpful advice. Thanks!

- Dale

Luke, Thanks for the recommendation! I'll take a look at Hospitable. I'm curious what would go wrong with my plan (to just use the calendar sync feature to avoid double bookings).

 - Dale

We have one STR that we are renting only on AirBnB. We'd like to list it on VRBO also but we'd like to avoid double bookings since it will be on two STR sites.

I don't think we need a full featured channel manager (we aren't interested in automation since we've enjoyed working directly with our guest so far). The only software we are using right now is PriceLabs for dynamic pricing.

I'm planning to sync the two calendars using the AirBnB "Calendar Sync" feature. From what I've read, VRBO has a similar feature that should prevent double bookings. The downside (based on my understanding) is that it could take several hours for the calendars to sync after a booking. I'm willing to accept this risk if that's the only issue because we don't get very many bookings for this STR.

Do we need a channel manager?

Thanks in advance for your help!

- Dale

Are the live sessions recorded?  I won't be able to make most of them on Monday nights :(

- Dale