All Forum Posts by: Mike Shemp

Only advice I can suggest is to continue to market future and guests to other channels such as a direct booking site, or the other housing platforms.

In the beginnning, Airbnb and VRBO were just about the only place we got bookings, but now we get some from direct, booking.com, and a couple of other sites.

Hope that helps.

Mike

We have our wonderful cleaners come on check out day.  We also do same day turnovers, so it's critical for us to have cleaners that can come on our checkout day.

In the cases where we don't have a same day turnover, and our cleaner is running behind, they wll come the following day.  So far, no issues with that every now and then.

Mike

Hi @Christopher Crooks - I'm not in TN, but manage 3 STR properties remotely. Please send me a message and I would be happy to talk and answer questions you might have about owning/operating short-term rentals.

Mike

We ship to our cleaner, and they will bring it over at the next turnover and put the supplies in our storage area.

Mike

Put out a home that guests want to stay at, and Airbnb wants to put out in front of guests.

In addition, become a Superhost, get your property to be a Guest Favorite, and great ratings and reviews.

Hope that helps.

Mike

If its a very large property, you may also want to make sure you are marketing to any wedding, family reunion, corporate meeting/team building customers.  Just may require a pivot from vacationers to the above type customers to get your numbers looking better.

Hope that helps.

Mike

We list on Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com, Houfy, our own direct site, and a couple of others.  We get bookings from all of them.  We try and meet our customers where they want to be met online, through whatever channel that may be.

Hope that helps.

Mike

We self manage 3 properties that are 7 hours away.  You can easily handle the guest communication, especially if you use a PMS like Hospitable or similar that has canned message responses, and AI integration.  We have Hospitable setup to automatically send messages to our cleaners for new bookings, cancellations, and alterations.  We also have Hospitable configured to text message me if we don't have anyone there the night before a guest arrives with the canned message ready to go so we can just copy/paste to the guest that they can get in early.  

Leverage the PMS as much as possible.

HOpe that helps.

Mike

We self-manage 3 properties remotely.  The key is to have an amazing team, as well as backups you can call in an emergency.  And in all cases this for us is a combination of our amazinb cleaners and handymen.

We have found most guests are pretty understanding, and if it's something that impacts their stay we will give them a gift card for breakfast or dinner with an amount that reflects the amount of the inconvienience.

True emergencies are fire, flood, or blood.

Hope that helps!
Mike

I recently used it to generate custom images for my STR coaching Powerpoint material. Outside of that, we use it to update our listing descriptions periodically, as well as responding to guest questions.

Hope that helps.

MIke