Why a Texting Platform Matters
It’s all-but official. Text messaging has become the preferred mode of communication for the hospitality industry, and it’s no mystery why.
Guests love the speed, ease and convenience that text communication provides. Vacation rental management companies, in turn, have discovered that text communication can be an invaluable tool for saving time, optimizing a team, making guests happy and driving more revenue.
The latest numbers help explain why texting has become a vital component of guest communication for businesses, including vacation rentals.
- 72% of customers say they would prefer to book with a travel company that texted them about travel plans, updates and reminders (Cision)
- 90% of customers say they prefer text messages over direct phone calls (SMS Comparison)
- 77% of customers reply back to a text within 10 minutes compared to just 28% who reply back to an email within that time frame (Simple Texting)
In the five or so years since vacation rental businesses began using it, text communication has grown dramatically in the sheer volume, breadth and sophistication of tasks that it can perform. An exciting new world awaits for vacation rental managers who have been thinking about updating their texting options.
The latest text communication still aces the basics, like providing instantaneous communication between VRMs and their guests, facilitating personalized messaging, storing a record of all communication and saving valuable time for VRMs and their teams. But text communication can do much more for vacation rental businesses — so much that today’s enhanced messaging demands its own platform.
The Texting Platform
A smart texting platform offers vacation rental companies a wide range of options, much like a tasting menu. Each feature is designed to perform a specific task, like sending emergency alerts, driving more revenue with extended stays, increasing 5-star reviews and using a dedicated text inbox so the company team can access texts from guests, owners and vendors, to name a few.
Here’s a look at some basic components an effective texting platform can include and how each one can enhance a vacation rental management company.
Text Automation
With text automation, VRMs can schedule and send texts on a date and time they choose. This means that they can schedule materials like welcome notes, guestbooks, surveys, review requests and thank-you notes when their guests book and then relax, knowing that the right information will land on guest phones when they wish. They can also text emergency alerts to all guests at once in the event of severe storms, road closures and fires. Besides reducing operating costs, text automation eliminates repetitive tasks and makes the company more efficient.
Messaging
There’s a big difference between texting colleagues or friends and business texting. Messaging elevates business texting to the business level. This feature assigns a dedicated business line for guests, owners, housekeeping and others so their texts don’t land on a personal or business cell phone. It also provides an inbox that the entire team can access so everyone knows when guest questions or issues, like room repairs, are dealt with. The benefits of texting remain: Guests are never put on hold and get faster replies than with email or face-to-face conversations.
Text Webchat
Monitoring a chat line constantly is costly and labor intensive. With text webchat, messages reach potential guests as texts. Users get a pop-up so the team can text back when convenient without keeping prospective customers waiting online. As a bonus, VRMs can collect the names and phone numbers of potential guests, making it easy to cultivate leads and grow the business.
Extend Stays
What if there was an easy way to turn gap nights into moneymakers? Extend stays hunts down gap nights on the company calendar so VRMs can text guests an offer of early or late access to the home at a discount. Since it’s cheaper to extend the stay of a guest who has already booked than to find a new guest for a vacation rental home, it’s a win, win for the business. Texting makes it happen.
Google Reviews
Google reviews matter. Potential guests use reviews on mega-sites like Google to search for vacation rentals. The more reviews, the more likely the vacation rental business will be seen. An abundance of 5-star reviews can help crowd out the occasional bad review, blunting the impact and underscoring the company’s overall good rating. Guests who discover the business during a Google search are also more likely to book directly. Make it easy for guests to leave great reviews by asking them to rate their stay in a text message that arrives an hour after they check out, as scheduled.
Guest Surveys
What did — and didn’t —guests like about their stay? Surveys are the ideal way to discover their preferences, personalize their visit, address issues proactively and learn about problems quickly. A survey feature makes it easy to create questionnaires that guests will want to answer. Multiple choice, check boxes, one-to-ten ratings — VRMS can choose the format that works best, then send the survey to guests by text.
Creating a Texting Platform
As enticing as they are, not every item on the texting platform we’ve detailed works for every business. Tech providers like RueBaRue offer a la carte pricing to let VRMs choose the features that work best for their companies. Because this is a fast-moving field, texting platforms are designed to add exciting new products as needed.
The day is fast approaching when it will be impossible to imagine a vacation rental business without enhanced texting. This is the perfect time to move to a texting platform and discover all that texting can do for vacation rental businesses.
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