Tips for Optimizing Property Care Service Delivery During the Pandemic
The pandemic has highlighted the importance of maintaining high-quality, safe, and clean vacation rental properties. As the operational needs of the vacation rental landscape shift beneath us, so do the expectations and behaviors that guests take to travel. Meeting the needs of these new traveler expectations can be a challenge, and many managers struggle with the operational aspects of maintaining high-quality properties (e.g. scheduling teams, coordinating work, tracking property readiness, etc.). More work presents a unique opportunity, though, and managers who professionalize their property care: operational processes, housekeeping protocols, and remote work coordination will gain a competitive advantage.
Below are our partner Breezeway’s tips for managers to automate operations and optimize property care service delivery in the current climate.
Ensure Communication and Transparency with Guest and Owners
Customer service is invaluable in the vacation rental business, and the expectation for effective communication with guests and homeowners has grown higher. What have you done to ensure the property care: quality, safety, and cleanliness’ is the question on everyone’s mind. Managers can instill more confidence with clients through your marketing channels (property listings, blog posts, social media channels, etc.) as well as purposeful communication (email marketing, text messages, guest and owner portals).
Enhance Your Property Care Protocols
While cleanliness has always been at the core of property care, the importance of sanitation and disinfection is now not just part of hospitality, but also encompasses guest safety. Managers should consider wiping down high-touch surfaces (e.g. light switches, doorknobs, thermostats, etc.) between each stay, customizing checklists for each property, and augmenting checklists with guidance from leading authorities. Following detailed cleaning procedures has become the most critical element of property care, and is paramount to ensuring the safety of guests, owners, staff and communities.
Tighten Lines of Internal Communication with Teams
Times of uncertainty present an opportunity to revamp and rededicate your teams to best practices. Doing so will help make sure housekeepers, employees, and contractors are on the same page, reduce internal headaches, and build trust among your team. Improving processes to share information and task updates with staff and departments is also paramount, and leads to high-quality work done at each property (disorganized communication tools like text messages, and WhatsApp can’t won’t cut it these days). Consider adopting technology that ties comments and updates to specific property care tasks, and eliminates ad-hoc communication.
Start Capturing and Using Property Data
Using digital checklists for quality control opens up new doors for vacation rental property managers, and empowers them to store data on historical issues, appliance conditions, access codes and passwords. These data points arm managers to drive more predictive asset management, and quickly diagnose issues, reduce repair time, and prevent emergency maintenance issues.
Breezeway and Avantio
Breezeway’s property care and operations platform eliminates the operational headaches in short-term rental management. The purpose-built software integrates directly with Avantio to make it easy to automate your property operations and deliver an amazing rental experience.
Interested in getting started? Request a demo and a member of Breezeway’s team will be in touch ASAP to give you a customized one-on-one product walkthrough, and share the full capabilities of the software.