Many vacation rental managers are conflicted about what to offer guests. Should you offer early check-in or late check-out? What if the guest needs it sooner than expected, should they have to pay for that too? It’s an age-old question with no easy answer.
The best thing you can do is decide on your goals for your property and then decide accordingly. Most importantly, remember to use vacation rental property management software to manage your vacation rentals. The software connects you to booking sites to increase bookings as well as your revenues.
Read on for some tips on deciding what’s best for your own business…
Here are some tips that can help you decide whether early check-in or late check-out would be ideal for your business:
1. Determine your goals.
What are you trying to achieve? The number of bookings or return customers? A new family friend for next year’s vacation? Money in the bank account every week of the decade? Deciding what you want is step one of any business, so take a moment and figure that out first.
2. Analyze your calendar.
Visit your online calendar and figure out which days of the year you could offer early check-in without being too overwhelming. You need to provide advance notice to ensure that your cleaners can get in there early enough, but if you’ve got an empty house for two extra hours it may not be such a bad idea.
3. Ask your guests what they want.
It’s important to remember that this is their vacation too! If they tell you they’d like an early check-in (or late checkout) then let them know that you will do everything possible to make sure it happens. Just keep up with their requests so nothing gets forgotten.
4. Factor in operational costs.
If offering early check-in or late checkout will reduce your operational costs significantly, then it could be worth doing.
For example, if the cleaners are able to work at full capacity for 8 hours instead of 10, they can clean more homes per day. This means less time between bookings which also means more income! If you have a peak season followed by a quiet period after that, then you might want to consider charging an additional fee for early check-in or late checkout so that you can benefit from those peak days without straining yourself too much.
5. Decide what your guests need.
If they’ve had a long flight and need time to rest or if they have dinner plans outside the house on their first night, those are valid reasons for a one-off early check-in offer that most people won’t mind accepting. However, if everyone wants an early check-in then you’ll need to rethink how it affects your business model. That said, if someone requests a late checkout but you know that no one is checking in until 3 days later, go ahead.
Conclusion
It all comes down to what type of business model you want to pursue when choosing between these two options–if maximizing profit margins is important then go with early check-in; if increasing customer retention rate matters most then opt for late checkout. Need to reduce your management costs and increase your bookings? Zero cost vacation rental property management software can help you in seamlessly managing your vacation rental property; from accounts to bookings and more!