As the vacation rental market continues to expand, operators often find themselves grappling with the complexities of scaling while maintaining efficiency and quality. Running a top-tier, automated hospitality business is both costly and time-consuming, but it's essential for success in this competitive industry. To help you navigate these challenges, we've outlined key strategies for scaling your vacation rental business leanly, focusing on systems, processes, and personnel.
Systems & Processes
Building an efficient system for your vacation rental business is crucial but not straightforward. Modern Property Management Systems (PMS) offer a range of integrations for guest communications, pricing management, cleaning, maintenance, and home automation. However, these systems can become fragmented, leading to inefficiencies and higher costs. To address these issues, consider an all-in-one vacation rental property management like Jurny, which streamlines operations by integrating all necessary functions, including guest communications, pricing and revenue management, and automated access control, into a single platform. This approach eliminates the need for multiple third-party vendors, reducing both complexity and costs.
Personnel
Scaling your team can be quite challenging. Hiring skilled personnel is costly, and training less experienced staff takes a lot of time. To scale more efficiently, you should consider using automation to minimize the need for additional hires. By using tools that automate routine tasks, your current staff can focus on more strategic initiatives. For instance, Jurny offers automation software that can handle booking management, pricing updates, and guest communications. This enables property managers to operate more efficiently and expand their operations without having to significantly increase their workforce.
Traditional Scaling Methods
Traditionally there have only been two ways for vacation rental managers to scale. The first way is to build a system and process yourself. This method is costly, time-consuming, and often ends up failing as companies scale. The needs of an operator can vary greatly depending on how many properties are being managed. For example, the needs of a host with 40 properties are not the same as the needs of an operator with 400 properties or 4,000 properties. That may seem like a wide margin, but with the right systems and processes in place, scaling from 40 to 400, or even to 4,000, can be a very realistic goal.
The second option for vacation rental operators to scale is to hire people, such as professional consultants and/or revenue managers. The fewer automation solutions and processes in place, the more personnel you will need as you grow, which is exponentially more costly and much less scalable. I mentioned the cost of hiring earlier, but with consultants and specialists, you should expect to pay a premium for their services. Not to mention that you will still need to put some systems and processes in place, albeit with the guidance and buy-in of the people that you hire.
Modern Scaling Solutions
Overall we can see a common trend for vacation rental managers and owners that may be looking to scale their business as the market continues to boom heading into 2022. No matter how you slice it, scaling a vacation rental operation has traditionally been very costly & time-consuming. Until now.
This is where Jurny comes into play. Jurny is a truly all-in-one vacation rental management system that takes all the guesswork out of the nitty-gritty back-office tasks like pricing & revenue management, reviews management, guest communications, listing optimization, accounting, reporting, and reconciliation so that you can focus on the important things, like growing and managing your business. Such a vertically integrated system for both software and hardware allows hosts to streamline their on-ground operations and guest experience with fully automated access control & code generation, guest app, cleaning & management app, task management, and much more.
The best part is that it’s already built for you without the need for integrations, 3rd party vendors, lengthy and costly onboarding, or steep learning curves for complex systems. The entire turn-key solution is available for a simple flat fee with no upfront cost.
