Vacation rental businesses are in a time of cutting back and building up. The more software you can introduce to streamline processes and cut back on people costs, the better. Now, there aren’t too many SaaS tools out there specifically targeting the hospitality industry. But, those that are will be in this article. 

We’ll also explore those SaaS tools outside of the hospitality “box,” that will most certainly help excel your vacation rental business. Let’s check out the software!

8 SaaS tools to support your vacation rental business

Whether you’re new to vacation rentals or are simply looking to up your game, some of these SaaS tools could be exactly what your vacation business needs to reach new heights. 

Take a minute to consider each one, and if something catches your eye, follow the link and do some research for yourself. You’ll be surprised by the amount of time or money you can save your business by onboarding a SaaS tool. 

It doesn’t just come down to operations; some of these tools will help you reach new audiences and build better relationships with future customers. Stay open to everything.

1. Lodgify—The one for booking operations

Lodgify is one of the few pieces of software that’s built specifically for vacation rental managers like you. It gives the gift of automation to your vacation rental operations. This unique vacation rental software allows you to: 

• Handle bookings 
• Management multiple properties
• Build a website
• Sync third-party booking channels 
• Process payments 

It’s the perfect tool to collect many of your processes under one roof. 

Plus, just because you integrate Lodgify into your tech booking stack doesn’t mean any of your other channels are on the sidelines. This vacation rental software is a preferred partner of Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, and more. 

It handles the operations, so you can focus on getting more bookings and save time to do the things you’re passionate about.

2. Hotel Tech Report —The marketing know-how

Admittedly, this one’s not necessarily a piece of software. However, it is perfect for all of those SaaS heads in the hospitality field looking to sell more. The hotel marketing guide is your complete marketing walkthrough to better promote your hotel. 

The guide is filled with information on how to market on third-party channels, hotel website design and SEO, email marketing strategy, and more. Jump over to the page, bookmark it, and come back to it later. It’s a great resource for small hospitality businesses stuck for ideas on how to go to market. 

3. Unbounce—The one for landing pages

Whether you’re in vacation rentals or not, any marketer knows the pain of limited human resources. Things like designers, or developers, are often hard to get hold of at a reasonable cost. Unfortunately, that means that some of our best ideas often don’t get to see the light of day—especially when it comes to campaigns. 

Unbounce is a “drag and drop” landing page builder that’s intuitive and filled with templates already proven to work. So, if you are short on design or coding abilities, Unbounce is your next best bet. Build landing pages for your campaigns that do your hospitality business justice and give your campaigns a fair leg (or two) to stand on.

4. Hootsuite—The one for social media 

Social media, you fickle beast. If you’re not capitalizing on social media for your hospitality business, then you’re missing out on a world of opportunities—3.5 million, to be exact. 73% of marketers believe social media positively affects their business, and 54% of people use social media to research their next spend. 

Plus, with the recent rise of TikTok and other more niche social media channels, there’s a wealth of opportunity for your business to “go viral” now you’re playing with new algorithms and not competing against the OGs on Instagram. 

Yet, with all of this opportunity comes the need for management. We’re not just talking about one social media channel here, we’re talking about multiple. Each one needs to have its content plan and content niche. It’s almost impossible to do this natively and remain productive while doing so. 

Hootsuite is a fantastic, low-cost, social media management platform. It will help you manage your social channels while collecting and analyzing data so you can constantly optimize, predict trends, and reach new eyeballs. 5.

5. Typeform—The one for guest feedback

Reviews are a great way of getting feedback. However, they tend to be biased or less constructive as people know they are public. To solve this situation, learn from your guests’ experiences, collect private reviews from them, and showcase data in qualitative, quantitative, and actionable ways. 

Typeform is a fantastic tool for handling customer feedback. In using Typeform, you’ll create engaging, intuitive, and optionally anonymous customer feedback forms. 

You can send these out via a link in emails after your guests have stayed with you or present them to guests on Ipads as they check out of your vacation rental. 

The best part is, you can share the link you create an infinite amount of times, and all of the results go to the same place. You’ll have percentage overviews for Likert scales nestled neatly alongside your qualitative feedback, and can continue improving your guest experience.

6. Local Clarity—The one for handling reviews

Think of every review platform out there your hotel or rental can appear? What comes to mind? 

• Google My Business
• Facebook 
• Trustpilot
• Tripadvisor 
• Expedia
• Booking

Any more? Local Clarity combines all of the above and more review platforms under one roof, so you never need to miss a review. 

Rather than jumping from website to website, you’ll be able to monitor and respond to reviews in real-time, track your online brand efforts, business sentiment, drive sales, and work on enhancing your reputation. 

Reviews also contribute a great deal to your off-site SEO strategy. By having a hold on them, you’ll positively build your business’s search engine rankings and earn more back-links to your website. 

7. Intuit Quickbooks— The one for finances

Remember the days when our finances were in little hand-held books and pencil scribbles? Nope? That’s probably for the best then, and we’re most definitely showing our age. Hotel vacation businesses have a lot of finances to juggle, and they need something a tiny bit more extensive than a hand-held book or even a well-maintained spreadsheet. 

Now, there’s a lot of bookkeeping software out there; each one has its benefits and its downfalls. If you know you need booking keeping software to lift your finance operations, then we’d highly recommend you spend a good deal of time doing your research. However, if you need help in general, then Intuit QuickBooks is a fantastic all-round solution.

The software handles live bookkeeping, manages outsourced talent expenses like vendors or freelancers, can handle payroll, and keep track of all your inventory and payments. 

Worried about taxes? They’ve got you covered there, too, with tax penalty protection. If you receive a fine, no matter if it’s on your part or the software’s, QuickBooks will pay up $25k. 

This software will come as a huge relief to those hoteliers that got into hospitality and the love of creating a customer experience but feel swamped in financials. It’s time to let the software do the tasks that you don’t want to, so you can focus on doing what you love and start your business in the first place. 

8. Mailchimp—The one for email management 

Last, but not least, we’re turning to email marketing. For every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses expect an average ROI of $42. That’s a massive leap and something any vacation rental business needs to take very seriously. 

Of course, we know we can’t rely on sending emails for our business accounts. It’s not scalable, there’s too much room for error, and we’re bound to get marked as spam sooner or later. It’s time to turn to email marketing management software to help us do our job well. 

At the top of our list for email marketing management is Mailchimp. Why did we pick this one above all of the others—besides the adorable monkey logo? Well, Mailchimp’s price plans are flexible and adjust as your business grows. 

It means you’re not going to be stuck on one price plan for an entire year before being able to up or downgrade. Mailchimp is also continuously working on templates, resources, and inspiration to guide and dictate your email marketing strategy, so it works for your business. 

Wrapping up the best software for your vacation rental business 

Hopefully, this article has brought some new software types into the spotlight for you to consider to help your vacation business grow. 

Remember, it’s not only operations that we can be improving in this sector. Think about how you can lift the customers’ experience, reach new audiences, and ensure your business keeps growing with all the success it deserves. 

Every successful business comes from a great idea. This idea can be purpose-driven, vision-driven, or both. Bringing it to life in the earliest years of your business can be overwhelming. We’re not all natural-born leaders, mathematicians, business analysts, and at the same time, we’re not expected to be. 

But that lack of expertise in every single business management category means mistakes are bound to happen. And if you’re not prepared to deal with those mistakes, it can quickly derail your business idea. So, if you’ve got a great business idea and are determined to bring it to life, then this article is here to help you avoid the 7 most common business management mistakes.   

The top business management mistakes to avoid 

1. Failing to track everything 

From day one of building your business, you’re going to be experimenting, creating data and processes, and learning. It’s so crucial that you keep track of everything. Even those things that you don’t deem as vital for your business to flourish. 

It’s hard to predict how quickly your business will grow. Even if you have a business growth plan, it doesn’t mean that your growth will stick to it. Perhaps you’ll boom, win funding, and need to recruit hundreds of people at a time; maybe you won’t. What’s certain is, new staff will come, and old staff will go, and if you’ve not documented the past, you’ll struggle to onboard and manage knowledge for future employees.

Process documentation is essential for enabling your business to scale. It will save your hiring managers time, and it will allow future talent to learn from past mistakes. Document everything; even if you don’t see it as necessary, there’s no doubt someone can learn from it in the future. Your documentation will help measure success and set benchmarks for future KPIs.

2. Breaking data compliance regulations  

One thing that you need to have down from day one of managing a business is your data compliance. Yes, we know it’s not the most thrilling of things. However, if you’re not handling consumer data correctly or legally, you could risk coming under fire and facing huge repercussions.

Take the California consumer privacy act, for example. It’s a relatively new privacy law to protect consumers’ personal information. It affects any business operating in California, or even with customers from California — which could be yours, depending on where you’re marketing. 

The act protects every piece of consumer data a business may keep, helping them to sell better. Unintentional non-compliance to this particular act can result in a fine of $2,500 per violation and up to $7,500 per violation deemed intentional. Either way, these fines are something any new business can do without–especially in its earliest years. 

It’s not only financial damage you can do here. A privacy scandal can also tarnish your reputation and stunt your business growth and sentiment. 

3. Conducting insufficient research

Research is key — it always will be. Whether you’re doing it with your business data or you’re using public resources. It’s so important before you make a business management decision or change. 

Leaders and ideas people tend to act on feelings. We tend to be very emotionally driven and impulsive. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, when handling a business and potentially great deals of money, we need to be more data-minded and back our decisions up with research. 

Use research across every area of your business. Whether you’re researching customer satisfaction, like UX research, or a competitor analysis, or are looking at more internal subjects like internal processes best practices or company structure research, you can take safer steps by doing your research first. You’ll minimize room for error and justify decisions based on data. 

4. Not focussing on branding

No matter your business niche, product, or service. Know that you’re not just building a company. You’re building a brand. 81% of customers say they need to be able to trust a brand to buy from them. 

Every public action you take builds your reputation and your online brand affinity; this also means it can jeopardize it. Ensure that you focus on building a brand and business that people can relate to, understand, and look forward to engaging with. 

Branding does not stop at building a customer base, though. It can also help you attract and retain top talent. 50% of candidates won’t work for a company with a bad reputation — even if it meant missing out on a bigger paycheck. 

Employer branding can drastically help your business to win the talent you need in this massively competitive market. With the 2020’s jump into remote work, it means talent can pick from more employers than ever before and are no longer limited to the businesses in their immediate travel radius. 

This remote work reality means employees are making decisions to work for employers they like rather than those who only pay well. LinkedIn research shows 75% of candidates will research a company’s reputation before applying for a role — time to build a brand that gives them great results.

5. Failing to be remote ready

Building on point number four, every business needs to be ready and able to function remotely. Those businesses that only ever operated in static offices really struggled in 2020 and many didn’t live through the transition. 

How can you avoid making the same mistakes? Invest in communication tools and strategies to ensure all of your business communication is online, and your employees are used to speaking using these digital channels. 

However, it’s much more than tools to ensure your business is set up for success in the remote work world. Try to look at ways you can build a company culture remotely and take a look at this home-based business checklist to ensure you don’t miss anything else.

6. Forgetting finances

Numbers, to some, are an entirely different language. They can be daunting, and managing finances is certainly not something that comes easy to everyone. New businesses need to take care of everything they spend. The good news is that there are plenty of financial resources and specialists out there to help you get a hold of things from day one. 

Don’t make the same mistake many new businesses do and put finances on the back burner because of a passionate idea. Driving a business with a mission is excellent. Still, you need to be able to support your mission along the way. Whether that comes through investment, personal finances, or another means, make sure you’ve got your financials looked after. 

Ensure the taxman doesn’t come knocking, and your business is set up for financial success as well as prepared for crisis.

7. Disregarding the importance of customer service

Lastly, but certainly not least is customer service. 84% of consumers say customer service is a crucial factor helping them to decide whether to buy from a company or not. 

The age-old saying of “the customer is always right” should be leading your customer service strategy, no matter your business niche. Even today, with all the forms of paid advertising available, the strongest form and highest conversion marketing tactic is still word-of-mouth — 86% of customers trust word-of-mouth reviews and recommendations.  

So, how do you win peer-to-peer referrals organically and authentically? You focus on honest and rapid customer service. Even if your product is flawed or faulty, or your business makes mistakes, with humble customer service comes forgiveness. 

You’ll be able to turn mistakes into opportunities, build loyal brand ambassadors, and win the hearts of your customers as well as their heads by simply handling situations with transparency. People forgive when we own up to our mistakes. 

At the same time, excellent customer service can help to build higher customer success rates and, in turn, win product referrals from your customer’s micro-communities. You could be a handshake away from your biggest client, but you’ll never know if you don’t treat your current ones well. 

Focus on customer service from day one and every day after you’ll be thankful for it. 

Wrapping it all up

These seven business mistakes may seem daunting, but there’s a lot you can do to avoid them. Undoubtedly, you’ll make mistakes on your road to success—we’re only human and are bound to encounter problems that we don’t overcome on our first attempt. What’s important is that we learn from our mistakes, and we document them for others to learn from in the future. 

Remember, whenever you are in times of doubt or come across business management problems that you’re struggling to conquer, come back to why you started your business in the first place. 

You started because you saw a problem or injustice in the world that you can overcome. Or you began with a vision of creating a better world with your product or service. Remind yourself of your business purpose, mission, and vision. Stay true to it. Keep striving towards it. Whether you make one mistake along the way or many, what’s important is you keep moving forward.