0 Shares 10 Ways to Spot a High Maintenance Renter In an ideal world, your renters will call or e-mail you to check availability of your property; complete a rental agreement; pay you on time; enjoy a wonderful vacation and write a glowing review in your guestbook. However, ideal world situations don’t always apply in our fun business of vacation rentals. Although most rental clients […]
0 Shares To greet or not to greet – that is the question “When renting a vacation rental, do you want a detailed meet and greet from the owner or would you rather just get on with your holiday?” This question appeared on Twitter this morning and it was very topical since we were discussing exactly the same thing yesterday while we were preparing our cottage for our […]
0 Shares Handling Cancellations Without Tears Do you have a cancellation policy? Is it clearly stated on your web site; on your Terms and Conditions, and in your Rental Agreement? Do you know what you will do when a guest with a confirmed booking, calls and asks for their money back because an event has occurred and they need to cancel? […]
0 Shares A Bill of Rights for Vacation Renters? I haven’t had a rant for a while so think it’s time to get something that’s been bothering me recently out in the open. Don’t go into this business if you don’t like people If you went into a store, there were no lights on, it was cold and you were totally ignored, wouldn’t you […]
0 Shares How to Handle Guests With Colic You check your property at the end of a rental and find some damage. First of all you decide if you’ll accept it as normal wear and tear and simply fix it; put it down to experience and add the renters to your blacklist, or whether you will make a claim on the damage deposit. […]
0 Shares The Early Bird Could Catch the Booking How quickly do you respond to an enquiry? I was reading a thread on Lay My Hat this morning and was interested in the range of issues this raised. Some people commented that when they had sent out enquiries to vacation rental owners, in many cases there was a less than 50% response rate. This […]
0 Shares How To Clear Out The Bad Apples In The Vacation Rental Barrel Vacation rental clients have higher expectations than ever before, and property owners should be giving this trend the attention it deserves. I recently saw a couple of photos submitted to a listing site that clearly showed the message is not getting across. Why would anyone find a photo of an unmade bed attractive? Who is […]
0 Shares It’s Time to Renovate The Cottage Guide This is such a great time of year for planning. We are scheduling in some renovations for the cottage – new kitchen flooring, deck remodelling – and a whole bunch of repairs. But while I leave that to the experts, I’m doing a renovation that can be planned and implemented from the comfort of my […]
0 Shares How To Minimise The Rental Risks We all want 5 star renters; those who leave the place as if they had never been there; write lovely comments in the guest book, and never call at midnight asking how the microwave works. Just as much as we’d like to win the lottery; raise kids who never act out and save the planet […]
0 Shares Significantly Not As Described – The SNAD Phenomena There’s a lot of media coverage about vacation rentals at the moment which is interesting as it shows an increased focus on what to many north Americans is a niche vacation product. The latest article in the Wall Street Journal comments on a phenomenom with the handy acronym SNAD or ‘Significantly Not As Described’. Sadly […]
