Benefits of Up-to-date Vacation Rental Calendar
Image via Wikipedia Keeping a vacation calendar updated and visible to the public will never harm your business, and will only help it. Providing interested people with this information upfront will result in more phone calls from potential business and less from those you have to turn away because you are already booked. Take a look below at why I stress the importance of having a vacation rental calendar included with your listings, and why it needs to be updated regularly.
For starters, having an updated vacation rental calendar will make things so much easier on you. You will have less inquiries asking about weeks that you have already booked. Without a vacation rental calendar reflecting your reservations, how will anyone know you are already booked? Keeping the calendar up-to-date will decrease your emails, calls, and answering machine messages.
Often, potential guests will not call for more information about rental homes. If they can’t get at least 90% of the details just by looking at the listing, they will not bother seeking a reservation and will instead continue on browsing other listings. With no vacation rental calendar available, they won’t know what your bookings look like, and if their week of travel is still open. This is way having an updated vacation rental calendar available for them to see is so important.
Also, note pending bookings on your vacation rental calendar. This may have interested people contacting you immediately, so that they have a chance at the week in question in case the other party doesn’t complete their end of the deal to get the booking completely accepted. This way, you have a backup, so you are pretty much guaranteed to get a reservation on that specific week, since two people are interested.
Let’s say you have a calendar available for viewers, but you never update it to reflect your bookings. This can be more harmful to your business than not having a vacation rental calendar at all. If someone sees an empty availability calendar, they are likely to think that no one has booked you. They may think, ‘Who wants to stay at a vacation rental that has no bookings? There must be something wrong with that place…’ If you are going to have a vacation rental calendar out there for others to see, place sure to update it so that visitors to your listing do not feel this way.
As you can see, there are no harmful effects to having a vacation rental calendar available and keeping it up to date. It will actually benefit your business by you providing this information to potential guests. It will increase business, and decrease the inquiries that prove to be, for the lack of better words, a waste of your time.
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