The Vacation Rental Amenities Your Guest is Expecting
Amenities are life for a vacation rental!
It's how we draw those potential guests in with a click, and it's how we surprise and delight them during their stay.
As a vacation rental homeowner, we need to make sure that we know how to maximize and utilize the use of our amenities in our vacation rental listing.
When I work with vacation rental homeowners, assessing our amenities is usually the first order of business. It is so important to properly understand what amenities you have to offer, and how you can talk about that to your potential guests.
There are several layers to providing amenities in a vacation rental; here are my 'Three E's' of vacation rental amenities.
E#1: Expected
This is pretty self explanatory, but if a guest expects to find it in your home these are the amenities that you need to be sure to provide.
These amenities are your appliances, lamps, bedding, furniture, TVs. These amenities are usually the ones that your guests will expect to find in your home, but there's another layer here to expected amenities...
In today's landscape, expected amenities also include paper products, single use toiletries, soaps and a hair dryer. At one point in time this maybe wasn't expected, but rule of thumb now is if standard hotel provides it, you should too!
I put together this free amenities checklist you can use to ensure you are providing all the expected amenities your guest is looking for.
E#2: Extra
Extra amenities are your surprise and delight items. You may not necessarily talk about this in your listing, but these are the items that you can provide to really go above and beyond, and wow your guests for those five star reviews.
These amenities help garner those five star ratings because they weren't expected. An example of this could be a really well thought out gift basket that you provide on the first night of their stay, a full coffee bar, providing their favorite beverage, etc.
I suggest you brainstorm here and really think about how you can go above and beyond for your guests.
I also like to take some time to think about why they are coming to your home, and what activities they will likely be doing.
For example, if your guests are coming to your location to go to the beach, then you could provide some additional amenities to help them enjoy that activity. This could include a wagon, cooler, umbrella and beach blankets.
Think about why your ideal guest is coming to your area, and if there are some additional amenities you can provide to help them enjoy that even more.
E#3: Eye-catching
An eye-catching amenity is something that is going to draw your guests in from the listing site feed. This would be highlighting an amazing feature of your home or a well desired feature.
This might be a swimming pool, or a really gorgeous deck with a beautiful view. It might be a beautiful jaw dropping room, whatever that is about your home it's something that is a little more unique about your home, and or a desired feature.
This is what you would want to feature in your cover photo because this is the first photo that a potential guest will see when they are researching the area.
Conclusion:
I encourage you to evaluate these three areas of your amenities and look at how you're using these vacation rental amenities in your listings, marketing & business.
Are you highlighting your top amenities in your headline? Are you featuring them in your photos? And are you integrating them in to the communications with your guests?
Your amenities are really what's going to sell your home to a potential guest, so I encourage you to really think about your top amenities and make sure that you're selling them in to all those various touch points with your guests.
Once you know your best amenities, you can then work your best amenities into your headline, description, photos and guest experience and you'll see an improvement in bookings and reviews in no time!
To help ensure you have all the right amenities, be sure to grab my amenities checklist!
This has everything you're going to need when you're first getting started. This will give you a complete checklist for the 'essential' amenities I covered as well as a starter checklist for your 'extra' amenities.
Be sure to grab your free copy of the Vacation Rental Amenities Checklist and comment below with the amenity that your guests love most!
Are you Providing all the Amenities Your Guests are Expecting?
The last thing we want is for our guests or potential guests to view our home as lackluster, run-of-the-mill or basic.But, if we don't place an emphasis on the amenities we are providing for our guests, this is often the result and we get lost in the crowd.
In my early days of running a vacation rental, I wish I would have focused on amenities more because when I did, it was a whole lot easier to fill out my calendar!
I created the Vacation Rental Amenities Checklist to help you cover all the essential amenities you need as well as start to think about what extra amenities you can provide.
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