Maximizing Vacation Rental Revenue

Saturday 29, Dec 2007 - 01:14AM

Hotels and Airlines have been maximizing revenue for a long time. When you reserve a hotel room or an airline seat, a powerful server crunches out the most optimum price based on the season, availability and a host of other factors. Well, you should be thinking the same way with your Vacation Rental properties.

First, we recommend that you determine all the special holidays where you expect to get maximum traffic. These typically include Thanksgiving, Christmas, July 4th weekend, Labor Day weekend and Easter Weekend. During these peak times, a lot of people travel, and availability is scarce. Consequently, you should set high rates during this time. You should also set policies about the minimum stay required during these high traffic times. Typically, we recommend setting at least a 3 or 7 day minimum.

Second, we recommend segmenting the calendar year into 2 or 3 seasons; Peak Season , Off Season and optionally a Mid Season segment.

During the Peak Season, you should set higher prices with higher minimum stay requirements. During the Off Season and Mid Seasons, your goal should be to keep your property occupied by offering competitive rates and a low bar for minimum rentals.

Without Online Booking, it is difficult to keep all of this straight in your head. RentExpert is powerful Vacation Booking Software that incorporates a dynamic pricing engine where you specify your pricing rules. RentExpert automatically crunches the numbers for you and presents the pricing dynamically to potential renters. Why is this important? Simply because it helps the renter make up her mind quickly without lots of back and forth conversations with you.