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Being a vacation rental owner comes with a whole list of responsibilities. You have to make sure that your vacation rentals are listed for booking, communicate with prospective guests, reply to inquiries, confirm bookings, market your vacation rental, coordinate housekeeping and maintenance, AND MORE. A virtual assistant can help a vacation rental owner with all of these things! Because virtual assistants can work for you remotely, finding someone to meet your needs can be easier than relying on your local talent pool. The tasks and responsibilities you can delegate to a virtual assistant will vary based on your needs but can be any combination of tasks to help you manage your vacation rental business.
The following are just a few ideas to get you thinking about how a virtual assistant can help you manage your vacation rental.
Blogging
If you have a direct booking website for your vacation rental, blogging can be an effective marketing strategy. It’s a great way to add new content to your website regularly, improve your SEO ranking for relevant keywords, and offer helpful tips and information to your guests.
However, writing blog posts may be one of those great ideas that always gets pushed to the bottom of your list. After all, we each only have so much time and energy in the day!
A virtual assistant can help a vacation rental owner write optimized blog posts to help boost their online presence. You can provide an outline or some information about your vacation rental and what you want to share in the blog posts. From there, your virtual assistant can write a blog post that is ready to be published, pending your approval.
Using ChatGPT for content ideas, blog post outlines, and blog post writing can be a great way to save time as well. The output needs to be checked for accuracy and edited to sound more personal, but a virtual assistant can also do that for you!
Virtual Assistants and Social Media Marketing
Maintaining a consistent social media presence is another great way to increase visibility for your vacation rentals. Sure, you are listed on third-party (OTA) booking websites like VRBO and AirBnB, and their site visitors can find and book your property that way. But you also want to be building your brand and following instead of just depending on the platforms to do it for you. I hear horror stories about property owners having their listings deactivated for some reason or another, so building your audience outside of the platform(s) gives you a solid following that no one can take away from you.
A virtual assistant can help a vacation rental owner develop a strategic social media content strategy, create content, and engage in social media posts on your behalf. As a vacation rental owner, you may have a lot of photos or promotions that you want to put out there, but you just do not have the time to organize and post them on social media. Delegating this task to your virtual assistant will save you much time to focus on more critical tasks in your business operations.
Some virtual assistants specialize in handling social media for other businesses. They are familiar with the ins and outs of different social media platforms and can even help you decide which of them may be the best for your vacation rental. They will familiarize themselves with your vacation rental and area so they can produce relevant and valuable content for your target market.
Email Marketing
Email marketing can also come into play here for communicating property updates, availability, promotions, and more to past guests. There are several software options for this that are easy to use, and a virtual assistant can often help you manage this too. I recommend Mailerlite, but there are other great options out there as well.
Guest Communication
The adage, “It’s easier to keep a customer than it is to find a new one,” applies to vacation rental owners, too. Besides being a business formality, guest communication is also a great marketing strategy. It is very important to stay in touch with your guests, not only before and during their stay but also after they checkout. Show them a beautiful vacation filled with great memories, and they will look forward to coming back to stay with you again (and likely tell their friends and leave you positive reviews!)
However, all of this communication can also be time-consuming. As this task requires time and attention, you can hire a virtual assistant to help with communicating with your clients.
Your virtual assistant can work as a customer service representative or receptionist, handling things like confirming bookings, making sure signed paperwork and payments are in order, setting up automated messages and making sure they are running properly, answering questions for guests, coordinating complaints, offering concierge services, and more.
You will just have to discuss with your VA the tone of voice that you want to utilize in your messaging, and which types of communication you want them to handle versus what you would want to take care of yourself.
Website and Booking Platform Testing and Updates
Another task you may be able to delegate to your virtual assistant is to make updates to your website and booking platforms for your vacation rental. Your virtual assistant can help you ensure that the site is up-to-date with new information, availability is synced, and everything is functioning properly.
So, Why Hire a Virtual Assistant?
Hiring a virtual assistant can help you save time and money that you can reserve for managing your overall business operations (or just enjoy some downtime for yourself.)
At first, delegating tasks to your virtual assistant may be difficult because you are used to doing everything independently. But this is also the reason why you should hire one. There will come a time when you cannot keep up with the workload as a vacation rental owner – and that’s not bad! It only means that you and your business are growing and need a helping hand.
From the list of possible duties outlined in this blog post, I encourage you to think of at least one task first that you can delegate to a virtual assistant. After you recognize some of the results of the help you are receiving, you can both grow together from there. Keep in mind that different virtual assistants specialize in different things, so before you start looking for someone to hire, make sure you are clear on the area(s) you need the most help.
I can personally recommend Barrier Consulting, a Virtual Assistant Agency. You can also find virtual assistants from the United States and around the world in Facebook entrepreneur groups and on LinkedIn.
