By The Hospitable Team

Running a short-term rental business is not an easy job. Many routine tasks must be done year-round to manage your listings, coordinate your team, secure bookings, and take care of guests before, during, and after their stay.

Luckily, different vacation rental apps can save you time and money. They can help you automate tedious operational tasks and run your vacation rental business with ease.

To help you find a tool that fits your needs, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best vacation rental software to help ensure everything runs smoothly.

Best Vacation Rental Software: Market Analysis

If you want to be successful in the vacation rental business, it’s not enough to provide your guests with a memorable experience. You should keep an eye on the competition and stay up to date with the latest industry research and trends. Here are short-term rental tools that can help you make sense of the data.

Mashvisor

Mashvisor is a real estate data analytics platform that helps investors find and analyze short-term rental properties for sale. The Heatmap tool helps hosts identify the best areas for investing in vacation rental properties based on such criteria as median property price, average rental income, occupancy rate, and cash on cash return. The Neighborhood Analytics pages provide a detailed analysis of the investment potential of neighborhoods in all US markets. The investment property calculator offers a detailed analysis of the costs, rental income, cash flow, occupancy rate, and return on investment when rented out on a short-term basis for hundreds of thousands of properties across the nation. All analysis is based on the performance of rental comps in the area.

AllTheRooms

AllTheRooms offers hosts everything they need to understand their short-term rental markets. The platform has a fully integrated suite of vacation rental tools, including Advanced Metrics, Precision Filtering, Historical trends, Competition Tracking, and VRP Score. They can provide hosts with data and help them optimize pricing, understand their competition, and improve occupancy rates.

Airbtics

Airbtics is a platform where you can find short-term rental analytics that can help you stay ahead of your competitors. Airbtics offers comprehensive data for insights, ideas, and inspiration. You can get a complete snapshot of your market, including information about trends, seasonality, occupancy, booking patterns, and daily rate. You can also see how other listings are performing in your area and use these insights to strategically position your vacation rentals.

Best Vacation Rental Apps: Channel Manager

Channel manager software connects your listings on different OTA’s and allows you to manage bookings on multiple channels in real-time from one place. It syncs your calendars and pricing and automatically updates your availability whenever you get a new booking. Here are some of the best vacation rental apps with a channel manager feature.

Hospitable

Hospitable is short-term rental management software that offers many useful features and allows you to automate almost every aspect of your business. If you have listings on Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and other listing websites, you can use Hospitable to manage all your accounts in one place.

The system will keep your calendars and availability automatically updated across all your channels, preventing you from double-bookings. You’ll be able to update your pricing from one convenient location, and integrations with the top pricing tools will help you push smart pricing to multiple channels. It’s easy to filter and export operational and financial data and use it in any application you like.

VacayHome Connect

VacayHome Connect is a cloud-based platform that allows property managers to reach more travelers via different distribution channels. The platform connects directly to your current property management system. It automatically imports your content and data into its system and runs a quality control check. Then it connects your content, availability, rates, and reservations to leading vacation rental travel agencies.

BookingPal

BookingPal gives hosts access to various distribution channels, which are fully integrated into its system. The software automatically syncs rates, availability, and restrictions between different channels and eliminates the need to manually update this information. The analytics dashboard allows property managers to access data and see how their properties are doing.

Vacation Rental Apps: Guest Communication

Effective communication with guests is the pillar of every successful vacation rental business. It’s the major component of an excellent guest experience. And today’s guests expect to engage with you almost immediately in real-time. Luckily, vacation rental tools can help you take your guest communication to the next level.

Hospitable

Hospitable automates guest communication on Airbnb, Booking.com, and Vrbo and covers the entire guest experience from inquiry to check-out. You can use different pre-loaded templates that were tested with millions of guests and customize them to each of your guests. Personalizing your messages to your style is easy, using 50+ shortcodes and different conditions and triggers.

With built-in AI models, Hospitable detects frequently asked questions on more than 20 topics and creates personalized responses for each inquiry. If you list your property on Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and other websites, Hospitable allows you to communicate across platforms, keeping all your messages in a Centralized Inbox.

Guesty

Guesty is a popular tool that offers the standard property management system functionality. It also helps users automate communication with their guests. You can answer all your inquiries via your inbox, which is synced with listing data across all channels. That means you only need to log into one platform to check and respond to guest messages.

Vacation Rental Tools: Dynamic Pricing

Setting the right price for your vacation rental is an art. If your rates are too high, you risk losing bookings to your competitors. But if you set your prices too low, you’ll miss out on profit. There are many things to consider when setting your pricing strategy, and making frequent adjustments to your rates based on market data is critical. So the best way to guarantee high occupancy is to use a dynamic pricing tool to generate automatic rates.

PriceLabs

PriceLabs allows hosts to easily manage prices and availability with data-driven insights and automation rules. Its algorithm recommends daily rates for each listing based on market supply and demand, seasonal and day-of-week trends, special events and holiday predictions, and the number of days left to book.

Customization options give hosts full control over their pricing strategies. They include setting dynamic minimum stays, enabling occupancy-based adjustments, and more. The tool also allows hosts to adjust prices in bulk using group and account level customizations.

Wheelhouse

Built by a team of PhD Data Scientists, Wheelhouse gives users data-driven recommendations while letting them retain control over their strategy. The tool automates pricing every night based on real-time analysis. It offers tailored plans for part-time or full-time hosts and professional property management companies.

You can customize your rates based on seasonality, last-minute discounts, and much more, considering your rental property’s unique amenities. You can also choose a “conservative,” “recommended,” or “aggressive” pricing strategy.

Outswitch

Outswitch is a platform tailored specifically for professional vacation rental managers and offers revenue and channel management. This dynamic pricing tool helps you optimize your prices to match market demand, maximize your occupancy, and achieve your true profit potential. Outswitch’s rule-based approach allows you to configure your pricing variations and take complete control over your parameters.

Best Vacation Management Software: Housekeeping

Vacation rental cleaning and maintenance takes a lot of time to manage, so investing in one of the best vacation rental management software to help you with housekeeping makes sense. Different tools offer different features, so you might want to test a few options to find out what will work best for you. We can recommend the following tools.

TurnoverBNB

The platform is a marketplace that helps connect vacation rental hosts with cleaners in their local area. You can use it to find cleaners for your Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com listings and manage them from one central location. TurnoverBNB automatically syncs your calendars from all major listing websites and channel managers and gives you tools to put your vacation rental on autopilot. The key features include auto-scheduling, auto-payments, and centralized communication for all your projects.

Breezeway

Breezeway is a software platform for short-term rental cleaning and service operations. It allows hosts and property managers to schedule and automate housekeeping tasks. The software integrates with many PMS, making it easy to sync reservations, track property readiness, monitor staff, and more. You can use it to schedule a variety of tasks, including cleaning, maintenance repairs, and concierge service.

Properly

Properly is a visual tool that allows short-term rental hosts to share detailed turnover instructions with their cleaners. Hosts can connect Properly to their Airbnb, Booking.com, or Vrbo accounts so that change-overs are coordinated with bookings too. The mobile app works on Android and iOs and is available in 8 languages. Hosts can use it to schedule cleanings, get photos and damage reports, and find good cleaners that work for other hosts.

Short Term Rental Tools: Home Automation

Technology has revolutionized the world of vacation rentals. A lot of rental property owners use home automation and smart home technology to upgrade their businesses. Smart short-term rental tools help provide a more secure space and ensure a more comfortable stay for guests while also cutting down your monthly energy bill. They also allow hosts to run their businesses remotely, offering guests a safe and secure self-check-in.

Brivo

Brivo is a cloud-based home automation platform that allows hosts and property managers to save time and money and create a better experience for their guests. You can manage all your properties’ smart devices from one dashboard, including smart locks, climate control systems, garage door openers, and noise monitors. This tool lets you view daily access log reports, track staff entry and exit on properties, and control doors, thermostats, and sensors.

Operto

Operto is an all-in-one solution that is designed for hospitality and vacation rentals. It integrates with your PMS and connects all your smart devices (smart locks, thermostats, boilers, sensors, and more) into one platform. The tool manages keyless guest entry, smart temperature and humidity control, property monitoring (i.e., noise), and more. Operto allows you to see real-time occupancy, ensure comfort for your guests, and save on energy costs.

Direct Booking Website Builder

A direct booking website can be one of the most valuable marketing assets in your vacation rental business. If you want to take direct bookings, the good news is it’s very easy. You can create your website using a direct booking website builder that comes with a built-in booking engine and pre-loaded templates.

Hospitable

With Hospitable, you can have a fully functional website within minutes. It will allow you to get bookings from your guests directly and build your brand. And if you already have a website, you can easily embed our booking widget. Our system will ensure that your calendars stay synced with OTAs where you have listings. We will also take care of automated communication with your guests to ensure they have a great experience.

Lodgify

Lodgify provides everything you need to build a vacation rental website to get direct bookings and manage all your bookings in one place. You don’t need any coding or design skills. The tool is user-friendly and completely customizable, and there are SEO-optimized and professional templates available in multiple languages.

Witbooking

Witbooking is an online solution for the hotel industry to help hoteliers increase direct bookings through their website. It is a hotel booking engine that hotels can use on their websites for processing online reservations. Users can also take advantage of advanced reporting and analytics.

Boostly

Boostly offers to build WordPress websites that are exclusively designed for vacation rental owners and can handle the increasing growth of your STR business. Boostly integrates with all the major PMS booking engines. They also offer website management and SEO audit.

Final Thought

Whether you’re managing a single vacation rental or are a professional host with multiple listings and accounts on different OTA platforms, vacation rental apps can make a huge difference. They have the power to make hosting easier and help you get the most from your rental properties.