1000+ Vacation Rentals and No Horror Stories

Everyone who manages or owns vacation rental property has had the following nightmare.

Your phone rings at 3am and the call display tells you it’s Joe, the slightly eccentric person who lives next door to your vacation home and has annoyingly achieved “early retirement” despite possessing the same marketable skill set as an untrained possum. After listening to Joe for a few minutes you understand that the nice couple who rented your vacation home was actually in town for the heavy metal pyrotechnics conference and invited everyone back to the pool for some “drinkie-poos” to keep the party going. One thing led to another and it dawns on you what the sirens you’ve been hearing in the background behind Joe are all about.

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The 5 Stages of a Bad Review

Just like grief, there are 5 stages we all go through when we receive a bad review. The problem is, if you don’t allow yourself to pass through all of them in order, things can get messy. Using one of our bad reviews as an example, I’ll walk you through all 5 of these stages. At each stage we’ll look at opportunities and identify pitfalls. Finally you’ll learn how to craft a professional response that also speaks to your future guests. In short, I’m going to show you how to turn a negative review into a positive experience in 5 (mostly) easy steps.

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Must Have Items for Every Vacation Rental Home

You can’t advertise a property as sleeping 10 people and only buy 8 dinner plates. Outfitting a vacation rental home is a science and there are certain items that just need to be there. Below are a list of the lessons we’ve learned over the last 1000+ rentals about what items absolutely need to be in your vacation rental home.

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Understanding Your Nicaraguan Electricity Bill

We have owned a house in Nicaragua for almost 9 years but it’s only been about 9 days since we finally cracked the indecipherable mess that is our monthly electricity bill. Here’s the problem; every month your electricity shows up at your home (or doesn’t) covered in charges, subsidies, kilowatt readings and usage rates rounded to the nearest 100,000th of a cordoba ($0.0000003 USD). Since Disnorte-Dissur uses a sliding scale, all of these calculations are done multiple times and in a font so small you need a telescope to read them. Continue reading “Understanding Your Nicaraguan Electricity Bill”

How to Get More 5-Star Reviews

If you’ve been renting your home for more than 5 minutes then you know that the secret to winning the vacation rental game is 5-star reviews. Regardless of the platform, the more 5-star reviews you have the higher your listing will rank. The higher you rank, the more often potential guests are likely to pick your property out of the hundreds of other vacation rental options from which they have to choose. Continue reading “How to Get More 5-Star Reviews”