The vacation rental industry can feel like a three-ring circus. Property managers are constantly balancing market conditions, pricing decisions, owner expectations, marketing initiatives, and guest demand while working to maximize revenue and occupancy.
To succeed, you have to look at challenges from different angles and identify opportunities others may overlook.
Here are three strategies straight from RevMax Account Executive, Jason Gann, that can help operators think outside the tent.
Ring 1: Use Market Data as a Guide, Not a Decision-Maker
Market intelligence remains one of the most valuable tools in a revenue manager’s toolbox. Occupancy trends, competitor pricing, benchmarking reports, and pace data all provide important context for understanding demand. However, the market only tells part of the story.
Your portfolio has unique booking patterns, owner goals, guest behaviors, and property characteristics that competitor data can’t capture. The market tells you what’s happening. Your data tell you what to do about it.
Maybe your luxury inventory consistently books further in advance than the rest of your portfolio. Maybe weekend demand outperforms the market while weekdays lag behind. Maybe different homeowners have completely different revenue objectives.
These opportunities rarely appear in market reports, but they can have a significant impact on performance.
The strongest revenue strategies combine external market intelligence with a deep understanding of portfolio-level data.
Ring 2: Patience is a Revenue Strategy
As booking windows continue to shrink, some revenue managers feel pressure to respond quickly when occupancy falls behind pace. That response usually comes in the form of discounting.
Lowering rates can be the right move, but if that’s the first thing you try, you’re leaving money on the table.
Travelers book closer to arrival than they ever did in previous years. In many markets, guests are simply waiting longer to make decisions, but they’re not necessarily looking for lower prices. Before reducing rates, it’s important to evaluate historical booking behavior, pace trends, and market demand.
Sometimes the most effective revenue management decision is maintaining pricing discipline and allowing demand to materialize.
Patience isn’t always comfortable, but it can be the difference between securing a booking and maximizing the value of that booking.
Ring 3: Revenue Management Doesn’t Stop at Pricing
Somewhere along the way, every manager becomes a reservationist, owner liaison, revenue manager, marketer, and handyman. Everyone in the short-term rental industry wears many hats, and the best managers know when to swap them out
One advantage of having interconnected systems (and knowing all of them) is that it’s much easier to move from idea to action.
For Example …
With your revenue manager hat on, you can identify properties that are underperforming or carrying low occupancy for an upcoming period and use that information to uncover opportunities.
From there, you can analyze reservation and guest data to identify repeat guests who haven’t rebooked and narrow the audience to specific properties and date ranges.
Then when you channel your inner marketer, you can take that highly targeted list of guests who already know the property, trust your brand, and are more likely to rebook.
Whether it’s a simple email campaign, a targeted promotion, or a personalized offer you can put the right message in front of the right audience at the right time.
This approach could help fill last-minute gaps. But it’s more powerful when you start 45 to 60 days out, giving yourself time to create demand instead of relying on last-minute bookings.
Sometimes the best decisions are made when you take a look from a different perspective.
Final Thought
Revenue management is more than reacting to the market. You have to understand your business, trust your data, and find opportunities your competitors have overlooked.
Sometimes that’s ignoring the competition, sometimes it’s resisting the urge to discount, and sometimes you have to shift the way you look at revenue issues.
Whatever ring you’re in today, the best results come from thinking from outside the tent.
Discover the possibilities with a revenue management expert.