How to organize your vacation rental team's work with Smoobu

For many vacation rental owners and property managers, working with a team is essential to ensure optimal management of their properties. This, however, can present some challenges. The operations of team members must be organized and scheduled to perfection to avoid any delays or inconveniences. In this article we will look together at how to organize your team’s work with Smoobu and manage your vacation rentals efficiently.

Teamwork for managing your vacation rentals

Managing vacation rentals consists of several steps:

Promotion of the accommodation: creating listings on booking platforms, with catchy descriptions and high-quality images, and publishing the direct booking website. Promoting your properties on social media to achieve maximum online visibility.
Booking management: booking confirmation and synchronization of availability calendars to avoid the risk of overbooking.
Pre check-in: communication with guests regarding check-in time, arrival at the apartment and any special requests. Accommodation preparation.
During the stay: welcoming guests, in person or via self check-in. Miscellaneous communications to ensure that the stay runs smoothly. Check-out information.
Post check-in: cleaning and, if necessary, maintenance of the apartment. Communication with guests to thank them for their stay and request a review. Sharing potential discounts and promotions for future stays.

To cope with all the tasks required for optimal management of short rentals, many property managers and vacation rental owners choose teamwork (in addition to management software, which we will discuss later).

Do you need a team to manage your vacation rentals?

You may be wondering if you really need a team to manage your vacation rental property. In fact, if you manage one property, not too far from where you live, you may be able to take care of all property management activities yourself.

However, you will definitely need to work with a team if:

You are the owner of multiple tourist apartments, located perhaps in different municipalities.
You are a property manager.
You manage an accommodation facility that can accommodate more than one guest at a time: bed and breakfast, rooming house, farmhouse or guest house.
You live in an area or state other than the one in which the property you rent is located.
You want to delegate work and have more free time.

What team members do you need to manage your vacation rentals?

Clearly, each vacation rental business has its own specific needs, so it’s up to you to decide which team members you need for successful management. Here are some examples:

Housekeeping staff
Maintenance
Front desk
Concierge
Secretarial staff
Professionals for any additional services: chef, babysitter, ironing service, massage therapist staff
Potential business partners.

For small businesses, the same person may fill more than one role. In the case of a family business, team members could all be family members.

Challenges in organizing the work of your vacation rental team

When working with a team, it is important that each member has the information they need to do their job.

For example, the person in charge of greeting guests needs to know what time they are arriving and be notified in case of any delays. The same goes for housekeepers: their duties need to be perfectly planned, especially during periods when bookings follow one another within short intervals, such as during high season.

At the same time, for privacy reasons, there is information that should not be disclosed to all team members. Your vacation rental maintenance worker who comes to fix faulty equipment after your guests check out should not be privy to their first and last names.

These are the main challenges in organizing your team’s work: making sure each member gets the right information at the right time, respecting guest privacy, and avoiding human error as much as possible.

Organize your team’s work with vacation rental software

Nowadays, there are few vacation rental owners and property managers who do not use management software to organize their team’s work. This is because, without a professional platform, communication and timely planning of operations can be time-consuming.

Smoobu is a leading software for managing short-term rentals. This is because it provides hosts with:

A channel manager for automatic, real-time synchronization of your listing bookings on rental sites.
A Property management system (PMS) to manage all bookings from a centralized desk.
A website builder to create your own direct booking website and increase your earnings.
A booking engine that can be integrated with your website to automatically synchronize direct bookings as well.
Various tools to enhance the travel experience, such as automated communication and digital guest guide.
Assistant accounts to help you automate and organize your team’s work, for dynamic and efficient management of your vacation rentals.

How to organize your team’s work with Smoobu?

Smoobu is a comprehensive solution designed to meet the needs of accommodation managers. Here are some tools you can use to organize your team’s work.

Read-access assistant accounts

Smoobu provides its hosts with a feature called “Permissions,” through which you can create accounts for each member of your team – learn more in our comprehensive guide.

Read-only accounts allow your team members to see certain information, without being able to edit it. Depending on your needs, you can enable different levels of access:

Reservation details: portal used, creation date, check-in and check-out times.
Guest information: name and other basic information, such as number of guests, number of children, and whether they are traveling with pets.
Guest contact details: phone number and e-mail of the guest who booked the accommodation.
Price: price paid in detail, prepayment, possible extras, and access to the statistics page.
Notes: you can leave notes for your team members, for example in case the guest has a special request.
Notifications: by enabling notifications, your team members will be notified automatically when you receive a reservation, reservation update or cancellation. If the feature is disabled, they will have to log in and check for themselves.
Messages: your team members will be able to see sent, received and scheduled messages.
Prices and MinLoS: access to the page that includes the price per night and minimum length of stay.

If you manage multiple vacation rentals in different areas, you will probably work with multiple teams. With this feature, you can create an assistant account for each team member and assign them only to the relevant property.

With the Smoobu Pro plan, you can use an unlimited number of read-only assistant accounts.

Write-access assistant accounts

Although for most team members a read-only account is sufficient, sometimes you may need one or more assistant accounts with write permission. For example, if you are working with a partner or if, as a property manager, you want to allow the property owner full access to the platform. Or, if you want to allow your receptionist who often receives reservations by phone to block dates on Smoobu, so that calendars are automatically synchronized across booking platforms.

You can allow your staff to have full access to:

Bookings: lock dates, edit or cancel a reservation.
Messages: write and respond to guest messages.
Prices and MinLoS: set the price per night and change the minimum stay.

With a Smoobu PRO plan, you can create writing accounts at any time at a cost of €15 per account per month. Discounts apply for annual and two-year plans.

Automatic communication

Smoobu offers its hosts an automatic communication feature with message templates and time triggers. Most vacation rental hosts use this feature to streamline communication with guests.

However, you can also create automated messages to organize your team’s work. In fact, the notification feature in read-only accounts allows you to automatically notify management team members when new reservations or updates are made. However, your guests may book your short rental weeks or even months before the actual check-in date.

With the automatic messaging feature, you can schedule an e-mail to the person in charge of receiving guests the day before they arrive at the property. For housekeepers, you can schedule a reminder one day before departure instead.

If you manage multiple teams, you can create templates (e.g., “check-out reminders”) and set them up simultaneously for different accommodations and team members.

Smoobu Teams Subscription

If you manage several properties and work with many partners, you may decide to opt for a Smoobu Teams subscription. In addition to the PRO subscription features, you will have access to:

Unlimited write-access accounts.
Domain setup.
Booking system customization (CSS changes).
Prioritized customer support.
Premium setup support service.

To learn more, check out our pricing page.

Use Smoobu software to organize your team’s work

In addition to automatic booking synchronization and other available features, Smoobu can help you organize your team’s work. Once you set up assistant accounts and automatic e-mails, you will benefit from many advantages:

Automate daily operations.