As rewarding as vacation rental management may be, it is also very time-consuming. From guest management, availability calendars, and housekeeping staff management to marketing, it seems a vacation rental manager’s task list is never truly completed. As the vacation rental market grows, the workload will only increase as more competitors enter the market, forcing many of us to increase our marketing efforts even more.

However, the forecast is not all doom and gloom; there are fantastic ways in which vacation rental managers can save time from their day-to-day tasks:

1. Save Time Managing Inquiries with an Online Reservation System

Responding to inquiries, sending check-in/check-out/review reminder emails, managing the schedule of housekeeping staff, doing end-of-month reporting, and utilizing dynamic pricing for seasonal changes can all be automated using an online reservation system. These valuable tools save a tremendous amount of time and allow you to respond to guests around the clock, even when you are not working. As the saying goes, the early bird gets the worm, and being the first to respond to a guest inquiry is more likely to turn the inquiry into a booking.

2. Save Time Managing Your SEO with Moz

If you have an independent vacation rental website to complement your portal listings, you will most likely spend time on search engine optimization (SEO). For those who are not tremendously tech-savvy, it can be time-consuming to manage sitemaps, research errors in titles and meta-data descriptions, or whether we are effectively using the keywords in individual pages. This is where Moz comes into play (formerly known as SEOMoz).

SEOMoz allows you to create a crawl diagnosis on your website, checks your landing pages and scores them based on your keyword usage, and also shows you what you should be doing next to improve your SEO.

3. Save Time Managing Your Phone Calls with Phone-Tag

Answering phone calls and listening to endless voicemails can be tedious, especially when your to-do list is overflowing with other tasks. A great tool is Phone Tag. Instead of having to listen to your voicemails, you can have Phone Tag convert your messages to text and deliver them to you by email or text message.

4. Save Time with Content Creation with Online Readers

Content creation is a great way to target long-tail keyword searches and helps increase search engine ranking. Creating content ideas can be tricky when you are already busy with other tasks. A great way to get inspired is to read other vacation rental blogs to see the various available topics. Simply select to track any new articles that talk about vacation rentals, holiday tips, family vacation tips, etc. With your reader, you can view all these articles in one place and get inspired by the ones that would be useful and relevant for your blog guests. For example, maybe there is a blog post written about “the Best Family Activities in Miami”, or you can write a blog post about “Best Family Activities in San Diego”.

There are various great online reader tools available; Feedly is popular. And remember, the key is to be inspired, not to duplicate content (duplicate content hurts your search engine ranking).

5. Save Time Managing Availability Calendars with Channel Manager

Availability Calendar management is not only time-consuming, but a mistake can also lead to costly double-booking. If you have multiple listings available on multiple portals, a great tool would be a Channel Manager. Channel Managers help you to update availability calendars, pricing information, and property information from one centralized point. Then it automatically pushes the updated information to all of your other listings.

Do you have any tools you would like to share that help save time managing vacation rentals?

Author Bio: Francesca Nurlu contributed this post. Francesca is the Digital Marketing Manager for Kigo Vacation Rental Software. Kigo provides all-in-one vacation rental software and channel management solutions for vacation rental managers. She creates various educational articles and ebooks to help property managers increase their bookings.