July 22, 2019

If you’ve been managing vacation properties for a while, you may remember when print ads and word-of-mouth were the primary drivers for generating bookings. Then, the internet came along, and booking websites became the lifeblood of a property manager’s quest to have perpetually filled rentals. Now, the times are changing again; since mobile traffic is set to account for 79 percent of internet use in 2018, optimizing your rental marketing approach for mobile traffic is increasingly vital to your long-term success.

Mobile Optimization Is a Must

For owners of small or medium vacation rental businesses, developing comprehensive mobile apps to help your customers book rentals probably isn’t the most reasonable choice. It is, however, important that you make booking your vacation rentals as easy as possible on mobile devices. Whether this means you list your properties on popular mobile-friendly apps or develop your business website to be mobile-friendly, capturing mobile traffic is the best way to make your rentals stand out from the competition.

Once potential renters have found your property, they might be discouraged if your mobile booking process is hard to navigate. In the social media age, your ability to generate a flawless guest experience depends on providing guests with the ease and convenience that they’re used to enjoying when they buy products and services on their smartphones and tablets.

If you don’t optimize your rental business to accommodate the emerging importance of the mobile market, it’s likely that you’ll be left behind; already, 81 percent of marketers have indicated that their mobile presence is crucial to their marketing strategies, and when marketers optimize their mobile presence, they become even more aware of the importance of this tool for reaching customers on the go.

Gather Information to Make Your Mobile Presence More Effective

Top marketing companies have found that the more information they have on their customers, the better they can serve their needs. If you tailor your mobile experience to leverage data you’ve collected on potential renters, such as their location and purchasing decisions, it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to target both new and existing customers with the exact types of properties that they’re likely to rent.

Whether you use targeted advertising in tandem with your mobile website or you build an app that feeds data into audience profilers like Adobe Audience Manager, understanding who your customers are and what they want is the key to generating booking processes that are quick and intuitive for your customers. Since the mobile revolution has made it much easier to gather consumer information, rental companies that don’t take advantage of this rich data landscape are missing out on potential growth opportunities.

Emerging Technologies Make Mobile More Important

While the face of the internet has already changed a lot in the last ten years, the rate that human interfaces with cyberspace are developing no signs of slowing down. For instance, AI-based personal assistants are no longer novelties that allow you to call your friends without navigating your contacts app; they’re rapidly becoming intelligent presences capable of managing your entire life.

Similarly, chatbots are becoming smarter every year, and it will soon be possible to complete bookings with a couple of back-and-forth comunications between a customer and a friendly, intuitive AI presence built into your website or mobile app. As super-fast 5G data networking technology is rolled out around the world, these emergent technologies will only become more articulate and prevalent, and by optimizing your web presence for mobile now, you’ll be better equipped to handle the eventual shift toward AI-based bookings that is rapidly coming down the tubes.

More on Vacation Rental Technology
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Enhancing the Guest Experience with a Dedicated Guest App