Beyond the Booking: Creating a Memorable Guest Experience
When booking a vacation rental, guests have an abundance of choices. To run a successful vacation rental business, “location, location, location” is no longer a reliable guarantee for success. Hosting has become a highly competitive industry, and the best spot on the beach or top-tier mountain view is no longer enough. Just a handful of years ago, your average Airbnb guest was happy with clean and well-located properties with basic amenities. But today, there are multitudes of properties to choose from, and the guests’ expectations have multiplied as well.
So what are today’s guests looking for? For many, it’s simply the opportunity to have a memorable, novel experience. And if a host can help facilitate that, great news! As summarized in “The Experience of Novelty and the Novelty of Experience,” unique travel experiences leading to unforgettable memories “are related to nostalgia and intention to revisit a destination.” (Skavronskaya L, Moyle B, Scott N. 2020). That’s right, if you can give your guests the opportunity to return home and tell all their friends, “I did that!,” you’ve increased the chance that they’ll come stay with you again.
At Mount, our goal is to help hosts curate this ultimate guest experience. Here are a few ways you can utilize our software to make every stay unforgettable:
Include adventure-based add-ons, such as e-bikes or kayaks, depending on your location. Mount streamlines the rental process for your on-site experiences from booking and calendar management, payments, and host and guest notifications and extends access to damage waivers and liability coverage for on-site experiences.
Consider experiential purchases to enhance a stay. Have a fire pit? Offer the convenience of firewood and a s’more package to sweeten the deal. Frequently hosting groups? Offer charcuterie boards or grocery basics. Hot spot for bachelorette parties? How about photo props or party decorations? Mount will manage payments and notifications—easy for the guest, easy for you!
Don’t have the bandwidth for in-house experiences? We’ve got you covered! Take advantage of Mount’s extensive partnerships with local tour guides and vendors, and sit back and earn a commission on every booking.
When you provide unique, personalized value to your guest, you have turned an expected experience into a curated, individualized service. In turn, you have the opportunity to turn one-time guests into loyal fans and repeat bookers.