At a Glance

• Big operators are both a threat and an opportunity to smaller PMCs.
• Size doesn’t matter if you remain agile and adaptive — a critical advantage in a fast-moving market.
• Building unique experiences can unlock new revenue streams and grow your customer base.
• Your customer list is a key resource for driving more direct business.

The consolidation and corporatization of the STR business have been underway for a while now. The thrilling, demand-driven gains of the COVID years saw an explosion of inventory, led in large part by corporations such as Vacasa, which manages more than 44,000 properties nationwide. The post-COVID market downturn that resulted as demand returned to historical levels was felt by many STR operators. Although things have largely stabilized, market uncertainty remains.

If you’re not one of the “big dogs,” it can feel like you’re swimming against a powerful tide. How do you grow inventory when so many properties are being Hoovered up? How can you stand apart in an increasingly crowded market? How do you protect yourself and even grow in such conditions?

1. Stay Agile and Adaptive

It’s practically a cliche at this point. Two fighters face off, one of whom is much smaller than the other. The little fella’s coach says, “Yeah, he’s big, but he’s slow. Keep moving and don’t be where his fist is.” Or something like that.

Cliche or not, smaller generally equals more agile. That’s not to say big companies aren’t—they certainly can be—but it’s usually easier to roll with market changes and experiment when you have 50 properties versus 500. 

A good example is catering to remote workers and digital nomads. Say you convinced a couple of owners to add nice desks and faster WiFi, promoted those properties to remote workers, and saw an uptick in occupancy. That’s something you could quickly replicate across your portfolio. By the time a big corporate shop got around to it, you might have enjoyed six months of cashing in on that trend.

Optimization, especially in your tech stack, can happen much faster at a smaller scale. The more units you manage, the more complex everything is, from auditing your current operations, to shopping for new vendors, to implementation. It’s never too soon to evaluate your tech stack and find new ways to improve your operations and guest experience.

Finally, experimenting with new revenue streams, such as fees or package deals, also is easier and faster when you’re smaller. You likely have fewer owners to communicate changes to and have less exposure if the experiment backfires.

2. Focus On Unique Guest Experiences

The commoditization, or same-ification, if you will, of the STR industry isn’t inherently good or bad. It just is. The more popular and easily available a thing becomes, the more closely it cleaves to a standard. And yes, consistency is important. For a brand, it can create loyalty. For a guest, it builds trust.

But it also offers an opportunity to set yourself apart. By nature, STRs have the flexibility to create completely unique guest experiences. The larger they are, the more challenging this becomes.

The process of creating and selling unique experiences is called experience marketing. Here are some tips on creating unique experiences that elevate your brand and delight guests:

Know thy guest

Chances are, you have some concrete data on what kind of traveler seems to prefer which property (or property type). That kind of information is solid gold when it comes to building a unique experience.

• Build a guest persona. When you picture someone staying at a particular property, what do they look like? How do they spend their time? What do they hope for when they arrive? Knowing whether a “typical” guest is a 25-year-old digital nomad or a 55-year-old semi-retiree helps narrow down the experiences you’ll offer.
• Map persona to local activities. Say your typical guests skews young and adventurous, and you have a lot of rafting companies in the area. That gives you a more focused starting point for building experiences.
• Look for amenity alignment. If younger groups are your sweet spot, and those groups often go rafting, then maybe a bigger house with a hot tub makes for an easy, “Cold River, Hot Tub” kind of experience. Be creative and don’t be afraid to try new things.

Connect the dots

Great experiences link the elements of the overall experience so they reinforce each other and your brand. Once you know your target guest, this becomes easier to do.

Generally speaking, the elements of an STR experience are:

• Marketing the experience
• Pre-stay communications
• In-stay property elements
• In-stay connected elements
• Post-stay communications

Sticking with the young adventurer example, you decide to build your “Cold River, Hot Tub” experience. Working with a local guide, you create some extra perks exclusive to your guests, like a special group rate, door-to-door transportation, a boat to themselves, and a gourmet lunch on the river. Having built the experience, you market it accordingly.

The goal of your pre-stay communications is to get your guests excited about their stay. Photos from the river and the property help paint a picture of a long, thrilling day that ends with a long soak in the hot tub and a movie on the big screen. You might consider keeping something a surprise until then, like a complimentary bottle of champagne or free sunscreen.

In-stay communication is all about checking in, requesting any feedback for the tour operator, and making sure everything is as expected. It also reminds the group of the next tour or check-out time.

In-stay connected elements include information about other property amenities, such as a large-capacity dryer or a great place nearby to watch the sunset. These can be sent via email or text, or they can be part of an on-premises booklet or digital guide.

Post-stay communication again requests feedback and maybe even includes a link to photos from the river. You’ll also want to thank them for their stay and find out what other adventures interest them next time.

The idea here is to ensure that all phases of the stay either align with, or at least aren’t incongruous with, the overall experience. They should feel unique on their own but linked to the experience you set out to create.

In the process of building out unique experiences, you’ll also forge or deepen relationships with other local operators — relationships the big dogs rarely enjoy.

3. Leverage Your List for More Direct Business

The more competition you face from large companies, the more important your direct channel becomes. Assuming you’ve been quietly accumulating email subscribers over the years, this is where those leads can really start to pay off.

Direct bookings offer better margins for you while guests pay the same as or less than the OTAs. However, it can be tricky to get them there, especially if they have a go-to channel like Booking.com or Airbnb. You have the best shot at a direct booking when you proactively reach out to your list with promotions, announcements of new properties, amenities, or incentives.

Cultivate and Curate

Your customer list is yours. No one can buy it off of you or sell it to you. These are people who know you and your brand, and (hopefully) feel good about you already. That makes them prime candidates for promotional offers or retargeting.

If you don’t do it already, consider a regular cadence of emails to past guests. Over time, this will help them get accustomed to hearing from you. Plus, each successfully delivered email improves the chances of them seeing the next one. In a world where 20% is a pretty good open rate, that makes about 1 in 5 emails will actually get read. Email marketing, like any marketing, is ultimately a numbers game. The key is to send regular emails but not so frequently that it feels like spam. Two to four emails per month is about right.

Your emails should always include something of value, be it a blog post highlighting the best local trails or an exclusive offer. That way, even if your guest only opens one at random, they’ll be glad they did.

But before you do anything else, audit/secret-shop your direct booking chain from start to finish.

• Look through your CRM to determine how clean your list is. Warning signs include a high rate of spam reporting, hard bounces, and unsubscribes.
• Make sure your website is clean, fast, and conversion-optimized. Run some tests with different emails (know the Gmail trick?) to make sure your booking engine passes everything through to your CRM and PMS like you want it to.
• Look at the booking confirmation email and any that automatically follow, on both desktop and mobile. Are they still in-brand? Is the information current, especially to contact you?
• Simulate a check-out and look at those automated communications as well.

Once you’re confident that your chain is strong, it’s time to look more closely at your list and segment or group them so you can reach out in a targeted way. Here are just a few ways to do it:

• Guests who have stayed with you more than once
• Guests who book the same property again and again
• Group by age (if you have that data)
• Average booking value
• Guests who have written especially positive (or negative) reviews

Now it’s time for the fun part — building out your offers or valuable content. Here are some ideas for offers that entice past guests and drive more direct business:

• Limited-time deals, especially during shoulder season
• Event-related promos or packages, such as an upcoming music festival
• Exclusive discounts for lapsed guests, e.g. “We miss you!”
• Offers that encourage longer stays, such as booking 5 nights and getting the 6th night free
• Exclusive discounts from local vendors or tour operators
• Highlights of new amenities, especially for a specific property they’ve booked in the past, or portfolio-wide features like smart locks
• Stories like how to beat the crowds, best-kept secrets, or a comprehensive event calendar

In Summary

It’s tough out there, and it’s not getting any easier. Consolidation and the entry of aggressive, deep-pocketed PMCs have definitely made it harder for smaller operators to grow their share of the market.

But bigger is generally slower, more risk-averse, and less creative by nature. Being more nimble lets you throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks. Rolling with the punches and moving quickly offers one notable advantage.

Being smaller potentially makes it easier to build unique guest experiences that the big dogs don’t have the luxury of testing out. Plus, just having a big presence in your market doesn’t mean they know it as well as you do. Be creative, add value where you can, and carve out a niche as someone who really knows what their guests want.

OTAs are a fact of life, and there’s only so much you can do to optimize your presence on those channels. From there, your best bet is to grow your direct business by consistently putting valuable offers in front of your best customers.

With an advanced hospitality CRM at its core, TrackSuite has all the tools you need to turn your size into an advantage within an increasingly competitive marketplace. Our marketing pros at TrackEcommerce would love to lend their expertise to digital marketing campaigns that support your direct-channel efforts and give you an (ahem) “leg up” on the big dogs.