As travel intermediaries such as online travel agencies tighten their grip on owning traveler data, vacation rental property managers are left in a precarious position.
“Property managers are getting squeezed between a rock and a hard place,” says Properly founder and CEO Alex Nigg of the role they play between rental owner and listing site, which often guards details like guest contact and payment information.
“Ultimately there’s a question around how the margin gets distributed between the listing platform and property manager. How does the property manager come back?”
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Voice technology, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, may be the key to helping vacation rental property managers rebuild guest relationships and establish new revenue sources.
It’s an area vacation rental management platform Properly is exploring through its integration with Amazon’s Echo devices, the first of its kind in the vacation rental industry.
Nigg believes that by investing in these services, as well as by aligning with the tech giants like Amazon and Google that power them, property managers are presented with a unique opportunity to enhance the guest experience.
Direct connect
At the most basic level, voice technology in accommodations can assist with functions such as setting an alarm, controlling music and checking the weather.
Devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home come equipped out of the box with these abilities, but developing the next tier of skills – particularly around services – Nigg says is where property managers stand to benefit the most.
Take, for example, a concept like room service. Vacation rentals historically don’t offer the same food delivery choices guests have come to expect at hotels, but with an Amazon Echo offering instant delivery through Prime Now, suddenly the same options exist in a different environment.
In this brave new world there’s Amazon and Google on one side and Airbnb and HomeAway on the other.
Alex Nigg - Properly
“There’s a whole wide world that can deliver the same services as hotels – and from any restaurant, not just room service,” Nigg says.
Not only does enabling a service such as delivery revive a direct line of communication between property manager and guest, it can also – crucially – recapture personal data that may have been lost to an intermediary in the booking process.
“There’s a big strategic subtext here around how does a property manager get that information,” Nigg says. By having delivery services on site, a property manager exclusively controls the activity, and in order to take advantage, guests must provide things like contact and payment details.
Selling experiences, similarly, opens up another possibility for new revenue streams via voice technology, and Nigg says it will ultimately be up to individual property managers what skills they want to develop and allow on devices thanks to the open platform services like Amazon provide.
Level the playing field
Nigg also sees partnering with the likes of Amazon as another strategic move against the hold major travel intermediaries have over property managers.
“In this brave new world there’s Amazon and Google on one side and Airbnb and HomeAway on the other,” he says. By partnering with the former, “We’re going to partner with an equally large entity to help us rebalance our relationship.”
Nigg says in turn Amazon and Google have shown “quite a degree of interest” in the vacation rental market because of the scale it grants. “The interest from their perspective is a really interesting multiplier. You can have hundreds of people going through a home every year,” he says.
“It’s an interesting way of exposing people to new products and capabilities. It’s a lot more powerful than putting [products] in stores.”
Risk vs. reward
Of course, with “a world of opportunity, there’s a world of risk.”
For one, Amazon’s and Google’s products weren’t developed with public use in mind, and issues such as privacy and consent are of concern in the context of vacation rentals.
“How do we make sure that consent was given explicitly? And that the guest is aware the device is always listening?”
Nigg says the hard problems around infrastructure and logistics are in place, but due to concerns about releasing things like personal data, it’s still early days for property managers to take advantage of how voice technology can transform service delivery.
For Properly, Amazon Business powers its current solution which allows for enterprise management across multiple Echo devices. The enterprise tools are designed to automatically wipe clean and reset devices as well as trigger cleaning services upon check out.
Nigg says property managers are excited about voice technology because of the backing by companies like Amazon as well as the device price points.
He says Properly is in negotiations with enterprise managers for around 40,000 listings and the company is actively talking with other platforms outside of Amazon.
Though companies such as Expedia and Booking.com have invested heavily in voice technology to address top of the funnel processes such as search, Nigg believes in-destination services will prove the most transformative.
“Voice is a core component that fits into our long-term vision because it drastically decreases the communication gap,” he says.