Industry Map for Short-term Rentals & Vacation Rentals

Property management software (PMS) is any app, system, or program that helps manage rental properties and organize business tasks. Those business tasks could range from managing your bookings and availability, to maintaining any insurances and regulations you may have on your rental properties, and generally managing your guests’ stay and experience. 

PMS can offer extremely expansive features, including (but not limited to):

• Inventory Management
• Calendar Management
• Guest Communications
• Guide Books
• Direct Bookings
•  Upsells
•  Channel management
• Accounting
• Integrations

Because of the many moving parts of managing a rental, this helps organize them into one singular platform.

PMSs are helpful for teams and individuals that want to sell their listings on multiple vacation rental sites like Airbnb, VRBO, Expedia, HomeAway, Booking, Google, and more. Instead of building a listing for each site, a PMS will help you create and manage your listings across all sites. 

PMS is the nerve center of your business and incredibly important to get right. They are the data center for your listings, the largest software category you will see on this list, and the “hub” for your business.

With the wide array of features and functionalities that are offered by property management software, there’s no question investing in one will make your life easier–and help increase revenue while reducing management costs.

Before deciding on which system to use, it’s essential to identify what your business or properties need. Since so many tools are on the market, we put together a list of property owner favorites.

• Avantio: Avantio offers an array of property management tools and services specifically for the vacation rental industry. Their features include a unified inbox for all rental inquiries, easy check-ins, a simple payment system to automate revenue, and postings on multiple websites at once. The platform works with Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO. Their packages include training and support, ensuring the platform best suits your needs. Plus, they don’t charge a commission on your bookings. 
• Barefoot: Barefoot understands that each rental property is different, which is why they customize their services to your needs. Their clients include vacation rentals, corporate housing, long-term rentals, and property owners, making them a diverse platform. Their software provides a live booking engine with all the information a web visitor needs to make a renting decision.  
• Guesty: Guesty aims to help property managers better manage their portfolio of rentals. The goal is for their clients to save time on the tasks it takes to manage a rental property. They offer a multi-calendar and task-assigning app that helps improve guest communications, manage property listings across multiple platforms, and optimize market pricing. The main selling point for Guesty is the ease of communication with guests. If you’re struggling with this, Guesty may be a good tool to add to your kit.
• Hostaway: Hostaway’s tagline is “an end-to-end solution for the professional short-term property manager.” It automates many of your tasks and creates a centralized location to manage all your bookings on one platform. One central calendar synchronizes your listings so they all have consistent information. They also integrate with Wheelhouse, which means they take advantage of dynamic pricing strategies for their bookings.  
• Hostfully: Hostfully offers similar services to Hostaway: a central dashboard for all your bookings, communication, and calendaring. They also offer digital guidebooks to assist you with your branding. The right branding can help elevate your listing and create more drive from web users. If you find that creating your listings is one of your more complex tasks, Hostfully can provide an easy set of tools to use.
• LMPM: In addition to centralized booking information, LMPM also provides resources and tools to build your own WordPress site to manage all rental inquiries and move away from third-party platforms. If you feel motivated to develop your business, LMPM could have the resources you need.

Channel managers help you sell your listings on the traditional channels (Airbnb, HomeAway, Booking, VRBO, etc.). But, they also help you sell on “meta” sites such as Google & Kayak, more specialized OTAs such as WhimStay, FabStayz, and many others. In fact, many CMs distribute to over 50 channels.

As teams professionalize, they may also go from selling on just a few channels to over 40 channels before eventually distributing on corporate sales channels and global distribution systems leveraged by hotels and airlines.

Channel managers are the distribution center for your listings, helping you sell rentals anywhere and set pricing strategies per channel. In general, selling on more sites will increase bookings and revenue. This means using a tool to help manage these bookings will help you stay consistent. 

In addition to distributing your inventory, many channel managers can help you adjust prices or create discounts across distribution channels. This can help you account for different booking fees or customer types based on the channel.

In the future, short-term rental inventory could be sold on any network or marketplace, like Facebook or Instagram. So while channel managers won’t help you with that today, they may look to add–or power–such functionality in the future.

• Booking Pal: Booking Pal connects rental management to the top consumer travel websites in the world. They offer distribution capabilities such as myOptimize, a calculator tool that gauges listing quality and optimal channel placement, and myInquiry, providing a team of reservation experts to handle all guest communications. You can easily track your bookings while posting your listing on websites with extensive client reach. This is key if you want to publish your listings on all major booking websites simultaneously.
• NextPax: NextPax works with over 100 booking channels, online travel agencies, meta-search engines, and more. You can connect, centralize, and synchronize all of your rental information to appear on various sites that will promote the most drive to your properties. The visibility of your rentals matters. NextPax allows you to create those listings on a diverse set of channels.
• Octorate: Octorate is a cloud-based platform that helps manage large and small properties. This means the platform uses no computer storage and can be accessed from any device, anywhere, at any time. Features include a smart calendar assisting with your rates, availability, restrictions, reservations, and access to more than 150 online travel agencies. 

IWhat they are

Revenue Management Software is designed to help teams maximize revenue by harnessing AI and powerful algorithms. Larger businesses often have revenue managers oversee these functions in conjunction with revenue management tools.

 In the short-term rental world, “RMS” often refers to dynamic pricing software. Dynamic pricing software analyzes historical numbers, industry trends, and even competitor data to help hotels set prices more accurately.

Revenue Management is often the second or third major software system that teams will add to their technology stack. Most RMS will attach to either your PMS or CM to help you price your listings across all channels.

In addition to dynamic pricing strategies, RMSs often offer market reports, CompSets, and other analytics tools to help individuals & teams both research and analyze their ever-evolving markets.

RMSs can be rule-based, data-driven, or sometimes offer both approaches through hybrid pricing. These systems can be both automated or “on demand,” pushing prices to all of your channels based on pre-set schedules, on-demand, or only when you permit it.

Revenue management systems are the pricing center for your listings, helping you respond to local demand fluctuations instantly, which is crucial to increasing your revenue through increased occupancy.

• Wheelhouse: Wheelhouse helps you hit primary revenue goals through pricing recommendations using your region’s most recent pricing data. You have the option to customize your rates based on the season, as well as add last-minute discounts to entice guests to book your rentals. It considers your property’s unique amenities to give you the most accurate price point when posting your listing. You can earn up to 40% more revenue and scale your portfolio. 
• Rented.com: Rented is a vacation rental revenue management tool that uses an automated rating tool for homeowners and property owners. Art was built to be simple and easy to use. It also integrates with your PMS to distribute its dynamic prices to your website and across all booking channels. 
• PriceLabs: PriceLabs is a revenue management software designed to help property managers optimize their properties. It does this by analyzing several market factors, then generating recommendations for pricing decisions. This software connects with all major booking platforms, PMS, and channel managers. The AI then calculates all the information you need to work with as a property manager.

In the short-term rental space, you’re in the business of selling clean spaces & getting guests safely into their listings. In this case, logistics are hugely important but they can be challenging to manage. Operations software helps keep track of guests arriving and checking out.

Many teams invest in software to ensure that their cleaning teams are easy to schedule, their maintenance staff can quickly resolve issues, and their customer service teams can efficiently and effectively communicate with their guests.

Scheduling, ticketing, and team communication can be tricky, so teams invest in software that addresses these concerns. In the short-term rental space, operators can break even (or even profit) on their cleanings. Therefore, investing in effective software can increase your revenue while significantly decreasing costs and time spent.

Operations software helps you avoid any guest issues, assists with the logistics of your listings, and provides data needed to manage both the cost and profit centers for your business.

• Breezeway: Breezeway offers property care and operations tools to help property managers with all the logistics of managing rental homes. Through their desktop or mobile application, you can schedule property management tasks, coordinate with your management team, message guests to keep them updated, and much more.
• Resort Cleaning: Resort Cleaning works with your PMS to automate scheduling for each of your units when cleaning and in-between-guest services are needed so there are never scheduling faults or conflicts. This includes keeping all the reports in one place for you to access whenever you need them. Their services include housekeeping, inspections, and general maintenance, connecting you with people in your area.

While sometimes mistaken for RMS, data tools provide information about how markets & listings are performing.

Multiple data providers effectively show you year-over-year (YOY) trends, upcoming demand patterns, and competitive sets.

Teams can leverage these tools to create their own pricing strategies, used in conjunction with pricing tools like Wheelhouse, or even used to inform investments and home purchases.

• Keydata Dashboard: Keydata Dashboard gives users clear insights into the core metrics that drive your business. With this software, you’ll also see how you stack up against your local and regional competition.
• AllTheRooms: AllTheRooms offers market intelligence to analyze your market, as well as benchmarking against local competition. With their property scoring, you’ll understand how you rank locally. 
• AirDNA: Data is just the starting point for AirDNA. They offer insights into potential investment properties, help optimize your listings, and research market trends.

Guest communications software helps keep your customers up to date and manage your communication across listings and rentals. They offer online check-in, one location for all messaging between you and your guests, and personalized interactions to increase the likelihood of a good review or returning customer.

Guest communications software helps save time and improve efficiencies by delivering the right messages at the correct times. This ensures guests that their booking is confirmed and ready for them when they check in.

• Duve: Duve helps you broadcast messages to guests and quickly reach out to them with individualized communications. They work with all leading PMS and hospitality systems which makes for easy implementation. Their mission is to create a deeper, friendlier, more enhanced experience for your guests by providing the strategic solutions you need to succeed.
• SendSquared: SendSquared creates a unified guest record for each guest to customize your communication with them. Their platform analyzes guest engagement to better serve them as the customer and you as the rental manager. They integrate with existing PMS meaning they are able to keep all necessary information in one place. You will never lose important data when working with SendSquared as they ensure they keep up to date with your guest’s interests, reservation tags, and more.

The Internet of Things tracks the network of physical objects that are necessary when managing your rental properties. Think lockboxes, security systems, and Wi-Fi connections. These are the tools that help increase the value of your property while allowing you to potentially manage it from a remote location.

Managing rentals can be a full-time job. However, the key part of a rental property is that you, as the owner, don’t live there. That means you’ll want remote systems in place, including security systems, Internet and cable connections, electricity and heat, and much more. IoT software helps keep an eye on your home and track those necessary tools when you cannot have direct eyes on them.

• Minut: Minut helps tighten your security with its smart home alarm system. Not only does it ensure that your property is safe when unoccupied, it will also inform you when the noise levels reach a certain level in the home, but the temperature also reaches too low or too high, and more. It helps give you peace of mind when your rental is occupied and unoccupied.
• Operto: Operto uses smart locks, thermostats, sensors, and other smart devices to manage your rental from afar any time, any day, occupied or not. It uses existing systems such as the locks you already have on your home and enables them to be Bluetooth connected, so you can easily lock and unlock the home from afar.

Ancillary software sometimes goes by the name “ancillary management system” (AMS). It’s a type of vacation rental software that manages ancillary products or services that property managers can offer with their homes. While ancillary software often supports upsells, it also provides other management features to indirectly increase revenue.

Additional revenue streams and upsell options might include:

• Late check-out
• Early check-in
• Tour guide services
• Selling local art or goods 
• Stocked fridge
• Grocery delivery
• Luggage storage outside of occupancy time
• Sports equipment, like canoes and kayaks
• Hygiene kits
• Airport transportation
• Babysitters and pet sitters
• Flowers
• Birthday supplies
• Pet fees
• Local delicacies 
• Cooked meals 
• Rentable transportation 

It helps when creating an accurate short-term-stay portfolio for your rentals. Guests also love knowing that there’s access to anything and everything they may want on their stay. From excursions to amenities, it’s a treat to find their hosts have thought of everything.

• Xplorie: Xplorie uses local attractions to create packages for your properties. This will increase your revenue and elevate your guests’ experience.
• Duve: Duve again! This platform offers end-to-end solutions for communicating with guests and up-selling services. They work with hotels, vacation rentals, and hostels to digitize and elevate their guest experience.

FF&E is short for Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment. It encompasses all movable or easily removed objects in a vacation home, hotel, or hostel.

FF&E Software helps design your rental home to best suit your guests. It allows you to design, upload, and manage all aspects of your rental.

• Minoan: Minoan offers discounts on over 160 brands to help furnish and upgrade your rental space. You can access these brands in one location to make centralized ordering fast and easy. Once purchased, you can elevate your guest’s stay by integrating a digital retail experience – what they see they can buy. Minoan keeps this data of how guests interact with the brands and products around them while staying in your home.
• Showplace: Showplace helps you design the home of your dreams for guests to have the best experience. You only have to accept products that you’d like and would use. Once they’re accepted, you’ll be able to add them to your rental within five days.

These software tools make it easier for property owners to analyze the investments they’ve made on their properties, their ROI, and how to maximize revenue.

Knowing your current property value and calculating whether improvements will help to maximize your return investment can make a difference to your profits. These platforms also make it easier to find financing or even sell your property.

• Nectar: Nectar gets you the fast, flexible financing you need to scale your rental portfolio. Take the funds you need when you need them, and stay in control of the finances for your rental home through Nectar’s easy-to-use software.
• Rabbu: Rabbu offers an all-in-one platform to find, manage, or sell your short-term rental. It provides the tools to find and analyze high-performing short-term rental investments. This allows you to maximize revenue and returns on your investments.
• Vintory: Vintory helps build your rental portfolio by introducing to you new properties and regions of interest. They help you capture more leads on optimal housing and provide support when closing deals on new properties. All the while growing your revenue to ensure a consistent rental income to maintain your properties.

There are many things to track when managing a property, not least of which are the financial obligations of proper accounting, finance management, and tax filing. You must organize all of your bookkeeping and accounting and using the right software is necessary to keep everything in order – especially as your property numbers rise.

Keeping everything in one central platform makes the reporting and taxation process that much simpler. Accounting, finance, and tax management software provides reliable, secure, and scalable services to ensure tax compliance.

•  Ximplifi: Ximplifi offers full-service accounting, CFO advisory, consulting, and new-age technology solutions for short-term rentals. Its platform gives a full suite of accounting services for rental companies of any size–allowing you to manage your accounting, finances, and taxes in one place.
• Avalara: Tax compliance software for your industry and tax type–customize the financial guidance you need to work with what you have in your rental portfolio. Avalara works with over 30,000 customers in 95 countries and offers cloud-based SaaS solutions for all rental organizations, no matter the size.

There are many processes that occur in the successful operation of a short-term rental. Within that ecosystem, there may be property managers, maintenance organizations, cleaners, customers, suppliers, regulatory bodies, and more. Connectivity apps improve the relationship between you, your customers, and this network of providers that keeps your processes running smoothly.

To grow your business in the short-term rental landscape, owners must embrace technology to facilitate connectivity. Everything from guest communication, marketing, distribution, and revenue management can be connected through connectivity software.

• Jurny: Jurny is a hospitality tech company helping you connect with your guests. They developed the first management operating system (MOS) for hotel and short-term rental operators. A MOS unifies the fragments of the hospitality sector—customer support, room maintenance, and check-in—into one necessary system, automating and streamlining the entire guest experience from check-in to check-out.
•  Apaleo: Transforming the future of hospitality from the inside out, Apaleo’s Open PMS means users can create a unique guest experience with deep integrations. You can roll your own software with Apaleo’s industry-leading APIs, or find the latest integrations in the Apaleo Store.

Market data and comps software provide performance analytics and comparative data to help predict the future of your properties.

These software tools help you aggregate historical and forward-looking information to help perfect your hospitality and rental systems. Professional vacation rental managers, tourism organizations, and even investment funds can use these platforms to improve metrics and their bottom line.

• Key Data: Key Data uses analytics and data dashboards for professional vacation rental managers, tourism organizations, and investment funds. Key Data believes that leading experienced property managers should regularly track their performance to improve it.
• Transparent: Transparent tracks over 35 million listings globally through Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com & TripAdvisor. Their mission is to help vacation rental property managers optimize their strategy and maximize revenue through data insights.
• AirDNA: AirDNA uses VRBO and Airbnb data from 10 million global properties in 120,000 global markets. They show you the best places to invest in a vacation rental, set the most optimal price, and stay up to speed with the investment data in that region.

Remote operations refers to setting up your business in a way that allows owners and vacation property managers to manage and control all operations from a remote location. Even if your property is halfway across the world, remote operations software allows you to manage your listing as if it was down the street.

Short-term vacation rental property owners shouldn’t have to live near their properties to rent them out successfully. Having remote operations in place means you can use the resources put in place to manage your property from afar.

• Hosteeva: Hosteeva has a team that has visited every continent in the world. Their goal is to give your guests the experience that all locals would want depending on which part of the world your property is in. They believe in pushing beyond your local horizons to manage a property somewhere else in the world, and they are there to help you.
• JetStream: JetStream is an all-in-one platform that provides owners and property managers the opportunity to expand their revenue in the short-term and flexible rental market. They combine their marketing expertise with distribution technology to get you the best global distribution no matter where in the world your property is located.

Direct bookings are reservations that guests can confirm directly with the hotel or rental management, instead of via third-party apps.

Direct booking software means you can eliminate intermediaries, build rapport with guests, offer better prices, and even improve brand awareness.

• Boostly: Boostly believes that the more direct the booking, the more control the renter has in their guest’s stay and experience. More than 2000 vacation rental brands use Boostly to build their own direct booking websites – you could too.
• Uplisting: Manage your short-term rentals and bookings through one easy-to-use platform like Uplisting. They offer reliable channel management, access to direct bookings, and guest messaging. They post your listing across the top booking sites, help you build your own direct booking engine, and empower you to add more and more listings through their time-saving automation.

Answer your guest’s questions before they even ask them through app-based versions of welcome books and guidebooks.

What are the top restaurants in Burlington? The best family-friendly activities in Sacramento? Where can they find the thermostat? How do they connect to the Wi-Fi? Stay ahead of these topics by providing information the moment they begin their stay–or before. 

Guidebook software makes it easy to add, update, and remove any information pertinent to a guest’s stay.

• Touch Stay: Touch Stay allows you to provide a Digital Welcome Book to give to your guests. It allows you to answer your guest’s questions easily and in a way that works for them. The platform saves the data from the questions your past guests had to provide the same information for your future guests. This is how you get rave 5-star reviews.
• RueBaRue: RueBaRue helps reduce repetitive calls and questions from guests while driving more revenue. They offer digital guestbooks, text messaging, smart lock automation, and much more.

Guest screening platforms help you track guests who have consistently broken house rules or caused damage to homes to avoid booking them to stay with you.

This software helps you book guests that are best suited for your rental properties. This helps preempt issues with guests and keeps your property safe. 

• Autohost: Autohost protects professional property managers using ethical guest screening. Manual guest screening can leave a large margin for error which can affect reputations and hinder growth. They use intelligent guest screening that includes AI and hundreds of data points to help predict the relative risk level of a reservation.
• Superhog: Superhog guarantees less damage, safer bookings, and pain-free integration with their intelligent short-term rental guest screening software.

Acquisition software in the short-term rental space helps investors find, operate, and sell their vacation rental portfolios. They provide revenue estimates, market data, unwritten on-market property listings, and even full-service property management.

Investors and property owners can both take advantage of acquisition software to grow their short-term rental portfolio.

• Vintory: Vintory helps build your rental portfolio by introducing to you new properties and regions of interest. They help you capture more leads on optimal housing and provide support when closing deals on new properties. All the while growing your revenue to ensure a consistent rental income to maintain your properties.
• Rabbu: Rabbu offers an all-in-one platform to find, manage or sell your short-term rental. It provides the tools to find and analyze high-performing short-term rental investments. This allows you to maximize revenue and returns on your investments.
• Nectar: Nectar is also applicable here. It helps you access fast, flexible financing needed to scale your rental portfolio.

Ranking and review software tools aggregate and analyze reviews to help property managers and owners to manage all their reviews. They can automatically collect reviews, request reviews, optimize listings, and more.

Ranking and review software help improve credibility and the number of direct bookings. Improving the number and quality of reviews you receive boosts guest trust and the number of bookings.

• Rankbreeze: Rankbreeze helps optimize your listing’s language and description while adjusting your pricing to best fit the property. This helps you track and improve your overall search rankings, and the reviews you receive from your guests at check-out.
• Revyoos: Revyoos provides software to authenticate your reviews so your future guests know they can trust them. This increases your Trust & Credibility by displaying only verified reviews from genuine sources.

Regulations and certifications are the mandatory minimum requirements to operate a short-term rental business. These differ depending on where you live, so it’s always important to confirm local government requirements.

Certain certifications improve customer trust and help your properties improve their booking rates. Regulation support ensures that you, as the property owner, are doing everything necessary to follow established guidelines, and certify the safety of your guests.

 I-PRAC: I-PRAC is a global trust accreditation and certification in 28 countries verifying short-term rental owners as legitimate, trustworthy, and professional. With their logo, guests can have complete trust in their booking and payment guarantees.

You never know what will happen to your rental property, which is why having it insured is essential. Using tools to gauge what types of insurance are necessary with your rental is also helpful in saving time and making sure you’re not insuring unnecessary aspects.

• Safely: Safely offers comprehensive guest screening, short-term insurance, and Airbnb & VRBO coverage. Not only does Safely offer coverage for their property managers but also their guests through vacation insurance to ensure their safety while staying on your property. They work with many of the top Property Management Systems which makes coverage fast and seamless.
• Proper Insurance: Proper Insurance has over 50,000 policies written in all 50 states. They use expert vacation rental underwriters to tailor policy-specific coverage for your short-term rental property. Short-term rentals do not fit into one insurance category, which is why they help create individualized insurance plans for each of their customers.
• Insuraguest: Insuraguest helps you recover quickly when damage occurs. They work seamlessly through any claim, ensuring you save money and know the exact repair and replacement amounts needed for any situation.
• Red Sky: Red Sky caters solely to professionally managed vacation rental management companies. Providing coverage exclusively to the vacation rental industry in coastal, lake, ski, and mountain destinations, this platform helps vacation rental managers weather the storm of unforeseen disruptions to their guests’ vacations. 
• Rental Guardian: Rental Guardian offers protection for renters, travelers, students, corporate travelers, property managers, and more. It provides integrated travel and damage protection with automated reporting, electronic invoicing, online claims processing, advanced coverage, and supports increased profitability. 

This list was long–but for good reason. To really excel in the hospitality and short-term rental space, your team needs to use–and be good at–all or the majority of these software types. This category map is a great way to determine what software you might be missing from your tech stack that can improve efficiencies and overall profit. 

No matter what tools you choose, don’t forget to lock Wheelhouse in for your revenue management needs.  

With market insights, competition data monitoring, an adaptable pricing tool, and ultimate customization capabilities, Wheelhouse offers the most comprehensive, data-driven recommendations with abundant customization options. 

If you’re ready to price your listings with precision and confidence, contact us and take your short-term rental business to the next level!