There’s a lot of new tech out there on the short-term rental market. In fact, if you have a problem, there’s probably a platform or a resource or an app to help you out. That’s why there was a crowded market of 20 entrants to the 3^rd VR Tech Competition sponsored by Rentals United. Three were chosen by three different juries with the finalists selected by popular vote at the Vacation Rental World Summit in Como next month, where a winner will be chosen.

The finalists join me on the podcast to talk about their businesses, what their product and service does and how it will help guests, owners and property managers.

Ben Smith from Check-in Scan explains the necessity for reducing the time it takes for a property owner or manager to collect the information that is required by law in many places in Europe. Having been through a manual process in Florence two years ago, while we waited for the owners representative to take down all our passport details, I recognize that this is a huge time saver for both guest and owner. And, when you are in a city for maybe a couple of days only, that time is valuable….spent counting how many statues of David there actually are in the city!

We met Michael Dreidger in a previous episode talking about Operto, so this was a good opportunity to catch up and get a summarised perspective of the home automation platform that covers so much more than just access or noise levels.

Finally, Alex Soria from Cohosting describes how guests can book a variety of services and tours recommended by their hosts, directly from an app. I would have appreciated this in
Barcelona a few years ago to help organize a transfer from the airport to my accommodation, and this is precisely the type of issue the app was designed to resolve.

You can hear from each of these innovators as they explain:

• What got them into the vacation rental space
• What the product or service does?
• The problem it was designed to alleviate?
• How sit help guests and owners/property managers?
• What winning the award would mean to them and their businesses?

Links in this episode:

Operto

Check-in Scan

Cohosting

Book of the Week:

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

By Gary Keller (founder of Keller Williams real estate)

This is more than another time management book (and I have plenty of them). It is more of a way of looking at priorities and focusing a simple question for each of them, ‘What is the one thing I could do to…….

• hit my goals
• make my business more competitive
• make us more profitable…………

Those are just a few of the many examples in the book that gets you thinking outside the box of to-do lists and TM apps.

Resource of the Week:

This week’s recommended resource is Text Expander.

I’ve been using this on my Mac for years and after the initial set-up of creating snippets of custom text, it cuts so much time from your email creation. Try it out free for 30 days then if you like it, it’s only $3.33 per month when paid annually. That is a very small investment of money for saving so much time over the course of a year.