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Communicating by Phone
by Robin Fowler

If you want to find success renting your vacation home, you must be willing to communicate by phone with potential customers.

You might have the nicest vacation rental property around, but you won’t get very far with your rental business if you are not willing to call back interested parties. Not communicating with those who are interested in renting your vacation home for their holiday will not only cost you that rental, but could cost you many more rentals down the line.

In terms of establishing a good reputation for yourself, as well as establishing trust between you and potential customers, a phone call is the best way to go. If you receive an inquiry about your property, and there is a phone number included, use it to call the person rather than sending an email. This proves beneficial for several reasons:

• As I mentioned before, it helps to establish you as a friendly and responsible businessperson.
• Creating a personal connection with customers helps to lessen potential conflicts later on.
• Some things are just better handled voice-to-voice, rather than by email. While you certainly want written documentation of all business transactions, these initial exchanges help create an overall rapport, and give you the opportunity to explain things like fees and policies, and make sure potential customers understand them fully before signing on the dotted line!
• Calling a phone number left on an inquiry is also a good way to weed out potential scams or fraudulent renters.
• While convenient, email often lends itself to misinterpretation and misunderstandings, because tones or attitudes cannot always be effectively conveyed.
• If someone leaves a phone number on an inquiry, chances are they would prefer to be called.

If you are worried about the cost of placing so many phone calls to different locations, there are solutions that can make calling long distance very inexpensive, or even free to you. Services like Skype offer free long distance calling over the Internet. All you need is an account and a headset for your computer! And digital telephone offers very reliable services with great rates on long distance (including international) calls.

When it comes to smart business practices as a vacation rental home owner, retaining and using referral phone numbers is the best way to book customers for your vacation rental home! And with the affordable technologies available today, there is no excuse for not picking up that phone!