Short Term Rental Tools

Best Short Term Rental Tools Every Host Needs

Owning or managing a short term rental is no easy job. There are many tasks that must be done year-round to upkeep the property, manage your listings, secure bookings and take care of guests both before and after their arrival.

Making a vacation rental run smoothly can be very time-consuming. Luckily, in modern times, there are plenty of tools out there so you take control of all these tasks. Let’s talk about some short term rental tools that can help you with running your business with ease.


Why do you need short term rental tools for your business?

Short term rental tools are of great help when it comes to your vacation rental business. It is possible to run your business without them, but it’ll require a lot more time and effort this way, and time is a valuable resource. Find out how short term rental tools can assist you with pricing, organization, property management, channel management and more!

We’ve prepared a list of tools for your short term rentals that can turn these time-consuming tasks into swift and sweet ones. Let’s see which ones made the cut.

Best short term rental tools for your property

Website tools

Build, run and optimize your website with short term rental website tools. Help your vacation rental get higher website traffic and more direct bookings.

Google Analytics

One of the most well-known tools for analyzing your website performance is Google Analytics. Enter your website’s domain to find metrics such as clicks, visits, users and best-performing content. Google Analytics provides you with the information needed to optimize and improve your website.

google analytics tool

Google Data Studio

Visualize your data with Google Data Studio. You’ll find interactive dashboards and easy-to-understand reports from your website analytics, making your data accessible and understandable for you. Their data-connectors let you import data from Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google BigQuery, Campaign Manager 360, MySQL and more.

Google PageSpeed Insights 

A fast website means more customers, so make sure to check your website’s loading speed on both the desktop and mobile versions. Google PageSpeed Insights offers this information and also suggestions for improvements to make your website run fasters. Websites that rapidly load pages when clicked are less likely to lose customers out of frustration.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Being mobile-friendly is now more important than ever with a majority of the population using their mobile devices for web searches. See if your website passes the test. If it doesn’t, you will be given a list of usability errors to improve.

Segment 

Segment makes it easy to connect all your third-party apps (Google Analytics, MailChimp, etc.) in one place. Collect, clean and activate your customer data with their data toolkit. Everything done in Segment is provided for every team in your business; the ultimate pipeline keeping everyone on the same page.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that focuses on measuring specific user actions and activities to help you improve your product. Learn which of your features are popular, who your users are and how long each type of user sticks around.

SimilarWeb

Get competitive insights into everything happening online with SimilarWeb. They estimate your website or mobile app’s traffic, geography and referral status by pulling data from web sources, so you can know how to improve your digital performance and accelerate your business’s growth.

Website Grader

Enter your website on Website Grader and you will receive grades based on speed, SEO, security and performance and tips for ways to improve your website.

Hotjar

Hotjar lets you dive into behavior analytics for key information on understanding your customers and how they experience and interact with your website. Visualize how your website visitors are interacting with your page with heatmaps, clickmaps and scrollmaps from Hotjar.

Ptengine

A tool with heatmaps and scrollmaps, Ptengine gives you analytics data for your website. It also allows you to compare multiple pages.

Lodgify’s Airbnb Description Generator 

Can’t think of what to write for your Airbnb listing’s description? The Description Generator from Lodgify is here to help with that. Answer the prompted questions about the type of property, location and special features to get a fully generated listing description you can use for your on Airbnb or any other listing site you wish.

Lodgify Airbnb Description Generator

Social media tools

In the age of information and sharing everything online, having a social media presence for your short term rental is a must. Here are some social media platforms along with analysis and management tools to get your short term rental on the map.

Facebook

Probably the most known social network in the world, Facebook needs no introduction. Facebook is an excellent platform to promote your business online. You can set up a free account and Facebook page for your business where you can post updates, content and news on everything related to your business and market.

They allow timed posts for a steady release of content and Facebook Groups to connect with other businesses and individuals like yours.

Twitter

The famous microblogging platform, Twitter, helps promote your content to over 217 million active users worldwide. Write a series of short tweets to gain followers and join the industry conversation. Easily engage with your followers and with industry influencers.

Linkedin

The best platform for professionals to connect with one another is Linkedin. A bit more of a formal environment than the other platforms, making it ideal for sharing information and building a reputation online for your business.

Similar to Facebook, there are short term rental industry groups you join in discussions with like-minded people.

Instagram

Part of the Meta universe along with Facebook, the popular photo-sharing app Instagram is perfect for crafting your business’ brand image.

Social Media

Pinterest

Pinterest is a digital marketing pinboard where you pin your interests. It’s great for driving traffic to your website, especially if you are in the fashion, food and travel-related fields.

Youtube

The most widely used video platform on the internet, Youtube, is great for sharing videos of your rental. Upload short videos of your rental property, interviews with satisfied guests or promotional videos.

Tiktok

Tiktok is a fairly new platform that is especially popular among the younger generations. Join in on the trends with short videos with sounds that play on a loop that show off your short term rental.

Their algorithm can show your video to any of their users around the world that they deem relevant, making the chances of reaching an interested individual higher.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social publishing app that lets you manage all of your social media in one place. Post content and check your notifications from all of your social media.

Tweetdeck

Organize your Twitter feed and activity on Tweetdeck. Maintain a steady stream of tweets and interactions with Twitter scheduling options.

Buffer

Another social media management tool for posts and replies, but Buffer also provides analytics to measure your social media performance as well. Track your growth, reach, engagements and followers to find out what you’re doing right with your social outreach.

Hashtags.org

Hashtags are what make your content discoverable on social media. Discover and track hashtags with Hashtags.org. Find what hashtags you can reach an audience with and gain interactions and boost visibility.

Facebook Audience Insights 

Facebook provides you with insights about your audience and the people on Facebook, making it easier for you to make resonating content and find more people to broaden your reach. Learn about the demographics, interests and lifestyles of your following to help you more accurately cater to your content.

Facebook Insights

Sprout social 

Sprout social offers detailed analytics and reports for your social media accounts. It’s an all-in-one social media management platform to unlock your full potential.

LikeAnalyzer

LikeAnalyzer analyzes and monitors your Facebook pages to see your potential and effectiveness on Facebook. It will evaluate your Facebook page activity and allow you to compare and explore possibilities to gain success on the platform.

Bitly

Have you ever come across a long URL that takes away from the cleanliness on a social media post? Don’t clutter your audience with long links that take away from information and shorten your URLs with Bitly.

Bitly is ideal for sharing links on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin posts.

Yelp

Yelp is a listing site for businesses that creates a local business list to the user’s area. Create a page for your short term rental to gain more local visibility for your business.

SEO tools

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital for your website to gain organic traffic by showing up at the top of the results page.

Google Search Console 

Just by entering in your website URL, Google Search Console gives insights of your website’s performance with detailed analytics to help you manage and improve your vacation rental website’s SEO. The best part about this tool is that it’s completely free.

Google Search Console

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a plugin for WordPress that scans your blog posts for the right keyword density. It makes sure your site meets the highest SEO standards while providing the tools to optimize your content. Before publishing, preview your keywords in the organic search results.

Mozbar

Mozbar is a free Chrome Extension that gives you an instant SEO report for any website you’re on. Check out the domain authority, page authority, number of backlinks and more! A great way to get inspiration for your website or analyze competitors.

Moz Open Site Explorer

Moz Open Site Explorere lets you check your domain authority as well as the number of backlinks, complete with the sources. All you have to do it enter the URL of the website you want data for and you will receive a full analysis for that website.

WooRank

Get an instant website analysis by entering the website domain to start optimizing with WooRank. They’ll even provide you with a list of priority issues to solve.

Quick Sprout

Quick Sprout provides everything you need to start, build and grow your business. They offer various categories of website, marketing, entrepreneurship, blogging and others to cover all aspects of a business. Their free website analyzer in particular helps with SEO. It provides an easy-to-understand layout of data, and also website comparisons with your competition with their Competitive Analysis tool.

On-page OPptimization Tool

Enter any website’s URL for information on keyword optimization, internal and external links, metadata information, header and page checking and source codes.

Siteliner 

Siteliner scans your whole website and provide myriad of information about duplicate content, broken links, skipped pages and related domains.

Moz Local

Improve your local SEO with Moz Local. This tool will check that your name, address and phone number are the same on every platform. Businesses that are consistent in these three aspects will build more trust with search engines and begin to show up higher on the results page for businesses in the area.

Keyword.io

Find the best keywords for your business with Keyword.io. Select the platform you are trying to rank on, then enter your main keyword and finally, select your country to receive a list of keyword suggestions. Find potential keywords to target and create content about for your blog or any piece of writing.

Content & design tools

Creating a great user experience that is visually appealing to grab users attention on your website or any type of media or content created helps to captivate your audience take notice in your short term rental.

Canva

Design is made easy and stylish with Canva. Canva is a solid editing tool that lets people with no design experience create their own social media posts, presentations, ebooks and pamphlets. They offer a variety of templates and pictures that are ready to use for your campaign.

Canva

Pixlr

Pixlr is a photo editing and design platform to resize, add effects, overlays or borders. Start from a blank canvas or choose from one of their many professionally made templates. You can edit from anywhere as their tools are browser, mobile and desktop compatible.

Picmonkey 

This free onlin image editing tool makes it easy to edit, creat and spice up your feed on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and other social media platforms.

Feedly

Feedly is a content creation tool where you receive your own AI research assistant, Leo. All you have to do is tell Leo your interests and preferences, and it will scan the web to find you organized content for you to share with your audience.

Snapseed

Snapseed is an online image editing software you can download. Make your listing stand out with high-quality photos.

Photoshop Express

Use Photoshop Exprress to touch up your pictures. If you don’t feel like doing it yourself, they also offer automatic fixes and filters based on their recommendations. Make your images pop free of charge with this Adobe tool.

Unsplash

Don’t worry about copyright or sourcing when it comes to your image use. Unsplash has a beautiful gallery of free-to-use images for your website or social media. Just type in what you are trying to find, and they will show you everything they have that matches your keyword.

Pexels

Pexels is another great website for finding stock images to complement your written content. As with Unsplash, Pexels is completely free and the images can be used at your leisure.

Wordswag

Add stylized text to your images with Wordswag. Perfect for posting a cute and informative image on Instagram.

Blog Topic Generator

Coming up with new ideas for a blog post can be hard, especially if you have been writing one for a while. Enter a few nouns into Blog Topic Generator, and it will give you a list of blog post ideas for you to get writing.

Blog Post

Portent Idea Generator

Portent’s Idea Generator helps you create catchy and attention-grabbing titles for your blog posts. Just type in your subject line, and let this tool do the rest.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a useful tool that gives you an idea of questions that the public is asking related to your keywords. Discover what your audience is talking about to get ideas for your blog.

Email tools

Communication with your customers is key. Let them know about your content posts, special announcements of your short term rentals and information they need to know when renting your property. No better formal way to communicate than with emails.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most well-known email marketing services. It is an intuitive and cost-effective way to manage and send large amounts of emails, and it also boasts other fantastic features.

MailerLite

Perfect for small businesses, MailerLite provides a free email marketing service for up to 1,000 subscribers. Use one of their templates to create your own email and send it to your followers.

Mailjet

Allowing full automation of emails and a wide choice of templates, Mailjet is the perfect email tool to choose.

Email Marketing

Financial tools

In short, financial short term rental tools help you with money. Whether they are short term rental pricing tools, yield management tools or vacation rental revenue management tools, they help short term rental owners to price their listings, grow their profit, collect revenue and more.

Beyond pricing

Beyond pricing is an automatic and dynamic pricing solution for vacation rental websites. Beyond utilizes real-time market data to give reliable pricing rate suggestions to help you both maximize your profits and your bookings and save you time. It keeps up to date with market trends; with this data, it then actively adjusts your price to align with current demand and competition, making sure that you are always securing bookings at the best possible price. They claim that with the use of their short term rental pricing tool, they can help you earn 10%-40% more!

What’s the catch? This tool is not free to use. Beyond Pricing charges a 1% fee for each booking made during a monthly period which gets charged starting on the day of the month you signed up. If any plans change or guests cancel, they will credit your account, so you only get charged when guests are physically at your property.

PriceLabs

PriceLabs is a dynamic pricing tool for short term rentals. It is available globally, and it works with Airbnb, VRBO and your own vacation rental website. All you have to do is connect your listings to the platform, and they’ll analyze each listing to recommend a daily rate for you. Don’t agree with their recommendation? Feel free to customize the algorithm to fit your pricing strategy.

They keep track of market analytics so you don’t have to. You can even compare your own performance against the market to get a better snapshot of your overall performance at the moment. Be the first to spot market trends to improve your bookings and find an optimized rate. Join the pricing platform that thousands of short term rental owners already use.

Lodgify Rental Income Calculator

Find out how much you’ll make with your short term rental business with Lodgify’s rental income calculator. It can help you find out your current revenue, as well as potential profit. Stay on top of your finances and get ahead in the business with this free tool.

Lodgify Rental Income Calculator

Paypal

Paypal is perhaps the most known and most commonly used financial tool when it comes to sending and receiving money online. Chances are you’re already familiar with this service, but in case you’re not, Paypal makes it easy to request and transfer money directly to your account. This money can then be withdrawn directly to a bank account, or left in your account as credit.

Stripe

Stripe is another gateway for doing online payments. It’s a good alternative to Paypal for managing and collecting payments for your short term rental. Through this tool, you can also send invoices, request a physical or virtual card and manage business finances and spending.

Wave

For all of your simple bookkeeping and payment solutions look no further than Wave. This accounting software is perfect for sending and creating invoices to guests and for keeping track of online payments. Payments can be made in as fast as 2 business days and as little as 1% commission is taken for credit card and bank payments.

Invoicely

Invoicely is an invoicing platform to help you manage your vacation rental business finances. They offer a free plan and other plans that range up to $30. Create invoices, accept online payments, track time and expenses and have all your finances in one place. Invoicely offers dynamically generated reports, monthly and yearly statements, income and expenditure summaries and accounts receivable and payable for your vacation rental to stay on track.

DocuSign

Sign legal documents online with DocuSign. Send and receive signed copies of contracts to guests. DocuSign is secure, legal and straightforward.

Organizational tools

Juggling all of your business needs can feel very overwhelming, and it also leaves room for things to slip your mind. Vacation rental organizational tools make it easy to keep track of everything that goes on in your business by sorting and decluttering your life.

Google Keep

Google Keep is Google’s own note-taking software. It lets you take and organize your notes.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar helps you to keep track of your obligations, appointments and to-dos on all of your devices. If working in teams, each member can view your calendar and easily send requests for meetings. Get notifications of all your events to never forget again.

Google Calendar

Google Drive

Google Drive combines and organizes all of your documents, presentations, spreadsheets and forms in one. It automatically saves for access on each of your devices and also allows for easy sharing with other people.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a dream for people working on the go with the ability to access your files from anywhere with this cloud-based platform. Collaborate with others on documents simultaneously and also suggest edits for your other team members all on the same documents.

Todoist

Todoist is an organizational tool that can be very useful to short term rental owners in need of a place to list their tasks and centralize their workplaces. Not only do they offer a weekly planner, but they also have features such as priority levels, reminders, filters, and email and calendar integrations. If there’s more than one person involved, you can even delegate the responsibility of tasks and projects to others.

The best part about this tool is that its basic plan is completely free. They have pro and business plan options if running your business is a shared task. Those range from $3-$6 per month.

Trello

Running your business is a lot of work, especially for one person, so if you’re working as a team, then you need Trello to successfully coordinate collaborations, manage projects, and reach peak productivity. They offer boards, lists and cards for you to start organizing your short term rental business.

Dropbox

This cloud-based file-sharing tool allows for the easy sending and receiving of documents and photos; use Dropbox to send property photos to inquiring guests and contracts once a booking is secured. Dropbox gives secure access to files and makes it easy to collaborate with guests and team members.

Evernote and Scannable

Evernote is a pretty well-known organizational tool at this point. Use it to organize your digital notes or even save websites for later viewing. They also offer cross-device synchronization, so you can have your notes with you at all times whether they be on your computer, tablet or mobile device.

Now, Evernote even offers document scanning through their app, Scannable. Scan your notes, bills, invoices, contracts and more to digitize your life and reduce time and material waste when it comes to running your vacation rental business. Get rid of the piles of papers lying around your office with Scannable.

Genius Scan

Go paperless with Genius Scan. This organizational tool helps users digitize documents and save them on their Genius Cloud. They offer business-grade export options, batch scanning features and also have an integration with Expensify for accounting needs. No more worrying about misplacing short term rental contracts or invoices, Genius Scan keeps everything in one organized place for you.

Property management tools

Vacation rentals need around-the-clock care and attention to stay in tip-top shape to welcome guests. We know it’s a lot to manage bookings, guests, repairs and services of the property; that’s where vacation rental management tools come in.

Handy

If you’re looking to get cleaning and repairs under control, Handy is the short term property management tool for you. Handy is a digital marketplace that pairs you with professional cleaners, handymen and other home service workers to fit your maintenance needs.

All you have to do is download their app and book someone in a matter of minutes to do that job. They can be booked as early as the next day! All the tools and equipment needed are brought by the workers themselves, so you don’t have to worry about a thing, just make sure you’re around to let them in.

Get your vacation rental ready for guests without having to do any of the cleaning. All the shine without any of the hassle.

Lockitron

Exchanging keys for check in and check out can be unpredictable, especially with delayed flights or heavy traffic. Make your check in and check out easier with Lockitron, a keyless entry system for your vacation rentals where you can unlock doors with the touch on a phone. All you have to do is download the app to lock and unlock your doors as well as  share the virtual key with your guests.

Lockitron offers the Bolt, which uses Bluetooth, the Bridge, that connects over WIFI, and a keypad add on, if you want to physically enter a keycode combination. You can get Lockitron for your short term rental starting at $179.

Smart Lock

Rently Smart Home

Rently Smart Home gives you remote access to lock or unlock your short term rental from your smartphone. You will also receive alerts whenever someone has accessed your property. They also include lighting, door and window motion sensors as well as smart thermostats to secure your short term rental.

Houzz

Make your interior and exterior design dreams come true with Houzz. Houzz provides you with design ideas for all parts of your property, so you can browse and find what decoration style works for you. If you’re feeling a bit stuck creatively, they’ve included over 10 million photos for inspiration.

You can buy directly through their website to do it yourself, or you can also hire professionals to design and install everything in your vacation rental. Bring your project to life

MagicPlan and MagicMeasure

Yes, we know these are two different tools, but they go hand in hand, so we’re grouping them. Together, these two short term organization tools take the pain away of laying out and measuring your vacation rental.

MagicPlan transforms your space into a floor plan; all you have to do is take a picture of your property’s room corners. You can then assemble the rooms together by rearranging them on the app, and then bingo! You have a professional floor plan.

MagicMeasure then magically measures distance based on an object captured in the photo. No tape measures are necessary. This way you can work out what can fit in a space when selecting furniture or decorations for your rental.

Fibaro

Automate your short term rental with Fibaro. They offer several home safety products such as smoke detectors, floor sensors and window and door sensors.

If any of these sensors are triggered, you will receive a notification on your mobile phone, making sure that you are informed of everything that goes on with your rental. This app is a lifesaver when it comes to security and management, especially with multiple properties.

Party Squasher

Party Squasher helps rental property owners stop worrying about guests trashing their property by throwing a party. This tool totals up the number of mobile devices in your rental to let you know if there are more guests than reported. Mobile devices don’t have to be connected to WIFI to be accurately counted.

Channel management tools

The easiest way to keep track of all your listings and avoid double-booking is to use a channel manager. Vacation rental channel management tools synchronize your calendars and connect your listings into one place.

Lodgify

It’s never been easier to create your own website and accept bookings online than with Lodgify. Lodgify is a great vacation rental channel management tool that allows short term rental owners to manage all of their listings in one place. We offer cross-channel synchronization of property information and booking calendars to avoid double bookings to make managing your short term rental business simple.

Lodgify offers website templates that are fully customizable, so there is always an option for you and your brand. Start a 7-day free trial to build your website and see how easy they make getting bookings and staying on top of the vacation rental game. Our Lite plan starts at $0 per month; a true pay as you grow plan.


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