Have you ever said to yourself “I don’t have time to focus on this right now, maybe later.”? Well, later is here. Especially if you’re determined to improve your skills and learn more about the vacation rental industry.
There are a variety of courses online that cater to particular aspects of building and sustaining a vacation rental business. So we’ve put together a collection of some of the best online courses to gain expertise to boost and improve your vacation rental business. Check out the full list below!
Vacation rental and short term rental courses
These online courses will help you uncover your own maximum potential so you can apply everything you learn to your business.
1. Lodgify Academy
Our goal is to teach you how to build & scale your short-term rental business – from buying your first investment property to managing your vacation rental taxes. We’ll teach you everything you need to know to start and grow a successful vacation rental business!
Topics include:
- All you need to know before buying your property
- How to create the perfect business plan
- Getting your property ready
- All about licensing
- Getting your price and rates right
- Extra tips before welcoming your guests
2. Fully Booked Formula (Vacation Rental Secrets)
Antonio Bortolotti has developed a course to take your business to the next level with his cheat sheets and step-by-step guides.
The course is divided into three modules that focus on:
- Turning inquiries to bookings
- Building your brand
- Making your website stand out.
3. VRMA Courses
The Vacation Rental Management Association (VRMA) has developed a certificate program for managers who aim to improve their industry expertise, improve their skills and achieve a competitive advantage in the professionally-managed vacation rental business. The course is divided into five sections and concludes with a final assessment.
Topics include:
- Business operations
- Business planning and organizational management
- Marketing and promotion
- Guest relations
- Owner relations
4. Vacation Rental Management for Property Managers (California Association of Realtors ®)
One of the courses in the Property Management Certification course focuses on vacation rental management. This four-hour course is intended to give you a basic understanding of the legal problems, principles, tactics, and contracts involved in vacation rental management. They also include useful tools, strategies and to assist even the experienced vacation rental manager.
Topics include:
- Getting started with a vacation rental business
- Licenses and legal requirements for short-term rental managers
- Marketing strategies
- Establish and set-up guest service procedures, from booking to departure
- Implement housekeeping requirements and related procedures
- Documents you need to prepare to run your business
5. The VRU
The Vacation Rental University (VRU) have over 340 free videos and also have a certification course. Their courses for those that are just getting started with their vacation rental business and multi-property managers or owners that are looking to learn more skills and/or train their staff.
Airbnb and listing site management courses
Having your own vacation rental website and accepting direct bookings is important but listing your property on listing sites like Airbnb, Vrbo or HomeAway is just as important to get your brand out there.For that reason, we thought we’d include courses that will help you optimize your profiles on listing sites:
6. STR Profit Academy
Eric Moeller and Jasper Ribbers have built an online course to help people who want to get started in the vacation rental industry by managing short-term rentals. Their course is focused on Airbnb but a lot of their lessons could be applied to direct booking channels.
This course will teach you:
- How to shift from long-term rentals to short-term rentals on Airbnb
- How to manage other peoples properties
- How to build financial, time and location freedom through automation
7. Fully Booked Course
Heidi Miget has developed a free 5-step blueprint course to help vacation rental owners set up and optimize their listings on Airbnb and HomeAway and increase their rental income.
Topics include:
- Which marketing strategies to avoid and implement
- 4-step framework to create a successful marketing plan
- What you should focus on once you start getting bookings
8. Airbnb Secrets
Dany Papineau claims that Airbnb changed his life when he was on the verge of bankruptcy. However, it has been quite a journey to get to where he is and has made costly mistakes along the way. He shares all these lessons about Airbnb hosting on his blog and online course.
His course covers the following topics:
- How to build an irresistible Airbnb listing from scratch
- How to take photos that will get you bookings
- How to maximize profits from day 1
- How to build positive reviews
- How to manage your Airbnb from anywhere in the world
9. The Airbnb Course
Nathan Rice has built a free 3-part video course is filled with useful information to help you optimize your income from numerous Airbnb listings while learning how to use software that will help you automate your listings. He also offers 1-1 coaching sessions, as well as paid Airbnb management courses.
10. Bnb Mastery Program
James Svetec works with students and companies throughout the industry. He helps new and experienced property managers to earn a full-time income managing other people’s short-term rental properties.
It’s more targeted for people that want to start an Airbnb property management business and turn it into a passive income. But he does share his approach to minimizing and eliminating risks, while maximizing potential rewards and achieving results from day one. Plus, it’s free!
11. Mastering Airbnb
Evan was able to get his property to be on the first position on Airbnb when you searched for 3+ guests in San Francisco. He has built this course based on his experience with hours of content so you learn everything you need to skip the painful learning process and start maximizing your profit quickly.
His course will teach you:
- How to land on the first page of search on Airbnb
- How to optimize your Airbnb listing
- How to guarantee 5-star reviews
- How to become a Superhost
Online marketing courses
If you’d like to develop a new skill or renew your new existing skills, marketing online courses are a great way to start. There are a number of online certification courses but we’ve picked the best ones for vacation rental professionals just like you:
12. SEO training (Moz)
We recommend these courses because they cover everything you need to know about SEO basics, keyword research, page optimization and link building. This knowledge will definitely come in handy with your own vacation rental website!
13. Blogging for business (Ahrefs)
Ahrefs covers the SEO techniques to get your website and blog to the top positions on Google. Their main objective is to teach users to grow their blogs past 100k monthly visitors/month and turn them into paying customers.
14. Online Marketing Courses (Google Digital Garage)
Google offers free courses designed to help get started or grow your business with digital marketing. They also have courses related to data and tech and career development. We recommend checking out the course on the “Fundamentals of digital marketing”.
Cat Coquillette discovered how to leverage social media in the right way to reach new audiences with her company and has built a course to share her insights. With this course, she’ll teach you how to strengthen your brand, boost sales and drive more traffic from social media to your vacation rental website.
16. Facebook Blueprint (Facebook)
Ideal for small vacation rental companies, Facebook Blueprint is all you need to learn to leverage your Facebook Business Page and execute effective paid campaigns. The online platform includes self-paced social networking courses and they cover the best practices and key tactics utilized by the biggest companies in the world.
Since Facebook is increasingly becoming a “pay-to-play” website, this is the best way for small companies to make sure their advertising dollar stretches as far as possible.
Topics include:
- Facebook terminology and know-how
- Best practices for Facebook & Instagram posting
- Optimizing Facebook & Instagram advertising
- Creating a quality Facebook page and experience
17. Inbound Certification Course (Hubspot)
Discover the basics of inbound marketing and learn how to apply it to your business. This course covers inbound marketing techniques that range from content creation to social promotion to converting and nurturing potential leads (or guests).
18. Internet Marketing for Smart People (Copyblogger)
This is a free 20-part course that’s delivered directly to your inbox. It covers the strategies Copyblogger has developed over the years to build and market a business online. This course is especially useful for those that are just getting started with online marketing!
19. PPC University (Wordstream)
PPC or pay-per-click marketing seems like a very complicated topic for most vacation rental professionals. However, Wordstream has created a manageable framework of PPC courses to teach everyone the basics of paid search as well as more advanced PPC strategies.
20. STR University
Short Term Rental University was founded as a product of Richard Fertig’s expertise in buying, renovating, selling, and renting real estate properties to share the results of his insights with people that are looking to learn about the industry.
Using platforms like Airbnb and VRBO Richard Fertig has created a real estate empire that produces more than $500k a year to finance his retirement. His course includes all the tips and techniques he has learned along the way.
21. Revenue management course (Transparent)
Transparent, short-term rental data provider, has built a course around vacation rental revenue management to teach owners and property managers to maximize their revenue from their inventories.
We hope you’ve found a course that will help you improve your skills. We also recommend scheduling a call with one of our vacation rental specialists. We’ve analyzed the impact of different markets and how they’re being affected by the “new normal” in the short, medium and long-term. These insights, along with our forecasting methodology, have helped our customers forecast the impact on their business to take corrective action. We can also provide other insights and ideas to help your business.
