October 2024 Webinar: Discover What's New in Escapia

Curious about what's next on the roadmap of exciting new Escapia features, functionality, and releases? Join the Escapia team as we highlight the upcoming changes to our vacation rental property management system and cover how those features will support your business growth in the future. 

A description of the presentation is below:

Introduction

Ryan Hutchings, General Manager at Escapia vacation rental software, opens with the goal of our webinar, which is to keep our Escapia customers informed on our roadmap, recent releases, and a highlight of what's coming next. The agenda covers new features and what's coming soon, as well as a Q&A portion of pre-submitted questions to cover hot topics on upcoming functionality!

It's also worth highlighting the incredible relationship between Expedia Group and Escapia, as Escapia continues its' position as market leader with the support of Expedia Group's ongoing investments. Therea re two main reasons why Expedia Group is committed to making the best vacation rental property management software in the market:

1. When you succeed, Expedia Group succeeds! We all want to create great traveler experiences and raise the bar for professionalism in the vacation rental space. That's why Expedia Group is dedicated to giving professional vacation rental managers the vacation rental PMS you need to thrive.
2. Expedia Group truly values what Escapia brings to the short term rental industry. Escapia is a key player for Expedia, serving as testing ground and standard for excellence in bringing high-quality inventory to travelers and high-quality guests to property managers!

And there's definitely a benefit for the Vrbo and Escapia partnership in customer performance. In fact, when property managers switch from one vacation rental PMS to Escapia, they experience an average 23% increase in booking value on Vrbo⁹! And that's just from switching softwares - no other changes necessary. Pretty amazing, right?

Since we're back by Expedia Group, we can also focus on improving traveler experiences - something you all excel at. Our product roadmap is shaped by your input provided through our Customer Advisory Board, feedback in product, surveys, and beta testing, and we want to give a huge thank you to everyone who shares their feedback. It's what keeps Escapia at the forefront of vacation rental software.

We know the tough competition you're facing, and the vacation rental industry has seen some wild changes in the last several years. But there's a growth for professionally managed vacation rentals. That's why, even as travelers are shopping around more and there's pressure on profit margins, we're enhancing Escapia to help you tackle these challenges.

Our roadmap

Our direct customer feedback and industry trends shape our product roadmap so we can help you face your top business challenges with the rollout of several new features. For example, we designed the new Communications Hub to centralize all guest communication, and we're working to enhance the guest hospitality experience with new guest guides.

We're also committed to improve our Airbnb channel manager integration, as well as providing coaching in-product to optimize performance across all channels, especially Vrbo, to help you deliver those high-quality guests. Finally, we also recognize that operational efficiency is a big focus, and we're developing tools to help teams collaborate better, delegate easier, and streamline communication with housekeeping staff through mobile-friendly interfaces, notification systems, and new functionality!

In addition to addressing these top challenges and releasing new features, we're completely modernizing our software across the board. We're on a mission, inspired by your feedback, to simplify your everyday tasks across the software and to give you an elegant and streamlined user experience, built on the Expedia Group tech stack, and combined with Escapia's over 30 years of expertise. Some areas may be on pause, and some to come in the future, but we're going ot spend some time diving into the details of all the things we're actively working on.

Guest Communications

For communications, we're focusing on two key priorities: improving team collaboration and efficiency through technology, and a better Airbnb integration through EscapiaConnect.

Internal communications is made all the easier with the new notes section in Inbox conversations of the Communications Hub. These notes will allow you to internally communicate with staff and pass along information - they're also time stamped and feature the note writer's name for easier tracking! You're also now able to assign an inbox user to a conversation, which will allow you to easily handle who is responsible for what conversation or alert a team member of something to look after.

You can now go into your reservations and update an email to resend rental agreements, particularly through Airbnb, as well as send out automatically for select channel partners. As we continue to bring you more powerful communication tools, we've also heard that you need a way to be notified of a new message in the inbox so you can provide a timely response.  Bringing you this notification system is what our team is working on providing next!

As we work on delivering our goal of bringing all communications into one place, we know that for many of this includes Airbnb. Now, for EscapiaConnect users, we're improving our status as an Airbnb channel manager by bringing Airbnb messaging into the Communications Hub inbox! From here, you can handle Airbnb guest communication for both inquiries and booked travelers right from the unified inbox. Send a message, and it will go right back into the Airbnb portal, and when a guest responds, you'll be able to see it in the Communications Hub inbox!

Managing teams in the field

We know that in order for your housekeeping staff to be successful, they need access to proper mobile tools to manage their tasks on the go and ultimately communicate unit readiness for your next guests. As of today, Escapia does offer some of the fundamentals necessary ot automate housekeeping task creation, assignment, and more.

However, we've heard from you that you need a more robust mobile solution that allows you to operate on the go from unit to unit. That's why we've prioritized working on a new mobile first housekeeping dashboard in addition to notifications for your housekeeping staff! 

Starting next week, you'll be able to set up notifications for your housekeepers to be notified of tasks they are assigned on the housekeeping dashboard. This dashboard was intentionally designed for you and your housekeeping staff to manage tasks on the go, and will allow staff to start/stop their tasks, change the unit status, review housekeeping notes, or provide notes directly within the task. This is a great spot for you to provide specific instructions for your housekeepers or for housekeepers to communicate any maintenance issues they discovered.

You'll also be able to set up notifications for housekeeping staff by selecting the housekeeping task due. In the case that a last minute booking comes in, your housekeeper will be notified immediately so they do not miss any last minute changes to their schedule! And this is just a start of what we have planned for our housekeeping feature. Let's take a look at some features we're working on.

Early next year, you can expect ot upload photos to an individual task to ensure unit cleanliness by your standards. We'll also be adding the option for captions to photos so your housekeeping staff can provide descriptions, information, or instructions, ultimately allowing for better communication between you and your team!

Guest Guides

Another big effort we've been working on is allowing you to create a digital and PDF guidebook for your guests within Escapia!

Current Escapia users either use our Glad hospitality software (which can be cumbersome to configure/sort/structure), pay for a third party product, or don't use either and can benefit from a new guest feature to save time and redundancy! By bringing hospitality tools inside Escapia, we hope to reduce the time you and your team have to manage multiple systems and help provide your guests with the very best experience.

To save as much time as possible, we wanted to streamline the initial set up work with out of the box guest guide templates. This way, when you start to create these guides, you'll already have recommended categories, subcategories, and templates for information, including relevant tags like Wifi codes, parking instructions and more!

You'll also be able to draft content, structure it, and sort the order of it, similar to a table of contents. After guidebooks have been structured, you'll need to send it! You can simply open up a conversation within the Communications Hub inbox and attach the PDF directly to your conversation. Only the content you created is applied to the given unit booked when pulled in, which will make each guide book unique to each unit and reservation.

You'll also be able to provide company logo and branding to your guest's mobile guest guide, and we'll work on automating the sending through our communication template.

We want to assure, however, that Glad to Have You will stay until we have all the equivalent features provided in Escapia!

Vacation Rental Distribution

At Escapia, we're always trying to improve our vacation rental channel distribution capabilities so you can leverage Escapia's integrations to better your business. We do this by building features that eliminate duplicate information entry, improving calendar availability parity, and surfacing opportunities in product to help optimize your listings.

Our first improvement to our distribution data flow is an enhancement on bedroom configurations - you'll no longer have to reconfigure bedrooms when you distribute a new unit, saving you time and mental load.

We've also heard your frustrations with cancellations not automatically reflecting in Escapia. So, we've released a solution that syncs those cancelled reservations from the channel, in real time, back to Escapia for EscapiaConnect reservations. Your calendar will be updated immediately so it is free to take a new booking!

Another piece of the Escapia distribution puzzle is focusing on helping you perform better on Vrbo. We hear from customers all the time that they prefer Vrbo bookings as they're a higher quality guest, and research backs that up. To more broadly provide Vrbo coaching opportunities, we're developing a feature in Escapia to more easily and quickly surface these suggestions. This will enable us to provide coaching opportunities within Escapia with messages in specific product areas, including the Unit Editor, Reservations, Accouting, and Lodging policies screen that can help increase your bookings on Vrbo.

In addition, to help increase your visibility on Vrbo, we added additional Vrbo location amenities to Escapia, including Mountain, River, Town, and ski-in/ski-out. Having location amenities selected will result in your listings showing up in more searches!

Reporting and analytics

Today's reporting can be fragmented and disjointed. There are reporting tools and information across Escapia, including the Performance Dashboard, custom searches, and in individual menu tabs. We've heard directly from you that the effort of customizing reports can be a lot of manual work occasionally. That's why we're dedicated to saving you that precious time!

We're excited to report on the progress we made from the last webinar. Our flex reservation reporting has an initial list of columns and filters, allowing you to customize what you'd like to see based on filter criteria. We've gathered great feedback from beta customers and we're working across the team to refine and finalize before launch.

For the learning that your business requires the most, we're building robust reporting around business performance and reservations, and we're prioritizing areas in performance insights, reservation related reports, and front desk operations. We're also adjusting our approach to expand from reporting by domains to a more comprehensive end-to-end view.

We're also excited to introduce new Flex Performance Insights, interactive customizations that empower you to select and prioritize metrics most relevant to your needs. You can also do performance comparisons across customized characteristics like occupancy rate for different unit types. So far, beta customers have appreciated the ability to customize reports instantly, add filter options, and share out data. We're also building new graph visualization, and we've made diving deep into data super easy for customers to harness the full power of customization and elevate your productivity like never before.

In closing

We've covered a lot - and that's because we're working on a lot! We're working on improving collaboration and communication both internally and externally for your teams, launching new features to better welcome guests (and get those critical reviews!), and analyze your performance data for even deeper insights.

We would like to make some quick reminders. You can give feedback in product at any time, and our product development team takes our feedback very seriously. It greatly guides our development efforts and roadmap! You can also see new features communicated as they roll out via email, within Escapia, and even on escapia.com/new.

Vrbo and Escapia are part of the same family. We work very closely together every single day to help you succeed, and we're not just software - we are your partners. Full teams on Escapia are prepared to help your business, and as a free offering, we provide personalized one-on-one optimization sessions for Vrbo on your Escapia product!

If you'd like to learn more, or listnen to the questions asked by customers, view the webinar and see our new features in action!