Guest comments are critical to any successful vacation rental

If you are managing your own vacation rental or have a management company running your rental home, electronic dialogue is becoming the norm when renting out your property.  In some cases your home is being rented without any telephone dialogue at all.  Statistics show guests younger than 35 are more apt to choose their property without ANY verbal dialogue.  So how are guests booking without telephone dialogue?  Pictures, great descriptions, and yes, they are using guest reviews.  Tripadvisor, I go u go, and several other websites are making their mark by providing travel reviews.  Heck, just about any good on-line retail store offers some type of review.  We use reviews to aide us in buying everything from digital cameras to automobiles.  Now vacation rentals have an independent free source to provide feedback on your vacation rental.  I just signed our management company up with Flipkey.com.  They offer an independent option for guests to write reviews about their vacation rental experiences.  Sure, it's a little scary not to have complete control over the reviews that will be posted.  I find it even scarier that potential guests may be moving on to other vacation rental homes that have reviews.  Flipkey allows the property management or owner to offer their side of the story as well as rebuttals.  They work from an email list provided by the property owner of past guests and email a standard request to the past guest to fill out a quick review of the property.  So, if you own a vacation rental and do not have guest reviews on your website, take a look at Flipkey.com.  It is early in the process for Island Real Estate of Anna Maria Island, inc. but so far so good.  In addition, if you would like to review how Flipkey is going for our vacation rentals visit our website where we will shortly have the Flipkey link to properties that have been reviewed within our inventory.