Greetings Owners!

The sun is shining here in The Berkshires, calendars are booked up, and our summer season is in full swing. Lots to do and lots of fun stuff going on over here at BVR — a few notes below about what we've been working on behind the scenes.

Direct Booking Site
Our direct booking site has been live for about a month or so now through the Wander platform. Long story short, we've been learning a lot. It's easy to get a direct site up and running, but having it actually take bookings from real guests is no easy feat. Thing is, guests have a ton of trust in the Airbnb product. They have no problem going to Airbnb, trusting the platform, and tossing them $5k for a booking. Getting potential paying guests to our site is one thing, but convincing them to hand over their hard-earned money to essentially a stranger is a whole different ballgame. We're getting there. We've already started to see some direct bookings come through, so we know the platform is working — it's just going to take some time to really get the ball rolling toward our goal of 20% of our bookings coming through the direct platform this time next year. One more thing to note: there are about a gazillion different things that have to sync up on a per-listing basis from our management software (Hostaway) through the listing software (Wander) to get each listing properly showing on our site. We know that some details inside individual listings are a bit glitchy, and we're actively working on getting those syncing errors fixed.

Owner Stays
At this point most of our calendars are pretty much booked up across the entire portfolio for the summer season. That said, there are still some small gaps here and there. Take advantage of them! The Berkshires are really incredible this time of year, and we hope we get to host you all at your homes this summer. It keeps us on our toes as hosts and helps us keep the quality of each property in good shape — nobody knows a home better than an owner. Reminder that you can create and edit your own owner stays inside Hostaway, link to a how-to article HERE.

Maintenance Updates
Appreciate everyone's patience and understanding as we work through a new system for our maintenance checkups and reporting. At this point we're pretty happy with the touch points we're hitting at the properties and the reports we're sending out. All properties have been gone through before the busy summer season, and it's safe to say that overall the properties are in great shape and ready to go for guests this summer. Now that we're through the bulk of the reporting and the small repairs, we'll be circling back through each report and will be in communication about other improvements and repairs that we suggest to keep things running smoothly.

Communication
Last but not least — especially now as we head into summer and we all get stretched pretty thin over here at Berkshire Vacation Rental — I just ask that you please start any non-urgent communication through email. Listing updates, pricing updates, calendar updates, notes from your last owner stay about things at your house, etc. — all this stuff I can handle better in front of the computer. Texting or calling me with this info just puts me in a position to lose the information before I can actually make the proper adjustments to better serve you or our guests. That said, you all have my number, and if it's urgent, 100% don't be afraid to give me a call or shoot over a text.

And one last thing — if you've got friends or family eyeing a Berkshires trip, send them our way via berkshirevacationrental.com -->  Booking direct is always the best rate, and every direct booking helps us build toward that goal I mentioned up top.

All the best and happy summer,

 - Jaryn