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The short term rental market is ever-evolving. New competitors continue to pursue its promise of superior return on investment (ROI), as the popularity of alternative rentals gains further traction around the globe. For property managers, the sector’s success is sometimes bittersweet because increased demand is only a benefit for those who are able to capture it.
Capturing market demand is becoming more and more difficult as property managers are now competing with record levels of newly available properties. That’s why we developed our booking data tool, DemandIQ®, to support those looking to boost their revenue for a healthy and scalable short term rental business.
What is DemandIQ®?
DemandIQ® is the lodging industry’s first tech-powered product that captures true, real-time, and forward-looking traveler demand data. The tool enables property managers to realize the full unconstrained potential of their short term rentals, by helping them understand what people are shopping for versus isolated conversion data.
Currently, there are no other products in the short term rental space providing true demand data. So, to date, the industry has relied on booking analysis to reflect guest demand. But, with DemandIQ®, property managers can capture everything from the searches that didn’t lead to a rental booking to the market-level demand that failed to make it to their website.
How to Use DemandIQ® to Boost Short Term Rental Bookings
DemandIQ® is built into the Key Data Dashboard, so property managers can easily access and view its data alongside all the other property, destination, and market data they track for their business. It consists of three dashboards which each provide a different set of insights.
- The Top Queries Dashboard (queries referring to any available search that happens on your website) tracks key performance indicators (KPIs), including the average length of stay (ALOS), arrival date, bedrooms, sleeps, number of results, and filters used. Property managers can filter these tables for online activity dates, meaning that, at a glance, they can pinpoint where and when potential guests are using their website.
Other valuable uses of these filters include checking if minimum length of stay rules are hindering conversions by comparing top arrival dates with ALOS data and identifying if zero results (no available listings for a website search) are leading potential bookers to a competitor’s website.
- The Quotes Dashboard (referring to the number of times a property has been quoted) enables property managers to filter data by specific properties, the total number of nights, ALOS, and average daily rates (ADR). These insights help managers identify conversion issues, for example, when demand is high but bookings aren’t being made. It allows them to then assess if rates are too high, if the minimum length of stay needs adjusting, what additional amenities guests are seeking, and if the rental needs an overall update. In a nutshell, this data can help property managers fix what may be turning guests away from their short term rentals.
- The Technology & Feeder Markets Dashboard shows insights into the type of device website visitors are using and where they are coming from. Property managers can filter the data by arrival date, ALOS, metro area, and device type. With these tables, managers can identify which areas are showing the highest demand for certain dates, allowing them to create geo-targeted marketing campaigns.
Once property managers have stacked filters to get to a specific insight, these filtered versions of the dashboards can be easily shared for cross-team collaboration.
The Benefits of DemandIQ®
- Capture and analyze every single query that’s happening across your booking website for refined marketing, revenue management, and owner communication strategies.
- DemandIQ® highlights any caveats to your listings that are reducing conversion rates, such as minimum length of stay.
- The tool pinpoints when guests are searching, where they’re coming from, and how they’re booking through your website.
- It’s an easy-to-use tool accessible from the same dashboard property managers use to analyze their portfolio's data.
- Gain invaluable insights of the ideal property type and length of stay guests are looking for.
- With better understanding of the customer journey and shopping experience, you’ll be empowered to expand your inventory by making further investments in properties enjoying the highest demand.
- DemandIQ® innovatively encourages the industry to look at booking websites as a search engine, rather than a booking engine.
- Identifies issues in the search process, such as filters that always return zero results or date pickers that allow the selection of a departure date that is before the arrival date, leading to an enhanced booking engine.
What Our Customers Have to Say About DemandIQ®
After its successful rollout in December 2022, DemandIQ® has quickly gained almost 200 active users. We’ve received fantastic feedback from these users, with many property managers having altered their booking strategies to better appeal to traveler demand. Here’s what they have to say about the product:
“This helps us see how our clients are behaving — the ones who visit us, the ones who end up doing searches, the ones who make inquiries, and the ones who actually book.”
“We try to use this as much as we can, and it fills in a very important missing piece of data.”
“About a year ago, when people were getting zero search results on our website, they weren’t even getting a “Sorry, there are no results” message… Now we have moved into messaging them with how they might change their search and provide them with alternative options when exactly what they searched didn’t come up. So we gave our customers tools to continue looking around, and not just navigating away.”
If you’d like to trial our DemandIQ® product, please get in touch with a team member here.