Self-catering accommodation could be the first to open up from 12 April (at the earliest) - giving the sector a headstart on hotels - as families pin their travel hopes on staycation breaks.
Continued uncertainty surrounding foreign travel means that anyone wanting to book a holiday cottage by the sea during the school holidays (Cornwall being the most popular destination) will find it increasingly difficult to secure as demand surges.
A Mintel poll of 2,000 consumers indicated a total of £7.1 billion will be spent on staycations between July and September 2021. With demand high, property investors are eyeing the short-let market as an attractive sector to operate in right now.
However, since the pandemic, many holiday rental guests now want contactless stays, high levels of cleanliness and often hotel-like standards. Property managers and owners have had to respond quickly to these guest needs and have adopted new tech solutions as a result.
These tech trends are helping to enable holiday rentals to be the accommodation of choice for staycations this summer:
1: Operational tech focus
The importance of safety, cleanliness and first appearances when a guest walks into their holiday rental are critical learnings from the past year. Increasingly, the professional holiday let market is turning to operational technology to deliver better housekeeping, maintenance and checks on properties. Platforms like Breezeway look after all those complicated processes.
Jeremy Gall, CEO and Founder, Breezeway, says: “Operators can meet elevated demands by adopting operational tools for better property preparation, deeper client service giving more confidence at booking.”
2: Property automation
The pandemic has increased the demand for teched-up, connected rental properties as people holiday and work away from home. Property managers have been getting into home automation in a big way: smart alarms, temperature control, noise monitoring and smart locks to name but a few. This type of tech, offered by companies like Operto, can create savings and provide valuable, enhanced guest experiences.
Sean Miller, president of Point Central, says that previously “direct to home check-in was not always a feature holiday rentals pushed. With COVID, combining this feature with checkout codes allows holiday rentals to deliver a more convenient and safer experience to guests, while being more operationally efficient themselves.”
3: Tech-enabled business models
Back in 2019, the master lease model was the hot business trend in the short-let market - companies took over the rents of large buildings and turned them into branded hotel-like apartments for short lets. Following the events of last year, new models are emerging whereby property managers and technology companies are now partnering with large asset owners and turning them into tech-enabled, branded lodging options for the short-let market.
Mike Liverton, CEO Jetstream Hospitality Solutions, concludes: "We are increasingly finding that owners of large, multi-unit properties such as blocks of apartments, condos and resort lodgings are looking to access the lucrative holiday rental market in ways that they haven't before. Technology, from operations to distribution is enabling this transformation to happen."
