Data Finds a Home in Vacation Rental Marketing

Travel became difficult and distant during Covid-19. But it also got personal. Rental management platform Vacasa has roughly 30,000 vacation properties throughout North America. However, it’s also part of an industry that spent a full year in decline due to the pandemic. According to vacation rental data firm AirDNA, the number of paid nightly stays at vacation homes dropped an average of 21% per quarter from spring 2020 through winter 2021. When the rental market returned this spring—with 46% more properties than the same period last year and a 6% increase over spring 2019—Vacasa approached with caution. “We came back in a very soft way,” said Caleb Donegan, vp of digital at Vacasa. “We weren't telling people they should travel across the country. We were really focused on drive-to destinations and really focused on people that want to work from home in different locations.” Remote Workers Could Soon Rent Office Space at Saks But Vacasa wasn’t quite sure what people were looking for when they visited its website, or whether marketing campaigns were reaching the right travelers. A mix of data and online targeting fixed that, and it may be the solution for vacation rentals in general as the industry prepares for holiday travelers. “Because of Covid-19, all brands across all industries, and very specifically the travel and hospitality industry, were hit pretty badly,” said Katrina Wong, vp of data management tool Segment, which is owned by cloud communication platform Twilio. “Everyone began to double down on digital means to connect with our customers.” The value of information Donegan had used customer data platform Segment at another company before arriving at Vacasa in 2018. That year, he convinced Vacasa to sign on with Segment and use their data to help property owners. Before the pandemic, Vacasa had grown to a nearly $1 billion company and was considering selling share to the public. After Covid-19 scuttled those plans, Vacasa received an unexpected boost from its data partners. In October 2020, Twilio bought Segment for $3.2 billion. That gave Segment users access to consumer data, Twilio’s text marketing service and its SendGrid email marketing. As a result, within the last year Vacasa was able to send out 2.4 million marketing emails (99.1% of which arrived) and 313,000 marketing texts (94.8%) each month. How Covid-19 Has Redefined the Ideal Traveler Of the roughly 500,000 emails Vacasa sent out for each marketing campaign, 21% were opened and 12.25% got people to click through. Vacasa liked seeing that, since folks who open those emails and click through are between 3 and 10 times more likely to book a vacation than those who open, but never click. Vacasa has analyzed and used first-party data about site users’ location, likes and dislikes, as well as their interactions with text, emails and reservation software to get ahead of changing pandemic travel patterns. Jamie Lane, vp of research at AirDNA, observed that travelers staying at short-term rentals this summer preferred destination/resort markets (Great Lakes, national parks, etc.) to cities and rural locations. Demand for those favored markets increased 22.7% this summer from 2020 and 11.8% from 2019. Urban and rural rentals, however, increased 30% from last year but are still 6.7% below pre-pandemic levels. Vacasa's data-driven strength in growing markets helped it merge with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) TPG Pace Solutions this summer and go public with a $4.5 billion valuation. “Most, if not all, of Vacasa’s properties are located in these destination/resort markets, and they have benefited from the large number of guests that have been looking to stay in short-term rentals over the past 18 months,” Lane said. Safety first Lane pointed out that much of the demand for socially distanced short-term rentals came from guests who felt safer there than in more traditional options like hotels. They wanted private kitchens to avoid restaurant mandates that varied by location, and they wanted a far-off place for when they were unable or unwilling to travel overseas. Segment provided Vacasa that data, and the company turned it into specialized promotions like its lakefront campaign. Forget Business or Leisure: It’s All About Essential Travelers Segment located four lakefront vacation rentals within 300 miles of where a user lived, ranking them based on distance from the guest to the house, the home to the lake, and reviews of the listing. Vacasa not only personalized the lakefront offerings, but had its marketing team share homes and target dates with low levels of expected bookings. Segment data let Vacasa’s team know when to send promotional and follow-up emails, and when to notify users that the price of a viewed rental property had dropped. “What we're really trying to understand, what we're really trying to do right, is offer a personalized experience,” Vacasa’s Donegan said. “What we don't want is for a guest or an owner to come back a bunch of different times and have us give them either the same experience or another poor experience.” By tracking customer behavior from text messages to email opens to site reservations, Vacasa and Twilio figured out when and how customers were returning to vacations. They knew how far they were willing to travel during the pandemic, what level of cleaning they were expecting from property owners, and how much flexibility they expected from Vacasa’s cancellation and credit system. Through all of that information, Covid-19’s effect on Vacasa’s day-to-day business was evident. Vacasa began regularly testing its app and website, tweaking its availability calendar, virtual tours, property photos and browser data as a result. While that’s helped tailor Vacasa’s platform and marketing to individual renters, it’s also helped property owners stay on top of customer reviews and gaps in their booking schedules. “They've been able to use our building blocks to not just run generic campaigns,” Twilio’s Wong said. “If you were to run campaigns off of a generic marketing automation platform, you're not going to be able to build tight segmentation and hyper-personalize your campaigns. They've been able to do that, because they've been able to build audiences.” A River Runs Through It: Small Cruises Are Back—But Pandemic Challenges Complicate Resurgence

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Data Finds a Home in Vacation Rental Marketing

Vacasa and Twilio teamed up to help property owners woo travelers during the pandemic

Jason Notte

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Jason Notte