As promised in our BookingSync & Zapier partnership announcement, we keep creating ready for use Zaps for vacation rental owners and managers, helping you save time everyday.

These 4 new Zaps -connections in-between apps- have been especially created for you by our teams. These connections are source filtered -meaning, one filter for each booking platform has been set up.

These Zaps allow you to send a text message each time a confirmed booking comes from a particular channel such as Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway and TripAdvisor. Of course, you can also create Zaps or connections by yourself but we wanted to save you some time by letting you access ready for use connection patterns.

Here are the Zaps we created:

• Get notified of new BookingSync TripAdvisor bookings with Twilio text messages

• Get notified of new BookingSync Booking.com bookings with Twilio text messages

• Get notified of new BookingSync Airbnb bookings with Twilio text messages

• Get notified of new BookingSync HomeAway bookings with Twilio text messages

Each one of them can be activated on your account in just one click and is also customisable, following your needs. What better way to contextualise and adapt your communication, depending on the channels used?

We’ll set up new source filtered Zaps as soon as possible. In the meantime, which ones would you like us to create? Tell us in the comments!

Irma, Jose, Maria… During the past few days, the West Indian populations have faced some of the strongest hurricanes in the recorded history. Time for reconstruction has now begun, as some of the regions that have been affected were “95% destroyed”.

Facing property damage, a devastated plant and wildlife but also human casualties: the BookingSync team wants to show solidarity with the victims of these disasters and their families.

We’re also feeling directly concerned by this catastrophe, as several of our customers have been affected.

How can you help the victims?

Material, human or financial donations can be sent to several organisations and associations, such as:

• The Red Cross

• The UNICEF

• Canada Helps

• Oxfam

If you wish to donate, especially if you would like to make a financial donation, we advise you to do so to well-known and trustworthy associations or organisations, in order to avoid any charity scam.

The BookingSync team is happy to announce the BookingSync app is now officially available on Zapier, and allows you to connect to more than 750 apps!

We're proud to be the first vacation rental software to be publicly available on Zapier to all our present and future clients.

But first, let's explain a bit what it means for you:

What’s Zapier?

To put it simply, Zapier allows you to send information in between web apps and create automatic processes, so that you can save time.

Gmail, Mailchimp, Facebook, Evernote, ToDoist, Quickbooks and now BookingSync, are so many apps you can interconnect thanks to Zapier, among a total of 750 apps available!

Why using BookingSync & Zapier?

Here are some ideas of tasks you’ll love stop doing everyday:

• Sending a receipt with Quickbooks, Xero, Freshbooks etc., once the balance has been paid

• Updating your Mailchimp newsletter subscribers with each new client

• Collecting your travelers arrival time with Typeform and updating the booking

• Sending your travelers a reminder text message with Twilio 24 hours before their arrival

Those connections created between apps are called Zaps.

How does it work?

Enter your BookingSync account, click on Apps > Visit the App Center where you can find the Zapier app that you can activate.

Back in your active apps, you’ll be invited to identify yourself or create a new Zapier account when clicking on the app.

You can find a selection of pre-established apps that can be activated in 1 click on our dedicated page: https://zapier.com/zapbook/bookingsync/

Have any other Zap ideas that could be added to this list? Share them in the comments below and we'll be more than happy to create them for you!

Some ready-to-use Zaps:

Organize your contacts

Simplify your billing

Work better with your team

Improve your daily work

It’s now official: the 2024 Olympics will be taking place in Paris!

Whether you supported this decision or not, it is now definitive: France will dedicate those next years to organising the greatest sports event in the world, in terms of attendance and prestige.

How can this event become an opportunity for the professionals? How can the vacation rental managers and owners prepare for this major meeting?

1. Rental investment & the Olympics: a good idea?

This may be surprising, but organising the Olympics doesn’t necessarily implies a rise in the flow of tourists.

In Rio in 2016, around 500.000 tourists* visited the Brazilian cultural capital whereas in 2012, during the London Olympics, more than 7 million visitors had entered the city for this event… Showing a 30% decrease in the visits**, during the two weeks of the Olympic Games.

Succeeding in targeting and calibrating investments for the upcoming games is a real concern.

Jacques Lavie, founder of BnbLord, thinks “no investment should be done for a one-time event. A property is paid off over several years, always aim to invest on a long-term strategy.”

However, “during the said timeframe, this can have a great impact on the prices, and it shouldn’t be underestimated. During the Rio Olympics, some of the Brazilian cities had been fast-tracked to the most expensive cities on Airbnb. Never risk missing the right pricing.”

Jacques also says: “I advise owners to watch how hotel prices will evolve in their neighborhood during that period, as this is a good indicator. They’ve engaged a price optimisation strategy for a long time now, in the manner of the airline industry. Additionally, you should also know the price evolution scale on Airbnb is wider. For example, if a hotel increases by 50% its prices, yours should then be risen by 75-100% for a nearby vacation rental”.

In his open letter to the French President Emmanuel Macron (letter in French only), Brian Chesky, co-founder of Airbnb, calls out to the public administration and encourages the French government to materialise the #MadeForSharing motto by promoting vacation rental in particular, so that anyone could enjoy the games.

2. How to prepare your vacation rental for the Olympics

The idea is then to adapt and prepare your housing, rather than investing for the Olympic Games themselves.

Here are a few tips for your vacation rentals, to benefit the most from the Olympics:

• Start setting up 1 or 2 years ahead and study cities in which trials will be taking place, especially if you own properties in those areas (such as Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux…)

• Adapt your workforce and be ready to face the tourist flow

• Manage your bookings, messages, payments and listings thanks to a vacation rental software, especially if you manage or own several properties

• Adapt your pricing, using dedicated tools such as Wheelhouse, PriceLabs or Beyond Pricing

• Have little attentions for your sports fan guests: provide an Olympic trials calendar and detailed map, add a few beers in the fridge to welcome them, not forgetting a flat-screen tv for them to enjoy the event, in case they can’t physically attend the games

Any other tips you would like to share? Add them to the comments, and we’ll add them to this article!

*http://www.tourmag.com/Bresil-les-Jeux-Olympiques-ont-booste-la-frequentation-touristique_a82444.html

**http://lexpansion.lexpress.fr/diaporama/diapo-photo/actualite-economique/jo-2012-le-bilan-en-10-chiffres_1491067.html#photo-1

As tourist exchanges are getting global, is it still possible for big cities to preserve their social fabric?

We, at BookingSync, think this is a major concern: how can the vacation rental industry favour the community?

A few examples on how to work with the community

An recent article posted by the Tourism Intelligence Network in Canada (link in French) highlighted several ways and solutions helping local and national social actions that had been set up by several tourism operators:

• Collecting clothes that had been left behind by clients, donating bed-linens, blankets, pillows and soap to those who need it most

• Providing financial support to several local and national associations

• Donating a certain percentage of the revenue to charitable organisations

• Offering discounts when people are socially active in the community or work voluntarily

• ...

BookingSync in the community

In 2015, Sébastien, our CEO and co-founder, went to Panama to visit Esperanza, an association working on rehabilitating former gang members. This marked the first step of our social and humanitarian engagement, and we’re still working today on creating new partnerships with local and international associations… Stay tuned for more information, soon on our blog!

We’ve also had the opportunity to organise an Ember Thalassa on three occasions, especially set up for the Ember developers. Ember is an open source javascript framework, aiming to develop ambitious apps. It’s being used in many companies such as Apple, Netflix, Linkedin, Nest, Zendesk… or even BookingSync!

Worldwide freelance developers or employees work on their free time to enable this framework to exist and we decided to thank them for this personal investment by offering them two villas for an entire week. The 4th edition of our now famous Ember Thalassa is on its way!

We see the vacation rental industry as a wonderful way to help people from everywhere meet, share and get to know each other: what if it also helped build, or even strengthen that link at a local and social scale?

What about you, have you set up such actions for your rental business too?