What happens when a guest loses the key to your vacation rental? Are you on call, 24-hours a day, to provide a spare? Do you have an employee waiting in the wings to handle these situations? If you’re serious about your business, the answer is yes.
But if you’re really serious about running the tightest and safest ship possible—for yourself, your employees and your guests—you’ll replace all the keyed locks at your properties with smart locks immediately. Guaranteed: The benefits of keyless entry will be nothing short of transformative for your vacation rental business. Here’s why.
Traditional Keys Are Costly, Time-Consuming and Dangerous
For hundreds of years, we’ve relied on keys to shutter and lock our residences. Hotel and vacation rental owners have used keys, and each business has a different strategy to mitigate the fact that keys are vulnerable to being lost, broken, stolen, shared and copied.
For hotels with 24-hour concierge service, it’s easier to manage physical keys—because there’s always someone available to provide guests with a replacement after they lose them—usually in the form of an electronic keycard. Yet, the situation is different for vacation rental owners who don’t have 24-hour staff sitting at the entrance to their properties.
Here’s why locks with traditional keys are particularly unsuitable for vacation rentals:
- Traditional keys are time-consuming and costly: When a guest loses the keys to your vacation rental—or when someone steals them—you or your employees will have to provide replacement keys at any hour of the day. This limits your freedom and time as a business owner, and if you have an employee on call, that’s a considerable expense. Of course, you’ll also have to meet guests in person to provide a key when they arrive and take the key when they leave.
- You’ll never know for sure if your guests and properties safe: With traditional keys, you’ll never know for sure that your previous guest didn’t make a copy. And it’s not practical to constantly rekey your locks. Therefore, there’s always the risk that a criminal could use a copy of your key to break into your vacation rental, live in it when no one is there, steal from guests, or worse, assault them. Also, if something happens at your property, you’ll suspect anyone and everyone who has a copy of the key: Maintenance people, cleaning staff, management staff, et al.
Ultimately, the threat of property-related crime at your vacation rental is a real and present danger. According to the FBI, more than 7.6 million property crime offenses were committed in 2017 in the U.S. Don’t let your properties and guests become a part of these statistics. One of the easiest ways to reduce these threats—and save an enormous amount of time, money and hassle—is to ditch keys in favor of a keyless, smart-lock system.
Keyless Smart Locks Offer Convenience, Safety and Cost-Savings to Vacation Rental Managers and Owners
We’ve addressed some of the setbacks, hassles, costs and safety risks associated with traditional keys for vacation rentals. Now let’s look at the benefits of going “keyless” with a keypad-based, smart locking mechanism at your properties:
- Control access remotely: Imagine you didn’t have to physically meet your vacation rental guests at the property anymore and could offer direct-to-home check-ins. With a keyless remote-operated, digital keypad lock, you can use email or text to send the access code to your guests, repair people, cleaning staff and others who need to access your property. Plus, immediately after they leave, their temporary access code will automatically deactivate..
- Save valuable time and money: Smart locks reduce a significant amount of the time burden associated with managing your properties. Key management, the check-in process, easy access to cleaning staff, vendors and repair people—none of tasks require you or your staff to be present anymore. That frees your team to handle more pressing tasks. It also frees up your pocketbook by reducing your staffing needs and eliminating the cost of constantly replacing physical keys and retooling locks.
- Keep your properties safer: Eliminating physical keys eliminates their vulnerability to being copied, stolen, lost and shared. That means, as soon as someone leaves your property, a new code for the keypad on the smart lock is created, and only the next guest will receive this code. Remotely operated smart locks also allow you to create temporary keycodes for repair people, cleaning staff and others. That way, you can limit their access to very specific times. But, what if there’s an emergency? No problem: Just click a button on any smart device to remotely unlock the door.
Try a Keyless Smart Lock System from PointCentral
Keyless, smart-lock, access control is just one of the many benefits that come with PointCentral’s automated vacation rental solutions. Make sure to visit our website to learn more about our automated smart home technology designed specifically to benefit the vacation rental property industry.
Biography
Fascinated by emerging technologies and the laws and market trends that follow them, Jeremy Hillpot’s background in consumer fraud litigation and technology provides a unique perspective on a vast array of topics including smart technology, investments, startups, cryptocurrencies and the law. Contact Jeremy at legalwritingFINRA.com or jhillpot@legalwritingFINRA.com.
