Corona & VRBO – How To Avoid Cancellations

With the coronavirus making its impact on vacation rental businesses everywhere, it’s important to find ways to get by. None of us wants our vacation rental business being a casualty of Corona.

With no idea as to how long its affects will be felt, it makes sense to try and keep as much of your money as you can.

In times like this, cash is king.

What The OTAs Are Saying

Each OTA is handling the corona pandemic differently, but the general message is that hosts should return the full amount back to the guest. Check out the post How VRBO and Airbnb Handled Corona Cancelations to find out how the big sites dealt with corona cancellations.

If the corona cancellations you’re getting are not on Airbnb then you’re in luck. You’ll be in control of how your cancellations are handled.

How We Usually Feel About Cancellations

During normal times, we’ve always had a strict cancellation policy. but these are not normal times.

Now we’ve changed our point of view… for now.

We didn’t feel comfortable keeping our guests’ money if they are unable to fly here.

Since the changes of booking the cancelled dates was slim to none, we decided to keep a flexible cancellation policy.

Now, we understand not every host can do this but we are trying to work with our guests.

We plan on keeping our business after this pandemic and during hard times good intentions go a long way.

Keep in mind, what goes around comes around – both good things and bad. We’d much rather the good things come back around to us. 🙂

How We’re Handling VRBO Corona Cancellations

We decided to give the guest the option of rescheduling their stay using the money they have paid as a credit toward their stay or they can cancel their trip. We let them know that we’d really prefer they reschedule their stay.

So far, all the VRBO guests that asked about cancelling have decided to reschedule their stay instead.

It’s not perfect for us, because we still loose the income from the rescheduled dates. But it allows us to keep the money that they have already paid. If we were to cancel the stay, we’d have to return all the money they already paid.

In this type of scenario we want to hold on to any money we can.

Remember cash is king.

Having those payments in our pockets now is far more important to us then the payments for the later dates they reschedule their stay to.

Things To Keep In Mind When Rescheduling

Give Them A Cut Off Date

Don’t leave it open-ended. The cut off can be either when they need to decide on dates by or when they need to use the dates by.

Either, way there needs to be a cut off date.

It Should Be A Credit

Meaning it’s not a date for date exchange. If they booked off-season dates and choose new dates that are peak season  – they’ll need to pay the difference.

We also told them that we’ll pay them the difference if the new dates are cheaper.

The Details For Moving The Dates

If The Guest Doesn’t Know The New Dates

If your guest doesn’t yet know when they’ll be moving their trip to, you can move the reservation to a date way in the future – like simetime in 2022.

Otherwise

If they already know what dates they want, you can change the reservation dates and everything will work the same as usual. If there’s a difference in pricing you can either give them a refund or send them a payment request for the difference.

I Hope That Helps

It’s not something that everyone will want to do, and it’s not our first choice. But faced with this strange set of circumstances it seemed like the best solution for them not to lose their money and for us to also hold on to existing income.

What’s your take on it? How’re you handling your VRBO Coronavirus cancelations?

Let me know in the comments below!

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