Did you know that you can create custom email templates on VRBO (HomeAway)?
And thank goodness for them!
VRBO email templates do a great job of streamlining our emails to guests – making our lives as vacation rental owners that much better. 🙂
The amount of time we save by using email templates is pretty significant.
We’re easily saving 5 – 10 minutes with every single email we send.
On top of that, the templates also allow us to maintain a consistent email sequence.
Without the templates, an email sequence would be difficult (if not impossible) to follow, and things would start falling through the cracks.
Both Airbnb and VRBO have email templates but, we find the VRBO email template interface is much easier to use.
In this post, we’ll go over where to find the email templates in VRBO’s menus, and how we do our templates.
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Creating Email Templates On VRBO
VRBO’s email templates are found in the owner’s dashboard.
In the dashboard:
- Click Inbox on the main VRBO menu
- Then Templates on the inbox’s top menu on the right.
Note: VRBO changes their website structure every so often. if these directions aren’t relevant let me know in the comments and I’ll make sure to update them.
Or you can always shoot me a message from the Contact Us page and I can help you out.
You’re now in the Saved Templates section of VRBO / HomeAway.
Saved templates is where all the VRBO email template magic happens. 🙂
If you click the Select Template dropdown, it’ll show you all the saved templates you have on VRBO.
Naming Your VRBO Email Templates
The title of the email template is only visible to you, so you can name it whatever you’d like.
The point of the template title is to make it easy for you to find the template you want to use.
With our templates, we name them similar to what is listed in the email sequence.
The name starts with the sequence number (that way they’re listed in order) followed by a short description.
So our first message thanking the guest for booking with us is titled “1 – Thank you for Booking”
Using that naming convention makes it very easy to find the template you want to send them.
Add Attachments To Your VRBO Email Templates
A great feature you have with VRBO email templates (and not Airbnb) is the ability to add attachments to your templates.
We send a bunch of attachments with our check-in emails, so having the ability to add attachments to the templates helps us a lot.
To add an attachment to your email template click the paperclip icon in the lower left of your template message’s dialog.
That’ll give you the option to upload a new attachment or select an already uploaded attachment.
The VRBO Email Templates We Use
These are the templates that we have created/customized and used.
There are a few other template types on VRBO that aren’t listed below, but we have never really used those.
Dates Available
We customized the default template, and that’s the one we use to respond to guests when responding to an inquiry.
We as have 2 additional Dates Available templates, one that’s a follow up letting them know that their dates are still available and another that asks if they made their final decision.
Unavailable
The Default Unavailable template was customized and we have another template for inquirers that are under age.
General
Request Review
Under Request Review, we have the 3 review request messages from #9 in the email sequence.
What To Do On Other Listing Sites
We prefer VRBO’s template interface over Airbnb’s saved messages (their version of email templates).
So when we need to use a template for a response on another listing site, VRBO is our go to.
We go to VRBO, copy the template text we need and paste it into the response on the other listing site.
It is slower than when we use a template directly on VRBO or Airbnb, but it’s also a whole lot faster than trying to recreate a response from scratch on the other site.
You’re All Set!
If you’d like to setup Airbnb Saved Message (their version of email templates), take a look at this post, How To Create Airbnb Email Templates.
I hope this was helpful. Is there something you do differently with your templates?
Let me know in the comments below!
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