Episode 19 - Happy Thanksgiving! How Gratitude Can Transform Vacation Rental Management

We share a practical case for gratitude as a core operating system in vacation rentals, moving from year-end stress to structured habits that lift guest experience, team morale, and profit. Personal stories, tactical rituals, and tools show how to make gratitude visible and repeatable.

• mindset shift from complaints to gratitude armor
• personal grounding that improves presence at home and work
• defining and rewarding ideal guest behaviors
• thoughtful arrival touches and handwritten thanks
• post-stay emails and specific review requests
• vendor relationships built on fast pay and public praise
• team recognition that rewards awareness and ownership
• systems that reduce friction: PMS, ops tools, smart locks, AI
• using Five Whys to learn from mistakes
• the no complaining rule and accountability wristbands
• seven-day gratitude journal with three daily entries

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Chapters

• 0:10 Setting The Gratitude Agenda
• 1:36 Holiday Stress And Mindset Shift
• 3:16 Gratitude As Armor Against Negativity
• 6:35 Personal Gratitude And Family Moments
• 7:53 Team Stress Across Owners And Guests
• 8:58 A Table Ritual For Recognition
• 9:53 Guest Gratitude And Ideal Behaviors
• 12:05 Thoughtful Touches: Notes, Bread, Water
• 13:46 Praising Proactive Guests And Feedback
• 15:02 Thanking Teams And Vendors Well
• 17:17 Awareness And Ownership In Service
• 19:08 Paying Fast And Recognizing Vendors
• 20:15 Systems, Automation, And Smart Locks
• 22:18 Trusting Owners And Proactive Thanks
• 24:03 Learning From Mistakes With Five Whys

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:10

You're listening to the Vacation Rental team with T and T, the podcast for Vacation Rental Managers and I Vacation Rental Managers. I'm Tim Kaffer. I manage two companies. One in Virginia and one in North Carolina. And I'm one of the two teams.

SPEAKER_00: 0:26

And I'm the other team, Tiffany Edwards, born and raised in a vacation rental business. I help manage our family businesses from P West all the way to Hawaii.

SPEAKER_01: 0:36

In the next 30 minutes, we're going to give you our fees to success in the vacation rental business.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00

You know, I have a lot of plans to give thanks. I have a lot of plans to eat. I have a lot of wines on my list to start consuming. So my book is full.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10

And is travel on your list as well?

SPEAKER_00: 1:14

Yes. This is the in-law year. So I will be going to Tennessee for a true Thanksgiving and essentially some camping.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24

Okay. There you go. Well, I think it's an even trade because my son happens to live just a few miles from your in-laws, and he's coming to see me. So there we go. We'll trade you for my son for Tennessee for this week. But the episode we have is it's entitled Talking About Thanks and Giving Thanks. And I think one of the takeaways I hope you will have today is how a simple mindset can transform your daily grind into pure joy and actually boost your bottom line. Because it is so easy at this time of year, particularly, Tiffany, to think, woe is me. And boy, I've got so much to do and so little time and I don't have money. Tell us about it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:04

You know, it's funny, Tim. I was just having this conversation with several of our teams and really proactively to let them know owners are stressed. Guests are stressed financially. It's just where we are economically. And how it looks for a guest is that they want to come back and they want more money or they have higher standards that they don't feel like are being met. And an owner starting to look at their bottom line and their property taxes are coming in and they're seeing what the end result is of a full year. And our teams are all stressed because they're trying to get a bunch of work in within two weeks with all the holidays into the end of the year. And so it just multiplies over and over, and it becomes more of a mindset of complaining instead of gratitude.

SPEAKER_01: 2:55

Yeah, great point. You know, gratitude is such a powerful tool that all of us can use to great success. As I'm going to jump on my soapbox here for just a minute, negativity can creep into your lives like a thief and a night. It just devours positivity. And we all have it happen. The Irish poet John O'Donohue said negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form. And that's really true. But what I would like to communicate today is that we all have a shield of armor we can use to block that negativity. And it's gratitude. You know, you wake up one morning and you say to yourself, it's not my day. I want you to stop. We all have so much to be grateful for. Not what you want, but what you have. We all have so many substantial blessings. The fact you woke up today is a blessing. The fact you can see, that you can think, that you can reason, that you can walk, those are all blessings. That you can talk and communicate. And any measure of health that you have is a blessing. Not to mention the people you have in your life, whom you love and love you. Your job. And every time we've interviewed somebody, I ask a question during the rapid fire round of give me a skill or talent that you do not currently possess that you wish you had. Can you play a musical instrument? Can you speak a foreign language? That is a blessing and a skill that's unique to you. And I don't even know most of you, but I can give you 50 right now about your lives. So start giving that gratitude. Once you replace those negative thoughts with positive ones, you will have more positive results. So that's how we get this started. And we've broken it up into five segments, if you will, of things you can be grateful for. And the first one is what we personally could be grateful for.

SPEAKER_00: 4:53

Tim, I'm still in awe by all of that. I I I love the idea of wearing armor. And this really came to a head for me in the last week or so because just as we said, everyone's feeling stressed. And between our several businesses, I have felt it more. The workload has been higher. The kids, I have a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old who are very active, but also have started a new school that is extremely rigorous and hours of homework and critical thinking. And it has left me depleted at night. And I have not been very present because of all of the things that are going on in my mind. But a couple weeks ago, I sat down and we actually have started to try to make an effort to sit down together at dinner. And instead of me being resentful of time taken away from me getting back to emails or the dinner taking too long and getting away from homework, I actually sat around and there was a moment that we all just started laughing about something ridiculous that one of the kids had done in the day. And it was a complete mind shift of these moments are so short. And these are what I'll remember. And I am so beyond grateful for my children and our health. But also, my family is unique that they understand this business. I work with my husband. I work with my mother. My brother is also in the vacation rental business. So I'm not alone when I have these conversations or pain points. I actually have someone inside my internal group to have these conversations and talk things through. So I'm very grateful for that.

SPEAKER_01: 6:32

That's great. That's a great personal, grateful uh gratitude uh blessing that we could all think of. So if you're listening to this podcast prior to Thanksgiving, I'll give you one of my professional hacks on this. Started this when my kids were very young, and some of you may do something similar. And so we write everyone's name on a piece of paper at the Thanksgiving table, and we put it in a well, it used to be a cup. It's now more like the size of a bowl because how many people we have at the table, and we pass the bowl around, you pick a piece of paper out of there, and you say why you are grateful for that person. It is powerful.

SPEAKER_00: 7:10

Tim, that would be a great idea to do when you have your strategic planning with your team to put that together for your team as well. I love that idea. And then, you know, to verbalize it, it means so much more when you say it out loud and recognize someone.

SPEAKER_01: 7:26

Comes from the heart. Of course, I immediately think of the time that one of my daughters picked out one of my other daughters' names, and she couldn't think of any reason she was grateful for that person. And how old was she? They were young, they were in their single digits, but it's yeah, that's that's okay. Things have changed. That wasn't exactly what I intended for that. So there's certainly a lot of personal gratitude we can share there. I think another area of segment two, if you will, will be the guest gratitude. Yeah, I hear some of you out there. But you have to be grateful for your guests and show them the gratitude you have for them doing business with you. What do you think makes an ideal guest, by the way?

SPEAKER_00: 8:12

Well, an ideal guest typically is someone who can care for the property, who loves the home as much as we do, who loves our area, who wants to be, I feel like, immersed into the local community, but comes back year over year and is just appreciative. They're there for that vacation and for that respite. And I think that someone who then expresses that gratitude and shares a review, shares our team members that have done something great. I think of that as a partnership. And to me, those are the best type of guests that we can get.

SPEAKER_01: 8:52

You hit on it there. Those ones that show respect and they're communicative, they they leave it clean. That's always good. And do we show or express genuine thanks to them and for them? You know, how can you do that? Well, we've talked before. Do you do personalized welcome notes or small local source gift to show appreciation for them? And then how about post day? You can send an email thanking them or asking for feedback. And you also need to show value that they have made that effort in that review that you mentioned, thanking them for that opportunity and respond to them. These are just easy things, but it falls into this gratitude area.

SPEAKER_00: 9:38

And you know, some one of the things we started doing is putting ourselves in place of the guests. So if they're coming in later at night, what's one of the things they want first and foremost? It's bottled water. Obviously, it's coffee. I think everyone pretty much does that now. But we've also started doing some local baked bread in some of our companies. And so having some breakfast bread available so they have something first thing in the morning and it's local is really great. And that handwritten note is fantastic. And I've just thought of something else, Tim, that makes a great guest and can be looked at differently. I'd love a guest who calls and reports that something may be an issue, but it they don't necessarily need it done right now. They just want to make us aware. And I think sometimes when we get in the hustle and bustle, the team will take that as another thing wrong. But it's actually great to let us know that if we've missed something and we can correct it, and they're not necessarily asking for a discount, but that's when we can also show our gratitude to them as well.

SPEAKER_01: 10:38

Especially those ones that say, you don't have to deal with this right now. Sometimes you're so shocked by that that you may be effusive, your praise. Oh, you are wonderful. You are the best guest I've spoken to in the last week. Oh, so seize those moments. So it was a move on to another area of gratitude. How about your team? Being grateful for your support team, your cleaning staff, your maintenance folks, even your vendors. They have a vital role in making sure that you get those gratitude-filled guests. I was looking at this a moment ago, and I just went to our Google reviews, and uh I looked to see if I could find one there where the guest or maybe a property owner had shown some gratitude. The very first one I came to nailed a point that we've been trying to make, and that is the word awareness. Being aware. You know, you go in the property and you fix the commode, but you didn't notice that the light bulb right above the commode was burned out. You know, that's awareness, being able to take ownership of the situation. And the first review I saw came from one of our property owners, and it said, I am grateful for our maintenance tech, and it says his name. He consistently goes above and beyond on treating our property as if it were his own. His attention to detail and kindness makes such a difference for us. It gives us peace of mind knowing the property is in such capable hands. Wow. That was the first one it came to.

SPEAKER_00: 12:14

That's impressive. I mean, that speaks volumes about that technician. If they're willing to put a review out there, and you know, Tim, one of the things that I'm most grateful for are our preferred vendors. So for us, if an AC is out and I know I can call, we have several companies throughout the different businesses that I know I can call and they will put me to the top of the list. That is invaluable. The same with plumbing. You've got to figure out how you also show appreciation for them because those vendors are in high demand. So if you're in the mindset of we give them this X amount of money, they should be grateful towards us. There's probably another company that can would be willing to take them off of you off your hands. So really understanding that their bills are being paid quickly, right? That your maintenance tech maybe is checking something. So they're not wasting their time checking something and you're giving something valuable for work-wise. And then just again, everyone loves to be recognized. So showing and speaking that gratitude to them, thanking them, and making sure the owners are aware of their support as well is really important.

SPEAKER_01: 13:24

Yeah, I love that. A strong relationship with a vendor, particularly, that shows respect and gratitude both ways, leads to faster services, as you said, and it gives you just such peace of mind that you can call on them when you truly are in a pinch and know that they're gonna come through. I think it's also a great time for me to show mutual appreciation for you in this podcast. I am really grateful of how you handle the content that we deal with every episode and how you hone it and get it on point. And you're doing a great job. Thanks, Stephanie.

SPEAKER_00: 14:01

Well, thanks, Tim, because I would not be able to sit and do the surmix with all of the recordings and the headphones and editing, because what you guys hear is a version of what could have been an um, um, um from me. So if you had had the full list, you'd understand how grateful you are for Tim's mixing skills.

SPEAKER_01: 14:25

Yeah, sometimes we've edited as much as seven minutes out of the podcast to get it down, but not always because of you. I certainly stammer and have issues as well. So is it if we move on to another area of gratitude and thankfulness this week? How about the properties themselves, the assets, and then of course the systems you have that make your business work? What do you think about there?

SPEAKER_00: 14:51

I was thinking about this earlier. And every business that we have, I have a different system that I'm grateful for because it's unique to that area. But for Hawaii, yesterday we were on a call in our revenue management. We've changed things over. And it was a complete change than where we were last year in terms of where we're hitting for occupancy and ADR. We're tracking much better of owner usage and being proactive in that communication and then really lining up where we compete with the marketplace. And we hadn't had the same type of system in place in Hawaii. So I'm super, super grateful for that. And also beyond grateful for locks, smart locks, because I grew up in the industry where I had to check people in and people's keys didn't work, or my grandfather would sit and have to make the keys, grew up in his garage where he'd have to make all those keys. And we actually have two businesses that have a lot uh older historic homes. So they don't have the keyless entry. So I understand now from going and staying there how difficult that is. So I do love my keyless locks as a part of a moment of gratitude for the staff, for the guests, and for myself.

SPEAKER_01: 16:04

Yeah, I'm really grateful for some of our properties, and I'm grateful for those business partners, as I call them, the owners of the properties who make their properties so attractive and approach it in the proper light. But you really hit on it. Systems and automation, where would we be without our software, our property management software, maybe our operation software, our locks, as you said, all that automation. Gosh, Jim and I and ChatGPT, where would I be without that? I will tell you, you would never see a script on our website without that, for sure, because it translates every word we say in about 45 seconds and boom, it's done. So we are really in an age of technology, and I am so grateful for much of that as well.

SPEAKER_00: 16:50

Tim, do you have any special stories of owners that view it more of a business and showing appreciation for them and how you recognize them?

SPEAKER_01: 17:00

Off the cuff, I'd probably not going to be great at this, but I think those owners that when we contact them and ask them to do something, they're almost put off. Like, well, you're the professional. I trust you. Sort of like, you're there, I'm not. Do the best you think is should be done. I love and am so grateful for those owners, as opposed to the ones that go, I've been on the website and I see a work order was just entered 15 minutes ago for a toaster. What's wrong with the toaster? There's a certain balance that you need to have. And certainly those owners keep us on their toes, and I'm grateful for them as well. But the ones who put their trust in our professionalism, I'm especially grateful.

SPEAKER_00: 17:44

So let that be a note to anyone who's listening. For those owners that you don't hear much from because they think you're doing a great job and they don't want to disrupt the boat and they respect everything that you're doing. Reach out, send them a handwritten note at the end of the year thanking them for trusting in you and being a partner in this. And that will be very impactful because a lot of times if we go silent, we kind of forget. And those are the owners that we really need to keep mindful of because those are the ones sometimes we're most appreciative of and don't realize.

SPEAKER_01: 18:16

Well, this process, gratefulness. This is a bit of a stretch, but I'm going to say it anyway. I'm grateful for the mistakes and challenges that we have. When something's not handled properly and there's a refund form that comes through, or however you might handle that, where it's a monetary mistake that you need to make up as the middle person, we actually have a form, and then we added something to that form called the five why form. Five whys. Why did this happen? Well, because of this. Well, why did that happen? Well, because of that. And if you ask the question why five times, you usually get to the root cause of something that probably needed to be changed a long time ago. Like where we keep the keys for this house. Why are we keeping a key for this house? We have electronic locks. You know, those kinds of things don't come out unless a mistake brings it to the surface. So I am grateful for that. It has been invaluable for our improvement on operations.

SPEAKER_00: 19:13

You know, and speaking of mistakes, I actually love when a new team member comes on and makes their first really big mistake. Not something that we can't come back from, but something that was a whoopsie that was just an oversight that we can address very easily and quickly. But you as a business owner, as a team leader, need to really dive in there and understand that it's a training moment and handle it with grace if the situation calls for it. But usually for us, those moments are there was an inspection and we missed one thing, right? And or they purchased something and they didn't return it in time, or they spent too much on a specific appliance or whatever it may be. And they're definitely teaching moments, but it's good to go ahead and have that right at the beginning because to your point, they start to pay attention a little bit more. And if they understand there's some grace where applicable, they feel more of a team member and feel like they're more of a partner in the company.

SPEAKER_01: 20:20

So the next section, turn the tables a little bit. I've told you guys in the past we do an annual planning retreat as a company. And this year we did just that. And we're really focused on a book. And I'll also give you a video that uh you might want to look up as well. The video is Steve Harvey. If you look up on YouTube, Steve Harvey has a video of gratitude. It's about five minutes in length. Do yourself a favor. Watch him. He's amazing. And the book is called The No Complaining Rule by John Gordon. One of those easy hundred-page type books, and it takes you through a story about a person that wasn't grateful, and at the end they were, and the whole team was. And we've implemented that as our rule for the next year. The no complaining rule is in effect at blue. And I actually got wristbands for everybody to wear. It says stay positive, no complaining. So if you see us at Darm next week, come see me. I'll give you a wristband that says no complaining. But at any rate, what I want to do is issue a simple and impactful challenge to you guys. This is in the book. Commit to writing down three things you are genuinely grateful about for your rental business every day. Do that for a week. And the psychological benefits you will have over that week is gonna be more than worth the few minutes it takes to do that. I'm telling you, it works because I did it. It's gonna mean better staff, better you, better guests, better bottom line. I'm telling you, it's going to do that gratitude journal. I think it will be helpful.

SPEAKER_00: 21:58

Tim, that's such a good point, too, because again, it's speaking it out loud, it's writing it down, creates accountability. It's wearing a bracelet. It creates accountability for gratitude within you and then with your team. And just as much as negativity can spread throughout your team, gratitude starts with you and can also spread throughout your team. So it's extremely important to, and I would say if you take anything away today, just try for seven days to write those three things down.

unknown: 22:33

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 22:34

Take a moment, breathe, take a walk, whatever it is you need to do to make sure you put on that shield of positivity. So we covered a lot here on this gratitude episode. We talked about personal gratitude. What are you personally grateful for? I hope the list is long.

SPEAKER_00: 22:53

And then the second, the guest gratitude. We focus a lot on owners. Sometimes we think of guests as being our pain point. Stop that mindset and start being grateful for those guests.

SPEAKER_01: 23:05

The other one we covered was the team that you've surrounded yourself with, and of course, your property owners. Why and how are you grateful for those folks?

SPEAKER_00: 23:15

And then lastly, it is gratitude journal. It is a daily reflection of exactly what you're grateful for and that ongoing process within your business.

SPEAKER_01: 23:26

So your vacation rental key isn't just a key to the door, it's a key to a more fulfilling business life if you show that gratitude. I want to thank the listeners as well. We're grateful for you. I forgot to say that. We are very grateful for all of you listeners that download our podcast every two weeks. We watch the numbers and see what the engagement is. And we are so thankful that you have given us good engagement. It also gives me an opportunity to ask you if you wouldn't mind. We'd be really grateful if you give us a five-star review on your podcast forum. It really helps us reach more people and makes us feel that we're doing the right thing. And if we need to do something different, tell us that too, because we're grateful for the feedback.

SPEAKER_00: 24:10

Absolutely. And if we missed anything, or during this time of your seven days of writing three things, we'd love to hear what you're grateful for in your business. We could also learn from that as well. And after you finish telling us what all you're grateful for, we've got another amazing episode headed your way. Tim, what do we have next?

SPEAKER_01: 24:31

We're going to talk about preparing for the end of the year. We just talked about how you are down in the dumps towards the end of the year. Well, there's still some stuff you got to do, folks, and we're running out of time. So we're going to give you a list of things you need to do now before the end of the year, so you don't regret your decisions over the next 30 days.

SPEAKER_00: 24:50

Yeah, 30 days, and it's 2026. So it's time to buckle up, kids.

SPEAKER_01: 24:56

Until then, so long, everybody.

SPEAKER_00: 24:58

Thank you for listening.