Improve your guests experience with all 5 senses

Sight . Smell . Sound . Taste . Touch

Would you guess that all 5 senses are important to consider when curating a great holiday rental?

When a guest books a Utula property, they are typically booking based purely on visuals. They’re booking because they like the look of the house in the listing photos and the amenities they read about in the listing description. But once they arrive on-site, we want to make sure that all 5 senses are wowed.

Read on for a few tips that you can easily implement into a holiday rental property – or for when you’re hosting guests in your own home.

SIGHT

First impressions are often a deciding factor of whether or not a guest will return to your property. So we try to make sure ours is always a good one. Cleanliness is of course important, but paying extra attention to the details will ensure your guests have a great first impression of your short-term rental home. Open the blinds to let in natural light (or leave a few lights on if you know they’ll be arriving late), neatly arrange the welcome beverages in the fridge, fluff those pillows, and casually but neatly rest that throw blanket over the side of the couch. These are all minimal effort tasks with big impact results!

Fluff those pillows and straighten those books on the nightstand – first impressions are everything!

SOUND

Most people go away for rest and relaxation, so we try to make sure our guests get the best night sleep possible when staying at a Utula property.

One of the easiest ways to add a little sound treatment to any room is to choose carpets over hard flooring. Sound waves thrive by bouncing off of hard surfaces. You can avoid this by installing carpeting. The carpet will absorb sound waves and muffle the overall noise in the room.

If wall-to-wall carpeting is out of the question, you can achieve a similar effect by area rugs with thick rug pads.

This should make a significant difference in the amount of echo present within the rental, and will result in some more satisfied guests. Or another alternative and particularly for family friendly stays is providing a sound machine like this one.

SMELL

There’s nothing that can ruin your stay at a rental home quite like an unpleasant odour can. Keep your guests and their sense of smell happy by making sure to odour-neutralise the space before their arrival. As much as some of us love the smell of freshly cooked bacon, it’s a bit different when you’re smelling someone else’s breakfast from that morning.

Steer clear of strong fragrances that can be found in some room sprays or candles. For both liability and safety reasons, we steer clear from candles all together. Your rental should smell pleasant and clean, but not perfumed. Fresh flowers or eucalyptus is a good idea depending when the turnover is.

Vinegar is an excellent odour-neutraliser, especially when trying to mask cooking smells.

TASTE

Who wouldn’t appreciate a basket of snacks after a long day of traveling? We know we would, especially when travelling with kids.

So we always leave an small assortment of goodies for guests to enjoy when they arrive.

This is another low-effort, high-impact idea and you don’t need to break the bank with this gesture. We typically stock up on a variety of snack-size items - think trail mix, granola bars, chips, cookies. We bulk buy from Costco and leave one or two of each snack type in a basket in the kitchen. We also leave a few drinks in the fridge – a local beer, or sparkling wine if the guest is celebrating a special occasion. Bonus points if you leave things for kids as well! We keep juice boxes, biscuits, fruit snacks and fruit + veggie pouches in stock for when we’re hosting families.

TOUCH

Going back to the importance of a good night’s rest, we make sure to provide quality bed linens at all of our properties.

These microfiber bed sheets seems to get softer after every wash.

In fact we are such big fans that we switched out the sheets at our own home for a set of these instead! We also make sure to have soft blankets stored around the house for cozy-ing up on the couch or for an added layer of warmth for sleeping.