Bathtime! How Your Vacation Rental Bathroom Can Sell Your Property to Guests

I blame hotels for this. Some modern bathrooms look as though they’ve been made for guests who bathe exclusively in asses’ milk or champagne rather than in plain tap water.

But a luxury vacation rental bathroom is now de rigeur in all the best vacation rental properties. Guest expectations are fast changing and it’s moving on down the line. For example, my wife and I are part of a group of 14 people who go away for a long weekend somewhere in the English countryside. It started about 6 years ago when someone suggested the idea of taking over a large barn conversion for the weekend. You may be familiar with barns – the kind of place offering basic amenities normally favoured by serious hikers. We’d have to rough it a bit, share a couple of basic bathrooms etc. but it would be good fun… That was then. The ‘barn’ quickly developed into an annual event which has now mutated into a period country house. The last one had its own library, for heaven’s sake. Now our fellow guests are asking if we can really manage with ‘just’ 5 bathrooms. Can’t we find a place where everyone has an en-suite? Is there a hot tub? See how the expectations have changed.

Guests seeking the ultimate luxury

While I’m sure that not everyone is seeking the ultimate luxury, there is a growing demand for better facilities and, along with the kitchen, the vacation rental bathroom seems to be at the forefront of this wave. Increasingly, we’re seeing traditional bathrooms replaced by wet rooms. Though initially expensive, a wet room seems like a good investment in a vacation rental. It’s easy to clean, shouldn’t require any decorating or much maintenance, but best of all, it can give the ‘wow’ factor suggestive of a luxury lifestyle. Not an essential, of course, but maybe worth considering if your vacation rental bathroom is up for a refresh.

Vogue for an en-suite vacation rental bathroom

The en-suite vacation rental bathroom is another must-have that’s crept into vacation rentals in recent years – at least here in England. It may be that because many of the vacation rentals are in older houses and buildings which traditionally had few bathrooms, owners have had to squeeze in the en-suites wherever they could. Modern purpose-built properties usually have them designed in from day one. Last time my ‘barn’ group rented a large house, my wife and I shared a ‘Jack and Jill’ bathroom with another couple (not at the same time, I hasten to add. It wasn’t that kind of holiday). For those unfamiliar with it, this is a bathroom sited between 2 bedrooms and linked by lockable doors leading off of each bedroom. If there’s limited space in your vacation rental for the en-suite treatment it could be a very good compromise if you’re seeking to improve the vacation rental bathroom situation.

Make the bathroom a feature on your website

If you have made a feature of the vacation rental bathroom (or bathrooms) in your property, do make a feature of it on your home website. It’s worth having good quality photographs taken and posting them on your site – particularly if you’ve just had the work done. There is no limitation on the number of images you can upload to your personal site which is provided to Homes and Rooms subscribers. Also, if you are investing money in bathrooms, use the opportunity to email all past guests with details (and pictures) of the changes to tempt them to make a repeat booking. As a Homes and Rooms subscriber, you have the facility to easily send out professional promotional mailings. It’s a very simple matter to select a mailing list from your guest data and post a professional looking email. You could even use the opportunity to offer a small discount for a return visit. The rule might almost be: you can never have too many bathrooms while often, you may not have enough. People seem to be obsessed with keeping clean on vacation – or is it simply that they have more time for themselves on holiday? Whether you go upscale or not with your vacation rental bathroom, guests will expect it to show the highest standards of cleanliness when they arrive. But then you knew that anyway.