Several of us attended a conference in Aspen recently. Continuing on the theme of eating our own dog food, we decided to book a vacation rental home as an alternative to a hotel, and share our experiences about how owners and property managers can make guests feel more secure.

Any time a person travels, they’re filled with anxiety. What time do I need to leave for the airport? How long is the security line going to be? Why do they make me take off my shoes? (As Bruce Schneier says, “It’s a good thing the shoe bomber wasn’t an underwear bomber.”) Will my flight be on time? Will I get stuck on the tarmac? Will there be bad weather? Will they keep my car reservation? How do I get to the place?

With vacation home rentals, travelers add one more really big “Will.” Will the house exist? And if it does, will it be nice?

Unfortunately, I managed to miss my flight and had to take a later one from San Francisco to Denver. So I found myself driving from Denver to Aspen because I had missed my connection. The drive was beautiful, and much better than being stuck in an airport for eight hours, which was my alternative. So you can imagine how I was feeling when I got to the property management office a little after 5:00PM (having planned to be there by noon). But that shouldn’t have been a problem…I had instructions emailed to me that told me where to pick up a packet with the keys and a map if I was going to be late.

As expected, I found the packet in the after-hours drop box with four sets of keys, but unexpectedly, there were no directions to the house. No address either. So I had to track down somebody in the back office to figure out where I was going. OK, it was probably an oversight, but I was lucky someone was still there or else I guess I would have called someone using the number in the confirmation email.

Success. I found the vacation home. It was a small house on a residential street downtown. But as I walked up to it, I realized I had no way of knowing it was the right house. All I had was a key and a hastily scrawled address. What if I got it wrong? They have a lot of guns in Colorado, don’t they?

Of course, it was the right house and I opened the door. But where were the lights? The switch was inconveniently located behind the now open front door. Other lights were scattered around the room. In the dark, I’d have been stumbling around.

I got settled in before the rest of my party. There was nothing welcoming me to the house. I wasn’t expecting flowers and candy, but I figured I’d find an information sheet telling me where everything was and anything I needed to know about using the place. I found nothing. No instructions about garbage, heat, appliances…nothing. I guessed we were on our own.

In the end, it worked out fine. One of the showers needed maintenance, but the other one worked. The beds weren’t great, but they were ok. One of us was scared half to death by a sound on the back porch at 1:30 in the morning, waking up another one, while a third slept through the whole thing. (I was the third).

But this experience led me to some key takeaways:

• Key exchange is critical. The renter should get directions to the house and the keys as early as possible. Keyless entry is probably even better.
• There should be something on the house that the renter can use to identify that it’s the right place. Obviously a big neon “vacancy” sign is going to be frowned on by the neighbors, but some kind of marker would help. Something that occurred to me was putting a symbol on the keychain that matched a symbol on the door, near the lock. Also, if you have a vacation rental home you should make sure your address is clearly visible from the street.
• Think about someone walking into your place at night. Your light switches should be in the obvious places. In fact, all your light switches should be the kind that light up so they’re easier to find, especially if someone is fumbling in the middle of the night, scared half to death.
• Put the rules of the house in an obvious place. I’ve seen a lot of owners put them on the refrigerator. They should detail how the house is expected to be used. They should talk about anything that’s unintuitive about the appliances. They should explain where to put the garbage. There should be some detail about where a renter can find things like food (especially at night), firewood if appropriate, coffee, etc…

If you’re saying you do all these things already, great, but I’d still advise you to take a nighttime walk through each of the properties you manage or own. You might be surprised at what you discover.