As a Young Person Working With Two Property Managers
I'm the young person in a team of property managers, maintenance persons, tenants, and prospective renters of a vacation rental. I'm struggling a little bit, but this subreddit has taught me a fair amount. While in this job, I've learned a great many skills, more than I thought I'd learn while getting my Masters degree in Literature (also the youngest in this program).  I'm not bragging, it's all pretty daunting, and sometimes I wonder how I got to this point or how I'm supposed to progress from here.

Thankfully, I really have learned a lot, but things seemed to have come to a standstill for me. What I really want to do more than anything is encourage more people in my area to visit my company's shopping center and, even better, encourage more people to inquire about the vacation rental we own in Barbados. The property in Barbados has been in this family since the sixties, and it is truly exquisite. We have a lovely house manager on the property who has helped me work out advertisements and has tried to help me manage listings. It's especially nice of her to do so since she has a full staff to manage and maintenance in general to keep up with. When listing the property on different websites, I've run into the following situations pretty consistently:

  
\-Most websites include the options to price per person, but they often do not include the option to price per room. Essentially, what guests would be paying for with their nightly rental fee is the utilities for that specific room. Say, hypothetically, we had a party of ten book the villa. Each of our nine bedrooms sleeps two adults. If these ten people were coupled up and they only wanted five bedrooms, they'd only have to pay for the five bedrooms. However, they could also choose to use all nine bedrooms, eight, etcetera. If this is the case, they'd have to pay more. This strategy of having to price per room often confuses the partner staff, who I call to see what their suggestion would be in terms of pricing. 

\-Often, websites will stop working or freeze on every device I use when I try and input square footage (or square meters) of the individual rooms. 

\-Since the property managers and I contact our prospective renters directly to arrange rental agreements rather than having them go through middlemen, we're better able to set a price that fits their budget. This is especially good for people who are renting out the property for a wedding or wish to use Sandy Lane Beach. But this also confuses the staff of certain websites since there is an option for guests to pay directly on the website. Their confusion comes from commission. Most sites charge a 15&amp;#37; commission per rental, which is perfectly fine. We still pay it, but we pay it ourselves and arrange it with the staff. It took us a good hour to communicate this though.

\-We don't really get a lot of bookings because we're more expensive. The reason for this is that we have a full staff to pay, maintenance, and because of our utility bill.

Any advice is helpful. Please let me know if anyone would like to see the property.  

[{"id": "e1js79q", "text": "i'd look at changing how YOU do a lot of things.  It sounds like you are basically saying \"our customers don't get our business model\" \"our pm staff gets confused by what we are doing\" \"our vendor sites get confused or aren't setup right for our structure\".  Thats a lot of stuff to fix that is outside of your control.  I'd focus on making this more streamless for your customers and vendors.  \n\n&gt; also - We don't really get a lot of bookings because we're more expensive. The reason for this is that we have a full staff to pay, maintenance, and because of our utility bill.\n\nNo one cares about this, they care about what they have to pay.  YOU need to figure out how to minimize your expenses to be in line with your competition.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}]