Author:
Bea Generalo
Running a boutique vacation rental company means every guest touchpoint reflects directly on the brand. For Jane Becher, owner of Homebody Vacation Rentals in Flagstaff, Arizona, that made one specific fear harder to shake than most operators would expect.
Homebody manages professionally designed vacation rentals across Flagstaff and Northern Arizona, maintained by a small, locally rooted team that’s held Superhost status year after year. Growing a business built on that kind of hands-on, local reputation meant Jane had a clear reason to be cautious about handing any part of it to someone she’d never meet face to face.
“I think my hesitations in taking on a virtual assistant was that we’re going to have someone that’s halfway across the world, and we’re not going to be able to train them well, you know, just doing Zoom or whatever,” Jane said.
It’s a familiar hesitation for hosts weighing outside support for the first time: how do you hand off something as personal as guest communication to someone you’ve never met, working from a screen and a time zone away, when your whole business is built on a local, hands-on reputation?
What changed wasn’t just getting matched with an assistant. It was discovering the onboarding wasn’t something she had to build and manage entirely on her own.
“Delegate is training them on their end and training us on our end on how to best use them,” Jane explained.
That distinction mattered. Instead of a generic hire she’d have to shape from scratch, the process worked from both directions at once, her new assistant learning the specifics of her properties and her brand’s standards while she and her team learned how to actually work with the support she now had.
“It’s just been—it’s been a really good experience,” Jane said. “I would say my experience is better than I ever would have anticipated.”
The relief in her voice on the recording is less about the tasks getting done and more about the fear itself turning out to be smaller than expected. “I think all of us were super scared about jumping into this unknown world of a virtual assistant, and we’re now like, why didn’t we do this a year ago? And so much more could have been done if we’d done it earlier.”
That’s the part worth sitting with. It’s rarely the outsourcing itself that costs operators time. It’s the year spent hesitating beforehand.
“So I would recommend to people just to go for it,” Jane said.
Jane’s hesitation is one of the most common reasons hosts delay getting support, not because the help wouldn’t be useful, but because handing off something personal to someone remote feels like a real risk, especially for a business built on a local, boutique reputation like Homebody’s. The training and onboarding process is what actually closes that gap, not just the match itself.
If that hesitation sounds familiar, it’s worth seeing what a dedicated STR assistant relationship actually looks like day to day before deciding the risk is bigger than it really is.
Book a discovery call to see what that could look like for your properties.
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