Adding smart home technology to your vacation rental with an Amazon Echo device adds an impressive “wow” factor for your guests and can reduce your costs.

The Echo has emerged as the fastest selling new consumer product because consumers love the ease of its voice-activated tools. Thanks to Properly’s integration – the first of its kind in the vacation rental industry – you can now use the Echo in your rentals.

With the Echo, guests can set a wake up call or kitchen timer just by asking. Echo can also answer questions about news, local weather or traffic, and offer restaurant recommendations. The Echo also makes it possible for guests to listen to their home radio station while staying in your vacation rental.

Beyond its features for guests, property managers and owners can use Echo to remotely control their smart home functionality. Echo supports most major smart home systems, such as locks, thermostats, and lights. This gives you the ability to become more efficient with your power and energy usage, ensure guests arrive to a perfectly heated or cooled home and ambient lighting, and enable smart lock systems instead of manual key exchange.

This powerful tool also needs careful management, however, which Properly’s integration allows. Giving your guests the ability to set a 5 am "wake up call" with Echo is a handy feature – until the next guest is awakened by the same alarm. To ensure prompts set by one guest don’t disrupt the stay of the next guest, the Echo device needs to be cleared after each stay.

Every guest checkout based on your reservation calendar will trigger an automatic clearing of Amazon Echo devices. Set it up once and never worry about it again.