Five Things We Heard Over and Over at VRMA

VRMA International 2026 was one of our busiest weeks of the year, and one of the most useful. Between the booth, the sessions and the hallway conversations, the Wheelhouse team talked with hundreds of vacation rental operators, from teams managing a handful of homes to companies running thousands.

We went in expecting a wide range of questions. What we found instead was a short list of themes that came up again and again, no matter who we were talking to. Here are the five we're still thinking about now that we're back home.

We fielded more questions about API and MCP access this year than in any year before. Operators want to build their own dashboards, pull pricing data into the internal tools their teams already use, and run their own models alongside the software they buy.

What stood out most was who was asking. This used to be a conversation we had mainly with the largest property managers and their in-house data teams. This year it came from operators of every size. "Can I get my data out and work with it?" is fast becoming the first question an operator asks, not the last.

The takeaway for us is simple: your data should work for you, wherever you want to use it. Locking it inside one screen is no longer good enough.

Ask an operator what keeps them up at night, and the answer often isn't occupancy or rates. It's owners. Many told us they spend too much of their week reacting to owner complaints and worries about pricing, and they want to get ahead of those conversations instead.

Getting ahead starts with a few basics:

• Knowing what each owner expected from day one. Revenue goals, how often they use the home, what "a good year" means to them.
• Knowing how they like to hear from you. Some want a monthly summary; others want a call when something changes.
• Having clear numbers to show them. When an owner asks why a rate dropped, a clear answer backed by data ends the conversation faster than any reassurance.

Good owner reporting has quietly become one of the best tools operators have, both to keep the owners they have and to win new ones.

We heard plenty of frustration with automation that operators can't see into. The stories were familiar: automatic discounts that pushed rates too low, base prices that changed with no explanation, and rates far out on the calendar that simply didn't make sense.

Nobody we talked to wants to go back to setting every price by hand. Operators still want automation to do the heavy lifting. But one theme came up again and again: they want to see why a price is what it is, and they want to be able to change it when their own knowledge of a market or a property says otherwise.

Automation earns trust when it shows its work. That's the standard operators are now holding their tools to.

One of the bigger shifts we noticed: small and mid-sized operators are increasingly open to outside revenue management help. A few years ago, dedicated revenue expertise was something only large portfolios could justify.

That's changed. Operators told us they see expert support as a way to get time back, earn more from the homes they manage, and stop second-guessing every pricing decision on their own. For a lean team juggling owners, guests and housekeeping, having someone whose whole job is revenue can be the difference between reacting to the market and staying ahead of it.

It felt like every other booth on the expo floor was promoting an AI agent this year. Some of them are genuinely promising. But when you're evaluating any of them, we'd suggest two questions:

1. What data is it working from?
2. Can you see what it's doing?

An AI tool is only as good as the data and tools behind it. An agent working from incomplete or stale data will make confident-sounding mistakes, and one you can't see into brings back all the "set it and forget it" problems above.

This is where the first theme comes full circle. Operators who invest in strong, open data access now will be in the best position to get real value from AI tools later.