The vacation rental industry has never been more competitive, and property managers who rely primarily on online travel agencies (OTAs) like Airbnb and Vrbo or paid channels are feeling the pressure most. When everyone’s listed on the same platform, the only differentiator left is price, and that’s a race no one wins sustainably. The managers who are pulling ahead aren’t necessarily spending more on marketing. They’re getting smarter about what their brand actually means, and using AI to make that brand work harder across every channel.
Rebecca Lombardo is a fractional CMO and marketing strategist who’s spent her career helping brands cut through noise. She started as a backpack journalist reporting from Namibia, Japan, and Ukraine, and then went on to shape brand narratives and marketing strategy for Fortune 500 companies including Kraft, Heinz, Revlon, and eBay. Today, through her Rebecca Lombardo Agency, she works with vacation rental managers who need senior-level marketing leadership without the overhead of a full in-house team. She’s also an award-winning speaker, writer, moderator, and host of the podcast Vendor Vibes. She joined Lynell Gordon on The Vacation Rental Show to talk about one of the most overlooked growth levers in the industry: owning your brand engine.
What Brand Is
Brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
When most property managers think about brand, they think about logos, color palettes, and website design. Rebecca is quick to reframe that instinct. Your brand isn’t what you say about yourself. It’s the impression you leave on every homeowner, guest, and industry contact who’s had an experience with your company, whether you were present to manage the narrative or not.
The mistake most property managers make is focusing on the three or four unique selling points they want homeowners to know rather than listening to what those homeowners are already saying. The reviews, the referrals, the comments in local Facebook groups: that’s your real brand. That’s the signal you should be amplifying, not the marketing message you drafted when you launched your website five years ago.
If you’re not sure where to start, Rebecca’s advice is direct: Google yourself and look at what other people see when they search your company. Then compare that picture to what your best clients already say about you. If there’s a gap between the two, you’ve found your starting point. And if you find it hard to see your own company objectively after years inside it, that’s exactly where an outside agency perspective becomes valuable.
Own Your Brand Engine
That way you own the learnings.
One of the most important ideas Rebecca shared is the concept of the brand engine: a trained AI project that acts as an operating system for all of your marketing. The goal is to build it, own it, and train it on your brand’s voice, your guest reviews, your ideal client profiles, and your messaging before you ever hand access to an agency or freelancer.
Right now, many vacation rental managers are unknowingly letting their agencies build this infrastructure for them. When an agency creates its own AI account or project to work on your brand, the insights they develop, what resonates with your audience, what copy converts, all of that lives in their environment. When the relationship ends, so does the intelligence. You start over with the next agency every time.
Rebecca recommends creating a Claude project, feeding it your brand playbook, your reviews (including the negative ones), your personas, and your marketing materials, and then inviting your agencies into that space to collaborate. You stay in control of the data, and every agency you work with builds on top of what came before rather than starting from scratch. The compound advantage of that continuity is significant, especially in a market where brand consistency directly affects how homeowners evaluate you.
From Wide Net to Spearfishing
In some cases, we lowered our cost of acquisition by $100 per lead, simply by refining all of the messaging before we pushed it out through Google Ads.
The financial case for owning your brand engine is clearest in paid advertising. When a new Google Ads agency takes over an account, the standard approach is to cast a wide net: broad keywords, multiple headline variations, and diverse messaging all tested against the market in real time. That learning phase produces useful data eventually, but it’s expensive to get there.
Rebecca’s approach changes the sequence. Before any ad copy goes live, you run it through your brand engine and ask how well these headlines align with your brand book, your personas, and what your guest reviews say. The engine identifies what to cut before you spend a single dollar, and the result is messaging that’s already calibrated to the audience you’re trying to reach. She describes the shift as moving from casting a wide net to spearfishing: more targeted, more efficient, and far less wasteful than traditional trial-and-error ad strategy.
This benefit also compounds over time. When you move from one Google Ads agency to another, the new agency doesn’t start from scratch. They go into the brand engine, see what’s been working, and build from there. The intelligence you’ve built stays with your business regardless of who’s running the campaigns, and every dollar you spent learning in the past continues to pay dividends going forward.
Messaging Alignment and Homeowner Trust
Clarity and consistency in your messaging build immediate trust.
When a property owner is evaluating management companies, brand signals matter more than most managers realize. Rebecca points out that when someone sees a different message on a postcard than they see on your website, and a different message again in a Facebook ad, the immediate impression is that the company isn’t organized. That credibility hit happens before you’ve had a single conversation.
Consistency isn’t just about using the same logo everywhere. It means your voice, your value proposition, and your tone are recognizable and coherent across every touchpoint. When a homeowner encounters you on social media, then finds your website, then receives your email, they should feel like they’re interacting with the same company at every step. That cohesion is what builds the kind of trust that accelerates the decision to sign a management agreement.
Getting there starts with an honest audit. Step outside the company’s perspective and look at your brand the way a stranger would. If what’s out there doesn’t reflect what your best clients already love about you, that gap is the first thing to close. The language your homeowners use to describe why they value working with you is the same language you should be using to attract the next ones.
Why Traditional PR Is Now an AI Strategy
It turns out that AI loves to source articles, like editorial articles, for its answers. That’s the first place it looks when it tries to answer your question.
One of the more surprising shifts Rebecca discussed is the return of traditional PR as a marketing priority, and the reason is entirely driven by how AI platforms find answers. When someone asks an AI assistant which vacation rental company to recommend in a given market, the AI doesn’t start with your website. It looks for editorial articles, travel guides, media mentions, forum discussions, and threads first. Your own site is often among the last places it checks.
That means the property managers who show up in AI-generated recommendations are the ones with editorial presence in travel publications, local media, and industry forums. Getting your company mentioned in outlets like Forbes Travel Guide or regional travel features isn’t just good PR anymore. It’s how you get found in an AI-first search environment, and the managers who are building that presence now are positioning themselves well ahead of competitors who are still focused entirely on their own websites and OTA profiles.
For managers who aren’t yet a national brand, Rebecca’s advice is to focus on local publications and community forums. A feature in a regional lifestyle magazine or a mention in a local travel guide gives AI platforms the kind of context and credibility they’re looking for. The editorial coverage you build now will compound as AI platforms continue to rely on authoritative external sources for their answers.
Conclusion
Just because something didn’t work before doesn’t mean it’s not gonna work again. So maybe let someone else take a stab at it.
Building a stronger brand doesn’t require starting over from scratch. Rebecca’s most practical advice is to start with what your best clients are already saying, identify where that language aligns with your current messaging, and close the gaps where it doesn’t. It’s an iterative process grounded in real audience intelligence, not a full rebrand.
The AI tools available right now make it easier than ever for vacation rental managers to build marketing infrastructure that was previously only accessible to large companies with dedicated in-house teams. A trained brand engine gives you the strategic consistency and campaign intelligence of a full marketing department at a fraction of the investment. And if past strategies haven’t delivered the results you were hoping for, Rebecca’s parting thought is worth carrying with you: a fresh perspective on something that didn’t quite work is often all it takes to unlock real results.
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