What's New in Escapia: Releases and Roadmap May 2025

Ryan Hutchings, General Manager at Escapia vacation rental software, introduced the webinar to hundreds of attendees and welcomed them to our May 2025 product webinar! The agenda will cover recent releases, updates and improvements coming soon, and answers to top pre-submitted questions, plus a sneak peek at an exciting new feature revamp.

Ryan also introduced Escapia’s new Head of Product, Steven Fishleigh, who covered how we prioritize different feature areas of the software. The 6 major areas the Escapia team was hard at work updating and upgrading are: 

1. Vacation rental guest hospitality, with the introduction of the exciting new Guest Guides feature
2. Vacation rental housekeeping software, with improvements to the mobile-friendly housekeeping dashboard
3. Notifications and automation, including the new notificatinos dashboard
4. Vacation rental reporting and analytics, such as new column options and advanced reporting dashboards in Flex Reporting
5. Optimizations to Airbnb distribution, especially across tax rules and folio processes
6. Vacation rental booking calendar upgrades, an exciting new look at a major upcoming overhaul!

Escapia’s team of product experts joined on hand to walk through the latest features and highlight what was coming soon, starting with Guest Guides.

Our most recent major feature release, Escapia started by introducing Guest Guides – a new guest hospitality tool that lets you build a comprehensive digital and PDF guidebook for your guests, directly within Escapia at no extra cost. No longer will you need to use a third-party app or partner product to deliver a welcoming guest experience, as Guest Guides can help simplify your workflow and save you time.

Escapia’s Guest Guides provides your property management company with a business specific guest-site URL, where they’ll be greeted by a customizable branded login screen. Once inside, they’ll see:

• Unit photos
• Details of their upcoming stay
• And any unit-specific custom content you've configured for their upcoming reservation!

Content on the digital guidebook for vacation rental guests can also be customized by phase of stay, unit number, and more. For offline or remote vacation rentals, guests can also download a PDF version of the guide directly from your branded guest portal, making it easy to access important information offline. The new experience is both mobile and desktop friendly and gives access to all the information they need in one central location without the hassle of a third party app or tool.

Better yet, you can build your guest hospitality guide in just a few clicks! Escapia has provided a filled in template to make setup streamlined, efficient, and intuitive. In your new Guest Guides section, you’ll find recommended categories, subcategories, and out-of-the-box templates containing information like ‘internet access’, ‘house rules’, ‘amenities’, and more, all of which are populated by merge tags within Escapia’s system to ensure each guest gets a digital guidebook that reflects that properties unique attributes. Sorting and moving is just as easy, with quick drag and drop functionality!

Escapia’s efforts to save you time don’t stop there. You can even automate the delivery of your Guest Guides through our Communications Hub tool, or utilize a manual approach to send a PDF version through Escapia’s Communications Hub or Correspondence tools. Want to learn more or see it in action? We offer training sessions and instructor-led webinars on the feature to help you learn how to maximize your benefit!

We’ve made significant investment in designing a mobile-first housekeeping experience that supports the needs of your field teams and managers in the office. For housekeepers, new updates will allow them to drill in farther and highlight priorities with an overhaul to our submitted issue notification system. Photo uploads are also another great tool to show proof of completion, updates to maintenance statuses, and reference photos to help vacation rental cleaning crews maintain your high standards for guests.

Another significant upgrade is issue reporting and alerts! This expands your communication across team by allowing housekeeping staff to report maintenance problems and inventory concerns on the go directly within a task in real-time.

These notifications are available via email or SMS with additional options to bundle types of notifications together to keep you from being inundated with too many notifications. 

Another key launch to help you manage your notifications is the Notifications Dashboard. Built based on customer feedback, notifications will allow you to e alerted each time an event triggers a specific activity, such as housekeeping statuses, inbox messages, or booking creation.

These notifications function off of templates that we have provided, and are available via email, SMS, or the Notifications dashboard! You’ll also be able to expand or narrow the scope of notifications you get, allowing you full control over how often you’re updated on a specific type of activity. When used alongside Escapia’s other incredible tools, our Notifications Dashboard can help turn your business from reactive to active! You’ll even be able to add conditions to notifications like vacation rental distribution channel, unit specific triggers, and more.

As always, Escapia is dedicated to enabling your team to customize reports as you see fit and empower your analytics process. Our new upgrades to the Performance Insights report will allow you to filter even more precisely than before, with a capacity to drill down by booking channel, specify time periods, and review Revenue, Bookings, and other key details by new insights.

We’ve also updated our Flex Reservation Report (which utilizes data from 30+ scattered other reports) to give you the levers you need to customize and create your own reservation-related reports. Similarly to Guest Guides, we’ve run instructor-led training sessions on how to optimize your use of this incredible tool that are well worth the review. Additionally, upcoming enhancements include Flex Accounting reports, report scheduling to deliver regular reports to your email at your convenience, and the ability to report on coupon code usage across booking channels!

Airbnb is an important vacation rental distribution channel for your business and being able to quickly and simply manage Airbnb reservations is a top priority for us. That’s why we’re improving our process and creating tools within EscapiaConnect that give you more control over folio creation and help you with the reconciliation process.

The first piece of the puzzle is unlocking improvement to the reconciliation process through tax remittance configurations for your units. This allows you to define which taxes Airbnb is responsible for remitting and which taxes your agency is responsible for remitting. You can now set this up unit by unit by unit or in bulk for all units in a tax district!

Once you’ve set up your tax remittance configuration, you can use the new reservation price comparison report to see a side-by-side reservation comparison of the Escapia calculated folio values versus the actual values collected by the channel for rent, fees, and taxes. Spot folio discrepancies and identify fee configurations to reconcile your folio on granular reference points to know how you may need to adjust!

And coming soon, you’ll be able to automatically add commission to Airbnb and other EscapiaConnect reservations, exclude those commission values from owner statements, and use the redefined folio editing experience to have more control over how items are calculated and recalculated. These (and other updates!) will allow you to significantly reduce the amount of manual work to reconcile your folios!

One of our most exciting feature areas we want to highlight today is reservations! And when we say reservations, we’re not just referring to our vacation rental booking calendar, the reservations grid – our goal is to provide you with access to critical reservation information in a streamlined and modernized experience no matter what device type you’re on.

First up is our new Reservations Agenda. This new mobile-first screen is designed to provide you a unified view for managing reservations on the go. While it’s optimized for mobile, we’ll also have this feature on desktop views to provide you with the most important information you need whether you’re in the field or at your desk. The screen consolidates key information that’s currently scattered across several places in Escapia. You’ll now be able to view today’s arrivals, departures, and occupied units all in one place, with information on guest details, unit specific information, payment statuses, rental agreement statuses, and booking channel available alongside them. This way, you can get the most important reservation details faster – especially when you’re on the move!

In parallel, we’re also modernizing the existing Reservations Grid with a fresh, updated look that improves performance, visuals, and ease of use, all while keeping the familiar layout and structure you know. We’re making it easier for you to scan, sort, and manage your reservations, and most importantly, no functionality is being removed! You’ll be able to continue using all your current tools and workflows, just in a cleaner, more intuitive format. 

We've covered a lot - and that's because we're working on a lot! Across guest hospitality, channel distribution, notifications, reporting and reservations, great things are coming for Escapia users. We wanted to take this opportunity to give you a preview of what’s next!

We would like to make some quick reminders. You can learn more about Escapia’s Guest Guides by visiting escapia.com/guest-guides/ for more information on how to get started. Additionally, we regularly offer instructor-led training across features (including the newly released Guest Guides!) that you can sign up for at escapia.com/training.

Be sure you start using the new mobile-friendly housekeeping dashboard and notifications dashboard to get the most out of your Escapia experience and start experimenting with some of the new additions to reporting! Finally, if you’re interested in signing up for EscapiaConnect, contact Escapia support to learn more about our inbuilt channel manager.

This is also an excellent time to check on in on some of our new integrated partners across the AI and housekeeping space, alongside our other options in our partner network. And finally, remember that we’re always open to feedback, and you can supply that in-product and following this webinar in the form of a survey.