The Real Reason You Can't Build a Vacation Rental Brand (It's Not What You Think) - And How to Fix It

Speaker A: foreign hey friends want to give a quick shout out and thank you to lodgify who made this episode possible if you aren't familiar with them already you absolutely need to go give them a look especially if you are a new hospitality entrepreneur i always say that for somebody who's building a real hospitality business without the backing of a big management company lodify is absolutely worth a look it's a platform that i recommend for hosts who are entrepreneurial but again who are just starting out and or have a smaller portfolio and don't have huge assets aspirations to you know scale to be a two hundred and fifty you know properties under management sort of group lodify is is built for entrepreneurs it's built for the next generation of great hospitalitarians you can use the code bts twenty at logify dot com for twenty percent off any yearly or bi yearly plan this offer is valid through october thirty first again bts twenty thanks to the team there they are so freaking responsive everyone i've talked to who's a customer of theirs has nothing but great things to say about their features and their customer service so go give logify a if you haven't in a while and tell them that zach from behind the stage sent you their way

Speaker B: when my parents would check into hotels or motels along the highway system um or highway you know interstate highways we were traveling from place to place they would literally go to the front desk and say can i have a key to inspect the room right and they would go in they'd inspect the room they'd see if they like it and then if they did they would you know go to the front desk and pay for a night or not m and that's what the guest is having to do today they're literally having to read descriptions because it's almost like the the old school hotel inspection right because there is no language of trust and so they're having to do all the details

Speaker A: in just a moment you'll meet ashley ching founder of inhaven former head of global merchandising operations at tiffany and company and the person behind what might be the most important piece of research the vacation rental industry has produced in years here's the question ashley keeps asking every other hospitality industry hotels airlines restaurants car rentals has a what she calls language of trust quality tiers that tell the consumer what they're buying before they arrive but vacation rentals well they don't and that single missing layer is behind almost every structural problem the industry can't seem to solve from review manipulation to failed scaling attempts to the reason you still can't build a transferable property management brand as she walks us through the reasonable hospitality framework her team developed alongside property managers and steve joyce the former ceo of choice hotels we dig into why service standards matter more than furnishings in determining where you fall on the quality spectrum this care coverage ratio concept that quantifies what boots on the ground actually means and why every attempt to put standards at the individual property level has failed she makes a compelling case that most operators calling themselves luxury probably aren't and that's not an insult because only three percent of us hotel supply is actually luxury and there's excellence at every tier we talk about the luxury fallacy why a hampton m with an eight point two rating doesn't mean it's better than a ritz carlton with a seven point eight rating and uh what the industry could look like in ten years if it finally gets this foundation of language of trust right ashley's incredibly smart this was a super fun conversation download her team's research in the show notes below thank you ashley for taking the time out of your very busy life to put this research together for us today ladies and gents enjoy this conversation with ashley cheng all right ashley we are live welcome to behind the stage it is such a pleasure to have

Speaker B: you on the show so nice to

Speaker A: be back again uh it's been a while since we talked lots has changed um but uh i think what's been consistent ashley is every once in a while you just pop into my algorithm you pop into my my my linkedin feed and i see another piece of thoughtful research or a perspective that just again feels it feels incredibly well thought through and also timely right i see a lot of timely content not well thought through see some thought you know well thought through content that's not always timely but you've got a magic of doing both so i wanted to have you back on on the podcast because you've uh continued to do great work and really helping the industry through think through standardization think through professionalization uh and so i want to talk about your your latest research and just anything that you guys have learned at inhaven over the last you know few years couple years in particular since we chatted that uh that that will be helpful and applicable to to those tuning into today's conversation but as a quick refresher because we've the audience has grown a lot and you know folks uh might not remember you from the last time you were on the podcast but you spent uh over a decade at tiffany and company running global merchandising then you were at home depot's company store for a while uh can you give us a quick just refresher uh on how someone goes from like luxury jewelry and housewares to redesigning how vacation rentals operate what's what's the through line there yeah so

Speaker B: i actually think my background um very much maps naturally to vacation rentals um as you mentioned at tiffany and company i like global merchandising operations where i set the global standards while making them locally relevant so i moved over to asia and i was responsible for delivering what are the national tiffany standards in beijing versus sydney and so really the question we were asking is how do we create this consistent brand experience without eliminating what makes that market unique um and ultimately why does someone choose tiffany over a local jeweler and a huge part of why they choose tiffany is because of the trust and service um and then i went on to the company store which is a home depot company and got really into the business of bed bath and kitchen um and at the end of the day in hospitality that's what we're built around right we're in the business of making sure people can sleep bathe and eat comfortably um and so that's really my background but we're going to talk today about this study that we recently launched on reasonable hospitality and i wouldn't say that was just developed by me sitting here in my office um it really brings together my team so megan myers who uh has her own podcast as well um she's head of growth at inhaven and she was formerly with uh three hundred sixty blue and destin and she ran outpost vacation rentals in jackson wyoming and we've got a uh great gentleman by the name of steve joyce who's the former ceo of choice hotels he's our head advisor on our board um here at inhaven and so working with megan with the team with steve we've been able to develop this framework but most importantly it's really the property managers that we work with day in and day out um we work very closely with them um we help them scale their businesses we see their problems and so bringing all these perspectives together is really um what has helped us create all this great research and content for

Speaker A: the industry so i want to hear a little bit about you guys started as a b two b uh e commerce platform if you will right uh folks can use in haven to get awesome discounts on great products uh whether they're furnishing a small condo or a large uh luxury vacation rental on the beach right people have people use you guys uh at least historically and you correct me if i'm wrong but maybe primarily to be able to help them furnish their properties for their respective businesses you could have built a great business just doing that there are other folks that kind of just do that help me understand help us understand why the need to take on this big uh i don't know mission if you will to help the industry professionalize itself in the same way that the hotel world has done you know previously in the same way that luxury brands uh as you just mentioned your experience with tiffany and company has done why does that feel critical to you beyond just being something you might personally care about why is that important for inhaven's business yeah

Speaker B: so we've at inhaven have always been focused on helping our clients which our property managers really deliver a better experience not only to their vacation rental guests but to also their owners and so we started with procurement as you mentioned because our customers were constantly saying you know i can't consistently source the right products for hundreds of homes and so we solved that and so then they came back to us and said all right now i have three hundred homes how do i make sure that i have the right inventory amounts how do i replenish those homes how do i charge homeowners for these products um and so and how do i onboard homes consistently and so what we did was we built an inventory management tool which is the operational infrastructure that helps them manage all of those um components and so now the conversations with our clients are becoming much more strategic so they're grappling not only with home quality but with increasingly and somewhat extortionary guest reviews um and they're asking questions like okay you know people have tried to scale in this industry like resort quest vacasa sonder and all have failed um and so that led us to these conversations and really strategy sessions with our property managers and through those sessions we realized we were really uncovering um some fundamental structural challenges in the industry and so we decided to publish the research that we've done so that you know people can see how we're thinking about it differently and how we're helping our property managers better scale their businesses and how

Speaker A: can you unpack that for us a little bit like in this research right uh like where does it start in your like i guess what was the initial revelation from your perspective that oh my gosh there there is something there's a huge opportunity here there's there's something critically important for the industry here what was that first data point or that that initial realization that you and the team had again to kind of justify the time and the effort the energy spent in helping bring these these ideas and these insights to the wider market

Speaker B: yeah i think the biggest realization that we had is that every hospitality industry whether you're in hotels restaurants airlines car rentals have a um language of trust right they have uh quality tiers and that is completely lacking from the vacation rental industry and with the lack of quality tiers in that language of trust there's an over reliance on otas guests are dissatisfied because they're reviewing something where they don't have expectations set ahead of time and so it creates a lot of um diseconomies of scale and whatnot and so we said all right let's set out to develop what would that language of trust look like for the vacation rental industry and so we published this paper that's called reasonable hospitality and we published our framework which says at the end of the day you have to start with standards and standards we have two levels or two components of standards we've got service standards and we have quality standards and so on the service standards perspective we look at um leadership is the leadership local can they make decisions you always hear people say oh i've got boots on the ground but what does that truly mean vacasa had boots on the ground it's just that none of their local teams could actually make any decisions for their business so do you truly have leadership that can make decisions on the ground within two hours from every home uh the second component of leadership is care um you know how many humans do you have supporting these homes what is your property people to property ratio um how much care are you able to deliver the third is experience you know what level of experience are you providing your guests are you providing concierge services or is it an app like a lot of technology where the guests can kind of form their experience and fourth is operations do you have a local office do you have the infrastructure to support these homes so we look at those um components of service and then we have the quality perspective how do you outfit the bed bath and kitchen and there's different quality tiers so once you set those standards you can then um go to the next level which is creating that language of trust and that's along three different tiers that we've defined signature being your highest luxury uh premium being your upper upscale and then um lifestyle more of your economy mid scale homes and so for each level so from premium or from signature to premium to um lifestyle lifestyle you have different levels of service and comfort quality standards that attribute to what makes that each tier excellent so then once you have that language um of trust right now you have a lot of efficiencies when it comes to alignment your guests know or uh your your guests know what to expect your owners know how to furnish the homes and what's to be expected of you the property managers can staff the teams accordingly and and define the service levels and then the distribution channels market those stays based on who's coming to them and through all of that um you're able to gain a lot of value and scale by having this this this this tiered structure in place

Speaker A: hey guys so i was talking to an str host that i know last week and she found out that when someone opens chatgpt and types find me a cabin in the smokies for a long weekend her neighbor's place is coming up but hers isn't she kept like trying to reprompt it but couldn't find like her her place it's in the same town it's a similar property it's got similar reviews right so there's nothing remarkably different between the properties except for the fact that her neighbor has a direct booking website built the right way and she just has an airbnb and verbal listing as we know as you've heard about ad nauseam at this point ai is becoming the new front door for travel discovery and most hosts don't even have a doorbel so to speak chatgpt isn't scrolling airbnb listings it's pulling from websites that it can actually read again for context here chatgpt has very limited access if any access to airbnb proper what it does have access to is loads and loads of websites and it uses websites to read contextualize and recommend places to travel to users who are prompting it so what this really means is that if your property lives exclusively on someone else's platform like airbnb or vrbox you're basically invisible to the next generation of how people find places to stay even if you have your own direct booking site but you haven't optimized it for ai so to speak and you haven't made it searchable and and contextually relevant to agents same thing right like you're you're just not being discovered lodify fixes that so lodify's direct booking website is built to get found by ai they call lodify the the new ai pms their channel uh manager their guest messaging payments it's all in one place and everything talks to each other further lodrify takes zero percent on direct bookings that's right so if you generate a direct booking lodify is giving all of that cash money to you so the money the guest pays is the money that you keep and again if you're not familiar with pmss most of them do this but lodfi definitely does this when a guest pays you get paid immediately right so you don't have to wait until check in or you know in some cases check out like airbnb often makes you wait and their ai co host handles guest communication around the clock so you're not the one texting the wi fi password is on the fridge at two am anymore so if you're an owner operator someone who's building a real hospitality business without the backing of a big management company lodify is the platform that i recommend for you full stop you can use the code bts twenty that's bts for behind the stays twenty at uh logify dot com for twenty off any yearly or bi yearly plan this offer is valid through october thirty first twenty twenty six of this year so again even if you have a pms already it's always good to audit it's always good to go do some shopping around right lodify makes it really easy to transfer but go check out lojify if you haven't already or if it's been a while since you've checked them out check them out again use the code bts twenty logify dot com and or tell someone on the team that zach from behind the stays sent you their way i love that you separated like service from quality because i think that those get inflated a lot or conflated a lot i should say and uh you know the hotel world those also kind of blur a little bit in the hotel world right you obviously kind of expect top tier service as you move up the food chain but but it is also i think you know some of the best service i have had is and or the best product i have i've had the worst service and then some of the best service i've had even the product wasn't great right so love that those were those are distinct i think that that's that's that's incredibly smart and helpful to the consumer i want to understand i love the broader mission right because as a consumer right when i go and i check into a courtyard right uh marriott right my expectations are going to be different than a ritz or uh an addition the basics need to be there right but i know what i'm getting into but i think you're spot on i could book a beautiful what looks like a beautiful vacation rental home on the beach in the outer banks and it could be like really really really crappy beds really really really crappy linens even though it's like a beautiful property maybe even on the water right and so i love i think that this work is critically important my question for you is how uh when you speak when you talk about language of trust how are you thinking folks position their offerings like on an ot or even on their website like when are are you encouraging folks to say things like hey zach's got a collection of lifestyle vacation rentals and that's what this means we're not trying to be signature we're not trying to be premium like talk to talk to me a little bit about how you think this language of trust gets communicated from a marketing perspective right you talked about so otas can better recommend for instance right the right properties to the right consumer segment what does that what do you think that

Speaker B: looks like tangibly yeah so i think you know it's really important i think right now that the industry over relies on reviews right to your point right you can have a five star um you know motel six day and you can have a three star ritz carlton stay yeah by as a consumer we have different expectations for a motel six day versus a ritz carlton and so what the vacation rentals they're overly reliant on these reviews but reviews are you know there's no level of expectations so there's no control that the property manager has over what that that that guest is reviewing because they're literally you know it's based on their own expectations they've made up so i think this language of trust you know we're starting with a group of property managers that have about three thousand homes and as we go out and we communicate this language of trust and we work with our b two b partners it'll become more you know and as we grow and grow this group of this group of like minded professionals um it'll become more um i guess known to the guests as they're trying to stay in these homes they understand you know what a signature home gives versus a lifestyle home so i think that language of trust is really important and we've got to start somewhere right right now we rely way too heavily on reviews and um the system's completely broken it's almost like

Speaker A: i think about this when i'm looking at a at a home whether it's on airbnb or some other uh ota and or even direct booking site i'm always looking for like again some some uh some messaging or some some sign i guess is the word i'm looking for that it's going to meet my whatever my level of expectation for the trip is and one of the ways i do it is like do they name drop like mattress companies or do they name drop uh appliances like in the listings so for example like if someone talks about like having a wolf like stove right or having you know you know an avocado sort of match whatever it might be when they name drop the brands of the products that they have in their home in the description that helps me as a consumer understand like okay like these people get they get quality or like they understand premium like you're not just marketing sort of a bright airy kitchen you're also taking the time to tell me it's a chef's kitchen with wolf appliances that means something to some level of you know consumer base who probably cares about those things so when you think about maybe that's a silly example but like

Speaker B: do you think it's a good example

Speaker A: those sorts of things of like helping your partners yes like hey let's drop this kind of like use these brand name versus if someone talks about their ikea couch right like nothing wrong against ikea couches but like but i i might also understand that okay maybe this is a lifestyle product versus the signature

Speaker B: product yeah two things um one is we are very much in the state so as you explain you're reading the listing description you're like oh there's a wolf range that must be a nice place right yeah it's the same thing it's the same um parallel to what we used to do in the eighties when my parents would check into hotels or motels along the highway system or highway you know interstate highways we were traveling from place to place they would literally go to the front door desk and say can i have a key to inspect the room right and they would go in they'd inspect the room they'd see if they like it and then if they did they would you know go to the front desk and pay for a night or not m and that's what the guest is having to do today they're literally having to read descriptions because it's almost like the the old school hotel inspection right because there is no language of trust and so they're having to do all the details and i would say though the other thing on this point is that while you know the furnishings signal luxury versus economy what we found through our research is the number one distinguishing factor um between the quality tiers is service levels so it's really the people to property ratio that you're looking at so just think about hotels when you check into an economy level hotel there's one person in the lobby versus if you check into a luxury hotel there's ten people there's someone to push the elevator button there for you same with the restaurant industry if you're going to mcdonald's you're ordering on a kiosk and maybe one person gives you the food versus i went to a five star michelin restaurant in chicago for my dad's eightieth and we had a million people caring for us and taking care and that warranted a dollar four hundred fifty per person bill at the end of the night because of all the different experiences we got and so really what we find is the number one distinguishing factor is service levels and so how do you communicate communicate those service levels it's through this care ratio coverage that we

Speaker A: have so i want to i want to dive into that a little bit uh and you talk about this is i think what you're what you're uh hitting on a little bit here too there's this line uh in the report where you talk about like standards are not quality controls they're coordination mechanisms can you like unpack what exactly that means and then how does that relate to this service standard these standards of service that are that are really that seem to be the distinguishing factors between how you fall on on the scale from

Speaker B: economy to luxury yeah so i think this is one of the most important concepts in the paper you know as i mentioned before every other hospitality industry has this language of trust and which tells the consumer what kind of experience that they're buying before they arrive you know hotels have their chain scale airlines have their um you know low cost carriers to private airplanes and vacation rentals don't have that language so it was through our research and through our conversations across hospitality um and working with our property managers day in and day out that we came out with this reasonable hospitality framework and so these are quantifiable service standards um and as i mentioned on service we've got the leadership care experience and operations and we break that down into tiers so there's different standards for an economy level say or what we call lifestyle versus a signature and so those generally map out and then we've got the comfort level um quality uh tiers as well so from you know um bed bath and kitchen you know what do those tiers look like and um so that third level right now that you know that gets you to is that predictability dividend and so once everyone understands that promise um suddenly all the stakeholders around the guest experience can make those aligned decisions and so that's when we can see that truly an industry can scale um does that answer your question around service yeah yeah

Speaker A: one hundred percent and maybe this may be a better way of even framing the question a little bit is you make this distinction that the the rating like the quality standards the service standards should really be at the the property like manager level versus like the ah individual property which like at first i sort of paused and i was like oh should it be but then i was thinking well from a from a brand trust perspective right uh am i more likely to like start uh as a consumer with a high level of trust if i hear st regis or if i see like like an individual photo of one st regis hotel like in a city i've never been to probably like the former meaning like i identify first and foremost with with the brand right which i think we could translate to the manager in this context versus the actual you know physical uh hotel uh itself that's that is also an important consideration but it's maybe it's maybe a second level of importance from ah an from an initial consumer perspective so i guess help help us understand a little bit about how you guys came to that conclusion like why is it because because the vast majority quite frankly right of property managers vacation rental managers their brands are not known by the by the general public yes there are people right who over time build cult followings right but when you think about and this is we've talked about the synonym on this show right the vast majority of consumer calls any vacation home and airbnb right and like that that that is just true now maybe it's shifting a little bit today but i guess my my my the question i'm getting at is why why did you guys land on the quality and service uh um uh thresholds really needing to be at the property management level versus the individual asset the the home

Speaker B: level yeah i think you know in every other hospitality industry um their assets are single use so if you think about a hotel for example it's built it's like purpose built for a hotel and all of its stakeholders are aligned with one you know they have one thing in mind how do i make how do i get a good return on this asset yep right so they're all aligned same with airlines right the airline the airplane is built for that purpose it's a single use asset it's not used for any other purpose but to trap you know to get passengers from point a to point b vacation rentals are very different because they are dual use assets you've got the homeowners who you know yes they want to have an economic return but they also want to spend six weeks in that home during the summertime yeah they love their pink sheets and they don't want to get rid of their pink sheets even though you know from a you know from a hospitality perspective the guests want white so you've got this you know you don't actually have control over the single property that's where the homeowner has control where you have control to define the standards is at the property manager level because that property manager defines what are the service levels going to be how am i going to staff this company what services am i going to provide and they also primarily most property managers professional ones define how are those items that are you know those high velocity items high velocity items like the bed the bath the kitchen replenished and so they are the ones that have control over those two areas and that's why we um say that every attempt at putting the standards at the property level hasn't worked you need to put it at the property manager level because that's where we see control in this industry um in terms of service

Speaker A: and quality so then do you think there is space right for a property manager to exist in multiple levels right because you see folks with portfolios for example right that span maybe at least the top two right many that might span span all three i guess how do you wrestle with that reality yeah

Speaker B: it's a question that keeps coming up we talk a lot about this with our property managers when you talk to most experienced property managers ninety percent of their homes are aligned with one tier m and then they might have you know so let's say that they're ninety percent of the homes align with the premium tier and they have they have five percent that are signature and five percent that are lifestyle yeah they're five percent that are lifestyle because their operations are built around a premium tier those are not profitable because they're over they're over servicing those homes yeah right yeah and then the five percent that are signature are getting bad reviews because those guests would expect higher levels of services at signature and so through time those homes will shed and they'll focus on their premium it's also you know if you look at the hotel space um and we're not saying that one tier is worse than the other i think that's a big message is you can be excellent at each tier but if you look at the hotel space you know an extended stay america has a very different operating model than a four season so extended say americas run at very high occupancy and very high margins but they have lower valuations because it's very easy to set up a competitive competing business around the corner whereas if you look at a four seasons they have very low operating margins sometimes six or seven percent operating margins but their valuations are like fifty seven times because it's very hard to replicate that experience yep right it takes a lot of money it takes a lot of people and so you have to decide as a business owner where do you want to be and then you align your operations to be the most you know to to align with that operating model and so when you're spanning across multiple tiers it becomes very inefficient for your

Speaker A: team so do you guys see as i want to actually talk before i ask that question i actually want to talk about the care coverage ratio because we yep you talked about a little bit but i don't think we unpacked it enough here mhm you talk you talk you talked specifically about sort of this this key distinguisher about like where you fall is is again based off of care is based off of service i think you go so far as to say like you know there's a specific employee count right and these exclude like ten ninety nine contractors like these these are actually ftes like that have that work at these companies if they meet these this this these different thresholds to enter these respective tiers uh unpack this for us because you guys you guys came up with this at inhaven why is this important and how does it how does it uh i guess further maybe the argument that you've been making over the last several minutes here on the importance of service being one at the local level but then also uh an operator choosing to and and really sticking to a specific tier yeah

Speaker B: so you know as i mentioned earlier the greatest differentiator in quality tiers is service we believe and it's really you know it goes back to what i just said about you know the number of people in the hotel lobbies those guest facing people or the number of people that are servicing you at a restaurant around the table and so we purposely exclude cleaning staff and vacation rentals because one um it can skew the average you know it can be skewed by the average stay so if the average stays only two days you need much more cleaners right than if your average day is five and it can also be skewed by the size of the home and so you know we know that cleaning teams are critical members of your team just as dishwashers are in a restaurant or ground staff on an airlines but for those industries what determines the quality tier are the frontline service employees those are the concierge the valets at the hotels the maitre d's and sommeliers at restaurants um and so we charted that data for our property managers and what we found was pretty consistent our signature or you know top tier homes operate at more of like a one service staff member to every five properties our premium are operating more of one to ten our lifestyle are one to fifteen and just to put it in perspective vacasa and saunder were operating at like a one to twenty

Speaker A: wow wow okay very very interesting so so so i'm thinking about this and this is really meant to not to quiz you here but more more to be like a brainstorm like if i'm if i'm a vacation rental manager and i'm let's say in the premium tier and i buy into like the importance of this and i buy into that hey we do as an industry we believe that this is critical to attract the kind of guests that we want to uh that we want to attract to stay competitive right to really build maybe not everyone wants to build a four seasons like brand but i think most of the operators at least that i know they care deeply about their brand right and they've invested so much in building their brand that eventually someday they probably want that brand to trade at a higher valuation than uh than than a brand maybe uh maybe at an operator that did not build a brand right that just that built a great portfolio maybe but their their brand isn't known to the consumer how do you help people think through how this translates to positioning we we touched on this a little bit but like but but if i'm you know if i'm if i've got fifty uh luxury vacation homes but i call them luxury maybe they're really like maybe they they're really the premium uh category how how do you where do i start in terms of like uh communication perspective in terms of brand you know trust trusted language that i start using either with my team in my comms et cetera to start building towards i think this ideal state that you guys have outlined where the consumer recognizes right beyond the pictures right beyond beyond the reviews that this is going to be the kind of experience that i'm looking for like where do you encourage people to start yeah

Speaker B: it's really starting with that pyramid that we've outlined in reasonable hospitality the case study um you know and you start with the service standards and the and the quality standards the standards level and they're pretty quantifiable right and so it's it's not something that's subjective it's you know literally asking questions like under service what is my local leadership look like what you know what types of services that i'm praying what's my care coverage ratio um you know what's my local infrastructure and then on the quality perspective you know it's pretty clear in terms of what level how am i furnishing these homes and so you can't be furnishing at a signature level but providing a uh lifestyle service right that means that your lifestyle overall just like a motel six can't put in saphir sheets and call it a signature property right yeah one hundred percent so i think there's alignment around the standards which are very clear and then it's sort of once you've got those standards in place then you're able to talk in that language of trust you're able to align your owners your guest your uh m team around those services and standards um and so that just becomes everything becomes more efficient and i think in general the industry you always hear people talking about luxury i want to be luxury and i think it's really important and we talk about this in the case study about the luxury fallacy that only three percent of us hotel supply is actually luxury most consumers want to stay in mid scale or upscale hotels and for me personally i travel along that chain scale all year long right like i will you know pay up for a four season stay for a special anniversary weekend with my husband but if i'm traveling across country for a soccer tournament i am totally fine staying at the hampton inn in some cases the motel six i'm not fine with ashley's motel across the street who knows what happens there but i want that uh i have that trust in those brand standards and so i think what we try to communicate in this case study is there's excellence at each tier and so it's really aligning your organization and your and your team around what you're trying to deliver and then delivering excellence

Speaker A: at that tier so in other ways in other words right here you're saying is like you you commit you and your team commit to a tier you ensure that you're delivering excellence at that tier and then over time right the general consumer will come to know that okay this is the kind of experience that i can expect from ashley's you know premium vacation rentals right and so the idea of like solving for like this solving today for consumer facing language or consumer facing marketing right in particular that helps evoke this sense of trust that comes maybe at a later point

Speaker B: no stay tuned okay there's stuff coming maybe even before this podcast launches amazing so yeah so we have a whole plan uh with our group of property managers managers but yes this will become consumer facing um and we you know if you're if you're out there and you're a property manager and you want to be a part of this um we would love to talk to you and hear from you because we have a very strong launch plan on this

Speaker A: what what what are your i like to just uh kick around ideas too so obviously if you guys are building maybe you're building this already but what are your thoughts on like there have been a few folks who've uh popped up recently who are trying to build like like you know niche or verticalized like otas uh and they would probably be offended if i called them an ota so like apologies don't want to offend anyone but basically like you know sites that aggregate right supply uh of a specific kind do you think like there's there's a world in which you know we see more things like the one hundred collection where you get folks together they you know they're all at the signature tier right and then there's there's a collective investment in building a consumer facing brand around the signature tier like again things like this have been have been tried but i think historic i mean it the framework that you have delivered uh is the clearest articulation of a foundation right that i believe something like this could then be built on but i guess i guess what's your thought on like from a consumer perspective because because what's been what is wildly hard is it's very very difficult even if you're a top tier vrm to compete to out compete from a marketing perspective any ota like it's it's it's wildly difficult now maybe you don't need that right maybe you've got your you know your return guests are just your ratio is incredible and like you don't care and that's fine but if you're maybe a newer hospitality entrepreneur getting into this space and you you aspire to build the four seasons of vacation rentals you're you're going to need it's going to take some time to build that brand so i guess this is a long way of asking a relatively simple question which is what what kind of consumer layer even aggregate consumer layer do you think could exist or should exist on top of these respective pillars uh you know if you even think that that's a good idea well first

Speaker B: of all you know i think the attempts that have been done so far have been a very much at the property level right and so it's it's let's take this collection of five properties and put it on a website or whatnot and so what we are saying is we're taking a very different approach and saying we are selecting the property managers yeah yeah and those property managers are the ones who can deliver the best services and standards to the industry right and so that's our that's a very differentiated approach um you know i think otas will continue to struggle because these these niche whatever we want to call them otas because you know they're looking at pictures from ai perspective like it looks nice right but it could be a really crappy mattress and you know crappy sheets or whatnot they just can't tell the quality and so at inhaven we see what our what our property managers are purchasing we see them allocating to the homes and we can guarantee that uh those standards from a quality perspective are in place we also visit our property managers we are working with their teams on a day in and day out basis we can see you know what is their local office like what are their operations like so we're really vetting these property managers as well and vetting their service standards and so we haven't seen anyone do that for the industry it's all you know either ai photos or you know and i think that's what's led to a lot of lack of trust because a guest then is expecting okay on one fine stay or whatnot i'm going to get the best day and then they show up to you know really crappy sheets service levels of hosts being hundreds of miles away um and so that's been the big disappointment so i think you know we've taken a very different approach where we vet the property manager we've got their purchases we vet their service standards and so that will give more trust you know in terms of in haven um and our program i

Speaker A: booked uh a i felt i've told the story on this podcast before but i booked a home ah on plum guide uh in europe and you know plum guide is at least presents itself as an exclusive ota right invite only at least at one point in time and you know luxury supply and again like uh by the time we got to the home it was wonderful and great or whatever but like we got a call as we landed with my like at the time six month old son after like an overnight flight and they they called and they were basically like the home's not available and they were like what like we were at the airport it was a total shit show they anyways we long story short there was a mix up we ended up getting our original place and like they did whatever they could to try to make up for it which was great and the home itself was beautiful but to your point ashley like i mean the minute i got that call my trust in like that brand which i had always held in like such high regard you know uh completely evaporated because i was like what you're leaving me stranded here so yes you know the supply that they had was nicer than the supply that they had uh that airbnb had in that particular area but you know uh with it came horrible uh quite frankly horrible service so makes a lot of sense so how do you think about the you kind of compare like this in the in the research a uh two thousand five hundred dollars a night vermont state and one thirty five a night shipping container on airbnb both with like perfect ratings and you know both have like their airbnb's like guest favorite badges but you're arguing reviews alone can't kind of organize a market you've touched on this a little bit but but unpack this slightly further for us like what do you what do you really mean by that

Speaker B: yeah we really believe that reviews need context um you know we make this a comparison in hotels you can have a ritz carlton with a seven point eight review and a hampton inn with an eight point two review but does that mean that the hampton inn is higher quality than the ritz carlton of course not yeah but it means what it means is that the hampton inn may have done a better job meeting the expectations of the hampton and guest right and so that's the distinction we find that reviews are retrospective and tiers are perspective and so the tier tells me what i should expect before i buy and then the review tells me whether you've delivered on that expectation and so you know vacation rentals today are trying to make reviews do both jobs and they can't so we need a language that tells the guest what they're buying before the booking happens and then the reviews become dramatically more useful because they're measuring against what the understood promises

Speaker A: when you guys think about service right and that again is the recurring theme is like service is a differentiator one of the biggest differences obviously between a vacation uh rental and a hotel is like when you go to a hotel you kind of expect service because you need it right like you don't have a kitchen in your room like you're likely going to the restaurant you are likely in a new city and want to understand you know where should i go for dinner right or you want to drink at the bar downstairs before you go to sleep like the the need for service if you will is is is greater it's expected right given sort of the the actual constraints of the three hundred eighty square foot whatever it is room that you're staying in right uh that that doesn't always translate to vacation rentals right oftentimes people book vacation rentals ten to not be in a hotel right like they they want their own space they they're it's it's it's multifamily or multi generational often not always right uh how how do you how do you think about this where i might have the most incredible time and from a furnishings perspective like it's top notch but i actually i don't want to talk to anyone i don't need to talk to anyone right whereas in the hotel context that could be the distinguishing factor between an exceptional experience and like an average experience is my interaction with the staff half in a vacation rental context that's one it's just harder and it's different my question for you is given how much you emphasize service and that that importance how does how do you think about when service isn't wanted and or needed like it is in a traditional hotel context

Speaker B: zach you're cutting out a little bit yeah

Speaker A: sorry oh i'm sorry uh did you yes i can hear you can you

Speaker B: hear me i caught it i think i caught it yeah sorry my my phone's cutting out a little bit but um you know i think the biggest so let me just talk to you about service let's talk let's look at rachel alday and abode they do about four or five pre arrival inspections before the guest arrives they arrive they inspect the home thirty minutes before the guest arrives to make sure that there isn't a fly that's flown into the toilet before the guest arrives you know the is lit when the guest comes up um they're there to greet the guests to take them through the home answer how the speaker system works answer how to turn the hot tub on you know make the questions they're there to um you know moving mountains in colorado provides van van services to and from the mountain for skiing you know there's all these different services these concierge level services that you can provide even in a vacation rental you can make the reservations and whatnot versus a more lifestyle tier you have the local team in place they can be there you know within a couple hours if the the wi fi is down or whatnot but a lot of the service is delivered on a app right where they have you know recommended restaurants and whatnot so there's a lot more technology introduced into that so very similarly that you have in hotels or restaurants you can provide levels of service based on those those quality tiers

Speaker A: yeah well said well said and then and rachel is such a great example of uh i think the creme de la creme here in terms of how and robin and all the uh incredible work he did at moving mountain so those are wonderful examples i want to uh uh you end the paper uh by talking about this or you use a specific line which i thought was very well written so i'm just going to quote it directly it says hospitality creates memories standards build industries uh if you get this right what does this industry look like in ten years that it doesn't look like today so in other words if we believe this to be true and if all the effort that you guys are doing if people buy into it if there's if there's you know um real momentum that's built both from a consumer perspective and also an operator perspective around around these ideals where do you think this goes like at the end of the day why is this so unbelievably critical

Speaker B: from your perspective yeah i mean our property managers have been asking us this question for years like why is the vacation rental industry the only industry without a national brand why don't we have meaningful loyalty programs you know why is it so difficult to sell a property management company without a massive earnout or requiring the founder to stay involved for years right and i think all of those are symptoms of this underlying problem the experience isn't predictable enough without the individual operator behind it and that's where the predictability dividend that we talk about becomes really powerful because when you have standards tiers and a uh recognizable hospitality promise the business becomes less dependent on that particular founder or that particular home the guest understands what they're buying the owner understands what they're investing in and the managers know how to operate and the distribution partners like the otas know how to sell it and so once that promise can be repeated across hundreds or thousands of independently owned homes you can start building things that are very different than how they're built today uh you can build national brands because the brand actually stands for something consistent you can build loyalty programs because the guests can trust that the next day will deliver a comparable you know level of hospitality and you can make uh you can create more valuable and transfer transferable property management businesses because the operating model doesn't rely entirely on the founders itself and so i think that you ultimately open up new forms of distribution financing investment around the industry and that's why we say hospitality creates memories standards build industries the memories can still happen at that individual home but the standards are what allow everything around that home to become scalable investable and enduring

Speaker A: well i feel like that's a mic drop moment right there uh ashley that was so well said and i think you're spot on uh it's a long time it's been too long quite frankly that the industry has there've been attempts i think at versions of this but uh yours is the most kind of coherent and believable quite frankly uh and so i think the question just becomes how do you get right and i know you guys are you guys have already had some success here which is which is really exciting but how do you get more people to buy into this with this way of thinking how do you get more people to think critically about how they're positioning how they're building their portfolios they aren't just taking on any property uh any owner right but they're being incredibly strategic about how they do this and i think the work that you guys are doing is so critical is so important and i wish you guys the best of luck uh and i i'm sure folks tuning in to this conversation wants uh to know more about this and want to think about this as they can as they think about building their own portfolios we've got folks who listen to this podcast who are building their own hotels but many of whom have you know both vacation rentals and hotels uh and whatnot and are trying to figure out what is the uh what is the loyalty solution or you know what is what is the the brand solution with my with my hotels that i can carry over into my vacation rental so if folks want to just like learn more about this thinking this way of thinking i'll have obviously a link to whatever link you want to give me for folks to access the report um but anywhere else that you direct folks if they want to understand a little bit more about the research if they want to understand your way of thinking and if they want to figure out hey how do i sign me up like what what do i do what is i guess the core call to action that you would encourage folks to take yeah

Speaker B: i'd love to hear directly from you so my email is ashley ashlynhaven dot com um youm can always sign up for inhaven um i'd love to hear directly from everyone um the conversations are very fun and we continue to learn more and um apply you know different ways of thinking to these studies wonderful

Speaker A: well i will have your email linked in the show notes below then uh ashley thank you so much for the time thanks to you and the team for the great work and we will chat again soon thanks zach take care hey friends thanks for joining us for this episode of behind the stays i'd love to know what you thought of the episode feel free to shoot me a dm on instagram at behindthestays or send me an email at zackourney dot com if this is your first time tuning in it's a pleasure to have you and we hope to have you back again soon but if you've been a listener for a while i'd greatly appreciate if you'd subscribe to the show if you aren't already and then leave us a rating and review of the show wherever you're streaming this podcast oh and if you know a hotelier or a hospitality entrepreneur that's building something new and novel i invite you to introduce them to me so that my team and i can discuss bringing them on the show again you can just shoot me an email at zackourney dot com or a dm m on instagram behind the scenes is brought to you by journey a next generation loyalty program built for the modern traveler we're looking to onboard new boutique hotels unique stays and the top vacation rental management companies onto our platform every day if you're a hospitality entrepreneur who has a stay or a collection of stays with seoul we'd love for you to apply to join our alliance at journey dot com alliance again that's journey dot com alliance thanks for being here y' all we will see you next time