Improving the Guest Experience

Hal Conick
9/3/2024

There’s a movement of vacation rental industry professionals who have grown tired of the industry’s reputation of inconsistency. They’ve heard from guests who have been disappointed by short-term rentals and believe that the future lies in providing guests with thoughtful, unique experiences during every stay.

“People are realizing this is what you need to not be commoditized and not be treated as an Airbnb,” says Robin Craigen, CEO and co-founder of Colorado-based luxury vacation rental company Moving Mountains. “To be considered an Airbnb is the worst insult you can ever give someone like me.”

The industry has grown massively—it was $79.3 billion in 2017 and will be $100.3 billion by the end of this year, according to Statista Market Insights. Beyond revenue, the industry has grown in awareness, as the average traveler now sees vacation rentals as a viable alternative to staying at a hotel, especially after the pandemic.

But as the industry has grown, so too has its inconsistency. While great listings exist, many travelers have stories about their less-than-ideal stays at a vacation rental property. Guests will see a listing filled with gorgeous photos, book it, and walk through the front door to a disappointingly drab decor. Kitchens are left half-stocked, furniture is uncomfortable, and customer service is left to scanning QR codes, squinting to read digital guestbooks, and calling phone lines that ring endlessly.

This movement of vacation rental professionals believes that each brand raising its standards will raise the reputation of the industry. They value quality, uniqueness, and attentive service above all else.

Here’s how they’ve been trying to improve the vacation rental industry.

Making Better Purchases

After Jeff Iloulian made a trip to IKEA to buy furniture in bulk for his properties, he realized that the money he was saving wasn’t worth the bother.

The furniture would take hours to assemble, and he wondered if it would last beyond a year of use. Worse yet, most of the furniture didn’t look very good—fake wood always seems to look chintzy, upon close examination. Guests would notice, and that didn’t bode well for their experience or his property’s reviews. An attorney in his past career, Iloulian started brainstorming a better way.

In 2020, Iloulian found a solution that he believed could elevate his properties, but also other properties across the vacation rental industry. He co-founded and became CEO of HostGPO, a group purchasing organization that helps more than 300,000 vacation rental properties get discounts on furniture, linens, and wall art, among other pieces. Each year, the average member of HostGPO saves more than $12,000, without factoring in improvements to bookings and revenue that come with a better furnished property.

GPOs have long been a fixture of the hotel industry, allowing hotels to group together and buy quality goods in bulk at a discount. This is where hotels, for example, would purchase stain-resistant linens. Vacation rental property managers have typically been on their own, paying full price and often opting for lower quality goods to save money—this is why guests sometimes have stories of finding the property’s bedsheets rough or towels ragged. This leaves vacation rental managers with the need to spend more money more often to buy new pieces.

“Managers often focus on the short-term—making record profits this year and buying fast furniture,” Iloulian says. “But they’re not thinking about how reviews make a difference long-term. If your reviews tank, you have to start over again. You’d have to replace all that furniture, and there are the hidden costs associated with replacing furniture—they’re astronomical. It’s a nightmare. I made a lot of those mistakes myself.”

After Iloulian began HostGPO and started buying better pieces for his vacation properties, he noticed that the level of design and aesthetic felt elevated across his properties, and his reviews improved. There were better bedspreads, improved light fixtures, and furniture that looked good well past a year.

And this, he says, is the feedback he gets from HostGPO users as well. It’s far easier to supply guests with a quality experience when the home décor is well planned and put together, and that’s far easier to do when managers don’t have to buy and assemble dozens of pieces.

Yacht-like Service

Before Craigen co-founded Moving Mountains—focusing on renting out full-service, catered ski chalets in Colorado—he and his wife ran a luxury yacht service in the Virgin Islands. He was the captain and first mate; his wife was the chef. Each day, on six-day jaunts around the islands, they would find ways to meet each guest’s unique needs.

After Craigen and his wife made the switch to vacation rentals to find stability and raise a family, Craigen saw that serving guests in vacation rentals wasn’t much different from serving guests on a yacht. Guests were willing to pay for a full-service, luxury experience, so long as the experience met and exceeded their expectations. And once Moving Mountains had about 10 properties, business really started taking off.

“We realized that there was this big, untapped opportunity at the top end of the market to deliver a premium level of service in the true luxury homes,” Craigen says. “The more we leaned into luxury, the more homeowners kept walking in the door saying, ‘Manage my house, I want to I want when you guys are doing.’”

Now, Moving Mountains is in four markets across Colorado, managing 250 homes with a staff of 120 people. At every turn, Craigen says that their goal is to abide by their name: They will work to move mountains for guests.

“It’s an extra level of service,” Craigen says. “We brought a lot of thinking from maintaining and running a yacht into how we managed homes. We did more preventative maintenance, and that led to better experiences for the guest. We’ve made sure as we grow, we don’t undermine quality. That’s been the biggest thing we worried about.”

Moving Mountains guests have rejected the commoditized experience and kept coming back for the individual attention they receive, Craigen says, even if it’s more expensive. By building a reputation and focusing on quality, Craigen says that Moving Mountains has found a base of repeat guests.

And that base of guests is growing, according to research from Allied Market Research, which predicts that luxury rentals will grow 13.1% each year until 2031.

“We’re the Mercedes or Ferrari of experiences,” Craigen says. “If you need a Ford, then it’s less expensive, but there’s a ton of people who can get you one. We’re clear about what we want to be in the marketplace: We want to be regarded as the best.”

An Elevated Experience

Kim Lalande never owned a vacation rental property and never worked in hotels, but she traveled frequently for work a decade ago, staying at four- and five-star hotels. Between hotel stays, she’d book a property in the burgeoning vacation rental market and compare experiences. Hotels would offer services like concierge, gyms, massages, and chefs at the push of a button, while vacation rentals—despite their interesting properties and locations—offered few amenities.

“I was sitting there thinking that someone’s going to layer on the services component at some point,” Lalande says. She decided that she could be the one to push forward an elevated service in the industry.

Now, Lalande is CEO and founder of KEY.co, which partners with property managers across 60 destinations. KEY.co offers services like pre-arrival groceries, chefs who cook on premise or meal prep for guests, baby equipment rentals, and private curated experiences. All these amenities bring a vacation rental property onto the same level as a five-star hotel, Lalande says.

“It’s all about allowing the time and space to create the memories,” Lalande says. “At our properties, it’s typically groups traveling together. If you’ve got one person in there who is having to go to the grocery store, figure out everyone’s food needs, and do all the planning, then there’s no time to create the space for the memories. And the memories are what matters. That’s why people are going on vacation.”

The Main Ingredient: Consistent Fundamentals

These professionals have one big trait in common: They strive to ensure that properties are consistently getting the basics right.

Amid the fast growth of the industry—Statista reports that industry revenue will grow to $21.1 billion by 2028—Iloulian says that many professionals focused more on getting properties listed and furnished than on thinking about quality and what it’d be like to stay there. The post-pandemic period especially was a gold rush for so-called “rentrepreneurs,” people who saw the time of growth with low competition and entered the market. Everyone was making money, and guests were taking the experiences they were given.

But as guests experienced the highs and lows of the industry, their expectations rose. Expedia’s 2023 Traveler Value index for the vacation rental industry reports that 57% of guests want the experience to be worth the cost. This means that may have felt ripped off after a poor stay.

“People are starting to realize that part of being professional means buying the right stuff,” Iloulian says. “And thinking about your long-term bottom line. How long is this furniture going to last? What happens when I need to replace these linens? You drive higher revenue by having a nicer looking listing that’s designed focused, but you can also drive profit by reducing expenses.”

HostGPO created checklists for its customers to help them think about the fundamental needs of a home, Iloulian says. It’s something that many vacation rental managers never consider, but not meeting the fundamentals can hurt their reviews. On his recent stay in Phoenix, Iloulian stayed in a property that had great potential that sleeps 16 people, but the kitchen cabinets were mostly bare—one pot, one pan, a small number of utensils. This is something easily fixable, Iloulian says. Once addressed, the manager would have a better listing, could charge more, and would likely win more positive reviews and return guests.

“The industry benefits tremendously by the quality of the listings increasing,” Iloulian says. “It’s a rising tide, because we’re an industry that loses value when people have bad days, because they lose trust in the whole industry, right? The No. 1 reason why the industry isn’t even bigger is because there’s a cloud over the industry of people who expect problems during their stay.”

Every Guest Challenge Is an Opportunity

On a recent trip to Vail, Colorado, Craigen booked an Airbnb to avoid paying high local hotel prices. He arrived when it was dark and looked to his phone to find instructions on how to enter. The instructions were unclear, with no clear contact, leaving him to fumble around, even knocking on someone else’s door to find his way inside. He felt embarrassed and frustrated by the experience.

“I look at technology as an add-on,” he says. “It’s not meant to eliminate the contact, but it’s giving staff more time to be in present with the guests in person. It’s about using technology to buy more time for the rest of the team.”

At Moving Mountains, Craigen says that he and his team look at mistakes as inevitable, but also believe that dissatisfied customers are not inevitable after a mistake. In fact, he often looks forward to when there’s a problem to solve, a mistake to correct, or a guest with a need to meet.

“Response is what matters more than anything else,” Craigen says. “The minute a guest calls us, we’ve just been given the green light to go show the guests who we are and what we do. Every challenge is an opportunity.”

One mistake that Craigen sees across the vacation rental industry is not measuring performance in a way that can help identify more missteps. At Moving Mountains, they use guest surveys and Net Promotor Score to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong, working to improve their services with each negative they find.

“There’s more opportunity when something goes wrong than there is when everything’s going right,” Craigen says. “But don’t have the same thing go wrong on a regular basis. If you see something wrong, fix it.”

Curation and Convenience

A lot of groups book properties run by KEY.co, and Lalande said that curating their needs and making their stay as convenient as possible are her two main steps toward success.

This may mean having cheese plates ready in the fridge before a bachelorette party arrives, doing runs to the grocery for large group, or even having a chef cook or bring prepped food to the guests. KEY.co’s platform allows guests to fill in what they need before their stay, offering a drop-down menu when they can pick what groceries they’ll need.

“We started here in Austin, Texas, but as we expanded to 60 markets, we see that it’s the same basic needs for guests: quality, convenience, and curation of services,” Lalande says.

This may also mean curating experiences for guests outside of the property, linking them with local vendors for private experiences. In Costa Rica, for example, Lalande says that their services can link guests with local vendors who give private surf lessons, private zip line rides, or take guests on private excursions out to beaches and rain forests.

KEY.co takes in guest data and will even recommend trips to take, Lalande says, or allow guests to search by what experience they want rather than specific dates.

“We’re always testing and iterating,” Lalande says. “It will never be perfect; it’s about how we can make it all even better for guests. Our platform serves as a curation engine for our team. When guests want something at a destination and we don’t have it in our catalog, and we get enough data points of guests wanting it, we add it as a service.”

Places to Improve Experience

Here are some quick tips from these professionals on where vacation rental managers who want to improve their guest experience can start:

Follow the Data

What resonates with guests? Lalande says to do tests, monitor reviews, and offer surveys to see what guests have enjoyed. “You’d be surprised what you think they want versus what they actually want,” she says. Lalande suggests building data-driven profiles on guests to remember what they like and make suggestions for future stays.

Bolster Your Culture

Craigen says that Moving Mountain’s company culture is built on its mission of serving guests. As a company, they also focus on building strong relationships with their team and property owners.

“We try to be the best company in the marketplace for the owners, because without good homes to represent without good supply, we don’t have any anything to offer our clients,” Craigen says. “If you have good employees and good homes, then you can attract the highest paying guests.”

Set Your Standards

The vacation rental industry hasn’t been known for its brand standards thus far, Iloulian says, but that will soon change, especially as competition rises. Each company should work to set standards for their brand and meet those standards in each listing. Craigen says that this should even include being consistent in marketing, such as how the brand logo is used in communication with guests.

“The vacation rental industry benefits when everybody’s listings are better,” Iloulian says. “When the expectations of guests are being met, more people are going to travel and book stays.”

The Future: More Unified Brands?

Within five years, Lalande believes that many in the vacation rental market will merge or be acquired by larger brands, much like the hotel industry.

“You’ll have larger brands owning most of the market and differentiating the properties,” she says, meaning that competition will rise, as will guest expectations. “In hotels, you have starred properties; guests will want to know what to expect from vacation rentals. I may want a five-star property for one trip and a three-star property for another.”

As Craigen suggests, more brands will also be using data to better understand guests and serve them on future stays. Much of this improvement can come from asking guests to provide honest feedback about their stay.

“We look at every single survey, and if the guest isn’t giving us nine or 10, someone is asking them why,” Craigen says. “Was it a bad reservation experience? A bad experience during their stay? Something else? We need to be able to show up for these guests in order to show our true value.”

For Iloulian, the future of the industry is in the hands of those who can give guests a good experience that’s memorable for all the right reasons—it doesn’t matter if it’s a large brand or a vacation rental manager who owns one property. The industry may have earned reputation for having problems during stays, he says, but professionals who own the future are those who can make their vacation rentals frictionless for guest, a place that feels like home.

“I’m not saying that every vacation rental needs to be the Four Seasons, but it shouldn’t be the two seasons either,” Iloulian says.

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