Updated on December 21, 2023
An essential element of any successful vacation rental venture is human connection – with and between guests, staff, vendors, and our communities. In the winter 2023 RR Summit, Rent Responsibly hosted Cliff Johnson, Co-Founder of Vacasa and VP of New Homes at Realtor.com; Fran Maier, Founder of Match.com, BabyQuip, the Santa Fe STRA, and other organizations; and Steve Schwab, Founder and CEO of Casago for a panel called The Art and Science of Human Connection.
In this session, these three masters of human connection gave tips on how to use data, emotional intelligence, military training, and other seemingly unrelated skills to build strong teams, host great guests, and build hosting businesses. The following are three of many insight-packed takeaways from the panel.
To watch the entire session, join or log into the RR Network BETA and head to the Replays & Downloads library.
Start by building trust into your brand values
Trust is the glue that holds together a brand, a company, and a team. When Fran Maier founded Match.com in 1994, much of her attention focused on creating a dating platform where members could feel safe and anonymous and have fun.
“Those were really our guide points in terms of building trust and brand trust with our customers,” Fran said.
Later, she built BabyQuip, a baby equipment rental company for traveling parents, on similar brand values.
“You can imagine the importance of trust when dealing with babies,” she said. “You can have all kinds of analytics that tell you, this ad is better than that ad, and these colors are better than those colors, and this guy is better for you than this guy. But it all still has to fit in within a brand framework, in a value-space framework.”
When you’re marketing your company, keep in mind your brand values and what is the promise to the consumer that you’re fulfilling.
The same applies to your team. In a military setting, operating as a cohesive team can be a matter of life or death. In a vacation rental setting, a cohesive team can determine the success of the business.
Part of having a cohesive team is making sure that everyone has standard operating procedures and principles to guide decision-making, said Casago founder and CEO Steve Schwab, a former Army Ranger.
When Steve first started Casago, he struggled with some of the decisions that his team was making at homes and with homeowners.
“I went back and looked at my fraternity days and my Army Ranger days … and sat down and wrote down all the principles of how I think people should make decisions and put them into our old credo,” he said. Then, he made it mandatory for employees to carry the credo with them on the job. In time, decision-making started to align with the guidance Steve had set out.
“There are thousands of decisions made for all of us every single day without oversight. And those are based on the principles that you have a conversation about on a daily basis, a common purpose, and shared language, and it builds a culture of social norms that make it successful,” he said.
For Vacasa, in times of growth and acquiring other property management companies, a credo helped to merge different cultures and operating practices, said co-founder Cliff Johnson. Getting in front of the new owners and learning their culture, how they use technology, and their values was a helpful way to “weave that culture into the existing culture as opposed to taking over that culture and forcing them to become your culture,” Cliff said.
“I would say a lot of our best ideas and best team members really came from those acquisitions,” he added. “So every time we did that, it was a learning opportunity.”
Build team harmony and loyalty to reach growth goals
If your goal is to grow beyond hosting solo, finding the right partner is vital to the success of your vacation rental business. As with any union, you should have common values and goals and complementary skill sets and interests, Steve said.
“If you both are interested in the same part of the business, it could end up being a power struggle over who’s going to do operations,” he noted.
Ensure that you both have a beginner’s mentality in the sense that you believe you have things to learn from each other. Write down what your goals are, your vision for the business, make sure that you are aligned with somebody who you like and respect, Steve added.
Have a north star, a common goal you’re trying to achieve that goes beyond making money, said Rent Responsibly CEO David Krauss. By having a higher mission and making it known in your marketing, job posts, and other materials, you are more likely to attract the right people to work with you, he said.
In the early days at Vacasa, Cliff was in charge of hiring the housekeeping contractors.
Five years after its founding, Vacasa ranked No. 9 among the fastest-growing private companies in the nation in the annual Inc. 5,000 list by Inc. Magazine. Throughout this phenomenal growth, Cliff kept his original housekeeping team.
“The level of care and detail that they gave to the homes was incredible,” said Cliff, who left Vacasa five years ago and is now vice president of new homes at Realtor.com. “In the early days, we were hyper-focused on quality of care, both for owners and guests. And having people that treated the home as their own was exceptionally important.”
However, these housekeepers who were outstanding at cleaning and caring for the homes often had gaps in technological and other skills that were necessary for Vacasa to scale, particularly in the area of hiring and training new employees.
“So an inflection point that was pretty important in our journey was actually giving our contractors the option that converted them to employees, and then giving them the support to learn how to hire and train,” Cliff said. “Many of our earliest hires became local managers and general managers and moved up through the company. I think that really showed other people what was possible and set a path that really hadn’t existed in a lot of these markets we were working in.”
Leverage a smart mix of emotions and data to book more and happier guests
Data and technology can be a great way to make decisions, from pricing your vacation rental to deciding on amenities to offer.
But Cliff suggests balancing data with emotion. For example, Cliff owns some vacation rentals where he doesn’t charge pet fees.
“It’s a missed opportunity, but guests appreciate it,” Cliff said. “They come back, and they rave about it. It shows up in the reviews. That’s a distinct decision that I made. Could you get away with charging pet fees and probably not bother people? Sure. But where are you going to be differentiated from your competition?”
Emotions can be a huge driver in decisions or transactions. BabyQuip, for example, solves the stress of traveling with kids. Booking a vacation rental is often a decision also driven by emotions: the longing to spend time with loved ones or the emotions associated with a big life event. Hosts and managers and their vendors have the opportunity to meet those emotional needs.
For example, BabyQuip has a community of about 2,000 quality providers, mostly the moms who own the baby gear. “They’re the ones who buy it, pick it up, clean it, deliver it, and they’re our frontline with our customers: the parents, sometimes grandparents, and sometimes vacation rental hosts,” Fran said.
BabyQuip gives these providers a community forum where they share ideas, celebrate wins, discuss customer issues, and even post photos of how they pack their car. “That community really reinforces those brand values, and those brand values then get translated to the experience that the customers have,” Fran said.
“When people are staying at your house, this is a special moment for them, just like it is during any vacation that they’re taking, and trying to address their experience as a special moment would go a long way,” she added.
Vacation rentals are often the setting for emotional moments in guests’ lives, such as going on vacation for the last time with a loved one who has a terminal illness. Cliff said when creating guest experiences, he keeps those emotional moments in mind.
“If that’s the scenario, you aren’t going to care about the money; you’re going to care about the experience,” he said.
“This is a unique industry in the sense of travel as a whole, but specifically vacation rentals, because it is so personal, that you have such a great opportunity to create an amazing imprint on someone’s life,” he added.
To get all of the tips and strategies shared in this session, join or log into the RR Network BETA and watch The Art and Science of Human Connection from RR Summit Winter 2023 the Replays & Downloads library.
