VRS684 - The Best Surprise Is No Surprise: Why Vacation Rentals Need Standards

Heather Bayer (0:01)

If you are listening to this on the day of publication, I've got some news that's hot off the press. This week in Nashville, Simon Lehmann launched his short-term rental Academy, the STR Academy, and I'm one of its founding ambassadors. I'll tell you what it is and who it's for in the middle of today's episode. So make sure you stay with me.

This is the Vacation Rental Success podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information, and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business a success.

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and as ever, I'm super excited to be back with you once again. Today, I am welcoming back a guest that I've had on the show a couple of times and that's Ashley Ching, the founder and CEO of Inhaven. Ashley is well-known in the vacation rental industry as a trailblazer, and certainly in what we're going to be talking about today, which is standards, she is going to show exactly what that means. Ashley spent 13 years at Tiffany and then rent merchandising at the company store, before a run of disappointing rental stays pushed her into this industry, and I'm sure she will talk about that. She started in Haven as a way for property managers to source beds and linens and kitchen basics to a consistent standard, and it's grown into something so much bigger. So her new white paper, Reasonable Hospitality, I love that name, proposes the thing vacation rentals have never had, and that's a shared set of standards and tiers. The kind of language of trust that hotels and airlines built for themselves long ago. And we've been talking about this industry for such a long time. So it's going to be really interesting to see if this begins to take hold. Because what I found so useful about Ashley's thinking is that she refuses to treat luxury as the only model of excellence.

Because a well-run economy stay and a well-run luxury stay can both be excellent because they're making different promises. And that matters enormously once you start adding AI to the mix. Because the right answer at once here can be exactly the wrong answer at another. So let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Ashley Ching.

I'm so happy to be with me once again with Ashley Ching from Inhaven. Ashley is a regular on this show, has been on here several times to talk about standards and linens and everything to do with making a vacation rental home look excellent and feel excellent. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me yet again. We're going to talk about your white paper today. We're going to talk about standards and we're going to slip in a little bit of AI because I can't spend 10 minutes without talking about AI. So welcome.

Ashley Ching (3:37)

Great. Thanks so much for having me, Heather.

Heather Bayer (3:40)

It definitely is my pleasure, but we're going to start off because it's been a year, I think, since you were last on.

So I'd love you to introduce yourself and just tell us what your journey into this industry was. Yeah.

Ashley Ching (3:51)

So my career started at Tiffany & Company, and I eventually became head of Global Merchandising Operations there. At Tiffany, we obsessed over the entire customer and brand experience, so that as customers traveled from Beijing to New York, to Cincinnati, they had a very similar experience, but it was locally relevant. Then later, I became head merchant at the company store, a Home Depot company, and so there, I obsessed over sheets and tetholes and pillows and traveled the world looking for the best of the best.

So I have this unusual combination of luxury brand experience and a deep understanding of home products. So at the same time, when I was at the Home Depot, we had a very young family of four children. So I think I had four under seven when I was at the Home Depot. And we increasingly stayed in vacation rentals. Hotels no longer met our needs. We needed multiple bedrooms, a kitchen, multiple bathrooms. And I guess the pivotal moment that really stuck with me, vacation rental moment, is I had booked a ski vacation with a bunch of other families in a vacation rental upstate New York. And we only have so much time off. And so we really looked at the pictures or views. Everything looks so great. We were so excited for this vacation rental experience. And we show up and there's only eight plates for a home that's up 16