Mike Bayer
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Mike Bayer
Without further ado, let's get this episode started. Here's your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
In today's episode, I am delighted to be joined by Ashley Ching, the founder of Inhaven, to talk about standards and expectations in our industry. This came about because I sat in on her presentation at the Vacation Rental Women's Summit, and I enjoyed it so much I immediately asked her to come join me and share her insights with you. Here we go.

Heather Bayer
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.

Heather Bayer
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer. As ever, I'm super delighted to be back with you once again. My voice is a little gravelly today, and I think a number of people came back from the conferences in Nashville with colds and flu, and I'm trying to keep this at bay. But honestly, I think something is brewing. But anyway, it's allowing me to talk today, so that's all I need to do.

Heather Bayer
Thinking on the Vacation Rental Women's Summit, there were a lot of great sessions there and it was a real tough choice between them. Which one should I go to? There's five amazing sessions and I know most of them were recorded, but there's nothing like actually being in on a session and being able to ask questions and also to be able to chat with other attendees afterwards to share insights and thoughts about the session. So I'm so glad I elected to attend the  presentation by Ashley Ching from Inhaven.

Heather Bayer
It was called, Unlock the Future of Stays: Surpassing Hotel Standards and Expectations. I'm going to read the description from the Show Guide in its entirety, as it will set the scene for the discussion I'm having with Ashley today. It says, Step into the future of hospitality with a session that redefines guest experiences. We'll dissect what it means to professionalize stays, set and sustain property standards and meet the evolving demands of sustainability and the rise of digital nomads. Learn not just to meet, but to surpass traditional hotel expectations, ensuring your property stands out in an increasingly competitive market. This talk is your key to unlocking the strategies that will prepare your accommodations for the next wave of travel trends. I found the whole presentation really insightful, and I am delighted to welcome Ashley Ching to the podcast to talk more about this.

Heather Bayer
I'm super delighted to have with me today, Ashley Ching, the founder and CEO of Inhaven. Absolutely delighted to have you here, Ashley. It was such a pleasure to meet you in Nashville last week.

Ashley Ching
Heather, I'm so glad to be here too, and thanks for bringing me on your show.

Heather Bayer
Not at all. When I sat in on your presentation, it was immediately apparent that I needed you to come on and share the message that you were giving with a lot more people, because those rooms only hold so many. Although you had a really good turnout, I think a lot more people need to hear this message that you were sharing. In the introduction, I shared the description that was in the conference guide and something that really came out to me from that. One of the reasons why I came to the session was because you said, We'll dissect what it means to professionalize stays, set and sustain property standards, and meet the evolving demands of sustainability and rise of digital nomads. I really want to explore that. But before we do, I'd love you to introduce yourself to the audience. Tell us your origin story. How did you get into this business in the first place?

Ashley Ching
Sure. I am an avid user of vacation rentals. I have four really young kids, so when we travel, we prefer vacation rentals. We need multiple bedrooms, a kitchen. What we would do is when we travel, prior to getting into this industry, we would search for homes on places like Airbnb or Vrbo, and we would find homes in the perfect location. Pictures look great, but we'd often show up to really terrible beds and missing pots and pans. The things you don't see in pictures or can't see alone in pictures. It was super frustrating as a guest.

Ashley Ching
I started to talk to dozens and dozens of vacation rental managers and hosts on how they procured products. This was particularly interesting to me because I was at the time the head merchant at a Home Depot private label company called the Company Store. I started my career in consulting, but moved on to Tiffany & Company and then the Home Depot. I'm just naturally curious to know how do people procure things? These property managers and owners consistently said; It's a nightmare. We have no idea what we're buying. We're not hospitality furnishing experts, and replenishing is also a nightmare.

Ashley Ching
You've got your housekeeping staff, which are the front lines, and they're texting or saying, Dishes are broken, and as a property manager you're thinking, Okay, where did I find those dishes? Oftentimes they go and the housekeeping team will just source new dishes and then you get mixed inventory and it's not professional looking. Given my background at the Home Depot, I know all the suppliers. I know that they have supply chains for retail, for our own homes, and they have supply chains for the hotel industry. I wanted to bring that supply chain that traditionally has been only offered at the hotel or restaurant industry, the more commercial grade, durable products to the vacation rental space. The other interesting background I have is I worked at Tiffany & Company for many, many years, and it took me all over the world. So I went out to Asia for five years and lived in Hong Kong, and I was responsible not only for the assortments in the stores and the inventory, but also for the product presentation. So that when guests traveled or clients traveled to our stores, whether they were in Sydney, Australia, or Beijing, China, they would have a very similar experience from an overall product presentation perspective, because we know that consistency is really important. The key marketed messages are upfront.

Ashley Ching
Combined with my experience at the Home Depot and then the brand experience I had at Tiffany, that's why I started Inhaven. Inhaven is a professional procurement platform that helps property managers and hosts set their standards for the bed, bath, and kitchen. Then we make it really easy to replenish and promote these to the guests.

Heather Bayer
Brilliant. I've got to tell you a story, because I was in a Dollar Tree yesterday and I'm buying Christmas cards. FYI, you never have to spend $5-7 on a birthday card from Target or Walmart. You just go to a Dollar Tree, they have really good cards. So I was stocking up on birthday cards for the next six months, and I walk out and I go to the checkout and in front of me is a woman who is unloading this absolutely massive, filled cart of the cheapest kitchen utensils and plastic bowls and what else was there in there? Oven mitts and stands for kitchen towels. I'm thinking, Gosh, she's got a lot in there. Then she started laying them out to go through and she had them separated out into four separate lots and there was exactly the same things in each pile, and I realized, You are furnishing vacation rentals. And she turned around to get something else out of the cart. And I saw she's got a lanyard on and a card which says, Vacasa. And this was the cheapest of the cheap merchandise that she was piling into this cart. And I'll leave that at that, but I just wanted to share that with you.

Ashley Ching
I can comment on that. Yeah. So not only is it cheap and it's probably not going to last more than just a couple of days, it's not sustainable. You cannot scale as an industry if you are having your workforce run out to Costco, to the Dollar Tree, every day to buy new things for the rentals, assortments change, pricing changes. It's just such a waste. I liken it to when McDonald's runs out of burgers, do they run to the lowest, the nearest Kroger to buy their burger meat? No, they have a professional supply chain set up that helps them make it easy to source and then replenish the needs. And that's what we're really here at Inhaven doing, is setting up that professional supply chain for the industry.

Heather Bayer
I know from running my own vacation rentals and running a property management company that we did not have that control over inventory. So every property was different. Every property was using different linens. I knew some of them were taking up the old stuff from home. This was in the early days before we began to some standardization and created minimum standards for the properties. But I think there's many places like that that the vacation rental is still for many owners where the stuff from home goes to die.

Ashley Ching
Yeah, and it's just so unfortunate, because it's no longer a cottage industry. It's a $160 billion industry, and really we need to professionalize. And we see that with a lot of the statistics out there. And we'll get into this in a little bit. And it's something that the hotel industry we'll talk about, grappled with 30 years ago in terms of setting standards and whatnot. So the vacation rental industry is at the same inflection point right now.

Heather Bayer
Well, let's talk about hotels and the way that hotel brands can create and maintain their standards. You know that if you go to a certain brand of hotel, you're going to get a specific mattress, the beds are going to look very similar. There's a lot of standardization in there. But there is an argument about this standardization that aren't we creating or are they creating this sterile, non-unique environment? We're going to come onto this, but let's just explore that position about brands and creating a brand that goes across every property in their inventory.

Ashley Ching
So at Inhaven, we are focused at the bed, the bath, and the kitchen. So really the foundations of that stay, so the sleep experience, the bathing experience, and then the fully stocked kitchen. We believe that those things should be standardized, those foundations. That doesn't mean that we want to standardize the furniture or the décor or the gathering spaces. That's what makes vacation rentals unique and what makes them super interesting for customers, they're just like me, to go and travel to. What we want to say is that we want to standardize those foundations. No matter whether you're staying at a mountain resort, a beach bungalow, or a cabin in the woods, you're getting that very local, unique experience, but you're not having to compromise on the quality of the sleep, the eating, and the bathing. We think that those can be standardized, and that's what we can learn from hotels. When I travel, and I travel a lot, even if I haven't been to a city, let's say I'm booking a Marriott hotel and it's in Kyoto, Japan. I've never been there. I know what I'm walking into with the Marriott brand. That's what we're trying to do with Inhaven is, no matter where you go, if it's an Inhaven quality stay-approved rental, whether you're at the Glacier Getaways up in Montana or Key West Vacation Rentals down in Florida, if it has that Inhaven Quality Stay badge, you know that you're going to get a great sleep experience, bathing, and eating experience. That's standardized.

Heather Bayer
What's included in that? How do you set those standards?

Ashley Ching
We are a team of merchants with over 100 years of experience. We understand what goes into the quality of great sheets, what goes into making kitchenware super durable. What we've done is we've curated the entire assortment or checklist for the bed, the bath, and the kitchen. We have different quality levels. Let's say that you have a place that rents out for under $100 a night, you might buy our basic level quality tier. Or if you are renting out a place, your luxury rental that rents for $15,000 a night, you would gear towards our luxury level. Each product, whether you're buying a comforter or a kitchen pan set, we've identified the best choices for you at each quality tier. And so once you fulfill that, you have become eligible to put the Inhaven Quality Stay badge on your rental listing.

Heather Bayer
So if there's people listening here who aren't Inhaven customers, they can do something very similar. If they've got a property management company and they've got differing standards, because I know that there are property companies out there that just are catering to the luxury market. I'm thinking Moving Mountains in Colorado and perhaps Stay Lake Norman in... where is that? North Carolina? I think that's North Carolina, north of Charlotte. And other luxury brands, it's going to be one standard right the way across them. But I like this idea, and I'm thinking back to when I was running a property management company, we had those $100 a night properties and we had the $1500 a night properties, but we still weren't really in control over what went into each. I can really see the value of setting up standards for a different range of properties.

Ashley Ching
That's what we're trying to do, is just create simple solutions for these property managers and owners to save time and money. But I think it's really interesting if we look back and I've done a lot of work studying the evolution of the hotel space and history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes, and I think about that a lot.

Heather Bayer
What does that mean? I heard you say that in the presentation and I meant to say, Explain that.

Ashley Ching
Yeah. So the hotel industry, if we look back 30 years ago to the late '80s, they had seen explosive growth in demand because of two things. One, cars became much more affordable. You could buy a Ford Taurus or a Toyota Camry. Two, the government built out, speaking to the US, the government built out the highway system. People could easily travel to places. Along this highway system, you had tons of different hotels, motels, thousands of different brands. Just like if you think about the vacation rental space, if you were looking at a map of the US today, you've got thousands of different brands out there from small independent brands to larger brands. The hotel industry, because of these guest complaints of inconsistencies, really got together and implemented a couple of different changes that were really groundbreaking and helped the industry scale. This happened all in the 90s. One is the Westin Heavenly Bed was launched. At that point, the guests really gravitated towards this, Wow, I know I'm going to get a great night's sleep every night I stay at the Westin. Some of the other hotel brands really caught on to this and started to implement standards in their stays.

Ashley Ching
The second is that the hotels, a bunch of brands got together and created a procurement solution for them. There was something called Avendra that was developed. It became their sourcing solution to really maintain and implement these standards. Then things like security really changed. You went from just metal keys to the digital key cards and just the way that we track customer or guests. Sustainer Hotels went from just the paper books to these reward systems. There was a lot of change that happened. As you watched that change in the 90s, if you look at the last 30 years, the independents who didn't get on to these standards and new CRM systems or join a brand had not grown at all. The brands have really scaled. The Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, WorldHotels, they control nearly 75% of the US supply chain. I think these national brands are really, really important as we think through how can we really scale as the vacation rental industry.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, that's interesting because going back to my experience at Dollar Tree. So, Vacasa is one of those brands, isn't it? That is rapidly scaling.

Ashley Ching
This is where it gets really tricky. I'm sorry to cut you off.

Heather Bayer
No, you please cut me off, because I'm trying to word something in a good way.

Ashley Ching
Yes, Vacasa is a property manager. Property management are all about creating an amazing local guest experience. It's the boots on the ground, it's creating these really value add experiences for the guests. It's guest communication, it's maintaining these stays. That's local managed. That's really local management. Brands are national. So the Hilton Heights, The World. They actually don't own or operate many of their hotels. That's a national standard. It's the property manager in the hotel space that's responsible for implementing these national standards that have been agreed on by the owners of these hotels. That's what we're missing in this space, is we've got a lot of local property managers trying to set national brand standards, but brands are national and property management is local. I think there's friction going on, and I think Vacasa's really struggled because they're trying to be national, but property management is really a local business. If you look at hotels, the hotel industry, if you look at the top five property managers to the Aimbridges of the world, they only represent less than 10% of the supply in the US. When you say, I would give this example in Nashville, when I stayed at a Marriott in Nashville, it may have been run by Aimbridge. It definitely wasn't run by Marriott. There was no Marriott employee actually in that hotel. I didn't leave that stay saying, Wow, I had a great Aimbridge experience. You think about the national brands, but those are the ones setting the standards and helping these local property managers buy to those standards and live up to that.

Heather Bayer
And therein lies the issue. I can't see a property manager at any point saying, I don't want my property management brand to be overridden by something much larger than me.

Ashley Ching
I think then there's a scaling issue, because if you look at the map, guests just can't understand all these thousands and thousands of property managers. I think you can still keep your brand. I'm going to London in January and I'm staying at a hotel called the Xenia Hotel, and it's an Autograph Collection. I know it's part of the Marriott Collection, but it's the Xenia Hotel. I think there's some marriage there with keeping your local brand, but also tying it towards a nationally recognized brand as well. I suppose.

Heather Bayer
Casago might be an example here because there's the local brands, but they're powered by Casago. Can I look at it that way?

Ashley Ching
You could. I don't know if Casago has actually set standards for those properties where the guests, when they say at a Casago, I think what's interesting about the hotel space is you have all these soft brands that you understand if you stay at... if I'm booking a Holiday Inn Express, I know the difference between a Holiday Inn Express, a Marriott and maybe a Walt Disney World Resort. There's true nouns associated with those brands. A Holiday Inn Express I think of, I can stay there overnight. There's going to be someone at the front desk to greet me. I can get a warm breakfast before I hit the road again tomorrow morning in a comfortable bed. Marriott, I know there's going to be maybe more front desk service where I can get them to book a dinner reservation for me. I'm going to have a nice big desk in the room, multiple chargers, and restaurants too to go to within the space. Then I think of Walt Disney World Resort, I think of family-friendly restaurants. I think of pools, I think of transportations that are easy to get to, the Disney Resort. So all of those have nouns associated with them.  I don't, and maybe I just am not as familiar with Casago, understand what that means when I stay at a Casago property. I think those soft brands are really important for the guests to understand the difference of what type of property they're staying in.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, this is really interesting. It's opening up my world a little bit wider. I want to talk about something that really resonated with me from your presentation when you talked about the growth in extended-stay hotels. I want you to give us those statistics in a second, but it seems like we've been arguing about standards for years, decades maybe. While we're doing that, the hotels are quietly building up their position as a really viable… How can we say hotels are alternative accommodation...., viable alternative to the traditional short-term rentals? Can you give us some of those statistics about extended-stay hotels?

Ashley Ching
Sure. So hotels have obviously caught on. Short-term rentals have seen explosive growth over the last 10 years, and the hotels are catching on to this. And so when we look at the US industry, one out of every three new hotels that are launched this year are Extended Stay Hotels. If we look at the brand specifically, Hilton has a new H3 project, which is Extended Stay. Hyatt is investing in Extended Stays. It's Extended Stay America is investing. When they talk about their brands that they're launching, they talk about, Come stay with us for extended stays. We have all the amenities that you need for an extended stay: the kitchen, the fully-stocked kitchen, bed, desk, etc. But you also have the backing of these trusted brands that you know what you're walking into. They do highlight that as a competitive advantage to the vacation rental space. Hilton even went further, where they launched an attack ad against the vacation rental space as part of their Hilton for the Stay campaign, where they show in an advertisement, in a commercial, a family showing up at a home. They're looking at their phone, their Airbnb ad that shows this beautiful Victorian home. In reality, the home is a complete dump. They talk about Stay with Hilton, we're the trusted brand. These brands have trust behind them, and so they're really trying to play up to the inconsistencies that travelers can experience in vacation rental space and drive fear for lack of trust.

Heather Bayer
Yes, I'd actually seen that ad numerous times, but I know when you played the ad, there were people there who had not seen it. It was, yeah, it's quite dramatic and always troubling to see attack ads like that, because they are sharing a perception of our industry. I'm thinking now about what's happening in British Columbia with the regulations that have banned short-term rentals in any town over 10,000 occupants. Really, it's taken out vacation destinations like Kelowna and closing down businesses. But this is pretty much hotel-backed, I'm sure, because there's people in Kelowna who've been running business saying there are no hotels of the same quality as our properties. However, there are extended stay hotels, so people can go and stay for a week or two weeks or three weeks or three months at a time.

Ashley Ching
Yeah, and these extended stay hotels, I've stayed in some of them, they're not great. The vacation rental industry has so much more to offer in terms of more comfortable places to really spread out. These extended-stay hotels are essentially studio or one-bedroom apartments. They don't offer the space. They don't offer those gathering spaces for families. The vacation rental industry has so much more to offer than these extended stay locations. I really do believe, though, from a guest perspective, that we need to drive more trust, more loyalty, and it's going to be through these national brands that will emerge within the vacation rental industry to really help at scale.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, exactly.

Heather Bayer
We're just going to take a short break from this interview to hear from our sponsor, Minut. Nathan Smith, the Head of Enterprise Sales, North America, answers some of the most common questions asked about the product.

Heather Bayer
Well, welcome, Nathan, so tell us a little bit about Minut and why it's so helpful for vacation rental owners and managers.

Nathan Smith
Yeah. Minut is a monitoring solution for rentals. We have a physical device that pairs really nicely with a powerful software, and together they offer monitoring for noise, crowds, cigarette smoke, temperature and humidity changes, security, and even a few other things as well. I'd say the two features that people tend to need most frequently are the noise monitoring and cigarette smoke detection. I mean, the reasons that those are the most common are probably pretty obvious. But for noise, our users are often trying to ensure that they don't have issues with their neighbors or city or council noise ordinances, maybe rental regulations. And then for cigarette smoke, of course, it's about the rental itself, protecting your investment or your homeowners' investment if you're a property manager. And as you all know, early detection for cigarette smoke is pretty critical. It could save you a lot of time and work and expense. Ultimately, though, I'd say the goal of our combined features is to help our users be better hosts and to make short term rentals work for everyone, from guests to managers to even the community. So really, we like to help people host happy.

Heather Bayer
I love that. Thank you.

Heather Bayer
So coming back onto perhaps some non-branded operators, thinking about lots of our listeners who are independent owners, or they have very small companies, what can they do to maybe set their own standards and then aim to certainly maintain them and possibly to exceed them?

Ashley Ching
That's really why we're here, is to help, especially these small independent operators, really work with them to set their standards and then to become part of a national brand, which is our Inhaven Quality Stay Approval badge or whatnot. We're really there for them to help them set their standards for their bed, their bath, their kitchen, depending on the price point or quality level that they want to achieve in each of their homes, and then get on this program. That will help highlight them as we market them as an Inhaven Quality Stay, give them marketing that they wouldn't get as an independent, and really target these guests that are looking for these quality stays in these smaller places that maybe they only operate one or two units. It's really hard from a branding perspective for them to ever get noticed out there by these guests.

Heather Bayer
So we talked about beds, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the types of... I mean, we know beds, mattresses, bed frames, linen, etc.

Ashley Ching
Yeah, all about the mattresses that you use, the linen. I really am a huge advocate for at least the cotton/poly blend. The cotton helps with the breathability. It's all about the pillows that you put in your vacation rental. Pillows can be very subjective, so we recommend that you would have two firm pillows on each bed and two medium to soft so that you give your guests some choices. It's all about the foundation of that bed. Then for the baths, we really focus on the linens, the types of bath towels we put in there that are absorbent, but also quick dry, so we save energy on the cleaning. We really believe that short-term rentals should be stocked with shampoo, conditioners, body wash, at least starter kits so that you're not forcing your guests to run out and get basic amenities. Then the kitchen, it's really all about the cookware, making sure that they can cook a basic meal, the utensils, and then the dinnerware, the flatware, making sure you have enough plates and bowls and forks and spoons stock so they're not constantly doing dishes.

Heather Bayer
What are your bug bears? You've been to many vacation rentals. What are your top, let's say your top three, and then I'll share my top three.

Ashley Ching
All right, so I am a coffee person. With four little kids, I need a cup of coffee, and it drives me nuts when I show up at a vacation rental. There's not just one little coffee pot I can throw in before I run to the grocery store to get one. So I definitely think coffee is a must at these vacation rentals are a huge disappointment to me. I do not sleep well in microfiber. I just sweat all night long. And so I really am trying to help the vacation rental industry try to get off this microfiber trend and move to a cotton/poly blend where you would see those in… Even the lowest of the lowest hotels use a cotton/poly blend in their sheeting. Then I would say, for sure, just basic amenities in the bathroom, from a shampoo and conditioner just to get us started.

Heather Bayer
Okay, so here's mine.

Ashley Ching
Yeah.

Heather Bayer
Pillows. I've been to so many vacation rentals where there is just one pillow per person and it's a pretty uncomfortable pillow. Then I end up stealing the one from my husband and say, Okay, you can lie on a bundle of clothes and I'm having two pillows or doubling up the pillow. At home we sleep with two, but the majority of people do have two pillows. That's a massive bugbear. Two pillows in each bed does not mean the pillow and a sham, right?

Ashley Ching
We did... Sorry to pause there. We did a study at the company store in Home Depot. How many pillows did the average female sleep with at night? And it's like 2.5. In terms of this, I have different pillows for different body ailments that I have. But yeah, I mean, it's really important to have multiple pillow and multiple pillow options.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, second on my list, it should have been first. I'm sure people are going to say, Why did you not put kettle first? The tea kettle. I have mentioned this on many, many occasions. I'm a Brit, we drink tea and there's a lot of Brits in North America, but tea is not a common... It's nowhere near as popular as coffee, obviously. But we stayed at a wonderful property in Nashville and he had the most... I'm going to put a picture of this kettle in the Show Notes, because it was a work of art, this kettle. It was over the top. It was not necessary. You can buy a $40 kettle. This was $90 something.

Ashley Ching
Was it a Fellow kettle?

Heather Bayer
A what?

Ashley Ching
Fellow. Oh, we have these gorgeous, for our luxury homes, we've got these gorgeous tea kettles on Inhaven by Fellowe. I was thinking it might be that.

Heather Bayer
Well, this one had a very narrow and long spout. It was a very elegant kettle. But I've been to stay at multiple rentals over the years, where the first thing I've done on day two of the vacation is to go out and buy one because there isn't one there. And somebody said to me once, Well, why can't you just boil your water in the microwave?

Ashley Ching
No!

Heather Bayer
There's a lot of research been done on how water boils in different ways, and it does boil in a different way in the microwave. I can tell. So yeah, that's that.

Heather Bayer
So pillows, and the third one is towels. I can't remember the last time I went to a rental and was able to say, Wow, these are lovely towels. Mostly they've been overused. They haven't been changed out sufficiently. They've got hard and rough and if they're white, they've gone gray. And in general, they're too small.

Ashley Ching
Yeah, I know when... A lot of our customers have come to us, or some of them have come to us, and they buy these Utopia towels on Amazon. I did a wash task with them, and I washed them twice and they shrunk six inches.  You can't even fit it around your body. I should take a video of my husband trying to use this towel. Whereas if you upgrade to hospitality grade, the shrink percentage is max 3%. I think it's really just making sure that you're buying the right towels that can go through multiple washes and that you're paying attention to the lifespan, because towels only last between 50 and 70 washes. You do have to pay attention to when it's time to maybe donate them.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. My local veterinarian loved us.

Ashley Ching
Right.

Heather Bayer
Exactly. Because every six months or so they got a big pile of towels, because I was not going to continue offering these towels when, yes, they'd shrunk and they've gone grey and hard. So how can we really encourage independent small operators to buy in to incorporating some standards into their businesses?

Ashley Ching
Yeah, I think the guests are going to continue to demand it more and more. I mean, you mentioned earlier, I believe that the guest is becoming more and more discerning, and they're going to demand these more consistent stays and these standards. So I think the time is right now to start to really think about your supply chain, how much money and time you're going to save by standardizing, you're just going to become a much more efficient small business operator. When you set standards, you know exactly what you're buying, that makes it easy to replenish, and you upgrade to these hospitality grade solutions, which will also save money because they're just more durable and you won't be replacing things so often. I think it's really time for our industry to professionalize and put together a professional procurement solution in place that really supports these standards.

Heather Bayer
That's what you're doing at Inhaven?

Ashley Ching
Exactly.

Heather Bayer
Okay, tell us a little bit more about Inhaven and how you... I mean, you have mentioned it a couple of times, but here's your pitch time.

Ashley Ching
Yeah. Inhaven is a one-stop shop procurement solution for the vacation rental industry. We work with our hosts and property managers to help them set their standards for the bed, bath, and kitchen. Then we make it really easy to replenish on those standards with our Inhaven Keep tool, which is a housekeeping tool that you have a QR code specific to the home and the housekeeper can go and identify anything that's out of stock or broken and they can just select the items through a visual first tool and that sends you a completed purchase order. You don't necessarily need to get a text saying we're missing a fork and then you need to figure out what fork you need to replace, this is a completed purchase order. It makes it really easy for you to replenish each of your properties. We are here to work with you, so you can reach out at any point. You can reach out directly to me at ashley@inhaven.com. We're also offering.... sign up is free, I should mention.... shipping over $75 is free as well. We're free to use. We are offering a special offer for Heather and her listeners, so if you log on to Inhaven and sign up, we are offering you $100 off your first order if you put in the promo code 'FORMULA', all caps.

Heather Bayer
Okay. I need to say this, how long is this offer valid for? Because we might get somebody listening to this two years down the road.

Ashley Ching
We'll keep it up forever.

Heather Bayer
Okay. That sounds like a wonderful, generous offer.

Heather Bayer
There's something I just want to add in here. We met personally at the Vacation Rental Women's Summit, but I came across you because of your booth at the Book Direct Summit in Miami last year. The one reason I remember Inhaven is that... and I have a thing about swag, and I think there is so much money spent on the things that are given away that go up into your hotel room and go straight from the bag into the waste bin. I mean, it's incredibly wasteful from a sustainability standpoint. Secondly, it's wasteful for the company that they've spent money on these things and they've just been thrown away. The point is you gave away a water bottle and it was the most beautiful water bottle. And I love my Inhaven water bottle. It goes with me every time I'm out on the Pickleball Court, I'm carrying that water bottle, and I've lost count of the amount of times that people have said to me, What's Inhaven?

Ashley Ching
Ah, that's crazy here. We've actually heard so much great feedback on that water bottle. The Book Direct Show had a big sustainability push, and we are true believers in sustainability. A lot of the products that we put on the site are sustainable. We were sponsoring the water stations with our water bottles.

Heather Bayer
I know. And I know that that sponsorship doesn't come cheap; however, it's a little bit like Will Gidara was talking about at the DARM conference when he's talking about unreasonable hospitality that yes, it may be more costly, but the buzz and the marketing buzz and the ambassadorship that comes out of that is worth way, way more. So I just wanted to thank you for my water bottle and for offering something that was truly valuable at a conference.

Ashley Ching
Thank you. I'm glad you enjoy it and continue to enjoy it. That's great news.

Heather Bayer
I will continue to tell people what Inhaven is. Ashley, it's been such a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining me and I'm sure we will speak again soon.

Ashley Ching
Thank you, Heather. I appreciate it.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much. Ashley Ching from Inhaven. That was a really good conversation. I know that any conversation that starts to pick up on how we create standards for this industry can become argumentative in places. And I'm sure that some of you listening will have some really strong views on this. We'd love to hear them. Let us know. I used to say go to the Show Notes and write your comments there. But in fact, what we're doing now is, if you've got comments on that particular episode, go to the Facebook group, The Business of Short-term Rental and Property Management, and we'll put a post up just for comments on that particular episode, because I'd love to hear from you. I know when I was running my property management company, once we implemented our minimum standards for new properties, it was so much easier to take on new properties and perhaps reject some because the owners weren't prepared to make changes. They weren't prepared to adapt to a new wave of guests. It was so much easier then to say, Okay, if you're not prepared to meet our standards.....

Heather Bayer
I'll give you one example. We had a wonderful property that I really wanted to take on, but the owner was absolutely adamant that he was not going to supply new pillows. Now, four pillows per double, queen, or king bed, two pillows per person. We said, Okay, we'll supply them and somehow we'll charge you for them. We may have even said we'd give them to him. He was just adamant. He was not having extra pillows on his beds. I have no clue what that was about, why he took that stance and whether he went to another company, I don't know. But we did not accept his property onto our program because of that. I'm sure most property managers listening to this are going to be nodding their heads. Yeah, nobody would have taken that on. It wasn't so much the particulars of the pillows, but it was the attitude. It was the attitude that was saying, You might be telling me what guests are looking for and what they're expecting, but that doesn't fit with the way I want to operate my property. Don't know what came of him. I really should check it out, check out to see if his property is on Airbnb and if we're just looking at beds with flat pillows, one flat pillow per person, we shall see.

Heather Bayer
Anyhow, thank you for being with us once again this week. It was just an enjoyable discussion for me. I hope you enjoyed it. Of course, we'll be bringing you plenty more over the next few weeks. As we go into next few weeks, I think it's only two weeks before the New Year. We've got something interesting coming up in February and I'm going to be sharing all on next week's podcast. Make sure you listen in to that. For now, I've enjoyed being with you and of course, as ever, I'll be back again next week.

Mike Bayer
We hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by Minut. Don't forget to check the link in the description of this episode to meet Minut and discover the best smart device you will ever integrate into your short-term rental business to help protect your investment and keep your neighbors happy.

Heather Bayer
It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the show notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you and I look forward to being with you again next week.