Maria Lancaster spent much of her career in high tech, with companies like Oracle, until her home was effectively an airplane. She traded that for a beach house on Tybee Island and a job at Tybee Vacation Rentals, where she found that everything she knew about technology had a real home in short-term rentals.

In this episode, Maria and Heather talk about what has changed for anyone who wants to build. Dashboard pages that once took Maria weeks of SQL and programming now come together in about 15 minutes of plain English requests to Claude. She walks through Helm, the dashboard she built in three days for the Wheelhouse Hackathon, including a what-if revenue planner and a way to make sense of parent-child properties, and she is candid about where she got stuck.

If you manage a portfolio and have wondered whether you could build your own tools, Maria gives you a starting point you could act on this week. She is also very clear about when you should build and when you should simply buy the software that already exists.

About Maria Lancaster

Maria Lancaster is the founder of MJ Creative Business Solutions, a deliberately broad name for a boutique consultancy that helps short-term rental companies with revenue management, business intelligence and marketing. Before joining the industry she spent years in technology marketing at companies including Lotus and Oracle. She moved to Tybee Island, Georgia, joined Tybee Vacation Rentals, and stayed on after VTrips acquired the company before going out on her own. Maria is part of ShortCuts for Short Term Rentals and describes herself as a knowledge sharer who is always happy to answer a question.

Key Takeaways

• You can start without any connections at all: export around three years of reservation detail (the individual reservations, not the summary) from your PMS, bring the spreadsheet into Claude or ChatGPT, and start asking questions.
• If you are not sure what to ask, ask the AI what your first question should be, or ask whether it understood your question and how it would have phrased it.
• Once you have seen what an export can tell you, ask your PMS, revenue and review vendors about their MCP, the connection that lets your AI read their data, so you can do the same thing on live numbers.
• Unless you want to become a technology company, do not build your core software. Your business is hospitality, so build the extras that make your owners, your team and your guests happier.
• AI can help you spot owners at risk before they give notice. The quiet ones you have not heard from in six months are often the ones who leave, and AI can also help you plan what to say when you call them.
• Maria expects guests and owners to find, book and evaluate managers through AI tools rather than websites within the next year or two, so it is worth thinking now about how your business will show up there.

‍Resources and Links Mentioned

• ShortCuts for Short Term Rentals: shortcuts4str.com/team/maria-lancaster
• Wheelhouse: revenue management platform; its MCP was the basis of the hackathon
• Claude, Claude Design and Claude Code: the AI tools Maria used to build Helm
• ChatGPT: the other option Maria suggests for getting started
• Lovable: the app builder Heather uses
• PMS exports mentioned: Track, Escapia and Beyond
• QuickBooks MCP: mentioned for asking questions of your financial data
• Simon Lehmann's STR Academy

‍Connect with Maria Lancaster

Maria describes her business as boutique and does not have a website, so LinkedIn is the best place to find her, or you can email her directly. If you have a question about how to do something, she is happy to hear from you.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/maria-watts-lancaster-4787b0  

Email: mariaglancaster@gmail.com

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