During his stint as managing director of Food Panda for Taiwan and Philippines, based in Taipei last year, Alexander Limpert became an Airbnb host. That was when he realised that being a host for the sharing accommodation site wasn’t that easy, there were many things to handle.
Alexander Limpert, CEO & co-founder: “I saw an opportunity for standardisation.”
“I saw an opportunity for standardisation. There are a lot of things to keep in mind when you’re a host. Sure, once you have done it a couple of times, you can get more efficient but still you would need help,” said the German-born, Zurich-raised, London-based entrepreneur.
And so he and Patrick Degen, who’s behind the Swiss Founders Fund, started GuestReady, a service designed to take the hassle out of hosting on Airbnb and to provide consumers with a more consistent experience.
Think hotel management model for hosts where it gets paid a service fee.
“Bigger hotel brands have quality standards, less so for home sharing. Sometimes the house is not that clean or the sheets are dirty. We want to ensure a service level that’s consistent – for example, properly functioning wifi, clean sheets and towels, professionally cleaned and easy check-in.”
The startup, launched in August, has to date raised US$750,000. It is now available in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong. While he declined to disclose how many hosts they have recruited since launch, he said he is happy with the progress thus far and believes getting 100 homes in each city would enable the company to achieve efficiency and scale.
Early challenges: Trust & Details
He acknowledges scaling such a model is a challenge and the early days of trying to get the first homes onboard were hard. “This business is reliant on trust, people trust you with their homes, getting that trust is quite difficult. We had to have face-to-face meetings to get people to trust us. But now that we are more established, it’s become easier with people now reaching out to us. There is an opportunity for us to automate that process more.”
The second level of complexity is how different each home is. “We were not completely aware of the extent. There are so many details about each home that when we live in it we don’t think of it – things like remote controls, light switches. Now we have a standard questionnaire that takes care of these details.”
Currently, it is working with individual owners who are letting out the whole home but Limpert said there could be an opportunity to work with property owners. “There are quite a lot of units that are empty in Singapore and we are starting to reach out to these companies,” he said.
It works with local co-founders in each city and it has teams of three or four in each of the six places it operates. He recognises that there are in-market competitors offering similar services on a smaller level ‘but we are the first to do this at scale and we want to be a global player”.
It is also now focused on Airbnb hosts. “We see a natural fit between them and the markets we are in. It is important we get occupancy for the homes and right now, we are achieving 80%.”
Parallels between food delivery and hosting
With three million listings on Airbnb, you could say there’s plenty of scope for GuestReady to grow anyway. It now offers two models – a menu of standalone services open to all hosts whether renting shared or whole homes and the full management model for owners letting out whole homes.
“We feel a lot of potential hosts are missing out on Airbnb and they need a service like ours to participate,” said Limpert. “The sharing economy is all about using unused assets.”
While he said that in general home sharing in Asia is behind Europe – compare Paris’ 70,000 listings and London’s 50,000 with roughly 5,000 each in Hong Kong and Singapore – the growth is much faster in Asia.
You could ask what’s to stop Airbnb from offering hosts similar services – as it did photography services in the beginning – but Limpert said, “I think they have bigger things to do. I don’t think it’s a natural strength of Airbnb – they are a platform to provide a layer to coordinate between hosts and guests. We do the behind-the-scenes work. It’s a different business.”
Drawing on his experience in food delivery, Limpert said there were similarities between GuestReady and Food Panda in that both are operations-heavy with a lot of on-the-ground processes.
“There were two things I learnt from food delivery. If you can offer a good customer experience, customers will come back and if you have a good back-end system, you can scale easier.
“At Food Panda, we were getting orders on the website and manually texting them to the rider. In the end, we had an automated system, orders go through to restaurant and rider, it’s all automated, nobody needs to touch it.”
Hotels should embrace the sharing economy
Being a millennial himself, Limpert is a believer in the sharing economy. “It’s less about owning now – I see owning as a real luxury today. Yes, it’s nice to have an owned car but it’s an unnecessary luxury. In London, I use a car sharing platform – easycarclub – and use my neighbours’ cars. We are also much more mobile now, it’s a hassle if you own stuff.”
This shift in thinking and customer behavior has implications for the hotel industry. “The value proposition of a hotel, especially the large chains, was that you know what you are getting – concierge service, taxi rank, laundry service, room service – but all these services are being or can be replaced. Food Panda, Uber, services apps, restaurant reservations apps …”
Instead of seeing them as threats, he said hotels should embrace these new players. In London, he said, some boutique hotels are offering concierge services to Airbnb hosts. And why shouldn’t hotels put their f&b on food delivery apps if they have a good brand?
In future, he said, GuestReady services can be offered to smaller guest houses or lodges and possibly, it could even become a consumer brand, promising a level of service for guests. But that’s for later. For now, the focus is getting its proposition for hosts right and onboarding more hosts. “We have to find a formula that scales in the cities which matter. It’s not the simplest business but I like a challenge,” said Limpert.
