When we were consistently achieving 4.9 average ratings from guests on a monthly basis, the number of reservations that were serviced were much less. In January 2024 we serviced 30 reservations. By the following January we serviced 180. In January 2024, my Wife was handling nearly 100% of communications with guests as well as coordinating turnover cleans, maintenance issues and repairs. By January 2025 she was almost completely removed from the business (Our children required her attention more than our business) – and she had been replaced with an army of Filipino Virtual Assistants (VAs). While we had a few VAs to support her in Jan 2024, it was more of a situation where everyone is responsible for everything. Compared to now, where we have departments that handle the various aspects of guest and property service. We have a front desk that is responsible for all guest comms and intra-department communications about repairs issues that guests bring to our attention. We have an R&M department that coordinates various vendor services to the properties around bookings. We have a cleaning department that coordinates the cleaning/turnover schedules. We have a Client Success department that fields the various questions and concerns we get from owners or the occasional blocking of dates for personal use. We have a payables department that makes sure cleaners, vendors and owners all get paid in a timely manner and accurately. None of this was in place in Jan 2024, because we were servicing a whopping 30 reservations and it was an order of magnitude easier to manage; and collecting quality reviews was just not that difficult because we could easily pay attention to everything so to speak.
It’s plain as day to see: as we grew, our guest satisfaction declined. We had to dig in and figure out how to fix this.
So while we realized our VA army was part of the issue – or rather the way we hired and trained people was inadequate – another big part of the issue was cleanliness. In fact the number one complaint was cleanliness.
Here are our cleanliness ratings over the same time period:
So we had a twofold problem: Our internal team of VAs was not nearly as good at positively affecting guest experience as my wife was, and we had trouble making sure cleanliness was on point. These are two big, hairy issues that we had to battle with every day for a while. But as you can see how the story turns out via the starting graph in this writing, we obviously pulled through. The next 4 parts of this series will walk through the biggest, most effective things we did to get our review scores up, at scale.
Ready to rebuild your growth strategy?
Book a discovery call to see how we can scale your listings without sacrificing guest satisfaction.
[Book a Call] → Click here to schedule your consultation
