How it all began: the GuestReady story
Launched in August 2016, GuestReady is a service provider that manages your property on short-term rental platforms like Airbnb – from providing 5-star level housekeeping services, linen rental, key exchanges for arriving and departing guests to profile management services for the hosts.
How it started…
Our story starts with constant travel and beautiful empty homes in the city. Travel is ingrained in our system. Being away frequently for business and leisure, many a time, our homes are left empty and lonely. Good thing Airbnb was already invented; so, we decided to list our flats on the sharing community, earn some travel money, give others an awesome place to stay during their trip and top it up with a more authentic experience — it’s a win-win situation.
Or, well, not really for a very long time.
As traveling goes, every seasoned traveler wishes to see more of the city they visit and enjoy the off-the-beaten-track experience. We were always on only one side of the coin – being tourists and just enjoying the place without an insight into the effort needed to maintain it in the first place. But, now that we’ve officially experienced the Airbnb revolution of being guests AND hosts, we understand where all the challenges are coming from.
And these are real hassles indeed. Imagine how time consuming and demanding it is to – reply to every guest who inquires about your listing, make sure your listing price, description and design are always updated, ensure that your apartment is spic and span, do the laundry, check guests in and out, add a little something for a warm welcome, etc.
Given our entrepreneurial spirit and seeing this problem (and an opportunity), GuestReady was born to share this dedication all over the world. We attracted a team from all walks of life – some with the strategical power brought in from the startup world, savvy marketers living their life traveling from Airbnb to Airbnb and even our very own Rocket Scientist (really!).
But, one thing we all have in common — building something that solves problems is in our DNA. This is essential on how we make it through everyday as a startup because we believe every problem has a solution. Also, we all believe in our vision and we have the passion to carry this service out fully.
Perks of being in GuestReady:
Composed of an international team, GuestReady opened this responsible hosting services to multiple cities on the onset. The team’s great foresight saw that this service will and should be available to multiple markets across continents. This may be one of our greatest challenge but we believe that short-term rental management differs entirely per city and no one template of services and techniques will work for all.
Our business allows us to meet and welcome the most diverse set of travelers and this is probably the most interesting part of our job – we learn from them as much as they learn from us and we get into several memorably silly situations throughout the process.
There was a time when we had a legit rockstar, Steve “Lips” Kudlow from the band Anvil, book one of our flats in London — we were a bit worried but he turned out to be a really cool guest and it was a memorable experience. Another memorable instance, in our Singapore flat this time, we had to help a guest out of a balcony because she’s inadvertently locked herself out while having a smoke.
And not to forget that one time when a band, the House of Wolves, which played on French music radio booked one of our flats in Paris. They loved the house so much that they decided to create a short film of a live acoustic session – now, that was one for the books.
Unavoidably too, there are times when we meet more uptight travelers. Through all these meetups, we learn different steps to improve on guest communication and understanding culture specific nuances and preferences to better serve all guests and hosts.
Here are some of the testimonials from guests and hosts:
“We were greeted by our host upon arrival and we’re good to go within minutes of getting there. We were very pleased with the entire experience and would come back if we ever needed a place to stay. We’d like to thank Alex and his friend Steffan for a fantastic stay.” – Lennard in London
“Everything was luxurious, clean, modern and comfortable. Calvin is a very thoughtful and nice person too! I stayed here with my family and we would definitely recommend to stay here again.” – Emily in Hong Kong
“The apartment is described and presented by photos perfectly. The presentation was absolutely real. Terry answered every email expeditiously. We would definitely go there again.” – Joe in Singapore
“This is a great flat in an amazing location in London – it is exactly what it looks like in the pictures. We didn’t meet Valentina, but she was very quick to respond and set up our stay, and checked in on us several times to see if we needed anything. Check in and out was also very well arranged. Overall we were very happy with your stay and would recommend booking this place!” – Victoria in London
How it’s been since August 2016…
In the last six months, the team has come a long way — from being only a little over a handful of people, we now have over two dozen and all our faces wouldn’t fit in the screen anymore during our global video calls. On top of our growing team, we also have more properties signed up across the cities, longer length of stays, happier and satisfied hosts, 60% of hosts onboard have now become superhosts and over a thousand happy guests, with an average guest rating of 4.8 across the different cities!
But none of these achievements came easily, hard work was (and is) needed to build GuestReady every single day. On top of the strategical aspects and the regular calls, we’ve all needed to go through some operational details and manual labor like doing the laundry, changing the sheets and linens and pumping toilets.
Just like every other startup, the GuestReady story shows some ups, downs and bumps in the road. There are challenges; but we see a lot more successes along the way. These successes further fire up our passion to deliver this service perfectly and be sure that we are aggressively expanding our coverage in the major cities we operate in – as our CEO Alexander Limpert explains in a recent interview with Serviced Apartment News. No matter where your beautiful, empty home is in London, Paris, Hong Kong or Singapore, you’ll be sure to hear from us soon and we’re hoping that you’ll invite us in to stay.
