Smartiz is born from the intersection of two worlds: owning AirBnB properties and delivering human-centric experiences.
Founded from the findings that maximising the revenue for AirBnB properties require owners to differentiate their properties through offering extensive services and convenience. This brings their properties closer to hotels than actually BnBs.
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Our Founders have seen this for themselves: going the extra mile pays back. Rates for our founder's properties went up by 15%, with occupancy levels never matched before in the area and with consistent 5-stars reviews.
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And yet, one problem remained: relying on the local people to deliver the service, providing check in, check out, taking the deposit, give out or collect back the keys. The logistic it implies means many people in the end-to-end supply chain and as many risks of failure through it.
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In parallel, our founders acquired 20+ years of experience in the corporate world leading the Customer Experience strategy and practices in the most prestigious Global 500 Fortune companies. Leveraging design thinking concepts, such as empathy, qualitative and quantitative analysis and journey mapping, our Founders invented Smartiz; the digital companion inside an owner's property, which provides the integrated channels for guests and owners to interact, to build the trust and keep in touch 24/7.
Our vision: level up the digital experience standards guests expect of properties they visit while travelling
Today it has become possible to send people - which are not trained astronauts - to space.​ And yet it remains difficult and complex for humans to trust each other, keep in touch and communicate. Why?
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Our research took us to the motivations that someone has when deciding on booking a certain property on AirBnB, Booking.com, VRBO and other providers.
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Through those motivations, which are: cost, location and pictures; guests are starting to identify the host and their possible taste, experience or qualities. This in itself gives ground to the relationship between a guest and a host. Then comes the time to experience it for real, which is often the time little things are not exactly going to plan.
It's in how a host respond to these issues that a guest deepens their opinion on their host. And in 98% of the cases we looked through, the host is willing to provide the extra mile, yet does not know how.
The guest then experiences increased frustrations and struggles to communicate about it at the right time, leaving both parties in a risky relationship, one that fosters frustration and mistrust.
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There are solutions out there which can help. Many apps flourished on the App stores to attempt to tackle this problem. Yet none are successful... and we think there is a reason for that. It's called: retention rate.
Making an app appealing to a guest is not easy. Doable, but not easy. To then have the guest use it more than 1 day: ouch! By day 30, 97% of the people would have deleted or not used the app anymore (source: Statista).
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Our own research has gone even further. Out of two luxury properties our founders own, they had a download count of their concierge app of: ZERO! Yes, zero. Running through a series of interviews with previous guests, it became explicitly clear: none of the guests wanted to download the app, not knowing what services it would provide, what the data would be used for and something they would expect to delete as soon as their stay is over.
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While we were still looking for a solution, we were clear on one thing: it cannot be an app. Smartiz was born.
