| | NOVEMBER 20198CIOReviewWhen Vacasa entered the short-term rental space in 2009, the vast majority of the industry was operating without the use of technology. Made up of thousands of small, local operators who booked guests by phone and took reservations on paper, Vacasa sought to solve for the antiquation that plagued vacation rentals. Ten years later and now North America's largest vacation rental company, Vacasa cares for more than 14,000 vacation homes around the world through its use of strong local teams and a proprietary technology platform developed in-house and hosted on AWS. Vacasa relies heavily on automation to scale the business, which includes the use of machine learning to drive rates and pricing algorithms.Starting out. When founder Eric Breon started Vacasa, his primary objective was simple: maximize revenue for vacation rental homeowners through the use of technology. To facilitate this in a way that would be scalable as the company continued to grow, he needed to build an algorithm that would emulate what hotels and airlines were using to adjust pricing throughout the day in order to generate more income. Vacasa built its first Yield Management tool and the company began marketing itself as a tech-enabled vacation rental company. By promising dynamic pricing and increased revenues for homeowners, the company signed hundreds of homeowners in its first year. As the company continued to scale, it placed a high priority on technology and product development to support its rapid growth. In 2017, Vacasa released a vastly improved tool, Yield Management 2.0 (code named Alan after scientist Alan Turing), which included algorithms that ran in real-time, analyzing market rates, location, and a variety of other factors. The news permeated across the vacation rental industry and Vacasa saw a spike in new homes added to its inventory. With new homes to manage and new geography to cover, the company would need to invest further in operational technology. Local teams using tech. One of Vacasa's other main differentiators is that it employs local teams in each of the markets it serves. Teams of local operations managers, housekeepers and maintenance staff are on the ground and ready to assist with both preparing the homes for guests, as well as responding to any emergency or last-minute needs a guest may have. To improve call answer rates and ultimately guest satisfaction, Vacasa invested in a new contact center solution, 8x8, in 2018. When it came to managing Vacasa's local teams, the question became, how do we manage our hourly staff and provide them with the highest level of both predictability and flexibility for their schedule? Vacation rentals are seasonal and popular times can create chaos throughout the summer or winter months and on holidays, but quickly taper off in the shoulder season. Vacasa first considered an off-the-shelf solution, but ultimately came back to the fact that we could build something better, more suited to their needs and unlike anything else in the industry. The result is Vacasa's housekeeping scheduler, which auto-assigns housekeepers to cleans through machine learning, but also allows for a human element by allowing MACHINE LEARNING IN AN ANTIQUATED INDUSTRY By Tim Goodwin, CTO, VacasaIN MY OPINION
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