A short interview (YouTube) between Mark Simpson and Mariah, founder of Smiling House, describing Smiling House’s luxury vacation-rental focus, direct-booking and B2B white-label platform efforts, partnerships (including Homes & Villas by Marriott), and brief anecdotes about COVID-19 effects and personal details. The conversation mixes business model description with personal remarks and a short slideshow walkthrough.
Questions this video answers
"a Swiss company based here in the Swiss apps in kst."
Homes & Villas by Marriott
Seven
Chapters
I'm really excited to talking about this topic because we're going to be covering so many and tonight's guest. All right, so let me just bring in today's guest, Mariah from Smiling House. Mariah, how are we doing? Thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you.
So could you please, just for everybody that is watching, just give us a brief introduction to who you are, where you are in the world and then we'll get started with today's show.
I'm the founder of the Smiling House, which is a Swiss company based here in the Swiss apps in kst. We are focusing in a small niche that's called the luxury segment in the vacation rental and we're doing a lot of direct booking.
Talk a little bit more about your model, talk a little bit more about the type of clients that you work with because I think that would help everybody sort of realize where you're coming at from.
Travel the world and offer it and actually visited the islands of Greece and in Ibiza and Mallorca and Marbella and arrived to the villas. The homeowners and property managers been quite surprised. They used to have such a quest from far away by big agencies just asking them to sign a contract. But we really wanted to see the place. We really want to confirm it. We really want to be faithful for the idea of hosting together.
I did mention when we were getting into the start of this interview that you have got a super cool little slideshow. So, so if you would just be so kind to line up that slideshow while I fill for a little second here. Whilst we've been doing that, Mariah's kindly started to share her screen. So I'm going to hand you back over and what we'll be able to do is see Mariah's screen and she's going to walk us through a couple of slides.
Okay, so this is from the start a little bit about us. I forgot to mention that big believer in third parties travel partners. We started our partnership together with homes and villas by Marriott. We decided that today will be the day we'll launch our B2B platform. It's a platform which is white label. Taking all these partners that I mentioned before and combining them with travel designers and travel partners and travel and concierge companies, etc. Where they can book our homes instantly, directly with COVID 19. I just, I think it was the time that we met together in London like two months ago. Platform. We even more open to join venture and to shake hands with many of you. But I saw that my husband got a little bit jealous. No, no. I would like to. I would like to be actually with Julie Andrews. Why? Because I'm exactly in the same views of the Sounds of Music if you know the movie. And I do have seven kids. And I really would like to have a great babysitter that will sing and do activities with them all day long while I will be able to keep on developing the business and breathe a little bit.
Do you have any favorite movies, TV series that you may have had on your to watch list for a while or anything that you can recommend on Netflix or Disney or anything like that? Any movie that you can recommend that people watch now, but now that we are still in lockdown, is there anything that you could recommend for people?
Yeah, actually, it's a series that I saw a long time ago and I would like to see it again.
