In this interview, the founder of One Fine Stay outlines the company’s evolution from its 2010 launch in London to its acquisition by Accor in 2016. He explains the core business model—a managed marketplace that functions as a "distributed hotel," handling everything from property curation and photography to booking, cleaning, and guest services. The discussion contrasts One Fine Stay’s capital‑light, service‑focused approach with Airbnb’s early heavy spending on paid marketing, emphasizing how access to capital shaped both companies’ growth. He details the city‑by‑city expansion strategy: London (2010), New York (2012), Los Angeles and Paris (2013), noting regulatory hurdles such as Santa Monica’s restrictions on short‑term rentals. The founder also touches on fundraising milestones and the strategic rationale for scaling slowly to maintain service quality, ultimately leading to the Accor acquisition.
Chapters
Could you just maybe walk us through your journey with One Fine Stay and maybe some of the, I would say, some of the key milestones or steps along the way?
Sure. So One Fine Stay was a really special business. We started the company, I want to say, less than a year after Airbnb was started. And Airbnb, the Airbnb of today really looked nothing like the Airbnb of 10 years ago, although I think the founding team there, and Brian Chesky has done a tremendous job building that business. And actually, it speaks to the point that I think we should probably spend a little bit of time talking about here, which is access to capital and how access to capital and paid marketing is really what built that business in the early days. And so now they're able to say, we only spend 20% of our revenue on marketing and it's brand marketing, but actually that's a pretty privileged position of having already arrived. Of course, they spent a lot of money acquiring demand for a long time. And so we at One Fine Stay, we're trying to be a managed version of that. So a hotel management company for homes was always the initial vision of One Fine Stay. So we would work with a homeowner who had an interesting property, a distinctive property, typically not just like a rental or something, but something that felt a little bit designed. And then we would manage everything from the photography and the onboarding of that property to the booking, the sort of the distribution, right? So the bookings for that property to the cleaning and the service that a client would experience or a guest would experience when they came to town. So essentially we were building a distributed hotel is the easiest way to think about, or hotel management company is the easiest way to think about One Fine Stay. It was a managed marketplace, so we were curating the selection of homes. We started the company in London in 2010. I moved back to the US in 2012. We launched New York then, so we were still just New York and London in 2012. In 2013, we actually launched LA, which we operated in most of LA besides Santa Monica. Which was incredibly difficult from the city of Santa Monica being super restrictive on short-term rentals. But for most of the city of LA, which is most of LA, we operated pretty cleanly. And we launched Paris right around that same time. So for most of the time of our journey at One Fine Stay, which really ran from 2010 through 2016 when we were acquired by Accor, and then it kind of evolved in ways that we can talk about. We were really just operating in 4 cities. And that was because we thought the depth of the market and the depth of the opportunity, when you look at the TAM of hotel demand, and then if you combine that with house demand in a place like LA or New York, I mean, it's billions. So we really were focused on scaling the business slowly and carefully and really delivering upon like a service promise. I could talk about like fundraising milestones and other things like that, but that's essentially the whistle-stop tour through One Fine Stay.
