How The Best Hotels in the World Solve Their Guest Issues

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I want to talk this week about how some of the best hotels in the world solve issues. Stay tuned. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I watch quite a bit of YouTube these days. I've got a ton of channels that I'm subscribed to. If you're listening to the audio version of this and you haven't subscribed to our channel, I would greatly appreciate it if you would head over there. It'll help us continue to create good content for you. I hope you've been enjoying. Of course, the name of the channel is Short Term Rental Riches. And this week I want to break down an episode that I saw about hotels for the super rich. We're talking hotels that charge like $10,000 or more a night. And there was a documentary one called Inside the London Hotel for the Super Rich Inside Claridge's. Claridge's is the name of the hotel, I believe it was in London, where they have guests like Tom Hanks, the Emperor of China. They have room that literally go for like $20,000 a night and some crazy, crazy numbers. But they've been doing this for a really long time. They're often all the way booked out and there's some reasons why. And so I wanna break down from that documentary just a few of my takeaways. The first one, and this one was a bit of a shocker to me. But when I was watching the documentary and they're going through the hotel and it's an older hotel, they. There was maintenance issues. You know, there was light bulbs missing occasionally and stuff that you would never think of in a hotel where someone's paying $10,000 a night. Now, this happened to be a part of the video where they're talking with the general manager. And of course the general manager was not happy seeing this. But I just want to point out that maintenance stuff kind of happens, right? It kind of pops up. But they're able to solve these things with excellent, excellent service. Service is what brings their guests back. And I have quite a few different points, specific points that I pulled out of the documentary. We'll jump right into the first thing. They have an elevator guy. That's pretty cool, right? I mean, you don't see that in a lot of hotels anymore people. There's actually less and less employees in hotels these days that really go in the way of short term rentals where, you know, it costs them less. But this hotel has 420 employees and it wasn't a really big hotel. I don't remember exactly how many rooms there were. So, yeah, they solve most of their problems with service. Right. For example, they're going to go out of their way to make sure that their guests are happy. They mentioned an example where they put four duvets on a bed to better accommodate for a princess that was coming in to stay and liked a really soft bed set of linens. They leave bowls out for guests that have pets. First of all, they're allowing pets. We know in the short term rental world, if we allow pets in our short term rentals, and yes, there can be a little bit more housekeeping, but yes, we can charge for those fees. And definitely, yes, we're going to have way more visibility because only something like 30, 35% of the listings on Airbnb allow pets. So you will get more visibility. Work that one out with your housekeeper. If you're having any challenges with occupancy, I know that that will boost it. They leave handwritten cards out there. So this doesn't take more than a few minutes. Right. And maybe the most important one is they remember the guest. This is something our team always does, is checks to see if one of our guests has already stayed with us, and then we send them a nice friendly message that says, welcome back. Everyone likes to be remembered. No one wants to feel just like another number running through a machine. Right. So they will go out of their way to make sure that you have an excellent stay by doing basically whatever comes up. They even put a Jacuzzi in a room or one of the penthouse suites that in a room that didn't have a Jacuzzi. So the guests paid tens of thousands of dollars and actually stayed there for a month and wanted a Jacuzzi. So they figured it out, they put it in there, and the guests showed up and they made a whole bunch of money. Obviously, they calculated that one out and they have staff to do that. But this is just another example of they go out of their way to make those guests happy. Another thing that they do really well is just the way that they communicate. So they're in a physical hotel. Obviously there's a lot more face to face verbal communication going on. But whether it's over the phone, whether it's written, one of the things I mentioned Is they never say, I don't know. No one really likes to hear that response when someone's asking a question, especially if they happen to be a little frustrated or something, hasn't gone how they expected. No one wants to hear, I don't know. Right. And so they just took that out of their vocabulary. So communication, obviously, huge crucial. That's a huge component of the whole guest experience. So we can offer excellent service, we can have the best communication, but our guests can still have a bad day if. If we don't have the right property for them. Right. And as I was watching this documentary, I was thinking in my head, man, these hotel rooms are kind of old and outdated. They were more of like an art deco style. Now, I like historic properties and I like modern properties. I just honestly, it just didn't seem that great to me. So that tells you right there that couple things. They have excellent service, but their guest avatar is actually an older clientele, right. That's used to that art deco style or that prefers it. And so they do a really good job at matching up their clientele to. To their property. And these are the type of clients or guests that pay travel agents. They mentioned one on the documentary where a lot of these people were paying travel agents $100,000 a year just to have the option to work with them and then a $25,000 a year retainer so that they can book all their travel for them. So yeah, the title of it was Super Hotels for the Super Rich or something like that. So again, this is essential. We need to make sure what type of guests are staying in our property. So let's wrap up just a few of these secrets to success. You could say excellent service is required for a guest. A good guest experience, always. You're never going to have a good guest experience with bad service. And that comes down to communication. That comes down to what you are providing the guest, the way you talk with the guest. We did do an episode on the cruise industry recently, so go back and check that out. If you missed it, it was episode 222. I was on a cruise for a couple weeks and it was a fantastic stay and a lot of good takeaways from that. Go back and check that out. You can find all of our episodes@strriches.com youm can also find a bunch of helpful resources there. Another takeaway is that in order to have excellent service with our guests, we have to have an excellent team. Right? Unless you're doing this all by yourself. And in this documentary, they had employees working in this hotel for 50 years. That's crazy, right? And I remember on the cruise, there was someone on that cruise ship that had worked for almost the same amount of time. So loyal employees that enjoy working for the company, that is going to translate down to the guests and it's going to provide a better guest experience. Right? If you have employees or team members, whoever's helping you with your property, that aren't happy, they don't like what they're doing, they don't like working there, that's going to translate over to the guest even many times, just through their written communication. So make sure to treat your team members, whoever, helping with your property fairly. That is going to go a long way. A third big takeaway is to test everything. Test everything in your property before your guests actually stay there. So sleep in your own property if you haven't already done that. Most of us that are just getting started, we have a property or a couple properties. Most time we're always staying in the property. Right. But when you start scaling, you add more and more properties. Sometimes we don't. But I guarantee you if you do, you will discover little things that maybe your guests haven't mentioned. So in the documentary, they had people use the jacuzzi in the room. They installed it before their guests arrived. Could you imagine they go through all the work to set up the jacuzzi and maybe they miss some little thing, they spend all these tens of thousands of dollars and they miss out on the hundreds of thousands of dollars from the reservation. So make sure you test everything. We really need to test our properties more than once, right? So if it's been a couple years since you've actually stayed in your property, I would highly suggest doing that or having someone that you really trust that's close to you staying in your property, just looking for things that could be improved. Another note from this documentary I thought was a really good detail was that they have a detailed list of all of their returning guests preferences and their likes so they can tailor things to their needs. So that's a really big one. And then lastly, what they did to ensure that everything was always top notch is that they had arrival meetings. So before their guests actually showed up, the people responsible for those reservations checked the property, checked to make sure that they had the services available that they needed or whatever they needed, catered or would be available. They basically had like a team meeting before their guests showed up. And this could be an inspection on your property and your short term rental. So something similar like that so we know that our guests aren't going to leave us good reviews if we're not offering excellent service. So even a hotel that costs $10,000 a night, up to you name it, really high numbers has things that go wrong. They have a light bulb missing occasionally. But the solution to all that is excellent service and leaving their guests with the best experience ever. That's going to bring them back, that's going to keep their calendars full, and that's going to keep them profitable. So hopefully you got a couple good takeaways from that. If you want to check out the episode, just jump on YouTube again. It was called Inside the London Hotel for the Super Rich Inside Claridge's and it was filmed maybe a few years ago. But these principles aren't going to go away, right? So I hope you've been enjoying the podcast. I hope you've been enjoying our YouTube channel. If you haven't checked it out yet, please head over there. And until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week. Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals? Well, it all starts with the properties you acquire. But you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties. I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that. There is no charge. It's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. Just go to restmethods. Com, That's Rest Methods. Com.