Hospitable Customer Story: From Corporate Job to Thriving STR Business

Meet Chris

Chris Hetzner owns Boost Rentals, a co-hosting property management company that manages vacation rental properties throughout the United States. Chris has been hosting for about 5 years for his properties and managing properties for other owners.

After leaving the corporate world, Chris wanted to build his own business. "One of the most exciting options was investing in homes and turning them into short-term rentals. And it connected with my past as a restaurant manager, hospitality experience, and I thought it was something I could excel at."

Now, Chris manages 50+ properties throughout the US and uses Hospitable to streamline operations and ensure a five-star experience for his guests. Watch the video to learn how Hospitable helps Chris scale while keeping the guest experience at the heart of his business.

Automating Daily Tasks to Improve Efficiency

Chris explains that he started using Hospitable when his portfolio grew to over 40 properties because he needed a system that could help him provide an excellent guest experience and ensure quick responses to guest messages—"one or two minutes max at any time."

"One of the biggest challenges I face daily is being super responsive to our guests and giving them great information about their questions. That is what Hospitable helps me overcome every single day because I can put in all the dynamic information for each of my properties. Most of the communication is automated for our guests, making them feel like they're getting a customer-centric response every single time. However, a lot of times, that's automated."

Chris underlines that with Hospitable, he can be sure that every single guest can get the right information at the right time throughout their stay, regardless of the property they book.

Chris says his team members use Hospitable's AI integration mainly in the chats with their guests. "The little button that you can click to generate a response automatically is super helpful in ensuring that regardless of how we feel about a situation, we're approaching it in a non-biased manner and then going through and quickly cleansing always to sound accommodating. And it is very helpful for my team."

Chris also points out that Hospitable's automated messaging functionality allows him to scale his business and ensure a seamless guest experience without expanding his customer support team proportionally to the size of his business.

"It's all about automated messaging to me. It makes life so much easier knowing that your process is always followed. It also puts you in a position where your customer support team, which you'll eventually hire if you're scaling further and further (you can't do it all yourself), is ultimately not expanding proportionally to the size of your business expansion. But you can save tons of money by hiring less support staff and maybe utilizing one support staff for every 20 properties instead of one for every 10 or 12 properties."

Chris says he uses smart locks at all of his properties to offer guests smooth check-ins and ensure safety, and he uses Hospitable to automate the creation of unique door codes and to message them to guests. He likes that he can easily manage all his locks from a single dashboard and see the devices' battery status. 

Why Hospitable

Chris explained that he chose Hospitable because of its advanced automated messaging capabilities, which saved his team a lot of time while enhancing guest communication. "The messaging capabilities were far better than any of the software I'd used. And that scale pushed us to do that and allowed my team to focus on issues as they arise instead of just the day-to-day communications."

Chris likes the quality of customer service that Hospitable's support team provides. "They put a very personal touch on their customer service. That has impacted how I serve my guests—they actually taught me something."

Another important aspect for Chris is transparency; he likes Hospitable's Town Halls. "It's an exciting way to go about their business and gain feedback from hosts like myself," Chris notes. As a tech person, he finds it very helpful that Hospitable has a published roadmap of new features. "It gives you a rock-solid foundation for understanding how you can progress with the software in maturing your own business operations."

Chris recommends Hospitable to STR hosts and property managers. "One piece of advice that I would give any prospective short-term rental property owner or property manager is to utilize all the automated technology you possibly can. And the reason you need to do that is to ensure that the core steps of your process are adhered to at any moment so that you can then be available when needed to support the guests in your home."