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 hub 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- terminal 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 $110,000 or more night and there was a documentary

uh one called inside the London hotel for the super rich inside clares clares is the name of the hotel I believe it was in London where they have guests like Tom Hanks the Emperor of China uh they have rooms that literally go for like $20,000 a night and some 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 want to 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 uh and it's an older Hotel 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 guest back and I have quite a few different points specific points that I pulled out of the documentary will jump right into uh the first thing is they have an elevator guy that's pretty cool right I mean uh you don't see that in a lot of hotels anymore people there's

actually less and less employees in hotels these days they're really going in the way of short-term rentals where you know it costs them less but uh 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 duvet on a bed to

uh better accommodate for a princess that was coming into 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 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 cuz 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 uh 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 is 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 guest 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 guest 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 that 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 guest

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 their property and these are the type of clients or guests that pay travel agents they mentioned one on 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 we know 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 of communication that comes down to what you were providing

the guest the way you talk with the guest uh 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 uh I was on a cruise for a couple weeks and it was a fantastic stay and a lot of good takeaways from that um go back and check that out you can find all of our episodes at strr riches.com you can also find a bunch of helpful resources there another takeaway is 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 are going that is going to translate down to the guest and it's going to provide

a better guest experience right if you have employees or team members whoever is 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 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 guest arve

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 topnotch 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 need needed or whatever they needed catered would be available they basically had like a team meeting before their guest 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 got a couple good takeaways from that uh if you want to check out the episode just jump on YouTube uh again it was called inside the London hotel for the super rich inside clares 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 been enjoying our YouTube channel if you haven't checked it out yet please head over there and uh until next time I hope you have a fabulous week want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals what 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 rest methods.com that's re St methods.com