Latest / STR Unpacked / Built From the Front Lines: The STR Software Forged in Switzerland and Bali
Transcript
- Ben: Hi, welcome to another episode of Short Term Rentals Unpacked hosted from Scale, España. I'm joined here with Reto from Elevate Software. Thank you for joining me, Reto. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. No problem at all. So you guys are a relatively new player in the space. You're telling me that you come about in November, right? Yes, November last year. That's right. So can you kind of take me from, I guess, how you ended up in the short term rental world and what led you to building the product that you're here with. It's quite an interesting story. I started back in 2013 with ⁓ my cabin in the mountains, in the Swiss mountains, which is like how it used to be at that time. It's just like if you don't use it yourself, you let it to other people. This is what we did as a family, a side household, not really to earn money. Yeah. And I, by that time, I was an entrepreneur with my own company in this smart home industry. This was like, I founded that 2008 and then 2022 I did the exit. Okay. I also did software development there, which I sold first as an asset deal and then I sold the company back in 2024. And as a new, I want to... live more around the world like this nomad life. have three children, they're all grown up now. They already move out. So it's now about the time to do that. So I sold my company and founded that short-term rental business. ⁓ Then we operated like 70 units, like 35 in Switzerland, 35 in Bali, Indonesia. And ⁓ based on my experience, which I had nearly for 20 years about process optimization, software development, automation. ⁓ I saw just the tools out there is so fragmented. So you need many tools for to actually operate your business and each tool you need to learn, need to feed, you need to maintain. And this didn't meet my needs. So ⁓ based on my experience of software development, I hired the team of software developers and we now we then our own software which is called Elevate Suite. We noticed how much time we really save. mean, we just two people in the operation for 70 units, besides of cleaning staff, ⁓ of course, but everything else is fully automated, like from access, guest communication, ⁓ etc. So is fully automated. We also get great reviews on that. ⁓ So that's basically the story. And then when we found out how much... time we saved, said okay, other hosts should also benefit from that, we made it a product and started last year in November. Fantastic, I mean it sounds like to me that you had this amazing company and you kind of exited almost like as a retirement and then ended up... that's right. Found them essentially two companies, Classic entrepreneur thing. ⁓ You obviously operate in between Switzerland and Bali at the moment. So what challenges have you faced building the Elevate Suite to work in a country like Switzerland, I imagine, very organized, very process driven versus a country like Indonesia, which I imagine is none of those things. How does your software work with those two worlds? That's a very interesting case. of course, we need to adapt both. what you just said about organized and maybe, let's say, more spontaneous organized. It's not only like how you operate there, also the visitors, the guests, they also this kind of, you know, like it's not everything planned in Indonesia. So that's why you need to find a way to even structure because if it's organized or not, you're losing some money. You're losing quality when you do. when you're not structured. so with this also, with the software, help to guide, to make some guidance in that field. But the main difference between those two markets is actually in Switzerland, it's very, very cost driven. So every single minute you spend too much on the cleaning, it's getting very expensive because the salaries are high. And on the other side, you can't really... provide services like personal services to your guests because it's just too expensive. On the other side in Bali, it's completely different. There you do a lot more like with hospitality. In Bali, for example, we do all the time personal check-in, which obviously don't in Switzerland. We offering like upsells, like private chef, massage, motorbike rentals, all this kind of stuff, which you can't do in Switzerland. So we experience both worlds. So I think daily cleaning, hotel standard in private villas, but also fully automated, fully automated auto drive, autopilot in Switzerland because you just need to, otherwise it never will be profitable. Yeah. Do you often feel like you wish you could that service in Switzerland ⁓ is it just, ⁓ it work with the market? Because I know that from my time, spent travelling around Asia, the level of hospitality there is so high. But realistically in Europe, increasingly, 10 years ago you used to get a bottle of wine in there, fruit with a bit of Air B&Bs and coffees and stuff like that, now you don't get anything, right? Do you wish that you could deliver that same level of hospitality or do you just accept that's where the market has moved to? Very good question. I think it's... Like in other things, what you get is just normal and the ones you desire. Sometimes I think, okay, what we do in Bali should be possible in Switzerland and vice versa. ⁓ But you simply can't do it. I think with Elevate Suite, which we are also very strong in the upsells because this comes from Bali, it's really an essential and major revenue stream we generate in Bali. It can be up to 40 to 80 % of the ADR is additional than the upsell. It's not only the revenue stream on our side, but also the guest, which takes some holiday and they really appreciate that everything is done for him. He gets it on the fingertip and just everything runs smooth. ⁓ But in Switzerland, think early check-ins, late check-outs, are by far better than the than the rest of the market or most of them, because again, it's fully automated. And in our case, not even one single WhatsApp or one single call is made until the guest has a confirmed late or early checkout or early check-in because everything is automated with double checking, with the cleaning, with the readiness, with the next guest, with the before guest. So there we have a much better setup than all the others, guess, through the software. And secondly, like mid stay cleaning, etc. it's to find suitable upsells beside of cribs and all this ⁓ stuff. ⁓ hospitality is ⁓ people are not to pay for the ⁓ upsell, the personal in Switzerland, except you really high and we are not there ⁓ because we must see Nearly everybody who's coming to Bali finds it cheap. Yeah, exactly. they come from. And nearly everybody who comes to Switzerland finds it expensive. You've almost got like the two most opposite places. But yeah, we do handle that. Fantastic. And then obviously from this experience Elevator Sweep was born. How have you found from... I guess managing our own properties and having that full level of control, even though they're in such different markets, to then having your new clients come in who maybe have different processes, different ways of running things. I assume they have properties that aren't just based in Switzerland and Bali as well, so regulations. How have you found that transition? Yes, so as I am a fan of structure, mean, process structure and standardization, we must admit that it needs like, you know, even if you as a property manager, you onboard with our software, it won't be 100 % blueprint of what you used before and is actually used before. we can't build for every product, every property manager. the designated and 100 % fit software. So I think there must be some, some steps left and right. Yeah. But very, very often, our clients, They just very, very busy their daily operations, ⁓ So they didn't have time to reflect that. And, ⁓ this is all the time, like, ⁓ the idle to reflect what you have done when you focus on a new or adapt to a new system. And second, what's very important to see as well, because Elevate Suite is, I think, because it's very young, we are developing them with the very, very latest technology, like really AI first. It's not that we have kind of a legacy code, which is a couple of years old, and now everybody talks about AI, so we need to adapt somehow, retrofit a little bit AI. So that's why it's really built out of that. So often we offering solution which our client, the property manager, not even thought about it, it's possible. So they appreciate this more than step. And of course, especially if you're young and relatively small, but very, very powerful. We have 14 software developers in our team full time. there are, we are very productive and nowadays also with the help of... of some copilot tools when you do programming. So of course, we listen very carefully to our clients. Very, very carefully, even if they only have one unit, but even more carefully if they have 100 units, how the rules or the game rules. based on that, that we have done it from our very own needs and the operating properties, it's not something, it's not many things missing because we already... touch everything that hurts in our operations. Yeah. And have you found that the clients that you're providing this software to, that they've got a lot of time back and that has allowed them to grow? they save a lot of time in the operation. I would say, I mean, ⁓ the other players out the market, they name it we've also saved 70%, you save 10 hours per property. ⁓ We don't tell these numbers because we don't really know how they work. some of them are very efficient already, some of them are less efficient. So it's hard to tell and we don't want to over promise something. yeah, you will save time. Definitely, it just depends how much, how you have been organized before. So if you're still working with spreadsheet events, WhatsApp, you definitely will gain more than 50%. But if you're already stream live with other well, known products, then it might be a little bit less. But the big thing is because we are an operation system and everything is built in, there are a lot of time you save in information from one system to the others. Even if they have API connection, we all know that the API connection doesn't cover Yeah, that makes sense. ⁓ So you've built a product that's working really well. ⁓ You're very young, but you told me off camera how many clients you've got, which is really impressive. What do you think your future roadmap looks like? Where do you take it from here? If you can talk about it. I can talk about it. It's just finding the right balance. By nature, are Swiss people. are neutral. Yeah, of course. But yeah, so there are many years ahead and this is really something we want to push to the market. Not only because the the revenue stream, but also we want really to show to the hosts out there that that's a better way how to work. And I think even if the industries or a lot of people in industry, they are kind of offence or even maybe a little bit afraid or very have a very big respect out of the regulation. So what all the regulations out there in the world coming every month every year it's getting more challenging, depending on the area, some of them are completely forbidden Airbnb business in the city and others that are regulated to 90 days, you need to supply some guest data to the authorities etc. And we see that as a chance because we can fulfill that with automation. Yeah, we want to further grow. We want to gain our custom base, which we already have, much further than being a well-known partner out there for the hosts. Fantastic. Well, I'm really excited to see how you guys grow and to see more of these sorts of conferences. So thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me today. Thank you. Likewise. Excellent.