Community Spotlight (Sydney): Gabriela & Derek

[Lizzie]

Hello everyone,

As many of you know,  Laura Chambers (lead the team at Airbnb that’s dedicated to helping hosts succeed) and I recently went on a world host listening tour where we met and heard from some amazing hosts from our incredible community. Although the tour has now come to a close, I wanted to continue to share and celebrate some of the people we met along the way and introduce them to you.

In the second stop, Sydney, Laura met with a lovely couple called Gabriela and Derek and got to know them a bit more over a coffee. Since then, they have  kindly agreed to answer a few questions for us here in the CC, so over to them. 🙂

Introducing... Gabriela and @Derek133 

1. How long have you been hosting for and why did you first start?

We became hosts accidentally, 8 years ago. After living on our nine-acre property in the Blue Mountains, Australia, for two years, we had to move to Singapore for work. We were reluctant to sell the property, so we asked friends to manage our home as a short-term rental, with the view to covering the property’s costs (Dantosa Blue Mountains Retreat). After a couple of years, we saw an opportunity to formalize the business and to drive both excellence and profit. We bought two apartments (in Canada and in Australia) and added them to our homeshare business. Today, we have left our corporate jobs to become full-time hosts for three properties; we are passionate supporters of homesharing and delivering the ‘perfect’ guest experience.

2. Can you tell us a little bit about your listing? How did you get your space ready for guests?

The main thing we did to prepare our home for listing was to declutter. We removed many of our personal items and made sure that the rooms were inviting to guests (for example having spare cupboard space). Over the years, we have added equipment and furniture items to enhance the guest experience, based on our target guest audiences.

For families we added items such as:

• a high chair and cot for guests with young children
• board games for our guests to play
• a luggage rack in each bedroom at the suggestion of an elderly guest

To celebrate our local community, and for overseas visitors we have:

• a wok, rice cooker and chopsticks in the kitchen for Asian guests
• a welcome guidebook with recommendations on local restaurants, hikes, entertainment, shops and ‘local heroes’ who can come to our home for specific purposes (eg, a chef, masseuse, tennis coach)
• local soap, shampoo and body lotion in refillable bottles
• artwork by local artists displayed in our homeshare

For corporate groups who run workshops we have:

• an 85-inch television screen build into our wall and flip-charts
• great coffee machine with a selection of different coffees and teas
• a collection of spices for their team-building cooking sessions

We have also worked hard to make sure that our guests have a great in-person welcome. We provide guests with a hamper of local produce when they arrive, as well as fresh fruit and flowers. In winter, we light the fire before our guests’ arrival and make sure there is plenty of wood for them to use during their stay.

3. How do you feel you have evolved as hosts over time?

When we started out, we thought that homesharing was very easy. Over time, we have come to realise that to excel as a host is a complex process and the best hosts are those that have experience running businesses and have worked in the hospitality industry. In 2016, we hired a consultant from the hotel industry to work with us on our homeshare business, as we realised that we needed to learn more about hospitality. We defined how to measure the success of our homesharing business, how to make wise investment decisions and how to drive more bookings.

Over time we have built a brand for our homeshare property. We gave it a unique name, Dantosa Blue Mountains Retreat, named after our three children, whose middle names are Daniel, Tobias and Sacha. At first we designed a logo and business cards, then we added some marketing materials (postcards), email templates and a Facebook page to promote Dantosa. We had cushion covers and bedrunners made with our unique logo as well as notepads and pens, etc.

We are strong believers in the importance of establishing a coherent design for your homeshare property and guest experience, which sends the subtle message to guests that your homeshare has been planned and is run well. Even in our small city apartment, we have a clear point of view on design and how we want our guests to experience our space. We often receive compliments from our guests about this.

We learnt about online marketing and how to get more bookings for our homeshare properties and quadrupled our revenue in 3 years. We built a Facebook page and website, ran ads on Facebook and video clips advertising our homeshare at our local cinema (click to view one of the ads) to attract guests. Before designing advertisements, we worked through an exercise to define our unique value proposition: What is that you offer guests that is truly unique and that they really value?

We now have 3 different listings on Airbnb for the same property, which allows guests flexibility to book the number of bedrooms they need (in our house, cottage or the entire property). We have also created additional revenue streams to enhance our homeshare business. We have developed our own version of Airbnb Experiences because they are not available yet in our neighbourhood, with on site wine-tastings in our cellar, run by local wine-makers.

We were delighted to win the Excellence in Accommodation award from the Blue Mountains Business Chamber in 2018, a prize usually awarded to a hotel! 

We are passionate about homesharing and have various projects to expand our homeshare business: We are designing a new experience for our guests to tour our Dantosa garden, we are planning additional accommodation on our property, and we are considering the purchase of a new homeshare property in France.

4. You seem to be very passionate about sharing your journey with other hosts and have written a book 'The Home Stay Guide'. Can you talk a bit more about why you decided to write this and what else you're doing to share your knowledge? 



After 8 years of building our homeshare business, we have learned the hard way what works and what doesn’t. We now know what first-time homeshare hosts and those seeking to build their business need to know. When we first started managing our homeshare, we looked for practical ‘how to’ information and were surprised to find very little assistance available online at that time.

After meeting Chip Conley at the Airbnb Open conference in Paris in 2015, we decided to write a book which contains all the information we had hoped to find when we first started our journey of becoming homeshare hosts. The book is designed for both new hosts starting out, as well as more experienced hosts who are keen to drive their businesses further and learn about the levers to pull to enhance their performance.

The Home Stay Guide is published by Little Brown, Robinsons (the same publisher as Harry Potter’s JK Rowling)!

While researching for our book, we interviewed many hosts from around the world to understand their pain points. We have become passionate about helping other hosts resolve their challenges and build great guest experiences. We have built tools and templates to help hosts manage their homeshares, such as the monthly scorecard and assessment tool.  

We recently left our corporate roles in management consulting, wealth management and film-making, to launch our own business, HomeShare Solutions. HomeShare Solutions delivers practical education for homeshare hosts which increases the value of their businesses and drives excellence in homesharing globally. In addition to our book, we offer a JumpStart program, residential host workshops and coaching for individual hosts. If you click in this link you can watch a video about our story and how we can help hosts grow their business using our Booking Blueprint: (click to watch, “Do You Want More Bookings?”). We are also hosting a host retreat on 6th May, 2019.

5. It's not really a Community Center spotlight without a fun fact! What's yours?

We are global citizens. We were both born in the United Kingdom, hold Australian passports and have lived in Asia (Thailand, Hong Kong and Singapore) for 17 years. Most of our childhoods were in Australia, but Gabriela also lived in Chile and Derek lived in Canada as a child. We were married in Bangkok 25 years ago. We have visited more than 50 countries and are planning to become global nomads soon, when our last child leaves high school. The success of our homeshare business has given us the opportunity to be remote hosts, travelling and staying at one of our own properties, while our other properties fund us.

Thank you so much Gabriela and Derek for sharing your amazing jouney as a host and all the many things that are keeping you busy. 

Please do feel free to ask them any questions or share any nice comments,  I am sure they would love to hear from you. 

Thanks,
Lizzie

[Cathie19]

Thanks @Lizzie  and Gabriela & Derek. Thank you for sharing your power hosting insights with us this month. 

Global citizens and moving forward aspiring to global nomads sounds pretty good to me! Though I think you have already achieved this, on so many levels......

All the very best to you both!

[J-Renato0]

Beautiful properties and beautiful pictures. Fantastic marketing.

Very inspiring and instructive this spotlight to all of us!

Thanks for sharing your experience, Gabriela and Derek.

[Lizzie]

Thanks @Cathie19  and @J-Renato0 for your lovely comments here. It's wonderful to hear you have enjoyed reading about Gabriela & @Derek's hosting lives.

I think it just goes to show we can all be heading down one path and then realise you can do something different, that can be more fulfilling and offer new ways to learn and experience life.  A new chapter begins!

Have you got any ideas from this that you can try out? 🙂