AI Is Changing the Short-Term Rental Business at Plum Guide: Full Video

25.08.2023 - 13:21 / skift.com / Justin Dawes / Seth Borko

The cost of listing a new home on the luxury short-term rental platform Plum Guide has decreased 85 percent in the past year because of implementing new AI tech.

Doron Meyassed, CEO of Plum Guide, shared details about what’s been happening and what’s next for the company at the Skift Short-Term Rental Summit on June 7. 

After his presentation, Skift senior research analyst Seth Borko joined him onstage to ask a few questions. 

View the full video of the presentation and the transcript below. 

Doron Meyassed: Hi, my name is Doron. I’m the founder and CEO of Plum Guide. For those that don’t know us, Plum Guide is a short-term rental platform specializing in the luxury segment. We’re a seven-year-old company. We have 30,000 homes. We’re about just shy of a $100 million revenue and there’s three things that make Plum different. The first one is that we vet every single home that we accept onto our platform. Roughly, we accept one in every 15 homes that we vet. Two, we are big on radical transparency. If you go onto any one of our listings, you will see we have a long list of reasons on every listing why you should not book the home. And three, we provide service to the touch of a button. So pre your stay, during your stay, you can press a button and speak to someone, usually within a couple of minutes to help you.

That’s a little bit about us. Hello, this is us. But what I’m really here to tell you about is a little adventure that we’ve been on moving from, let’s call us a traditional tech company, to a more of an AI driven company. Despite being obsessed with a topic, I am not going to lie to you. I am already tired of the words AI and machine learning and all of that. So I hope I’m able to give you a more down-to-earth under the hood view of the travails we’ve been on and the mistakes we’ve made and the mess ups along the way. Before I do that, I just want to give you a little bit of context. When we started the business, and we still do in some cases, we used to send hospitality experts into every home.

These are people who used to work in the hotel industry. They would show up at the house with an iPad app. They would test the bedding, the toiletries, the Wi-Fi speed, the shower pressure. They were experts in the field. The results from having homes vetted in that way were exceptional. So our [net promoter score] was in the 70s. Our effective repeat rate — so, if a customer went back to a destination we are in — was, in a four-year period, 600 percent. So they booked once and rebooked six times. So we were massively onto something powerful in terms of identifying quality. The problem arrived when we started to — we were in about 10 locations around the world — we started to think about how we scale