What 4.9-Rated Properties Do Differently (Based on Real Guest Reviews)

Kaye Putnam: What is the actual difference a 0.1% or 0.1 star difference makes to your bottom line? That is the question that we're exploring today. I did a fun research study to prep for this where I pulled 4.9 rated Airbnb listings that had hundreds of reviews each. I wanted to take a look at what guests are actually saying matters to them. What's so top of mind that they put it into the review so that we can start to decode how we can earn those 4.9 star reviews ourselves.

The problem is when we scale, efficiency often kills the soul of your brand. It's something that we're really sensitive to at FreeWild. We don't want our guests to feel like they're just another number. And we also don't want to just get quote unquote good 4.7 overall on our portfolio.

Eric, you were recently at the Airbnb host summit and they really hammered home the importance of 4.9 and above. Do you want to remind everybody who's listening what they said there?

Eric Moeller: Yeah, for sure. I think the game has completely evolved. And Airbnb themselves, Brian was sharing with us that he is making a huge push this year into more professional hosts. I used to have this mindset that if you're hosting at scale, it's impossible to get high reviews all the time. Some of our clients that we work with in RPM, our revenue management service, and then in that room at the Airbnb headquarters, they have hundreds of listings and they're still operating at a 4.9 across their Airbnb portfolio. So it's completely possible.

We're trying to bring on a client right now who is doing about $20 million in top line bookings and he's adding 10 to 15 new properties. And these are massive South Florida, beautiful mansions. He's adding 10 to 15 a month to his portfolio. So he's scaling like crazy. His Airbnb profile is at a 4.97. I've got to send you this profile. It's unbelievable.

So we'll get into the how in a second, but from Airbnb's standpoint, they're battling right now the bad PR that's been going on for years of checking into a property and just having a crappy experience. So Brian and the Airbnb team are really working on incentivizing more hosts to operate at a higher level. And he did make a comment to us that he believes that they're going to lead towards incentivizing the operators that get higher reviews and devaluing the operators that are subpar, that are just not getting great reviews on their profile.

And he didn't go into detail, but I'm assuming it's placement on the platform. I think I'm assuming he's going to be kicking people off, things like that. All of this to say is the industry has evolved so many different times throughout the years, but right now it's creating professional operators. You have to be professional. You have to drive incredible hospitality experiences and not do this set it and forget it, or just set things up and AI-fy everything. And there's no human contact or connection. This is not an easy business to do that. You're on 24/7 and there's reasons why people start dropping their reviews. It's really difficult to get 4.9 or above, but this is now becoming the new standard.

When we onboard somebody into RPM, the baseline is 4.7, but now we're even looking at that even being higher. Brian was saying now the new baseline is 4.9. And I'm like, okay, well game on, we got to play at a different level. It's amazing to see how much bad reviews, just one negative review impacts your entire portfolio as a professional host. Completely drops. You don't want bad reviews. You want to do everything possible to over deliver for your guests and get those higher reviews.

Kaye Putnam: Yes. Mic drop. You need to be paying attention to this. The data shows it too. AirDNA has a study that shows that properties that have 4.9 rating or better earn 15% more on average than even the 4.8s or the 4.7s. So this is dollars in your pocket when you do it correctly.

I, with the help of AI, analyzed a bunch of 4.9 and above listings and identified four attributes, the core four we're going to call them, that guests consistently call out after their stay. So the first one, Eric, you're going to love this, is the unreasonable hospitality factor. Things like just being proactive with communication makes such a big difference versus waiting for things to happen.

So I have some fun examples that I've heard from some of our clients, but before I dive into that, I'd love to hear from you. What are we doing now with FreeWild to be proactive? And what would you like to do in the future with FreeWild to continue to earn these five-star reviews?

Eric Moeller: Yeah, there's a lot that I want to do in the future. For everyone who's listening, we started FreeWild. We still just have our first flagship property, and on that property we have four cabins. So we don't have a lot of scale there, but those four cabins allow us to really customize the experience and really get in depth.

Our goal by the end of this year is to get approvals for phase two of building out the additional cabins. Once we're able to... so there's a pro and con of being at the size that we're at now. One pro is that we're able to go above and beyond on experiences, but the con is it's too small to centralize everything into the team. We have to rely on contractors and things like that, which create its own challenges.

Once we get to scale with this, there's a lot of different ideas on how we're going to implement it. But right now it's very simple. We understand our avatar, our client avatar really, really well. And we know why they're traveling to FreeWild and we know that they're traveling from LA, Orange County, or San Diego. We do have certain people that fly out to go stay at FreeWild, which is awesome. That's where the majority of our guests come from.

So just anticipating those touch points, those guest touch points. We know that every single guest, more guests than not, they're going to ask for an early check-in. And we also know that every single guest is going to ask for a late checkout. Now our goal is to get them in at four and out by 10 so the team has enough time to turn over. But we are communicating with them. If they're not asking for it, we stick to those times, but we're already anticipating it. So we're scheduling our team and then allowing our guests to check in an hour early and check out an hour late. So we create those windows. If they don't ask for it, we'll let our team know and they can get in there early and clean. But we already scheduled our teams to anticipate an early check in and a late checkout. So it's thinking through those aspects.

There's also times you can use that as leverage. If we have a guest that just, whatever things start breaking down and their experience is not exactly what we want it to be, we use that as leverage. Hey, just want to issue you guys an extra hour for checkout, and that's on us. Don't worry about it. We apologize. And here's 10% off for the next time you come in.

It's thinking through all those anticipations. And then I know this is a touch point that we're going to go into, but to me, the biggest and most important aspect is your property needs to be better than what they expect it to be. We'll get into that, but it's thinking through that side. We're really hands on with customer service. That's something that I've been putting a lot of effort into is training our customer service reps to truly be experts on our property and on our market. So any questions that come in, we have a standard that has to be responded to within five minutes and it has to be accurate. And if they don't know, they're on the phone with me and I'm responding. They get 90% of it accurate, which is amazing.

I would summarize this to understand your guest avatar and their touch points and their expectations and tailor everything towards that. And then you have to meet expectation or surpass that every single time.

Kaye Putnam: The key is to optimize for connection versus just optimizing for efficiency. I think one place where I would love to improve our process at FreeWild is we do the proactive reach out, I think it's the next morning. So they check in in the afternoon or evening, they have their first night. We send an email the next morning, just want to make sure everything is incredible. If anything's not, please let us know. So we're asking for them to essentially bring us problems if they exist.

But something that our RPM client Beth from Northridge Escapes who has earned over a thousand five-star reviews with her portfolio, she mentioned to me that she's still managing the guest communication herself and probably won't ever give it up because she is constantly looking for an opportunity to create a human connection between her and the guest. And I think that, especially with some of those automated check-ins that we do, I would love for us to find a way to personalize them even more versus the automated message that goes out and find a way that when somebody says that they're booking for their birthday or they're booking for their anniversary, we're addressing that or at least congratulating them. And we do it often, but I think we can find ways to do it consistently every time in the future.

Eric Moeller: Yeah, that's where personalizing every stay should be a new goal for the industry to go after. That is something that guests and travelers are fatigued with, just the automated Airbnb stay and it just feels cold and soulless. And with the rise of AI, it's just going to become, things are going to just start trending more towards that. I think the ones that are going to really thrive, and we talk about this with the content that we create and why we're choosing to put a lot of effort into the podcast, talk to the world through this setting. This is us a hundred percent. This is what we talk about offline and online. And it's what we think about and implement. And we're trying to be as authentic as possible.

We get that feedback a lot from our RPM clients, but we also, it's not to the level that we desire right now in FreeWild, but I really do think if we can, as an industry, implement that, the ones that do are going to be the ones that will win. You can have AI in the background and technology in the background that enhances your team for that information, but we're in the hospitality industry. And we still need that human to human connection and excitement for you coming and stay at FreeWild to celebrate your birthday. That's awesome. Celebrate that together. Let's have people on the team that are excited about that.

And the one thing that I noticed with a lot of companies, a lot of hosts is that they don't have team members that are excited about the hospitality. It becomes a problem for them. Here's another guest complaint or whatever. They don't want to talk. They don't want to deal with the guests. It's very frustrating when I see that. And the ones that thrive, the ones that get the 4.9 and above, they're excited about the guests coming and staying. It's like they chose your property. They're paying you, hopefully top dollar for that if you have the right revenue management strategy in place. You have to really celebrate those customers.

We have another client that has the unreasonable hospitality role in his business and I forget his team member's name, but she is obsessed with this. This is what she does, all day long, all night long, she just thinks of how do I over deliver for these guests and personalize the entire experience? And they're winning. They're absolutely crushing it. We just need more of that nowadays in our stays. And I think we're going to get some incredible feedback from our guests.

Kaye Putnam: So second attribute of the core four is quote-unquote better than photos accuracy. So a lot of guests will say that the photos don't even do it justice or it's bigger than it looks online. The insight here is to under promise and over deliver. So you want to be accurate, but you don't want to go so crazy with the post production editing that it looks like it will never look like that in real life.

And then one other tip for that is you can show the basics, show everything that they'll need to know to make the decision to book, but maybe save a few surprises for them to discover when they show up at their property.

At FreeWild we have our Wild Mode box and we have some goodies inside of it and we kind of hint at it and we show it in the listing photos, but we don't show all of the contents. And I think that that's kind of that key surprise factor where you're getting something more than you bargained for. Can you think of any other examples of that, Eric?

Eric Moeller: Well, I think the biggest thing is when it comes to operations, where that starts breaking down is delivering consistent operations and maintenance to your properties. I know there's a couple of Airbnbs that are out there and properties that are out there that have hidden rooms that they don't promote on their properties, but they talk about it in the listings. And then the guests start talking about it in the reviews and it kind of builds up and it's really awesome. They have speakeasies and things like that. So having that discovery is really awesome.

But most people I would assume who are listening to this have traditional short term rental businesses. They have traditional vacation rental homes, maybe beautiful, maybe standard, whatever it is. But they don't have those unique factors where they can build in a speakeasy or a pickleball court or whatever. Although those Airbnbs are on rise.

I think the biggest thing is you have the ability nowadays to take really beautiful photos, edit those photos to make them even nicer. And now, I mean, you were messing around with this one tool where you can put humans in the photos and they look amazing, super, super real. And it's like, all right, this is crazy what you can do.

But if you have this incredible viral, beautiful digital world, your expectations in reality need to match that or surpass that. And where that starts breaking down is teams losing their touch on maintenance. And I'm talking even from personal experience. We had a guest that left us private feedback on one of our listings saying a chair downstairs was broken, one of the lights over the bed was broken, this was missing. And what I realized was the our cleaning and maintenance team, they are not feeling the pressure of us saying, hey, the moments you recognize this, let us know, we'll fix it. The moment that the guest starts giving you that feedback, you have a breakdown in your system in your business.

And I realized, okay, we got to retrain our team again. We got to create incentives. We got to create accountability towards this. So if a chair is broken, you're not leaving it there for the next guest. You notice it and we fix it immediately. It's that, that's the factor between operating at a 4.7 and a 4.9 is being obsessed with those details.

So it's, hey, if you have a beautiful property and you understand that the maintenance side, of course the operation, the hospitality, what we just talked about is really important, but then it's the operations. It's making sure that you shut your property down every quarter, maybe after your busy season and paint the walls, fix the broken furniture, replace the lights that blew out. Fix the little things. Because people feel that and people see that.

Last point on this is, I remember, I think we talked about this on a podcast a while ago, but I think it was about two years ago. I was hosting, I rented a house down in the Jersey shore for my family. My parents in Florida, my brother's in Jersey. I'm in California. So we always bring everybody together. And my sister found this great Airbnb that had beautiful photos and some decent reviews, but it wasn't world-class, but the photos look fine. It looked great. And I was like, you know what? It's not world-class, but we just need rooms. That's all we need. We're going to be spending time with our family. We just need a place to sleep that's clean and easy.

We checked into this place and it was a mess. Furniture was broken, holes in the walls. The carpets were dirty. There was garbage on the floor outside and it's just like, what is going on? And we get on the phone with the host and he's like, yeah, what do you expect? It's a party house. You know, people come down the Jersey shore and party all the time. And it became a problem. He started threatening me and then Airbnb got involved and kicked them off the platform and all this crazy stuff.

But my point is we had this one expectation of a clean, nice place to stay at. And we weren't expecting five star experiences. We checked in and we got a one star experience and it didn't match at all. That's the extreme of it.

But I see this all the time where hosts just, it's really hard. They haven't built out the systems to keep up with the expectations of when a guest checks in. Is everything in the same place that you have when they see the photo? Does everything in the photo work?

One experience we had yesterday is we have a fire pit that we promote in our photos and it's broken. And I didn't realize that it was broken because our team didn't communicate that. And we haven't gotten the feedback from the guests. The guests wanted to use it yesterday and we realized that it was broken. And she was really upset about it because it's part of the experience that we promote.

So I realized, okay, here's an experience that our guests are really looking forward to, especially in the winter time. And we don't have our system or accountability dialed in yet for our maintenance team to check it every single day to make sure that it works for the guests that do want to use it. So it's those little things that I'm realizing. And then you expand that out across 100, 200 properties becomes really difficult.

That's the difference between the companies that were in that room that have hundreds and hundreds of properties that still operating at a 4.9 and five star. They figured out all those moving parts and they're just relentless at fixing them and making the experience match or surpass what the guests are seeing on photos and in reviews.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah, like you mentioned, this is a bit of a challenge to do at scale with FreeWild with just four cabins. But if you have 15% higher revenue across 50 properties, 100 properties, you can afford to have somebody who's obsessed with these details. And you can't afford not to have somebody who is obsessing over these details. It's really, really crucial, especially if a bulk of your bookings come from Airbnb who is raising the standards like we mentioned.

Eric Moeller: Yeah, 100%.

Kaye Putnam: Moving into core attribute number three, hotel plus cleanliness standards. You kind of touched on it with your Jersey stay. Cleanliness is the baseline. It has to be clean. But what we're trying to do, our bonus tip here is to create a sensory experience within the first 60 seconds. In the reviews that I analyzed, guests said things like smelled amazing as soon as we walked in. The linens felt brand new. The air conditioning was turned on before we got there. Really setting the scene for a very strong, positive, emotional impression right when somebody gets to the property is just next level and it's something that we've been working towards with FreeWild as well.

Eric Moeller: Yeah. And that's been happening obviously in the hotel world forever, but you see also some of the highest, the high end stores, high end restaurants and high end hotels all have that dialed in. They put a lot of effort into understanding what is the space going to smell like? Where are the lights dimmed at?

I have a friend that owns a handful of restaurants here in San Diego and Carlsbad. He says a big part, his number one, his first thing that he does in his day is goes, he goes around and sets all the lights to the right temperature based on what the lighting is outside. So if it's cloudy, he adjusted, if it's bright, he adjusted. And then as the sun starts going down, he starts adjusting it to the sun and he's obsessed with this. And when you walk into his restaurant, you feel it.

Every single time you feel that. And the music is curated, everything is curated for that experience to either be something that pops out to you if you're obsessed with detail or something that's just seamless for you. There's no friction points. And it's the number one concern across every single traveler. Is my property clean? I always do that. Every time I go to a new place, I always look at the bed right away and I look at the sheets. I'm like, is this clean? Did they do their job?

I've had some nightmares that I've checked into. But yeah, I mean, this should be a standard across the board. To see that, again, it's a difficult thing to do is to execute on this every single time, but it needs to be a standard and a focus in your business.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah, to be a portal of possibility, Troy was on the podcast again recently and he mentioned that when they brought linens and laundry in-house, they now have a full commercial press for their sheets. So they are steamed and crisp and what you would get in a hotel. So that's the top bar. So how can you do that in your own way with your portfolio or something similar? Maybe it's just upgrading the thread count on the sheets and making sure that they're white and crisp and bleached every time and putting that extra effort in pays off.

Eric Moeller: Yeah, it does pay off. On that too is we got to stop going for economy products. There's a whole opportunity out there for you to buy every single product at the cheapest level, from toilet paper to sheets, to beds, to Ikea furniture, all that stuff. We got to move away from that because if you're as an operator investing into the cheapest products, you're going to get, there's no way you're going to maximize what you can charge for your product. Your product is everything from toilet paper to the lights, to the bed, the linens, the entire experience. So if you're trying to cut corners and save money there, you're never going to be able to maximize what you can sell your product at.

And we got to move away from the one ply Amazon cheap toilet paper and then the crappy scratchy linens because it's the cheapest stuff we can find. Okay, I get it. If you're starting a business and you're trying to figure it out and you're bootstrapping, start there, but start figuring out how to implement into the best products possible, especially the products that guests will be touching every single day. That is what's going to really set your property apart and then you have to hold in line with your cleaning staff and your maintenance staff to make sure that it's delivered hotel quality every single time.

Kaye Putnam: All right, our final core four is frictionless problem solving. So it's not so much that something went wrong, it's the speed to solution that guests are particularly impressed with. So they'll say things like the wifi went out, but the host responded in minutes and had it fixed. So for a property at scale, you need to implement standards for your team. Eric mentioned that we have a five minute response time standard within our team.

There's really this golden hour when something goes wrong where you need to be at least in motion working on fixing the situation. Can you think of any other examples, Eric? I'm sure you have many.

Eric Moeller: Yeah. I mean, I think we've kind of been talking about it, but that is the first thing. Guests want to know that they're being taken care of. And we all know that. But we have to, what I mean by that too, is the energy of when a guest sends a problem, is it, here's another problem to solve, or is it, no, this should not be happening. I'm on it now to make sure that this never happens again and that you have a great experience.

Taking the ownership, getting excited about solving the problem. Every single time we have something that comes up, there's times of course, if I'm on a Saturday night trying to relax from a crazy work day and something happens in one of our properties and our customer service rep levels it up to me. I'm like, okay, got it. But then I switch immediately.

I give myself five seconds to feel like that, but then I switch immediately and be like, this shouldn't be happening. It's my responsibility to make sure that this wasn't a problem to deal with in the first place. So then we take action on it immediately. And there's always going to be challenges and problems that pop up. And most guests, if you approach it like a professional, and if you approach it with your heart from a hospitality standpoint, they're going to accept the fact that things break down, this stuff happens and I'm being taken care of. And then it's, hey, I'm so sorry about this situation. Here's how we're going to repair it. If you ever want to stay with us again.

Most people are going to accept that. There's going to be people that never, no matter what you can't make those people happy. But once you recognize that you're dealing with somebody like that, I typically just overload with love and just, well, okay, it's clearly not me and something else is going on. It's not FreeWild. I get it. But we're just going to move forward.

We had a guest that left us a two star review on Ursus because she said our walls were too thin and she couldn't sleep because her kids in the other room were talking. And I was like, okay, well, I can't solve that for you. I apologize that the walls are thin, which is what it is. But as I'm trying to lead through this process, I realized that no matter what I was saying, she just had that energy of the world is against me type of thing.

And we were just over delivering. We were sending her blankets. I sent her up earplugs. I offered for her and her husband to stay in a different cabin and just give her a second cabin and be like, hey, why don't you separate? And no matter what I did and offered, she wasn't happy about it. Then she left us a nasty review, two star review. We worked with Airbnb, Airbnb recognized what was going on. They took it down.

The reason I share that is I don't let those experiences dictate how we show up to problem solving to begin with. You got to recognize, is it something that we created and can we control the outcome of the solution here? And if it is, you got to jump on it as a hospitality professional and solve it immediately. And then you have to recognize that 1%, 2%, 3%, depending on what market you're in, you're going to have individuals that no matter what are going to see everything as a problem and you just have to over deliver for those individuals.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah. Another thing that one of our clients, Joe, said, I think I mentioned him earlier as well, he has built in many layers of contingencies. So you have problems that you know are going to happen just because they often do. So maybe it's Wi-Fi going out, maybe it's the automatic door locks not working. Whenever you have a problem once or maybe twice, start to think about what is the backup fallback for this? Is it having a lock box with extra keys in a few different places? Is it having the Wi-Fi people on standby or the manual available for people to troubleshoot? Whatever it is, understand that there's patterns and that you as the CEO or you as the operations human can basically reduce work for yourself later by thinking through those in advance. I thought that was really, really smart.

Eric Moeller: That is a really good point is anticipating problems as well and solving problems ahead of time. We're in the mountains and when storms come through, power lines get knocked down all the time. And we received an email from our power company stating that there's a high risk of power outages and internet outages in the area.

So we immediately communicated that with our guests for not just the guests that were staying there, but the guests that were coming up. Hey, this is what's happening outside of our control, but this is how we're going to solve it for you. And it gave me the idea that this is something that we deal with it every single winter. So as we do this expansion building in generators into the property. We'll support just the basics. Having Starlink that you can go to use your phone and go on the internet, all that stuff.

So thinking through those touch points and anticipating that, but then making it fun. Because you're in the mountains and this awesome cabin and the lights just went out, but now we have an emergency lights that kick in through the generator.

So thinking through those steps, when we do this next phase, we're going to work that into our cabins. And it's anticipating that, but then also anticipating how you communicate with your guests and supporting them through the process. And the guests, they're like, all right, great. It comes with the territory. That's completely fine. And they were happy about it.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah, love that example. Amazing. So even if you've heard all of these things before, really check yourself on how, are we living up to the 110% level of each of these things? Are we being proactive and human and connecting with our guests? Do we have hotel plus cleaning standards? Does it actually smell good, sound good, feel good in all of your spaces? Is the property better than the photos? And how fast are you solving your problems? Check yourself on each of those. And a lot of the CEOs that we work with, this is their favorite thing to work on. They want to nail the guest experience. And if you are wearing too many hats and you're still managing pricing at the same time, maybe it's time to delegate your pricing. I'm just going to sneak this in here. But I keep hearing it from all of the clients that we talk to. It's, yeah, I was managing this myself. I was doing it well. But now that I'm not, I have so much more brain space to do the guest experience and the brand building and the relationship building. And those are really the highest level activities for CEOs in most cases.

Eric Moeller: Yeah. Plus they tend to make more money once they're out of that position. So then they're able to invest that extra capital into these roles and solutions that we're talking about. And it's the client that I was telling you about out of Florida. That's his exact situation. He's grown so fast. He's got these beautiful properties and these guests that are spending thousands of dollars to stay with him. But he's still doing his pricing. He's still leading his customer service team.

And he's like, it's all going well, but it's not a hundred percent. And I know that I'm leaving money on the table because there'll be weeks where I don't go into PriceLabs to change stuff. And then on the customer service side, he's like, I just get overwhelmed by managing all the different parts. I'm like, well, you know that right there, you got to hire two, you got to put two of the best people in those seats.

To free you up from that because your number one goal is leading this company. And we looked at his portfolio and it's like adding, he's leaving a lot of money on the table, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I'm like, dude, here is how you solve this problem. Take the extra capital, hire an expert to lead this side, hire the marketing and get yourself out of that position. So it leads to those points.

Revenue management is just one thing. If you're not an expert in that space, get yourself out of that seat. And then it comes down to this as well. If you're having problems with customer service or maintenance or cleaning, you gotta hire the person that's gonna be obsessed with just that one thing to solve.

Kaye Putnam: Exactly. We can take a look at your portfolio and your pricing strategy, how you've been doing it over the last 6 to 12 months, and let you know if you are leaving money on the table. If you go to freewildfoundry.com/report and you're generating over a million dollars in bookings, we do that absolutely complimentary. No risk, no commitment. At that point, we're just showing you and giving you transparency and clarity of what is possible when you have an expert in that seat.

Thanks for listening. I'm so happy that you've been here.

Eric Moeller: Yeah, that was awesome. Thank you. And peace out.