Everything Isla Case Study

Before I knew there was a thing called the Vacation Rental Industry, it was just me and my best friend managing a couple of beach houses on Isla Mujeres. There I was, using Microsoft Excel in hopes of preventing double-bookings that would otherwise ruin our guests’ vacations. During a time before revenue management existed, setting rates was a crude science and any revenue was welcome. Over time, our use of technology grew and our portfolio grew with it. With all the results this yielded, I wanted a new challenge. I had an idea to adjust our rates not just by month or season, but by the inventory and demand we were seeing on the island. This resulted in my first ever revenue modeling system to visualize pricing history to set competitive rates.

 

Before that, when we first started as operators, I was just a rates manager. I would see a gap in the calendar and adjust the price based on what I “felt” in the market, but I knew there had to be a better way. I’d been aware of “data scraping” for years, so eventually we tried it ourselves to see if our feelings were based in reality, and we quickly discovered that what you may feel wasn’t always real. From the moment we began to funnel scraped data into these models, my mind was blown! I was hooked on visualizing what had happened in the past and testing my predictions of the future. To this day I’ve had no prouder business moment than when I got a handle on the market data, created a strategy, and it WORKED. When my inbox blew up with booking after booking at higher rates than we had ever seen before, I was hooked.