Mathieu Ecollan, co-founder of Staycation, looks back at the genesis of his value proposition, which offers an additional opportunity for hoteliers to fill their properties. A formula in the post-Covid era where leisure and relaxation are consumed more regularly.
What attracted you to the hospitality sector as you come from the world of communication and marketing?
We started out by wanting to set up a project together. Neither of us knew anything about this sector and it had a "sleeping beauty" aspect for us. Airbnb has the hype while there are some great players in the hotel sector. We were interested in the idea of reconnecting our generation to this industry.
We quickly decided to go and talk to Parisian hoteliers to understand their issues. It was these discussions that put us on the path to Staycation. We saw a strong business opportunity to help hotels address the millions of people who live around their establishments all year round, beyond tourists and corporate clients.
In addition to the business interest, we were going to bring value and address a topic that was not previously addressed. There is an ecosystem that works very well with OTAs and the work of hoteliers directly. Addressing a new market for hoteliers was also a transformation challenge for us. Connecting hotels with their local customers, we couldn't do that with their original offerings. We had to help them create these experiences to appeal to this clientele who don't come just to sleep but come to experience something outside their daily lives.
It was a completely counter-intuitive idea to target the local clientele for the hotel industry
It emerged when we spoke to the hotels in August and they told us that they were empty during this period in the Paris market. The absence of corporate clients had a real impact on the occupancy of establishments at this period. We wondered who was in Paris during this period. We didn't want to bring in more tourists or corporate clients.
Some hoteliers invited us to spend a night in their establishments. When we stayed there, we were struck by the potential of this type of stay. There are many establishments that offer experiences. They have swimming pools, Jacuzzis, rooftops... We realised that the Parisian clients, neighbours of these hotels, had no idea that this offer was available. Parisians go to the cinema, to restaurants, to shows, but they never go to the hotels.
For our work, we systematically start with the needs of the hoteliers. We began by accompanying them on Sundays, which is a low point in the year. We therefore asked ourselves who could be available on Sundays and who was looking for something to do. We therefore started with a hotel problem with the aim of providing a different response to address it. We started by supporting hotels that already had the infrastructure and services to offer experiences.
We are neither a hotelier nor a start-up; when we launched Staycation, we had very traditional processes. We saw the problems of hoteliers and a community that could respond to them. At the beginning, Staycation was a simple newsletter where we presented offers for Sundays and the summer and we took reservations by phone. We had an active customer base of over 300 people in the first few months. This stage was the time for us to interview these customers. To find out why they had called us, what they were looking for, what they wanted to experience... At the same time we also established partnerships with more and more establishments.
We also delivered personalised messages to our partner hotels every Sunday. This allowed us to be very close to the hoteliers to whom we spoke every week. We also talked to our end customers very regularly. This is a culture that we have kept at Staycation.
Where does Staycation stand today?
We are a tech company. On the customer side, we now have over 2 million users, with an average age of between 25 and 35. These are also very urban profiles with expectations that are totally different from those of 'traditional' customers. They come to live experiences and not only to take a bed to sleep.
To build this community of 2 million users, we do not rely on traditional channels. We rely on social networks with the following angles of approach: "how to break the routine? " What's special activity to do? " How to get away from everyday life? " etc... 80% of our base comes from organic sources and word-of-mouth. People who have taken advantage of our offers tell us about their experiences when they arrive at the office on Monday morning, for example.
We work with just over 1,000 hotel partners, mainly 4-star to luxury hotels. After starting with hotels that already had experiences to offer, we began to accompany hotels that had no experience within their walls and that wanted to attract Parisians.
The whole challenge of Staycation is to create experiences for these hotels. To do this, we create partnerships with brands that speak to our millennial clientele. With Staycation, a very business hotel can become a lifestyle hotel. This is a know-how that we have developed enormously for hoteliers.
Today we are present throughout France. For the end customer, our value proposition is: boost your daily life. The objective is for our application to be next to Uber, Too Good to Go, Frichti... services used in urban life. Now in France, when you open the application, there is necessarily a hotel within an hour of where you are. Lifestyles are changing with the development of teleworking. Our users are on the move and always book a Staycation within an hour of their home.
We are now present in London, Brussels and Geneva. We have also recently started offering the first experiences in Spain. The challenge is always twofold: to create an offer and to reach local customers.
How do you ensure that, while the number of partner hotels is growing, the offer remains at Staycation's standards?
We are very lucky to be in this industry. We work with these hotels that are already of a very high standard and are also used to dealing with external partners. These establishments have such a high level of service, that they have achieved very high levels of service. The average score of Staycation establishments is 9.3. Of course, we have many elements in place to support the hoteliers.
It happens that some partners exit our portfolio and most of them by mutual agreement. When a partner has scores below 8, we trigger the support system that we have put in place and which is deployed over several weeks. We call all the clients and the hotel every week. The exchange is so close with the establishments that if we don't meet the standard, it is imposed on us and it happens naturally.
We currently have about forty employees and will reach 50 by the end of the year. We do not have any hotel profiles in our workforce. We rely heavily on the hotels' know-how for the operational part.
Our added value lies in marketing, technology and our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of our clients. As I don't come from this environment, I ask myself the right questions based on my needs and thus provide the hotels with concrete elements to progress and understand this clientele.
What is your business model?
We take a commission on the turnover we generate. After a selection process, once we decide to work with a hotel, our only remuneration is this commission. It is therefore in our interest to make this work for the hotels that also see us as a showcase. For the properties located in Paris, it gives them visibility to a million Parisians all year round.
Staycation is a new category. There are the OTAs on the one hand, which are on the tourism and travel side, but the staycation category is totally different. If a New Yorker comes to an establishment, the chance of him coming back every year is relatively low, it's much more likely for a Parisian who lives next door and who can come back for the restaurant, the spa...
We are a UFO, there is no comparable activity, which made our launch more complex. We are what is called a category definer. We had to convince by example. For example, customers who consume more when they are on site.
There are now hotels that ask themselves the question between selling a bare room on Booking.com and selling a Staycation product. It is our offer that can be the most interesting during certain periods. We are therefore working more and more on the value with these packaged offers that allow us to go beyond the bare room available on the platforms.
What are your goals?
We don't see ourselves as a hotel company at all. From our point of view, we are in the process of creating a usage from the point of view of customers and from the point of view of hoteliers. We have therefore made it our mission to create a staycation culture in France and in Europe.
When it comes to culture, everything has to be invented. Why practice staycation? How can we connect with people's daily lives and their problems? What needs do we meet?
Our challenge is to create this community on the user side while creating this new market for hoteliers. How do we address the staycation clientele? How can I offer meaningful experiences and how can this benefit my hotel? What are the objectives? Improve occupancy of the establishment? Make the assets outside the room profitable?
We work with totally different targets, so hoteliers are very sympathetic to us, they know that we don't work with customers that they could reach directly.
We don't see ourselves only as a reservation site. We want to work on the whole experience. Our objective is for our application to become the remote control for our user's stay. Today we are working upstream by helping hotels to think about their experiences. Quite quickly tomorrow, we will be able to create tools to accompany the user experience during the stay. We will be able to recommend things to do inside or outside the hotel, and propose new services.
Did the shock of the Covid 19 pandemic have an influence on your partners and customers?
The Covid was an accelerator for us. End customers became aware that they could have experiences around them. So there was an acceleration of usage on the customer side.
As for hoteliers, after some hesitation at the idea of creating experiences that are out of the ordinary, they are now developing offers that go even further. Some hoteliers are even more innovative than we are. Others are also coming back to us after changing hotels, even in very corporate facilities. There are establishments that work extremely well at La Défense or Charles de Gaulle airport, for example.
Our approach allows us to put hotels back at the centre of neighbourhood life. Before, hotels were places you walked past, now they are places of entertainment where you can experience things that are out of the ordinary.
As an entrepreneur, are there any messages you would like to pass on to other entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs?
The Covid was an accelerator for us. End customers became aware that they could have experiences around them. So there was an acceleration of usage on the customer side.
As for hoteliers, after some hesitation at the idea of creating experiences that are out of the ordinary, they are now developing offers that go even further. Some hoteliers are even more innovative than we are. Others are also coming back to us after changing hotels, even in very corporate facilities. There are establishments that work extremely well at La Défense or Charles de Gaulle airport, for example.
Our approach allows us to put hotels back at the centre of neighbourhood life. Before, hotels were places you walked past, now they are places of entertainment where you can experience things that are out of the ordinary.
As an entrepreneur, are there any messages you would like to pass on to other entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs?
My first piece of advice, which may seem basic, is to talk to people. It took us 6 months to take the step of talking to hoteliers and once we did, we learned a lot from them. You shouldn't be afraid to confront your ideas and take feedback. It's part of the corporate culture.
You can learn anything, you just have to go and get the information. We force ourselves to exchange with hoteliers several times a week to get information. The vast majority of people in the professional world are very open and willing to help.
You have to maintain your singularity. Ask yourself what triggered the creation of this activity and remain faithful to it. For example, as far as we are concerned, targeting an ultra-local clientele, offering experiences that are out of the ordinary, potentially cuts us off from a part of the business, but we believe in the value of our positioning in the long term. By bringing in very specific things and continuing to develop an offer that didn't exist before.
The fact that people are now saying: "I did a staycation" is a first stone that confirms the creation of this new use.
It is also interesting for the staff. The receptionists are happy to welcome people of their own age, who come for a moment of importance to them, who come to experience different things and who stay in the hotel.
