The co-construction of the Online Check-In with Keylodge

For 3 months now, we have been working closely with Keylodge, a vacation rental agency based on Reunion Island, to develop a new feature. We wanted to present and tell you about the genesis of this new Yaago feature and who better than Romain Designes, Director of Keylodge, to talk to us about it?

Through this exchange, discover how the co-construction with one of our customers allowed us to develop a new feature in Yaago: the Online Check-in.

A feature that every traveller is now used to seeing and using in airline or hotel network applications. Its aim: to make the arrival of travelers even more fluid and to make each reservation even more secure, thus making managers more serene.

Hello Romain, thank you for agreeing to this exchange, can you please introduce Keylodge and yourself to the readers?

Hi, please. We founded Keylodge in 2019. In 3 years, we went from a single home managed with 0 employees to 150 managed homes and 40 employees. Perhaps our specificity was this desire to internalize everything from the start: marketing, finance, maintenance staff, housekeeper, maintenance service, revenue management.

And so control everything. We attach great importance to the structuring of processes. At the very beginning of the business, we worked hard on our offers to owners and travelers.

Then once this solid foundation was in place, we built solid work processes around the supply chain.

When you started testing Yaago, we discussed Keylodge's needs together. You liked our Pre-Check-In, but you were missing something:

In the first quarter of 2022, we indeed explored numerous ways to cover these needs related to the travel experience and the security of stays:

• competing solutions
• multiplication of applications to cover everything
• Questioning on internal development

Then we discovered Yaago and started using it to cover our first needs:

• The welcome booklet of course
• the implementation of more developed passenger communication with automatic messages
• Igloohome code sharing (access solution that we were already using)
• The chat with travelers

But we still had to solve problems related to the inventory and the online check-in.

Can you tell us more about this part?

As a manager, we make a promise to the owners: we take care of their accommodation, ensure who rents it and in what condition the accommodation is returned after each stay.

Any manager who will read your article knows that they are crucial parts of our job. And since we like to have rigorous work processes, we sought to define one for this part.

An inventory of fixtures is not mandatory for short-term rentals, but the absence of an inventory can be harmful, if a traveller takes advantage of this vagueness. Unfortunately, we have experienced this, but it has allowed us to fill our shortcomings by shielding our general conditions and by going further in our processes.

Now thanks to Yaago, we cover all the important steps.

Thanks to the inventory, travelers are given the opportunity to report the slightest anomaly upon arrival and departure. If it does not report anything, it is estimated that there is no problem. This feature is very much appreciated by travelers, who feel reassured to have this opportunity to report anything.

Then, we require all our travelers to go through this new Check-In Online feature, which allows us to collect their identity document, contact details and have them sign our general conditions of sale electronically.

Now thanks to Yaago, we cover all the important steps.

For us the advantages of Online Check-In are clear:

• In the event of noise pollution in one of our accommodations, if the police intervene, we now have all the necessary identity elements of the traveller, to share with the police.
• Despite 3D Secure, we still have some chargeback situations on payments, due to customer objections. By collecting information and identity documents, we can expand our records and better protect ourselves.
• Sometimes we had unwanted uses of our homes, too many people for the capacity of the accommodation, party plans or evenings in the house. We found that these new imposed steps encouraged some to finally change their mind and cancel their reservation.
• Among the Online Check-In steps, we also ask travelers for their arrival and departure times. Having this information is very important for us and our maintenance staff.

Because we only give access to accommodation to travelers who have completed all these steps and posted their deposit.

The benefits are twofold, because being able to explain this process to owners allows us to reassure them and therefore to more easily seduce them.

Some managers are reluctant to implement this type of process and especially to impose it on their travelers. Can you tell us about the adoption rate among your travelers?

As I said before, we impose this process on all our travelers. And the reception is positive. The important thing is to present these steps well and explain them.

This ultimately allows this to be seen as a service, such as the possibility for the traveller to make an inventory for example.

To date, we have registered 2086 Check-In Online with this new Yaago feature.

We are coming to the end of this exchange. For our part, we are proud to have been able to build this feature with you and to make it available to all our Premium users. This is in line with the professionalization of our industry.

To conclude, do you want to share feedback with the other managers who are going to read you?

I will repeat myself, but working on your work processes is essential, it is the keystone of business development, in all aspects. This will allow automation later and bring peace of mind.

Another important thing: in 3 years, we tested a lot of tools, we changed tools often.

The bottom line: there is no perfect tool. That is not serious in itself, you just have to be aware of it and not stop at this observation. You have to take those that are closest to your needs, maybe adapt to them. And if you have the will and the capacity like us, develop your own tools to cover certain needs.

Thank you very much Romain for taking the time to look back with us on these last months of collaboration that led to the launch of Check-In Online. And thank you for your very enriching sharing for all managers who will read you.

With pleasure and thanks to Yaago for his support!

Do you also want to offer an unparalleled travel experience while mastering all the tasks related to the management of your stays? Request a demo to be able to take advantage of the free Yaago trial period

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