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Dan Legault's business is up 100% over last year.
One reason is the high-end villa rental industry has taken off. What used to be the domain of the rich and famous is now drawing clients accustomed to staying at a nice hotel for a week.
The other is, Legault's Toronto company, Homesaway Inc, is one of the most top-rated in the world by industry insiders such as Conde Nast's Traveler and Travel & Leisure.
But offering villas on the hilltops of Europe for between US$5,000 and US$37,000 a week isn't easy when your clients are nearly all wealthy, highly sophisticated travelers. Says Legault: "Our job is to provide particularly amazing experiences for people who expect them. Anything less and our clients aren't happy."
The definition of happiness has changed dramatically in the last few years, and it's driven by both the Internet and consumer sophistication. You don't have to settle for some snapshots of a villa mailed by the owner and hope there's not a coal mine next door they're not showing you. According to Legault, high-end travelers hardly ever settle for the first choice their travel agent of their own research offers them. Doing their own research is now part of the fun.
This leads to a daunting challenge for Legault.
"Today, every major hotel chain is building villas, and if you Google "Tuscany villas", you'll get 2.5 million hits. So our absolute priority is to set ourselves apart when the Internet reduces high-end experiences like villa vacations to their lowest common denominator via price."
Homesaway tries to differentiate itself in two ways. First, with every villa comes a local host, a combination concierge, local insider and social director who works to make the experience more 'authentic'.
Authenticity, it seems, is what everyone not only craves, but will pay a premium for these days. Says Legault: "It's not enough to drive through a small Tuscan village and stop off for lunch. Even for just a week, you want to live like a local, shopping at the vegetable market and taking in events that tourists never even hear about."
The problem is, lots of villa rental companies advertise local hosts. Legault is dismissive of those who offer a phone-in concierge who's 1,000 kilometres away, or who contract the high-touch stuff out to a call centre. Homesaway invests in finding and training people whose background is as sophisticated as their clients — for example, their Istrian local host is a British woman who learned to speak Croat when she was a UN documentary maker in the Bosnian conflict over a decade ago. Legault also talks about the local hosts having not only passion and judgement, but "peerness" — the ability to act as an equal in producing a 'brilliantly great time instead of just a very good time.'
Despite their skills, catering to the rich and famous is never easy.
One client was unhappy because his Italian villa was "mechanical" rather than "personal."
A "mechanical" home is more like a model home or a show-home, someplace that looks and feels not lived in. Homesaway had negotiated with the owners of a villa that used to be a private home and was transformed into a high-end Bed & Breakfast. The owners gave up the B&B business and Homesaway took it over.
"Our problem was that we never got across to the client that it's not a lived-in house, but more a show-home. Like most clients, this man wanted a 'real' home. He called me to complain and said he was moving out. But we talked and I cut a deal with him and now he's coming to another of our villas next summer. The lesson for us was to make it clear to our booking staff that they have to communicate the mechanical nature of the house."
This kind of subtlety may feel like the tyranny of tiny differences to some, but to high-end clients like Legault's, a big sticker price brings out big demands from the clientele.
Homesaway plans to keep growing, "not like Wolfgang Puck where they're franchising the brand, but also not like Alain Ducasse who has just three restaurants." Instead, Legault (who owns 30% of Homesaway) wants Homesaway to be known as "the most subtle and sophisticated" company in a market where those qualities are everything.
