The same brand, two very different check-ins
Four properties run a staffed front desk. Six run remote—a guest lets themselves in, and AvantStay shares revenue with the owner. That split, not guest type, is the primary lens for this map: it's the biggest single driver of what can go wrong before a review gets written.
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Front-desk
Sense28 · The Gilmore · The Code · The Mara
Staffed properties—a person hands over the room, not an app.~24,000 reservations, ~89% of total value · ~$11M · average stay ~2.2 nights- Wants
- A human, in-person handoff that feels effortless—the thing a front desk is supposed to guarantee.
- Risk
- The Gilmore alone is ~45% of all hotel reservation value—its front desk quality effectively sets the portfolio's review average.
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No front desk · revenue-share
Blackhaus · The Wesley · The Monkey Tree · Hotel El Cid · The Rosalie · The Weekend
Remote check-in, no staffed lobby—closer in operating model to a vacation rental than a hotel.~2,700 reservations, ~11% of total value · ~$1.4M · average stay ~2.2 nights- Wants
- Clear, self-serve access instructions—there's no desk to fall back on if something's confusing.
- Risk
- Ticket categories here skew toward contact-info and check-in/access questions—exactly the friction a front desk would normally absorb in person.
Six guest segments, built from channel and loyalty status
Built the same way as the vacation rental personas—combining segments that plausibly describe one real kind of guest, not a single verified query. The difference: rental personas leaned on party size and trip value, but those barely vary at hotels (95% of reservations are under $3K, 99.8% are single-unit). Booking channel and operating model are where the actual signal is here, so that's what defines these six.
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#1 by value
The Direct Front-Desk Regular
Books straight from avantstay.com at a staffed property. The largest single segment in the file.~8,400 reservations, ~42% of front-desk value · ~$4.8M · ticket-to-value index ~1.0, proportional- Wants
- Recognition for skipping the OTA, and a staffed handoff smooth enough to make booking direct feel worth it.
- Risk
- Already the largest, most proportional segment—the risk here is complacency, not crisis. Front-desk quality for this guest effectively is the brand for nearly half of all hotel value.
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#2 by efficiency
The Expedia Front-Desk Guest
Books via Expedia at a staffed property. The quietest segment in the portfolio.~7,700 reservations, ~26% of front-desk value · ~$3.0M · lowest ticket load of any channel, ~0.6 tickets/reservation- Wants
- A smooth in-person check-in. This guest doesn't ask for much beyond that, and the data backs it up.
- Risk
- Low risk today, but worth understanding why it's the most efficient channel—that's a pattern worth replicating elsewhere, not just leaving alone.
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#3 by friction
The Airbnb No-Front-Desk Guest
Books via Airbnb at a remote-check-in property—the highest-risk combination in the portfolio.~1,100 reservations, ~43% of no-front-desk value · ~$590K · ticket-to-value index ~1.6, the highest flag in the file- Wants
- Clear, self-serve check-in instructions, and a fast way to reach someone if the lockbox code doesn't work.
- Risk
- Airbnb's top ticket categories are contact-info and check-in/access requests—exactly the friction a staffed desk absorbs in person, concentrated at the properties with no desk to catch it.
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#4 by consistency
The Booking.com Guest
Books via Booking.com—shows up at roughly the same rate at both operating models.~3,200 reservations, ~13% of value at both front-desk and no-front-desk properties · ticket-to-value index ~1.3, high- Wants
- Straightforward confirmation and check-in details, without needing to contact support to get them.
- Risk
- The over-index holds steady regardless of operating model—this reads as a channel-level pattern (message clarity, timing) rather than a property-specific one.
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#5 by friction per booking
The VRBO Guest
Books via VRBO. The smallest channel by volume, but the highest support load per booking of any source.~490 reservations, ~3% of value · ~$340K · ~1.8 tickets per reservation, the highest of any channel- Wants
- The same fast reassurance an Airbnb guest wants—VRBO skews similarly self-serve.
- Risk
- Too small to move portfolio averages, but the highest per-booking friction in the file. Worth a dedicated look precisely because volume won't hide the problem.
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#6 by upside
The Repeat & Member Hotel Guest
Has stayed at an AvantStay hotel before, or is enrolled in the membership program.~3,500 repeat reservations, ~14% of value at ~0.75 tickets/reservation, the most efficient guest in the file · members are still just ~1% of value- Wants
- Recognition of history across stays—the same ask as the repeat vacation-rental guest.
- Risk
- The most efficient guest in the portfolio, and the loyalty program still isn't capturing it: active members are only ~1% of value, barely different from the vacation rental side's ~2%.
The scorecard answers reviews. These are what's left.
The reputation scorecard above covers the review side of the goal with real numbers. What's left is narrower and more specific: closing the one property with no TripAdvisor listing, wiring the tracker into Chef so this stops requiring a manual screenshot, and connecting reviews to revenue and tickets so both halves of the goal reinforce each other.
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Infrastructure gap
Wire Brand Reputation Master into Chef
Resolved, sort of: TripAdvisor and Google data exists and is good (see the scorecard above)—it just lives in a separate live tracker Chef can't query directly. Someone still had to manually screenshot a dashboard to get it into this map. Worth fixing so this updates itself going forward instead of needing another Slack thread each time.
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Pending
Hotel El Cid's TripAdvisor listing
The one property with no TripAdvisor profile at all, out of ten. A claim/verify task, not a data-pull—should be one of the fastest wins on this whole page.
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Pending
Longer-term rating trend
We now have a snapshot and a 14-day delta per property—still missing a full 12-month TripAdvisor/Google history, the same window used throughout the rest of this map.
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Pending
Review-to-ticket correlation
Whether an unresolved in-stay ticket actually predicts a low review—the thing that would turn the ticket data above into a real prioritization tool.
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Pending
Review-to-revenue correlation
The goal here is reviews and revenue, not reviews instead of revenue. Blackhaus and the Rosalie sit at the bottom on TripAdvisor—do they also underperform on rate or occupancy versus the rest of the no-front-desk group? We have both datasets now; they just haven't been joined.
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Pending
Front-desk group's Booking.com/Expedia/NPS
The scorecard above only has these three metrics for the no-front-desk group. Sense28, The Gilmore, The Code, and The Mara are missing them entirely—an asymmetry in tracking coverage, not just a data gap for one property.
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Pending
Current comms map
Partially answered: the Comms Map now has a dedicated journey for front-desk hotels, with the front desk playing the "local team" role. No-front-desk hotels still don't have an on-site equivalent, so that half is still unmapped. Two ideas from guest feedback should still be tested once it is: local-team identity in comms ("a message from your Joshua Tree team"), and moving local recommendations earlier than day-of check-in so guests can actually plan around them.
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Pending
Trip purpose
Business vs. leisure vs. group segmentation, if it exists for hotels—front-desk properties likely skew business/solo, no-front-desk likely skew leisure/group.