Recently, while presenting hospitality training for a cabin rental company in the mountains of North Georgia, I had a participant in my class whose job was to take the after-hours calls from inhouse guests. Knowing that these calls are usually from distressed people who have encountered a problem or quandary, I remarked something like, “Wow, now THAT must be a hard job.”  She immediately replied, “Actually, not at all Mr. Kennedy. Before this, I spent over 30 years as a supervisor on the assembly line in a broom factory. THAT was a hard job!”

At that moment it occurred to me that everyone in the vacation rental industry actually still works in a factory. But rather than making a physical product, our factories create something that is much more important to most humans than just about any physical product we can ever possibly buy, which are vacation memories that will surely last a lifetime.

Since that day I have often used the “memory factory” analogy during our workshops and webcam events and it seems to be a relatable analogy.

When I think back on my own heritage, my father grew up in Braddock, PA in the 1920s and ’30s, when it was the steel capital of the world. Nearly everyone there had a family member responding when Carnegie’s steam whistle blew to signal a shift change.  My own father only escaped the factory worker track because he turned 18 in 1942, 6 months after Pearl Harbor, and instead enlisted in the US Navy and became an electrical engineer, where he instead designed electrical panels at the Square D factory.

When you stop to think about it, an awful lot of vacation rental companies are actually located in what were once manufacturing locales, from the heavy equipment manufacturing belt of the Pocono Mountains of PA, through the rolling hills and textile factories of North Carolina, to cannery row in Monterey, California.

While most of the traditional factories are long since gone, the manufacturing continues every day.  While the final “product” is now an intangible experience, the “assembly line” works largely the same.

For example, just as on a traditional assembly line, every staff member plays an important role in manufacturing our guest’s memories. This starts with maintenance to ensure that all the components of the complex homes most of us rent are in good working order.  So many others on the “line” touch the experience too, from the IT/website team who ensure that bookings come through accurately, to the reservations and guest services staff who correspond with each individual guest. Let us not forget laundry and housekeeping, because cleanliness is just about always number one on any survey in which guests are asked to rank what is most important to them. Depending on your inventory and location, there may be many other workers on the assembly line including pool and hot tub staff, concierge, transportation, and of course accounting to send owner statements and charge guests’ card-on-file on an accurate and timely basis.

When I took a bit of time to research manufacturing terms for this article, it was interesting to learn even more analogies that apply such as “Delayed Differentiation,” also called Last Mile Manufacturing, referring to the final steps to “customized” a “product” that happen near the end of the supply chain assembly line.

For automobiles, this refers to the choice of upholstery or sound systems, whereas for clothing it means that the apparel may be dyed at the last stop before distribution to the stores and warehouses based on what is selling the most.

In our vacation memory factories, the final customization is likewise conducted at the end of the line. Although the accommodation experiences themselves are the same, the delivery can and should be customized for the specific life experiences playing out, based on each individual guest’s vacation vision.  Examples of customization might be personalized, handwritten welcome notes, (at least for those booking high-value stays), offering authentically local welcome amenities specific to the region or personalized to the guest’s reason for travel, such as birthdays, anniversaries and reunions.

In the hotel industry, one of the finest hotel chains in the world is Four Seasons and they love to use another term originating from another type of manufacturing, referring to tailor-made clothing such as men’s dress suits. The word is “bespoke,” for which Google offers a modern definition: “Made for a particular user or customer.”

Now granted, there are plenty of high volume, low-touch vacation rental companies that are currently very well-funded that are trying to literally “manufacture” vacation rental experiences like a Henry Ford’s assembly line pushed out Model A’s. Time will tell how well they will do over the long run. I for one have my concerns, mainly because of their seeming obsession with forcing guests and homeowners to use tech to communicate with their rental company and making it harder to reach a live, dedicated, local-area staff when you really need one.  Likewise, these companies seem to have a similar obsession with automating relationships with the homeowners, which I hear is already causing inventory slippage when they acquire new companies. So unless these companies also buy up most of the vacation home inventory itself, I think this presents an opportunity for those who recognize that many if not most owners are also emotionally invested in the vacation home they own.

Over the long term, I predict that guests will stay loyal to the locally-owned and branded vacation rental companies that truly understand that the vacation home rental industry has very little to do with vacation homes and a lot to do with manufacturing vacation memories.  Those who use “tech” in order to “touch” their guests during the “assembly line” process, and those who take a bespoke approach at The Last Mile, will manufacture memories that will cause guests to do the two – well actually three – things we want most; come back next time, book directly, and tell others good things about us on social media.

I hope you will share this analogy of a memory factory with your staff.  I find that it gives new meaning to the hard work we do, the long hours we endure, as the memories we create will be captured in pictures that are actually printed, framed, and hung on the wall for decades to come.

As Published Previously at VRMIntel

By Doug Kennedy
doug@kennedytrainingnetwork.com
@DougKennedyKTN