Swanky VacayRentals
Vacation Rental · 160 Properties · FL
The Challenge
Swanky came to us mid-merger: three vacation rental companies becoming one brand — 160 units split across Orlando and Cape Coral, two markets that behave nothing alike, each legacy brand carrying its own systems, its own guest history, and its own untested assumptions.
The bigger problem was dependence. 86% of bookings came through Airbnb, VRBO, and the rest of the OTA stack — everyone paying a commission and handing the guest relationship to a platform. The website was thin, there was no email program, and the brand had zero visibility in the AI search tools travelers now use to find rentals.
And underneath it all, nobody could say, with data, who the best guest actually was. Three companies’ worth of beliefs — none of them verified. An outside audit wasn’t going to untangle that. So this engagement took a different shape: a year inside the operation.
The Solution
Foundation first. We pulled every booking across all three legacy brands — 9,995 in total — plus 1,802 guest reviews, and ran it all through a confidence framework rather than trusting the house assumptions.
The data confirmed opportunities nobody was acting on. Two guest segments — small adult groups and large groups — accounted for 41% of all booking volume, with no dedicated marketing between them. International guests concentrated cleanly by market, with planning windows long enough to market into months ahead. A Midwest snowbird pipeline showed up with 51-night average stays.
The data killed a strategy before it spent a dollar. The “Weekend Warriors” segment, which everyone believed accounted for 39% of the business, was actually 1.2% — 16 bookings. The original plan would have spent real budget chasing a guest who barely existed.
The data made the direct-booking case stronger than any pitch could. Direct bookings had 0% low ratings — compared with 8.8% on Airbnb and 14.3% on Booking.com. Same properties, same team. Better guest fit, better stays, no commission.
And the data surfaced what had to be fixed first. Some findings weren’t marketing problems at all — they were operational issues hiding inside review language, the kind that gate how fast you can press on marketing. Those went on the roadmap ahead of campaigns, because marketing a promise the operation can’t keep just buys bad reviews faster.
From there: three brands consolidated into one, a segmented Klaviyo program built around the validated segments, and a rebuilt site and AI-search foundation — the groundwork a direct booking strategy needs before it can move beyond OTA dependence at all.
Results
Performance data publishes as full seasons complete. The foundation came first — by design.