We have been working closely with Keylodge, a property management agency based on Reunion Island, for 3 months now, on the development of a new feature. We wanted to present and tell you about the genesis of this new Yaago feature and who better than Romain Desvignes, CEO of Keylodge, to talk about it with us?

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

A feature that all travelers are now used to seeing and using in airline or hotel mobile applications. Its goal: to make the arrival of travelers even more fluid and to make each booking even more secure, thus making managers more serene.

Hello, you’re welcome. We founded Keylodge in 2019. In 3 years, we have gone from a single managed accommodation with 0 employees to 150 managed accommodations and 40 employees. Our specificity, perhaps, was this desire to internalize everything from the start: marketing, finance, maintenance staff, housekeeper, maintenance department, revenue management.

And therefore control everything. We attach great importance to the structuring of processes. At the very beginning of the activity, we worked a lot 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 talked together about Keylodge’s needs. You liked our Pre Check-In, but something was missing:

In the first quarter of 2022, we have indeed explored many avenues to cover these needs related to the traveler experience and the security of stays:

• competing solutions
• multiplication of applications to cover everything
• questioning about internal development

Can you tell us more about this part?

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

All managers who will read your article know that these are crucial parts of our job. And since we like to have rigorous work processes, we have sought to define one for this part.

The inventory is not mandatory in short-term rentals, but the absence of an inventory can be detrimental, if a traveler takes advantage of this vagueness. Unfortunately, we have experienced this, but it will have allowed us to fill our gaps by shielding our general conditions and going further in our processes.

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

Travelers are given the opportunity, thanks to the inventory feature, to report the slightest anomaly on arrival and departure. If it does not report anything, it is considered that no problem is present. This feature is very popular with travelers, who feel reassured to have this ability 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.

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As I told you previously, we impose this process on all our travelers. And the reception is positive. The important thing is to clearly present these steps and explain them.

Which ultimately allows it to be seen as a service, such as the possibility for the traveler to make his inventory for example.

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