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Each episode of GAIN Momentum focuses on timeless lessons to help grow and scale a business in hospitality, travel, and technology. Whether you’re a veteran industry leader looking for some inspiration to guide the next phase of growth or an aspiring executive looking to fast-track the learning process, this podcast is here with key lessons centered around four questions we ask each guest.
GAIN Momentum episode #108: What Hotel Tech Can Learn from Short-Term Rental Tech with Pierre-Camille Hamana
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Adam Mogelonsky: Welcome to another exciting episode of the GAIN Momentum podcast, focusing on timeless lessons from senior leaders in hospitality, travel, tourism, and technology. So here we have Pierre-Camille Hamana, PC, and you are not a hotelier. You are the founder and CEO of Hospitable, which focuses on the short-term rental market, STRs. And you're here with us to tell us everything that hotels are doing wrong in their tech stack and all the ways that short-term rentals are better and are gonna dominate the future of travel.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Thank you. Thank you very much, Adam. I'm not here to give any lesson. I'm here also to be educated about the daily life of a hotel.
I'm the neighbor next door who is indeed helping short-term rental hosts run their operations in a way that is sustainable, compliant, scalable, and bringing plenty of joy to guests altogether.
Adam Mogelonsky: Right. Yeah, you took it out of my mouth there to start off with the elevator pitch. And to pull out one word from what you said there is the term scalable. Because before we started recording, we were talking about the emergence of STRs as a sector of accommodations versus hotels that have a 100-year head start, but also the legacy of that 100 years in terms of working with existing tech stacks and existing distribution. But STR has basically leapfrogged hospitality in a lot of ways because it's newer.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Yeah. I think that's kind of right. So just to basically go a little bit deeper into what Hospitable is doing, we're a super application for the short-term rental industry. We started in 2016 as a messaging automation tool for Airbnb hosts, and now we are indeed a full property management platform for that industry.
That means the channel management, AI-powered guest messaging, dynamic pricing, direct booking websites, smart lock integrations, team management, operations management, rental agreements, et cetera, including one of our most recent releases, which is an MCP server that allows you to connect your AI agent to your property management software.
You were talking about scalability. In 2025 alone, our customers together, Hospitable hosts, have earned $5.2 billion in revenue, and the core thesis of our product is simple: running a short-term rental should not be a full-time job because our customers probably have one already. We want to automate everything that we can on the guest communication and operation side so that hosts can focus on growing their business or, frankly, living their lives.
I think that's indeed a great comparison with the hotel industry, and indeed it's a valuable industry that I think short-term rentals would not be there without in the first place. But there was a challenge on the technology side. Frankly, when Hospitable started in 2016, there was not a great set of APIs to be integrating with. It was a little bit of, I would say, gray-hat type of hacking between different booking platforms, not exactly the level of professionalization that we now have. But the opportunity that it created is that we were able to start from a really good territory with recent technologies that were a lot more, I want to say, bulletproof to scale because it already started as a scaled operation from day one when it was launched.
So that does mean, I think, for short-term rentals, if a hotelier and a short-term rental host were comparing their software, I have a feeling that the attention to the user experience is gonna be a lot better on the short-term rental host side.
I believe that there's gonna be more development on the integration, on the distribution of channels. I think there will also be a lot more recent developments, especially leveraging AI that basically are now burgeoning left and right in the industry. But I think, to put that into comparison, you could put one hotelier against 10 short-term rental hosts, and you'd know that that hotelier will have software, whereas it's not guaranteed, far from that, on the short-term rental host side.
In preparing for this fantastic podcast, I wanted to ask about the penetration of property management software. Channel managers in hotels are basically at 80%, and I believe it's almost unheard of to be running a scaled operation across a certain number of keys and not have that.
The penetration rate of property management software in short-term rentals is basically 34%. You have 65% of listings in the US, which obviously is a market where there would be a greater willingness to pay, that do not have any software operation connected. And that has consequences, obviously, on distribution.
That means hosts tend to be listed on just one channel and not grow past it, which means they're leaving money on the table, and they probably create a lot more work for their operation than just using software for themselves.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, I mean, that sort of speaks to that difference. So, north of 80%, let's say, of hotels have a channel manager to distribute across the map. But only, let's say, under 35% are using any sort of software, and whether they're listing on Airbnb or Vrbo, it's all still paper and pen behind the scenes, or Excel, but a disconnected flat file in either case. And that speaks to not only how much service addressable market you have left for your platform, but also what happens when that 35% who have a proper platform to distribute and to automate all of their operations goes to that 80%. And what does that mean in terms of the service that you're able to deliver for an STR versus a hotel, and then the ability to compete even better?
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Yeah. And I think, to go back and repeat on something, one of the challenges that is really coming in the short-term rental industry is always that of professionalization, and I believe software obviously has a very meaningful place in that opportunity. It's not obviously the case for hotels.
You don't have conferences where you talk about, "Oh, do we professionalize the hotel industry?" You guys have fantastic operations and budgets and training to create it. That's absolutely... It has to be rebuilt from the ground up when it comes to short-term rental hosts in particular.
So what happens whenever those 35% become the 80%, basically becomes the rule? That's a very interesting theory that we obviously work on at Hospitable ourselves. I'm gonna go and share a few more initiatives on that.
But I think the very first thing that would be very beneficial for everybody, and hosts in particular, is the fact that it increases the competitiveness between booking platforms.
In short-term rentals, there used to be one particular player, one incumbent that is now being attacked by multiple parties, but not necessarily with a lot of intention. That has changed. In 2026, Airbnb is being really attacked and is being challenged in all its markets by many other booking platforms, such as Expedia and Booking.com, and that's something that we see every day as a property management software and channel manager.
So the fact that now there is this increased competitiveness means that, for hosts, it creates opportunities to be testing different platforms. Now, to be fair, in some markets it's Airbnb that is the dominant player. In other markets it's Booking.com that has grown its alternative accommodation segment very well.
And so the property management software is the best place to be leveraging those opportunities. I think, in this world, what I'd love to have is a, I want to call it almost a 51% attack, taking a word from the crypto world.
But if there is greater adoption on the supply side by those APIs that the booking platforms are releasing and developing, and they're actually being leveraged, all of a sudden those booking platforms are competing on the quality of their integration as well, which I believe will be music to the ears of many of your listeners.
But also that means it's no longer something that comes secondary to some development or some teams. It's basically becoming the best way to be distributing your inventory to booking platforms. And I think that's fundamentally a completely different change in the industry.
That does mean booking platforms are put on notice. They need to deliver. They are performance booking engines, and they need to deliver the guests that are booking through their platform. That also means greater competitiveness on prices.
And then there are also all the benefits for hosts themselves, which is streamlined operations across different booking platforms, the ability to run their own business logic on top of the data buckets that are proprietary to the booking platform, which is basically allowing you to have standardized operations.
Yeah, short-term rentals want to have standardized operations. They don't want to have any guest falling through the cracks of a process, which is why pen and paper is not exactly a process. It's a great way to make sure you need to triple-check everything nonetheless, receive all the messages, have all the proper accounting treatment, distribute the money to the owners if you are a property manager, make sure you have access to the property itself, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's a great benefit for guests as well because it means you know you're gonna be dealing with a professional operator, and you're not gonna have trip issues. You are gonna have access to the property. You're gonna know who to ask whenever there's a challenge.
And you can just be happy and leave a five-star review, which is the job.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. And again, that word scalability, all back to it in terms of helping those mom-and-pop operators get on the platform, distribute, test out different channels, Expedia, Booking, versus just the incumbent.
And then, I guess the 51% attack, getting more towards 80%. Now you have a full integration of Booking and Expedia's loyalty platforms and their reward incentives as well, where now it creates even more of a dynamic by which regular travelers are incentivized to stay with Booking and Expedia versus booking direct with a hotel, which is sort of my own system thinking to see how the short-term rental increase can impact hotels in a lot of indirect ways, knock-on effects that just create this dynamic competitiveness where hotels really need to understand that this is a force to be reckoned with in a lot of ways.
I wanted to pull out one more thread here before we dive into specific features. I'm wondering if you could just unpack your founder story a bit because you mentioned all these great features that your platform handles all in one.
I'm talking every day with hotel vendors who are basically doing a daisy chain to stitch all these features together, and they're promised to be somewhere on the roadmap for the future.
It always takes longer than expected, yet you've done this all on your own, bootstrapped and built up across every single feature in one platform since 2016.
So let's start there with your founder story, because in reviewing that and researching it, it actually has a lot in common with Brian Chesky of Airbnb in that you started Hospitable to solve a personal travel frustration, and then you realized that there were millions of other people that also had that frustration and were willing to do something about it.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Yeah. Absolutely right. I was a bit surprised you drew that parallel, but it was indeed something that I fixed for myself.
So I've been an Airbnb host in Brussels, Belgium for several years. I started with a very small operation, just one private room and one couch. I ended actually with that very same operation. It didn't scale very much. The thing, however, is that I grew in depth of services.
So what I was offering in the beginning was very basic standard accommodation. But then over time, I offered more of an experience, especially, for example, with a beer-tasting experience.
Obviously, Belgium is fantastic for its beers, so I wanted to make sure that my guests had a chance to taste a few of them. And every time there was this ding, ding from Airbnb, because the next guest was asking a question or there would be a new booking, there was a lot of back and forth that I needed to do while I was running my show during this beer tasting.
I was very frustrated because I needed to stop and go back to that guest. I was really feeling the pressure of responding very fast. And I'm just a human being, so that meant I was copying messages, pasting them into the Messenger app from the booking platform, and I think 50% of the time I would forget to change the name of the guest.
So that's really a bad first impression. And that was in 2015. Obviously, back then, mail merge was a pretty basic feature, and I was really disappointed by the inability to automate that very simple, very basic, and frankly universal workflow when it comes to working with short-term rentals.
So I said, "You know what? I'm gonna do it for myself."
At the time, I wanted to go back to another job, another project of mine, another startup. But first, I wanted to automate my own Airbnb operation. And I'm 10 years in. I'm still looking forward to going to that next project, but I think I'm pretty much married to that idea now.
So yeah, back in 2016, I was really building everything that I could to automate my own operation. It was extremely basic. There was no particular user interface. But I got the fundamentals right, and I realized very quickly that this was so valuable to me that I could go on vacation and come back at the end of the day without having any network, and be able to see reservations coming in and clarity for the guests on what was offered.
So I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna probably make that useful to other people."
There has been a very aggressive roadmap and development ongoing. The first year I was indeed on my own. We're now a team of 77 people, fully distributed across the planet. Actually, if you count everybody, that's 150 people who are really waking up every morning to be working for Hospitable.
That represents 300,000 listings worldwide in 145 countries.
I noted that during 2025, we've hosted the entire population of Australia. That's 27 million guests. We sent 100 million messages last year in 2025. Obviously, I don't have the numbers for 2026. I can assure you those 100 million are peanuts, and we're probably gonna reach that same number by July.
So that has basically been growing as a very scaled operation that has a little bit of market share now in the short-term rental space.
Fully remote and indeed fully bootstrapped. So that means I can say that I'm the owner of a property management software company. I don't think it's a sentence you get to hear very often.
It's not without pain. I can assure you. I would not necessarily recommend that. But the path that we've taken is basically that we want to be community-owned.
So we do have investors. They happen to be our customers. We've raised a few million through their support and, of course, in addition to their subscriptions.
And our team is also the very first investor in Hospitable as a company.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow, PC, that's tremendous insight. One hundred forty-five countries, hundreds of millions of messages, and yeah, bootstrapped the whole way, which means that you've had your fair share of sleepless nights and, I imagine, lots of late-night coffee to pump out features on every sprint and keep things going.
But the results are there in that it is a holistic platform that can go toe to toe with some of the best hotel tech stacks that are out there that have the scalability to, I guess, hide behind in terms of amortizing those technology costs. So, incredible story.
One way to put a pin in that story is to say, well, in hotels we love to pride ourselves on that one guest where something happened and then it created this heartwarming moment.
Do you have any of those heartwarming moments where, either within the Hospitable family or with guests who have stayed at properties on your platform, you've created these moments of joy for people?
Pierre-Camille Hamana: I would talk more about the hosts themselves because, for them, it's really a challenge to be able to enjoy their own personal freedom while they've invested in those properties and are hosting guests.
Every day we have two reviews that I always talk about—reviews of Hospitable as a product.
The first one was a mom who went into labor and had to give birth. Nobody knew, in a way, among their inbound guests or the people running the operation, for example, the cleaning staff, that she would be giving birth. She was able to automate the entire short-term rental operation without anybody noticing.
And I think that was basically the best review ever to receive because it shows the level of automation that you're able to offer and, at the same time, the actual benefit on the other side. It's your free time. That's a great thing. Every software is working to help you automate, do a little less work, or be a bit more productive.
No, here we take pride in that particular moment.
Another story was about vacations. Our customers are families. They go on vacation themselves, but when they go on vacation, it's also peak time for their properties. So it's always been historically a challenge for them to go on vacation with their kids while the short-term rental has to be running itself.
We had this host who hadn't gone on vacation for several years and finally wanted to take one. She had a backup plan. Unfortunately, that backup plan completely fell through the cracks. It didn't work at all. So there was no backup plan. Basically, Hospitable had to deliver.
That person went to Portugal. There wasn't a lot of network available. She didn't know whether everything was going okay. When she was finally able to connect to Wi-Fi that was working, she realized everything had gone fine.
The guests had checked in. They were able to gain entry. The cleaners had done their job. Everything was clean before check-in, and there were no hiccups. All the questions the guests were asking, we were able to answer.
And that was already back in 2019, just to show that it's not about the very latest developments in AI. It has already been in our DNA to detect questions and provide answers well before you heard of an LLM.
Those are the kinds of stories we're talking about.
On the guest side, the one that always comes to mind is a host who has a few properties around the Mayo Clinic in the United States.
Obviously, it's a very different type of tourism. You go there with families who are hoping to receive life-changing treatment.
There's a very different way of hosting that's much more personal. She shared some anecdotes with me about hosting families with children in the terminal stages of cancer who were receiving treatment that might be experimental.
This is a completely different hosting experience, and you cannot listen to that without sobbing or wanting to hold your own kids and hug them.
But that basically shows there are some things that you can automate, and there are some things that you can't.
Here, there really needs to be special attention to making the stay as frictionless as possible and as humane as possible because nobody wants to be there.
Nobody wants to be there. It may be a great hospital, but it nonetheless comes with a lot of human challenges.
So, heartwarming is very often what happens, but it's also real emotional work at those properties.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. I could definitely feel that. Kids going into the Mayo Clinic is definitely something that has to be treated with care.
So, to move out of the heartwarming, the human side, let's go to the tech stack side.
Most of our listeners on this podcast are hoteliers or hotel technologists, and I'm wondering—we've talked around it—but I'm wondering if you could speak a little more directly to some of the key differences in feature requirements for an STR tech stack versus a hotel tech stack.
Or, if you can't speak to the hotel side, just tell us some of the things that STRs really need—certain finance features, accounting, compliance, tying into a cleaning service, et cetera.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Yeah. There are many similarities and many things that are different between those two adjacent industries.
Obviously, the very first challenge is the fact that when you are running a hotel, everything is concentrated. That feels like a dream to a short-term rental host, where everything is absolutely decentralized.
You don't have a cabinet to put your stuff. You're gonna have a car, and you're gonna be in that car for a long time between properties if you're a cleaning person in that specific industry. So you need to manage the turnaround time in a way that's significantly more intensive than what I expect would be the case in a hotel, with every property having its quirks and features, every guest asking for an early check-in or late check-out.
There is no front desk, et cetera. So there is a lot of focus on the operations side, basically being able to manage a scaled portfolio of properties in a way that satisfies guests in the best way possible while ensuring the quality of service. That's the part where we've invested a lot recently.
The second dimension, I think those industries are about the same, but I think there is a greater interest in personalization and authenticity.
There are amazing hotels, and I've been staying at hotels, of course, that pay attention to those extra details and create that heartwarming moment, as you were saying.
In a short-term rental, the baseline expectation is that you have a unique property, and I'm a unique guest. There is not gonna be another guest at that property, and I want to have a unique experience that's tailored to my needs.
I'm not gonna be sending emails to the hotel in advance of the stay because I know there is a concierge. But in a short-term rental, you're asking all those questions in advance and having a lot of back and forth.
If you are a hobbyist, that's gonna be a problem because you already have a full-time job. You're gonna answer all that back and forth. That's creating what we call hosting fatigue and ultimately leads to burnout, where the time you would like to rest and spend with your family, you're actually starting your second or third job, hosting those guests and answering all those questions in advance.
So that is, I think, very different.
The other feature I think has been fantastic for the short-term rental industry is smart locks. When I started in 2016, that didn't exist with the same level of penetration that we have now. Now every short-term rental, especially in the US, has made the appropriate investment in recent modern technology.
There was even a shortage two years ago where you could not buy a certain brand of smart lock. It was really a challenge. Now that's over.
That allows hosts to accept last-minute bookings, where you can have a booking at two o'clock for the same day, and you don't have to be messing with the back office of that smart lock provider to create the code manually.
Now the property management software can create those automatically for the appropriate time, communicate them at the right moment, and that basically means nobody's leaving money on the table with those last-minute bookings.
Thermostats are also very important for short-term rentals.
Imagine a big villa with several bedrooms. The guest checks out with the AC blasting. Obviously, a cleaning person might arrive hours later and enjoy that, but we've invested quite a bit of time to make sure that we have the technology to support integrations with those thermostats.
We're ensuring that the property is at the right temperature by the time the guest checks in, neither too warm nor too cold, while also saving energy outside of the guest's stay.
No problem while the guest is staying—we cannot force boundaries—but we are able to make sure that a lot of energy is not being wasted. It's both sustainable and a major cost saving for operators.
You also have rental agreements. The regulatory landscape of a hotel is special, but in the case of a short-term rental, you might be dealing with a homeowners association that requires a rental agreement, ID verification, communication with a registry, or even charges its own fees.
So that's a rental agreement that needs to be signed in advance before guests receive the check-in instructions.
You're dealing with all the security aspects. When you go to a hotel, you hand over your credit card, there's an authorization charge, and all of that is fully expected.
There is a bit more reluctance with short-term rentals, but you still need the tools—security deposits, damage waivers, damage protection insurance, and owner's insurance that covers the commercial risk of hosting guests.
We'll be spending a lot of time working on this because we believe many hosts are actually misinsured. If there were a problem, they might not be able to make a claim because their policy could be voided.
You don't have a GDS. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but every integration has its own quirks.
As the software provider, we need to educate our users on what they can and cannot do on each platform.
That means every integration with a booking platform is bespoke in a way, with many common features that we're able to standardize so that working on Airbnb doesn't feel too different from working on Booking.com.
Those are some of the specific differences. The operational side is probably the biggest one.
You mentioned accounting and finance. I believe that moves more into the territory of the property manager who is running short-term rentals on behalf of the property owners.
So there are features that we have at Hospitable to generate owner statements, invoices, depending on the flow of funds, and generate payouts—the transfer of funds between what the property manager has collected and what is distributed back to the owner.
There is also a lot of work that we're doing on tax compliance.
We operate as a merchant of record, where we are the one registering with all the tax jurisdictions where possible, at both the local and state level, to collect lodging taxes and sales and use taxes.
It seems like a fantastic way to innovate by creating more taxes.
But we are able to register and make it much simpler for our hosts to stay compliant.
I think I'd rather stop the list there.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: But we can go very deep on any of those.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, one way to go deeper on this, but keep it still general is to say that you have to do tax compliance, any sort of features there and reporting and integrations, but you're doing that across 145 countries.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: I wish that would be true.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Not there yet. That's for now, the tax compliance product is really restricted to the United States, which is where we have today about 75% of our listings.
So that's where we're able to offer the greatest impact, but we would love to expand into other jurisdictions. And I think based on market needs, the one we're looking to first is gonna be Canada, and then Europe is gonna be its own challenge.
But we would love to offer that service worldwide over time.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. I mean, and, you know, that will be on you to decide with your development team in terms of what the actual expected value is from putting in all that work, and that's very tough. Yeah. So I'm wondering, you know, you mentioned—going back to this talk about integrations, and in essence you have Hospitable sits at the heart of the hotel operation as the technology side. Then around that, we've mentioned various pieces that plug in. We've mentioned distribution. We've talked about the cleaning integration. We've talked about if there's anything going into the homeowners association, and maybe other messaging platforms as well that they have going in and out. I'm wondering, just to give people some background so they can research on their own, are you able to name any other companies that you have preferred partnerships and are very important in the STR technology space?
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Besides the booking platforms, we do have obviously a state-of-the-art integration with Airbnb, with Booking.com, and now with Vrbo as well, and with Google Vacation Rentals. I think you are talking more about the ancillary service providers or point solutions. That would be, I think, on the pricing side, on dynamic pricing, revenue management, obviously a very big need for the entire industry.
So we're integrated with PriceLabs, which I believe is really the leader in this space beyond Pricing and Wheelhouse being challengers. While we are a challenger ourselves, we offer our solution for dynamic pricing. On the operation side, you have several solutions that might talk to hotel as well.
I believe Breezeway and Tongo, Tongo, I believe, being a leader for everything that's on the operation management and cleaner management. And obviously Bidiul, where we also are competing ourselves with our own product. So we are very open. We allow everyone to compete, including ourselves.
So yeah, I think those are basically the most significant and most widely adopted types of integrations that our customers are using across the board.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. And I mention all those other technology pieces because it's one thing for a hotel to put together a tech stack and spread those costs around 100 rooms or 1,000 rooms, however much it's on a per room per month charge. It's a whole other thing for an independent operator who has another job and is raising a family to then decide on a technology stack and also spread those costs around a key count or a unit size of one or two if they're doing that.
So how do you make all these features available while also making the cost reasonable for a single operator and also doing new feature development, sales, marketing, customer support, everything that goes along with running a business?
Pierre-Camille Hamana: While staying bootstrapped.
While not taking any third party money.
That's a very good question. I've been trying to find also for the past nine years. Turns out you can do it. So you're right on many things. So first of all, I believe the technology is not a cost.
It's really an investment. Our customers are real estate investors. They do due diligence when they acquire a property. They are gonna acquire a property for short-term rental in a jurisdiction where there is a history or there's a good rate of short-term rentals, where it's seen favorably, where it's not been banned, where there are no restrictions, so they can have leverage and basically expect to have a sustainable operation where they've been looking for cleaners.
The biggest risk that I see in some great location is actually that burnout, that hosting fatigue. The fact that while they've done all their research, they may have to shut down that investment early. They may have to move to a long term. They may have to sell the property altogether earlier than they thought because they didn't anticipate the workload that was created on short-term rentals and, you know, at any price point, on the real estate investment property.
So the arbitrage especially for those is what's the price of your hour as you're managing a short-term rental? Our monthly rate, the lowest one that we offer, is at $29, and that includes actually two properties, to $29 for two properties per month. So that is basically, I think, a very democratic rate.
If you want to access more features, that basically can start at $59, including, for example, smart locks, et cetera, always including the first two properties. But that still gets in the way. And I'm an entrepreneur. I'm in there to win. I see the numbers of the penetration rates of PMS and the technology in this industry, and they're very disappointing, and they've been disappointingly stable, I want to say for the past 10 years, even though there was a lot of investment.
The price should not be causing friction, so that's why beginning of April, we actually have released what we call our Essentials plan, which is a zero subscription fee plan where you can use Hospitable in these, I want to say, I don't say for free, but you have access to all the same integration that we have with booking platforms.
You can have a unified inbox. You can have the same calendar to protect you from double bookings. You can have the same guest messaging, et cetera, et cetera. I don't want to say free because it's actually less than free. A lot of PMS that you have in the industry, and I believe that might be the case for yours as well, I really think that they're in there to earn you more money. There is a premium that you're gonna be able to generate if you go with a property management software.
But somehow, they still charge you per seat. They still charge you per room or per property. Like, no, that doesn't sound fair to me. So we are all in on this. As you grow your revenue, we're gonna be taking money. So that means whenever you have an early check-in or a late check-out, a pretty universal need that currently is gonna be a pain to be charged, to be collecting those funds from the booking platform, well, we're gonna have a take rate.
We're gonna take care of the compliance. We're gonna take care of the chargeback protection, et cetera. So it's not gonna be an empty service. Definitely not. It's packed full of value. But we are gonna be generating some feedback. When you have a direct booking, you don't need to pay to have a direct booking website, especially not in 2026.
But to secure this transaction, we're gonna have a take rate that's gonna be 7% to 10%, to basically fund our operation. And the reality of it is that it ends up, it should be in a situation where that take rate is less perceived as a cost because it's not money that's leaving your wallet.
It's a little bit less money that you're receiving.
Now, of course, your audience is particularly familiar with that. It's the battle of the day and every day. But if you want to grow the adoption of technology in a market that is so focused on the long tail as we are in the short-term rentals, you need to deploy, I don't want to say tactics because it has a negative connotation, but you need to basically take the users where they are.
And I can completely understand that if you've not been using software, probably the willingness to pay is exactly zero dollars. But if you're able to generate revenue that I would not have been able to generate earlier, then go ahead. You can generate a few dollars on those transactions. And the percentage that I've been mentioning are totally reasonable considering, one, the value delivered, and second, the competition that basically would be from the booking platforms altogether.
So that's what we want to do to grow the size of the market and basically have users gain more technology adoption. And yeah, hopefully taking them where they are and being democratic.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, it makes sense, the 7 to 10% for the customer and the market you're dealing with as a business model, a revenue model for Hospitable. One other aspect I wanted to touch upon is, you know, it's one thing for a hotel to have an IT director who can then configure a system and learn it, and then all the PMS companies or ancillary endpoint solutions are all willing to offer training and continuous training. It's a whole other thing on whether it's $30 a month or a rev share model to say we're gonna offer one-to-one training to use the system. So what features have you put into Hospitable to, number one, make the platform as intuitive as possible to learn, even though it does everything, which can be daunting to start, and then number two, to offer any sort of one-to-many scalable online university features?
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Yeah. No, that's a great question, and that's our challenge obviously every day. I think about 40% of the product team and engineering team at Hospitable is basically working exclusively on onboarding at any single point in time. So that means ensuring that gaining engagement on features that are being released.
So they don't release new features. They're just here to make sure that those features are well understood, well onboarded across the user base. I think there is a lot of importance in design. It needs to be intuitive, it needs to be modern so that people that are used to using a booking platform can basically find the same concepts whenever they're dealing with a property management software that they don't know.
I think that's what we invested a lot into, and we're still being praised for. We have many workshops, many live webinars to train in-depth on the product, but we do also offer one-on-one onboarding. That's a paid service across several hours and several weeks to basically guide our users, whether that could be self-managers with one or two properties, or that could be property management teams, guest experience teams, operation teams, to be leveraging the features of the product.
So we have entire programs to basically educate them about the product and whether they are pros, whether on software that has been already implemented, or whether they basically are just starting their operation, any guidance on where to start on their own timing, I want to say.
But there has been a lot of development and investment, for example, around artificial intelligence, being able to really answer questions as they happen, and more sophisticated products to help you onboard on the product itself. So you don't necessarily know where to do something for the first time. Then you need to have an answer immediately that guides you or can even do it for you, which is an even better experience.
So we have, again, our entire support team is entirely focused on that part. It's really adding an experience that's gonna be automated with top-of-the-line AI that's gonna be helping not just answer the questions, but can actually do actions on top of your account. I've not seen another product that basically was supporting with the level that we do, with the depth that we do.
I wish that to be the case because the problem that we're dealing with actually, transparently, is that not many people believe in it.
When I hear AI, it's fine. Okay, like, dude, you're going cheap on me. I want a human. This is a very important problem that's worthy of a human's attention.
We actually have invested to fix that. I think right now the team is on 70% of all the volume of support is entirely resolved with a positive signal from the customer by artificial intelligence.
And those are some of the most complex and thorny issues that we may face that are actually gonna be resolved by AI that investigates. It's built to manipulate the data from the property management software itself.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. The dawn of AI, you can already see immediate use cases in the FAQ, or Q&A, whichever you want to do it, on both the guest side and the customer side for yourself, the user side. And, you know, you mentioned AI versus human, and I would say that in these cases where somebody is just expecting a basic answer, convenience always wins.
They would rather have that answer delivered by an AI if it can be delivered inside of three seconds than having to wait three hours for a human to get back to them because, you know, they're sleeping, they have a family, et cetera.
On the note of AI and some embedded features, you mentioned at the start your new MCP endpoint. Can you talk about what that is and what types of artificial intelligence tools can now be plugged in, so to speak, directly into Hospitable?
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Yeah, that is very interesting. So fundamentally software is you integrate software via APIs. Okay. Everybody, I think you all just believe that I'm a joke.
But an AI agent needs to be able to discover those APIs, and that's what the MCP is doing, is basically providing a bit of a map of all the APIs that are available and descriptions so that as you interact with your AI agent or assistant, that can be as simple as your own cloud account.
You link the MCP, you authenticate it yourself with your Hospitable account or any other resource account that you want to connect via an MCP. And that means you can now interact with the data from your property management software using English as a programming language, so that, for example, things as basic as, "Give me the list of the next 10 guests that are gonna be checking in that city."
It's gonna look at the property, it's gonna look at the address, gonna look at their reservation, list of reservations, the check-in date, and then be able to return to you with that list immediately.
Now, that's a simplistic use case. Since the release of our MCP server to our users, I think they've finally grasped the potential that could bring to them.
So we've had many users vibe coding applications on top of Hospitable. So really long-tail feature requests that would be like a very strong pacing analysis specific to the industry with awareness of the events, et cetera. Great. They're able to do it independently.
We have some that have rebuilt their own AI messaging products with the way that they wanted to, with all the data that they have and data that may be third parties to Hospitable.
So still leveraging Hospitable infrastructure, the fact that the data is coming from the booking platform and being able to manipulate it the way they see fit, but basically directly with their own custom needs that basically no possible software developer could possibly anticipate.
And doing so obviously at a cost that is, I don't want to say nothing, but it's the cost of your cloud subscription, the cost of the token, which is orders of magnitude lower than it would be for a software company to use those tokens ourselves, to be coding this, to be supporting it, to be explaining what it is.
So I think I'm very excited about those MCPs, and we basically wanted to... We've created, for example, a build-a-thon to promote the usage of MCP so that users can inspire others on what they can do with an MCP, and we're gonna distribute a little bit of stock actually to the winners of that competition.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. That's quite something. You're gonna give us some stock, stock options for that. That's pretty cool.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Stock directly. No, no, no options. Just euros and RSUs for Google App, yeah.
Adam Mogelonsky: Oh, okay. So just to unpack that a little bit further, because the first simple feature you said about, okay, Claude or another LLM gets authenticated, and then you're able to interact with Claude and pull data.
So that's a read feature. Then one of the biggest concerns with MCPs has not been the read, but it's been the write, insofar as ensuring that any sort of agentic AI does not do something wrong and either leave you exposed for security reasons or rewrite or delete information that's on the core database.
So how have you solved for that challenge while still enabling things like vibe coding, which your users maybe are not doing the same degree of testing and QA?
Pierre-Camille Hamana: I'm not sure how to answer the question because fundamentally I'm dubious that since December 2025 those are things that really can happen. There are disaster stories. There are cases that have been very chaotic with vibe coding that goes wrong because you leaked your Stripe keys on a public website or deleted the entire database, and you could not actually get a straight answer.
Now the models, the frontier models, by whatever provider you use are frankly so great. They're orders of magnitude better than what you've experienced in November 2025, and you remember what you may have done in November 2025. So I don't believe there will be something really going wrong with what you're asking to get, to delete listings or update them with stupid descriptions, et cetera.
So you would have to give the instructions, and you would have pushback, maybe the equivalent of pushback in an LLM. It would basically say, "Maybe I should not do that. That sounds ridiculous."
And this is actually a real action. The agent will have the context that it is doing something that might be very wrong.
So it's good that they are making some effort. Is that gonna be the case 100% of the time? Probably not. But I think it's more often right than not. For the past few weeks, we've not heard of any kind of issue in this way. Obviously everyone has an incentive to make that work.
It's not something that is funny or you play with. This is business data. You can post a message. Will you be able to post 1,000 messages that might be inappropriate to the guest? No, because the booking platform will block you. It's not an MCP problem. The capabilities don't translate into unrestricted actions.
There's been a lot of care in the early days, and that was legitimate. I'm not saying relax, but just basically don't go crazy. The AI will do what you want to do. Communicate all the context so it's able to leverage that. Don't just stick to "send a message," especially if you're doing a task.
Just basically provide all the context, the voice, the tone of voice that you want to have. Go with everything that a great human would need to know to do a great message. And the AI, I believe strongly, will do a much better job with all the context that they might have.
And they can gather that context themselves through the different functions.
But on the other part, I think while you can do a lot of those things via MCP, software is not dead. Far from it. I think this is great to see all the adopters using MCPs and developing their workflows and vibe coding applications.
There is also the challenge of any technology, and it takes time. So we are also adding our own features that might not have the potential of working across the long tail of needs but are able to nonetheless get 90% or 95% across without those kinds of fears and risks that you elevate.
Because, for example, we do have our own AI inbox product that's able to answer questions day in, day out, and press the send button directly. But that's with a risk assessment, with an audit, with different agents that are verifying that we're not saying something that might be inappropriate or a bit too playful.
I think in the early days we were, for example, questioned about, "Is the pool heated?" And the answer was, "Yes, you're right, it is sun heated." Well, it's not exactly what I meant, though. Thank you for being a bit funny. That's way too smart an answer right now.
But now we've gained in quality because the models have been orders of magnitude better.
Including recently, Anthropic just launched Opus 4.7, which was state of the art for probably two days. Since yesterday, OpenAI released their GPT-5.5 model, which I need to try. But from the benchmarks, it's orders of magnitude better already.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. Well, it shows you the context of where it was in November last year to now we're recording on April 24th. So that is, let's say, give or take five and a half months. And to see it mature that quickly, really the lagger is our perception of it in terms of having that outdated way of perceiving it.
And, you know, travel does work that way in terms of outdated perceptions about the safety of certain markets, the cleanliness, how people perceive different countries from afar or different destinations.
So we're mapping a very new technology that's progressing very fast onto a piece of technology that moves a little bit slower, which is the human mind.
Yeah, I guess to close things out, we've talked a lot about the technology about Hospitable, but you mentioned this term "long tail" twice now, both in terms of coding as well as just the long tail of distribution.
And one big thing we're seeing with travel overall is that travel is really being niche-ified. It's not just about the classical segments of free transient leisure travelers, then corporate groups, and then other types of groups, et cetera.
Realistically, we're seeing this whole blend and people really looking for these niche experiences.
So from your perspective, because you're so close to a lot of the data in the STR market, what are you seeing in terms of these travel niches that are emerging and some of the distribution vehicles that are catering to this?
Pierre-Camille Hamana: I see your point. I almost want to say for us as a software provider, it's a classification problem. And one other thing I'm thinking that comes to mind directly is basically the list of amenities that were supported by booking platforms has grown probably 10x in the past two years.
So you want to have very detailed amenities and basically be able to show that this particular property has this thing. And every booking platform wants to offer more details to have this kind of long tail of needs and basically making sure, I think it's about meeting customers' expectations really, and being able to market the properties in the best way they can.
I kind of see almost the reverse is also happening. Airbnb made a big update, I think in 2024 or 2025, about the launch of Airbnb Categories. So you could navigate throughout the inventory of Airbnb and be able to put that into categories. So that basically was, to your point, that you could have very specific listing types.
And that was removed. That was removed because no guest is actually navigating looking for a stay in this way.
It was actually, no, I need to have the fundamentals there. You need to have a location, a check-in date, a checkout date. You can offer me alternative dates. You can expand the horizon, but actually that's my problem, and I need to have a solution on this.
Nobody cares about whether you want to go to a specific dog-shaped cabin. That might not be relevant to the needs of why you show up on Airbnb.
So that's the focal point. But to your point, I'm gonna add a bit of an argument, which is that now LLMs as a way to search fix this problem.
There is no way that Airbnb will be able to compete with ChatGPT or Claude that would be able to search through the inventories of those third-party platforms and really find the property that may be matching your need, including a property with character in the way that you see fit.
I see more that with AI, and I'm sure you've been talking a lot about that on the show, but that's really what does search look like in a universe where people are gonna be looking first at an AI assistant rather than connecting onto Expedia, onto Airbnb, or onto Booking.com to look for their property because they don't want to be spending a ton of time investigating.
In fact, my very first product in that space was focusing on that. Is there a product on the guest side? Because you would spend hours looking for the property. You would check different things, and there was no way to have an aggregated quick view of, "These are the five listings that I need to check."
Based on my own criteria, that can be very good Wi-Fi, great reviews, et cetera. There is no way to get that.
But with AI agents, you can.
The problem, I think, for booking platforms, just as much as it is for hosts or hoteliers, is gonna be how can I show up as that number one property?
Knowing that it's no longer about the law of big numbers, the eyes that are gonna be looking at search impressions, et cetera, but it's basically resonating particularly well with the guest that is gonna be your best fit.
It's gonna be a persona. Everybody's having avatars and personas, especially in the case of short-term rentals. That's crucial because every property is unique.
But this is basically what's gonna drive it. You need to resonate very well with your top core customer, top potential guest because you really need to stand out 10 times more, 10 times better, 10 times flashier than the next property.
And that basically means you're gonna have the same persona showing up at your door, which may be a great thing for hosts. It may be a great thing for guests.
But it's the death of the undifferentiated listings that want to be there for everybody, that don't have character, that are bland, that don't have amazing reviews, that are not basically shouting from the rooftops how amazing the properties are.
I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but that's an opportunity for many.
Adam Mogelonsky: No, I think it explains it perfectly. There are opportunities. You have to have character in some way, but you also have to be flexible for discovery.
And as you mentioned with that point about Airbnb removing a feature, they tried to go too far lower funnel before allowing people at the top of the funnel to then drill down.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: And I think a lot of that was basically driving the problem of booking platforms, which is that you only use them whenever you need them. And the challenge of the booking platforms is obviously to make sure that you come back just to play, just to have fun.
You have five minutes. Why would you not look at those fantastic-looking properties on a paradise island far away by the sea while you're under the rain in Brussels? That's great. But the problem is that you also have other devices that are gonna be competing for your attention, and you're not thinking about those booking platforms for that.
But they try to get that point with the idea that they're merchandising other features elsewhere.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. No, it's a fantastic way to finish off because there's so much happening in the travel space, and it really is about enabling operators to be the best that they can be for their guests.
And then from there, we are creating this incredibly dynamic global travel world, and Hospitable, of course, has a very central role to play in that evolution.
So thanks for coming on the show, PC. It's been fantastic. You've shared a lot of wisdom both for people that are looking to get into the STR space and also for hoteliers to see what they're up against.
So thank you so much for coming on the show.
Pierre-Camille Hamana: Thank you so much, Adam, for inviting me.