Listen to this articleVilla Finder was founded in 2012 and the first to make villa rentals in Asia simple and accessible. Seven years on they are now proud to be the market leader for villa rentals in 28 APAC destinations. Below is our recent interview with Daniel Rouquette, Managing Director & Co-Founder at Villa Finder:
Q: Can you tell us something more about the company and what you do?
A: I am the co-founder and managing director of Villa Finder, a villa specialist agency based in Singapore. We have about 2,000 villas in our portfolio and adding news ones every week. I am involved in every aspect of our business, from operations, sales and marketing, to our ongoing CSR projects.
Q: You’ve recently launched 14 new destinations in new APAC countries; could you tell us something more?
A: Having started off with offering villa rentals in Bali and then strengthening our presence in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Mauritius, we wanted to better serve our loyal clients who over the years have expressed their interest in travelling to other upcoming APAC destinations. With this confidence, we’ve expanded the Villa Finder portfolio to the Maldives, Japan, New Zealand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, India and Laos. We also knew it would be in our best interest to leverage our strong team of travel and concierge consultants who are already familiar with these destinations and experts at guiding travelers on holidays.
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Q: You’ve also revamped your website, what’s new?
A: For our website revamp, we wanted to make it easy for users to access and understand Villa Finder’s services. Our most popular and new destinations are seamlessly searchable with intuitive filters to help match the right villa to travellers needs. We have invested a lot of time (and resource) in researching UX best practices to arrive at the most user-friendly design to meet the demands of the mobile first world. We also provide as many options as we can to communicate with travelers who prefer to speak to someone before booking. Our team is always on hand through standard and relevant messaging channels like email, Facebook, WhatsApp, and the tried and tested phone and mobile calls.
Q: How do you guarantee the high standards of all your villas?
A: Most people aren’t aware that we turn down almost half as many villas as we list and that we visit every villa in our 28 destinations to make sure the description matches up to reality. A lot of the time some villas look great in photos but when we do our routine inspections, we may find a few things that fall short of our standards and expectations. That’s when we decline to take on the villa and only list the ones we would personally stay in. Our inspection teams are responsible for making sure that from the very start, over a few hundred quality points are ticked off before a villa is signed on and included on our portfolio. We then run routine inspections to make sure they are still well maintained, and share our best practices with the staff to continuously improve our clients’ experience.
Q: You have a full-service distribution solution – How do villa owners stand to benefit by working with Villa Finder for their properties?
A: Villa owners trust us to effectively manage their properties. From the start, we work together with owners as our partners to elevate the overall experience travellers would enjoy at the property. We advise owners on what travellers typically look for when renting a villa, and personalise our expertise based on the type of villa- for example a 1 bedroom villa that is more suited for couples vs a 4 bedroom villa well suited for families: this might be obvious but it translates into very different marketing strategies from the style of the decoration and pictures to the pricing strategy and channels that will best sell the property. Villa owners also leverage on our villa sales and marketing expertise where we promote their villas to relevant target audiences through online and offline channels. We actively engage with villa owners and keep them updated with the latest trends in the market. We also strive to organise events where owners and market leaders can network and gain industry insights. Our upcoming event will touch on Villa Investment in Asia.
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Q: What’s next for Villa Finder? Do you have any plans to grow or expand even more?
A: We are planning to open even more destinations this year: Philippines, Malaysia, some remote islands in Indonesia, and many more. We will keep an eye out for other destinations our clients might be interested in. Our main expertise is in Asia Pacific destinations, but within a few years we might be looking further.
Our other plans involve strengthening our concierge service to be able to offer even more services to our guests, but also developing further our network of specialized travel agents (yoga, events, wedding, MICE) in order to improve further the ROI we generate for our villa owners.
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