Onefinestay Case Study: Branding, Growth, and Competition in the Sharing Economy

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JILL AVERY ANAT KEINAN LIZ KIND
onefinestay
Miranda Cresswell was delighted to be helping Greg Marsh (HBS MBA
‘06), founder and CEO of onefinestay, a vacation home alternative to
fine hotels, with branding work for the company. onefinestay was
founded in September 2009 in London, and offered high-end home
rentals to travelers who sought a more authentic and local experience
than a typical upscale hotel might provide. The company equipped its
rental properties with luxury amenities such as fine linens and towels,
prestige brand toiletries such as Kiehl’s, and an iPhone loaded with
local maps and restaurant recommendations. By the fall of 2014,
onefinestay had approximately 250 full-time employees, and an
additional 250 contract staff. The company operated in four cities in
Europe and the U.S.
According to Marsh, onefinestay's brand had been "hacked" together
quickly during the company's early years. After five years of rapid
growth, Marsh brought Cresswell on board to do a comprehensive
analysis of the company's brand and its positioning in the marketplace.
Cresswell had spent several months gathering data and insights, and
was starting to experiment with use case scenarios that took a crack at
segmenting the company’s customers. The preliminary results were
interesting, but raised more questions than they answered, and
Cresswell wondered if this was the best way to segment the market.
While segmenting in this way was intriguing, it led to a branding
challenge – as a start-up, it was difficult for onefinestay to have the
resources to support multiple brand messages in the marketplace and
different segments wanted different things from their travel
experience. She pondered whether there were other ways to group
customers that would allow for a more universal positioning for the
brand or whether the company needed to focus on one or two
segments to serve.
Positioning the fledgling brand was a challenge. Who was the company
competing against and how could it carve out a unique value
proposition that would appeal to travelers and be differentiated from

what was offered by other hospitality options? Was its current moniker
“the unhotel” working for or against it?
As a two-sided marketplace, onefinestay also struggled to find the
balance between meeting the needs of two customers: the homeowner
hosts who supplied the company's unique inventory of properties and
the guests who paid to stay there. At times, their interests were at
odds with one another. As Marsh and Creswell considered refinements
to their product strategy, they had toEducational consider how their product
and service offering differentially impacted the host and guest
experience.
The competitive landscape was heating up and Marsh was eager to
allocate marketing resources in a way that would generate substantial
returns and help scale the company. He had big ambitions for the
company, but wondered what the right growth strategy was. Should he
focus on increasing the breadth of onefinestay’s global reach by
expanding into more cities around the world or should he focus on
building depth by increasing market penetration in the cities in which
he was already operating?
The Founding of onefinestay
Marsh was born and raised in London, England. Following his
graduation Christ’s College, he worked for GF-X, a logistics
marketplace startup, in a variety of operations and marketing roles.
Following the completion of his MBA program at Harvard Business
School, he joined Index Ventures, a leading London-based venture
capital firm, as an associate on the IT investment team.
Marsh had just returned from a 2009 trip to Pisa, Italy when the idea
for onefinestay occurred to him. He had a “dreadful stay” in a “dreary
airport hotel,” but thoroughly enjoyed an out-of-the-way restaurant
recommended by a friend who had grown up in the area. Without the
friend's advice, Marsh recognized he would have missed out on a local
experience in lieu of the typical tourist attractions. At the same time,
after coming back to London and making his nightly walks home from
work, he couldn’t help but notice the many luxury residential
properties in the area that appeared empty for vast portions of the

year. Marsh wondered, "Why are these places empty? Why are the
places where I would most want to stay if I was visiting a city the ones
where you can't get to stay?"1 He called it a “no light bulb moment,”
noting “the lights aren’t on because nobody is home.”
Marsh conducted research to see if anyone else was doing something
similar, and ran the idea by a colleague who encouraged him to start
the company. Marsh’s concept was to provide discerning travelers with
upscale home rental options that would be more authentic than hotels
and more reliable than other vacation rental choices. At the same time,
homeowners would earn extra income from their properties when they
otherwise would have stood vacant.2 Marsh elaborated further:
Our mission is not to destroy the hotel industry. However, a proportion
of travel— certainly the majority of leisure travel—is just infinitely
better and far more enriching to stay in a home than in a building that
is soulless and has been designed for transient occupancy.... What
we’re bringing to that rental sector is generally a curation and quality
and service control that you take for granted in some industries
including hotels and chain restaurants, but that you don’t find in this
much more informal sector of the economy or that you haven’t found
until now.3
In September 2009, Marsh left Index Ventures to co-found onefinestay
with Demetrios Zoppos and Tim Davey. Zoppos and Marsh had worked
together at GF-X, and Marsh knew Davey through his work as co-
founder and chief technology officer at one of Index Venture’s portfolio
companies. (See Exhibit 1 for management bios.) Marsh commented,
“With this business, I wouldn’t even have attempted something so
ambitious and complex without Demetrios and his operations expertise
and similarly with Tim and his experience: we simply couldn’t have
done this without our technology.”4
Together they raised approximately €200,000 from friends and family,
and launched onefinestay in May 2010. Marsh reflected, “We really did
have to beg, borrow, and steal to get the first half dozen homes on the
Web site to start the ball rolling. Another adage, fake it till you make it,
well, we faked it a bit—of the first half dozen homes, one was mine,
one was Demetrios’s, and one belonged to a friend who has never
rented it out and insisted that he was never going to—it’s long since
come off the site, may I say—but we needed calling cards.”5

By late 2010, onefinestay was able to raise $3.7 million in a Series A
round led by Index Ventures, PROfounders Capital, and a number of
angel investors with experience in the travel and hospitality industries.
The company grew rapidly, signing 100 homeowners and increasing
revenue tenfold in 2011. Spurred by its success in London, in May
2012, onefinestay launched operations in New York City. One month
later, the company announced it raised $12.2 million in a Series B
round, led by the U.S. venture capital firm Canaan Partners, along with
participation from Index Ventures and PROfounders Capital. (See
Exhibit 2 for board member biographies.) (According to Marsh,
onefinestay had raised additional capital since 2012, but had not
disclosed its more recent funding events publicly.)
Boosted by tourism during the summer London Olympics, by the end of
2012, onefinestay had 1,000 member homes in New York and London,
and employed a team of more than 100 people. The company
continued to expand and refine its operations, and in September 2013,
launched in Los Angeles and Paris. onefinestay also began developing
partnerships with travel agents and corporate travel organizations. By
the fall of 2014, onefinestay had operations in four cities, with plans for
continued rapid expansion. The company had over 2,000 houses or
apartments to rent, with more than 5,000 rooms. In total, onefinestay
had a property portfolio worth over $5 billion.
The Rise of the Sharing Economy
The sharing economy (also known as “the peer-to-peer rental market”
or “collaborative consumption,” among other names) generally
referred to the exchange of assets or services among individuals, aided
by the Internet and smart phones. Since the mid- to late-2000s, the
use of technology and online market platforms was enabling
individuals to become part-time entrepreneurs, blurring the distinction
between consuming and producing. The best-known examples of
sharing economy companies included Uber and Lyft, the taxi-like ride-
sharing services; Airbnb, an accommodations rental platform; and
TaskRabbit, a marketplace for outsourcing small jobs and household
errands. Forbes estimated the revenue flowing through the sharing
economy would exceed $3.5 billion for 2013, with year-over-year
growth of more than 25%.6 Investors had taken notice and were
aggressively funding sharing economy companies. By October 2014,

Uber had raised $1.5 billion, and had an implied valuation of $17
billion, more than rental car market leaders Hertz and Avis combined.
Airbnb had raised $795 million, and had an implied valuation of $10
billion, more than the market value of Hyatt Hotels, a leading
hospitality company with 549 properties around the world. Shervin
Pishevar, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist argued, “This is a
movement as important as when the Web browser came out.”7
Nonetheless, observers recognized the challenges faced by sharing
economy companies, including establishing trust, providing
demonstrated value, and addressing the “chicken-and-egg” problem of
ensuring enough supply and demand. Investor and entrepreneur Raj
Kapoor also pointed out the need for consistency of service in the
offline experience, particularly during a sharing economy company's
early days.8 Perhaps the biggest hurdles for sharing economy
companies were the legal and regulatory issues, since most existing
laws had been established for traditional large-scale organizations, and
were primarily set at state and city, rather than national, levels. Some
locales such as San Francisco, Washington DC, and the United
Kingdom were developing regulations to support the sharing economy
and encourage economic growth, while other regions were moving
more cautiously. By the fall of 2014, Airbnb remained in a contentious
battle with New York state regulators, and many other cities and
countries were grappling with the tax, legal, insurance and policy
issues raised by sharing economy companies.
Managing a Two-Sided Marketplace
While people often described onefinestay as a “high-end Airbnb,”
Marsh disagreed with the comparison. He noted, “We don’t think we
compete with Airbnb any more than Marriott competes with Expedia.”
Marsh pointed to onefinestay’s collection of carefully curated homes
and apartments, its attention to detail—similar to that of a high-end
hotel—and the fact that guests never interacted with hosts as
distinguishing characteristics. In addition, Marsh saw onefinestay as “a
vertically- integrated service-enabled market, providing a variety of
value-add on top of a brokerage piece. What we’re doing behind the
scenes to create that market and then service and support it, is
actually almost more important than the market itself. We’re not a
distribution business, we’re a manufacturing business.” He further

described onefinestay as “a hospitality company and also a very
complex logistics company behind the scenes.”9
Homeowner Hosts: Managing the Supply Side
Most of the properties listed on onefinestay were homeowners’ primary
residences. Marsh commented, "The homeowners might travel for a
month or two, they might have work that takes them overseas, they
might have a second home in the south of France or whatever. It’s
even more important in those situations that they’re emotionally
comfortable with onefinestay and the guests that we introduce to their
properties, and [that we] manage them on their behalf as a very, very
credible service partner. There’s lots of stuff we’re doing behind the
scenes to earn that trust.”10 He elaborated further on a homeowner’s
decision to join onefinestay:
It’s not only about money. Of course, people wouldn’t be likely to do it
if there were no money or emotional benefits involved. The average
onefinestay member probably earns a household income of $250,000 a
year and their property is worth ten times that. It’s not like an extra
few thousand dollars a year is going to fundamentally transform their
lives. But, if it’s free money, and someone else is doing all the work, all
you have to do is overcome the anxieties and the trust issues around
affiliating. When you get your home back after your vacation cleaner
than you left it, you stop asking yourself, ‘Well, why the heck would I
do that?’ and you start thinking ‘Well, why wouldn’t I do that?’
Homeowner members were required to list exclusively through
onefinestay and were expected to make their homes available to the
company for at least four weeks per year. Two-thirds of onefinestay’s
homeowner members came through word-of-mouth referral. Keyvan
Nilforoushan, onefinestay’s Paris general manager noted, “I know to
expect three calls on a Sunday from people who’ve been out to dinner
on Saturday night with one of our hosts. When hosts come back from
holiday, that’s when it happens.”11 Marsh reiterated the importance of
social validation and noted that most decision makers on the supply
side were female, "Often it’s one mom talking to another mom at the
school gates. We realized that if we could figure out how to make
things sufficiently easy and compelling for folks who would not
otherwise do this, we could bring a tier of inventory to the market
that’s never previously been available.” (See Exhibit 3 for additional

information on onefinestay’s member hosts.) Marsh explained the
process of signing up homeowners:
The “take-on” process starts when the owner first joins. It’s not one
single interaction, but takes place over a period of a few weeks.
Homeowners may have heard about us from a direct mail marketing,
through an editorial piece, or increasingly, from a friend or an
associate at work. We go to visit them in their home. The visit is
basically a sales meeting, in the sense that we are trying to persuade
them in a very general and soft way, to join the service. We’re almost
discouraging folks from membership unless we’re really convinced it’s
going to be valuable for them and for us over the medium- to long-
term.
Marsh estimated the company listed approximately one in ten of the
properties offered to them. He explained, "People get anxious that
we're the taste police, but it's rarely a question of taste. Our issues are
much more likely to be practical, like is it a good location, does
everything work properly?”12 A third co-founder and president of the
Americas, Evan Frank added, “The homes need to have WiFi, they
need to have bathrooms and kitchens in really good condition, and
they need to have character. It has to look like somebody lives there
and that the owner has a personality. What we don’t want are homes
that look like standard hotel rooms or apartments. Whether it’s nice
furniture, great views, interesting pictures on the walls, you have to
walk into the home and think there's something special about it."13
Once onefinestay and a homeowner decided to move forward, the next
part of the take-on process was called the registration phase. It took
place again, on premises, in order to register the homeowner’s assets.
A representative from onefinestay went in with a scanner and created
an extensive and detailed inventory of the property—information about
everything in the home and where it was located, down to the rules
and exceptions of the owner. Marsh added, “That might include
instructions such as not to use an abrasive surface cleaner on the
downstairs table. It might also include information about which
bookshelves or wardrobes to seal off, and which spare room should be
used for storage.”
The meetings typically lasted a few hours, and for a large property,
could take significantly longer. As Marsh noted, “Ultimately, we need to

be able to deal with any issues that arise in that home, so we can
manage the property as if the owner didn’t exist.” The next step was
the photo shoot. onefinestay merchandised the property, wrote copy,
and presented images of it on the company’s Web site. Marsh
commented, “We’ve actually done a lot of process engineering to get
the quality consistently excellent at a sensible cost.” Typically, the first
reservation occurred within just a few weeks since homeowners often
signed up with onefinestay in anticipation of an overseas or extended
trip. According to Marsh:
This is where the fun part starts. Once the homeowner leaves town,
the property’s essentially under our control. We go into the home and
we stage it. We call that provisioning. We run through the original
checklist and it’s almost like an episode of CSI. We bag and tag things,
and when needed move stuff around. We do a little bit of de-cluttering
and we usually seal off a spare room or some of the wardrobes and
cabinetry with little bar-coded, tamper evident seals. They serve as a
nudge to remind guests to be considerate during their stay. There’s a
deep clean, including fresh hotel- grade thread-count linen sheets on
the bed, plush towels in the restrooms, and fancy bathroom products—
Kiehl’s in New York, Aesop in London, and L'Occitane in France.
The homes included in onefinestay's portfolio were distinctive.
Examples included a former sugar warehouse in New York City with
views across the Hudson River, a three-story loft in a former rectory in
New York’s Murray Hill neighborhood, and a two-bedroom apartment in
London’s St. Pancras railway station’s clock tower. (See Exhibit 4 for
images of sample properties.) Prices ranged
5
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from $250 per night for a comfortable one bedroom apartment to well
over $2,500 per night for a grand townhouse. Pricing for homeowners
was negotiated up front and then marked up by onefinestay before
being posted online. As one reporter noted, “The beauty of
onefinestay...is that you stay in the kind of place you’d like to live in,
but probably can't afford.”14
Attracting Guests: Managing the Demand Side

Approximately 70% of onefinestay’s guest customers were leisure
travelers, and the remaining 30% were business or mixed-purpose
travelers. Frank noted, ““[We cater to] a wide variety. There are a lot
of families and business travelers. They are the type of people who
would otherwise stay in a higher-end hotel at a four-star price point."15
The vast majority of guests booked their stays with the company
online, about half the time with phone or email assistance from a
onefinestay guest sales representative. Historically, approximately
80% of onefinestay guests learned of the company during a Google
search. However, by the fall of 2014, it was a much more blended
picture, with bookings coming from a range of online and offline
channels, alongside a high proportion of organic (unpaid) traffic. (See
Exhibit 5 for more data on onefinestay guests.)
The travel agent channel was relatively new for onefinestay. Corporate
travel departments used onefinestay primarily for relocations and
consultants who came to a city on repeat business.16 While the
majority of onefinestay’s properties had multiple bedrooms, some were
single-room apartments. By the fall of 2014, one-third of the
company’s channel business was with traditional, offline travel
organizations such as Virtuoso, while two-thirds was with online
organizations such as Booking.com, Expedia, and HomeAway. In the
hotel sector, travel agency fees typically ranged from 10% to 12%.
Marsh commented, “It’s not free, but it is scalable. Referral behavior
within the travel agent community is very, very strong. We have a
unique product and if we’re successful in educating that channel, we
think it’s very, very powerful and a great opportunity for us.”
A typical guest might stay around a week, paying in the region of
$600-700 per night for the experience. (Channel sales through travel
agencies, carried a higher average ticket of approximately $7,000 per
stay.) Travelers generally reserved properties well in advance of
arrival, typically paying by credit card and providing flight details. The
company had a “meet and greeter” to meet guest travelers onsite
when the guests arrived. The meet and greeter helped guests with
their bags, handed over the keys, showed them the iPhone, and
explained the house rules. Marsh noted, “We lend guests an iPhone
because most people have a smartphone, but they often don’t have
local data packages, so it’s extremely expensive to use that device
when they’re traveling.”17 The iPhone also included onefinestay’s own

app with a ‘contact us’ button so that guests could contact onefinestay
anytime during their stay. Marsh added, “From then on in, the guest is
on their own except for periodic maid service, usually once every
week. Then, when the last set of guests leave during a specific rental
period, we go back in and reverse all those set up steps so the owner
finds their place like they left it. Actually, they probably find it a bit
cleaner.” (See Exhibit 6 for a flow chart of onefinestay’s operations
process.)
Onefinestay’s net promoter scoresa for both guests and hosts—
consistently between 60 and 70— were extremely high, particularly for
the hospitality sector. Other feedback was generally positive as well,
although as one guest commented, "For the practically challenged,
there are downsides to living
like a local. Locks and keys, light switches and alien TV and alarm
systems are not my friends."18 According to Marsh, guest loyalty
appeared strong to date.
The onefinestay Virtual Marketplace
The onefinestay Web site functioned as its virtual storefront, attracting
and serving both sides— homeowners and travelers—of the two-sided
marketplace. The company’s home page was geared primarily toward
guests, with glossy images of sample properties, media logos from
high profile news and travel publications that had covered the
company, and folios to assist guests with beginning the home search
process. Other pages provided guest testimonials and additional
content on onefinestay’s unique offerings and amenities. A separate
tab was dedicated to potential hosts. In addition to a general overview,
two videos highlighted onefinestay’s ease of use and financial and
other benefits from different homeowners’ perspectives. Marsh
commented on the company’s digital presence:
Although we don’t think of onefinestay as a web business, our online
storefront is clearly the most salient introduction that most customers
will have to our brand and proposition. It’s also almost the only way
you can effectively communicate the specifics of a unique home, so
the site is really doing three things: it’s educating people about a new
category of accommodation, it’s introducing them to our branded
service promise within that new category, and it’s a point of a sale for

the particular homes that we market in the cities where we operate.
It’s the antithesis of a transactional purchase: big ticket vacation travel
is a deliberative, considered, consultative purchase which will take
days or even weeks to consummate. Our typical guest or guest group
will visit our site many, many times, from multiple devices, before
making a final decision. That’s why we have a fully staffed follow-the-
sun inbound sales organization: at this price point and service level,
some people want support if only to provide comfort that we’re the
‘real deal’. A complex purchase path in a novel category makes it
especially difficult to get insight from traditional web analytics tools,
which are designed for simpler, more transactional small basket
commodity shopping. That in turn means determining the efficient
frontier for paid search acquisition, say, is quite a subtle and nuanced
analytical problem.
Expansion Plans
onefinestay’s launch in New York City was the first step in its broader
strategy of international expansion. Marsh’s plan was to test and fine-
tune onefinestay’s operations in London before taking a leap of faith
and launching in New York. He explained, “We made a lot of mistakes
in London. It was expensive, but we built the tools, systems, best
practices, processes, and organization structures, so that when we’re
launching now, we’re coming into a market with far more
sophistication and a much more mature tool kit.” New York
homeowners warmed to the onefinestay concept relatively quickly,
joining at a rate that was three times as fast as when the company
launched in London. Marsh added, “It took us more than 14 months to
sign up our 100th homeowner in London. It’s taken only 6 months to
achieve that milestone in New York.”19 The same was true for
onefinestay’s Paris and Los Angeles markets, which took four and five
months, respectively, to sign 100 homeowners. (See Exhibit 7 for
additional data on new market growth.) Ultimately, Marsh hoped to
have operations in every major world city.
Marsh felt there were two key learnings the company had gleaned
from its expansion efforts to date. The first was the importance of
referrals and increased brand awareness. He elaborated,
"When we are launching into a new market and starting the city
operation, the first thing we do is to email our existing community and

ask if they know folks who have a place in Paris or have their own
place in Paris, and many of them do. Our first 25 or 30 homes in Paris
were all through our own network.” Second, Marsh also recognized the
need for strong general managers to run the local markets. He
elaborated:
One of the constraints in growing this business is the management
competence needed to operate these business units. They are
commercially and operationally complex. You need a certain amount of
personal maturity because you’re often interacting with high net worth
homeowners and guests who have high expectations. You need to
pacify those on both ends, and deal quickly and effectively in service
recovery situations in a competent way, often without support or
recourse from the center of the business.
Increasingly, we’re convinced that we need to grow much of that
general management capability internally because it’s too unusual a
set of combination of skills and abilities. As a result, one real constraint
on the rates and locations of the launch strategy is our ability to find
the type of folks who are going to be effective at running these
businesses.
Once a general manager was in place for a new market, they typically
had two lieutenants—an operations lead and a commercial lead. The
commercial lead focused on the supply side, building the portfolio and
inventory of homes. The operations lead was initially responsible for
procuring a warehouse and office space, and then transitioned into the
day-to-day management and execution of the business. About nine
months after its launch, onefinestay’s Paris operation employed
approximately 25 people. Roughly one-third of the Paris employees
were on the commercial side, assisting with pricing analytics,
merchandising, sales, and account management of the portfolio. The
other two-thirds in the operations group were split roughly equally into
three functional areas. The member services team supported the guest
experience. The coordination and logistics team did the operational
planning to manage the different cleaning and staging groups. The
third team provided logistics and warehousing support.
Marsh was proud of the company’s expansion plans to date, and eager
to grow further quickly. On the one hand, Marsh recognized the value
of having a global footprint. As a budding hospitality brand, he wanted

to be present in every key market to which his customers had occasion
to travel. One option was to add ten new cities around the world to the
onefinestay footprint by 2018.
Marsh commented, “As we add new markets, the customer acquisition
costs decline and lifetime value increases. The other compelling reason
to expand into new markets has to do with brand. Until we’re in
significantly more markets, travelers can’t always use our product. In
my view, this is a prerequisite to being able to get return on
investment from above-the-line marketing and advertising spend. It's
also clearly a necessary precondition to building a billion dollar
business.” However, adding additional cities to the onefinestay
network was costly from a marketing and operations standpoint. It
would take time and a significant amount of resources to expand this
way. Marsh worried that rapid expansion could stretch the fledgling
company’s human and financial resources and risk the company's
reputation and Net Promoter Scores. Variation in product and services
across markets could dilute the budding brand image he had built.
A second option was to increase onefinestay’s market penetration in
London, New York, Paris and Los Angeles. The company could leverage
the fixed marketing and operations costs they had already incurred by
further delving into the markets in which they had already established
a presence. Adding properties in these cities could help the company
strengthen its brand equity in four of the leading travel markets in the
world. The company was already the recipient of strong word-of-mouth
referrals from its existing homeowner hosts. It would be relatively easy
to find new homeowners to increase its supply of homes in these cities.
But, this option left most customers attracted to onefinestay’s online
presence unable to use the company’s services for most of their travel
needs.
Branding and Positioning Challenges
Marsh felt that the onefinestay brand had been cobbled together
without much deliberate attention during the company’s early years of
rapid growth. Initially, in 2009, he organized a marketing exercise with
a friend who had been a brand strategist and copywriter at a London
agency. March reflected:
We did a brand onion exerciseb, where my friend facilitated the

conversation, and we used whiteboards and brainstormed using word
associations and so on. We talked a lot about whether we should price
against hotels or vacation rentals. We talked about our “unhotel”
moniker and reinventing hospitality. At the end of it all, during the ‘ta-
da, this is the brand strategy presentation,’ I thought, ‘You sly dog.’ It
was very clever of him. He was doing group therapy and telling us our
personalities. He framed it very beautifully around an onion. The
middle of the onion was curiosity—the animating essence of the brand.
Around that, as layers, were behaviors: playful, adventurous and
considerate. Then, around the behaviors were personality traits—
smart, thoughtful, whimsical, and Romantic with a capital “R,” as in
Romantic poets, Romantic fiction, and Romance as an aesthetic ideal.
It was essentially about the people, not what the company was going
to do. We could have had exactly the same brand identity—maybe a
different name because the name implies something about the line of
service—but been in a different business. What’s fascinating is that
actually, if you’re talking about building a service brand, it’s the
behavior of the team that matters. And in a start-up, that means it’s
really about the personalities of the founders.
Marsh believed that the brand onion (see Exhibit 8 for excerpt) served
as a helpful starting point for the company, and that the focus on
behaviors continued to be useful as the company scaled and hired
additional employees. He and his co-founders sourced the onefinestay
logo for $200 through 99designs, an online graphic design firm. The
“unhotel” tag line they came up with also stuck.
By early 2014, Marsh was eager to revisit onefinestay’s branding
strategy and brought Cresswell on board to help. She reflected, “Fast-
forward a few years in a rapidly scaling business, and what you find is
that there may have been a certain amount of drift. In some areas, the
company is still thinking in a way that’s entirely consistent with the
way it had originally. In other areas, through a combination of factors,
the company is now speaking about itself in a different way. The bigger
mystery is, are any of those ways actually resonating with our guests
and our hosts and our staff?” Prior to joining onefinestay as director of
brand marketing, Cresswell ran global digital brand strategy at Ralph
Lauren Corporation. Cresswell’s work for onefinestay included a
branding project with three components: 1) gathering customer
insights, 2) creating an aspirational or mission statement, and 3)

developing a new set of creative briefs. Cresswell elaborated, “What
may have started as a quest for a refreshed color scheme and a little
bit more consistency in some of the language we use is evolving into
the opportunity for something a little bigger. Ultimately the color,
typography, or logo doesn’t really matter. What matters is if you have
a shared sense of purpose as a team that informs all of your behaviors
and all of the ways in which you present yourself to the customer. And,
that those ways are meaningfully important to the customer.”
During the spring and summer of 2014, Creswell and her team
analyzed dozens of detailed interviews with onefinestay guests and
hosts. Cresswell noted that "when you read the 40 hours of transcripts,
you realize you have this amazing story telling—guests telling what it
means to travel and hosts telling what it means to open up your home
to someone else. We tend to talk a lot about features, but not as much
about the benefits that are emotional. The most successful brands I
see are the ones that actually figure out how to turn all their features
and emotional benefits into something that truly touches their
customers.” In thinking about branding strategy, Cresswell focused on
onefinestay's unique points of difference and how they would help
drive growth over the next few years.
As she thought about onefinestay's ‘unhotel’ moniker, she wondered
whether positioning the company versus traditional hospitality options
was the right strategy or whether she should consider changing the
positioning to communicate what the company stood for, rather than
what it stood against. Marsh explained, “We feel like we are
reinventing hospitality, but what the heck do we call this new
category? I had read works by the marketing professionals, Al Ries and
Jack Trout and was thinking of ‘the uncola’ launch campaign for 7-up.
Can you define something by what it isn’t and what are the pros and
cons of doing that? People have very polarizing reactions to the
‘unhotel.’ Some people love it and others absolutely hate it.”
Market Segmentation
As a result of the research, in July 2014, on its Web site, onefinestay
clustered its home listings into four consumer-use groupings—family,
prestige, explore, and work—as a way for travelers to search more
efficiently for properties that would meet their needs. Creswell
explained:

The early work was an attempt to get to know our people better and to
try to group them into categories by need. A number of segments
emerged around use cases and we thought we’d test with something
very quick and dirty to see whether they’d hold. It was basically just an
onsite merchandizing play.
What you see [on the Web site] are actually not so much segments as
they are use cases. Two are based on needs, depending on the nature
of the travel—work or family. If I am a business traveler, I might only
need an apartment or a small home in a certain location. On the other
hand, lots of people mix work and business travel all the time. We
know that it is really compelling to choose a private home instead of a
hotel so that your wife and kids can come and stay at the end of the
trip.
The other two folios are based more on risk versus cost. The prestige
folio is for people who want to invest a little bit more to make the
experience of staying in a private home as close to a hotel as you can
get—informally what we call de-risking. With a prestige home, you will
get a very high spec kitchen and bath. They will be pretty luxurious in
terms of the fixtures and fittings, and you won’t have some of the
colorful quirks that can come along with staying in a private home and
that some people really enjoy. At the other end of the spectrum is the
explorer folio. Some people have a lot more flexibility with
neighborhood. If you want, you can get a very big home, slightly
further away from the town center that will allow you to travel at a
very economical rate, particularly if you start to think about it on a per
room basis.
We hoped people would have an easier job navigating the site, and are
noticing that people are starting to use the groupings as a new way to
choose a home. Since we added the groupings, travelers who find us
through search engine marketing have had a much higher conversion
rate. The customer folios are still a pretty blunt instrument, and the
decision to use them was very much in the spirit of, ‘Hey we learned
something, let’s develop a hypothesis.’ At the same time, it may not be
enough to make a list of homes that seem to fit one set of needs better
than another. We may have to add and maintain a unique service
envelope for homes in each of the four categories. There are a bunch
of reasons that stop business travelers from renting a private home
instead of staying in a hotel. We don’t have an onsite gym. We don’t

have a business center. People rarely use them anymore, but you
might need something faxed or you might need something printed. As
soon as you start to segment your customers into folios, then you have
to think about segmenting your marketing method and you also have
to start thinking about segmenting your product and service offerings
so that each folio provides the product and service experience those
customers want.
Through Cresswell’s efforts, she and Marsh recognized that the
company's branding strategy was more a reframing than a
repositioning. She commented, “We did this project in three months—a
really accelerated time frame compared to how some bigger company
might think about it. We are very nimble and we’ll likely refresh and
refresh, and continue to iterate on it." At the same time, Marsh
believed that building a brand in the hospitality business was also
about human resources. He elaborated, “A brand is not just something
you can define centrally, stick on a logo, and send out to people. It is
also a function of the interactions people have with our team
members. We can’t oversee each and every experience someone’s
going to have with a meet and greeter. But, we can try to create a
company culture that is focused on service.”
Defining the Competition
Global Hotel Industry – Traditional Hospitality
As Marsh thought about onefinestay’s competition he reflected, “We
now have more beds than the Ritz, Savoy, and Dorchester hotels put
together.”20 “However, we have nowhere near the capital expenditures
involved in building an upscale hotel.” The global hotel industry had
recovered considerably since the economic recession-induced declines
of the late 2000s. Rising tourism and disposable income levels, among
other factors, had led to industry revenue growth of roughly 5% per
year since 2009.21 By 2014, demand for hotel rooms was outweighing
supply, and global hotel and resort industry revenue was expected to
reach $717.1 billion for the year.22 The top four hotel operators—Hilton
Worldwide, Marriott International, InterContinental Hotels Group, and
Accor Group—accounted for approximately 12.1% of available
worldwide industry market share in 2014.23
Tourism was projected to increase between 2014 and 2019, as global

economic conditions were expected to improve. As a result, global
hotel and resort industry revenue was forecast to reach $837.8 billion
by 2019.24 Tourist arrivals in emerging economy destinations in Asia,
Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa were
expected to grow twice as fast as those in developed economies.25
While leisure trips accounted for the vast majority of tourism, between
2013 and 2018, growth in business travel was expected to outpace
that of leisure.26 Hotels were increasingly catering to millennials—those
born between 1981 and 1990—through the expanded use of mobile
technology and social media, and by updating the style and design of
their brands.27
The hotel industry was frequently segmented by price, quality, and
service, often using a five-star system. Star rating systems varied, but
in general ranged from one-star, economy-oriented properties to five-
star luxury hotels providing world-class service. Most major
competitors in the hotel industry maintained a wide portfolio of brands,
ranging from budget to luxury and boutique hotels. At the top end of
the market, The World Luxury Index provided international rankings of
the most searched- for brands within the luxury industry in three
categories: upper upscale (mainly integrated chains such as Hilton and
Sheraton); luxury brands of a small/medium sized exclusive luxury
chain (such as Four Seasons, Loews, and Mandarin Oriental); and
luxury brands of a major integrated chain (such as Park Hyatt, Ritz-
Carlton, and Sofitel). (See Exhibit 9 for a list of luxury hotels by
category.) While the upper upscale category accounted for 38% of all
hotels in the luxury segment, based on Internet searches, it was the
most sought after of the three luxury categories, at 76% of searches.28
The luxury hospitality industry was valued at approximately $164.4
billion in 2013, up 39% from 2012.29 Demographic trends were
expected to support significant growth in the sector. For example, the
number of billionaires was projected to increase 85% between 2012
and 2022, and the number of high net-worth individuals with assets
greater than $30 million was forecast to grow 50% between 2012 and
2022.30 As in the general hotel industry, the luxury sector was seeing a
shift in customers and a rising trend toward unique, individualized, and
experiential travel. One hotel marketing executive explained:
Our customers look a lot different than ten, even five years ago, and
we have to offer the product and services that cater to their needs.

Eighty-five percent of Starwood's luxury guests hail from generation X
and Y,...[an] ever-more global generation of affluent travelers. This
growing cadre...is multi-national and cross-generational, mobile and
jet-setting; more comfortable moving across our portfolio of luxury
hotels for business and leisure, but also demanding personalized
service at every turn.31
Most luxury hotels were responding with enhanced technology
offerings—particularly in mobile—and even greater levels of personal
service. At the same time, a New York Times article noted “Some
hoteliers argue that the next generation of wealthy travelers will want
a room experience that reminds them of home, even while they are
getting away from home. Those companies are moving away from glitz
and technology to focus on creating casual, individual atmospheres
that seem far removed from the standard hotel ambiance."32 Ninety-
four percent of exhibitors at an International Luxury Travel Market
conference believed that luxury travelers most wanted an “authentic
local experience.”33
While Marsh was proud of onefinestay's distinctive properties, he felt
that the company provided more of an upscale hospitality experience
than a luxury one. He elaborated, “It’s a crucial distinction because
what luxury means in the context of hospitality is white glove service
and throwing people at a problem. We think we’re creating a
competitive or substitute product for a Hilton or a Marriott or a
Sheraton or any of the upscale brands. We’re not really competing
directly with the Four
Seasons or the Ritz. It’s not that some portion of our portfolio can’t
compete in luxury, it’s just that the service support required at the
luxury level of hospitality is intense.” Who was the competition for
onefinestay? And how did the definition of that competitive set affect
how the company positioned itself in the marketplace? Could
onefinestay compete for an upscale customer without offering the
product and service experience typically associated with luxury
hospitality? What could it offer to upscale customers that traditional
luxury hotels could not? (Exhibit 10 contains a comparison of the
value propositions of various players in the hospitality market.)
Vacation Rental/Home Share Options

Private accommodation—the rental of properties or rooms—generated
$38.7 billion of global room revenues in 2013, and was expected to
grow to $46 billion by 2018.34 While the sector had existed for some
time, the recent success of Airbnb had increased its profile
dramatically. HomeAway was the largest online marketplace for
vacation rentals, and its portfolio included HomeAway.com, VRBO.com
(Vacation Rentals By Owner), and VacationRentals.com. HomeAway
had over one million paid listings, the vast majority of which were
vacation properties. The average listing was available 22 weeks a year,
with an average price of $400 per night. The company raised $216
million in an initial public offering in June 2011 that valued the
company at $2.15 billion. In 2013, HomeAway had revenue of $346.5
million and net income of $17.7 million. Historically, HomeAway
charged listing fees—generally in the form of annual subscriptions—to
property owners and managers to advertise their vacation homes. In
late 2013, the company began offering performance-based listings.
Airbnb was founded in 2008 and provided a platform for people to rent
their spare rooms or homes directly to travelers. The company grew
rapidly and by October 2014, had 20 million users and 800,000 listings
in 34,000 cities and 192 countries worldwide. Airbnb earned revenue
from renters through a 6% to 12% markup on each listing, as well as a
3% commission per booking from hosts. According to a 2014 Fortune
article, approximately two-thirds of Airbnb’s listings were for entire
properties.35 The average price of an apartment on Airbnb in one of the
top ten most expensive cities in the U.S was $151 per night.36 The
average price of a home listed on Airbnb in San Francisco was $226
per night.37 Total 2013 revenue for the company was estimated at
$250 million.38
Despite its success, Airbnb faced strong opposition from local
governments as officials around the world were considering whether
Airbnb should be regulated and taxed the same way as hotels.
Regulators were also concerned about protecting local housing stock
from speculative investment in buy-to-let properties that could price
out locals and foster housing bubbles.39 Further questions about
insurance and legal liability remained outstanding. In the spring of
2014, Airbnb announced it would begin to collect hotel taxes from
guests in San Francisco and certain other municipalities. In October
2014, San Francisco passed a law allowing permanent residents to rent

their homes to short- term travelers.
Nonetheless, Airbnb executives were continuing to aggressively grow
the company. However, in addition to geographic expansion, Airbnb
CEO Brian Chesky “decided Airbnb will become nothing less than a full-
blown hospitality brand, one that delivers a seamless end-to-end
experience when its customers travel.”40 The company was testing an
airport transportation service similar to Uber, and a cleaning service
that would provide fresh towels, sheets, and a gift basket welcome
package. Chesky and a colleague believed "Airbnb will win by
delivering local experiences chock-full of personality and
idiosyncrasies, all supported by the best hospitality its hosts can
deliver.According to the research firm Mintel, approximately 10% of
U.S. adults had used a home rental/home service. Mintel’s report noted
“Although to date the impact on hotel revenues is minor, it is likely to
have the greatest effect on budget and economy hotels and those not
catering to the business traveler.”42 Nonetheless, hospitality providers
across the board had taken notice. A number of startups had entered
the market as direct competitors. (See Exhibit 11.) HomeAway was
suing San Francisco over its new short-term rental law, and the
company's co-founder and CEO noted, “HomeAway makes money.
That’s the difference between us and Airbnb.”43 An executive from the
Four Seasons added, “Our guests don’t want the Airbnb feel and
scent.”44 Hoteliers were also responding with a variety of tactics to
enhance their existing product offerings. For example, Starwood
introduced keyless doors that could be opened by smartphone;
Marriott hired Ian Schrager to revamp its Edition boutique chain; and
Marriott began allowing guest to rent out "workspace on demand"
(conference rooms, hotel suites and private dining rooms) on an hourly
basis via mobile apps or the Web.45
Other accommodation options included home exchange programs,
where home owners agreed to swap properties for a certain time
period, without a monetary exchange. However, most home exchange
sites charged membership fees, although pricing varied dramatically.
Memberships at HomeLink started at $39 per year, while other players
charged annual memberships starting at well over $100. Leading home
exchange companies included HomeExchange, HomeLink, and
Intervac. Many hotel and resort chains offered time share programs,
and at the very high end, a number of firms specialized in exclusive

luxury vacation clubs. Typically, travelers paid a membership fee for
access to luxury residences around the world. Two of the leading
vacation clubs were Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato. Inspirato charged
$12,000 to join, with additional annual fees of $3,000 per year.
Exclusive Resorts charged $250,000 to join, with additional annual fees
of $15,000 per year.
Making Some Decisions
Cresswell continued to ponder the best use of the company’s
marketing resources and in particular, which side of the two-sided
marketplace onefinestay should focus on. She elaborated:
We are constantly questioning whether we should be orienting our
brand around guests or around hosts. The answer is it has to be both,
right? But, there are a number of obstacles involved. Are we in the
hospitality industry? Yes. Is our primary business to provide
accommodation services for people who are traveling for business or
leisure? And to set them up with the right accommodation for their
needs and to give them a great experience so they keep coming back
to us? Or, are we in the property management industry, serving our
hosts? Is our business one where our main goal is to persuade,
convince, and delight hosts who will choose to make their properties
available to us for the times that they are not in their home rather than
make their properties available through another channel? It’s quite an
interesting discussion because if you decide guests, you kick off a
whole series of activities and if you decide hosts, you kick off a whole
different series of activities.
If you decide both, that’s kind of interesting, although quite
complicated. You have tradeoffs in both marketing messages and
actually more significantly, in your operating channels. From the
messaging point of view, in a connected world, everyone sees
everything. Guests and hosts both see all the articles placed in
newspapers and so on, so you can’t really restrict marketing to one
actual target audience or another. If you go one step further, from a
business point of view, how do you prioritize a host’s needs or a
guest’s needs, and what framework do you have that allows you to
make that decision?
These kinds of conflicts happen every day because we are dealing with

real people’s homes and real people’s holidays where the stakes are
quite high. Let’s say a guest accidentally breaks something in the
home. In a hotel it would be a very easy fix, but in a home, it becomes
so much more logistically challenging. Sometimes a guest wants a lot
of storage space, but the host doesn’t want to move a lot of their
things out of the house. There are all sorts of things. Some are just
operational hiccups, but some are actually quite meaningful points of
tension.
When we talk about where our future growth is going to come from,
you can say that without host homes we don’t have a business. But
you can also say that without guests to put into those homes we don’t
have a business. That’s one of the fascinating things that comes up
when you’re dealing with a branding project like this. When you start
to unpack the strategy of who we are and what our brand means, you
have to think about what it means to both sets of customers and how
any decisions we might make will affect one or the other customer. We
really have a dual customer question.
As Marsh considered onefinestay’s competitive position, he
commented, “I challenge you to name a big brand in the vacation
rental sector. There are no brands like Hilton in the vacation rental
community. That's really intriguing to me. I believe we have a chance
to become the first real service brand, in a sector which is
characterized today by its mixed reputation, its informality, and its
unprofessional nature. So I think that’s a hugely exciting
opportunity.”46 But, what was that path to growth? Which customer
segments offered the most promise? And, what value proposition could
the company craft to best attract them? Did onefinestay have the right
product and service strategy to delight upscale customers? How critical
was a global footprint to that value proposition in the short term?
Should Marsh stay focused and go deep in the locations in which
onefinestay already operated and concentrate on obtaining strong
brand awareness within their existing locations, or try to open up more
territory quickly?
Exhibit 1 Management Biographies Greg Marsh - Co-Founder & CEO
Prior to founding onefinestay in 2009, Greg spent 3 years on the
technology investment team at Index Ventures, the venture capital
firm behind Skype and MySQL. Previously he had management roles in
operations, business development and product development at

logistics marketplace start-up GF‐X, latterly as the firm’s Product
Manager. Greg has an MA from Christ’s College, Cambridge, and an
MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School where he was
a Fulbright Scholar and graduated top of his class. He also works with
Amnesty International and is elected to the charity’s Finance and Audit
Committee.
Demetrios Zoppos - Co-Founder & COO
Before founding onefinestay in 2009, Demetrios was founding CEO of
GradFutures, a Web community site. Previously he was co-founder,
Operations Director and Managing Director of GF‐X, the leading trading
exchange for airfreight capacity, which raised £50m, and was acquired
by Descartes. Demetrios was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. where he
specialised in e-commerce, and was an associate at the World Bank.
He has an MA with first class honours in Economics from Robinson
College, Cambridge, and an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, where
he was a Fulbright Scholar.
Tim Davey - Co-Founder & Head of Product
Previous to founding onefinestay in 2009, Tim was co-founder and CTO
of Snaptalent, a Web recruitment ad network based in San Francisco,
which raised funds from Y-Combinator, Index Ventures and other
leading investment firms. Tim has a BSc in Theoretical physics from
Imperial College, London and is an active member of the International
Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (IADAS) and the Privacy
International advisory board.
Evan Frank - Co-Founder & President of the Americas
Evan was co-founder and CEO of iwantBOX.com, an e-commerce
menswear brand. Previously he was a Director at Kennet Partners, a
technology growth equity fund based in London and Silicon Valley.
Prior to that, Evan worked at boutique technology investment bank
Broadview (now part of Jefferies) in New York. Evan has a BBA from
University of Michigan Business School.
Dan Atkinson – Vice President People
Dan was previously at eBay where he led an enterprise sales and cross
border trade business across continental Europe generating multi-

billion $ sales volumes and year-on-year growth of over 3 times market
and site rates. Prior to that Dan was HR Director EMEA and HR Chief of
Staff for eBay Marketplaces where he helped realize a dramatic
improvement in employee engagement levels, and successfully
delivered a critical European business transformation & subsequently a
global HR reorganization. Previously Dan built and managed his own
niche advisory business supporting the international expansion of
digital startups in addition to having worked with several household
brands including Vodafone, LEGO and AstraZeneca. Danstarted his
career in management consulting with Andersen and Mercer.
Katy Andersen - Director of Service Development
Prior to onefinestay, Katy launched and ran the artisan food and
housewares categories at Lot18, a venture-backed startup in New York
City that raised $45 million from Accel Partners, NEA and FirstMark
Capital. She holds an AB from Princeton University, where she also
received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Italy, and an MBA from
Harvard Business School.
Jackson Hull - Chief Technology Officer
Jackson most recently was CTO at Kleiner Perkins-backed Plum District,
the leading daily deal company for mums, based in San Francisco.
Previously, he co-founded Chatterfly, a mobile loyalty application
startup sold to Plum District. Jackson was CTO and VP Product
Development at venture- backed Sitoa, the largest US drop-ship
platform provider. Jackson has a degree in Mechanical and Material
Science Engineering from the University of California, Davis earned
with honours and a Masters in Information Systems from the University
of California, Berkeley, with honourable mention.
Miranda Cresswell - Director of Brand Marketing
Miranda has been in digital strategy and brand development for over
15 years, working in luxury, media and entertainment in the UK and
US. Prior to joining onefinestay, Miranda was part of the global e-
commerce and digital strategy team at Ralph Lauren Corporation.
There, she developed global merchandising and marketing programs
across the company's family of over 20 brands. Prior to this, Miranda
launched and ran a new digital content portfolio for BBC Worldwide in
New York, and had a lead role on the development team for HBO GO –

the groundbreaking streaming service from Home Box Office. Miranda
holds a first-class honours degree in Social Policy from Bristol
University.
Goh Kuan Tan - Director of Acquisition Marketing
Goh Kuan was Director, EMEA Search Marketing at Hotels.com
(Expedia) before going on to lead the global team as Interim VP, Global
Paid Search, managing a 9 figure spend budget. He previously led
projects at the Boston Consulting Group and Monitor Group advising
clients on marketing, growth, monetization and market entry
strategies. Prior to that he worked at UBS Investment Bank as a
Corporate Finance Analyst and at IDEO, the design consultancy. Goh
Kuan earned a BA and MEng in Manufacturing Engineering from Trinity
College, Cambridge and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of
Business.
Exhibit 2 Board Member Biographies Greg Marsh (See above)
Demetrios Zoppo (See above)Robin Klein – Index Ventures
Robin’s investments at Index include Adzuna, Citymapper, EDITD,
Farfetch, Geckoboard, MOO, onefinestay and Transferwise. As well as
onefinestay, he is also on the board of Wonga, MoneySupermarket,
Zoopla and is a trustee at JW3 and a Governor of Rhyl Primary School.
Robin is on the Tech City Advisory board and an advisor to Silicon
Valley Bank. Prior to joining Index, Robin co-founded The Accelerator
Group, with his son Saul, an early stage technology investor. Prior to
that, he built and sold a number of businesses, the last of which was
the Innovations Group.
Warren Lee – Canaan Partners
Warren led Canaan's investments in Artspace (acquired by Phaidon),
an online marketplace for art; Associated Content (acquired by Yahoo);
Blip (acquired by Maker Studios); and Peer39 (acquired by DG), an
online semantic advertising company. An early investor in Tremor
Video (TRMR), the leading provider of technology-driven video
advertising, Warren also serves on the boards of Tremor Video (TRMR,
Emissary, NatureBox, Rocketrip, and Tubular Labs.
Prior to Canaan, he worked at Comcast Interactive Capital. Before
joining the venture industry, Warren worked as an engineer and

project manager at Solectron, a business development director at Sun
Microsystems, a management consultant at The Boston Consulting
Group, and an investment banker in Alex Brown's technology group.
Exhibit 3 Homeowner Profiles
Source: Company.
19
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Exhibit 4 Images of Sample onefinestay Properties

20
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Source: Company Web site.
21
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Exhibit 5 Guest Profiles

Source: Company.
22
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Exhibit 6 Operations Flow Chart

Source: Company.
23
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Exhibit 7 Data on New Market Growth

Source: Company.
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Exhibit 8 Excerpts from onefinestay’s Original Brand Onion

Source: Company.
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Exhibit 9 Luxury Hotels by Category

Source: “The World Luxury Index Hotels,” Digital Luxury Group, 2013, p. 7. Exhibit
10 Hospitality Industry Value Propositions by Category
Luxury HotelsFour Seasons95 hotels in 39 countries
We have chosen to specialize within the hospitality industry by offering
only experiences of
exceptional quality. Our objective is to be recognized as the company
that manages the finest hotels,
resorts and residence clubs wherever we locate. We create properties
of enduring value using
superior design and finishes, and support them with a deeply instilled
ethic of personal service.
Doing so allows Four Seasons to satisfy the needs and tastes of our
discriminating customers, and to

maintain our position as the world's premier luxury hospitality
company.
26
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Ritz Carlton 71.3% occupancy; $323.83 Average Daily Rate; $230.82
Revenue Per Avg. Room
87 hotels in 29 countries and territories
The Ritz-Carlton is one of the world’s leading global luxury lifestyle
brands, with hotels and resorts renowned for their extraordinary
locations, inspired design, and legendary service. The brand, designed
to appeal to the guest who enjoys genuine care and comfort, seeks to
provide unique, memorable, and personal experiences that transcend
luxury hospitality and create indelible marks in guests’ lives. The Ritz-
Carlton properties typically include elegant spas and wellness facilities,
restaurants led by celebrity chefs, championship golf courses (at resort
properties), 24-hour room service, twice-daily housekeeping, fitness
and business centers, meeting and banquet facilities, concierge
services, and The Ritz-Carlton Club level. The Ritz-Carlton is a highly
reputable, award- winning organization, and the only service company
to have twice earned the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality
Award.
Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts
24 hotels in 10 countries and territories, with 10,529 rooms
Upper Upscale HotelsHilton 554 hotels and resorts in 80
countries and territories
Marriott Hotels 73.6% occupancy; $ 179.44 Avg. Daily Rate; $132.03
Revenue Per Avg. Room 489 hotels (174,509 rooms)
What began as an iconic hotel in New York City is today a portfolio of

24 luxury hotels and resorts.
In landmark destinations around the world, Waldorf Astoria Hotels &
Resorts reflect their locations,
each providing the inspirational environments and personalized
attention that are the source of
unforgettable moments. Properties typically include elegant spa and
wellness facilities, high-end
restaurants, golf courses (at resort properties), 24-hour room service,
fitness and business centers,
meeting, wedding and banquet facilities and special event and
concierge services.
Hilton is our global flagship brand and ranks number one for global
brand awareness in the
hospitality industry, with 554 hotels and resorts in 80 countries and
territories across six continents.
The brand primarily serves business and leisure upper upscale
travelers and meeting groups. Hilton
hotels are full-service hotels that typically include meeting, wedding
and banquet facilities and
special event services, restaurants and lounges, food and beverage
services, swimming pools, gift
shops, retail facilities and other services.
Marriott Hotels is the company’s global flagship brand, primarily serving business an
leisure upper-
upscale travelers and meeting groups. Marriott Hotels properties seek to be “brillian
hosts” to
guests who blend life and work and who are inspired by how modern travel enhance
both.

Properties are located in downtown, urban, and suburban areas, near airports, and a
resort locations.
27
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Vacation Rental/Home Share Companies
Airbnb 1 million listings; 25 million guests; 34,000 cities; 190
countries
HomeAway 889,875 paid listings; $368 Avg. Revenue/listing; 72.5%
renewal rate; 752 million
visits to Web site
HomeAway is the world's leading online marketplace for the vacation
rental industry, with sites
representing over one million paid listings of vacation rental homes in
190 countries. Through
HomeAway, owners and property managers offer an extensive
selection of vacation homes that
provide travelers with memorable experiences and benefits, including
more room to relax and added
privacy, for less than the cost of traditional hotel accommodations.
Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover,
and book unique
accommodations around the world — online or from a mobile phone.
Whether an apartment for a

night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects
people to unique travel experiences,
at any price point, in more than 34,000 cities and 190 countries. And
with world-class customer
service and a growing community of users, Airbnb is the easiest way
for people to monetize their
extra space and showcase it to an audience of millions.
Source: Compiled by casewriters based on company Web sites and SEC filings:
www.fourseasons.com,
www.ritzcarlton.com, waldorfastoria3.hilton.com, www.hiltonworldwide.com,
www.marriott.com, www.homeaway.com, www.airbnb.com, Hilton Worldwide Holdings
Inc., December 31, 2013 Form 10-K and Form S-1 (filed September 12, 2013), Marriott
International, Inc. December 31, 2013 Form 10-K, and HomeAway, Inc.,
December 31, 2013 Form 10-K.
28
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Exhibit 11
Home/Room Rental Startups

Source: “The<https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/airbnb-competitors-international/>.
Note: Based on publicly available data; onefinestay in particular has not announced
several of its more recent financing events.
18 Companies Going After Airbnb Internationally ,” CBInsights.com, November 3, 2014,
available at

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Endnotes
1 “The Un-hotelier: We Meet Greg Marsh, Co-Founder & CEO of onefinestay,”PwC Fast
Growth Companies Blog, May 20, 2014, available at
http://pwc.blogs.com/fast_growth_companies/2014/05/the-un-hotelier-we-meet-greg-
marsh-co-founder-and- ceo-of-onefinestay.html., accessed September 4, 2014.
2 Crunchbase,”onefinestay company overview,” available at
http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/onefinestay, accessed June 10, 2014.
3 Addy Dugdale, “Interview: Greg Marsh of onefinestay,”TheOnSwit.ch, February 26,
2014, available at
http://theonswit.ch/2014/02/26/interview-greg-marsh-onefinestay/, accessed September
4, 2014.
4 “The Un-hotelier: We Meet Greg Marsh, Co-Founder & CEO of onefinestay,” PwC Fast
Growth Companies Blog, May 20, 2014, available at
http://pwc.blogs.com/fast_growth_companies/2014/05/the-un-hotelier-we-meet-greg-
marsh-co-founder-and- ceo-of-onefinestay.html., accessed September 4, 2014.
5 Addy Dugdale, “Interview: Greg Marsh of onefinestay,”TheOnSwit.ch, February 26,
2014, available at
http://theonswit.ch/2014/02/26/interview-greg-marsh-onefinestay/, accessed September
4, 2014.
6 Tomio Geron, “Airbnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy,” Forbes,
January 23, 2013, available at
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/01/23/airbnb-and-the-unstoppable-rise-of-
the-share-economy, accessed October 3, 2014.
7 Tomio Geron, “Airbnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy,” Forbes,
January 23, 2013, available at
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/01/23/airbnb-and-the-unstoppable-rise-of-
the-share-economy, accessed October 3, 2014.
8 Raj Kapoor, “Lessons from the Sharing Economy,” TechCrunch, August 30, 2014,
available at http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/30/critical-lessons-from-the-sharing-
economy/, accessed October 1, 2014.

9 Addy Dugdale, “Interview: Greg Marsh of onefinestay,”TheOnSwit.ch, February 26,
2014, available at
http://theonswit.ch/2014/02/26/interview-greg-marsh-onefinestay/, accessed September
4, 2014.10 Addy Dugdale, “Interview: Greg Marsh of onefinestay,”TheOnSwit.ch,
February 26, 2014, available at
http://theonswit.ch/2014/02/26/interview-greg-marsh-onefinestay/, accessed September
4, 2014.11 Charis Perkins, “The Holiday Makers,” The Australian Financial Review,
December 13, 2013, via Factiva, accessed June 10,
2014.
12 Charis Perkins, “The Holiday Makers,” The Australian Financial Review, December 13,
2013, via Factiva, accessed June 10, 2014.
13 Danny King, “onefinestay co-founder Evan Frank,” Travel Weekly, July 2, 2012, via
Factiva, accessed June 10, 2014.
14 “Make Yourself at Home, on Holiday,” The Times, February 1, 2014, via Factiva,
accessed June 10, 2014.
15 Danny King, “onefinestay co-founder Evan Frank,” Travel Weekly, July 2, 2012, via
Factiva, accessed June 10, 2014.
16 Michael Baker, “U.K. Corporate Housing Alternative Enters New York Market,”
Business Travel News, June 30, 2012, via Factiva, accessed June 10, 2014.
17 Addy Dugdale, “Interview: Greg Marsh of onefinestay,”TheOnSwit.ch, February 26,
2014, available at
http://theonswit.ch/2014/02/26/interview-greg-marsh-onefinestay/, accessed September
4, 2014.
18 Teresa Machan, “New York Apartment Rental Holiday: the Big Apple for Less; Renting
a Local Apartment Can Often Make for a More Authentic Experience than a Stay in a
Hotel—as Teresa Machan Found in New York,” The Telegraph Online, February 20, 2014,
via Factiva, accessed June 10, 2014.
19 “onefinestay Announces Addition of 100th Home to the New York Portfolio,” M2
Presswire, November 15, 2012, via Factiva, accessed June 10, 2014.
20 Ginetta Vedrickas, “Going for Gold in the Rental Market,” Sunday Express, August 5,
2012, via Factiva, accessed June 10, 2014.
21 “Global Hotels & Resorts,” IBISWorld Industry Report, IBISWorld, July 2014, p. 2. 30
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22 “Global Hotels & Resorts,” IBISWorld Industry Report, IBISWorld, July 2014, p. 2.
23 “Global Hotels & Resorts,” IBISWorld Industry Report, IBISWorld, July 2014, p. 6.
24 “Global Hotels & Resorts,” IBISWorld Industry Report, IBISWorld, July 2014, p. 9.
25 “Global Hotels & Resorts,” IBISWorld Industry Report, IBISWorld, July 2014, p. 4.
26 “Passport - Global Hotels: Reaching New Heights,” Euromonitor International, June
2014, p.2.
27 “Passport - Global Hotels: Reaching New Heights,” Euromonitor International, June
2014, p.13.
28 “The World Luxury Index Hotels 2013,” Digital Luxury Group, p. 8, available at
http://www.digitalluxurygroup.com/intelligence/research/, accessed November 9, 2014.
29 Kevin Brass, “Luxury Hotels: Luring the Next Generation,” The New York Times, June
5, 2013, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/travel/luxury-hotels-luring-
the-next-generation/, accessed November 9, 2014.
30 Kevin Brass, “Luxury Hotels: Luring the Next Generation,” The New York Times, June
5, 2013, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/travel/luxury-hotels-luring-
the-next-generation/, accessed November 9, 2014.
31 “The World Luxury Index Hotels 2013,” Digital Luxury Group, p. 8, available at
http://www.digitalluxurygroup.com/intelligence/research/, accessed November 9, 2014.
32 Kevin Brass, “Luxury Hotels: Luring the Next Generation,” The New York Times, June
5, 2013, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/travel/luxury-hotels-luring-
the-next-generation/, accessed November 9, 2014.
33 Samantha Shankman, “Five ‘Authentic’ Luxury Travel Trends to Watch for in 2013,”
Skift, January 10, 2013, available at
http://skift.com/2013/01/10/five-authentic-luxury-travle-trends-to-watch-for-in-2013/,
accessed November 9, 2014. 34 “Passport - Global Hotels: Reaching New Heights,”
Euromonitor International, June 2014, p.24.
35 Miguel Helft, “Growing Quietly in Airbnb’s Shadow,” Fortune, March 12, 2014,
available at

http://fortune.com/2014/03/12/growing-quietly-in-arbnbs-shadow/, accessed November
7, 2014.36 “Airbnb vs Hotels: A Price Comparison,” priceonomics, June 17, 2013,
available at http://priceonomics.com/hotels, accessed
November 17, 2014.
37 Carolyn Said, ‘Airbnb Law’ Would Make Business Harder for Airbnb’s Chief Rival,” San
Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 2014, available at
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Airbnb-law-would-make-business-harder-for-
5812918.php, accessed November 7, 2014.
38 Evelyn M. Rusli, Douglas MacMillan, and Mike Spector, “Airbnb is In Advanced Talks to
Raise Funds at a $10 Billion Valuation,” The Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2014,
available at
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303802104579451022670668410>,
accessed November 17, 2014.
39 “Airbnb: New Lease of Life,” The Economist, October 16, 2014, available at
http://www.economist.com/node/21625934/, accessed November 6, 2014.
40 Austin Carr, “Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans,” Fast Company, March 17, 2014,
available at <http://www.fastcompany.com/3027107/punk-meet-rock-airbnb-brian-
chesky-chip-conley, accessed November 9, 2014.
41 Austin Carr, “Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans,” Fast Company, March 17, 2014,
available at http://www.fastcompany.com/3027107/punk-meet-rock-airbnb-brian-
chesky-chip-conley, accessed November 9, 2014.
42 “Hotels- U.S. – October 2014, Competitive Context” Mintel Group Ltd., p. 1 of 2,
accessed November 9, 2014.
43 Carolyn Said, ‘Airbnb Law’ Would Make Business Harder for Airbnb’s Chief Rival,” San
Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 2014, available at
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Airbnb-law-would-make-business-harder-for-
5812918.php, accessed November 7, 2014.
44 Austin Carr, “Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans,” Fast Company, March 17, 2014,
available at http://www.fastcompany.com/3027107/punk-meet-rock-airbnb-brian-
chesky-chip-conley, accessed November 9, 2014.
31
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45 Austin Carr, “Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans,” Fast Company, March 17, 2014,
available at <http:// http://www.fastcompany.com/3027107/punk-meet-rock-airbnb-
brian-chesky-chip-conley, accessed November 9, 2014.
46 Addy Dugdale, “Interview: Greg Marsh of onefinestay,”TheOnSwit.ch, February 26,
2014, available at
http://theonswit.ch/2014/02/26/interview-greg-marsh-onefinestay/, accessed September
4, 2014.
32