Our research
What actually makes a successful short-term rental business?
Revenue and occupancy are easy to celebrate and easy to misread. We want to understand what an STR business actually keeps, what it takes to run, and which improvements genuinely make it better.
The long-term ambition
We're working towards a more meaningful, evidence-led benchmark for STR business performance.
It doesn't exist yet and hasn't been validated. Our nine-property portfolio is the first case study, and the benchmark will only be as credible as the method and findings behind it.
01 · What we measure
Five research dimensions.
These are our initial research dimensions, not a validated scoring formula. We don't weight them or combine them into a single score, and we won't until the evidence supports doing so.
- D1
Profitability
What does the business actually keep after its costs?
- D2
Revenue performance
How effectively does it generate revenue from available accommodation?
- D3
Operational efficiency
How much time, labour and complexity does the business require?
- D4
Guest experience
Does the business consistently deliver a high-quality stay?
- D5
Business resilience
How well can it handle changes in demand, costs, distribution channels and operational risks?
02 · How we research it
Starting with one real business, recorded properly.
Our first research environment is our own established nine-property business in the UK. Over a planned 12-month experiment we're testing changes, evaluating software and working with specialists across these areas.
Revenue
- Pricing and revenue management
- Financial performance and profitability
Demand
- Distribution and direct bookings
- Marketing and guest acquisition
- CRM, guest data and retention
Stay
- Guest experience
Operations
- Operational systems and automation
- Cleaning, maintenance and operating efficiency
- Software costs and overlapping functionality
Owner
- Owner working hours
- Business resilience
Every intervention gets the same record
- 01
Starting conditions
- 02
Implementation date
- 03
Costs
- 04
Measurements
- 05
Results
- 06
Limitations
03 · Software and specialists
We evaluate connected systems, not just individual tools.
A better result rarely comes from one product. A direct-booking improvement might involve a website and CRM, guest marketing and the booking system underneath. We want to understand how the connected system performs, and where each provider genuinely contributed, without assigning the same improvement to everyone.
Company roles describe current or planned involvement. Some relationships are commercial and are disclosed on each findings entry. Involvement doesn't guarantee a favourable result.
How each contribution is assessed
Ten questions for every provider.
- The problem
- What the tool or service is supposed to solve.
- The provider's role
- What they do, and what they have agreed to deliver.
- Implementation effort
- Set-up time, training and disruption.
- Costs
- Subscription and service fees, plus our own time.
- Integration
- How it connects with the rest of the stack.
- Reliability
- Operational impact when it works and when it doesn't.
- Commercial effect
- Additional revenue or cost savings, where measurable.
- Time saved
- Owner and staff hours, where recorded.
- Limitations
- What the evidence can't tell us.
- Worth it?
- Whether the investment appears worthwhile.
Possible verdicts
Keep
The evidence supports paying for it again.
Question
Some value, but the cost, effort or evidence is mixed.
Cancel
It did not earn its place in the business.
Insufficient evidence
We can't honestly tell yet, so we say so.
04 · What we've discovered
Nothing to report yet. That's honest.
October 2026 is preparation; the experiment is planned to start on 1 November 2026. As evidence emerges, the findings area will publish:
- Case studies
- Measured business improvements
- Software and specialist evaluations
- Cost-benefit analysis
- Implementation lessons
- Unexpected discoveries
- Failed experiments
- Inconclusive findings
- Wider observations about STR performance
Our first experiment runs in one UK market. Regulation, tax, platform fees and operating costs differ by region, so a finding from nine UK properties isn't automatically a rule elsewhere. We'll say where we think a result travels and where it doesn't.