Vlad: For those who have no idea about you or the company, can you introduce who you are, what you do, and why people should give you their business?
Vahan: Of course. We are Deluxe Holiday Homes, a Dubai-based holiday home rental company - in the worldwide lexicon, a vacation rental company. We manage over 700 properties in Dubai and other emirates, mostly in Fujairah, and I'm the Deputy General Manager. I've been with the company from its first days, when it was created and built, and we are one of the pioneers of the legal, licensed holiday home business in Dubai. This type of business was officially allowed in Dubai from 2015, with government regulations, and we were one of the first companies to hold a license - maybe in the first five or six.
Vlad: How did you end up working for a company like this? What is your background?
Vahan: My background is finance and economics. My MBA is in finance, my PhD is in macroeconomics, and I worked for a long time in the telecom industry. As unrelated as it sounds, it really isn't. It's all about your sense of business and your sense of understanding people. The industry is not the most important thing in management - it's more about your passion to create something and change something. Your background and your daily work on yourself grow every single day.
Vlad: What is something you understand about running short-term rentals at scale that most property management companies get wrong?
Vahan: The main thing is that big management companies sometimes forget about hospitality itself. The bigger you become, the more it turns into a conveyor belt - guests on one side, owners on the other, and revenue and operations in between. But guest experience is always important. Whether you have 10 properties, 20, or 700, that is where most companies miss. There are examples worldwide - one of the biggest, very successful in technology and everything, that simply went bankrupt. They didn't go bankrupt because of technology or finance. From one moment, they stopped producing hospitality and guest experience. Guest experience shall always be on the top level. Regardless, you have 10 properties, 20, 700, or even 7,000.
Vlad: How important is the view or the location when someone books a rental?
Vahan: To be very honest, the importance of the view is a bit exaggerated, unless we're talking about genuinely iconic views. In Paris, a view of the Eiffel Tower is iconic and has its own price and demand. In Dubai, a direct view of the Burj Khalifa brings demand. But location itself - how reachable it is for transport, how good it is for shopping, restaurants, entertainment, how close it is to the main activity areas - and the property and building facilities themselves, are much more important drivers than the view. The view works only in very specific, iconic cases.
Vlad: What advice would you give yourself 10 years ago to avoid some of the mistakes?
Vahan: Very hard question. I can't say I'm unhappy with the path I passed, but one of the biggest pieces of advice would be to get out of the details earlier. Detail-oriented people are very good in the middle and lower positions - it's a great quality. But when high-level managers stay detail-oriented, it can look amazing at first: he notices everything, misses nothing. In reality it is the main enemy of delegation. If you zoom out from the detailed view and put your attention on people management - guiding people, trusting them to do the detailed work - that is the way to success. Success is not knowing every single detail in the company. I kept many things under strong, detailed control for a long time, taking time that could have gone to growth, to major projects and decisions, and to helping people grow into roles they could cover without me. Maybe that was my biggest mistake, or maybe I was just late to understand it.
Vlad: I saw that you connect the property, dynamic pricing, channel management, and the owner relationship into one operation. Which part is harder and more complex than people realise? They book, they arrive, and that's it - they don't see behind the scenes.
Vahan: When you are in a restaurant, what do you see? The final dish - what you ordered. You don't see what's happening in the kitchen for that dish to be done. Same in hospitality, whether it's a hotel or a vacation rental. Every booking, the moment it's confirmed, starts a whole process: scheduling the housekeeping team, scheduling an inspection to be sure the property is in proper condition, and maintenance fixing anything before check-in. You have to keep the traffic in mind. Such check-ins run around 80 or 90 a day, not one or two. With 700 properties, you have 80 or 90 of these A-to-Z processes, plus 80 or 90 guests checking out who want a face-to-face goodbye. Daily you have 70 to 80 housekeeping tasks, 60 to 80 inspection tasks, and deliveries for extra requests - a foldable bed, an additional chair. Your guest relations officers have to be in all these locations in a short window to handle check-ins and check-outs. That is the main difference between a holiday home and a hotel: your apartment is not two floors up, it can be on the other side of the city. Guests don't see that routine. They see that a bedsheet had a small stain - which we try never to let happen. For a guest it's simple, but behind it there is an operation. It's not an excuse; it's just that how the operational person understands it and how the guest values it are naturally a bit different.
Vlad: Everyone sees the final outcome. Some people just want the outcome and don't care how it was made. But the effort behind it is what justifies the price and the experience.
Vahan: But if you gave the guest only one bed and charged too much for it, that's a fair complaint - it's too much for one bed. That's not about operations or what you went through to reach the result. The client is buying the result.
Vlad: Why do you think guest experience in short-term rentals still breaks so often, even with platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com solving distribution?
Vahan: First, understand one important thing: Airbnb and Booking.com don't provide the quality. They are the marketplace - like eBay or Amazon connecting the seller and the buyer. Of course they get involved when there's a quality issue and try to bring a fair decision between guest and host. But in the end, it's all about the host. Guest experience mostly breaks for two reasons. First, in some countries the regulations aren't strong - there's no standard for how a host should behave. In Dubai, the regulator works at a top level: here are the regulations, here are the minimum standards, here is what must be in the property. Second, as I said, people forget that guest experience is the most important thing - and it's not only the property. It's the full journey. The property can be good, but you were late at check-in, late to answer a request, or your housekeepers rushed and missed a corner. The property is good, but there's dust in the corner - and as a guest, I paid for it to be clean. Guest experience is a complex of things: the hardware, which is the property, and the service - customer support, housekeeping, maintenance, everything needed for the guest's journey. Many holiday homes, and especially single hosts managing one or two units, miss here. We also sometimes miss it - we're not ideal and we make mistakes. But in our minds it's the first priority to grow the level of service every single day to meet the highest guest experience standards.
Vlad: I spoke with someone from Shaza Hotels who said the same - guest experience is everything. When it was my birthday, a hotel I booked on Booking.com gave me a glass of champagne without me telling them. Even if I don't drink, the gesture made the experience, and now I go back every time I'm in that city.
Vahan: Let me tell you a short story - one of the super-luxury hotels in Dubai. The GM told me they have a guest who returns every time, and the reason is this: they found out the guest's child looks for a gift when she first enters the room - any toy, one dollar or five, it doesn't matter. Now every time they book, the hotel personalises it and the gift is there at check-in. That child is the one forcing the parents to stay at this hotel every time, just to get her gift.
Vlad: That's a human connection. I work a lot with AI tools now, and sometimes you just want to interact with a human. Where do you see technology or AI fitting into guest experience?
Vahan: We think about it every single day - AI is already in our life and it's developing faster than any other direction in the world. In hospitality I see at least two or three places where it genuinely enhances quality and experience. One is customer support: with AI you can be much faster, and with well-trained AI you can avoid the robotic feeling - if it understands your business, it knows when to shift to a human and where its own limits are. The second is that returning-guest problem. To bring people back, you need to know the persona of your guest. A company like us has around 100,000 guests a year, with maybe 20,000 to 25,000 stays - three or four guests per booking. Personalising at that scale is very hard for a human. But with AI you can analyse their persona and find the repeating touch points and patterns from the numbers. AI cannot analyse better than a skilled human, but it can analyse far faster. What would take a person two years, AI can do in ten minutes - even at 80 percent of the quality a proper human analyst would reach. That speed is the point.
Vlad: The guest experience is often something small and unexpected - a letter, a gesture - that exceeds what you came expecting.
Vahan: Yes. The question isn't even what you get. The question is whether the expectation you arrived with was met or exceeded. If it's not reached, that's a red flag.
Vlad: What's one of the biggest sources of friction on the operational side - something owners never see?
Vahan: Owners see their property and their statement, but there's a big routine behind it. What they don't see comes down to the feeling of "my own asset." Your own asset is always the best in your eyes - unique, a bit different. For an owner it's hard to accept that in the market there are 25 properties exactly like his, and that thousands of them might be even better in renovation, location, or building facilities. For the owner, it's like his baby. For us, it's the place where we build the service for guests. That's where friction appears, and we try, on a professional and business level, to keep the conversation about where things stand and where expectations or knowledge fall short. It's a very human, psychological thing - your car is your car, your apartment is your apartment. Not everyone is a pure investment-minded person who sees it only as an asset for earning money. That emotional connection sometimes stops owners from seeing that something is wrong and that they need to invest to make it better.
Vlad: Last question. If you had a magic wand to remove one thing from the market or the operation, what would it be?
Vahan: In the operation, with pleasure, I would remove the traffic. Then everything would at least become predictable. The problem with traffic isn't that it's hard - it's that it's not predictable, and that unpredictability affects your whole operational schedule. In the market, I wouldn't remove something so much as bring clarity - so all operators think the same way about one thing: that this is hospitality, and we compete in hospitality, not in secondary or third-rate things. That would clear the market of the small companies that try to show a competitive advantage purely on lower prices. A lower price has a cost somewhere - something won't be done to the proper level, because every service has a cost. Charging 10 percent less is fine; you work on your margin. But charging half of what others charge means something in the service won't be delivered. I would clean the market so it holds people with a real business mindset who genuinely care about hospitality, not only profit and figures. When 300 companies out of a thousand do a poor job, it affects all of us - it becomes the reputation of the city, not just of those companies.
Vlad: Where can people find or learn more about you and the company?
Vahan: Our company has its own website, and our properties are on all the well-known portals and OTAs - Booking.com, Airbnb - and on local UAE portals like Property Finder. If you simply type "Deluxe Holiday Homes Dubai," you'll find us. Even if you type "vacation rental in Dubai," I'm more than sure you'll find us. We're one of the largest companies, if not the largest, in the UAE market.
Vlad: Congratulations for that. There are a lot of stories behind it that people don't see.
Vahan: It's worth it, believe me. It's not about money or profit - it's the feeling that we could build something. When someone comes and tells you a friend recommended us, and you realise that friend is one of our owners, nothing more is needed to be happy. That means you gave the person more than they expected, and they recommended you.
Vlad: That's the biggest satisfaction - happy customers. Thank you so much for being our guest and for everything you shared today.
Vahan: Thank you very much for the invitation and the opportunity. It was a very nice discussion, and we touched on very important topics in hospitality. I hope it's useful for people.
