Casago
Fostering an Owner-Centric Approach in Property Management

Casago is a full-service management company specializing in short-term property rentals. Founded in 1996 in Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico, Casago now has brick and mortar offices in 17 cities throughout Mexico and the US, serving vacation rental, corporate housing, and specialty housing with high quality service.

The company’s mission is to provide customers with a stay experience that makes them feel at home. The locations of each vacation rental property are handpicked to ensure that there is a choice for everyone. Situated in picturesque and safe communities, Casago has options for every budget, ranging from alluring villas to spacious condos to grand beach houses.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Wes Melton, CTO, talks about the integration of tech in the hospitality industry to leverage a competitive edge in the market landscape.

Could you brief us on the genesis of Casago and your plans for its expansion?

Founded by the CEO Steve Schwab, the company started off as a small local vacation rental management firm in Rocky Point, Mexico. Today, we are the world’s second-largest traditional property short-term rental management company operating in locations all over the US and Mexico. Our offerings include homes, apartments, and condos travelers rent for less than 30 days—mostly for a stay length that is anywhere between one and two nights all the way up to week-long stays for vacationers. There has been a recent spike in long-term stays as well, propelled by the COVID19 pandemic, making people realize work can be done from anywhere.

I’ve been in this industry for almost ten years now, having founded and exited three companies in the space. I started my career in technology as an SAP finance implementation consultant for enterprises doing more than one billion in annual sales before jumping into operational property management as an entrepreneur. As our industry continues to rapidly mature, I recently shifted to Casago as CTO to join an existing team of incredibly talented people to assist in taking our brand to the national stage.

My role is to supercharge the existing tech side of the business and bring more organizational structure around strategies that involve bringing in and utilizing technologies that are common outside of our industry to give the company a competitive edge against the rapidly evolving competitive environment. The team at Casago are like-minded in how we see tech fueling enterprises across the globe. Technology has an increasing impact on customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, consumer experience, and revenue, and therefore we believe in capitalizing on it to grow the brand and company.

How would you explain the features and functions of your tech-infused online platform?

There is an increasing priority being raised at Casago to drive the tech roadmap that will enrich true customer satisfaction and spark joy during their stay through personalized experiences and high-quality product delivery through our technology and apps.

One of the main work threads we are moving on is the emphasis on intelligent chat assistants to enrich our guests with incredible check-in experiences and personalized in-stay experiences. When people go on vacation, they are not looking to book a home, but rather an experience—be it to get away and just rest or to enjoy the local offerings. Addressing this need, our approach is to build intelligent chatbots that can perform the job of intelligent itinerary planners for people as they travel. We want to leverage technology to enrich the guest’s stay in a way our competitors are not.

Beyond the customer aspect, the company goes through a huge minutia of operational processes and tasks to coordinate the thousands of check-ins and check-outs, repairs, supply chain management, and staff scheduling/ orchestration to ensure our guests have a remarkable stay. There is already a good foundation of best practices and solutions around operations management, intelligent route planning, and resource scheduling problems outside of our space. We feel it’s a huge opportunity and a focus to bring in those technologies and apply it to our industry.

Another key part of growing our brand is acquiring inventory in our industry through homeowner sales & contracting. When Casago acquired my latest venture, I was in the process of building an AI-powered marketing system with a niche focus on scaling a solution to this exact problem. As we work on that product’s roadmap, we feel confident our homeowner acquisition technology will enable us to outperform our competitors on a number of fronts.

What sets you apart from the market competition?

The industry is primarily made up of a myriad of very small companies - roughly 15,000 in the US. A typical company would be managing an average of 30-50 homes in a single destination, while we are managing thousands in multiple locations on an exponential growth curve. We are investing our growth momentum to build a national brand and establish a top-of-mind presence among travelers abroad. To do that requires technology and internal capabilities that smaller companies will likely never be able to build or buy due to their size.

Our superior tech-enabled revenue performance, backend AI services, product experience delivery, and a really strong emphasis on transparency and communication with our homeowners are what make us a go-to brand as we enter into new markets and expand our footprint across the globe.

Could you elaborate on a success story to provide an understanding of how your offerings play out in the real world?

When we entered new markets— primarily through acquisitions historically—we have found immediate gains for our customers and a faster payback period on the investment along with a typical 25-30 percent immediate uplift in revenue. This is largely due to our superior technology on the revenue optimization side, operational streamlining and ops management software, and a dramatic expansion of property exposure from our demand-side partners, including every major OTA, travel agents, and some local partners.

What does the future hold for the company?

Our roadmap as we look to the future is incredibly exciting and involves many industry-firsts. With things like advanced vision systems, constraint optimization solutions, real-time guest experience optimizations, and an increasingly broad adoption of advanced services across many operational and guest experience services, we feel very well poised for continued exponential growth and brand superiority as we continue executing our national growth strategy.