Customer story
How Ohana Vacations delivers unforgettable hospitality with StayStack
"The fact that StayStack lives everywhere makes it so powerful. It reaches across all our systems at once, and it's right there in Slack, where the team already works."
Ohana is StayStack’s first customer and a company our founders help run.
At a glance
Challenge: Ohana manages vacation homes across multiple states and countries — a mix of properties it owns and homes owned by individual homeowners, plus a handful of historic inns. The systems running all of it didn't talk to each other, so answers lived in a dozen places and things slipped between them.
Solution: StayStack as the connective layer across every system — surfacing what changed, what's at risk, and what needs action — bringing every answer right to Slack.
Results:
- Ten systems connected that were previously siloed.
- ≈670 hours delivered since June for a team of 11.
- $53K surfaced — $37K in vendor overcharges and $16K in missed guest payments and refunds.
- 20+ scheduled reports a week, posted to Slack without anyone asking.
- ~30 guest issues a week, with 4 in 5 flagged reservations still rated five-star.
- ~16 unreached callers named every Monday.
- A turnover costs 1.8 hours and $45 in wages (~$70 loaded) — with a ~$90K/yr opportunity revealed if above-average inns reach the 1.8-hour average.
The Company
Ohana manages a few hundred vacation homes across several states and two countries, plus a handful of historic inns. The company owns some properties directly; most belong to individual homeowners who trust Ohana to run their short-term rentals well. The portfolio grows in every direction — more properties, more markets, more owners to answer to, more guests to delight.
The Before: A Fast-Growing Team, Systems That Couldn't Keep Up
A capable team that had outgrown its tooling — not a team failing, but genuine structural complexity handled by hand:
- The work was getting done — manually, across platforms that didn't connect.
- Whenever a question arose, it meant opening one system after another: Hostaway for reservations, QuickBooks for accounting, Gusto for payroll, Intermedia for phone calls — then stitching answers together by hand.
- Reporting meant logging into each system, pulling CSVs, and rebuilding the same deck every week. Fifty-two times per year.
- The real cost of silos: a refund promised to a guest in a message but never reconciled against the money side; a missed call no one circled back on; a listing slipping in reviews before anyone caught it.
- Leadership without a reliable weekly read on the numbers that mattered.
StayStack's Impact in Practice: Three Workflows
Workflow 1 — The Daily Guest Experience Report That Just Runs
"With one tool that can see across all these systems that don't talk to each other, we now catch things we'd never find otherwise."
- What it looks like: An automated daily digest posts to Slack on its own each morning, listing which in-house guests have an open issue that still needs action.
- Real example: The customer service team promised a guest a $100 refund in a message, but the actual refund never processed. StayStack flagged it; a manager handled it before it soured the review.
- Why it's different: A traditional ticketing queue would miss this — it cannot connect what was said to a guest with what actually happened to the money.
- Outcome: Commitments stop slipping between systems, and reporting happens whether or not Maria is in the office. About 30 guest issues a week — 8 or 9 every morning — surfaced while the guest is still in-house.
Workflow 2 — The Turnover Math the Business Never Had
"I wasn't tracking any of this before StayStack. Without it, I'd be getting into each platform and pulling all those CSV files. It's just not practical without AI."
Wages per checkout
| Property type | Wages | Housekeeping time |
|---|---|---|
| Motels | $30 | about an hour |
| Average | $45 | 1.8 hours |
| Largest inn | $130 | three hours |
- What it looks like: Every Friday, StayStack pulls checkouts across all properties and Maria calculates recommended housekeeping hours per unit. Every Monday, she pulls actual checkouts, the revenue they brought in, and Gusto payroll hours worked — to calculate cost per checkout and time per checkout for every property.
- Who it helps: Teams get a clear target to work toward; Maria gets the full analysis without logging into multiple data systems; property owners can finally see what a turnover actually costs.
- Outcome: A number the business never had before, now driving a real operational target: about 1.8 housekeeping hours and $45 in wages per checkout (roughly $70 fully loaded) — from about an hour and $30 at the motels to three hours and $130 at the largest inn.
Workflow 3 — Visibility Into What Happens on the Phone
"Now we can see how many calls we handled, the busiest hours, and the callers we never reached back — the ones we'd have just lost before."
- What it looks like: A weekly call report — inbound volume, busiest days and hours, missed callers who didn't get a call back. Maria refined it over several rounds until the definitions were right, then scheduled it to post to Slack every Monday morning.
- Outcome: The team now sees exactly who was never reached — about 16 callers a week, named by day and time — managers schedule better coverage; the team improves against a metric it couldn't even see before.
Why StayStack, and Not Just Any AI
"Most tools have their own AI now, but it only knows its own tool. Ask Hostaway's and you get Hostaway. Ask Ramp's and you get Ramp. StayStack reaches across all of them at once."
- Every other tool's AI is boxed inside its own data. StayStack keeps its own fast, current copy of all data across every system, so it can answer questions no single platform can — answered in ~15 seconds, right in Slack.
- The connective-tissue concept tying the three workflows together: one tool watching across systems that don't talk to each other.
Example cross-system questions now answerable in seconds:
- "Which houses are underbooked in October?"
- "What's the average cost of Internet service for our properties in Costa Rica?"
- "Are any of our Airbnb listings missing the tax information?"
"StayStack is how a small team sees everything a big company would. It's connected to all our systems, so we can see what's going on all around and know what needs attention for our owners and our guests."