Twohearts — for hosts, by hosts.
Empowering professionals to be AMAZING hosts.
Introduction to Twohearts
Twohearts is a fully-integrated property management software (PMS) that empowers professional hosts to save time, reduce costs, and increase revenues in order to provide the best experiences to their guests.
Twohearts integrates communication (unified inbox), distribution (multi-calendar), operations (task management), and recommendations (customizable itinerary) all in a single workflow.
Yes, that’s a lot of stuff. So before we get into more details, perhaps it will help to know how this all started.
How it all started?
On a normal Friday afternoon, a guy decided to quit his job because he felt that he needed to do something different. In that “oh shit!” moment, right after sending in his resignation letter, this same guy scrambled to figure out how to maintain the life that he had. Does that sound familiar?
In 2014, that’s exactly how I became a host on Airbnb, quitting my finance job and renting out two rooms to travelers to cover my own rent. This side gig quickly expanded into a full-scale travel company called Christina’s, with over 450 full-timers across 8 major cities throughout Vietnam.
Twohearts was built as an internal set of host tools to support this fast-growing operation, which includes accommodation, tours, restaurants & cafes, and transportation.
What makes Twohearts different?
Unlike the typical Software as a Service (SaaS), Twohearts did not start out as a business. Twohearts was built for internal use and out of necessity.
When we grew our listings from 2 to 18, everything changed. The simple Airbnb app was no longer sufficient. The sporadic guest messages became constant. Instead of showing guests around town, I was glued to my laptop. Check-ins were becoming routine and tiring. When our team stepped in to help, we ended up with double messages and eventually double bookings as we tried to “optimize” our occupancy. You know the story…
In an effort to make hosting enjoyable again, we needed a tool that is mobile-first, built for collaboration, and most importantly, putting guest experience above everything. Instead of taking people out of the process, like a lot of softwares proudly claim to do, Twohearts makes it easier for our hosts to connect with guests — and we have the results to show for it.
We believe that host tools should be mobile, easy to use, transparent, fully-integrated, and most importantly, empowering hosts to deliver better experiences.
With Twohearts, we were able to grow our team to more than 450 people, expanded into 8 major cities, operating 4 off-lines of businesses, while maintaining 30 Superhost accounts with 91% 5-star reviews. Christina’s is also ranked as the #1 Bed & Breakfast in Ho Chi Minh City as well as in Da Nang.
Twohearts Inbox
If you’ve read this far, then you understand how important communication is for a good guest experience. At Christina’s, we believe that good guest experiences can only come from good team experiences…and effective communication is the key to both.
Our Inbox integrates Airbnb, traditional Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), Messaging Apps, and email into one message thread. Not only that, we added an Internal Note feature to ensure that important information related to our guests will be visible and tag-able to anyone who is granted access to that thread. With our Got/Take-Over feature, we eliminated double messaging altogether while providing complete transparency to our team as to who sent which messages to our guests, and when. If there’s a feature that you need, chances are, we have built them.
And the best part of about our Inbox is that it is fully integrated with our Multi-Calendar. What this means is that all the information you need to respond to your guest is either visibly available or just a quick swipe away.
Task Management
Many of you may have already outsourced cleaning to an external company. However, at Christina’s, we do 100% of our cleanings in-house and we even provide additional cleanings during stay. Allocating daily tasks for a team of close to 100 Chis (cleaning sisters) across 8 different cities in 50 different buildings would be an impossible task if it weren’t for Twohearts, especially if we were to maintain our 4.9+ ratings for cleanliness.
By integrating Task Management into Twohearts, we not only save time for our hosts, but we also make it easier for our Chis to manage their schedule.
Calendar with Official Airbnb API Integration
As a professional host, you need to fill rooms and maximize revenues in order to grow your business. If you haven’t already, you will eventually list your properties on multiple platforms. Besides increasing occupancy and maximizing revenues, listing on multiple platforms diversifies your traffic so that you are not beholden to any single platform and the seasonality that comes with each.
Currently, Christina’s is listed on Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway, Expedia, as well as on our website. While you do not need to list on every OTA out there, we do recommend that you consider listing on at least one channel in addition to Airbnb just in case.
While listing your properties on an additional channel is easy and the benefits are clear, managing multiple distribution channels can become a challenge. If not handled properly, double bookings, missed messages, and inconsistent pricing can negatively affect your revenues, team morale, and guest experiences. This is why hotels are willing to pay as much as USD9/key per month for a Channel Manager to simplify the process. Twohearts has a channel manager built into our Calendar.
Not only does our Calendar connect with Airbnb and other OTAs, it also integrates seamlessly with our Inbox, which is not included in any Channel Management software prices. With this seamless integration, there is no more switching back and forth from one app to another. Information continuity is a host right!
And guess what? Our Calendar is so fast you will wonder what happened to all the other “cutting edge” multi-calendars out there. Feel free to put us up for a speed test!
Revenue-Generating, Customizable Itinerary
Being a professional host means hosting is your business and a good business needs to grow. You can either grow by adding more listings, or you can grow by providing additional services, such as airport transfers, welcome baskets, and booking services.
At Christina’s, every single guest is provided a customizable Itinerary link with their check-in details and local recommendations at a click of the button. Not only does it save our hosts from hours of back and forth messaging, it also prepares our guests ahead of time for a smooth arrival. Depending on your location, commission revenues from these recommendations can also become a significant source of ancillary revenues.
Our Fair-Pricing Philosophy
Since our mission is to empower professional hosts to be amazing hosts, we wanted to make sure that Twohearts is as affordable as possible, and still generates enough profit to reinvest into making it better over time. Therefore, we asked ourselves how much we would be willing to pay for this tool had we not built it in-house. Our answer is definitely not 3–5% of our revenues.
For hosts getting started with 1 to 3 listings, our tools are available for FREE. Why? Because the marginal costs to us is relatively low and we would like to provide these hosts with the best chances to succeed. Yes, that is all there is to it. No tricks or hidden fees.
For hosts with 4 listings or more, we will start charging — yes, we have to charge you. However, our goal is to balance between charging enough to be profitable while making sure it’s not prohibitive to the hosts.
Why are we doing all of this?
At Christina’s, we believe in empowering people to do what they love, working for themselves, and making the world a better place. Therefore, Twohearts aims to provide professionals with the tools necessary to run their business effectively so that they can focus on being amazing hosts to their guests.
See our hosting philosophy.
