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Amit Bolds
The World's Most Amazing Vacation Rentals is a 2021 American Netflix series following three hosts as they travel the world visiting unique, budget, and luxury vacation properties. Netflix streamed two seasons of the series, the first of which premiered on June 18, 2021.[1]
Each episode, the show's three hosts, Jo Franco, Megan Batoon, and Luis D. Ortiz,[2] share their top choice for a vacation rental to spend a few nights in. Franco's expertise is "Travel", and her goal is to pick the most unique rentals in the world to visit. Ortiz has a background in New York real estate and chooses the best "Luxury" rentals to stay the night. Batoon loves DIY (Do It Yourself) projects and is tasked with taking the other hosts to the best options for "Budget" vacation rentals.[3]
The three hosts travel across the United States, as well as to spots in Mexico, Japan, Bali, and a number of other countries. Never staying at a hotel, they aim to uncover the best Airbnb and VRBO destinations.[4]
Among other notable rentals, they would feature such spots as the G Bar M Ranch, the 3,200-acre dude ranch in Clyde Park, Montana that opened in 1934 (in Season 1's "American Adventure" episode), the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Bernard Schwartz House in Two Rivers, Wisconsin as well as Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (both in Season 2's "Super Modern Stays" episode), the Futuro house in Joshua Tree (in Season 2's "Paranormal Places" episode), the Louise Harpman-built Casa Xixim in Tulum, Quintana Roo (in Season 2's "Eco Friendly" episode), and the remaining mill (which has been turned into a vacation rental) inside the Kingsley Grist Mill Historic District in Clarendon, Vermont (in Season 2's "On the Waterfront" episode).
While we love that the show puts things into context, we wish the travellers were a bit more critical in their reviews. That way, the show would be even more useful for property managers curating vacation rentals.
A single-season show on Netflix, Stay Here sees designer Genevieve Gorder and real estate expert Peter Lorimer take over the small screen to help vacation rental hosts boost their profit-turning businesses.
The show is fast-paced and engaging and sure to have you coming back for more. Genevieve and Peter are a real dynamic duo as they rip places apart and use their expertise to get the property up to par with industry standards and guest expectations.
Sense of Place is a great series for anyone with a deeper interest in vacation rentals, the sharing economy, global tourism trends and the way that different locations deal and benefit from the rise of vacation rentals. In this exclusive interview, Matt shares why his show is important for our industry.
And boy, did they deliver on that title. Throughout the eight-episode series, hosts Megan Batoon (the designer and travel newbie), Jo Franco (the experienced world traveler), and Luis D. Ortiz (the luxury NYC real estate guy you may recognize from Bravo) traveled around the world to 24 truly spectacular vacation rentals from caves to chalets to treehouses. The trio evaluate the properties themselves and the entire guest experience, which they do well to show are intricately intertwined.
On the surface, it's because Netflix pays a fixed fee to its suppliers for content, while Spotify has to pay music labels a percentage of their total revenue. This means as Netflix grows their subscriber base, they grow their profit margins, but as Spotify grows they just have to keep paying the record labels more and more.
This is also fairly well known. Netflix, when they first started, didn't have to cut any special deal with movie studios in order to exist. They could basically just buy DVDs and rent them to consumers over the internet. This gave them the ability to grow a user base and gain power before negotiating any special streaming deals. Spotify, on the other hand, had to cut deals before launching, which is a weak position!
My first thought was that maybe CD rentals never took off, because music is the kind of thing people want to consume repeatedly, unlike movies, so it makes less sense to rent. But then I learned that there was actually a booming CD rental business in Japan throughout the 80's and 90's!
"Let us turn for a moment to consider a dramatic demonstration of the consequences of record rentals: the Japanese experience. More than 1,600 record rental shops have opened in Japan since their first appearance there 3 years ago. Surveys indicate that in areas where rental shops appear, record sales by retail record stores have declined by 30 percent."
Surprisingly, in the same hearing that banned CD rentals in America, movie studio execs were also present. They were there to lobby for another bill that would ban VHS rentals. But their bill failed. Unlike the music rental industry, which was tiny, VHS rentals were a huge business by 1983. It was too late to stop it.
Fast forward to 2020, and now, because of all this, the record labels extract way more profit from Spotify than movie studios do from Netflix. The result? While Spotify is trying to figure out how to escape the grip of record labels by moving into podcasts, and Netflix has become a competitor to the very studios it used to buy DVDs from.
I thought of this the other day when my wife was trying to set up a community for one of her clients. What are the best options? Facebook groups? Google groups? Set up some forum software, like maybe Discourse? A Slack?
When Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded Netflix (formerly known as Kibble) in 1997, the company appeared to be little more than an upstart DVD rental business whose only real value proposition was the mail-order element of its operation. Fast forward two decades and Netflix has become one of the biggest TV and movie studios in the world, with more subscribers than all the cable TV channels in America combined. How did Netflix go from renting movies to making them in just 20 years?
Legend has it that Reed Hastings decided to start Netflix after returning a copy of Apollo 13 to his local Blockbuster. Upon returning the movie, Hastings was told that he owed $40 in late fees. Fearing what his wife would say about such a steep late fee and convinced there must a better way to rent movies, Hastings began to devise what would later become Netflix.
1999: Netflix announces its new subscription model. Introduced at an initial price point of $15.95, the subscription plan allows Netflix members to rent up to four movies at a time, with no return-by dates.
2000-2003: Netflix enjoys consistent growth. However, despite increases in both revenue and subscribers, Netflix is still operating at a loss. The company reports a loss of $4.5M in Q1 of 2002 alone. Much of this loss is the result of an increase in operational expenses over costs reported in 2001.
Even at a relatively high monthly price point, Netflix offered greater convenience and value in a (then) crowded space. It did this by eliminating two mainstays of all home entertainment business models, while simultaneously applying just enough restrictions on members to drive further growth. This allowed Netflix to not only score early wins with consumers (Keep rentals as long as you like! No late fees!), but also helped the company to further differentiate itself from the Blockbusters and the Hollywood Videos while increasing revenue.
The financial challenges that Netflix experienced from 2000-2003 meant that diversifying its service offerings was as much a business necessity as a response to external forces. The company was still several years away from debuting the streaming service we know today. However, behind the scenes, the company was already investing heavily in making Netflix a more personal, individualized experience by introducing recommendations powered by the CineMatch algorithm.
Netflix knew that its growth strategy was working. By making it easier for people to find and rent the movies they loved, the company had built a relatively small but growing subscriber base. Netflix knew it wanted to further expand its subscriber base through its DVD rental business before transitioning them to its online streaming service, even if nobody else saw what the company was doing. And, while its competitors remained focused on the short-term, Netflix was busy developing and investing in the technical resources the company would need to grow even further.
Consumer demand for streaming video was practically nonexistent. For one, streaming technologies in 2007 were terrible. Even the fastest broadband connections lacked the capacity to handle the bit rate of higher-resolution video, which meant overall video quality was poorer than DVD. When Netflix launched its streaming product, Watch Now was only compatible with computers running Windows and would only work in Internet Explorer after users downloaded an applet to make the video player work.
Rather than focus on improving delivery of physical DVDs, Netflix would reinvent entertainment delivery by providing its subscribers with instant access to thousands of titles that they could binge-watch on any device. While cable companies were preoccupied with traditional business models and quarterly revenue targets, Netflix was already looking a decade into the future and beyond.
This was the real risk for Netflix. Even though its core business was growing and performing strongly, Hastings decided to invest time, money, and capital building a streaming product when there was no consumer demand and few people thought the idea could even work. However, because hardly anybody thought it would work, even fewer companies actively pursued it. By the time everybody else caught on, Netflix had the best streaming technology, the largest library of titles, and the biggest subscriber base.
2008: Netflix announces it will stop DVD retail sales just one week after debuting Watch Now on Mac platforms. The announcement comes less than one month after Netflix announces its partnership with premium American cable TV network Starz, which gave Netflix subscribers access to more than 2,500 movies and TV shows.
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