VRS670 - When Hospitality Leads and Tech Follows

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Sab Mulligan came into the short-term rental industry from a decade in media production and another in tech education, and she arrived with a beginner's mind that turned out to be an advantage. 

What she noticed in those early industry conversations wasn't the passion for hospitality she'd expected. It was burnout, worn almost as a badge of honour. People competing over who'd taken the most 3am calls. She found that troubling, and it drove the approach she'd go on to build at Zzzing, a fast-growing property management company based in Malta.

Three and a half years later, Zzzing has grown from 50 properties to 650, and their AI agent Zoe handles 90% of all guest communications across the portfolio. But what makes this conversation interesting isn't the scale or the technology. It's the philosophy behind it: that tech should be silent, and hospitality should be loud. That AI doesn't replace the human side of this business, rather it gives people more time and energy to deliver it.

Sab and I talked about her TRT framework for designing AI policies, the seven guest moments that anchor everything Zzzing does, how they handled team resistance to AI adoption, and what she'd say to property managers still watching from the sidelines.

Key Takeaways

•  Tech should be silent, hospitality should be loud. The goal of AI in guest communication isn't to replace the host's voice.  It’s there to deliver that voice consistently, at any hour, across every conversation.

•  AI amplifies what you already have in place. If your policies aren't documented, AI won't fix that. It will amplify the mess. Getting your foundations right before deploying AI isn't a delay,it's the work.

•  Sab's TRT framework makes policy design accessible. Trigger (what initiates this communication), Reaction (how you would genuinely respond), Tone (the warmth, the friendliness, the examples), and Guardrails (when does the AI stop and hand to a human).

•  The seven guest moments give you a map. Discovery, booking, arrival, access, during-stay, checkout, and come-back. Everything you need from AI slots into one of those seven buckets.

•  Humanising the AI agent internally matters as much as externally. Naming Zoe and giving her a clear job description helped Zzzing's team understand where the AI started and stopped, which reduced resistance significantly.

•  Test your own policies. Don't experiment on real guests. Make a test booking and run your AI through every scenario every few days. You are in the driver's seat and AI isn't taking over.

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📣 The AI Ambassador Program

This episode is also brought to you in part by our AI Ambassador Program. If you're curious about using AI in your business - whether it's for guest communication, operations, or even marketing - check out our AI Ambassador Program. It's designed to help you learn, lead, and get hands-on with the tools shaping the future of hospitality.

🌐 Learn more and join us at VacationRentalFormula.com/AI

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https://www.vacationrentalformula.com/podcast/VRS670