How Host and Stay Cut Email Response Times by More Than 95%

Host and Stay specializes in holiday let management across the UK. The company helps property owners maximize their rental income while taking care of compliance, maintenance, and housekeeping needs through in-house teams.

Challenge

Host and Stay faced challenges in managing a high volume of daily vacation rental booking emails. The constant influx of guest inquiries, averaging around 700 emails a day, resulted in delayed response times and an inconsistent guest experience. Email felt like an endless treadmill for the team, with hundreds of messages piling up and causing a sense of paralysis.

Solution

Booking requests typically involve multiple email exchanges with guests, so one of the first workflows implemented by the Guest Services team was Emailgistics' Assign to Previous Owner feature. This automatically routed ongoing booking requests back to the original agent, allowing staff to respond more efficiently without having to review entire threads.

Performance reports gave the team valuable insights, helping management track response times and balance workloads. The dashboard and tagging tools also made it easy to monitor email activity and quickly find specific inquiries, driving greater efficiency across the team.

"You can see exactly where an email went, who did what with it, and use those insights to train somebody." Lindsay W., National Head of Customer Experience

Emailgistics transformed Host and Stay's email management, enabling the Guest Services team to handle high volumes of emails, improve response times, and increase productivity.

Benefits

Improved Response Time

Before Emailgistics, the average reply time to guests was over 48 hours. Since implementation, that has been reduced to 2 hours. "That improvement in reply time speaks for itself; it's great," Lindsay noted. Routing emails back to the same agent means faster responses, as agents already know the context and history of each booking. Faster replies also eliminated guests sending follow-up messages, reducing the team's overall workload.

Enhanced Team Productivity

With Emailgistics, agents no longer worry about managing an entire inbox, allowing them to focus on a narrow set of tasks and client requests. Each team member has an email workload limit so their attention isn't stretched too thin. By dividing the high volume into smaller, manageable sets of tasks, the team immediately saw improved morale — eliminating the overwhelming feeling of working through an inbox with hundreds of messages.

Detailed Insights for Management

Detailed reporting capabilities track email assignments and response times, making it easier for managers to identify performance issues and process bottlenecks. This visibility enables data-driven decisions to optimize team operations. The dashboard provides an at-a-glance overview of email activity, helping leadership allocate resources to ensure prompt attention to critical issues.