Onefinestay CEO Views Hyper Personalization as Next Stage of Luxury Rentals

A lot has happened in the year and seven months since AccorHotels announced its intent to acquire luxury alternative accommodations provider Onefinestay for $168 million. Since the acquisition, the founding CEO and his successor, another co-founder, left the company. The eight-year-old company, which had a little more than 2,500 listings in a handful of cities when AccorHotels bought it last year, now has more than 10,000 listings in 33 countries. That's because AccorHotels in July combined several of its rental brands under the Onefinestay umbrella. That move brought together Onefinestay Travel Keys, and Squarebreak under the leadership of new CEO Javier Cedillo-Espin, a longtime executive with AccorHotels and Starwood. Most previously, he served as AccorHotels global integration officer following AccorHotels' acquisition of Fairmont Raffles Hotels, so Cedillo-Espin clearly has experience bringing acquired brands into the AccorHotels family. Skift sat down with Cedillo-Espin when he visited New York earlier this month to ask him about his plans as the new CEO. Here's what he had to say about the future of Onefinestay and alternative accommodations. Why AccorHotels Combined Everything Under onefinestay According to Cedillo-Espin, the primary reason why all three brands were combined was to give consumers more choice in luxury vacation rentals and private home rentals. "Why did we merge? Why are we doing this? Really, we're doing it because we saw the success of luxury private rentals," Cedillo-Espin said. "We asked our customers what could get you to come back. They told us: 'Give us more destinations.' Over time, we've been able to collect that feedback and be able to understand more of the destinations that we could be in. That's really where we're focused. We're focused on now being able to deliver that 180 destinations around the world. It's a lot, but at the same time the space is big. The space is so big, and you know very well, this is an amazing space for us to be playing in. We see this with optimism, absolutely." Using the Onefinestay name made sense, primarily because of the "maturity of the brand," he said. However, it should be noted that Travel Keys has been in business for 25 years. Squarebreak debuted in 2013, and Onefinestay launched in 2009. "Onefinestay truly has a lovely brand promise. There was definitely much more maturity of the brand," Cedillo-Espin said. "It was a merger of strengths. Squarebreak was much sm