‘We are the opposite of Airbnb’. Max Aniort, luxury villa rental with Le Collectionnist

There is such a thing as a €2.5 million holiday rental. Which French champion, European leader in its sector, presents itself as the opposite of Airbnb and is not about to be bought by Accor? The Collectionist. Given that the number of millionaires in the world is rising sharply, the company seems to be positioned in a buoyant market: Highstay, Homanie, Iconic House… are just some of the other companies launched in similar niches. With a global market worth $25 billion, it’s sure to attract a lot of interest.

Max Aniort and his 300-strong team try to satisfy the ultimate desires of 5,000 customers a year who, with Le Collectionist, want to enjoy a holiday experience that lives up to their expectations. But what are they? How can we ensure that we have the finest villas and chalets?

Interview* with the CEO of one of France’s profitable tourism champions, who is now the sole director of the company, which was originally set up with Eliott Cohen-Skalli and Olivier Cahané.

Max Aniort, The Collectionist © Edouard Jacquinet

Have customer and traveller experience standards changed in your market in ten years?
We’re not the start-up we were ten years ago, and thanks to the 5,000 customers we welcome every year and the fact that we listen to their expectations, we’ve managed to classify them into more or less homogeneous categories. The first of these is what we call affordable luxury and does not correspond to the most demanding category. Last year, for example, we secured a €2.5 million rental for one of our clients. These were English clients who rented a châlet for several months. In this type of case, the service component is obviously significant.

Do you get orders like this very often?
We’d like to think so, but it’s still exceptional, even though we often hire out properties worth more than a million euros.

What motivated the creation of the company, the initial project?
(..) It was pure market opportunity, Airbnb was booming in 2014, offering travellers affordable accommodation solutions. We felt that there was a vertical to be made in the luxury property sector, with the aim of filling this gap by offering top-of-the-range properties for short-term rental and providing a luxurious, bespoke experience. This only existed in small local agencies and was very restrictive from a geographical point of view. There were no platforms covering several destinations and committed to a good customer experience on both sides, owner and tenant.

We are the opposite of Airbnb. With us, the two parties never talk to each other; we are the interface for everything (…)

How do you select the villas you offer for rent?
(…) To find the most exceptional properties, we adopt a two-pronged strategy. Although we are constantly on the lookout for extraordinary properties, we are also very selective in our choices, accepting only 5% of the homes that are offered directly to us. We apply very rigorous criteria to ensure that we choose only the best homes in terms of performance and character. Our regional offices allow us to immerse ourselves in the local life of our destinations and to establish privileged relationships with the owners, while helping us to discover remarkable properties through word of mouth. Every year, 300 villas or chalets are added to our catalogue (…)

Some customers complain on Trustpilot or Google MyBusiness about non-compliant services and sometimes use very harsh language. Are you obsessed by this, and how can you avoid it?
Our business is a service business and there can be mistakes, more or less objective. The important thing is the ratio of dissatisfied customers to the number of customers served and welcomed.
In such cases, we try to react as quickly as possible, during the stay, when dissatisfaction or misunderstanding arises. This is the role of the local managers, bearing in mind that there is an in-house after-sales service, available until 10pm and from 7am in the morning, 7 days a week.
As I said earlier, the important thing is to clearly define the customer’s needs and expectations from the outset. Customer knowledge is therefore an essential subject. As soon as the prospect arrives on our website or platform, we get in touch with them to define their expectations and the context of their request.
We have also learned that certain moments in the customer experience can be critical, such as when the deposit is cashed, and the damage review at the end of the stay. If we retain this option, we need to be sure that we have reached a good understanding beforehand, with regard to the inventory of fixtures on arrival and departure. Especially as the deposit amounts are significant.
Listening to the customer’s voice and expectations starts with the request, the order, during the stay and continues afterwards. We systematically call all our customers to gather their views and measure the NPS. Internally, Slack allows us to share all this information.

Some houses from The Collectionist

Is there an internal Customer Experience department?
No, because this is everybody’s business, but there is a quality department.

Consumers are increasingly reluctant to pick up the phone, as they are difficult to reach. How do you go about this? How and with what type of tools do you manage your CRM?
Contact by telephone is essential, and WhatsApp has become a standard. We use it almost systematically, with the agreement of our customer.
We use Hubspot, which is functional and less expensive than Salesforce and Slack for sharing information that is useful to everyone in-house.

How far does the concierge service go?
(…) We are first and foremost a serviced holiday rental brand. From the outset, there has been a real curation, an inspection – with the pluses and minuses of each property – including geographical ones. The idea from the outset was to offer a good portfolio of homes. The concierge service wasn’t introduced until two years after the company was founded. We then set up a real service. Today, unsurprisingly, the most popular services are home chef, boat hire and ski instructor. In Verbier (Switzerland), the concierge is also a ski instructor! This service is included for the first two days of hire. The service is very sophisticated, from tables that are impossible to reserve in a restaurant that doesn’t answer the phone, to a private beach in Saint Tropez that turns people away. But we can also organise small weddings, parties, or bring in a world champion mixologist… (..)

Where do you draw the line in terms of the services that can be requested and provided?
You can do and provide anything as long as it’s legal. The second limit is that service must not become servitude.

Accor bought John Paul, a concierge service provider, years ago. Could you one day be bought by Accor?
There are no plans to do so, although I do have fruitful discussions with Sébastien Bazin, the group’s CEO. We’re more in the process of developing through acquisitions. That seems to me to be the best way of moving fast and keeping up with our standards.

Nb: Near Annecy, for example, where the company has one of its three offices in France, along with Marseille, Vallat Immobilier’s business was acquired.

Saint-Tropez, Ibiza, Méribel and Tuscany are the most popular destinations (…) Our travellers always go to and ask for the same destinations: Courchevel, Méribel, Val d’Isère, Sardinia, Saint-Tropez, Ibiza, Tuscany… What’s important for them is the community effect and finding the groups they interact with the rest of the year. We don’t really have any off-the-beaten-track destinations, although we are seeing a growing interest in more confidential places, such as Umbria or Istria. Once again, these are mainly cycles of well-known destinations.

Every conversation is a penalty.
(The 100 VIPs or customer experience and journey specialists in France / The importance of the telephone call and the conversation)

As in the sale of luxury or collector’s cars, or in events, the appropriate use of the telephone or WhatsApp is essential: there’s nothing like a conversation to find out and determine the expectations of a prospect, a candidate or a dissatisfied customer. This explains the theme chosen for the 12th ECTFF, the Customer Experience Forum, which kicks off on 23/09 at the Hermitage Barrière in La Baule.

The organisers have invited Anne Rigail, from Air France, Damien Nuyttens (Edenred), Max Aniort, Michel Faul, the most followed French guide on social networks, Guerlain Chicherit (Les Etincelles), Jérôme Bourdenet who runs a rather special monastery in Rochefort du Gard, near a sanctuary. ‘We’ve drawn up a list of one hundred people or CEOs in France in whose business customer journeys and customer knowledge are at the heart of the customer, patient and passenger experience. And who are either ahead of the game on these subjects, or are researching them. And 3 start-ups, as every year. We invited them all, using a procedure as old as the hills: we sent out an invitation card and then made a Top Call. It’s an exciting and instructive process,’ says Manuel Jacquinet, the Forum’s organiser.

Worth knowing:
The company frequently works with film producers looking for specific locations.
What’s new: The Collectionist has developed a villa sales business.

A few figures
– In 2024, the platform will list 3,000 addresses. 300 properties will be removed from the catalogue each year because they do not meet the required standards. By the end of 2022, for the first time, the 100 million mark in sales volume would have been reached.
– The stated objective is to achieve €500 million by 2026.
– The company has been profitable since 2020, and reportedly has one of the highest average shopping baskets on the market (€30,000 for an average ten-day stay).
– The average basket of concierge services per stay is €5,000.
– 30% of customers are regulars.
– The company employs 300 permanent staff and recruits over 300 fixed-term or freelance staff on 6-month contracts every summer.
– The luxury villa rental market is estimated to be worth 25 billion dollars a year.

Who is Max Aniort?
Originally from the Brittany coast and descended from a long line of travellers, Max Aniort spent a large part of his childhood abroad, notably in Saudi Arabia and Greece.

*Some of the quotes, those in italics, are taken from an interview Max Aniort gave to Le Figaro in April this year.