4 Vacation Rentals
10 Years Hosting Experience
Designing Guest Experience
Every hosting empire starts somewhere small. For Familie Buitenhuys, it started with a single, slightly worn-down holiday house in 2016, a set of tools, and an interior designer who couldn't stop thinking about what the space could become.
"It actually all started with one little holiday house in 2016," Marielle, founder of Familie Buitenhuys, recalls. "I'm an interior designer, and I love creating spaces, so I renovated the entire house myself and afterwards, decided to rent it out."
What happened next is a testament to what happens when you create genuinely, authentically, and from the heart. "It was the perfect match. Guests loved it, I loved creating it, and one house eventually became several Familie Buitenhuys houses."
The Journey
There was no five-year growth strategy, just passion and intuition. Familie Buitenhuys grew the way a garden grows: from the roots, season by season, decision by decision. After that first house proved the idea worked, they bought land and designed two more houses from scratch. Then came more properties, each one bought unfinished and reimagined from the ground up.
By the time the portfolio had multiplied, a philosophy had quietly taken shape behind every single renovation.
"Every house is different, but they all have the same idea behind them: creative, personal, happy spaces that don't feel like standard holiday rentals." Much of that comes down to the focus they put on guest experience.
Designing Guest Experience
Walk into a Familie Buitenhuys property, and you won't find a sterile, catalog-furnished interior. You'll find a shelf of well-loved books, jars of pasta and coffee beans sitting on the counter as if someone actually lives there, and toys tucked into a corner, ready for curious hands. The space feels like a home away from home, and that's exactly the point. These are houses the founder would genuinely want to stay in, and it shows in every detail.
"I want people to arrive and immediately feel that they're somewhere special," Marielle explains. "A place where families can slow down, a solo traveler can fully relax, and people can spend time together and make memories."
From Chaos to One Central System
As the property portfolio expanded, so did the operational complexity. Managing multiple holiday houses across several booking channels meant juggling separate calendars, direct bookings, guest communication, and availability updates, all without a centralized system.
"As we added more houses and booking channels, keeping track of everything became increasingly complicated. I urgently needed one central place to manage it all."
Since implementing Smoobu's vacation rental management software, day-to-day operations have become significantly easier to handle.
"It made running several holiday houses much more manageable, and it still does. I can see all reservations and availability in one place, bookings from different channels are synchronized, and a large part of our guest communication is automated. It saves me a lot of repetitive work and, more importantly, I know our guests always receive the right information at the right time."
Marielle's most-used Smoobu features for multi-property hosting:
- Channel Manager and central calendar: syncing availability across all booking platforms
- Automated guest communication: ensuring guests get the right information at the right time
- Direct booking management: handling bookings from their own website alongside OTA channels, all in one dashboard
For a growing vacation rental business managing properties across multiple channels and a direct booking website, the biggest advantage has been consolidation.
"The biggest advantage is having everything together. We rent out several houses through different channels as well as our own website, and Smoobu gives me one overview instead of having to manage every platform separately."
The impact extends beyond the booking calendar. Cleaning staff also benefit from the centralized system: "Our cleaning ladies are part of it too. They can see new bookings as soon as they come in, so they're always up to date. I never need to make separate cleaning schedules, which saves me a huge amount of time."
Marielle's advice to prospective hosts is simple: automate the boring stuff as soon as possible, because hosting involves a lot more admin than one might think. Looking ahead, Marielle wants to keep creating experiences that spark joy for guests and keep her own creativity alive.
Key Takeaways for Hosts
- You don't need a business plan to start; you need one property done well. Familie Buitenhuys grew from a single renovated holiday house with no five-year strategy. Momentum came from guests loving the experience, not from upfront scaling plans.
- Design and atmosphere are differentiators, not decorations. They're what give your property soul. Personal touches, real books, everyday items, and a lived-in feel all set a property apart from standard holiday rentals and directly shape the guest experience.
- Operational complexity creeps up quietly as you scale. What's manageable with one property (separate calendars, manual guest messages, ad hoc availability updates) becomes unsustainable once you're juggling several houses and multiple booking channels.
- Centralizing early prevents chaos later. A single system for reservations, availability, and guest communication, rather than managing each channel separately, is what made continued growth possible without drowning in repetitive admin.
- Automation isn't just for guest-facing tasks. Extending visibility to cleaning staff, so they're automatically notified of new bookings, removed an entire category of manual coordination work.
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