CEO Spotlight: Eric Goldreyer of Savvy

Savvy

Eric Goldreyer has spent three decades in the travel industry, with a focus on short-term rentals as founder of BedandBreakfast.com back in 1995 and later co-founder of TurnKey Vacation Rentals.

Savvy offers bookings for short term rentals hosted by professionals minus service fees. The company also recently launched a price comparison tool through which it illustrates the savings a traveler can have by booking through Savvy instead of a platform like Airbnb.

Eric Goldreyer’s tenure in the travel industry has been lengthy. His career has spanned nearly three decades and includes being co-founder of TurnKey Vacation Rentals (acquired by Vacasa in 2021) and founder of BedandBreakfast.com (acquired by HomeAway in 2010). In 2022 he became owner of bnbfinder — a vacation rental booking platform founded in 1998 — and earlier this year he rebranded it to Savvy.

As the company moves into its next chapter, Goldreyer talked to PhocusWire about what motivates him as CEO, his ambitions for Savvy and the state of the vacation rental industry.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What motivates you to get up and go to work every day?

I think what gets me excited is creating something that allows people to create more experiences and memories and time together with friends and family …  and then also just sort of the thrill, the excitement of seeing an opportunity and bringing the team together and having the wherewithal to pull together a product or a service that the market needs and wants, and being successful in that.

From when I was in second grade and grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, my mom always joked that I was the kid that would collect seashells on the beach and then go door-to-door and sell the seashells to the neighbors. I've always had this sort of entrepreneurial spirit.

What are your greatest challenges as you embrace this entrepreneurial spirit and lead the company as CEO?

I think the biggest challenges are probably the same across a lot of companies. But first of all, it's finding a great team, because you're only as good as your people.

Fundraising, when you need to raise money is always a lot of work. But then I think it's just the decision making. 

Why was the rebrand needed as you look toward the future for Savvy?

Primarily it tells the market what we're about. We're not trying to be yet another online travel agency like Airbnb or Vrbo or Booking, with the same model and the same sort of functionality. We're telling the world that, "Hey, we're the place for savvy travelers to go and savvy property managers to go." I mean, if you're a traveler and you truly are savvy, no pun intended, you're not booking vacation rentals often on the big platforms because of the excessive fees that they charge.

What we're doing is coming out with a new vacation rental platform that gives travelers the ability to book professionally hosted vacation rentals, so not for rent by owner. We give travelers peace of mind, knowing that the property, if they find it on our site, it's professionally managed. And secondly, we don't have the service fees.

What is your biggest goal for Savvy?

Before we rebranded, we were bnbfinder. That business was started last century: 1998 was when bnbfinder was started, and it's been a great business. It was targeted to the bed and breakfast industry, not the Airbnb or vacation rental industry. One of the things we wanted to do with the rebrand was get away from that quaint, old, sort of doily brand and bring a new brand for the new travelers that are sort of tired of Airbnb. They're tired of Vrbo. They want the next thing, they want something better and they're looking for that.

I think what gets me excited is creating something that allows people to create more experiences and memories and time together with friends and family.

Eric Goldreyer, Savvy

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The talk already this year is about artificial intelligence agents, such as the recent launch of OpenAI's “Operator.” How do you think AI will impact the travel industry?

I think … we're going to see the adoption of AI a lot quicker than we saw the adoption of the web in general. When we went to our first conferences in the bed and breakfast space, innkeepers didn't know what the internet was, and it took seven years for innkeepers in general to be like, "Oh, okay, the internet is the way that we're going to get distribution."

[But] I don't think AI is going to happen overnight. There's a lot of people spending a lot of money that's going to get wasted. There's people spending money that's going to be useful.

We're just remaining open … we've got the newest platform in the industry. We don't have legacy code. We've literally just built this platform over the last several years. So we'll be open to AI. We'll connect to who we feel adds value. But I think in the in the meantime, whether that's two years, three years, four years, I think it will be a great alternative for people directly, and then over time, will be one of the ones that come up when you're looking on ChatGPT.

And what about impact specifically on the short-term rental space?

I don't have a crystal ball into what's going to happen. But I agree with a lot of what people are saying. And I think you'll have an agent, and you won't go to Google — and you may not go to Savvy or one of the other online travel agencies (OTAs) — you'll go to your agent, and it will go out and find the best deal for you based on what you're looking for. And so I think companies need to be prepared to integrate through APIs to those tools so they're in the game.

Can you be more specific about how you are integrating these new technologies at Savvy?

We are not integrating it today. We're keeping an eye on it. It's too early for us. We literally just launched our rebranded full OTA two weeks ago. So we're still adding things like more ratings and reviews and building more APIs to more property management software systems so more properties could take advantage of our distribution. So we're aware of it. We're paying attention to it. We have zero AI integration today.

Our plans are to pay attention and be reactive and to integrate it when we feel that we're not wasting time and energy with the team that we have chasing something. We're not going to lead the industry on AI adoption for the vacation rental industry.

There's been some consolidation in the vacation rental industry, how much more do you think is needed in the space?

Is it needed or is it going to happen? I'm not sure there's a lot that's needed. There are three major players currently, as OTAS. You've got Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking, I think [we] will be the fourth. I don't think that's too many. You've got different value props there.

I don't see some big, huge rush around consolidation right now, unless it's ultimately driven by where AI ends up over the next six, 12, 18 months.

You have extensive experience in the vacation rental space, how do you see the competitive environment evolving? 

I think you're going to have more supply, which means you're going to have more competition. I think you'll see brands develop and products and services continue to develop as more and more people continue to come into the industry.

We've got 500 listings on Savvy right now in Austin. I'm not sure what Airbnb has. Maybe 2,500, I don't know, but if you double that inventory over the next five years, or you add 50, 60% more inventory, that's material growth. So you're now just competing with more people, which means your property has to stand out. You need good ratings. You need good photography. You need to have, you know, whatever that unique feature is, is it a hot tub? Is it a pickleball court? Is it just location, location, location? 

What do you know now that you would tell your 25-year-old self?

Before I sold BedandBreakfast.com back in 2010 I would have told myself to leverage the fact that we had the leading platform in the space and had vacation rentals before selling it. We were in a very small segment of the industry. We could have very easily taken that platform and moved it into the vacation rental space.

And if you weren’t leading Savvy, what would you be doing?

I would be spending even more time with my family and friends, and I'd be out playing pickleball and I'd be out foiling on the water.