VRWS Leadership Interview of the Day

1. You joined Beyond as Managing Director EMEA and have since become CRO, a journey that mirrors Beyond’s own evolution from a dynamic pricing tool to a full revenue management platform. How has the commercial strategy had to change as the product expanded in scope, and what does selling revenue management mean today compared to three years ago?

Three years ago, selling revenue management often meant selling a smarter price. Today it means helping operators think across every lever that drives bookings and protects margin: listing quality and perception, marketing and distribution strategy, promotions and markdowns, channel mix, and yes, pricing too. That shift has made our commercial conversations far more consultative. We’re not just demonstrating an algorithm anymore, we’re sitting with operators to map out where they’re leaving revenue on the table across their whole operation.

The bigger change, though, is who needs this. Revenue management used to be something only the largest property management companies had the resources to do well. In this economic climate, with margins tighter and guest expectations higher, every operator, from the five-listing host to the thousand-unit portfolio, has to get sharper about how they price, market, and manage their business. That’s not a luxury anymore, it’s survival. My own path, from leading our European business to CRO, has tracked that exact shift: the conversation got bigger because the stakes got bigger for everyone we serve.

2. Beyond recently launched Neyoba, the first AI-powered natural language assistant embedded in an RMS for short-term rentals. As CRO, how do you think about AI as a revenue driver for Beyond itself and where are you seeing it genuinely change how operators engage with the platform?

AI is a revenue driver for us in two ways, and I think about both constantly. There’s AI inside the platform that makes our pricing and market intelligence sharper, the kind of thing that’s been core to Beyond’s algorithm since the beginning. And then there’s AI that changes how operators actually use the platform day to day, which is what excites me most about Neyoba.

Within six months of launch, Neyoba had more than 15,000 hosts and property managers in nearly 50,000 conversations with it. What’s telling isn’t the volume, it’s what those conversations replaced. Things like reviewing nightly rates, checking booking pace, or auditing competitor pricing used to take operators two or three hours of digging through dashboards. Now they ask a question in plain language and get an answer in minutes. Across our customer base, that’s already added up to more than 100,000 hours handed back to revenue managers.

That’s the real shift I’m watching as CRO. AI as a revenue driver isn’t just about Beyond pricing listings more effectively, it’s about freeing our customers’ time so they can spend it on strategy and owner relationships instead of manual analysis. The operators who lean into that fastest are the ones pulling ahead of the market right now.

3. Your career runs from mobile marketing at EE to programmatic advertising, Google, and AI-driven MarTech before landing in STR. What has that background in disruptive technology cycles taught you about timing knowing when an industry is ready for a shift versus when it is still too early?

Every industry I’ve worked in, mobile marketing, programmatic, search, AI-powered creative, went through the same arc: a period where the technology was real but the market wasn’t ready, followed by a much shorter window where everyone needed to move at once. The skill isn’t spotting the technology, that part is usually obvious. It’s reading whether the buyer is ready, whether the operational pain is acute enough that people will actually change behavior to solve it.

Programmatic advertising is a good example. The technology worked years before most brands trusted it enough to shift real budget into it. What changed wasn’t the tech, it was that media buyers finally felt enough pain managing inventory manually that automation stopped being optional. I saw the same pattern with AI-driven personalization in MarTech: plenty of hype before the pain point caught up to the promise.

Coming into STR, I look for that same signal. Short-term rental operators are feeling real pain right now, tighter margins, more channels to manage, more complexity per listing, and that’s exactly the condition that makes a market ready for AI to genuinely change how people work. That’s why I’m confident this is the right moment for tools like Neyoba, rather than just another moment to launch one.

4. Beyond operates in a market where other players are all expanding aggressively into broader revenue tools. As CRO, how do you think about differentiation when the feature sets are converging?

Differentiation gets harder to talk about in a feature comparison and easier to talk about in outcomes. As more players expand into broader revenue tools, the feature lists will keep converging, that’s just what happens in a maturing category. What doesn’t converge as easily is the depth and quality of the data underneath those features, and how seamlessly the tools actually fit into an operator’s daily workflow rather than adding another tab to check.

So I spend less energy on what we’ve built and more on how well it actually gets used and how much it moves the needle for the operator running it. If a tool sits unused, doesn’t create real business value, or duplicates work, the feature set doesn’t matter. That’s where I think the real separation happens over the next few years. It’s not just about who ships a feature first, but who operators trust to make their business genuinely easier and more profitable to run.