Values-First Hospitality Meets Software Efficiency
In approaching the 13th edition of the Vacation Rental World Summit, we’re releasing a series of interviews to leaders, key players and highly motivated people in our industry whose companies make a deep impact in our space and will be present at VRWS.
The aim is to get you some insight into these leaders and the company they founded, manage or work for, as well as getting some behind the scenes on their thinking, their motivation and their drive.
TOIVO HALVORSEN
What from that early survival-mode period still shows up in how you run Dharma today?
I think it taught me to be extremely practical and resourceful. I still tend to look at problems from the ground up—what actually needs to get done, what creates value for the customer, and how we can make something work with the resources we have rather than waiting for perfect conditions
How do you reconcile high-touch, values-first hospitality with the efficiency-driven nature of software?
I don’t really see them as opposites. Technology should remove repetitive work and operational friction so people have more time to provide better hospitality. In fact, our current direction increasingly combines technology with actual operational services rather than assuming software alone is the answer.
What told you Dharma’s operational knowledge was something other operators would pay for?
We kept seeing other operators struggle with exactly the same problems we had spent years solving ourselves—guest communication, housekeeping, maintenance, coordination, and managing distributed operations. At the same time, we realized we were operating better than many others. I think that came from being extremely thorough, building proper workflows, and taking operations very seriously from the beginning. We also invested early in building technology internally to support our operations. From that came the original vision for the Dharma Operations Platform: a system that could support hospitality operations remotely and do it well, even without a traditional front desk. Once we saw these challenges were common across the industry, it became clear that the combination of our operational know-how, workflows, and technology could become a product for other operators, not just an internal competitive advantage.
What will translate to Latin America, and what probably won’t?
The fundamentals translate very well: distributed teams, remote oversight, standardization, guest communication, and the need to know what is actually happening at every property. What won’t translate automatically are local labor practices, culture, customer expectations, regulation, and the way business relationships work—so we have to adapt the operating model locally rather than simply exporting the U.S. version.
You’ll have the opportunity to meet Toivo directly at VRWS in Lyon
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