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Company: SaffronStays
Year: 2023
Hospitality
B2B
Mobile
Overview
SaffronStays is a premium villa rental company operating across India. Their promise to guests is simple: a private, well-managed stay that feels like home. Delivering on that promise depends heavily on one group of people, the villa owners.
By 2023, SaffronStays had grown significantly. Hundreds of homeowners were listing their properties on the platform, each one tracking bookings, monitoring earnings, and managing guest reviews across fragmented channels. Phone calls to operations teams. Manual reports. Spreadsheets shared over WhatsApp.
The company needed to give homeowners a single place to see everything. I was brought in to design that product from scratch.
Problem
Homeowners had no centralised way to manage their villa business. Earnings data lived in one place, booking information in another, and guest reviews came through separately. Getting a clear picture required chasing multiple sources, which created friction, confusion, and unnecessary support load on the internal operations team.
The deeper problem was trust. When homeowners could not clearly see their earnings or understand how their property was performing, they began calling the ops team for answers. That was not scalable, and it was not a great experience for either side.
The goal was straightforward: give homeowners one place to see everything, understand their performance, and feel confident about their property without needing to call anyone.
User and their pain points
Primary user: The Villa Owner
Meet Amit. He owns one or two properties listed on SaffronStays. He is not a full-time hospitality operator. Managing his villa is a side business, so he checks in on it between other commitments. He is comfortable with smartphones but not with complex dashboards.
What he needed:
- A quick snapshot of his earnings without digging
- Clarity on which bookings are upcoming, completed, or pending
- Visibility into what guests are saying about his property
- Confidence that every rupee is accounted for
What he was dealing with:
- Complex financial reports he could not easily parse
- No single place to see bookings and revenue together
- No visibility into guest feedback without asking ops
- Uncertainty around payout timelines and deductions
The underlying theme across all pain points was the same: lack of clarity created anxiety. And anxiety created support tickets.