Delisted in May. Accepted on Airbnb Luxe in July.
A Montréal property. The owners live six hours away. Same building, same quirks. A different operator. A different tier.
The owners came to us in June 2025. They already had a property manager, so the work was set up as a co-host arrangement: the manager ran the property, we ran the revenue and the listing. The first summer was fine.
Then it started to slip. The property had quirks, the kind every property has. The heating ran separately from the air conditioning. Guests who didn’t know that left cold or confused. They said so in reviews. Each quirk had a fix. None of the fixes got made.
Guest satisfaction fell. Refunds rose. To keep it booked, the price had to come down to match the category the reviews now put it in. Lower price, same problems, lower reviews. A trap.
In January 2026 a fraud booking did heavy damage to the property. The listing sat offline for six weeks. Not because the repairs took six weeks. Because nobody was running the recovery.
The insurance claim was recovered because the owners’ side built the record: police report, inventory, receipts, photographs. That work is the operator’s job. It fell to us.
By May 2026 the listing’s rating had fallen to 4.5 with multiple open quality issues. Airbnb delisted it. The manager resigned.
“There are two kinds of operator. One runs quick, standard turnovers. The other puts the cherry on with a pair of golden tweezers. This property needed the second.”
Jason Baxter, Founder, MarketicsThey let everyone go except us. Their reason was simple: they could see the difference between what we had done and what the manager had done.
The property didn’t change. What changed was the record, the welcome and the person running it.
Every quirk was written down and explained before arrival.
Every guest was treated as someone worth the trouble.
We vetted her ourselves. She had cleaned for another property, she was at home with her children and she wanted work that fit around them. She liked guests. That was the whole brief.
“You don’t replace a property manager with a revenue manager. You need both. What you can’t survive is the wrong one.”
Jason Baxter, Founder, MarketicsThe same quirk that drew refund requests on the standard listing stopped being a problem once the property was positioned and run as Luxe. The heating and the air conditioning were the same. The guest was not.
A guest who is told in advance and treated as worth the trouble reads a quirk as character. A guest who isn’t reads it as a defect.
In July 2026, weeks after relisting, the property was accepted on Airbnb Luxe.
The co-host has since built a business out of it. We’ve sent her more properties.
A listing’s real product is the record: what is written down, what is fixed, what the guest is told before they arrive. When that is done, positioning takes care of itself.
Results are property-specific; every property is audited before a target is set.
Jason Baxter · Operating since 2016 · Founder, Marketics
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