Twohearts Calendar

Knowing the context.

A side-gig that started with renting out rooms to cover rent quickly expanded into a full-scale travel company called Christina’s. At its peak, the company had more than 450 full-timers across eight major cities throughout Vietnam.

Twohearts was built as an internal set of host tools to support this fast-growing operation, which included accommodation, tours, transportation, as well as restaurants and cafes.

“With Twohearts, we were able to grow our team to more than 450 people, expanded into 8 major cities, operating 4 off-lines of businesses, while maintaining 30 Superhost accounts with 91% 5-star reviews.”

— Thu Nguyen, Co-founder & CEO of Christina’s

Defining the problems.

Twohearts did not start out as a SaaS business. It was born out of necessity and built for internal use. 

As Christina’s grew its listings tenfold, logistics got more complex, routine tasks became tiring, and human errors proliferated across the business. The Airbnb app was no longer sufficient.

To make hosting enjoyable again, we needed a tool that was easy to use, collaborative, and – most importantly – put the guest experience first.

Understanding the users.

With up to 200 potential internal users across various business functions, a granular understanding of their needs was imperative. This meant a detailed comprehension of who would be using the product, how they would be using it, and for what purpose. 

The first step in this process was to identify and differentiate between low- and high-maintenance users. 

The former constituted a minority of the user base, and needed a minimal amount of functionality to complete their tasks. The latter group, however, required advanced features to achieve their goals. Following a detailed mapping of the user needs, it was determined that solving problems for the high-maintenance cohort would generate cascading benefits across the user spectrum.

Working on the solutions.

Automating the process of booking allocation

Since double-booking damages the guests’ experience, it was identified as the primary problem to tackle. We devised a complex algorithm to automatically allocate a room to a booked listing based on a set of criteria such as booking time, channel preference, and vacancy optimisation.

The interface was designed to reflect this function. In certain edge cases, the system was configured to notify the users in charge to override – or manually allocate – the room.

Outcome: This function reduced the team’s time spent on room allocation by 70%.

Task management

The next problem we solved involved task management. At Christina’s, room cleaning was done by our internal cleaning staff and the host team would always inspect every room before check-in.

A built-in task management system was created to help the team allocate and manage tasks to reduce human error. This involved managing major tasks like cleaning as well as minor aspects such as making sure that the A/C is on at 25°C degrees, 15 minutes prior to check-in.

Outcome: The new system helped Christina’s maintain a 4.9+ rating for cleanliness, with 100 cleaning staff across eight different cities.

Inventory and listing management

With more than 600 rooms in 50 different buildings across eight different cities, inventory management could get complicated.

A new feature was designed to make property onboarding easier and simplify the inventory management process. It allowed the users to select the channel and listings they wanted to publish the room on, and the APIs would handle the rest. (In addition, users could manage the listings across different channels directly from Twohearts.)

Outcome: Time spent on listing rooms across multiple channels reduced significantly and total room sales increased by 23% in the following month.

Team management

With a team of more than 250 hosts, having role-based access control is essential. The team management feature allowed for inviting new team members to create an account, adding members to a specific team, assigning roles, and enabling controlled access to specific properties.