Vacation Rental Success

High occupancy is not the same as a healthy business. That's the thread running through this conversation with Sarah Stahl, VP of Marketing at Lake.com and founder of short-term rental marketing consultancy Market Movers. Sarah has spent the last seven years watching operators fill their calendars while quietly losing ground on margins, guest relationships, and long-term resilience - and she's done being polite about it. In this episode, Heather and Sarah cover the real cost of OTA dependency, the origins of Sarah's marketing philosophy through her unusual route into the industry via the US Army and rural tourism management, and the thinking behind Lake.com's newly launched subscription model. They also get into a question that's easy to avoid but important to ask: when platforms step back from the booking relationship, who holds hosts accountable? Sarah's answer is more considered than you might expect. The conversation closes with a candid exchange on AI - Sarah's evolving relationship with Claude and ChatG