When Ashley Ching and her family of six started vacationing in privately owned rental properties instead of hotel chains, she noticed that vacation rentals often didn’t always measure up to their online marketing images.

“You see the pictures online, you like the location, but oftentimes we show up to terrible beds and missing pots and pans,” she says.

Ashley Ching, founder and CEO, Inhaven

Ching, a veteran of product sourcing, merchandising and ecommerce, figured there must be a better way to manage the growing U.S. vacation rental business, which, according to research firm AirDNA, totals approximately 1.5 million rental units in the U.S. market.

In September 2022, she founded and became CEO of Inhaven, an online B2B company she launched to raise the operational standards of the short-term vacation rental industry. Ching brought to Inhaven her experience in product sourcing, merchandising and managing brand standards at Tiffany & Co. and in ecommerce at The Home Depot housewares brand The Company Store.

Inhaven deployed a customized a B2B ecommerce site at Inhaven.com on the BigCommerce platform, which it designed to make it easier for property managers and their buyers in the complex vacation rental industry to find and purchase quality products ranging from beds, linens and pillows to bathroom supplies, kitchen utensils and tableware.

Inhaven also has deployed the Zoho CRM application to manage things such as customer application forms and Klaviyo for email marketing.

One of Inhaven’s primary goals is also to establish product standards among the thousands of vacation rental property management companies, who handle about 40% of the U.S. vacation rental market of 1.5 million units, Ching says.

“The challenge that we have in the vacation rental industry today is that there are 25,000 property management companies … 25,000 companies doing things in different ways.”

She asserts that, just as the hospitality industry set higher bed standards decades ago for economy as well luxury hotels, the vacation rental industry needs to follow suit.

Working with suppliers to furnish “Masterpieces”

Ching says Inhaven works with suppliers to provide products that meet quality standards in four levels, from basic (or “Canvas”) to high-end (or “Masterpiece”). It organizes them with images, pricing and other product details on Inhaven.com to simplify how buyers can choose the ones that fit their market and pricing strategy. Buyers for property managers can see which products meet their companies’ purchasing policies.

Inhaven.com has API connections to suppliers to update product details in real time and forward custom orders to vendors for drop-shipping. It works with about 200 brands, including Gibson Home and Martha Stewart.

Ching says Inhaven also uses the Flxpoint drop-ship platform, which “helps us maintain current inventory and supports our order workflows to and from our manufacturers.” It also uses Aftership to track order fulfillment once a manufacturer ships to a customer.

Inhaven is privately funded and doesn’t release revenue figures. But Ching notes that it has been growing steadily since launching in 2022 and now serves buyers for about 55,000 rental units.

“We’ve been doubling sales every quarter since then,” she says.

Going forward, Ching says she hopes to expand on Inhaven’s product standards strategy by working with online travel agencies and rental listing services to identify vacation properties that meet particular Inhaven standards.

“We’re focused on people looking for vacation homes managed by teams committed to these standards, and making it easy for them to find these homes,” she says, adding, “There’s nothing like that in the vacation rental industry.”

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. [email protected].

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