Converging travel and technology is an art: STAYFOLIO Founder Benny Lee wants fine-stay and heritage experience bookings to be a breeze
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About STAYFOLIO - Meet the Founder and CEO, Benny Lee
STAYFOLIO is a booking and curation platform for high-tech design stays that appeal to millennial and Gen Z travellers. They also provide hosts with a full-value chain solution to distribute online, with added AI and IoT-based solutions to become leaders of the smart hospitality industry.
Hi Benny, tell us more about yourself and your role in STAYFOLIO.
Hello, I am Benny Lee, founder and CEO of STAYFOLIO.
At STAYFOLIO, we embarked on a mission to become the global No.1 Fine Stay curation and booking platform. We aim to achieve this by creating and sourcing stays with exquisite design and unique experiences like nothing that has ever been available.
We are always searching for talented individuals to fulfil this vision together.
We have managed to build a successful product in the Korean market that is enjoyed by many, and actively expanding our STAYFOLIO service beyond Korea to Japan and SE Asia.
Your background in urban design and architectural design led you to founding Z-Lab, a Korean design firm specialising in place-making and developing relationships between community and space. Having previously founded a company, what made you take the leap to start another start-up?
The idea of creating a company like STAYFOLIO came way before we did the Z-Lab project.
When I first encountered the iPhone, I realised that the world would go through a mobile revolution, and I wanted to create a business in the ICT area. Fortunately, my friend from high school was running his own IT company, and thus we joined forces and brought STAYFOLIO to life.
At the start of the business, I co-founded Z-Lab, a creative studio that offers all solutions, from design to branding, that a would-be host could want to generate income from their stay.
Afterwards, drawing inspiration from the concept of “Netflix Originals”, we established a relationship between Z-Lab and STAYFOLIO. Z-Lab became a content production studio for an exclusive original stay series and an online platform for market expansion and distribution.
Compared with the booking and curatorial platforms such as Traveloka and Airbnb, STAYFOLIO’s emphasis on curatorial taste is evident -- from the minimalistic approach of the website to the choice of locations and each experience. What prompted your love for design and curating experiences, and how have you transformed that passion into a career?
I have always admired design and continued my research on the history of architecture from my school days.
I believe architecture, with its philosophy and values, goes beyond the architect's work. It can inspire ordinary people and influence their everyday lives and lifestyles.
Since the work of architecture could not be reproduced as a product, from a business point of view, it was only possible to turn them into Fine Stays (a term we’ve coined) with unique experiences, adding commercial value to it.
I often imagine converting the early works of popular architects into Fine Stays.
Your design ethos is evident in the beautifully curated spaces and experiences listed on your site in both modern and traditional contexts. This ethos is evident in reviews. Please share with us the design ethos and approach in STAYFOLIO.
I always asked myself, looking at the beautiful stone houses on Jeju Island or the authentic Hanok in Seoul:
What could we create if we combined modern technologies with the spatial heritage of the past?
By giving the STAYFOLIO spin on the traditional homes of the past, we could modernise them in a way that appeals to this new generation.
From these exciting questions, I tried various projects. They revolved around melding layers of the past with our modern technologies.
Travellers who stay with STAYFOLIO can reinvent travel experiences by meaningfully examining and savouring the reinterpreted authentic stays.
Those kinds of spaces with unique stories and designs are present in all countries. We are searching for spaces with traces of time that cannot be valued with money but with the stories behind them.
Ultimately, we aim to connect those unique houses with avid travellers that value these characteristics.
During the pandemic, global companies were placed in an environment where they had no choice but to focus on the local. Similarly, global-minded travellers also started exploring local spaces.
STAYFOLIO’s Fine Stay was reborn more meaningfully during that time, where “space where staying itself becomes a journey”.
Venturing beyond merely using platform-based software popularised by Airbnb, STAYFOLIO is introducing elements of IoT and smart home technologies into your properties. What challenges have you faced in implementing these solutions, and how have consumers responded to this value proposition?
Even before the pandemic, we focused on building systems for contactless hospitality.
We were keen to introduce a new concept where a home can turn into a “stay” and a “stay” back into a home seamlessly with the help of modern technologies.
To facilitate this, we’ve incorporated an AI Chatbot, which guides travellers without an on-site person.
Our IoT System checks all the metrics in the house and converts them into a high-tech stay that can be managed remotely. Our technologies aim to introduce new experiences, too.
In fact, in 2019, we could fully utilise our vision of including IoT systems in our project called Stay Waon on Jeju Island. Even though it is another traditional renovated space, added technologies greatly improved the user experience and convenience.
From a host's point of view, these technologies helped with energy saving, security, and safety without having someone on site.
Currently, we are developing a mobile model of a home and a “stay” called CABIN. Our goal is for a house to become a “stay” based on a person's desire and vice versa. It can be purchased online just like you buy a TESLA, and it will be possible to manage everything from one panel.
Ultimately, the STAYFOLIO platform goes beyond the simple concept of connecting hosts to guests. We continue to challenge ourselves where we can disrupt the concept of a “stay” by integrating modern technologies.
Southeast Asia is home to one of the most vibrant startup centres in the world, and there has been considerable interest in using IoT and smart home technologies in consumer spaces. As STAYFOLIO ventures further into this region, how has BLOCK71 Singapore supported you?
We aim to develop STAYFOLIO across Asia as we can deeply understand the Asian market, building on what we have done well in Korea.
For Asia, the sheer market size is why we choose to expand to this space. Increasing capital and economic growth come with an increased interest in travel for the population. And we believe that post-COVID travellers desire unique travel experiences.
Our next goal is to expand to Japan, as consumers are also greatly interested in a unique design. They have a rich history rooted in their properties and homes, such as ryokans.
Indeed, such historic homes are not limited to Korea and Japan. Singapore, for instance, has shophouses steeped in colonial and historical culture.
Our goal is to introduce, incorporate and elevate Asian values through the properties we offer to travellers from Asia and worldwide.
What are Asian values? We believe they are seemingly small but vastly important gestures, such as removing one’s shoes before entering a home. Such values will be part of the cultural engagement and experience that our platform shares and provides, too.
We chose Singapore and BLOCK71, because we saw Singapore as a regional hub and access point to the region, which includes Indonesia and Vietnam.
At the same time, we hope to expand to Singapore as not just a place of transfer hub but a destination itself -- and we hope to work with partners and spaces here, in Singapore.
We are thus grateful to BLOCK71 for helping us to actualise this goal. We need to meet local partners and big tech players.
We are thankful, as BLOCK71 helped connect us to regional industry leaders with whom we were initially unfamiliar.
Travel and tourism are picking up across the region and STAYFOLIO is riding on this wave, tailored specifically to Gen Z and millennial travellers itching to get out. In your opinion, what exactly are Gen Z and millennial travellers looking for now in this new era, and how does STAYFOLIO answer that call?
The defining characteristic of this generation is that people consider the digital device or smartphone a natural extension of their body and soul. They use it almost like a tentacle as a window for communication and information, sort of like a sci-fi movie.
We believe this generation is at the centre of a change in humanity as momentous as when Australopithecus transformed into Neandertal (laughs).
Beyond hyper-personalization, they acquire information through social networks. If space and product are beyond satisfactory, money will not be spared, and the market will continue subdividing to cater to their needs.
In this trend, will the existing traditional hotel meet their needs? The dominance of traditional hotels might be over, and I think 'STAYFOLIO' might be the answer.
The iPhone kickstarted a model that breaks the limits of the latest technology and design with every new drop.
Similarly, I believe that STAYFOLIO’s accommodation will evolve and develop as an experienced product reflecting the current generation’s values and technology changes.
STAYFOLIO is planning to develop an entire ecosystem for “fine-value” stays, including listings of property sites, an in-house property management system, IoT, and an “Only STAYFOLIO”” series of properties built and designed from scratch. Why did you create a closed-loop ecosystem for the travel/booking industry when incumbents seem to focus on scalable platforms?
To me, the pinnacle of technological development is the establishment of an ecosystem followed by paradigm-changing innovation.
An example is the iPhone-led app ecosystem and MAC OS/IOS being integrated. Or Tesla's ecosystem, which realises battery optimisation, autonomous driving, and an AI ecosystem.
I have been inspired by groups and organisations already creating a closed-loop ecosystem driving in the world, such as SpaceX and the outer-space industry.
The essential core of STAYFOLIO is to create 'A place where staying itself becomes a journey’. Effectively, a different concept of travel.
It is about creating our ecosystem. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to turn a house into a Stay, just like owning a smartphone allows us to access many functions. We want it to be easy to transform a space into an asset.
A crucial part of our vision is to meld tradition’s legacy with the present generation’s values.
All the above are elements of the ecosystem that we need to focus on and bring together.
We are grateful to carry out this mission with talented people who come together as one team.
Congratulations on your recent funding rounds! With the opening of cities worldwide as endemic covid sets in, what are your goals for STAYFOLIO in the next 1-2 years?
With the concept of K_STAY (“Korean stays”), I aspire to expand K_SPIRIT (Korean spirit) by showing Korean architecture to people around the world.
I want to focus on making the current Korean wave a trend that people worldwide want to experience. We’re starting by expanding the scope of STAYFOLIO to the Asian market, with offices in Japan and Singapore as our short-term goal and aspiration. Still, ultimately, I want to show the world the value of the Korean spirit rooted in Korean architecture and way of life.
This spirit will start with the space and content we create, flowing into a virtuous cycle for this era’s designers, architects, and creators.
Soon, we hope that STAYFOLIO will be a good companion for artists who create diverse experiential spaces. With this, I believe that STAYFOLIO will grow into a global service.
Finally, you have made us desire to hop onto the STAYFOLIO site and plan a trip. Which is your favourite destination on the list, and why?
I've always had this vision: If my house is on STAYFOLIO, I can travel anywhere.
In the spirit of this vision, our stay, Blind Whale is uniquely valuable to me.
This is where STAYFOLIO was first widely publicised, and the value of Jeju was shown to the world.
As the head of the STAYFOLIO, I have a full plate, so I can't dream of a leisurely escape.
Still, I dream of a future where I will one day entrust my home to STAYFOLIO as a free spirit and travel while communicating with like-minded people worldwide.
Thank you, Benny.
We care a lot about the why and what behind our startups are building, and how BLOCK71 can support communities to sustain long-term impact. This interview is part of our efforts to shine the spotlight on our ecosystem partners and Founders.
BLOCK71's Global Startup Runway is an accelerator programme designed to help the most promising Founders leverage BLOCK71 and our partners' global network and expertise to take on uniquely Asian markets, and scale high-impact solutions to create value for society and industry.