I’ve spent years inside brand strategy, working with large, complex companies on a deceptively simple question: what does this actually feel like to choose?

At that level, success isn’t driven by features or volume. It’s driven by emotional clarity. When the story is coherent, people decide easily. When it isn’t, friction shows up everywhere: in hesitation, in second-guessing, in the sense that something isn’t quite landing.

Later, I brought that same lens into hosting. The scale was different, but the stakes were personal.

I wasn’t advising from a distance anymore. I was living inside the feedback loop, reading reviews, answering messages, holding the tension between what a space is and what guests expect it to be. I could feel how small misalignments carried more weight than they should have, and how much effort went into compensating for a story that wasn’t fully settled.

That’s when the pattern became impossible to ignore.

Most short-term rental advice focuses on what to add, what to optimize, what to improve. Very little helps hosts understand the emotional signal their stay is already sending, or why that signal sometimes turns into exhaustion, defensiveness, or doubt.

The Stay & The Story exists to work at that layer.

This isn’t branding for hospitality. It’s emotional positioning, applied with restraint. I bring the discipline of brand strategy—the ability to name what matters and ignore what doesn’t—together with the lived reality of hosting, where ambiguity has a real cost.

When the emotional role of a stay is clear, guests self-select more accurately. Expectations soften. Reviews stabilize. Hosts stop carrying confusion that was never theirs to manage.

Nothing here begins with reinvention. It begins with interpretation, with seeing what’s already present, so it can finally do its work on its own.

That’s the practice. That’s the care. That’s why this exists.