Doug and Sandy Kraus first imagined running a small coastal inn years ago on their honeymoon, when they traveled along the Oregon and California coastline staying in bed and breakfasts. “We thought, wouldn’t it be nice as another future chapter to run a boutique hotel or small bed and breakfast,” Doug said. “I grew up near the coast and that’s not far from where we met and married.”
That dream eventually led them to Arch Cape Inn, a castle-like coastal chateau just south of Cannon Beach, Oregon. “I saw it on Zillow,” Doug recalled. The moment they saw it, they knew. “We drove in and fell in love,” Sandy said. “It’s just a beautiful, beautiful property.”
When the Krauses took over Arch Cape Inn, they inherited a business that wasn’t built for optimization. “The prior owner managed it almost like what I would call a lifestyle business,” Doug explained. “She was just setting prices based on prior pricing that had been in place before she bought it. If she wanted to go on vacation, she just closed the whole inn down for weeks and months at a time.”
Doug began managing rates using what he knew. “We were pretty familiar with the pricing in the area,” he said. “When we took over, we were mostly just basing it on historical rates and then trying to adjust them a little bit for inflationary costs like food and labor. It was pretty much just a try-something-and-see-how-it-works approach.”
The introduction to TakeUp came through a trusted partner. “Our web marketing team, the owner of that firm, Jeff Logan, had recommended we look at TakeUp,” Doug said. “We were having one of our regular monthly marketing meetings. We had already grown over 40% the first year we had the inn and were in the midst of another 40% or so growth the next year. Jeff mentioned TakeUp because we were always looking for new ways to grow.”
Doug was immediately open to the idea. “There’s a lot of data involved and it’s not something that owners or innkeepers typically get much time to really go out and sense versus you can have machine learning looking at it continuously.”
The decision to try it was easy. “It made a lot of sense to me,” Doug said. “We thought, well, let’s give it a try. The downside risk is pretty much zero. We’ve always been pretty much early adopters of technology.”
Once they decided to move forward, the onboarding process was smooth and straightforward. “It was pretty seamless,” Doug said. Because each room at Arch Cape Inn is unique, Doug took care in setting up the right approach. “Probably the only thing we put a lot of thought into at that point was just the room offsets because every room is different,” he said. “But again, it was kind of like a lot of the stuff in this business. You try something and learn from it rather than sit there in indecision.”
Once TakeUp began running, the results spoke for themselves. “The ‘aha’ moment was when TakeUp started charging prices we would have never thought to charge and we were getting them,” Doug said. “It was like, ‘Oh wow.’ Particularly in the peak season, summer especially. There were what you might call hero rates or bold rates that were being charged.”
We know that TakeUp is getting us the best price we can get. It’s been a game changer for our business.”
Doug Kraus, Co-Owner of Arch Cape Inn
Beyond pricing increases, Doug quickly saw the benefit of having reliable insights at his fingertips. “You get the reports that show how you’re doing relative to the same time last year,” he said. “TakeUp does all your data comparisons and shows you the TakeUp boost and all that.”
Most importantly, TakeUp relieved a major pain point. “The one thing that was a relief for me is not having to think, are we setting our prices right, are we too high, are we too low, where are we in relation to everybody else,” Doug said. “Week by week, day by day, you’d have to go out and see what everybody else is doing. TakeUp has just taken that all away. We can focus on other things. We know that TakeUp is getting us the best price we can get.”
The results were clear. “We’re probably conservatively making about four times the revenue of what it’s costing us,” Doug said. “It’s been at least a four to five times return and probably more if we really wanted to crunch the numbers.”
Sandy emphasized that the people behind the product have been just as valuable as the technology. “All of the people we have worked with through TakeUp have been amazing,” she said. “Very easy to work with. If we had questions or problems, they were always there for us.”
She described the working relationship as collaborative. “They would work with us on whether we wanted to be aggressive or not aggressive,” Sandy said. “It wasn’t just, okay, this is the way it’s going to be and take it or leave it. It was nice being able to have that working relationship with people.”
Doug also praised the ongoing partnership with his revenue strategist. “That’s definitely a key thing for people considering the platform,” he said. “It’s not just a computer that runs off and does its thing. You get that dedicated support. They’re very responsive and committed to making sure that we’re kind of a team, as opposed to just, well, there’s a platform and there’s us paying the platform.”
Satisfied with their results, Doug and Sandy have already shared their experience with others in the independent hospitality community. “We partnered with another couple to open up an inn in Ilwaco, Washington,” Doug said. “Based on our experience with TakeUp, they decided to go ahead and implement it. We helped them start it up, and they’re seeing better rates now than they were.”
Reflecting on their journey, Doug and Sandy see TakeUp as a natural fit for owners like them who want to combine technology with hospitality intuition. “It’s a relatively low cost to try it, and you’ll see whether it’s working relatively soon,” Doug said. “It’s not like a strategic bet where it takes a year before you see results. You start to see the impact pretty quickly.”
From a trial-and-error approach to confident, data-driven pricing, Arch Cape Inn has found its edge. “We know that TakeUp is getting us the best price we can get,” Doug said. “It’s been a game changer for our business.”
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