Chloé Fournier's open response to the Le Monde newspaper article

When Airbnb’s “little helpers” become the pride of French tourism 2.0.

On Friday, August 4, 2017, an article in the newspaper Le Monde titled "The underpaid 'little helpers' of Airbnb" was published by journalist Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre. As the article mentioned Welkeys, its founder wanted to share her own thoughts to clarify certain points that were raised. Here is her response.

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On the morning of Friday, August 4, my Kantar email alert (the one that notifies me when an article mentioning Welkeys is published in the press) flagged an article from Le Monde. I felt such pride seeing the startup I built and grew with my team through sheer hard work cited as a reference. Then came the scathing headline: “The underpaid ‘little helpers’ of Airbnb.” It must be said that two months ago, when Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre asked me for an interview, the discussions were not very cordial. The article is no less so. I learned that several startups, including Welkeys, are not being praised for the jobs they have created in record time (permanent contracts) or the new opportunities they offer to thousands of courageous people starting independent businesses, but rather that they “exploit” people by imposing regular tasks on them all year round and demanding “that they be available at all hours, on weekends, at Christmas, or in August.” There is clearly a misunderstanding here, and it is not my habit to let this type of misconception tarnish our work. It is time to restore the reputation of these poorly named “little helpers” who are my pride today and the very heart of Welkeys’ business: the pride of French tourism 2.0.

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As an entrepreneur, to create value (and jobs), you must live with the times and know how to listen to your customers.

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This is what I have applied to the letter since I launched Welkeys in March 2015.

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Welkeys is now the leading French digital concierge service dedicated to short- and medium-term rentals. Our website connects apartment owners or tenants with concierges—independent service providers eager to evolve in the reinvented “vacation rental” sector. Welkeys is aimed at those who know, or at least had the intelligence to sense, that the Airbnb phenomenon and “its new way of traveling” is not a threat, but rather an extraordinary opportunity for creating value at the “local” level.

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Thanks to Welkeys, an owner who wants to rent their property on peer-to-peer rental platforms can have it managed from A to Z or find a verified and experienced concierge to welcome their guests, coordinate cleaning, and manage linens between each rental. Thanks to the Welkeys site, a concierge/guest manager, verified by our team, can offer their services according to their own schedule and the status of their choice in exchange for payment. They are evaluated after each assignment and recommended by their owners to other owners, thus growing their own clientele through 2.0 word-of-mouth.

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Finding clients is expensive and difficult to balance with a logistics-based job.

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At Welkeys, we have worked tirelessly since our inception to optimize our site to address the mobility challenges of our “concierge” users (mobile site, performance incentive system, online payment, autonomous availability calendar management, real-time assignment alerts, automated invoicing) and the transparency and convenience needs of our “owner” users (tracking reservations and synchronizing calendars with rental platforms, recommending the best concierge profiles, simple and transparent pricing, online payment, automated invoicing). We have one goal: to listen to what our owner clients really need in order to generate a maximum number of assignments (and income) for our concierges.

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Today, Welkeys is a company that operates 7 days a week. We advocate a neo-hotel approach through teams of city managers, concierges, and high-quality professional cleaning providers. After 2 years of operation, our team now counts 27 people (permanent contracts/partnership agreements) spread between the Welkeys headquarters in Paris and the cities where we offer our turnkey service. We have entrusted more than 50,000 assignments to over 900 concierges across 40 cities in France. As I write these lines, we have 5,149 owners registered on our platform, and we have no intention of stopping there. We work harder every day to create jobs and encourage people in their individual ventures. We are committed to building the future of French tourism with a generation of talent that evolves as fast as we do, and we fully intend to bring many more enthusiasts on board.

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Chloé Fournier, CEO of Welkeys.com.

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(You can find the full version of this response on Medium, as well as an excerpt from the mentioned article).