Slack
Confluence
Google Drive
Zendesk
Salesforce
Gong
Jira
Website
Technical documentation
with Realm
Background
Hostaway is a leading property management platform serving the vacation rental industry. As a fully remote, distributed company with no physical offices, they operate across more than 40 countries with a team of over 270 employees. Hostaway recently raised $365 million from General Atlantic and PSG, and continues to grow rapidly while maintaining its commitment to innovation and operational excellence.
The challenge
With a decade of customer interactions, extensive product documentation, and dozens of tools in use, knowledge was scattered across different systems. For example, if the sales team wanted to create a comprehensive customer health picture, they needed to spend hours searching across various tickets, emails, chats, and CRM notes, and then compile this information into a digestible format.
Solving this challenge was not easy, as everyone on the team had their own preferred LLM, and running public versions of them introduced significant security risks.
Why Hostaway Chose Realm
Trust and control were key decision criteria. During the POC, the Hostaway team confirmed that Realm only provided factual information. Unlike other products they tested, it also offered the ability to granularly hone in on which knowledge you wanted to use for which use case, down to individual Slack messages sent within the past month or Google Drive files in a specific folder.
"Realm doesn't hallucinate. It will tell you if it doesn’t have the context to answer a question. That’s really powerful."
— Ken Weary, COO of Hostaway
Hostaway started the POC with 25 users in the sales and support teams and by the end of the 4-week period, 74 team members had already been onboarded onto the platform. The Realm team's commitment to collaboration was what ultimately sealed the deal.
"Miika and the team made it clear they wanted to be a partner in our growth, not just another vendor. And that's exactly what it’s been."
— Ken Weary, COO of Hostaway
Impact at Hostaway
With Realm, Hostaway is transforming its operations through a suite of high-impact AI agents. An example is their Customer Intelligence Agent, which unifies data from Salesforce, Zendesk, and call transcripts into a complete customer 360.
“We’re able to see the full customer picture, identify expansion opportunities and early churn signals, and act on them.”
— Ken Weary, COO of Hostaway
Rather than limiting adoption to just the sales and support teams, Realm’s impact has been felt everywhere with company-wide adoption. Through consistent reinforcement and leadership emphasis, 80% of the company is now using Realm on a consistent basis. “Throw it into Realm” has become the go-to recommendation for solving a problem.
“Realm’s impact has been instrumental, it’s a true productivity booster. Everyone on my team uses Realm.”
— Phil Hodges, VP, Customer onboarding and support at Hostaway
Realm has brought the Hostaway team non-linear productivity gains, with its agents making tasks 50% faster, even when compared to using standard LLMs.
"What is not promoted enough by Realm is the fact that it is an extremely affordable way to offer multiple LLMs to your company. That right there is worth it almost in and of itself."
— Ken Weary, COO of Hostaway
Looking Ahead
Hostaway views Realm as a strategic platform that enables secure AI adoption, unlocks knowledge, and empowers teams to work more efficiently. Looking ahead, the Hostaway team is excited to explore deeper integrations to automate even more workflows and extract greater value from their knowledge.
"The speed of development and the pace of change that the Realm team is able to produce has been very impressive. I don't feel in any way that our feedback is ignored—we see it turned into features and improvements quickly."
—Ken Weary, COO of Hostaway
