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There are only two ways to survive an oversupplied market. You stand out, or you drop your prices.

Most operators pick the second option without realising they’ve made a choice at all. The market softens, the bookings slow, the panic sets in, and the nightly rate starts sliding. It feels like responding to the market. It’s actually just surrendering to it.

This week I sat down with Daniel Rouquette, founder of Villa Finder, who has been living this exact problem in one of the most oversupplied markets in the world. Bali’s Airbnb listings have grown from roughly 40,000 to over 70,000. Supply overtook demand in 2025. Market ADRs have dropped 20 to 30 percent in two years.

Villa Finder’s ADR dropped 6 percent.

That gap is not luck. It’s positioning, and Daniel broke down exactly how they do it.

A few things that I think you could learn from:

The Villa Positioning Plan. For every property, Daniel’s team builds a plan for how that villa will stand out against its direct competition. They start with the guest persona. Who is this villa actually for? What do those people care about? They research comparable listings that are performing well, work out what the property already has that the listing isn’t showing, and identify what could be added. They build the plan with AI doing the heavy lifting on research, then get a second AI to review the plan. It’s rigorous, repeatable, and almost nobody in the market is doing it.

The record player. Daniel picked this one up from Sean Rakidzich’s session at STRive Melbourne, which I loved hearing. A record player in your hero photo isn’t about music. It’s an emotional trigger. It makes someone stop scrolling and feel something about the stay. In another market it might be a cold plunge or a piano. The point is the same: your hero image should create an emotional connection, not just document a room.

The $200 family kit. This one is so practical it hurts. Pool toys, kids’ games, a baby cot, a pool fence. A couple of hundred dollars of investment, and suddenly a villa that was competing against every other villa in Bali is competing in a much smaller category: genuinely family-ready properties. Now the hero photo shows it, the listing says it, and the family searching for exactly that books it. You didn’t drop your price. You changed what market you’re in.

Make the invisible visible. Bali’s biggest advantage is service. Villa staff, concierge, a chef, people who make your stay better. But service is nearly impossible to show in photos. Daniel’s fix is simple: when guests leave a review, ask them to mention by name anyone who made their stay better. Future guests reading reviews now see the thing photos can’t capture. And his team calls every guest within 15 minutes of an enquiry, not to sell, just so the guest knows there are real humans behind the booking.

The line that sums the whole episode up: in an overcrowded market, the only alternative to standing out is racing everyone else to the bottom.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

🎯 How to build a positioning plan for every property using guest personas and AI

📸 Why your hero photo needs an emotional trigger, not just a nice angle

👨‍👩‍👧 The small investments that move a property into a less crowded category

⭐ How to get reviews that showcase the service photos can’t capture

📉 What’s actually happening in the Bali market: supply, ADRs, and the coming cleanup

Daniel is the founder of Villa Finder, managing villas across the APAC region with Bali as their primary market and a bustling office on the island. Based in Singapore, he’s one of the most transparent operators in the industry, sharing what’s working and what isn’t as he goes. If you don’t already follow him on LinkedIn, fix that.

The reason this one matters: whatever market you’re in, supply is probably growing faster than demand. The Bali story is just the loudest version of what’s happening everywhere. The operators who hold their rates through it will be the ones who did the positioning work while everyone else was quietly cutting prices. Daniel’s playbook is a head start.

We’ll be seeing Daniel at STRive Indonesia on September 10. If you want to be in the room with operators thinking at this level, that’s where they’ll be.

📺Watch the episode here

🎙️Listen to the show here