Jeff Baars

I started in hospitality at 15. What began as a part-time job became a career that has taken me from European hotel groups to the C-suites of two of Australia's most recognised accommodation brands.

Most recently, I was Chief Commercial Officer at Urban Rest, a tech-enabled serviced apartment and aparthotel operator. I played a central role in scaling the business from approximately 100 to 1,700 live units across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland. I built the commercial, revenue management, distribution, reservations and technology foundations that made that growth possible, including the end-to-end Salesforce implementation and the full integration between Salesforce, PMS and distribution platforms.

Before Urban Rest, I spent five years at Quest Apartment Hotels, Australasia's largest apartment hotel group. As Chief Customer Officer and Chief Marketing & Digital Officer, I led the commercial and digital repositioning of a 180+ property franchise group, delivered a multi-year e-commerce transformation that reversed sustained revenue declines and built the data, CRM and distribution infrastructure to support long-term growth.

Earlier in my career, I held senior commercial and digital roles in London and Europe, including Director of Marketing Operations at glh Hotels, Digital Strategist at Adelphi Digital Consulting (now EY) and roles within InterContinental Hotels Group.

I founded The Accommodation Co. because the problems I spent two decades solving inside these businesses, from the wrong technology, the underperforming revenue function to the commercial strategy that never quite gets implemented, are problems that every operator faces. Most of them, however, don't have access to the level of experience needed to solve them properly.