The peer group for homestay services in Muong Lay Town

In recent years, Muong Lay has a group of 9 households which take advantage of their house location by Da riverbank to provide homestay service. The group is led by Mrs. Lu Thi Toan, a young Thai female entrepreneur who creates contents and promotes the services online. When the number of guests is higher than her capacity, she introduces them to her neighbor’s hosting service. Thanks to Muong Lay town’s development strategy of promoting tourism, more and more guests are visiting the town, which increases demand for guesthouses. Mrs. Lu Thi Toan really wants her group to upgrade the services to increase the guests’ satisfaction for coming back and/or introducing more new guests. However, she finds it difficult to raise the consensus of the group members about standardizing the service quality.

The peer group meeting is a very relevant activity for this homestay group as it creates time and space for group members to gather and discuss their common business. Instead of ad hoc group conversations when there is any event to do, monthly meetings will facilitate exchanging market information, sharing experiences, setting up common ground of understanding about how to grow the business as a whole group.

The discussion result of the first meeting of the group in December 2024 shows the relevancy of this activity.  In this meeting, group members had a chance to gather opinions about how to prepare the same quality accommodation for guests during the New Year Festival which is taking place in a couple of weeks.

Mrs. Toan, the leader of the group said during the meeting “Regular meeting is a great initiative for our group. We must take advantage of this chance to boost our services and get our business united. This is the only way for us to develop business of individual family.”