About Sarah

Sarah Stahl is VP of Marketing at Lake.com, a three-year-old vacation rental OTA focused on lakefront, lake-adjacent, and lakeview properties across rural America. After the founder spent 18 months building PMS integrations, inventory jumped from roughly 3,000 properties in October 2025 to about 70,000 by February 2026. Sarah leads marketing for a niche platform built so families can experience nature — with a host-first business model and a standard 10% booking fee or annual flat-rate option.

What we talked about

Explosive PMS-driven growth — How direct property-management-system connections unlocked scale without double-booking — and why hosts resist yet another distribution channel unless integration is seamless.

Winning in LLM search — Lake.com appearing in roughly 47% of traveler LLM queries, outpacing bigger OTAs — and the role of schema markup paired with strong on-page content.

Template-scale content — Spreadsheet-driven lake, state park, and national park pages at 70,000 properties — with manual craft reserved for homepage and brand storytelling.

Creators over stock photos — Why Sarah pairs hosts with creators, rejects AI avatars for partnerships, and wants stock photography out of travel marketing entirely.

Simple personalization — A split-test popup that buckets travelers by region and trip purpose — including a "surprise me" option for the undecided.

Destination dupes and rural travel — Marketing around lesser-known lakes as alternatives to Tahoe or Lake Como — meeting budget-conscious travelers who still need an escape from burnout.

Sharpest moments

On why creators beat brand messaging:

people trust a creator 80 % more of the time than they trust what a brand is saying about themselves

On Lake's LLM visibility strategy:

Can't tell all our secrets.

On keeping personalization simple:

we over complicate the personalization. It's really simple

On travelers who do not know where to go:

surprise me

On stock photos killing trust:

I wish people could understand that that's killing your trust more than anything else.

Key takeaways

• Lake.com's moat combines PMS-native distribution, lake-specific inventory, and technical SEO/schema that LLMs reward.
• Core guests are female heads of household booking 4–5 night stays six months out for family reunions in 10–20 person homes.
• Creator partnerships cut trust-building touchpoints from ~20 to ~7 — especially effective with Gen X checking in on people they follow.
• Destination dupes and rural alternatives align with economic pressure: travelers want delight without Lake Tahoe price tags and crowds.
• Discovery starts on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest — but Sarah tackles one platform at a time with culture-specific content, never cross-posting identical creative.
• A two-person content team serves 70,000 properties; organizing host photo rights at signup is the automation Sarah wants most.
• Sarah is building a marketing dashboard tying CRM, Lipper Studio, and channel-level KPIs from discoverability through booking.