The person behind Chez Nous

Hospitality is a craft. I have been learning it for twenty years.

You never know what a guest is celebrating, or how long they saved to be there. A birthday. A first trip after a hard year. A family that only manages to gather once. A clean unit is the baseline, not the achievement. What makes someone leave five stars, come back, and tell other people is whether they felt expected, cared for, and understood.

That is the whole idea behind Chez Nous.

I am Margot. I studied Art History in Mexico City, and while I was still studying I took my first job doing media relations for an art gallery. During the week I gave guided tours at the Museo Tamayo, which is where I learned to hold a room and tell a story to people who did not know they wanted to hear it. Art History gave me the rest: an eye for how things are composed, and the understanding that how something is presented is inseparable from how it is experienced.

From there I moved into public relations agencies in Mexico City, working with luxury brands, through the years digital marketing was taking shape as a discipline.

Then I moved to Playa del Carmen, and the work changed scale. I handled communications for the Riviera Maya Film Festival and for the FECUCA, a Caribbean culture festival, which is guest experience at its most demanding: thousands of people, all of them expecting to feel taken care of, and no room to fix anything after the fact. Those festivals led me to the boutique hotels and restaurants of the Riviera Maya, working across Holbox Island, Playa del Carmen and Tulum, in one of the highest-volume tourism markets in the world, where a property lives or dies on its reviews.

Alongside that work I ran mystery shopping evaluations for brands like Cartier, Montblanc and Longchamp. That is where I learned to measure a service experience against a defined standard, from the customer's side of the door. It is still how I look at every property I take on.

For years, marketing and hospitality lived in different parts of my life. One taught me how people perceive value. The other taught me how people experience it. Eventually I realized they were not that different. A beautiful brand can make you want something. A beautiful experience makes you remember it.

Hosting came later, in Quebec. I became an Airbnb Superhost in 2020, and since then I have hosted more than a thousand guests with a 4.87 rating. Those reviews are not a vanity number to me. They are thousands of small decisions about what to say, when to say it, and what to have ready before anyone thinks to ask.

Today I run Chez Nous from Montréal, managing chalets, condos and apartments across the Laurentides and Montréal. I also co-founded Miel Hospitality in Tulum and Playa del Carmen, which keeps a foot in each market and a perspective most local managers do not have. I work in English, French and Spanish, which in Quebec is not a detail. It is the difference between a guest who feels accommodated and one who feels like an inconvenience.

Starting Chez Nous did not feel like starting over. It felt like connecting the dots. The marketing, the festivals, the hotels, the standards, and the part of me that notices the things most people walk past. Chez Nous sits somewhere between all of it.

If you own a property and want to know what it could be doing, I would rather show you than tell you. Start with a Revenue Audit, or write to me directly at margot@cheznousgestion.com.