Heads In Beds Show - ALL The Ways You Can Run Promotions For Your Vacation Rental Business

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about all of the different ways you can run promos that are not just "cutting rates lower" to drive more bookings.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads of Med Show presented by Build Up Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. All right, Paul, it is. a podcast Christmas recording Eve.

I guess I don't really know. The list of this, I think, on Christmas Eve. I think if I've got our dates correctly here. So Merry Christmas, to the listener. Hope they're having an awesome one. Good year. You're all done with your Christmas shopping at this morning. I'll dialed in or more things to run to Target again.

If I spend more money on gifts for kids, family, I don't think my wife is going to let me come in the house with them. So I can try. Hide them in your car. I've got to get them out at some place. is the only problem there still yeah it's uh no it's it's it's a fun time of year it's uh we've i we talked last week two weeks whatever ago the 70 degree difference of our temperatures i got to get a 70 degree difference in 24 hours um messes with your body a little bit yeah i mean it is it's

i'm saying we both talked about we got we both have been having flu run through our homes right now so um that's extending the winter breaks for a couple of our children but uh you know It's, this is the season. So how are you doing, sir? Yeah, pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. So we shall soldier on, as it were. And there's always more things to solve and problems to go through.

And yeah, it's just that end of your rush. I think I'm reminded of the DMB, classic DMB sign a little bit this week and last week, of a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. The sort of classic, you know, service worker DMB sign that they have up in front of their window, which is accurate, painful when you're on the wrong side of it. And perhaps someone's satisfying if you're on the flip side of that sign. And you're like, ah, see, I told you to do this earlier. So a little bit of that going on.

But no, it is all good. We're looking forward to all the new stuff we have to do in this next year. And what, you know, the favorite, the favorite phrase right now, right? Well, let's circle back to that in the new year. We'll come back to that in the new year. You know, you could defer about anything right now. Just, you know, anything. Someone could be like, what do you have for lunch?

I don't know. Let's just circle back to that in the new year. Yeah. You know what a lot of people do, though, around the New Year time period, Paul, is book a vacation. They book a vacation rental. And what they often look for is a promotion. They want a deal. People always want a deal. But I think when the New York comes around, maybe people make a little bit more of that consideration. What am I going to book with? I think this is, in my mind, if I zoom back a little bit to like this topic today and what we're talking about,

this is kind of like the core, I think of what like good or like interesting or compelling vacation rental direct marketing looks like because it's like this is not what Airbnb allows, right? Airbnb does not allow creativity. Verbo does not allow creativity. Verbo puts you in the white box, the classic white box of here's what you're going to do pricing here's you're going to do fees etc etc and i've always thought like that's fine but that's not where i find myself really enjoying living in playing in that world but i actually really enjoy playing in this world like it's very interesting and compelling to me to kind of figure out like what gets someone to click the buy button you know because i think a lot about pricing and there's a lot of pricing and

revenue experts out there and all the respect in the world to them but my sort of take on it is that you changing a rate from 210 to 220 night does nothing like sure it signals something to some algorithm or whatever the case may be but no one's the way. one's booking because it was 220, now it's 2.10. Like, that's silly. What I think does happen is people have to be compelled by a marketing message. They have to see something that makes them want to take action. And there's a lot of things that I've tested over the years that we're going to talk about today that I think do that. Check that box for me. So walk me through kind of your history and the promo side of things. Like, we got to get a promo. It's a classic client meeting technique.

What do you learn there? So we, back on resorts and lodges, we had a section of the website dedicated to deals and packages and it was a very interesting section of the website just to kind of see because you did now this was I think it was unique from the standpoint of we did we had a lot of different business types so not some vacation rental companies we had some hotels we had some resorts we had some ins we had some B&Bs all the good stuff but in having so many different accommodation types and kind of having that unique deals ecosystem we'll call it you did you saw a lot of different examples of a lot of what we're going to talk about here, whether it's you know, fixed dollar percentage discounts, giving away free nights, trying to do some other

items. Still, the most consistent deal package that I ever saw was a military discount, which is great. Nope. This is not a shot anyway towards their arms services, anything like that. But that was all people offered in a lot of cases. And that's great. That's reaching a very small part of the population and actually incentivizing a very small part of the population. So I do. I mean, I think a lot of it is. We don't have the chance to incentivize a lot of people to take action a lot of times. You talked about it. It's the white box. It's the black box. We put the information in and we can't do a whole lot more with it. So allowing yourself to be creative with some of these deals and packages. Now, yeah, and with those, that big repository of deals and packages,

we also sent out a weekly deals email and kind of handpicking those 20 deals that we're going to put in by location, by the interest of the deal. There was. There was a lot that we tried to pull in there to make it actually compelling because the last thing you want to do is send out an offer like this and not really have it be compelling and encourage people to take those, you know, make that call to action, whatever it is. So it is. I've seen, I've seen deals done well.

I've seen promos done very poorly. And I think that's everybody's done that. Everybody's tested and tried some things that do work, don't work. So laying out some examples of what people have done that has been effective. I think it helps people just, if nothing else, get those ideas percolating of how you can take this and bring it into your business somehow. Quick Google search, by the way, and this is from an AI overview, so take that with a grain of salt. But it's citing from Pew Research Center, half of 1% of Americans are. current active duty military, just heads up there. And then this is the number. I'm not doing

a meme here. Six or seven percent of the veterans are at the U.S. are veterans like in the population. So six or seven percent are veterans. Yeah. So to your point of like that's hitting one out of every 200 people for active duty if that was your offer. It's hitting one out of every, what would that be, 40 people, 30 people on the other one. So again, that may be appealing to not be, but it's just like, to your point, it's good to understand like the context of what the offer actually is. I do it. We do a client we work with who has a military discount. They have a teacher discount and a first responders discount. So it's like just kind of extending that net a little bit. But again, it's like if those offers are all the same or they're

the same offers that you give to everybody, is that providing extra value or not? I don't know, test it. Like with this particular client, they've done it for a long time. It seems to work well. People take them up on it. So there must be some pluses there. So let's dive in. Let's start to talk about some of these ideas. So let's start with the classic. Let's start with the classic Coca-Cola, the Honda Civic of discounts. The one I use more than anything, the good old fixed dollar discount. So the most common thing that we do, most often we're working with a new client, we have a pop-up on the website, and it is save X, and we can discuss X here in a second, but save $50, let's say, off your next stay. Now, there's a lot of different variations of this. For example, you could have one competitor that I work with actually, or one client that I work with a competitor in his market, has tiers. So it's save $50 off of any four nights stay. Save $250 off of any six or seven. Again, six or seven nights day. So interesting ways that you could test that and offer people different promo codes or offers. depending on it. But we've kind of done that for a long time. I question this sometimes and I go back and test it. And it's still seemingly works really well. Like it's, it's rare that I find

the percentage out pulls from a sign up or redemption standpoint than a fixed dollar discount. Sometimes when they do pull better, it's maybe a little bit better. And if it's a higher end property, you're giving up so much more margin on a 10 or 15% discount, typically speaking, than you are at $50. Again, this depends on your average booking value. But it's a huge thing. So that's my, that's my, that's my, you know, whatever you want to call it, my old faithful fixed dollar off discounts? What's kind of your read on those? What's your feeling on this? I think fixed dollars are great. I don't know why it was so difficult to get people to agree to a fixed dollar versus a percentage at different times. That's something that...

I think the concern is their lower ADR properties. That's the number one pushback I get from a client is, hey, I want to do it or I'm open to it. I hear what you're saying, but what if someone books two nights in my smallest unit? I just basically lost money doing that. Yeah. So I do. I mean, I think that that's the data that you have on this, I think, is some of the best stuff that there is, because it is. It's clear percentage versus a dollar specific dollar figure off. People don't know what that dollar figure is at 10, 15%, at 5%, even, you know, whatever that is. And you kind of have to do, you have to move that needle a little more than just, we'll give you 5% off the next day. Well, you could have 5% worth of fees that also contribute to that to that stay here

as well. So I do. I think that that's something that giving people that tangible $100, $150, you know, longer bookings, $500, maybe it's $1,000, whatever that is, that's an eye-opening number. That's going to call the attention. Now, again, they still have to get to your website, get to find the rental that that's going to work or whatever that is. But you're giving them that motivation to at least start that process. And I think that that's half the battle there. You know, it is kind of talking about the progressive side of things. I did see someone do progressive. There was a resort down in Branson that did this pretty aggressively where they had progressive discounts up to like 40, 50 percent for seven nights days.

And sure enough, they got way more six and seven nights days than they did three and four nights days on that same package. I can't help it. I literally can't help it. It's a surprise. Actually, my son didn't come in and do that. 10% of listeners right now know exactly we're talking about the other night. 90% don't and you know what I wish I were the 90% but so yeah that is something that they absolutely did see significantly higher bookings take place on those longer length stays because

they had the more perceived value for the guest that was going to come in and they were making more money on those days anyway so yeah I will I'll steal my steel man myself at touch here which is that I had a client meeting the other day and he summed up all of his 2025 discounts and he goes hey Conrad, your promo was a great idea. It cost me $12,000 this year in promotions. That was how many were redeemed and how many promo goes are redeemed. So I'm like, I hear you. That's valid. I guess the question becomes, and it's an unknowable answer. If we had offered no promotion on the email signup, how many options would have gotten? My answer is probably out three, four X less than we did get. That's what I typically would see. So if we got a thousand emails, we probably would have closer to like 200, maybe emails if we had had an offer on it. So of those 800, again, how many them did or didn't book? And based on the margin, there's a lot of questions to be had there. But, Again, what I would say is, like, as an idea here, between fixed dollar and percentage discounts, test it yourself. I think that's my best advice I can give, try it, look at it. If you can, in a perfect world, run them both for 30 or 60 or 90 days during peak booking season, let people redeem both. And then do the math at the end of 90 days and say, okay, I offered a 10% and I offered a $50 off discount.

Here was the opt-in rates on both. Here's somebody ended up getting redeemed from both. Here's the percentage people who opt in, who then redeemed it. Those like the three numbers you'd want to know, look at it and go, what am I going to do from here? And the most importantly, on the 10%, how much margin did you end up giving up? Was it more than the $50? If so, you don't go from there. But that is not the only technique or tactic that we leverage.

We have a lot of other ones. Hard to miss on this one, but free night offers. Like whenever we were able to run a free night offer, it's rare that it misses. The only time it misses is when it's like clients will do this during like dead low periods where no one's coming at all. And I'm like, okay, but your occupancy during this period is like typically 35%. So it's like, it's really hard to assume that a free night offer is going to get someone to like want to come to the middle of this, cold destination in the middle of winter if it's like a beach market like who wants to go to cape cod

in February like I'm pretty sure almost nobody I don't know the client there but just kind of an example um so I do think the free night offer there's a time in place for it I think it's mostly in your shoulder where the Monday the Thursday is often unbooked so if it's a weekend type market it's like offer the free night because you're not really giving up anything that's typically going to book anyways so the political risk that you're taking on the revenue that you're losing is very minimal um again you could do a day of week analysis in your PMS software and say how often are my Tuesdays booked in, you know, February or how often are my Wednesdays or Thursdays or something like that booked in whatever day? So if someone extends or adds a day, am I even losing much

anyways from a revenue perspective? And you can almost keep your base rate higher because you're giving the free night. It's like there's a discount there, but it's implied that it's a big discount, but your base rate could potentially sustain a little bit better on your website if you're giving way a free night. So that's kind of been my thought process there. Like a little pro tip there, do make sure the free night you give away is the cheapest night. Some PMS software is allowed this. Some do not. So just be aware of that. I have one PMS that I have to work with, unfortunately. that just discounts the last night or gives the last night free. So if they were to line if they're booking to be like a Wednesday to a Sunday or something

like that, then the free night is the Sunday. And as a result, that could be a higher dollar average night. So the discounts bigger. So just some food for thought there. Actually, I didn't say this in the last block, by the way, when you do the $100 discounts or the fixed dollar discounts or percentage discounts, make sure they apply to the rent, not your fees. So that way your margins aren't getting hurt as much there.

So one other I think I'd say there. But yeah, free nights, a classic ball. Your thoughts on free nights. I think that's something where I've seen. particularly in like the mindset of extending your stay. Like adding that Monday or adding that Thursday or adding, adding the looping a day onto the end there. And I think that's something that you can actually kind of proactively,

if you do have those Friday to Sunday bookings, you can proactively go back to those weekend bookers and say, hey, want to tack one on the end? You want to tack one on ahead of time? I think that's a really good solution. Like it's, it is a promo, but it's kind of one of those.

operational procedures where, especially during your shoulder season or low season, I don't think there's any reason not to, as long as you do, you want to be able to, as long as you want to get those people in and kind of keep them satisfied. I do. I think that that's something, and maybe it's not a free night at that point. Maybe it is, you know, a deep discount on that. But I do think that when we were at the, you know, at Great Wolf Lodge, we had an offer in state. Like, I think it was, if we would have extended it,

more day. It was 75% off that last night. Well, that's pretty crazy. So, like, whatever the number would have been, that didn't move the needle for us. Because, again, we had the restriction of, this is when we're saying, this is when we're going. I think that's where if you get those weekend bookers and they happen with a 90-day lead time or 120-day lead time, absolutely you should be pushing them to extend somehow or get some type of additional ancillary revenue coming through to you there. Yeah. Yeah. And that's because great will flage, they kill you once you're in the property. Yeah. For those that haven't been once you're in this property, it's like obviously targeted towards kids, Paul and I have kids around the same age. The cost of all the

activities within the resorts are expensive. So like, whatever you pay for the rent fee of the actual resort room, hotel room isn't what get you. It's all the things inside of it that gets you cost wise. But yeah, good stuff there. Yeah, makes sense. So different ways of positioning. So again, And we talked about this before. Actually, we get, excuse me, sort of tie these two things together. So doing a first-time guest offer or, like, a repeat guest discount are things that are often talked about or things that people would refer back to. Hey, you were a previous guest, use promo code, welcome back, and you get this discount.

Again, it could be fixed dollars, could be percentage, a lot of clients do that, or a first-time guest offer, that sort of thing. Again, it's just positioning it differently. I would say, take a look at your copy, take a look at your offer. Even within the testing, let's say you determine the $50 discount code works well. we've learned some things about how we present that offer and what type of audiences respond differently to it. So I'll give you an example. We have a client that is more, I would argue, have a luxury property manager, but they use the terminology of get a $100 travel credit towards

your stay when you sign up for our list and we'll send it to you. That terminology travel credit is used by a lot of these like high-end American Express cards. Like you see it at the four seasons, you see at these higher-end brands, their customer type is more of that type of customer. And they actually sign up for it. And they're getting not a promo code or a discount or a coupon code. they're getting a travel credit that they can apply their stay. So like do some testing around that. That's kind of how I feel about a fix our first time guest offer or a repeat guest booking offer is it's the same offer you're making.

It's just positioning it differently. But again, those things may work. Sometimes people want to, oh, they gave me a specific promo code just for me because I'm a past guest. It's a little bit different. Now, we could make that case or the argument that it might make sense to make your returning guest discount better. So if the one on your website is $50 and yours is $75, hey, that's a little bit better. I'm a past guest. I'm getting a better offer. And then just Joe Blow who comes in and looks at this

a website for the first time. So I don't know if you any nuance there, but I just want to mention like every possible angle to this and the goal of covering this topic is comprehensive. Right. I mean, I do. I think that that's one of those things where, you know, book direct was something that I think when we were building out initial travel net, Google ads, we put it on everything, book direct and save. And not only that, but when we looked into the like responsive ad reports, that was one of the most commonly served up variations of the ad as well. So it's not that just we put it in there is that it kept getting served up and it kept getting clicked and it kept getting engaged with so i do i think that concept of of the book direct and save or

you know doing some of those items is is certainly helpful there um yeah i mean on the stay again referral discount stuff like that it's one of those things i mean it's it's it's the way we can build loyalty we have very few ways to build loyalty and and i think from that perspective of the credit of something like that now if you're looking at it and you're thinking age wise what about travel credit versus travel voucher travel voucher seems a little older feels like feels a little more classic maybe 90 something like that but would you be more willing to think of travelers checks yeah oh boy a whole other thing but but i mean thinking about it that way would you consider that based on maybe a more luxury property or maybe a more upscale little

a market that skews slightly older with their target audience, something like that. It was just, it popped up. As you said credit, I was like, what about voucher? Travel voucher. That feels airliny as well, but what do you think there? I think you can test anything. I wouldn't do that myself. That would not be the copy that I would write if I was the one writing the copy.

But it doesn't mean that it's a bad idea. You know, I have my own biases, my own perspectives. I'm not always the target customer. Sometimes we, as every marketer can tell you, sometimes we do struggle to put ourselves in the mindset of the target customer. target customer as much as we might want to. We might not have that same life experience. We might not have that same feeling of that of like,

what does this look like when I see it on the page for the first time? Do I feel like this is a good deal? Do I feel like it's a bad deal? Am I getting what I want out of this? So yeah, you know, it's the cop-out answer, but I think testing is something that does make some sense and maybe worth exploring further or figuring another terminology. You know, I got an email a little while ago.

I saved it in my swipe file. And it was a discount offer on an annual subscription software. And it said, $35 is waiting for you, Conrad. That was the subject line of the email. And then the email that I actually got was like, it almost looked like a credit card, but my promo code was put on the credit card, like the graphic. And it was like Conrad, you know, 7, 2, 3, 4, 3, you know, 3, whatever, right?

So it was like obviously some ID number to attach to my name and my email, trying to get me to come back and subscribe to this annual software again, which I did not do. But I love the email, like, the way that it was presented. I'm like, it feels personal. It has almost like kind of a nice, interesting design to it. It's not like, again, it sounds simple. But even the way that you send that promo code to people,

It should feel a little bit like I'm excited to open that email. I want to see what's inside. I want to grab the promo code. I want to redeem it. By the way, you should probably just have their promo code be in the thank you of the modal. You shouldn't get people to force them to go to the email, but you might want to put an email in addition to this little thank you on the screen as well,

just a sidebar. Even better if you can cookie them and then apply the discount automatically without them having to copy and paste anything, just another sidebar for people, if they really want to take it to the next level. But yeah, those are things that absolutely can make sense. So I think it would be one to test. If you want to take the next one open to it, waving fees or waiving fees or waving a certain charge on the invoice or whatever the case may be. What are your thoughts on that, waiving a fee?

I think so few people are willing to do that because we're so fee-driven on a lot of different items and that's how a lot of people do kind of maintain parts of the operational side of things. So it's not that I wouldn't recommend it. I just think that's where a lot of people right now do drive a lot of that ancillary revenue that we're talking about to to help kind of run the business. and keep everything profitable there. So I think it's a great idea.

But again, I think it's probably better for larger operators or those who have a little better margin there to be able to say that type of thing. But, yeah, it's, as with all of these things, you know, you do kind of have to test and feel how our things are going to go. This is probably the one area more than any other in the space where AB testing is critical.

Because like it, and I think AB, true A.B testing is really difficult to do. You explained it in a really great way. It's talking about doing it in season, doing them in parallel, doing it over the same time period. That's really the only way you can judge that because if you run them back to back, well, it's a different time, even if it's apples and oranges. High season, exactly. You're just never going to be able to make that true comparison. The same thing. If you were, you're, we ran this last year. Different by your minds. I mean, if someone ran something in 2021 versus 2022, I guarantee that. the effectiveness was different. That's just how it happened. So I do. I think that that's one thing.

Even jumping back into the promo codes, like I think that's something that are there best practices to putting together a promo code? Do you want it to be long? You want it to be short. Do you want it to be memorable? How do you actually have to phrase a promo code to make sure people use it and make sure people are actually getting some value out of it? Because I think that that's something I've seen more often than not is that all of a sudden you get you're trying you've maybe you've got 15 or 20 promo codes in your property management system already and you're trying to make something unique and the air quotes are heavy there but like you're running out of like options you're running out of characters you're running out of something so I if you're helping to build someone help someone

build a promo code what are you doing how are you recommending them to put it together some of these comments are a limitation of most PMS software so I'll kind of preface with that because I've seen some e-commerce stuff out there that's really compelling where you give someone a discount and it's a personalized discount to them so the promo code would be like Paul 74213.992 something like that or Conrad through you know that sort of thing some string of numbers and with that with that nature you can personalize it because I can say I sent this promo code to Paul it's personalized to him and it expires in 48 hours or 72 hours most of the time we're not doing that because again limitations of the PMS where we're making a code we're using something like welcome 50 or save 50 or something like that and that's our promo code that we're using you know so I would say that the robustness of how discounts and promos and offers work in our space is most PMS softwares aren't very good at it some are better than others some are horrible like all you can do is like a percentage off and that's it and nothing else and they don't even calculate it the right way in my opinion you know not taking it off rent so there's always you know qualms I have with that but I understand

and like not many people use these functions and thought it's not their software and if you ask you'll get a thousand ideas or answers on how to do it so i mean i'll run through a few more just to talk about like some many things are hard to do i'm not disputing that but do they work from marketing perspective absolutely some of them do um early bird discount or early deposit discount so a client that i'm working with right now this is their very typical kind of December campaign they do it's book now for any 2026 stay as we're recording this it's kind of the middle of December. And it's put it $1 down or put $10 down or put $100 down or some variation of that. And then you owe your balance for your, let's say, summer vacation.

It's a beach market on January 30th. Logic being, you just spent all this money on Christmas presents for your kids, perhaps, or your end bonus hasn't come in quite yet. You hope it does come in, but it hasn't come in yet. As a result, you will have it in January 30th. We'll go and do it again. We've crushed that one as well on a tax return promo. We did a tax return promo a little while ago where it was like book now for a dollar and then you owe us the deposit or you owe us the balance a little bit after tax time people got a refund they would then buy their vacation rental book their vacation rental so i've had success on that one too so that's kind of a clever one that we've had some success with and it's just to close up put a bow on that one because

you opened that one earlier you didn't close that um yeah it is typically where you have some margins so you got to think about it hey is this the thing that we'll get people to book but again people are always looking for what are things that give me that give me momentum that are not just rate reductions. And I'm like, okay, well, if you're willing to play ball, like, let's come up with some ideas. And maybe some of these can be billed back to the owner. So if you did like a free pool heating offer, promotion, maybe if it's a short stay, maybe it's during a low season. Maybe you could say, hey, owner, we'll split this, 50-50. You know, I'll take half out of my commission, half out of, you know, you'll pay the pool fee, um, heating. And maybe your pool fee,

uh, pool heating fee has some margin built into it. So maybe you were charging 200 for the pool heating. It was only costing the homeowner, $100 or something. So maybe you split a 50-50 and it works out relatively fair on both sides. And someone might book the property because it has a free pull heat, but there's a lot of other things that kind of can tie to that. So I'm going to go kind of towards the experience packaging kind of angle. So if you want to build on that, let me know and then I got a lot to say on that. Well, I mean, I think the experience package is great. Like, I think, is there a tangible thing that you would give to something? And that doesn't feel like more of a promo, it feels like a giveaway or something like that. But I do. I think

of like some of these welcome packages. And like, it's, could you incentivize, Is that as a promo? I mean, the welcome basket. Tom Goodwin does a great job of really reaching out and personalizing the experience for his guests. Is that something that you've seen people monetize? And is that something where at a certain point it is, it's the reciprocity. The rule of reciprocity you're actually giving them the value without charging them for it. Like where does that stand here in just,

the promo concept, I guess. Well, I think it goes back to this broader conversation that we touched on at various points throughout this, which is value versus price, right? Like, people will value things very differently at the price. The example I give, we're both golfers. The example I always give is if I was doing a golf focused or a golf themed getaway, and I gave a box of pro v1 golf balls to every golfer who had booked for that particular stay, and it was a three-day golf trip or something like that, a box for

$5.00 for reference point, if you buy them to bulk, they're a little bit cheaper. We're at $55 a dozen for those that don't golf. That's a lot of money to pay for a box of golf balls because, yes, in any moment, could take one swing and lose a $5, $6 golf ball. It's not a good feeling as a golfer. So even if you're not a golfer, I feel like I could understand this. If like a tennis ball costs $20 and I could like hit it once and break it, I'd be like, that's tough.

Like that's an expensive hobby. But the golfers would greatly appreciate that as a gift, as a welcome thing that was waiting for them. Hey, there's four golfers. They walked in there. There was four dozen pro v ones sitting in the box. They'd be like, holy smokes. Yes, it's $200.

They might have booked a $2,000 vacation rental. You give them $200 pro vans. They're going to be excited by it because of that, right? Because the value that they put on it. and I speak personally to this to some degree too. I place more value on it than $55. I can go afford a $55 in a box of golf balls. I just don't want to spend $55 if I can avoid it, right?

Especially once I go and, you know, lose it, right? So that's a good example of there's so many examples you could do within that realm of, hey, typically there's paid parking here. But if you book through us, the parking is free. Oh, cool. Yeah, I don't want to pay from parking. It's great that the parking is free. Actually, Hyatt offers this.

We were just staying at a Hyatt property a few weeks ago over Thanksgiving for visiting my grandfather. And if you're like a high at whatever it is globalist or some other status I've got because I've got their credit card, you get a free breakfast. And it's not like a cheap like low quality like hotel breakfast. It was like sit down with a waiter like buffet style like very high quality. And I'm like every day I got the bill with my wife and my oldest was there. My youngest was with me as well. And it was like $119 that we weren't paying because it was included as part of our thing. So I'm like because it's whatever 25 bucks person, you know, for this breakfast buffet. And again, this is like a decent hotel like a high regency. It's like a little it's probably up there in the three. Four. star class if you go look at the hotel ratings. So again, I value that like, oh, cool. I'm having breakfast every morning. It's great. It's high quality. I enjoy it. My son was loving it. And I paid nothing for it because I had this high credit card. So like, was that the reason I found out for the high credit card? No, but it was a nice perk that I got once I got there. So I think like all those things are, again, we've hit on this now a few times. But it's like, no, your audience,

know what they care about. Those are two small examples. I think any sort of like, like you said, welcome basket offer or I have a client who does this and I think it's really clever. On his website, he has a list of amenities that you can't uncheck. And if you mouse over it, it says these are all standard amenities. Every property has a hot tub. Every property has Wi-Fi. Every property has both a regular coffee maker and a smart, like a curig cake-up coffee maker. Every property has smart TVs.

So it's like these are all standard amenities and every single property no matter what. So we list them there. But we're just reinforcing the fact that like these are there. I think about that when I think about value too, where it's like if I know when I'm booking, you can even put something beneath the checkout where it's like, my booking with us, you get these benefits. As a reminder, you are getting benefit A, B, C, D, F-G. And those are just the standard of things you do it for everybody, but it's reinforcing value.

It's like, oh, great, when I'm doing that. I know Mark Simpson in his book, he talks about the idea of, like, a direct booking can check in at 2 p.m. A OTA booking can check in at 4 or 5 p.m. Like, he's talked about that as a way to, like, get people to cancel their OTA booking booking and then make a direct booking. That's interesting. I've not personally done that myself. I think the tricky part about that is like, you know, are you willing to enforce it, right? If someone's like, because the property's there, it's ready that's

clean, they happen to book an Airbnb. Are you really willing to take it that far and say, no, I'm not going to actually let you in the property until 4 p.m. or 3 p.m., even though it's ready and willing to be open. I would have a really hard time advising a client to do that personally on that grounds, but it is a heck of a hook to say, wow, if I book direct, I get other benefits or perks that I'm not getting my booking an OTA. I didn't know that. I guess I think two of all these hotel brands where it's, hey, you can't access the Wi-Fi without booking direct on the, you know, being a free, whatever, Hyatt or Hilton was the one who are staying at Durham Hilton member. If you're

not a Hilton member of the free program, you have to pay the Wi-Fi, it's $10 a day, that sort of thing. So it's like all those things in my mind kind of wrapped together into what is the guest value? What are you charging for? What aren't you charging for? What do you offer just by default that you can like reinforce to people? That's part of your value. So it's like, hey, use promo code, whatever at checkout and we'll double the size of your gift bag basket for a bigger family or we'll include, again, there's a thousand things you can do here, but just some things we've done before. It's like use promo code, free dinner at checkout and we'll leave a $100 gift card to our favorite local restaurant in the property when you check in. If you make a booking

during the month of February, let's say. So it's like, oh, that's compelling. Now you could do something clever too with that where you either, A, buy the disc, by the gift card, a discount from the restaurant, or it's more of like a charge card deal you have at the restaurant. I have a client that has this relationship. So it's, if the guest redeems it, they then pay for that dinner. But if the guest does not redeem it, up to $100 or up to $50, they don't pay for it. So some of these people actually believe it or not, book on that promo, go in the property, stay, consume the stay, have a great time, leave a five-store review, and they never redeem the dinner. So like got them to book, but they never actually redeem

the dinner. So why are we going to buy a $50 gift card that's not going to get redeemed right from the restaurant? So again, a million ways you could do this, a lot of ideas there in that block but like I think the idea being that what is the guest value what are things that they care about sorry one more this one just came to mind it wasn't in our notes um this was years ago when I was at the previous agency I worked at they started doing free beach gear and all their properties so it was like every booking includes I think it was like a kayak two beach chairs at the smaller properties I think it was three or four beach chairs of larger properties and there was like a little kit like your umbrella everything was just sitting there waiting for you in the garage typically

in the property and when they when they initially kind of pitch this idea to us and they said they're going to do this I was like yeah I like it I was like this is a solid idea then I saw how excited honestly I always guessed where to get this free beach gear and they would get review and the review would be a $5,000 vacation rental booking and someone would mention the free beach gear within it and like this is like $40,

$450 of stuff that you're leaving there when you're done. Like I'm sure it's going to get ruined and destroy and it's not to last forever but it's like I'm like I was always skeptical of like I don't think this is that exciting I'd offer but they're like oh I didn't have to lug stuff in my car I loved it. It was all sitting there when I got there and people were pumped about free beach gear. So like again I think there's a lot of ways to skin the cap

but I'll stop because I'll keep going and you know curious your comments. I think that's that last one specifically I mean, I think there was a vendor in the space that really had a great idea kind of around that concept. And I, you know, I think maybe the focus was lost there a little bit along the way. But everything we've said here has boiled down to, you have to know your audience. You have to know what is going to be appealing to your audience. And I think that that's, it's not just, you know, where they're coming from.

It's not, I mean, you really have to dive in to make these promos effective because you can't. You can just slap a 5%, 10%, 15%, $100, $100 on the next off. your next day. But is that really what the perception of value is for your traveler? You can talk about the homeowner side of things too. I mean, that's, you know, we touched on some homeowner promos. It's the same type of thing. What do your homeowners actually value? I think we get so sucked into, well, this is what worked before or this is what, this is what works for everybody else. This is what I should do. And I think the way we started the conversation was the way you can discount or not discount,

but still drive that value for the traveler, for the homeowner there. So I think that it is. A promo does not have to mean that you're not making as much money, that you're losing money, that you're not giving something away, something tangible or something physical away. There are some other items of just personalization

that makes it feel like there is a promotion there and that you're getting more of that value. So I do, I think that, you know, whether it is a stay-again credit, whether it is a last-minute deal. And I think anything you're trying to do, you're probably building a sense of urgency one way or another. So, like, that's the one thing we haven't touched on that much is just urgency. Like, in a lot of cases, what you're trying to do with the promo is generate that urgency,

generate that engagement, generate that call to action. So, you know, some probably need to be more urgent than others. you're trying to drive some type of action and you've got to use the right words to do that. So I think I think we beat this one up pretty big. We beat this one up. Yeah. No, I think so. Yeah, a bit of a, a bit of a deeper dive maybe than most people would want to.

But I think it's, again, this, I believe this over and over again. I've thought about this a lot this year, actually, this idea that marketing is creativity to some degree. And it's how do we come up with a new idea? What's a new visual? What's a new kind of hook that we can play with, you know, on the, on the on the emotional creative side of things and then there's like a data there's a science version of it where it's analytics and numbers and that sort of thing and I think if you're a good

marketer you have a bias we all do and I think Paul and I have the same bias which is we tend to look at the numbers we tend to look at the data but you realize very quickly once you get going your career and once you start thinking about this a lot that the numbers and the spreadsheets and all that kind of stuff is meaningless if you don't seriously also think about the creative how are people perceiving our offer what does our ad actually look like how is it how does it present to the gas all those things and you know I think as I've gotten further along in my career or not thought about this lot this year. I've tried to better be balanced. It's like my right arm is wrong. My left arm is weak. I'm trying to make my left arm a little bit weaker. I think all this

offer design stuff is very much into that creative angle. And then you can then analyze your theories or ideas or what you think might work with the numbers with the data. That's great. Definitely have that capability on your team, whether it's you or someone else in your team that can go and pull that stuff for you, have him or her help you with the tracking with the numbers. But go back and think about things creatively and think about what it is. And I think, again, that's kind of like, to put about want it to bring it all the way back to the beginning. It's like in my mind, this is kind of the essence of what kind of good like direct response offer marketing is for vacation rentals. It's getting traffic. And then it's how do I get the traffic that I'm getting to convert at a

high clip? And it's thinking about kind of creative solutions like this. So that's all I got. Paul, any parting thoughts before we put a bow on this one and wish everybody a Merry Christmas. I think that's the key. I wishing people are Merry Christmas and that happy New Year. If we sneak another conversation before that, that's going to be phenomenal. So I'm wishing everybody to get. Absolutely. Well, you know what it is though, Paul. We do ask for one gift. Here's the thing. You don't have to ship it.

It doesn't cost you anything, which is an amazing gift you can give us. It is a podcast review. So go ahead and get your hot cocoa. Log in to iTunes or Spotify. That's where we get the most downloads. Click five stars. Leave us a five-star review.

We appreciate it. That'll be an awesome Christmas gift you can give us. If you do do that, please a screenshot it, email to us. It's Conrad at buildup bookings.com. It is Paul at Manzi Digital.com. Send us a note to both of us. That'd be great. And maybe we'll get you a Christmas gift in exchange.

We're giving us a Christmas gift of a podcast. We appreciate it. Have an awesome one. Whatever holiday you happen to celebrate. Hope you have an awesome one. Hope you had a great year. If not, next year it'll be even better. Onwards and upwards.

We'll catch you on the next episode.