Heads In Beds Show - Build The Demand Formula For Your Vacation Rental Marketing

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, we dive into the factors that drive DEMAND in your markets and attempt to break apart what creates and drives demand. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 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 Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation 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. I'm your co host Paul. And we're live. What's up, Paul? You know, I talked about it. We in Minnesota are getting the

South Carolina experience of weather and I gotta tell you, I don't know how you do it. No, it's great as a parent of young children because who does it zap the energy right out when you get a couple hours running around but this is a this is not where I want to live full time on the weather side of things I joke I complain about the cold which justified when we get down to the numbers that we do but I don't know you could be complaining a whole lot more about the weather I think if you're experiencing this a lot. But how are you doing in your neck of the woods? I hope you're a lot better off than this.

Like I said, I'm used to it. So I'm sure we're probably similar right now. But I'll deal with the highs because I don't want the lows. Maybe I'll explain it that way, you know, because I can't tolerate the lows anymore. I just don't enjoy the lows anymore. So you got to take what you can get as it were as it relates to, you know, weather and stuff like that. So this is the world you've chosen, you know, Paul, you could change it if you want to. So I keep telling myself that, but you know, I then I couldn't be a downtrodden Minnesota sports fan. There's a whole lot of really great things that keep me here. You do what your parents have done.

Your parents got the house in Florida, right? And then they got the house up. Yeah. You don't have to leave forever. Yeah. Yeah. They, they spend their six, six plus six months plus one, whatever you got to do down there. But that's, yeah, it's at some point we've thought about that. But that's a long ways away now. It's a future

plan. People will enjoy the outdoor oddities that make Minnesota so unique that when you aren't happy with the weather, just wait 15 minutes, it'll do something different. Yeah, we keep waiting only a few minutes for things to change, as goes the change in vacation rental demand. So I think we've got a relatively novel concept today, which is always a bit of a risk when we record and we don't exactly know where we're headed. But I think we've got a decent idea here. And it's talking about this this concept that you and I talked about before, which is what are actually the different if we create a formula that would predict vacation rental demand, what would that look like? And I don't mean a formula that the air DNA guys have or the beyond pricing guys have or some of those pricing people have. Although we should talk about that maybe as we get going here pricing, because I think that's it, that's key portion of it. But there's many things outside of just pricing that I think impacts how much demand a given market has. And, you know, you and I were talking about record about like, it's, it's a good idea, I think, because we've been doing this a long time now to have a little roll with X in our mind, or maybe like a little Wikipedia in my mind, I do have things that have worked well in given markets or given situations that I can then see and go, oh, you're not exactly like this client over here or the situation over here, but you're pretty similar. And I bet because we had success with this tactic over here, we'll probably have success with this tactic over here, maybe with some slight variations.

But it's because each market, each destination, each even property manager, even in the same market might have different variables, different inputs that impact how many people actually wanna stay, book with them and book their properties. And we talked about this already, we've done some previous episodes. I think you have to go back to in them, and book their properties. And we talked about this already. We've done some previous episodes.

I think you have to go back to in your feed and you'll see one where we talked about specialty versus unique and how much demand a property has as more desirable or less desirable, based on the overall number of people that might want to book that stay. But I think we're gonna take this idea further. We're gonna keep talking about things

that I think are the variables maybe in the demand equation if there was one, if we could actually make this equation that would give us the right answer. Pricing is part of it, location is part of it obviously, the destination is obviously a huge part of it, the platform and so on and so forth. And we're going to try to break this apart and just better understand it and maybe it'll help us as we go through and try to give better advice to our clients. And maybe it's something that you need to think of when you look at another destination. Maybe try to find some sister or cousin destinations that you might have.

So for example, I was on a call this morning with our client that we have in Jamaica. I think Jamaica might behave somewhat similarly to a client that we have in the Bahamas. Obviously, these are different markets, but there's enough similarities there that maybe if you're in Jamaica and you have a premium high end property, go follow what some companies are doing in the Bahamas and you might learn from it or vice versa. Or maybe folks that are in Hawaii can learn from something, you know, some type of marketing that's done from in Bali, for example, you know, attracting a different audience or marketing in Spain might

be somewhat similar, whatever the case may be. So these are all just random examples. But that's what we're going to try to do today, Paul. Anything I missed as we kind of get going on the outline here? No, I think that this is what I thought was fun. We've done a lot more of the mind maps more recently and kind of just showing just the complexity of what we're talking about. And this one, it kind of blew me away with just how many factors and then you know, thank you AI for putting the help and us put this together as well. But when we talk about how little we actually control in the whole marketing and sales of in the

direct booking year. This is these are all the things that we do need to take into consideration. Now, obviously, these are going to have different factors for different, like you said, different markets, different properties, all that. But we're going to try to go deep here. And I think this is going to be it's going to be a fun conversation just to talk about a lot of things. I think we talk more about this off camera than we do on camera,

because it is it's things that we more deal with on the daily basis of being in the grind and being in the weeds and, and trying to figure out, okay, what is actually impacting the effectiveness of what we're doing? And how can we visualize some of that? So I do, I love this topic. And it's gonna be fun conversation. I'll give you one example off the jump here and it'll again relate back to a conversation I had today. And it's kind of a funny story in a way, maybe not for the client listening, hopefully. So long story short, this client took a five night booking for next spring already. So as we record this, it's mid-June. I realize you may listen a little bit later, but this mid-June 2025 and this client took a booking for the early part of 2026 at premium high end rates, because that's a pretty far out booking or

also they speaking and it was a five night window. And then he was like, the next day I got a nine night request from a travel agent who was trying to book that property for nine nights. And he goes, Oh no bummer. I just sold the five nights to someone else. We go look up the dates. So we think the first guest, um, either booked for a spring break or Easter of next year, but we think the second guest was trying to book for Passover of next year,

because the dates lined up perfectly. It was like April 1 to April 9. So it was like an eight or nine night booking that they were trying to get. And of course, he sold it at a good rate, to be fair, but he only sold half the nights he probably could have had he waited for the other booking to come in. So look, you know, you can't go back and, you know, hop in the time machine and make better decisions on things like that. But it was an interesting piece. One of the things we have in here, these kind of seasonal or temporary variables, how does the holiday line up? I remember last year, so 2024, Easter fell into March last year,

this year was in April. That messed up a lot of like revenue reporting and things like that for some clients that we have that get a lot of Easter related travel or spring break related travel. Sometimes those things line up with Easter and it kind of caused a little bit of confusion as we were doing some year overover-year comparison numbers. Wow, March looks terrible year-over-year, April looks great year-over-year. Well, not really. If you take both months, sum them up and kind of compare that 60-day timeframe, it was relatively similar.

So anyways, just one thing that we have in the list there as we get going here on these temporary or temporal variables is how do the holidays line up? Some holidays change every year, some don't, obviously, but the ones that do change, what month are they falling into, how long are they, in this case Easter and Passover, going to overlap like directly. As far as the celebration dates, maybe in your market, that might make some sense if you attract people who are celebrating those specific holidays in their in their given faith. So it's like, yeah, like a unique one. And obviously, my clients like grinding his teeth a little bit that he sold five nights when he could have sold 10 nights. But

hopefully we'll get a booking in the backside of that we We got plenty of time to, you know, to promote those other dates, but that's one that I have here. I'll do maybe, maybe we'll do like two or three at a time because we have some, we'll try to get through as many as we can. Which is, we talk about this a lot lead time, you know, this is like a really valuable discussion point right now is everyone kind of the theme is repeated over and over again, you know, anecdotally, at least of my clients, man, I can't believe how late people book now the last last minute bookings are, you know, going crazy this year versus where we were last year. A lot of reasons for that probably that would be very difficult

to parse out and put into a, you know, simple list. But certainly, I think when you have anxiety about booking, you're not going to want to book too far out in advance. And I think the more commodity your property is, but the more high demand your property can be, it's when you can get those last minute bookings, particularly when there's lots of other alternatives. I think when people don't really care which one they book, I think that's where the lead times get really compressed. I think if your property has more desirability, you can try to push against that trend and say, no, I want people to book a little bit further in advance, but it's always a challenge. So those are just two to start off with. Yeah, feel

free to go through some other ideas in that list and react to those variables. Yeah, I think the holiday proximity is really key because it's not only the date, because we have changing data, but day of the week, when those holidays fall, I think that when people are comparing like a weekend to a weekday and things like that, that also impacts in the long term there too. So that's one that, yeah, that always hits home just even when we're comparing reporting period over period that the day always switches up on us. That's school calendar alignment. That's

something that as, you know, we're up in Minnesota, we always, I always feel like we're on the tail end of it because we start school after Labor Day. It feels like everybody else in the rest of the country is starting before and we're kind of trailing things off here and same thing. We're ending, I think we ended June 10th. So, you're talking about, you know, for people who chunk off a lot of their season from Memorial Day forward, well, that's two weeks of time where if you're in a market where you have drive to destiny or whatever school is in your target Destination where people are coming from when your source markets there

That's gonna factor in or when people are going to be traveling to you as well I think the other thing you know check-in day is a week I think that's something that when we look at you know A lot of people are trying to go week long Sunday Sunday to Saturday, Saturday to Sunday, check in stuff like that. But that's not the reality of what you know, what you're able to do in every market. And you know, we talk about going back to the commodity versus specialty. That's not always something we can do there. So can you control who books the Tuesday to Thursday versus the Tuesday to Sunday and things

like that. But like you're saying, it's, it's something that is it going to impact your revenue? Yeah, it, it certainly may. If you're getting, you know, more three night bookings this year than you're, and you're getting more five night bookings last year, those are, those are the comparisons you have to make and try to adjust as best you can. Is it pricing? Is it marketing? Is it opening up your, your availability dates or shortening your window of minimum nights booked something like. Yeah, that's that's the thing right like on the on the minimum

nights numbers, you know, stay conversation. It's like a lot of our clients I think who might see a little bit shorter stay like this year than last year more tend to be more drive to you tend to be more affordable or more, you know, budget kind of focused properties. It's like well, if we're going to leave all the Mondays unbooked, I want to try to sell them into something right like I'd rather get something than nothing from a revenue perspective. And I think that's kind of been an idea that a lot of people have kind of grasp on to is selling more GapNights and other

solutions that automate that, which I think is fantastic. Because before some of our clients are doing that more manually, you know, where they're going and selling GapNights manually, which is obviously a little bit of a tricky process versus doing it more automated. So I'm with you on that check in day of the week before we move on the next block here. What I would say is we have clients who are their weekends are literally booked out. I'm talking to someone right now, a potential client who is completely booked out weekends wise, again, recording mid June, I think all the way up until the tail end of October, beginning of November. And he's like, and all my mid weeks feel empty, which is not actually true. But it feels

that way when all the weekends are booked, and all the mid weeks are empty. And it kind of creates this, you know, concerning scenario where it's like, how do I get people to book these midweeks? So I think it has to be a whole marketing messaging, media advertising, you know, landing page campaign on the website. We've got to put together a lot of pieces, I believe, you know, we'll see how it all flashes out here when it's all said and done of, hey, Tuesday to Thursday,

you know, how do we get, how do we sell more of that? Monday to Thursday, how do we sell more of that? We got to let people know that it's available. We got to show them how much money they're going to save. And maybe we do have to try and do some clever testing run targeting. Maybe the older person is more willing to travel midweek versus a weekend because they're not as restricted by maybe a job or a career or maybe the very affluent, whether regardless of age or able to travel and book more midweek, they own the company,

they can take off whatever time they want in a way. Well, not me, but that's sometimes how it can go. So yeah, some fun ideas there I think that always worth testing. And I think if you give these prompts to people of like, what's our lead time? Is that going up or down? Is it changing? Walk me through our midweek coverage and occupancy data versus our weekend occupancy coverage data. How's that changing? How is our seasonality changing right now as far as being reactive and proactive to the changes that are occurring with regards to right now as we record, it's like you better book in for fourth of July, there's not much time left, that sort of thing. Events, holidays, like you said, school calendars, these are all things that obviously play a role. So those are kind of some of those temporal or

seasonal variables. I'm gonna flip the page a little bit to pricing. And again, we're not pricing experts, we don't try to play one on the internet or in audio form. So you should probably talk to a pricing expert if you want a lot of advice on pricing. But I do think the pricing marketing and the brand itself have obviously an inherent connection. You know, it's kind of a left-hand right-hand type of thing almost in a way because yeah, our marketing is going to work really well, right? Go lower the prices, you know, down to a few dollars a night and we'll all pretty much guarantee we'll get 100% occupancy. Our clients will be poor on the streets and not have a job, but you know, that's one way of doing it,

as far as if you're trying to get a lot of bookings right away. So we all agree that some measure of effectiveness or what ADR measures, revenue per available night, that sort of thing, are a better way to measure overall success, not what do we sell that one night for. The piece that I always struggle with psychologically, this is one thing I really do struggle with,

and I mentioned that viral LinkedIn post I had a little while ago where I kind of said, why don't we end pricing in nine-nine, and then all the revenue managers were like, that's impossible, because of the way we do pricing. But regardless, changing prices by 5% or 10%, or something like that, why is someone a buyer at 210 a night and they're not a buyer to 29? Like, that's one thing I don't know if I have a great hold on or understanding on. It's almost like, in my

mind, there's these bands of pricing variables that matter. So you know, for example, I'm looking at three properties, and I'll just make a fictional scenario, me and my wife are going to go on vacation in the winter this year. And we see three properties for our family. And one for the week is going to be $2,500. One is going to be $2,700. And one's gonna be $3,200. I'm lucky enough I have the means I could afford in those properties, right? I could book any of them. To me, that's not enough of a difference to make any difference. I'm going to pick the one that I think is the best, which might be the cheapest one. It might be the middle one. It might be the top one.

But there's a close enough band there where it's like to me, $2,500 versus $3,200. I kind of have no reaction to that if it's only the vacation I'm going to take all year. But I realize other people may have saved up $3,000. That's all they have. So they look at that $3,250 one and they go, I can't do it. I won't be able to do it. So I realize there's these cliffs that occur in people's minds. But it's one thing I really struggle with on pricing, because I don't know, seemingly changing pricing down 10 or 20% seems to move the needle. But I'm always curious as to why that is, is it that we just look for a deal and we feel like we're getting a deal? Or is there actually some motivation there

behind, oh, you got me under 2500. And that's what I was willing to spend. And therefore, I can book it now. And I couldn't before I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. But there's a whole bunch of psychology there. I think some of the variables that we've got in the list here to price versus comp set and then in specific markets, price positioning versus hotels. I think in those more urban markets and talk about location and accessibility a little further down to that's a whole different discussion. But if you're in a market where it's more of a large traditional vacation rental markets, smokey zenos, Myrtle Beach, another good example there.

More on the vacation rent or that's the majority, that's what you're comparing against. But when you're in different markets where half of the lodging, half the accommodations are hotels, resorts, things like that, I think of like a New Jersey or things a little more in the Northeast, there are, there's just more resorts going on, more hotels, more of those inns, bed and breakfast. And those are the unique accommodations that you're also battling against. So that's the other thing is it's not always just,

and that's where I don't know what pricing tool is the best to be able to help you understand that comp set. I know Pricelabs has some really good numbers and they do hotels and they do all these other things. But that is something you have to take into consideration, I think. And I think those who really excel on the pricing variable side of things are taking all that into consideration.

And it's not just what is my ADR versus RevCar and looking at how much more revenue can I get out. It is taking into consideration what are the other two bedroom condos in my market doing? What are the other four bedroom luxury homes in my market doing? And where do I need to be to, I think, let's take it outside of pricing

to be in front of that target audience that I'm also trying to match that pricing set against there. So now we're getting into the point of why this mind map is so complex, because now we've taken from three different types of variables, location, pricing, and temporal. And again, we're just starting to touch on the location and accessibility side of things. So there's more, but every algorithm that the pricing solutions have is amazing, but it cannot take into consideration the psychology behind it.

Even if they're trying to, how, what, what, what is the point? How do you get a plus B plus C equals that? And the properties are too unique, right? Like the, the one thing we can say about, um, you know, and I see the Airbnb memes from time to time where it's like, uh, the rules and they joke about Airbnb rules, and then they compare to a hotel. And it's like one boring room, please. I like that meme. And then it's like, because because let's be honest, if you blindfolded me and brought me into like a Hilton, a Marriott, and a home with sweets or whatever the case may be, would I actually be able to tell the

difference between them if you just took the blindfold off and drop me in the middle of a room? I don't think so. Right. But like if I did that with three different property managers and three different homes that maybe, heck, maybe they're the same price point, you know, they could all be 300 bucks a night for a two bedroom home or three bedroom home or something. Each one's going to be a little bit different and each one may appeal to a different audience, a different, you know, set of criteria. You know, I'll reference this. I think we talked about this before on the, on the show. I have a client who has, uh, I originally connected with them on their golf packaging business,

but that business frankly has seen a little bit of a decline or had seen a little decline when I originally connected with them. So they were renting out what essentially were condos on the golf course, people who had no interest at all in coming down to this area for golfing. It was just like more affordable inventory. There was at once much more golf packaging demand that's kind of fallen off a little bit. And there's this inventory that was kind of forgotten a little bit. So on the website, we actually ask people now, Hey, you're interested in golfing or you're interested in just the lodging or are you interested in both? So there's kind of three check boxes they make when they sign up for the email list. And depending on what box they

checked, both golfing, mostly lodging only, those three different choices, we give them very different messaging and media after they sign up for the email list. If they indicate they're not interested in golfing, you would never know past that initial message that there was a golf course attached to this resort or this lodging opportunity at all. It's just about, hey, here's a great place to stay. It's 10 minutes from this. It's 10 minutes from this. It's a gated community. It's very nice. It's kind of a little bit out of the way, but that's good because it's peaceful. It's serene. It's calming. It's relaxing, that sort of thing. So we tried to talk about all the reasons why. But again, how do you price that when there really isn't exactly any comparable properties? It's kind of its own thing. Yes,

there's similarities. And yes, someone may look at that on a page somewhere and compare that two-bedroom to another two-bedroom somewhere else, maybe closer to the beach. But if you don't care about the beach, you're getting much better value over here. It's bigger, cleaner, nicer in one way. If you want to stay right next to the beach and you don't really care about the property, you just want literally a bed, I'm sure you can find something that more fits your speed there. So that's the tricky part, right? It's like, how do you actually build comps that are somewhat familiar? I think Verba is this feature where if you lose a booking, it'll say like this person booked someone else, but it looked at your listing and a few other listings, just so you know, like

here's who you lost to. I think that's kind of a clever thing because it's always interesting to see like, how often I wonder people are booking something nicer than what your property may be. And nicer is of course, someone's objective. But you know, it wasn't like, oh, I need to lower my price to get a booking, which of course is always a double edged sword with regards to, you know, revenue and getting more demand there. Because although you and I talked about that recently, hey, have you actually test the bottom of the pricing? It's challenging to know if that's the thing that actually fixes the problem. Or if it's more just, you know, having the right

property, having their product people actually want. Not ideal, I would say. Yeah, yeah, never ideal. You know, but it's it's it is one of those things where if the pricing is the issue, then it takes a heck of a lot of marketing to try to solve it if the pricing is the issue, right? Like that's been my experience in my career where it's like, the demand for this property is there, but not at this price point. Like I looked, they're having the KPMG women's tournament this week. And I looked at the field like rentals that they have at PGA Frisco. These things are like $5,000 a

night. And I just picked random dates in the fall. It wasn't like I was picking some like holiday or anything like that. And I'm like, what is the demand for that property at $5,000 a night? And yet I look and they're sold out. So it's like, sometimes I look at something and I think I have a decent understanding of demand for market and then I go do some digging. And I'm just like, I don't understand the demand for this market at all. There's people willing to pay thousands of dollars a night for these like larger vacation homes on a PGA Frisco. And I'm just like,

huh, like I'm scratching my head a little bit of like, what where's the value in that, but someone's seeing it, someone's paying it. So, you know, we have clients all the time, I think, misjudge a property, tend to over judge and think, oh, it's more desirable than it actually is. But I've seen the opposite occur to this property, we signed it, we thought it do well, it's done way better than we thought, like, we're actually very surprised by that, that has happened time as well.

Some of that is, as we get into, like, just, you know, talking about the properties that you are bringing on, I think this is something that people do well, but they could do better. Taking into consideration how these things are going to impact there. I mean, it is. You're probably not going to be able to choose. You're going to choose either urban or a more rural market. That's a choice you have to make there.

You can split the difference, but it's tough. But then, thinking about location- difference, but it's tough. But then thinking about location-wise, drive-to market, are you in a drive-to market? Understanding whether or not you're in a drive-to market. I think that's the one thing is that sometimes people try to expand that reach to a more national audience when a national audience either doesn't know about your market or just isn't that interested in going to your market. So I think that that's it's not just knowing the bits, it's understanding how far people are willing to go and do things like that. Flight accessibility, that's something that we've put together marketing

campaigns when people do, when some of the airlines put together a flash sale or something like that, knowing that that is a place where a lot of people are coming to travel. People are coming from Toronto down to Miami or down to Southwest Florida or things like that. When those specific flight deals are on, that's a good time to maximize that and understand. But we're also seeing, I know up in Minneapolis especially, we see a lot of the carriers are actually taking some of their flights off. It is, it is. They're not carrying the same flights. So is that potentially impacting what you're doing? And you know, are fewer people traveling because there are fewer flights to your destination or things like that?

I think that that's something we joked. We also have weather seasonality. If you're in a market that has 345 days of sun every year, hello San Diego, yeah, you're going to have a different type of, just a different understanding of what a desirable property is. Is the temperature going to have some effect on you? Mountain areas, obviously weather and seasonality plays a big role if you're a downhill destination and there's no snow all winter.

So these are some of the things that we get a little more worried about. You know, you get into, I mean it's disaster relief when we get to some of this stuff. That is something that certainly we can't control. But at least you can put some type of campaign around a lot of these locations. You can put some type of backstop around to say, okay, I'm gonna lean into I'm in a rural versus an urban market. I'm really gonna lean into that with the the content that I'm putting together, the messaging I'm putting together and knowing that I'm going to go after a very specific audience who's looking for that.

Now the same thing with a drive-to market. You can really lean into that. You can readily lean into, hey, it's a really terrible snow season, but that doesn't mean that you don't you know that that Steamboat Springs isn't a great spot to visit So I do I think that that's who is to your you're at the whims of my conversations You're at the whims of Mother Nature at all times Location stuff, but what do you think here? Well 100% and and what's burned in my mind? a lot of this location stuff. But what do you think here? Well, 100% and what's burned in my mind, we might talk about this one before a client that we had years ago in Florida, on the Gulf side that lost the season to red tide, basically, or like

had a very, very low demand season due to red tide. Obviously, we don't mention the C word and you know, that happened in 2020. And that obviously killed and then somehow respiked up a lot of demand curves. So whether and let's just call it like, what's it called in the in the travel insurance world acts of God, if you will, right? That's always a complex factor, but it certainly makes a difference. I couldn't agree more.

We might need a speed run. Some of the next things at least not go to all the detail, but the platform itself, right? Like we've we've had clients just, you know, my short version of this would be we have clients who launch a listing on let's just say Airbnb or Verbo. It's doing well. And then all of a sudden stops doing well. And it's like they didn't get a negative review, they didn't have any problems that they're aware of, it's just who knows, right? There's some algorithm thing that changed and they have one thing behind the scenes change in their listing itself and that caused something to get

down-voted or maybe just other properties are doing better. Like one thing we probably didn't touch on earlier that we should have is competition increases over time. So that's why I always dislike these people who have these spreadsheets where it's like, hey, the property did $50,000 in 2019. So it's gonna increase, you know, 3%, 4% year over year for the next 10 years. And by 2030, we'll be doing, you know, X number of dollars per year in the property.

Well, it's like, how do you know that? Because you don't know what's gonna change and what variables are gonna change with respect to what's around you. You know, think of the Gatlinburg Pigeon Forge Market, which we have a client in. The demand, the growth in that market is unbelievable from 2018 or post-fire up until today, the number of new cabins there. And the demand was there for a while too. Now the demand's not quite as strong there. It's not bad. I mean, it's still one of

those visited parks, if not the most visited park in the entire country, at least in the entire 48 states down here. And yet there's only so many people coming and only so many cabins that fill those people, right? At some point you overbuild, you overdo it. If you owned a cabin in 2019, you might have been blown away by your results in 2022 and now very disappointed maybe by your results in 2025. So it's like, how could you have controlled the number of cabins being built? Now could you have foreseen that occurring through understanding regulation, understanding laws, that sort of thing? Maybe, but it's like, you probably weren't thinking about all that when you bought something 10 years ago or close to 10 years ago at this point.

So yeah, things can change in the platform. Things can change in the dynamics of the city, the destination, the area. I'll give you an example. We have a client in the Outer Banks who we believe is being impacted a little bit this year, at least, by the fact that folks who live in that DC area are impacted. They were impacted by Doge for a while. They were cutting jobs and cutting careers. And people were like, I don't know if I want to book right now. I don't know if I want to go drop $5,000 in my Outer Banks vacation when there's a decent chance that maybe I'm gonna lose my job. Where did we put that in the model of, you know, Doge impacting, you know, vacation rental demand in the Outer Banks? It's like, don't really know how to put that in the formula, but yet it's a real

thing, you know, like where you're actually the cities where you're drawing in from, they may have something bad happen to them. You know, a plant may shut down, a business may go belly up, a government efficiency thing might kick in, and then they don't want to spend money. So these are all things that come to mind as these source market dynamics can impact how you feel if you're a feeder market. We're a feeder market from Charlotte, for example. Charlotte's had a lot of growth over the last few years. People are moving to Charlotte more so from cities in the Northeast and maybe even parts of the Midwest as well, I would imagine. That's probably helping Myrtle Beach a little bit, right? But it's like, you can't guarantee as well, I would imagine. That's probably helping Myrtle Beach a little bit, right?

But it's like, you can't guarantee that's gonna keep going. There's other things that might impact that. The banks could move and go to Atlanta, and then maybe it's gonna benefit Destin, Florida. It's gonna benefit St. Simons or whatever the case may be. So it's always very complex, but anything else to add into that, Simon?

I mean, as you go even that next step further, of international versus domestic, and that's something that we've certainly seen just more globally that there is a pretty big downturn. I think it's this year the number of international travelers coming into the US is like 8% down. So these are notable numbers. And if you're in a market where you rely on that, some of those bigger metro markets, you're probably going to feel that a lot more. So again, how are you adjusting to try to go for more of a domestic market or something like that? You also touched on market supply. I mean, you can't control the number of active listings that there are

in your market. Maybe you should be looking for markets that have capped listing numbers or have something that's a little more, I'm not going to get into regulation, but where you know where the supply could be in two to three to five years, something like that. But again, you can't control the occupancy rate, you can't control the rev bar, you can't control the amount of new listings that are coming into a market. Not even looking at your local competitors, your vocal competitors, Let's still look at a ball Let's still look at there are lots of Vakasa Kasago listings out there that are There I mean that's that's it. I get that that's you can't control some of the other big national players as well

So I do I think that this is one where? Because we've been in so many I think because you and I both been in so many markets this is one that feels like you have the least control over sometimes just because because we've been in so many, I think because you and I have both been in so many markets, this is one that feels like you have the least control over sometimes just because, again, being on the owner side, it feels it's even exasperated more because some of these numbers come into that conversation as well as, okay, well, I promised you this.

Now the active listing numbers have gone up to here and my occupancy rate has gone down and my rev power has gone down and now we don't, we're not interested in having our property managed by you anymore. So I think I heard too many people have that conversation or anything like that. Breaking up is hard to do, man. Yeah. It's something that, again, those are the conversations you don't want to have either. Going back, we've kind of talked about the property characteristics.

We kind of wore those out, talked about the property characteristics. We kind of wore those out, but certainly the property type, whether it's a house, whether it's a condo, whether it's a cabin, those are going to impact in different markets. Whether you're a two-bedroom or a five-bedroom, whether you can sleep eight, whether you can sleep 20, it matters on where you're being compared, it matters on how people are finding you, all these things. A quick note on that, Quick note on that. Quick. Yeah, we have some clients who there seems to be different schools of thought in the industry about this, where they take a larger home

and they think, hey, stack them in a rack. I'm going to put as many beds as possible in this thing. And I'm going to try to get an occupancy of the max. And then you hear a lot of people say, no, you don't want to do that. You know, you got to find a middle ground. And then some people almost go the opposite. They say, hey, it's a six bedroom, but we only really intend for, let's say, 10 people here. You know, the example that

we give in the art hospitality podcast is if you sleep 20 people, you better have 20 cups and 20 play settings and 20, a place for 20 people to eat dinner, which a lot of places don't have when they're just stacking rack and beds in there. So that's another, you know, interesting characteristic there, right? Am I overdoing my occupancy? Sure. It might help me show up in more searches, but I'm actually giving people a good experience or am I, yeah, just trying to maximize number of search views, not actually maximizing the guest experience?

Absolutely. No, it is. And property rating and review scores. I just saw Ty in another post yesterday about the V2 star review that had water coming out, the 10-year flood that affected things that are completely out of our control. But that review is also completely out of our, like the experience was out of our control, but the review was out of our control as well. And oh my goodness, we know that that has a bigger impact because obviously that can drop our score, that drops our local S, we

can go down the path there. But I think we've talked about the external demand signals like gas prices. Now, certainly that was something that around the COVID time as well, when a lot of people were doing the drive to and then we were fighting with gas prices. I mean, I think you you were talking about running gas cards. Yeah, some giveaways, right? Yeah, it's one of the more successful campaigns I've done with a client where gas prices were spiking, we started giving people gas cards to get them to book not discounting our stay, but

rather giving them a gas card. And yet that was more effective. So they were more intrigued by $200 gas card than they were by $200 discount the property. Between you and me, it's the same thing, right? But like, it's like, logically, it's like, oh, I'm not paying for my gas, you know, the property manager is paying for my gas. So that's maybe that's an interesting one to end it on. We get all the way to the bottom, there's a few things that we can touch on the end. But hopefully

that illustrates to you, dear listener, of how complex this thing is. And so when things aren't working and you are looking at your agency or someone on your marketing team for why, it's like, well, let's go down the list, starting with reason number one and ending with reason number 55 of maybe why things aren't going well. And to be frank, on the flip side, why are things going better than we anticipated? There may be 50 things helping us that we're not always in tune with every single piece of the puzzle. So that's why collecting data, iterating, changing what's working, trying to get some data, you know, before you make a decision, of course.

But then you've got to rely a little bit on your intuition. You've got to rely a little bit on your own research and your own estimation to get to the right answers where you can typically get more success in the marketing side. So that's one thing Paul and I do believe, even though we know it's very complex. We know that, you know, there's a few things that you can do once you start seeing work and keep doing them until I stop working, you know, stop working. Good way to end it. Thank you, dear listener, for making it all the way to the end. Hopefully, we didn't put your brain into a complex of a pretzel, as it were. But one thing that's very simple, very one variable, if you will, Paul,

it's just one five-star review. That's all we have. So if you made it to the end, go to your podcast app of choice, iTunes, click five stars, write a little message, click send. If you're a Spotify listener, the data tells us it's kind of 50-50. Go, click five stars, leave a sort of review there. We appreciate it. Some more people to listen to the show. Thank you, and Spotify listener, the data tells us it's kind of 50-50. Go, click five stars. Leave us a review there. We appreciate it. Some more people to listen to the show. Thank you and have an awesome rest of your day. Thanks so much.