Heads In Beds Show - How Are Direct Bookings Trending According To Industry Research Experts?

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, we break down the Key Data Dashboard report on trends of market share by direct vs major OTAs, trends of marketing for direct bookings and a LOT more...⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101KDD Report - Download Here🔗 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 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. Paul, good afternoon. What is going on? What's happening? How are you? We're the news breaking, not not news breaking business, newsreacting business, we'll say this. This is, you know, we get to do our assessment and give our opinions.

And not that we don't always give our opinions, I guess. But, no, this is, you know, I guess as we're looking at the calendar, we're dangerously close to the end of summer here. I know some people who I've been in meetings and they're saying their kids are already back in school. And I say, who am I jealous of you all right? now, but yeah, we're winding down the summer months, and I'm sure in three weeks when we do hit school, I'm going to be very sad that I don't have my kids with me, but right now I'm thinking, whew, let's race to get to the end here. So how are you doing? You've had a bit of an eventful day week here. How are things going for you? Not great, if I'm being honest.

There was a small injury in the house this morning, and we were in the emergency room for the last several hours. Four stitches later, my lovely number two, I call him, my middle son, Liam, is stitched up, ready to go. He'll be just fine, as it were. But yeah, a lot of a lot of pain and misery and sort of crying and scream between now and then. So don't let your kids play outside on fences because they'll try to climb a fence, fall and hurt themselves. And that's not good. You can tell them not to do it, but they do it anyways, which is always interesting, you know, actually, you don't want to tell them to do it because that puts the idea in their head. You don't tell them and maybe it happens 50 to 50 but you tell them oh immediately there they go yeah that is a

good thing you know i think sometimes we are playful with like our daughter like our older daughter madeline and um you know we'll tell her you know just joking around with her about certain things but the other day she like put her hand on a stove when we're like don't touch it it's hot and then she's like put touched it and like burned her hand and i'm just like how do you how do you parent around that like i don't i mean sometimes i just scratch my head i don't know what i'm doing because i'm just like got one kid injured got the other kid burned the other day it's just like i told you not do that thing and you did exactly that thing. I guess you can try to redirect. Like, that's something I've had some success with. I don't know. If any older parents are out there

who have kids that are, you know, teenagers who are past that and you could email me any child injury prevention tips, I'm all the ears because I don't like to see these kids get injured. To be fair, it's of their own doing, you know what I mean? But the same token, it's a, it's not a good feeling and breaks my heart to see little, little tears, you know, falling out of little eyes, never a good thing. So all is well that ends well in the grand scheme of things, that is nothing. But in that moment, it's like, oh, God, you know, like, and there's blood. And He's just never a good thing. And someday, we're going to write the rulebook on bad life.

But for right now, let's just keep talking about what we know, what we think we know, at least, on the vacation. I don't think the listeners tune in, yeah, for injury updates on our children, as it were. You know, it's interesting, though. Yeah, there was blood on the floor of my house this morning, unfortunately. Is there the blood in the streets on the direct booking movement? So today we're reacting to the key data dashboard. Let me get this title correct. the prehead title is report for property managers, but we downloaded it.

Hopefully that's okay, cool with the key to date dashboard folks, I'm assuming so. And we'll put a link in the show notes, so you can download your own copy. We're not trying to steal all their thunder, by the way, in this report. It is 42 pages, so we are not going to cover everything. And I promise you there's information in this report that you will want to look at, even if it's not related to direct booking, maybe it's stuff about OTA market share, et cetera. So definitely, again, we'll put a link in the show notes. We are reacting to this report from key data dashboard because I think they have excellent

data, excellent information. And they released this report called U.S. Vacation Rental Market Report, Q2, 2025, industry performance analysis, the subtext here to get to the last little bit of text in this first page of the report, competitive analysis of short-term rental performance, regional markets, and strategic outlook. So goodness gracious, that's a mouthful. But anyways, it's 42 pages of, like, rich, very relevant information. So, you know, as Paul said, we're going to react to this document, see some interesting, you know, trends, see some interesting findings that they have from this report and kind of tell you what we think about it. What do we see, you know,

anecdotally, what is the data from Gita dashboard said? Does that line up? Is there some differences is there are some nuance. There's often nuance in these types of things. So, you know, want to kind of go through that. But you've had a chance to look at it. If you had to, you know, kind of hit what was like the most interesting thing at a high level. Or maybe you can, you can push a few little bullet points out if you want. What kind of clicked in your mind when you started to read the report? I think it's the one I sent you. Like initially, it is. It's that I think we have gotten so accustomed to just being or just being comfortable saying, hey, this is kind of the trend across the entire country.

This is the entire vacation rental space. And for the most part, I do. I think that you haven't seen maybe as much variations recently. But the point or the phrase, the bullet point, whatever this is, different reasons are experiencing distinct demand patterns, suggesting that localized factors are becoming more important than national trends in determining market performance. Duh, like this is one of those things.

And this is, it's kind of painful, but I do, I think that we talk about that a lot, that just based on the different markets that we get to see, we've gotten to touch. Like, there are true differences in demand variations. And we talked about all the other factors that do comprise the things that could impact those demand variations. But that, that just stuck out to me that it feels, I mean, it's early enough in the, in the report, it's page eight. It's like the third or fourth real key area that they're talking about.

And that feels like an aha moment in the report. And I just don't think that that should be the case. I think that we should have seen this as a trend more so over the past months. And I would say years because this is not unique to this season. Maybe it's more defined and you can see some more true variations and you can see some more trends and things like that. But I just think that the concept that what works in the entire vacation rental industry is going to work regionally market specific, I think that is that that's long since not been the case. But seeing someone actually write it down putting into words, putting it into a report like this, that is something that, I don't know why it struck me, but it really struck me that why is this a new concept? So I could I could I steal man it for you just for the sake of the argument?

So here here might be my steel man against what you're saying. When times were good, they were good everywhere. When times slowed down, it's good and it's okay in certain spots and it's not so good in other spots. So if I could offer a fair, you know, rebuttal to that idea, it would be during these big growth periods of 20, you know, tail end of 20, 21, 22, maybe that era. It was like, hey, everybody's doing well. The only question is how well are you doing, right? Are you up 20%? Are you up 50%?

You know, it was like, everybody's making money. Everybody, you know, it's like, I can't really imagine this scenario, but it's like, you walk in a casino and all the slots are hitting, just a question how much money you're winning, you know, that's what it felt like maybe for a while. So I think if I could, I hear what you're saying 100%. And the joke that I text back to you was like, yes, the weather in California is not the same as the weather in South Carolina or Minnesota or wherever the case may be. So that's sort of a tongue-in-cheek one saying like, yes, that's the case.

But I think that's probably, you know, where, and this goes back to like that investor mindset that we've talked about so many times on the podcast, those investors, mindset that crept in, you know, during 21, two, and three really at the most heavily. And there's people buying, oh, I've invested in Poconos and I got a great return on my investment. I invested in Destin, Florida. I invested in Key West. I invested in Breckenridge.

I invested in San Diego. And look, I'm doing all this revenue. There's a guy following Twitter, Ryan Danz, and he posted a screenshot of a property that he manages, that he's managed for like 10 years or something. And it was so fascinating to see the pre-COid, post-COVID splits where it was like, I forget the exact numbers. But let's say it was doing like 50K year, 55K year, 58, 7%. 60, 61. That was all pre-COVID, you know, annual revenue. And then it was like, COVID happened and it saw this initial decline. I think the property is in California. And then it was like $80,000, 120,000, you know, in such a short period of time, this property went from like a slow, almost like one of those boring stock charts you see where it's just like, did that, up, up, up slowly. Nice pre-COVID curves. You know, our industry is getting more popular. People are checking it out to a little dip that like COVID crash and then the COVID boom, you know, right after. And it was just like, and now this year, you know, we posted a number. It's, it's.

like, hey, it's kind of back to that maybe 2021 level. So these like crazy high ones have kind of leveled out a little bit, but it's still doing way more revenue than it was in 2019. You know, and I think that's an interesting comparison point if you want to look at it that way, you know, resetting the deck a little bit and saying, all right, here's where we are. So, yeah, I hear what you're saying, and I agree

with your logic. But if I could, if I could, you know, protest that in that way, that would be like the thing that I might protest in that context. Yeah. That's fair. Oh, absolutely. I think it's, it's, I mean, if they do a couple of these pieces in here, I mean, the other one, market is separating with overperformers and underperformers based on operational sophistication.

Again, yes, this is something that I think that when you're understanding and truly delivering that operational success, a true hospitality experience, it's not about the numbers at that point, I think that is something that is differentiating people because even you and I have seen this and the people who are, who do put that focus on, understanding their numbers, first of all, but then understanding how that pushes out into how they support their guests, how they support their internal teams. Those are the companies that are succeeding here, and they are turning into the overperformance because they do. They understand the data behind the decisions they're making, and they are able to adapt when some

of these changes in booking patterns happen. They're not relying on the OTAs, hopefully in most cases, or that's a healthy mix that's contributing to their overall success there. So I think that, I mean, it is. When we're looking at things like that, it's not just about the revenue. It's not just about your ADR. It's not just about all these things. It's about the holistic operational success of your business that is contributing to some of these other numbers.

So, I mean, it is. I think those are. Sorry. Like, we're not statisticians. You know, I think they actually have people working at KData Dashmore that are actually staticians and have much more data. training knowledge than you and I probably combined. But like this is what happens with averages to your point, right, is that you've got some great operators in there that are absolutely beating

the market, probably even beating their own numbers, et cetera, seeing great, you know, great performance. They've brought on more inventory. Maybe their rates went down a little bit, but their occupancy is very similar. They do great marketing. They drive a lot of demand. And I have a handful of those clients. I don't deserve any credit for that. I'm just there were great long before I showed up. But you can see it tell the difference. When you and I begin to work with a company, you know, we talked about so much offline. It's like, oh, this company, they got it going on like they have their stuff dialed in and as a result that they see a little bit of a body blow and a little bit of revenue loss maybe but they're also signed new inventory so I've

clients who are down on a per property basis in inventory but still make a lot more money because they're like yeah we peeled off 25 more units you know they're all doing $100,000 a year from this competition that's not doing a great job anymore right so that's that's one side of it and then of course you've got the the real people that really are you know laggards and are really seeing really poor results and they get thrown in the data mix too so when you have this massive data set as key data dashboard does, it kind of edges out the bad ones, edges out the good ones. And then you kind of find what's the meaty metal of performance, which, you know, it's like, I think that's a line from the office. God loves average people. That's why he made so many of them. It's like maybe God

loves average property managers because he made so many of them, you know, in most markets. And I say that in the sense of like you can go into, you know, any like AirDNA is the data that you and I've talked about a little bit offline recently because I recently upgraded my account. And you can go see the average score in a market I could put in, you know, I could put in San Diego. And then I could go look at all the companies that have more than 20 listings that let's say are doing more than $3,4 million a year in gross booking revenue. These are estimates, but it's directionally relatively accurate. Certainly a number of listings it is pretty accurate. And you can say, what's their average scores? And like the average review scores in most

markets is kind of that 4.5 on the low end, 4.67 in the middle end and 4.8 or 4.9 in the high end across, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of reviews on Airbnb, if we're looking at that as a reference point. So like I always told people, chop off the 4. The 4 is irrelevant. and just look at the second two numbers. There are 55, there are 75, they're in 95, you know, and after you get enough of a sample size, you actually get a pretty good sense of like how well that company's probably doing. It's rare that I go look at a company that has 8,500 reviews on Airbnb, you know, 4.95,

and I get in there and I go, this place is a mess. I feel the opposite, right? It's like, it's always the 4.24s, you know, that I get in under the hood on, and I'm just like, oh, geez, like, there's some problems here that we got to correct. Yeah, it's, I mean, and that could get that point right there. I think it does go into some of those leading and lagging indicators of truly success of the business here and why sometimes what we monitor is not always the best measure of performance for the overall company for X, Y, Z, anything like that. So I do. I think that that's something that, I mean, you know, going down into some of the more generalized here, you know, direct bookings.

We'll jump into direct bookings because this is what we talk about a lot of the time. It's one of our greatest hits, the people want it. You got to give it to them, I feel like that. You got to give the greatest hits. You do, you do. You know, just looking at the market share decline. Yeah, direct bookings are down slightly.

Down a percent over the last three years and down 2% year over year, 30 quarter 25. We have 28% down to 26%. Okay. Number of direct bookings. I'm okay with that. Revenue share. This is where it starts to, you know,

get to be a little more concerning because we can play the game of Airbnb does volume. There is still no doubt about that. When you look at some of those booking reports, they may be only for half, two-thirds of the booking value, but holy cow, can they still push some bookings your way. But again, this is the revenue point being a decline as well. Okay, two-point loss in revenue share over the same year-over-year period. That's also concerning.

Again, that's not a product of what we're doing. and for different property managers, I guarantee that's, that's different. This is the averages. But the averages across 800,000 units, 800,000 plus units that they're tracking here and measuring, that's substantial. We're not talking about a small number of units here. We're not talking about small sample size. So that much of a shift downward across the entire industry, that's certainly concerning for me. So, I mean, you know, we can talk about why there's still value in those direct bookings, but what do you think about just how that's contributing overall to OTA versus direct and everything like that? Yeah, I agree. It's not a great trend. And I think that, you know,

my gut reaction is that if you listen to the naysayers or the promoters on both sides, you get a very, very skewed, you know, sense of exactly how things are going for most property managers, most vocational managers, because if you listen to the naysayers, they would say something to the effect of direct bookings are so hard to get. How can you ever do it? Airbnb is this powerful, $10 billion marketing machine, you're never going to compete with them. Why bother, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then, yeah, the average across, you know, many, many thousands of listings of listings, direct in this data set. So that kind of tells me, here's my thesis on this. And I can't prove this. So now this is to be clear, me talking, not quoting from the

KDD report. But my sort of assessment, having done this now for several hundred companies and seen under the hood on several hundred companies, is that for the companies that put very little or no effort into direct bookings are actually way less than that. They're your five, 10, 15% people that are dragging down the average because they're like, yeah, I have a website. I built it through my PMS, maybe, or I just kind of had an inexpensive one that I got built out out of marketing. I don't send out of emails. I don't run any Google ads. I have a Facebook page or Instagram page. I don't post to it a lot, etc., etc. I mean, you and I see it all the time. That person's going to be getting some level of direct bookings, just almost through

accidentally tripping themselves into them. You know what I mean? Like, you know, someone will go on a platform like Airbnb, find a listing, search it offline, their SEO will be decent enough before they'll find it. They'll make a direct booking. And many people are good operators. I'm not saying they're not good operators, to be clear. I'm just saying they suck a direct booking marketing. You know,

so maybe they'll get a pass gas to, oh yeah, I remember they stayed with, you know, Conrad's cool cabin rentals. Last time I went up to North Carolina, blah, blah, so they'll just search it,

find it, you know, they'll get some level of directional, navigational branded search and some conversions there. So like, that's kind of a, you know, a decent chunk of the audience,

probably a lot of your sub 20, sub 30 unit property managers, certainly anyone sub one million in revenue. I would even argue maybe a little bit more than that. 1.5 million in gross revenue probably doesn't have much of a marketing budget, probably doesn't have much of a marketing effort being put into this stuff. So that's your smaller group there. Then you've got the very large, very serious property managers who are doing 30, 40, 50, 50,

60,000 or 70% direct bookings, excuse me, and they're spending tens of thousands of dollars on Google ads, et cetera, et cetera. They have an either in-house marketing team or an in-house, like maybe marketing team member, plus they're outsourcing. They have Paul working on stuff. They've got buildup working on stuff. They got different competitors out there that we have working on stuff.

And those people are your bigger ones. And then where the average kind of falls is, of course, over the middle. And I'm sure the data would indicate that there's a large people who are getting this 25%, 26% range. But my assessment, I've seen this a lot is that the people who take it seriously have no trouble getting past at least 30, 40, 50% direct bookings without unbelievable amounts of effort. And those companies that have the really high direct booking percentages are ones that

typically have been around a long time. They have very, very unique inventory. And they put a significant amount of effort into direct booking. So it's like, of course, we're going to get direct bookings, right? It would be silly for them to assume that they wouldn't. So what I say by that or what I mean by all that is like, I don't, I'm not shocked by a decline in reservation share from direct because I think there's a lot more of the first group I talked about that are not doing much than there is the second group who are doing a lot and seeing

results from it. So, you know, imagine the water almost gets diluted over time by these more and more, you know, call so-called Airbnb managers or Airbnb co-host style managers as opposed to your more legacy traditional established companies that have been around for, let's just call it pre-COVID, least, if not, you know, in some cases, literally decades before that, and they've had the way they've done things for a long time. They're going to keep doing it that way, unless they feel like they need to stop doing it or their economics get horrible or whatever the case may be. So that's kind of my take on it. You know, you can disagree or agree with that, but that's like what I see

anecdotally to match up with what we're seeing in the data from KDD. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think 100% that that that hits spot on there. And it is. I mean, this is not to say that you shouldn't be going for direct booking still. I mean, obviously there is, Well, let's go off the bullet points, higher ADR, typically 10 to 15% more than direct, oh, than OTA bookings, longer average stays. Now, this is something that I've seen in the data as well. This is, when you're, when you have more direct stays coming through, yeah, more revenue, higher ADRs, longer stays.

And in some cases, this is a day or a day plus more on the length of stay as well. So, and I think not only that, we don't have it here, extended booking. Yeah. So extended booking windows as well, those short booking windows for some of the more commodity markets. I can imagine being at the whims of, you know, having same week bookings, same day bookings in some cases, and then having to kind of scale your business on those economics and saying, well, we got same week bookings in for 30% of the inventory. That's tough. Like you can't depend on that. You can't worry about those items. So that's something that

But as we do look at them, we've talked about the gap in the booking window of shortening. So again, when you are able to push more of those longer value, higher value, and further outstays, everything just becomes a little more predictable there. Obviously, zero commission costs. That's a big amount of money that you can reinvest in your business and better guest relationships. You know, that person who comes in through Airbnb is an Airbnb customer. they're they're they've booked with you they're an Airbnb customer so if you can have those more direct relationships with your guests yeah obviously you can remark it to them down the road make sure that you're driving more of that direct business and doing things like that obviously

we still want to push as much direct as possible and this wasn't our outline by the way so I'm pulling a little ninja move on you here so you didn't you don't know what I'm about to say I did a yeah I did a webinar with um or I should clarify that because I have to do a lot of webinars. I simply attended a webinar recently with Chris Walker, uh, that he did for VR Nation. And it was about some of his direct booking tool stuff that he does with his price comparison tools, which are interesting. You should take a peek at them for sure. But, um, he had, it was interesting because he came out from the property manager's perspective, because he himself in addition to his technology platform is a property manager here in South Carolina and in

the Hilton had market. So he actually, um, laid out these four things that are kind of reflected in that last little block that you just said and that what I mentioned, but not everything. So here's some interesting things that I thought, you know, he noticed in his own business that I thought were kind of interesting to bring up here as well as far as the pros of direct bookings. When you have a direct booking, you are going to be able to have the opportunity to sell travel insurance. When you sell travel insurance, every property manager that I work with that sells travel insurance gets commission on that travel insurance. So obviously, this depends a lot on your exact numbers, but in his case, I have a screenshot here from his presentation. He said, if you get a 30% left in your direct bookings, you may make an extra five or six or $7,000 a year, depending on, you know, the policy in annual revenue increase just by selling travel insurance directly.

So is six or seven or eight grand going to make the difference between, you know, you doing something or not doing something? Not really. But is it a nice tiny little, you know, cushion that's just giving you a little bit more margin, giving you a little bit more opportunity. Yeah, that's pretty good. You know, and depending on the size of your company, you may make a lot more money in travel insurance commissions. I have some clients who do clients, you know, annually, if not more from travel insurance, very large companies. And it's like no effort. Like they have a little button their checkout that's like, do want to add travel insurance. They click yes. And then if people choose to do so, they get, you know, whatever, half that policy or something like that as commissions. So not bad work. If you get it, which is like set it up one time and then you just have like, you know, little dollar bills flowing in your bank account for doing nothing extra. So I like that. That's the smallest fish to be clear in the pie that he mentioned. This was interesting. Again, because you and I don't are exposed to this world, I'm not familiar with this, an increase in escrow interest income. So when you get a direct booking and it is a 90 day or 180 day in advance and you get a little bit of that money, you're taking that money, right? You're dropping it into a bank account and you get to make money on all the people's

money that you're holding. So if you're holding a good amount of money for someone, it's an trust the count. You're following all the right rules and regulations as far as your state or your area as far as trust accounting. Again, we're not experts in accounting. Talk to an accounting expert. I hate doing my own accounting. I certainly wouldn't want to do it for a occasional company. It sounds miserable. But anyways, when you have that, you have money sitting in an account that you're controlling. I know it's not your money, but you do get the interest on that money. So, you know, over the course of a year, again, with the 30% lift and direct bookings, Chris's assessment is that you'll get another $8,500 in income from that. So again,

we've added those two things together. That ain't bad. Now we're talking like well over a thousand dollars a month collectively between those two things maybe are you know getting a benefit there then i would say the last two that he hit on were the big bigger fraction ones that you already reference uh when a guest books further in advance you discount a lot less typically speaking so that depends heavily obviously on how far in advance the guest actually books um his assessment was that a you know a typical hundred unit company might do another 30 40 000 per year um by not doing as much discounting so they get those get those properties at a higher rate again the kdd report backs that up um adrs from direct bookings are higher and then obviously the big fish

the one that like everyone references, but it was actually the last point in Chris's presentation with the Our Nation was an increase in your, obviously your commissions, you know, so like you are going to make more money on a direct booking than you are in any of their booking from Airbnb and the like because you're not paying that heavy commission. So his, again, his assessment on 30% lift is $150,000 a year, you know, an additional income. So sum it all up, the increase in commissions that you're taking in and you're not paying out to the platforms, the reduction in discounting, you're getting a higher rate on average, the fact that you're getting some interest income off holding people's cash, and the fact

you can sell travel insurance, those are just kind of all the financial, you know, tooling, everything on top of what you just mentioned, his sort of assessment is that a hundred to company could maybe do another $195,000 per year in additional income just from those, you know, those big, those pies, the biggest pie, of course, being the commission angle. So just interesting, you know, feedback to kind of back that up. And it's, it's always good to hear from someone who's kind of in that world every day and got, as their hands in, you know, those pies, like Chris does with in Hilton had with his property management company. And now he handles that. And, you know, just more and more ammo, hopefully for you and I, just to like,

convince people because I know about all these things conceptually, but I didn't, I wasn't always able to, like, articulate them to someone. Let's be honest, some people are listening, you know, or we talk to are more like direct booking curious than they are like bought in and like a member of the team, a member of a member of the cause, right? They're just like, well, maybe it could be better, but it feels daunting to them. And if they start to see and understand, oh, wow, when I do these X number of things, I see all these benefits and the backend, you know, maybe that'll also give some people some confidence to be like, all right, I'm already getting 20% direct. Maybe they're 25% like the average here in the KD report. But if I get it to 30, you. But if I get it to

35. If I get it to 45, man, I'm just, I'm so much more in the driver's seat and I can see so much more additional revenue through these other channels. So just, just some extra food that I wanted to layer in there for people to gnaw on as well. And it is. And I mean, I think in the greater hospitality space, there are a lot of opportunities for ancillary revenue where I don't think in the vacation rental space, we do have those same things. So I love that Chris actually pulled those out and said, hey, these are other ways you can make the money and do those things because, yeah, I think we get sucked into just that initial revenue, but there's more ways to grow your wealth.

You grow that business through that way. So I think that that's always important as well there. And again, it's atypical in our space. So being able to pull that out is super important. You know, taking direct versus OTAs, Airbnb continues to grow up to 45%, almost half of the reservations, up four points over the last three years. That's scary. 35% revenue share.

it's a third of the pie but I think when we were at Darm it was 32 33 so even since that time and those numbers may have shifted slightly I mean that's that's 2% just in the last that was that was in December for reference of the listener so yeah we're recording this in August but the last report that we saw from KDD I believe was in December at Darm yeah yeah so these those numbers are shifting upwards in a hurry and we've got the notes here there ux pricing algorithms mobile adoption that mobile is such a game changer and then again that's where they're app users they're not necessarily travelers per se they are not your guests they are Airbnb app users so um verbo declining on the reservation share now this is something that i've seen mixed results you know i've seen some where verbos going up and i do think more recently verbo is increasing the reservation share and i think that's because i i've noticed it on tv as well as that as they increase their marketing boy do we start to see a few more bookings come through holistically through that channel. Now, again, them being down four points over the last three years down to 21% of the share, that's still a healthy portion.

And I mean, slots in is number three behind Airbnb and behind Verbo there. Excuse me, behind direct. So though I, this is another area where revenue share. Yeah, they've got 24% and that's down five points. But I've also seen, again, looking at the revenue as opposed to Airbnb, those verbal bookings coming in much more closely related revenue-wise to a direct booking, extending out the stay a little longer, longer booking window, and higher ADR is coming through there. So I don't know if you can speak to any of that specifically on the Verbo side, but that's one that's not contradictory to this data, but I think more recently, Verbo is making more

of a push. I think Expedia is making more of a push to put Verbo in front of more people, put vacation rentals and more in front of more people you know booking.com that's one that i hope that that's one that that actually grows um i think that that's a still think that's a better experience overall for people i think the fact that it's more meta search related and that you can play pay to play a little bit in booking is an area that if we can ever unleash that and unharness that boy you can have some fun on booking dot com but that's still i mean it's it's it's another area where are do we see people who have a big mix there. Not a lot. Homes and Villas and Google and booking and all these other ones.

They're there. They're there. But what's actually, I mean, it's still the big three that are driving it. It's the big three. It's direct. You can put booking.com in there for now. But I think even at some point, if they don't see that reservation share increase or revenue share increase, they'll drop off on that report as well right now. So. Yeah. Yeah, I could agree more. I mean, and we talked about this. I think after, I think we did like a darn wrap up podcast of memory serves way back in the archives. We had to dig back to December or January or something when we did that recap. And I asked the key data dashboard folks at that time, I was like, is anyone over 1% that is not Airbnb direct? Obviously, like we talked about booking.com and of Robo. And at that time,

I think they had said no. And I think that's still the case from what I can see today. I don't think there's any MOTA platform, at least that I saw in here, that has a market share of over 1% in their nationwide data. Now, that being said, there is some, you know, regional examples, some sites that only operate in a given region that could easily be 5 or 10 or 15%. But let's say it's like a smoky mountains.com, you know, from the guesty team. That's obviously only a smoky mountains. So like you might get a lot of bookings from them if you're there. And obviously if you're in Florida, that there's something you can do with that on that particular site. Although I do other sites, but that's a different discussion for a different. But yeah,

so yeah, to kind of put a lid on that OTA discussion, again, direct despite the, despite the naysairs, right, it's still bigger than a verbo, right? So all this brand marketing, all this budget. So this idea of the fact that your typical average property manager cannot compete with, you know, Airbnb. There's a little bit more credence than that. The fact that they can't compete with Verbo, who spends not as much money as Airbnb in advertising, but is it that different? We'd have to like do, maybe we should do a deep dive on that. How much money does, you know, Verbo actually spend in advertising?

It's hard to figure out because when they do reports and public, you know, market reports, they don't actually break out Verbo separately as far as revenue like or advertising to spend, I should say, in my experience. We've gone through that, you know, path before I know, and we didn't get any information from it, which is a bummer. But, yeah, whatever the case may be, right? like verbo we know is collectively spending tens hundreds of millions dollars on you know marketing advertising initiatives and yet direct is still better you know despite the fact that a lot of people

aren't doing anything so like people don't mind booking direct people like booking direct do they like it more than Airbnb the data would say no not right now right but they like it more than verbo you know and verbo has all these supposedly all these things going for it booking.com is the biggest hotel platform you know they spend billions dollars in advertising and they don't get more revenue share we have clients to get no bookings from booking.com you know they they are on booking.com they get no bookings from them. They're pretty much Airbnb Direct and then a small share from Verbo. And that's pretty common from what I've seen over there. So anyways, as far as like the actual implications for you, the property manager listening, right? It's like direct is still the thing

that you have, in my opinion, obviously, the most control and influence over. And it still has a lot of upside. Like if you're only 20% direct bookings, you absolutely can get to 30, 40, 50%, that is not an impossible task by any stretch of the imagination. It's running a marathon. It's not easy. You can't just roll off your couch and do it, you know, just like it is to get more direct bookings. But this data is very clear that, like, Verbo's not going to save you. Booking.com is not going to save you. So if you're Airbnb only and you think, well, at least let me get a little bit more on a Verbo and a little bit more on a booking.com and I'll get some additional revenue book here through that. Yeah, but it's not going to fill you all the way up. You need to be having

at least 20% direct bookings as kind of a floor and you probably should be optimizing if you can for closer to 50% or as close to you can get as close as you can get to that as possible with a few carve-outs for, you know, folks that have very low repeat book and rates and the like, it should be very feasible. It should be very possible, you know, to do that. So, Yeah, I mean, we could go down a whole list of things that you could do, you know, maybe see last 150 episodes if you want some further ideas on what you can do. But it's still, you know, if I was doing my own key KDD-style report of like looking at all the sources of traffic and where things are coming from and how what actually drives direct

bookings, it's still Google. You know, you and I have beat this drum for a little while on the LLM search tools. Are they coming? Are they here? Are they being used? Absolutely. Have they come massively at the expensive Google traffic? Absolutely not.

You know, for most of our clients, that is still 90, 95% of their quote-unquote search traffic share that's coming from Google. If anything, Bing and Duck.D. Go still get way more referrals, you know, for our clients than does chat TPT or, you know, Jim and I or any other platform like that. Now, it's that going to shift and change over the coming months and years. Absolutely. You know, you and I don't know where all the cards are going to fall. It's such a rapidly developing thing. But like if you haven't mastered the SEO portion, you're basically ignoring the biggest piece of wins that you could have. It's like saying, I want to be super strong. I want to, you know, be able to, you know, whatever, lift amazing weights or, you know, do this and then you

never go to the gym. It's like, let's start there. Let's at least start going to the gym and doing some kind of exercise. If we want to have good results on LLM tools, we want to have good results with direct booking, let's kind of get SEO down at least to a B plus level before we start to distract ourselves with other things. And I think people just don't want to do it because we beat that drum now for 10 years, at least I have. I've been doing it for almost 15 years in my career. And it's like that's still the thing that works really well. And ironically, and you and I've touched on this before too, you know, back to what's tactical for the property manager. When you end up doing really good SEO, it's going to end up, you know, helping you

a lot on the LLM, quote-of-co optimization side of things, right? There's some little tweaks and things that, you know, you and I are kind of figuring out as we go along here. But it's like, it's hard to point an example of a company who's like, oh, man, they're LLM search, they're crushing it in Chack TBT and they're getting no Google referrals. Like that's just that doesn't exist right now. That's a fallacy. That's impossible.

No, this is, I mean, this is, I see more on, when I'm looking at my reporting on a daily weekly basis, I see more bookings and more engaged traffic coming through Bing and dot, dot, go, like you said, then I see coming through chat GPT and it's not. I had a 21,000. $1,000 booking the other day through Dock.com. That's what I'm... Property manager on Gulf Shores, you and I both know. Yeah, they had a $21,000 booking through dot, dot, dot, go the other day for next year.

When you was an individual user lived your life and build your life around using chat GPT and using all these things, it's easy to fall into the same preconceived notion that we get when we look at a desktop site and remember that two-thirds of the site, traffic still comes from a mobile. See, we have our biases, too. We have our biases, too. We know, we're not, we know where we get us to. Everybody's got biases. It's very difficult to overcome. But that's the thing is that, like, we do have to kind of step outside that shell every once in a while and say, oh, the data is still telling me that this is how people are coming in.

Yes, we are going to work towards all of these other fun things. But if we don't have the table stakes down and we don't have our best practices, our 101 level information in place, we can't go, we can't graduate to 202 to 303. to these other advanced courses and classes and strategies and all these other implications behind that because we don't we have no bedrock we have no framework to build on so taking a look at strategic implications here what we know what we actually have to do you have to optimize your website you have to take into some of these considerations that i think again listen to the last 150 episodes we've got some suggestions optimize your website automate some of the marketing that you can do, that you feel comfortable doing, you know, make sure you're doing

brand marketing. This is something that, and I do not pretend to be an expert on the brand side of thing, brand positioning, anything like that. I'm a direct response guy. I want to see those bookings come in. But you don't get those if you don't have your brand and you can't position it outside of Airbnb. Because, again, that's how a lot of this.

I mean, Airbnb is going to do the brand positioning. Verbo is going to do the brand positioning. You don't have to worry about the branding for those two companies. Everybody's going to know about them. So it's a matter of how can you put your brand out there? How can you put yourself in a better position so that people know Conrad School Cabins and not, ooh, I can get to Conrad School Cabins when I go to Verbo, when I go to Airbnb. Ooh, I can find this.

Or I'm going to figure out what the name of that company is after I've done three, four, five, six visits and done all my pricing comparisons and done all that. So, I mean, those are, you know, conversion. things. We've talked about it. It's not just about getting the traffic to the website. It's about getting it to convert. And you can send 100 people. You can send a thousand people. But if you got a leaky seal that you're sending them to, then that doesn't do us a whole lot of good in the grand scheme of things. And pricing and inventory strategy, that's not exactly our area of expertise, but there are plenty of companies out there that do a really good job. Kedadad one of them and doing some of these other items as well there. So it's weird. It's not rocket

science what we're trying to do some of it feels like that probably at times but i think if we focus on really those small areas those small improvements you can make i mean talking about you know moving your direct booking from 20 to 25 percent you know that you don't have to have these big hairy audacious goals to succeed you have to set goals and hit those goals the last thing i mean the last thing you want to do is set that big hairy audacious goal to be hague and then all of a sudden you're falling flat 10 percent short of whatever that number is. That's not going to build anybody. I mean, smart goals, all those things. But all of that plays a role in all of this.

And I think that sometimes we do. We maybe overcomplicate things. And we may try to think that there is that silver bullet out there that can fix everything, that can do all of these things for you. Because AI has made us think that. There are things that can just, that silver bullet is much easier to find. It's not always for everybody. but now there's a there's an AI bot that can help us you know cheat we can cheat a little bit here

cheat a little bit there don't cheat but put the best practices in place yeah yeah couldn't agree more you know and I think that's a good way to think about it so maybe we'll pick out some other odds and ends here on the rest of the report at least things that were interesting from like a seasonality perspective direct booking perspective and then we can put a bow on it so booking compressing this is something that again and totally I saw in every single call this year have I heard anyone say that's not the case it's hard for me to you know think but How about this? So the data, the data from the report indicates that June's booking window went from 70 days to 66 days, just that one month. There was this four or five day compression.

As that keeps going along, I feel like as the year goes along, people keep booking closer, closer in there. They're booking a little bit shorter stay, by the way, 0.2 days on average, 0.2, not two days, point two days on average. They want to pay a little bit less. And here's the problem. We've trained the consumer that if you wait, you get a better deal. And I was trying to think about this, by the way. And I feel like, you and I can do a deep dive on this. Why is this not the case in like the airline industry, for example? I know that you, like, I just booked our tickets for Vegas, my tickets for Vegas for the VMA conference because I went on Google flights and it said if you book this kind of 45 to 90 day window ahead

of a flight, you get the best deal. Not that I got some amazing deal. I think I'm still paying 400 bucks for American. Bummer. I think you have a direct flight that's a lot cheaper. But it's like, why is that the case that I can pay this rate and get a much better deal on a flight? If I wait last minute, they actually tend to jack up the prices.

If I wouldn't fly up your way tomorrow, it'd be 300 bucks. If I booked it for three months from now, it'd be way cheaper. I know some of that seasonality and trends market and stuff like that. So what are the airline. done well to convince us we have to book far in advance and we can't move it. And the vacational industry has done the opposite. You can book last minute. In fact, we will keep lowering the rates. Please, please. Take it. Take it. Take it. And it markets with an excess of supply and a high demand, but not enough demand to fully satisfy the supply. It seems like that is

the only thing that most people should do. You know, like my wife is afraid to do it. But I'd be willing to say, like, if we took a vacation, we've discussed Thanksgiving as our vacation week this year potentially. And I'm like, we can wait last minute and we'll find something. Because if we go to somewhere in Florida, which is in the discussion point, there will be a place that will you can find, especially for whom I'd open. Oh, we don't have to go to this market. We can go to another place in Florida. We can go this area versus this area. I guarantee it. You know, and I bet we might get an amazing property at a heck of a deal. She just has this almost mindset of like, no, I'm risking it that way. So yeah, I don't know how to solve that, by the way.

It's just like, it's good to hear, I guess the KDD report back up what I've heard on every single call for six months, seven months at this point. So I don't know if you've heard the same thing or, you know, it's gone down that path, too. But very much. I mean, it's the, We do. We, and there's a couple, couple people I work with that did have a tract. And, and we did. We followed it kind of from like January and followed that trend line. And it was, you know, 100 days out and then 90 days out.

We bumped back up to 100 days again and then back down to 80 and then down to 70 and 60. And we're rounding back out again. And we're getting definitely some more, more long term out, more further outstays being booked. We're talking about a full month and a half shift down. From 100 days to about 60 days, that was pretty apparent. Now, again, in some cases, the inventory that people are booking, a little higher ADR and stuff like that, I think that that's going to contribute a little more. And macroeconomics being a little whiplashy, that certainly contributed.

I think that's the one thing that we haven't talked about that probably has contributed to at least the booking window more than some other things have. because you don't know, I mean, whether that's the fact that you're going to have the money to do it, whether you're going to have a job that's going to support you in a certain amount of time. There are. There's a lot of uncertain economic uncertainty, not for everybody, but certainly for, let's say, a vast majority of the traveling public. It's just not sure when something, another shoe will drop there. So I do.

I think that that's something that we can. underestimate that that is something that can have an effect on the business and certainly on booking windows, certainly on how much people are willing to book and ultimately if they even end up traveling because I think the one thing we haven't seen maybe as much is cancellations. I think people have actually, you know, booked the trips. They've actually gone on the trips. Even if it's a short, you know, a shorter booking window, a shorter amount of time, the trips are still happening. That's when maybe I'm going to be a little more concerned is when

when we see cancellation rates start to go up, when we see the bookings themselves just not happening. And I think that that's, we're not there yet, but we don't know. And then that's the thing that we always have to be at the whims of something that we can't control, but we can put our best foot forward and make sure that everything we can do, we can control. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's probably a good place to end there, right?

Which is like, go download this report, check it out, read the data. There's a bunch of stuff in here outside on the OTA side that maybe you might be more interested in and want to, you know, want to evaluate. There's a big picture here that we kind of covered a more narrow, you know, area around. I think there's so many things that you can do around, you know, making your pricing more logical when someone is booking for out and not jacking up the rates and then crashing the rates. Like I think that's sort of like up down, up down is some, you know, consideration. Understanding better when you can push minimum stays and when you do have to relax a little bit, you know, selling gap nights. Like I have some clients

who have like very aggressive, very comprehensive, I would say gap night selling policies where it's internal and it's software driven. You know, it's not just one, it's both. payball, you know, you and your family are coming, you know, if you want to check out late, I could offer you that. That's a soft, you know, kind of gap night. So do you want to stay a whole extra day? I'll give it to you for half price. Like, those are things that I think are interesting. And then, yeah, I think you want to be putting more effort into direct. The data here indicates that, like, most people aren't, but that doesn't mean that it's not working. That doesn't mean that it's not doing well. Again, the data here tells us that it's still the second

biggest booking source. So to ignore it, if you're not, if it's not your second biggest booking source, excuse me, it should be, you know, at least that, if not the number one, or it should be fighting with Airbnb for number one. All the great companies are set up that way. And it takes effort across search, social, and email to get there, regardless of if you do it in house or if you hire an agency or an extra consultant, you will get results if you do those things and you attract tension in that way. And you've got more homeowners, by the way, too, because they'll see your great marketing and they want to sign up with you. Um, you know, the homeowner's not excited by.

Imagine you come in and you say, yeah, I get 100% of my bookings from Airbnb. And then the next presentation they go to from a larger, you know, more successful property manager in your market goes, oh, yeah, we get, um, you know, half our bookings from Airbnb, 25% direct, you know, 13% whatever of ribo and 13% booking. And we drive higher occupancy, higher average rates. We make you more money because we have a marketing machine we built out. What do you think the homeowner is going to pick? They're going to pick the one that makes more.

Oh, that makes sense. You guys are doing everything. This other company is only doing one thing. I'm going to get more value out of that. So anyways, I digress. We could do a whole other hour just on that topic, Paul, but we don't want to beat people over the head too bad with it. Hopefully they'll end in a decent spot on that side of things.

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