Heads In Beds Show - Is Listing On Airbnb The Same As "Marketing" For Your Vacation Rental Business?

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad dive into "automated" SEO reports that agencies send you - do they even matter at all? They discuss how and why these reports work and what value you can get from them. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellThe Bear Cave Substack AirbnbAirbnb To Verify All Listings (2019)Airdna Source Of Data For 1% PMs Revenue🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 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 and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? It's just fantastic, Conrad. It sounds like we're starting the week off on a high note.

A lot of good things happen here. We're in tax season. That's always fun. It's a time of year where we get to give the government lots of money that we rightfully earned, we think. So that's always a fun time. How about you? How's the week going for you?

Yeah, I call that file an extension. I do it every year. I don't think we should tilt this towards a libertarian podcast. I don't think that would be necessarily well received. But maybe this is an idea. Maybe the listeners can weigh in. I've actually thought about doing we could do like heads and beds after hours and we could just do like personal problems. Oh, that may be just a special episode every once in a while. Quarterly or something like that. Yeah. Heads and beds after hours. We'll touch on anything. You want politics, sports, religion,

no topic too taboo. We'll see. It was a bit of a pickle. Let's dive into marketing minute here a little bit is Google, they are a little panicky. Sundar like getting on a flight going over doing an interview. We haven't watched the full interview. So we'll save our reaction, maybe the reaction piece next week. But Google is now publicly out there. Hey, we're fine. We're fine. Look at all the stuff we're working on, which feels very weird. That doesn't feel like a super easy thing for me to do, for them to be doing, I should say. So interesting stuff. No, and I think we both talked about the difference between chat GPT Bard right now. I think in the big headline coming out of that interview is, we're not ready for it. Right. Is he talking about Google's not ready for it? Or we as a society aren't ready for it?

Because I think he's trying to paint it as the society. But I think he's really trying to cover his tail a little bit there and saying that Google simply is not ready for it. So yeah, that's one that I want to dig into certainly a little further because I think there's going to be a lot there. Yeah, there's some threads there that I think are worth pulling on further, but maybe we save it for another day. We didn't catch a lot of headlines that really moved me a lot. There's some minor little things I put out. I'm putting a post out on LinkedIn recently, or should come out this week on new GA for features with regards to you can now set a goal to only fire once per session or fire multiple times. So they're approving the product. So not probably where it needs to be

completely honest, but is what it is. We'll see where we go from there. But yeah, all good stuff. So I think I want to save more time for the meat of the chat today, because I think it'll be pretty solid. It's always funny to me, I think this was a good example of something that bled out of we have our bubble that we're in, right. And then I have a broader bubble that I might consume media online. So Twitter being like a primary consumption of news for me in some cases, and I learned a lot. And I sometimes see what's going on because of Twitter. And I saw Airbnb trending, which is not uncommon for me, I feel like I frequently see Airbnb trending. And it was something to the effect of Airbnb stock dropping due to report or something like that. And I was like, Oh, what was the report?

Was there revenue down? Did they lose properties? Was there some other broader thing at play? And what I quickly found was that our little bubble had escaped that news and notes and things from our bubble popped out into the other bubble that is like broader, or let's say like tech or investment news or something like that. So we'll put a link in the show notes to what I'm talking about. But basically, there's a my understanding is he's a pretty famous or notable short seller. His name is Edwin Dorsey. Again, we'll put a link to his sub stack in the show notes here. And basically, he does a breakdown on what direct booking actually looks like. I would say that's like a reasonable summary at a high level. If you want to read the full thing, go to his go to read his thing. I

don't know if you caught this, though. So is it okay if I like summarize a little bit of it? Or I don't know if you caught some of it. By all means, I've been once you shot me the link, I've been looking through it. But are you watching the deep dive? Because there's a lot of great stuff in here. So absolutely. Yeah, it's really interesting. So like I said, nothing in here is news to us. So I was reading this. And I was like, in my head, I'm like, what's the big deal? Like, this is all very common stuff. They reference a property manager. I think the name of the property manager is Stay Heirloom. I actually think they are a StayFi customer. So I've heard of them before, never really had the chance to talk with them. So maybe they are a listener or something like that. And it looks

like they're doing a pretty solid job on their marketing. So kudos to them. But they get in this article, they elevated Stay Heirloom to be this like, in my mind, it's just more of one example. There's a million companies like Stay Heirloom out there. Obviously, we're trying to work with many of them to help them with their direct marketing. So this in my mind was again, like almost a nothing burger. But because it was like, because it escaped the bubble back to my earlier point, I think people were like, wait, you mean that I can get it cheaper on the property manager site?

And I was like, obviously, we're not doing what we need to be doing. The broader public is just shocked by the fact, shocked by the fact that Airbnb is charging fees and that those fees are completely optional, essentially, and that you can book directly with a property manager or a professional host and save in some cases. I think the example they put in the Substack article here, Edwin, was only about a $225 savings. So it wasn't a significant savings. But then later in the article, he dives in and he gives lots of examples and he references different information.

He references, it's weird. He's equating, in the first part of the article, he's equating like bad hosting tactics and then applying it to Airbnb. And I think that's actually a little bit unfair. So like he gives an example of someone who has an interior camera in the property, which is a huge violation of privacy and should never happen. But to be clear, nothing, Airbnb has nothing to do with that. Airbnb deserves to take a lot of L's and we criticize them enough. But I don't see how that would tie in at all with a host making the horrible decision to put an interior camera in a property because that could in theory happen with the direct

booking that can be happy with any channel, Verbo, etc. So that's not Airbnb's fault that a host does something egregious. Now, if Airbnb didn't react to that issue and ban that host from the platform, I think that's like a zero strike in your out situation. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, then sure, then they deserve some criticism, because they're allowing someone to, you know, do something that they shouldn't be doing. But a lot of the complaints about quote, unquote, Airbnb really seem to be complaints about bad hosts. Like that seems to be more of the chief complaint. Now the argument could be made that Airbnb is perhaps allowing or gives a certain level of credibility to a bad host by letting them come on the platform by doing very little vetting. Actually, someone said this to me the other day, isn't Airbnb

authorizing, sorry, verifying every property on their platform. And I said, yeah, they said that. And then I'm like, when did they say that? And I Googled it. And they said that in 2019. They said, no, they said there's an article, I can try to dig it out, put it in the show notes. I think it was a skiffed piece, or it might have been someone else. But this was a public appearance from Chesky. And he said, in 2019, we're going to verify every property. That seems to not have happened at all. I know they're doing some work, I think on guest verification, with respect to uploading an ID and things like that. But the property verification project that apparently was started, I guess, pre-COVID now, doesn't appear to have moved forward at all. And they haven't made any progress on that. So again, I think we need to separate these things because we know better. So we have to

explain it more clearly. But watching it escape the bubble last week and watching basically this guy, this Edwin Dorsey, appeared to be enough of a needle mover that the stock went down like 10 or 12%. And Airbnb hadn't reported, from what I could tell, any financial news or any good news or bad news. They hadn't said anything. Just this man's one report was able to move the needle a little bit on their stock.

Interesting stuff, I guess, as you go through this. Is that just what this is? Is it just like the broader public awareness about the platform and how it works? Or is there something more to this? I guess I'm curious. I think it is. I think there's a lot of people among us that we push hard on book directing. And certainly that's something that we promote with managers and

everything like that. But I think there's something to be said for the billions and billions of dollars that Airbnb throws out there and even HomeAway throws out there, Virgo throws out there, Expedia throws out there to say, hey, this is, they're not worried about, they're not talking about the push isn't for the value. And I don't think that's ever, I think that's been a shift is that you're not staying there for free. It really is about getting away from that traditional hotel stairs, the four block walls or whatever it is. I think

that was how initially everything grew. But since that time, I would say it's more home away sniping at Airbnb saying, hey, it's more about not having the host in the home with you. It's about having your own personal space. That's something that they just don't talk about the fact that if you actually, and I think the other side of the coin is we've, I think we've talked about it a few times, 2015, 2016, everything was a VRBO. Not everything was a VRBO. A lot of these were professionally managed things. It's the same thing. The nomenclature has now shifted from VRBO to Airbnb. And I think it's just, we forget that there are individual or travelers forget that there are individual property managers on there that may have their own professionally managed site. Could be those people that we work with, could be individuals,

certainly. But I think that those two companies overall have done a really good job of talking about that being the values that maybe you're willing to pay a little more to have that more unique experience, to have that more personalized experience, to have that individual one-to-one experience in a great destination with a great rental listing there. But it's cringeworthy to think that that news that, again, we take for just commonplace and happenstance, for lack of a better word, it was enough to actually change the dynamics of the market for one of the big, again, for a huge company. I don't know.

It's scary in the fact that maybe we're not doing as good a job as we think we are, or the channels we're trying to pull, whatever we're trying to leverage, maybe it is. We're not doing it collectively enough as a industry, as a short-term rental industry, vacation rental industry, wherever you're seeing that. But it kind of ties into, I was listening to Good Morning Hospitality this morning, and they actually had a VC guy on. And he was talking about more of the consolidation that you may see more of the branded things happening where franchises right now, but at some point are just a group of vacation rentals or Airbnb managers just going to come together and create a company and just be a brand in and of themselves.

I think that's what it would take to, and we've seen certainly multiple examples. And I think we're going to talk more and more about Airbnb in this episode, certainly, but there is. There's certainly something to be said for a lot of the individual managers, and we know there are thousands of them out there, having that collective voice that's not quite so collective as compared to an Airbnb or a Verbo. So I guess that's my two cents on it. Yeah, I think there are two threads to pull down, I guess. The first one is there's a piece of data cited inside of this article from AirDNA, and I want to give full credit to them. And again, I'll link to them in the show notes. This is the claim from AirDNA.

I can't verify this. I'm just trusting that they're doing things accurately based on how they pull down data. This is the exact quote. Professional property managers represent 1% of all vacation rental hosts, but manage 23% of available listings, which generate 35% of total revenue, end quote. So what that tells me a little bit, if that's an accurate stat, is that the property manager obviously can control a market almost to some degree. And one property manager in some markets, usually what you find is that there's two, three, four property managers that are the biggest. And then most people are bottom

feeding for the next set of inventory. That's typically the case. It tells me that they probably have a little bit more sway and influence than they think they should. It's a common statement that I hear from a lot of property managers feeling like they're not valued by Airbnb, that Airbnb does not give them the attention or does not give them what they desire as far as support and things like that. I'm not here to pass judgment on that because I'm not a part of those conversations. So I don't exactly know what's going on a day to day basis between a property manager and their professional relationship with Airbnb. But I know that they complained about it a lot. I know that for sure. And the way the place I wanted to go in the

next part of the conversation was around the book direct day, I think is a good example of something where they're trying to get that narrative out there. And we have helped participate in Book Direct Day. And I think we're a fan of it. But obviously, it's not, we haven't won yet, right? If there's a scoreboard, it seems like Airbnb seems to be winning the scoreboard as far as public perception of the platform being the place to go. And that's the thing is like, if a guest was going and doing price comparison shopping on Airbnb, and then finding your direct booking website, and still choosing to book on Airbnb, that tells me they don't trust you the proper answer.

That's something you have to work on. But that's not a failure of book direction, in my opinion, if that were to happen, if they were aware that there was another option out there and they still chose to do what they did. That's just called you didn't do a good enough job. No different than I'm very aware that I can book a hotel directly or I can book a hotel through a platform. And I'm going to end up BVRP here in a few weeks.

Subtle plug there. And I looked on the hotel website and I looked on the OTA website and the price was identical down to the penny. There was no difference in the cost. So I booked direct and was doing the hotel a bit of a favor, a fist bump, trying to bro move to the revenue manager at that hotel and knock off a number of dollars and commission fees at booking.com. But every once in a while, it's not uncommon in the hotel space that I see a property on booking.com that's cheaper than the same listing on their website. I'm like, who is letting this happen? So now that rarely, if ever,

I've pretty much never seen that happen. At least that would be ashamed if that happened to one of my clients where the rate on Airbnb was lower than the rate on their website. I've just not seen that to be the case. So if that's the case every time that you're always paying a premium on Airbnb,

why is the narrative not just like a bug we're implanting in the mind of our guest out there? That's just, ah, you overpaid a little bit by booking an Airbnb. Just instead of saying book director, instead of just obviously that message hasn't like perfectly resonated with people. I would just love it if that was our statement. Ah, you overpaid a little bit by booking an Airbnb. Or even just you overpaid, you overpaid by booking on Airbnb. And then it's, oh, I don't want to overpay. Oh, yeah, you can go on our website here and blah, blah, blah. And then we go into our pitch. But just I think we need a better psychological hook, I guess is what I'm getting at. The idea of book direct makes sense to all of us. Going back to my bubble commentary from earlier, all of us inside the bubble understand that book direct mindset, the language, the messaging, it all we all kind of high fives and happy hands all around when we say that the guest is getting it a little bit, I think, the guests that have been trained, but the broader public is not.

The broader public is still very much in the mindset of, let me go to Airbnb and find my inventory. I'm going to toss it in that nobody who ever saw any of my Google ads on the guest side was ever confused by that because one of my headlines every single time was book, direct, and save. That's the... I think it is. Yeah, maybe that's it. my headlines every single time was book, direct and save. That's the, I think it is a small little

thing there, but it's, I, and I don't know how you change that conversation to be exactly, to be able to say it, unless Airbnb is building in a component where they are separating professional managers or making it much more clear that this is a professional manager that's actually managing the home, that is the host. I think that Airbnb does a really good job of making it more of that individual feel. So it doesn't feel like you're actually being hosted by the property manager who has 300 properties in Big Sky, Montana, it's that one person who's just the face of the company in this case. But I do, I think there's, it may go back to the kind of the mindset of how we've developed the gig economy here in the shared economy of, again, being that one-to-one. I'm going to support

this one person here. Maybe that's the shift is that people think that they're actually supporting one-to-one an individual by going through Airbnb when really, if there's a way to get around it, that's the way you're actually, you're doing more for the individual host or the individual property manager. And certainly Airbnb and Enverbo did all the work in 17, 18, 19 to make sure that people weren't going because they were losing tons of money outside the system. And they did put those checks in and they did flip that switch to say okay we're going to start taking commission on everything that we're attributing back to us the outcry there was loud and aggressive but it is it

there the machinations have been in place behind the scenes and maybe i think you can give both of those giants some credit in saying they identified it early. They identified it six, seven years ago now and put the steps in place to not allow people to communicate out with a traveler outside the platform and to make of that implemented for a lot of PMS partners because they were missing out on revenue because they couldn't talk to these Airbnb and Vrbo just shut it off. So to, I think maybe that's, there's something to be said. You can give a little credit to Airbnb, Expedia and HomeAway and all those big players now that they saw what was going to happen. And they took the steps right away and probably did more of an education push at that point that we don't even remember anymore.

That was, hey, this is how you're going to, this is how you're going to book. Now, streamlining that process as much as possible, not creating a lot of communication points. Most of the communication, and it's been a little while since I booked on Airbnb, but most of it's post booking. Like you're not communicating with them prior to the stay, prior to at least booking that room. Now, you might disregard the booking or cancel the booking at some point there, but that is, they've created an internal ecosystem that works pretty well for them. And it is.

there. And the education wasn't just on the guest side, because there's a lot of property managers that do just use Airbnb as distribution marketing. What is it here? And I think as we're transitioning into that part of the conversation, what is it? Is Airbnb marketing? Is it distribution? Is it a channel? What are your thoughts there, Conrad? It reminds me, we talked about this a few weeks ago, I think we did the four Ps, right? And it was like, we changed out, I think, product for property because property was a better fit for what we're talking about. But in what sense could Airbnb be marketing if we think of that simplistic definition? If Airbnb is a channel, then it's certainly not price. You set your price on Airbnb, but it's not price.

There's no way. It's obviously not your property, right? You are your property. You manage the property. Airbnb doesn't have your property. So that's obviously not the case. Place, okay. That's. You manage the property. Airbnb doesn't have your property. So that's obviously not the case. Place, okay. That's more so like distribution.

I would argue that's most similar. And the promotion, because like in theory, Airbnb can promote your property for you in some respect. They are promoting your property when they do advertising. So I think if we're to compare Airbnb to a piece of marketing, I would argue maybe promotion would be the most apt comparison. But I would argue that it should only ever be one piece of the promotion strategy. I think that the truth is that over the past, during the COVID boom

years, the last few years, and that's now tailed off a little bit, you could get away in most markets with just doing things on Airbnb. I would actually argue that you probably weren't necessarily yielding the most you could by doing that strategy because yes, a lot of people are on Airbnb. Yes, there's a lot of demand on Airbnb. All those things are true. But not all the demand, not all the guests, right? So maybe it's, let's say it's the majority of the pie in your market. If there's a pie chart available, and maybe Airbnb is 60% of demand at 60% of eyeballs. Great, fantastic. You should definitely be on Airbnb. To be clear, I've never, ever recommended, maybe I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually said,

yeah, I think you'd go ahead and safely disconnect your listings and move on from the platform. Pretty rare, pretty rare that someone would do that. I would never do that. If I had a property, I would never take it off of Airbnb, barring some kind of horrible rule change that I disagreed with that would cause my business harm or something like that. But today, based on the rules that I see, I would never take it off completely. Now, I would try to rely on it as little as possible.

And I think that's the piece that people just don't understand is that if you're putting all of your trust into a promotion bucket, and said promotion bucket happens to be Airbnb or any other platform, you are setting yourself up for a risky, damaging situation to occur. You're just not asking for it. But if it does happen, you're very poorly equipped to move past it. So when we say that, I think a lot of people are just like, yeah, you're just pushing your agenda and stuff like that. But it's not really the case, because if you look at any successful company, think of a company that's out there in the lodging space or any just pick like any sort of platform out there, where they rely on one platform to get all of their leads. If you knew a contractor, and the contractor only got leads from the Home Depot

pro service desk, that was the only way he grew his business. And you were giving advice, you'd be like, man, you should probably be getting leads from like other sources. So why do some property managers just put their blinders on? And this occurs, I see this frequently, I'm having a conversation with someone right now, who I'm trying to lift the blinders off of his eyes a little bit. And I'm actually wondering if it's worth doing to be completely honest with you, because he's so skeptical from the jump on if it's going to work and the cost and exactly how much is this going to cost and exactly how much revenue am I going to get off of it that I think he's missing the forest through the trees. He's realizing that he is just a barnacle attached to the Airbnb boat, which is what I see frequently, your barnacle attached to the Airbnb boat. And if that boat

goes down, you're going down with it. And if that boat wants to jettison you, they can jettison you and then you're floating around the ocean. So that's just my broader like impact of this is that Airbnb can only ever be one part of your marketing strategy or actual market put what you're putting in the marketplace and only ever be one part of it. And ideally, it should be 20% of said strategy, it should never be the whole thing. So we're talking our own book here, but it's because we've seen it, it's not like regardless of if you do it with us or some other partner or person that you're working with, that's fine. I don't care whatever. But the idea that you do it with us or some other partner or person that you're working with that's fine i don't care whatever but the idea that you're safe with airbnb is completely not true and i think that question has been brought up a lot is that because it is it's what's that

end of world situation where what if airbnb just shut down for a day a week a month and i think that's that it is people have never been posed with that question, or maybe they have, they just didn't put much thought into it. But it's a legitimate question for some of these, for some major, some bigger managers, or even some smaller managers, if you did, if you like, if Airbnb just went down or you had to get a refund of, they refunded quarter million of your reservation. That's certainly something we talked about a few months ago now. It happens. So how would you cope with that? And I think that's, heck, that's something you address in a SWOT analysis. Where are your weaknesses? Where are

your threats? The weakness is that we rely on Airbnb and Verbo for 60, 70% of our bookings. And the threat is that, hey, what if there was a policy change? Or heaven forbid, what if the sites went down? And it is, it's maybe something that we didn't address much, but I've certainly heard that question more frequently, seen it on LinkedIn posts and stuff like that, where people really are starting to wonder or at least talk about what are the alternatives. And I think that you do need some more people who are more experienced in the space who have had those horror stories. For a lot of managers, they're probably pretty content with taking in the average 10 to 50, let's say rental manager, pretty content taking what they take through Airbnb and home away, getting some direct in there however they're doing it.

But there is the unknown of what, what are you leaving on the table or what if the worst would happens. So I do think that it's, it is, and it still wraps back up to, it's an education point. It's an education point for travelers. It's an education point for managers. It's, I think we all just have to get on the same page here. And there has to be some more of these articles, sub stacks, stuff like that. It is interesting. I will know. It's interesting that going back to even those stats you're talking about representing professional property managers, representing 1% of all hosts, 23% of listings, 35% of revenue. That's even going back to 2022. And we know there's been a shift since that time. Jamie Lane from EarDNA, who is usually the guy who's pulling out a lot of this data, he would have, I'm sure those numbers have shifted even more where now, and I think they actually have released more data that it is more people or more listings that are out there that are professional managers.

You would think that it would be the other way where people are scaling back and trying to go more direct. No, people realize that's still where the bookings are coming from. That's still where the eyes are. And until there's a massive fundamental shift, and it would take like a Google, taking more market share. It takes a Google vacation rentals or something like that, I think, or some other type of integration with a big player. I don't know if ChatGPT is going to end up with more of a true HomeAway plugin, not just the Expedia plugin or an Airbnb plugin. And at that point, then I really don't think you can turn those channels off because

that's a whole nother audience that maybe you haven't even tapped into yet. A whole different persona of, I would say that most people, most chat GPT users tend to skew probably a little younger right now. So that is, it may be a really good opportunity for anybody, managers and hotel, anybody in the hospitality space to get in front of those younger users who have the money, who have the capital, or who are looking to test out the newest, who have the capital or who look are looking to test out the newest, coolest things and booking through chat GPT, I gotta say, it'd be pretty cool just to try it once. And then to actually if it's streamlined, if it's easy to go. Again, it just it's hockey stick potential growth from there. So I, yeah.

I would like to do a comparison. This is a bit of a departure from what you were saying. And the comparison that I always like to do is eBay. I've done that on other podcasts, but I don't think I've done it on this one. So I'll do the eBay Amazon comparison. Yep. So I went and looked up eBay annual revenue. So this is just revenue according to macrotrends.net. So we'll assume this is a legitimate source. So they went public in 08, first revenue reported in 09, they did 8.7 billion in sales, then 9.1, then 11.6, then 14 billion. So from one, two, three, four, five years straight, they went, they increased by at least $500 million a year. In fact, from 2011 to 2012, they actually increased their annual revenue by over $3 billion. What happened in 2012,

you might ask in 2012, this is my sort of assessment, not having access to all the files, but it seems like Amazon started to gain a little bit of momentum because from 2012 to 2013, they went from over $14 billion in revenue to 8.2 in 2013. So they lost billions of dollars of revenue in just a year. Then they are stuck. They're the 8.2 in 2013, 8.7 in 2014. They kind of bounced back a little bit. Needless to say, they've got nowhere close to 14 billion since then. Here we are looking at 2022 numbers, they did 9 billion last year, 9.7 to be exact. So they are probably 60% of the size of the business they were in 2012. And honestly, the dollar and like the inflation and stuff like that, really a $9.7 billion company

in 2012 dollars is probably like a $20 billion company, right? So they're really a lot smaller, if you think about it, with all the numbers weighed in there. So Amazon ate eBay's lunch. Now, eBay is still a relatively successful company. In fact, their stock prices actually went parabolic during 2021. So they may be selling less revenue, but maybe they're making more per whatever, per purchase or whatever.

Maybe their rake has gone up a little bit. I don't know. I'm not giving stock investing advice here. I'm just giving an example of two companies that I think a lot of people who have been around for some time can think of in their heads, Amazon and eBay, and one won and one lost. And if you were relying, let's take ourselves out of the vacation rental operator seat and

put ourselves in the e-commerce world. And you were relying on eBay revenue from 2012 up until 2012. You were super happy because it was on this trajectory that Airbnb is on. Everything's great. The fees are reasonable for the most part. Everybody's happy, great ecosystem. And then from 2013 on, they just get crushed. Their business loses about half of what it could. Airbnb's business lose about half if another upstart were to come in and offer a different service or a better product or whatever

the case may be. Of course it could. You'd be insane to think that's impossible because this is capitalism. Sears used to be this unassailable, oh my God, Sears has too much power. They're the most successful retailer of all time. And now we laugh and joke about Sears. And that didn't take place over... It took place over decades, but it wasn't an instant thing. It took a long time for the long tail of death to occur on the physical retail side of things. But obviously that has happened to Sears and it could happen to any retailer. Amazon one day may be ashes on the ground. Maybe we'll all be older, maybe dead. I don't know.

It's hard to predict. But that's my point, which is that these marketplaces come and go. Your marketing strategy, the actual piece of that is marketing is your ability to see what's out there and build your own little island. You have to build your own little island. I don't really care too much how you do it. Obviously, we think there's ways to do it with search social and email marketing, but you could play it in other ways.

I follow a account on TikTok, which has been a small focus of ours, but I follow an account on TikTok, who is getting the majority of their bookings through TikTok. She runs like a glamping site up in the Smoky Mountains area of Tennessee with 2025 campsites, something like that. And really, like you said a second ago, targeting that, that like essentially the new gen demographic that consumes on TikTok. They think going glamping in Tennessee is awesome. They love it. They think it's fantastic. They probably don't want to book an Airbnb or they don't see a need to book an Airbnb. Oh, I can go right here. Look, she has all these videos on TikTok. Of course I trust her. Look at all these reviews. Look at all this feedback. Look at other people that have shot videos there and they've had a great time. I believe it's going to

be a great experience. They'll pay 200 bucks a night for a tent. Mind blowing to me, not really my thing, but there we go. She's running a thriving business off of essentially TikTok traffic. So maybe that's what a new generation short-term rental property manager look like. Maybe, I don't know. I'm not saying that is the case or is not the case. But my point is that her marketing channels are diverse. Her marketing channels are unique. She has different ways that she's thinking.

She's going where the eyeballs are. She's not really so focused on, oh, there's a way to track the bookings and stuff like that coming in. She's like, nope, if I just get a lot of views, I know I'm going to get bookings off this. She's very confident about that. And she's proven to be correct. So I can't disagree with her. Marketplaces come and go. Airbnb is here today. It could be gone, not tomorrow. That would be impossible, but it could be gone in the future. And if you're relying on that, and this is your long-term plan, if you're just trying to surf the wave for a little while and

hop off, then yeah, sure. Do whatever is most capital efficient. And I'm fine with that. But if you're trying to build like the business that's stable, that has like long lasting capabilities to it, or you're just trying to build a great business, not like a mediocre business. I just can't see how you can only rely on Airbnb. I can't see how that's a healthy operational strategy for you to employ. And yet a lot of people do it. And just like we opened the show talking about how the public isn't aware of the fees and how the money's being picked up right now. The property managers seem, some of them seem to want to put their head in the sand and not realize that what they're doing is not just not efficient. I think that's like a fair criticism

of it, but literally suboptimal. Like over a long enough period of time, Airbnb is going to keep their take rates going to chip up 1% at a time until they're taking 20, 25%, just like booking sites until they have you relying on them. And then you're going to be in a horrible position. So I just don't see a way that you can square it in your head where this is the most optimal long-term solution. Is there some cost and expense you have to endure in the short term to get a solid and respectable direct booking approach up and running? Of course you do, but that's like cost of doing business. I hate to say it. If you're going to build a more stable business and you're going to have to invest a little bit in website pieces, in marketing pieces, et cetera, whether it's your time or your money or both, that's going to have to invest a little bit in website pieces in marketing pieces etc whether it's your time or your money or both that's going to have to occur for you to be

successful b&b is not marketing airbnb as you say is distribution and it's just it should just be one prong of a fork that you have of distribution to get your name out there and they've done a lot of good for the industry i don't want to sit here and just rag on them endlessly they've brought a lot of eyeballs in and i think we should be grateful but i also think that we should be we should have them at an arm's distance in some respect. And if you take that kind of messaging into account, I think you can be a lot more successful with this long term. If you let them move into your house, business house, if you will, and do whatever they want.

I don't know. You might get some mud on your furniture. I just I'm not believing it long term. No, I think I think that's the perfect and I think it is the perfect wrap up of. Yeah, we can make the argument that however it's effective for you, yeah, make it work. But for long term, and we're on the sustainability kick now for at least the next week here and probably a little further than that. But it is for a long term sustainable business. Just you have to diversify.

It goes back to the same. It goes back to the same, if you were using print journalism at some point, if you were doing you in the using the newspapers and magazine articles to do your advertising, and you're still devoting 50%, I, first of all, I highly doubt you're still devoting 50% to print advertising, but it is. Think about the changes that have happened up to this point and how you market and how do you distribute and how you do all that with your listings. Just know that's not going to change. It is you. There's new places to put them. There's new things. There's new tools. There's new tricks. There's new strategies. Ultimately, though, it's about making sure you're spread out so that it is. At some point, one catastrophic failure at one spot doesn't stop your business. It is.

You want to make sure that you are not dependent on someone else to run your business. And for a lot of managers, yeah, Airbnb is how they run their business. And we're trying to avoid that. We're trying to give you the tools. We're trying to give you the strategies. And we're trying to make you understand it in a way of why we say this, because we can put those examples out there. And we do, we have some really fun examples from hundreds of partners that we've worked with and

some not so good examples from the hundreds of partners that we've worked with. But it is, we're trying to make everybody here as successful as possible. And that's something that you can use Airbnb to do that for a while. You can't leverage only Airbnb to do that long-term. No. This is how I feel about motivation, actually, which is I believe motivation is like Tylenol or like any sort of painkiller. It's fine to take when you're in pain

and you need to, ah, my knee's messed up and I need to take it, but I can't take it every day. If you need motivation every day, something's wrong. If you need painkillers every day, something's wrong. And if you need to rely on Airbnb every day to get your bookings, something's wrong. So you're not setting, you're not setting yourself up for success. What would be really successful? What would make people more successful in my opinion? If they reviewed our listing or reviewed our podcast, I think it would help them

immensely. I think it would help them a lot because not only would they get the pleasure of leaving us a review, which takes them less than a minute typically open up your podcast app search heads of bed show tap the review link and then leave the review that would be less than a minute in fact i bet i could get someone to do it in less than 25 seconds if they have the if they're already subscribed it would be even quicker because they would if you're listening to this here it's literally one click away so that would help them quite a bit if they left a review and it makes them feel good and if you feel good you do well for yourself you do well for your guests your owners everybody's happy it's a true win win and again is that right i think you got the win there and it lets you want to share this with some other people in the industry and

the best way to do that is get those reviews out there because the more reviews we get the more people somehow the algorithm works behind the scenes and all of itunes and anything apple spotify anybody anywhere We'll take them anywhere. But you know what? Every time we get those reviews, those numbers just go. So let's come on. Let's get some more people involved here. It's a good point. We don't distribute this audio on just one platform, do we? We've got it on iTunes. We've got it on Spotify. We got it over here, Google Podcasts, et cetera. Overcast is my podcast player choice, but that's fine. If you want to use something different, just leave us a review, please. That's right. That's all we got.

Thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it. We'll be back next week. We're going to do this GA4 one eventually. So maybe this is us publicly, me publishing, publicly nudging Paul to do the GA4 one so he gets a little bit more savvy with it. But no, we really do appreciate listening. Hopefully this episode was fun, different, tactical one than we normally do, more kind of high level discussion. And it was fun. We'll see you next week. Thanks so much for listening to the Heads and Beds show.