Heads In Beds Show - Leveraging Cognitive Biases To Get More Bookings For Your Vacation Rentals

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad give a fresh look at Bard vs ChatGPT, share updates on the possible loss of organic traffic with the new "generated summaries" Google is planning to roll out AND also share a smattering of biases that impact your ability to get more bookings. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellSupercharging Search with generative AI - GoogleSearch ads today and in the future - GoogleWhat’s ahead for Bard: More global, more visual, more integrated🔗 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. All right, Paul, how's it going? It's a fantastic start to the week here. We've got a lot of good news, a lot of big news, I think it is. I think if nothing else, we've been in over our heads with the amount of news that Google releases.

It was ChatGPT for a couple months there, and now we're back to the Google side of things. So excited to be talking about that, excited to be launching off into the episode here. But how's your week going? How's everything going for you right now? Yeah, pretty good. We obviously, we record before the episodes come out. So people listening right now are going to be like, that was a while ago, but I got to see myself like dominate a game seven. It was stressful for the first half. And then they just ran away with it there in the back half.

Had my feet on my couch, just sitting there playing with my kids towards the evening, getting them ready for bath time was stress-free, not worrying about running back to the TV, going back over here, figure out a way to do it. It was all good. So yeah, sports-wise, got to see some good stuff there yesterday. And let's see, by the time this episode comes out, we'll see how they're faring in the Miami series. I have just a medium amount of doubt.

We'll see how it all goes. And what's the expression? Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Oh yeah, hoping for the best, expecting the worst. They've been inconsistent this year. Whenever you have a team that's talented but inconsistent, you always worry about them and like high leverage moments that something's gonna go wrong.

So that is the fear with this team, for sure. Who's not making a lot of mistakes in a high leverage moment? Google, I think they're actually making some pretty solid decisions, at least for the benefit of Google. Not sure it's great for us or great for the industry, but certainly good for them. So we have a few notes here that we'll drop or a few links, excuse me, that we'll drop in the show notes on generative AI search ads, how that's going to be impacting with this AI thing and Bards going global. But maybe Google was down for a little bit there. Maybe they were down when their series, but luckily it's a long one. It's not

something that's getting decided right away. It seems like they're coming out swinging. Whatever ChatGPT has been doing or OpenAI has been doing, it seems like Google's, yeah, we're not sitting here twiddling our thumbs, willing to do more and do better. Now we did a bar little preview a while ago and we were both like, yeah, this isn't as good as chat GPT. What's your thoughts today? So maybe we'll leave with that one. What's ahead for Bard? It's now essentially globally available. Anyone I think can use now Bard, no waitlist, no beta, anything like that. I went into Joven and spent a little more time with it. We didn't talk about this, so I don't know your take on it. What's your thoughts on it? It is. I did this. I did the same thing post Google I.O.,

their big general event, I would say, talking about all the newest, latest, and greatest things, and mostly around the dev side of things, tech side of things, but certainly around AI, obviously around BARD. I did jump into BARD again over the weekend a little bit. It's better. It's getting better. And it is. And then that's just some initial releases. There's still a lot of releases that are happening as a kind of a fallout of that Google IO stuff, but it is. And I've kind of, I have been testing it periodically just to see if the results are getting better. It is, it's LLM, a large language model. It should be improving over time as it's taking in more of this information. But you know, some of the, some of those key takeaways, yeah, the wait list is gone. And I think that's taking in more of this information. But some of those key takeaways,

yeah, the wait list is gone. And I think that's a huge sign of the confidence of Google. They already were behind the eight ball from the standpoint of they didn't release right away, or they were behind. Being able to feel comfortable enough to remove that wait list, to make it more international, 180 countries, three languages that they're focusing on right now. I think that's a big step because there was a reason why they didn't want too many people going in there and being so critical of it or not finding the information that they wanted. They're ultimately trying to take it from a very positive start for people because they know once they've lost people on bar, they're never going to get them back. Overall, a lot of cool news. There's some small things, some big things, but I think the biggest point that was announced or discussed there during the

bar discussion was generative search results. And I think that's what's scaring me the most, right? Everything's going to get flipped upside down on its head here pretty quick. How much it impacts every industry, every vertical, it's hard to say right now, but what are your thoughts on just the overall, the new UI, the new UX, everything like that? How are you feeling right now on the SEO side of things? I think it's, so my first reaction, I saw the generative AI search results. Again, we'll drop a link in the show notes. So if you don't know what we're referencing, well, obviously you can click on that link

and check it out. But basically imagine a Google search. And then at the top of said Google research search was a summarized view of all the content beneath it. And I breathed out a little sign. I went, oh, fudge. I didn't say fudge. We're trying to keep the clean tag on this podcast, but I didn't say fudge.

I said something else. And my logic is that kills a lot of our content strategy that we might potentially have in some respect from, Hey, we're going to do best restaurants. We're going to do things to do, et cetera. So, okay. The traffic to that content going down isn't ideal for us. Obviously after my initial reaction, I went, okay, but like Google can't summarize and say on the vacation rental point from the guest side of things, we can't say, okay, maybe it could link, okay, here's 25 vacation rental properties that are more that are ideal for your search. Maybe there's a future where Bard or ChatGPT or some of these large language model tools can help you filter through thousand vacation homes in a market.

Okay, I want a four bedroom. I want this. I want that. But all those tools are basically available now through checkboxes and filters and stuff like that. So my initial reaction cooled off a little bit. I was actually talked to a client of mine who I was worried about his reaction to it thinking, hey, this could jeopardize our contract, honestly, to be fully transparent. And he didn't feel that way at all. He's like, oh, no, this is I think, a positive step forward, because we're going to be able to create content around this, it's going to make it we're going to maybe we do lose traffic, but we're going to be able to get more like visibility that we don't get today. So he was more optimistic about it. And it cooled me off a little bit for sure. As far as just like, my initial reaction

was like, I guess there it is, the SEO is dead. No, I wasn't saying that. I was like, the SEO is dead, people would have the best case seeing that than they would have the past 10 years of them saying that nonsense. Because certainly for a lot of queries, if you do that search, and it's no different than the one box stuff that came up when we talked about one box before where you do a search. And it's I think the most, I'll try to hunt this down and put a link in the show notes if I can find it. But there's a story about the celebrity net worth guy where he built the sole website, celebrity net worth. I think it's.com or it might be.net or something like that. Sure.

And basically Google tried to license his content. He was like, no, like I don't want to do that because I want people to go to my site. I make money when people go to my site. So when you search name a celebrity, right? You search Donald Trump net worth, his website used to rank number one and get a lot of traffic off that. Then one day, Google just literally extracted the only thing people care about on that website, put it at the top of the search results, not just a feature snippet. It's like literally a one box that just shows it right there. And then his business effectively was tanked overnight. It didn't die. But it was it went from being a level 10 opportunity in terms of traffic to maybe a level two or three opportunity overnight because of Google.

So that's more so what it felt to me is that there are sites that will get damaged by this severely because they rely on that traffic to that things to do type content. If you're a trip advisor, let's say, I think you're pretty worried about that because you're like, my whole strategy is basically, or a lot of my traffic comes from organic search, Google being dominant in that field. Much of my content can be summarized because it's a lot of like user generated text content forms, that kind of stuff. Or it's like me synthesizing reviews for people going and visiting the Skywheel and then, you know, photos and stuff like that. If Google just scrapes that and puts that at the top, why would anyone click over to TripAdvisor when

it's pretty much the same thing? So if you're in that business, I think you're not feeling great right now. In our business, I feel okay. I don't feel great because we are going to lose traffic, even if we still make that content. So that was my mixed bag now that I've had a day or two to think about it, honestly. I would agree. I think the industries where zero-click searches were already an issue, and they're not going to get any better. That's the thing. You're hoping now maybe that you can structure the content or structure the information in a way that maybe Google will include you in. What I think is interesting is that you have that generative box, AI box, and then you have the three organic replacements or placements that they're calling in the upper right-hand corner, the three cards.

So the card format appears to be replacing just the inline results format side of things. to be replacing just the inline results format side of things. But the one thing I don't think we've seen or we don't really understand yet is how Google travel plays into this. And that's where I hope that we'll see a little more of that coming out of the Google Marketing Live side of things, because so much of the revenue just overall is derived from some of those big OTAs. So what does that look like as we're actually looking on the Google Ads side of things, Google Marketing Live coming up May 23rd for those people? Again, listening a little behind or a little ahead here, that is going to, I think, give us just a little greater understanding of what the impact is on that side of things, the Google Hotels, Google Travel, Google Vac now. That's there. There's been a

lot of rumblings in that area. There were, there was a lot of turnover when the cuts happened in that specific segment, that vertical. So I do, I think that's still the outline thing of Google's Google organic generation, all these good things for the SEO side of things are interesting things, but what does it actually do on the travel side, on the hospitality side? Because we are, we're in this unique niche where, what is it? 80% of all Google's revenues come from the ad side, I think 78%, whatever that number actually is. But of that number, the big OTAs, Expedia, Priceline, they make up a huge proportion of that. I would say probably last time I checked, it was like a third. So how can you,

it is, they're going to have to balance making sure they're keeping their advertisers satisfied or just the hotel hospitality space satisfied. And really, I don't think that this is, I don't think we're the industry they want to mess with too much here on the SEO side of things or the paid side of things or whatever we're looking at moving forward. We're entering a whole new world here. So we just got to keep up. Yeah, exactly. No, we got to keep up. And ultimately, I think the more I'm thinking about it,

it's like Google is going to do what Google is going to do to maximize their long-term company health. I actually wonder in the short term that this might actually harm them in some way. But shout out to Google for doing that, right? It's the hardest thing to do. Apple's done this before when Apple realized that when they released the iPhone, they could have taken, I think, music? That's the hardest thing to do is Apple's done this before when Apple realized that when they released the iPhone,

they could have taken, I think, music capability off of the iPhone and said, oh, yes, we use an iPod, like iPod and an iPhone. And then they realized, no, the iPhone is just going to eat the iPod eventually.

And this was back in 2008, 9, 10. They made that decision. And the iPads, the iPod, excuse me, still had, I think, like a five or 10 year run after that. But ultimately, it's like writing on the was on the wall at that point, like the iPods were going to,

you know, be dead. And that was once their biggest product line or one of their biggest products line. So I think that's a good example where Google will put a link to in there about the ads. They weren't super transparent about the ads or like, Hey,

we might put ads in the Bard responses and then I'm sure they'll have to disclose it and label it as an ad as they always have to do. Yep. But ultimately I don't see it. Maybe we'll get there. I don't know. In the short term though, I doubt you'll see a scenario where you ask Bard a question like i just did as a test what are the best hotels

in area name then it gave me that was one of them is actually my client so i said tell me more about that um hotel and then it gave me a bunch of feedback from the website that's mostly summarized and reworded but i can tell it's basically home page slash about the resort page copy because i wrote it anyways so they're kind of barred. Yeah, yeah. I trained you on that one. But what I was what you would expect Google to get to soon is a button there that says click here to book now. And oh, by the way, that would be a link. I think the long term vision would be, would you like me to go ahead and reserve this hotel for you, Mr. O'Connell? That's the long term thing that they get to. And then because Google is handling the whole

transaction, they effectively become the OTA. So I don't think that's an insane thought process to go down long term. Because to your point, yes, booking and the big OTA platforms, whether it's vacation rental or hotel resort, just general accommodations, shovel literally billions of dollars a quarter to Google, never mind what they spend on a yearly basis in the billions. But like Google already has a lot of those relationships as far as being able to drive potentially direct relationships with a lodging provider. And if you're a PMS company and you are listing your properties on, or you've built the integration for listing on Google vacation rentals and you're a PM using those services, you know that they're trying to go in that direction. The problem is

that they haven't had enough uptake for it to be successful. So there's people on Twitter all the time will say, oh, Google could take out Airbnb. That's maybe but like they would need the participation of all the providers to get there that then the question becomes, would Airbnb be best served by serving their listings through BART? Or do they say, you know what we offer, we have a moat, we have the properties, we have the inventory. If we just give you a feed and let you do whatever you want with it. We're breaking that fourth wall a little bit between what makes us valuable and why someone wants to come to our platform versus just giving you everything. And I think if you're Airbnb and Vrbo and stuff like that, you're smart to avoid it because once you break down and give it to them, then you're almost training the consumer just to go to Google first. Whereas

with Airbnb, like consumers are trained to go to Airbnb first in many cases and get the property they want. It's actually, it's good. I think in some respect to see the competition and see how it's fleshing out, Google controlling everything probably isn't good for the health of the industry because they'll figure out a way to pull their tax out of the middle and provide as little value and as little support as possible, which is the true Google way, for sure. It is. And I think just trying to put a bullet in it as we got a little more to talk about here. But it is. I think the one advantage Google does have from that perspective is that they don't have to do the plugins. They've already got,

I think, a much stronger relationship and in some cases, a much more direct relationship with the meta search that's already taking place on that side of things. So I think you're spot on in the fact that Google just asking you, not even through a partner integration, through anything like that, just asking you, do you want to book this room? They may slow roll that out in beta and we'll just see it and have to respond to it as opposed to, I'm sure there'll be some type of partnership behind the scenes where you can work up, I don't know, like a whip hotels or something like that, where they'll offer it more directly or do something like that.

But it is, that's, I do think that's Google's advantages. That's obviously where most people are starting their search already for travel. That's why they incorporated it right into the current organic results as they have them. That's why they probably are going to work. They've already got the framework ahead right now. Yeah. So my last thought on this, then we'll get into the topic today. Go do a Google flight search and go through and book that process because they've been

at that for a while and they really haven't fully integrated it a lot of airlines you like you do the whole flight search process on flights.google.com you put in dates you put in departure arrival 90 of the experience is google and then you get to that last tab and there'll be a button a blue button that is google branded and it says book on american airlines that's often who i book through and then they take you literally everything's all pre-filled but they take you to an American Airlines checkout page with I'm sure all the tracking parameters appended properly to it. So they get credit or whatever. And then you make that booking. So I wonder if that's potentially even a clue maybe as to what they might end up doing. Now, some some airlines, you can book on Google, and there'll be a button when you go to the checkout,

and it's like book on Google or book on the airline website. And I tend to always book on the airline website, because then I'm like, I know, technically, it's maybe a direct booking in some respect, but like less to go wrong. Like I just generally prefer to book on the airline website. And I tend to always book on the airline website because then I'm like, I know technically it's maybe a direct booking in some respect, but like less to go wrong. Like I just generally prefer to book with the airline directly. You don't really get a deal by booking with an OTA anyways on airlines. It's different on lodging and stuff like that.

Different discussion for a different day. But yeah, maybe that's actually the experience where it's like, hey, I found everything. Maybe they learn like the format of each website where they know how to like manipulate like the property names, the query strings to put in the URL, see if it's available why not right you can crawl everything why couldn't they crawl stuff like that but then the button at the bottom is just click here to book now

and then boom it just drops you on the checkout page ready to enter your credit card in on abc vacation rental manager.com or whatever the case may be so that even could be like maybe a middle solution until they get there which honestly is like pretty good for the property manager pretty good experience for the user like a win-win in many respects. As long as Google gets to extract their tax out of the middle, their ad revenue, they're happy to and potentially a better partner in that scenario, I would take that relationship 10 days out of the week over the OTA middleman where they hold the money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, again, different story for a different day. Who else likes to tell herself stories? I tell stories all the time to my

to my kids. And I try to tell them stories about what to watch out for in life. I'm sure you do the same thing as well. You try to warn them about certain things. And that's actually the topic of today's episode, long preamble to get into it. But today's episode is talking about cognitive biases and how to get more direct booking. So I'll tell a short story and then we can dive into it. I actually, I love these cognitive biases and I love studying these kinds of things. I did two classes in college that kind of shaped my opinion about this a little bit. One was actually took a philosophy class, which you had to take one like arts humanities class and somehow ended up with two. I don't know how this happened. I take like an I take like art history class and I had to take a philosophy class. They were in

different semesters. But I was like, how did this happen? I was I thought I was only supposed to have to take one of these. But there was some scheduling conflict or a lot of new students or whatever they couldn't accommodate. So art history class was terrible. I learned nothing. I'm sorry, our history people out there. I learned nothing, didn't like it. But the philosophy class I found fascinating because they actually made us confront. It wasn't like, oh, what did philosopher ABC say in this year? That really wasn't what it was about. It was like, why does this person think this way? And then we did a whole section. There was like the bulk of the class was actually about, was about stuff like this, was about these cognitive biases that humans have that cause us to make bad decisions. So it was almost more of

an intro to psych maybe type approach, but I actually really enjoyed it. I learned a lot from it. And I haven't heard of all these before. But I found a list the other day of these most common cognitive biases that actually occur, primacy, anchoring, ambiguity, we're going to go over a whole list here. And what I thought it would be interesting is how do we tie that into a vacation rental experience or a vacation rental background or something like that, right? So with each of these biases, we'll go through as many as we can. How would this actually impact your ability to change your approach from a marketing, branding, website design, just general company operations perspective? So I thought it'd be interesting. Maybe I'll lead us off here with the primacy effect and we can dive right into it.

Let's go. Okay. All right. So the first here with the primacy effect and we can dive right into it. Let's go. Okay. All right. So the first one here is primacy or anchoring bias. So basically I'll read this kind of summary of it really quickly. Anchoring bias refers to the tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information that you get when you start to make decisions. So in a sales context, you see this all the time.

Actually, a client of mine actually does this on homeowner ones. Maybe we can talk about homeowner too as we go along here, which is, hey, I'm not going to charge you 50% commission or anything like that. And the first minute of the conversation, he automatically anchors their commission as 50%. And then when he then pitches 30% later on or 25%, it seems very reasonable. So this is a well-known longstanding sort of sales technique or sales tactic that certainly people have been using for a long time in personal kind of one-to-one selling relationships. But I thought it was interesting in the context of vacation rentals. I thought, how does the anchoring bias project to vacation rentals? Here's the thing. When you

list your property out there, you're putting together that photo, that lead photo. That's really what the anchoring bias is. The price, the photo, and that initial snippet of information that a guest sees when they actually go to, whether it's your website, whether it's on OTA, it doesn't matter in my opinion, the anchoring bias is at play. They're going to remember that first thing that they see, whether it's that external beautiful shot of the property, the internal, et cetera. So a lot of people say, make that thumbnail great when it comes to the photo on the website or on the OTA, but they never explained what that means. They just stopped there. They're just like, Oh, if you make the photo better, then you'll get more clicks and then I'll help you. But they

don't finish the process. They're okay. It's like, you know, what do you mean by that? What they mean by that is that this is what's at play. That's what people are going to remember. That one thing you want them to stick in their mind is the anchoring bias. And that's why you have to continually test these. Your thoughts on the anchoring bias and as it relates to vacation rentals.

Yeah, this is one that I think, as I was reading through this list, this is one that really hit home because I think it catches me in two different ways where numbers, big numbers, guys. So when that number hits, that's the first thing I'm comparing everything against. And certainly it is. I was reading some other articles here and it's that found money principles. Man, my budget was already here. And this is the first number I looked at. Now I've got this

rate in there for, oh, it was $1,000 a night when I went down to 300 bucks. Well, that's 700 bucks in my pocket, even though I didn't want to spend more than 300 bucks there to begin with. But on the visual side of things, having written a lot of those listings as well out there, and that was a huge education point is to try to tell people, but I never used the anchoring bias to say, you want to put that wow factor picture right at the front so that that's what people are remembering because they may not get to picture two. They may not get to picture three. That's how you're, that's, I'm thinking of it as we got to get them to the next pictures and get them to the slideshow. It's not even that. It's that now that image, that, that description, that headline, whatever it is, that first piece of information

is what you're comparing against. No, I couldn't put into words that anchoring bias is what you should be doing it, why you should be doing it. But there was a lot of learning for me. And admittedly, I didn't take the psych classes. I didn't take the philosophy classes, but in hindsight, I probably should have

because it would have made me better at my doing this side of the job because all marketing is psychology. You're just playing psychological games with people and trying to manipulate them to do what we're trying to do here. So it's on the owner side of things. It's a big thing about that initial number, setting the number and then going under it. I've heard people, I've heard salespeople on the conversations listening to some of those calls using that exact same thing, do they know they're consciously using anchoring bias? Probably not. It's just the system or sales tool that's there utilizing, leveraging to get more of those sales through as well. Yeah, certainly I'm guilty

of it. And certainly it's something that affects me maybe more than some of these other biases or something that I can acknowledge more than some of the other biases, but it's something that if you're not using it in different ways, whether it's the price, whether it is the image, there's a lot of different ways that you can incorporate this and make sure that you are on the, when you're listing your home, setting a competitive, you have fair initial price to create that positive anchor point in the minds of potential guests. That way you are, you're that great deal. And that's going to incentivize them to get that booking and move forward there. Yeah, I think that's about it on the anchoring side of things, really. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Let's slide along because we got a lot to get to over here. So the ambiguity

bias is the second one that we have here is the tendency to avoid options with unknown or uncertain outcomes in favor of options with more familiar or predictable outcomes. It sounds straightforward, but in the context that we're talking about here today, I think of this as a trust bias, which we tend to, when we're unsure, we tend to go to the things that we trust. We tend to go back to the things that we maybe have had at least good or ideally great experience at before. And we tend to avoid the things that when we're unsure, we don't make a decision. I think that's a good way to sum this one up. When we're confused, we just don't want to make any particular decision. We stand the sidelines and we don't make a decision. I think that's a good way to sum this one up. When we're confused, we just don't want to make any particular decision. We stand the sidelines and we don't take that next step. So this I think is huge because ultimately when we

talk about a lot of people will talk about direct bookings, it's a topic of conversation. I think very few people talk about what it actually takes to get direct bookings initially. That's actually the hardest thing to get that initial traction where you get your first 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 direct bookings for most managers. And this is actually, I think what it is, which is that how do I reduce and remove ideally as much uncertainty and ambiguity about my brand and my company and what I offer as is humanly possible. So people will say things like have a professionally designed website, certainly copy can help, photos can help, video can help, all these things help. But I think what it is, it's like a chef, like putting it together in the kitchen in the right way with the right ingredients,

and cooking it in the right way is actually what leads to the right outcome. So for me, ambiguity bias is saying, how do I remove as much uncertainty as possible? So people not only feel confident booking with me, but they know that they should be booking with me, they another option shouldn't even enter their mind once they see the value that we bring. And rate, by the way, is just one one point of that, again, a lot of people point to rate and they say, it's cheaper on my website. That may be true, but why would people knowing that still choose to book on Airbnb when it's cheaper on your website? And again, people don't finish the thought. They just say, oh, it's cheaper on my website. Surely that's enough to motivate people. The fact that Mercedes sells all the cars they do

as a luxury car manufacturer proves to you that people don't do things purely based off financial motivation. Otherwise, Honda and Toyota would sell the most cars, right? People buy a Mercedes or a BMW for a million reasons. It has nothing to do with the car itself. Honda and Toyota being bad is that they wanted something that was not financially ideal for them, but they want that luxury experience. That's not a great analogy, but back to the reason why someone would book on Airbnb versus booking directly on your website. They trust Airbnb. You may not like Airbnb, but the guests trust Airbnb. They have a positive affinity and they like going to Airbnb to make a booking

or Vrbo or whatever. Pick your OTA of choice if you're in other markets. So that's your job here is to remove the ambiguity as much as possible and not say, oh, it's the guest's fault. The guest is stupid. I've heard property managers say stuff like that. How dare they?

It's no, you didn't do a good enough job of proving that you're actually a safe choice. There was something that they saw as either a yellow flag or a red flag on your website or in your marketing or your communication or in your just brand kind of standards the way you present yourself that made someone go eh you know what i'm good i don't actually want to book with them and that's what's that this probably kills more bookings than anything once you get someone to the website the traffic is one thing we could do whole episodes on that we have but once you get someone to the website the reason that your one thing. We could do whole episodes on that. We have. But once you get someone to the website, the reason that your conversion rate is bad is

they don't trust you. They're not sure what to do. So yeah, your thoughts on this one. I think you hit Airbnb on the head. That's the first, as you were talking through the first part, that's exactly all I could go to was Airbnb. And I think we talked about this on a previous episode as it was noteworthy in this news article, in the blog post news article,

that, oh, it's actually cheaper to book direct on a professional manager's website. That's, everybody knows that in the space, or we thought we're, we think we're doing a very good job of educating people, alerting people to this. Clearly we're not, because that's not, it is. And I think this is the re-seeing it it full picture there of clearly it's not just about having the lowest price. And clearly it's not just about having the prettiest pictures or anything like that.

It is. It's that cohesive experience. Does it take you 20 clicks, 30 clicks to book as opposed to Airbnb? Hey, first name, last name, contact, contact information, credit card number, and let's go. Then it's about communicating with the guests there. Yeah. I think between the confidence of just knowing Airbnb and how everything is an Airbnb, I think that plays into it as well, is that what is synonymous with a vacation rental now? It's Airbnb and we haven't, everything is just ambiguous. Everything's the same. It's not. No, there are professional

managers. There are self-managing managers. There are Airbnb hosts and co-hosts and stuff like that. And this is one I think that probably hits us more. And as the reason that we've got the old, we're not, I'm not Airbnb or we are not Airbnb, the hashtags that are out there right now, because we haven't done a good job of educating or dissuading the travel community away from their ambiguity biases, I would say. Do you think the restaurants are doing something right now where it's, we are not Uber Eats? No, because Uber Eats is just a mechanism that the food gets from the restaurant to your door, but you still recognize and hopefully have a better relationship with the restaurant. I think that's a better analogy for me. I don't like that we are not Airbnb. I like people behind our gate. It's just I don't like that messaging because I think what it's admitting is basically they want you're just seeding them full control. Your brand is dominant. And you're saying, Oh, yeah, we're not them. But by saying that you're

automatically giving them the authority that you're trying to run away from. So not a big fan of that. I'm a big fan of the idea. I'm not a big fan of that messaging. I think that messaging is off a little bit. I think it needs to be something else. I think it needs to be again, more of that. I'm a big fan of the idea. I'm not a big fan of that messaging. I think that messaging is off a little bit. I think it needs to be something else. I think it needs to be again, more of that Uber Eats type of marketing that you see with restaurants where the restaurant is like, yeah, like we've now improved our technology to where we can offer you delivery when we can offer it at this price point, etc. Our product is now similar equivalent to what you can get over here to Uber Eats. And by the way, we're going to charge you 50 bucks and you're going to actually get $45 for the food that a $5 fee, not a 50 bucks, then we're going to give you $20 for the food, which is kind of what

Uber Eats does, but different conversation again, for a different day. But that to me is something that we could probably go circle back and dig into a little bit more down the road. But I think if you were to sum it up, it would be just that a confused guest does not want to book direct with you, they don't trust you. And you have to build things, you have to put things on your site, and build things in a way where they actually trust you. And sometimes it's hard to do that. I'm not going to lie, but you have to get it done. We'll move around. We'll move along here to storytelling, which is how I opened this segment about it.

And storytelling bias refers to our tendency to prefer information presented in a narrative or story format rather than plain facts or data. So there's one place, one place that I only, I would argue in some respect that this makes the most impact on my day-to-day basis in terms of getting more bookings. And it's the property description. There is nothing that grinds my gears more and gets my jaws mashed together more than the property description that lists off rules and what you can't do in the property and the fact that it's a two bedroom and all this kind of stuff and says nothing, nothing about the actual experience of staying in that home, which is

going to be something that's hopefully very special and very meaningful for the person that's booking that property. At least for most of our clients in leisure markets. That's the thing that they're actually there for. This is it right here in that property description. Yes, there might be a section or a place or a position on the page where you talk about the facts of the property, the bedroom, bathroom, the number of square foot, all that kind of stuff. Fantastic. We need it on the page. Let's put it on the page. In fact, let's put it in its own section so that people who need that information can quickly go to that section and find it. But the main property description is not for listing a bunch of facts, listing a bunch of rules, listing a bunch of stuff about what they can't do. No smoking, no this, no that.

Yes, there's a time and a place where we need to tell them all that. The property description is they've looked at the photos, they've gone down the page a little bit, and they want to know right now why they should book that property. And you need to tell a compelling story as to why not only that property is right for them, but also why that area, that destination and the experience you're going to provide for them is what's really worth paying the money for. That's ultimately where you're trying to get at. So this, in my mind, is the number one thing. Use the storytelling inside of your descriptions. I'll do a quick plug, guesthook.com. You can order from us. We'll do a description for you, obviously. I don't want to plug that too much, ultimately. But ultimately,

that's the thing that's actually going to move the needle for people is going in there and actually telling a story. So given that you've done a lot of those, your thoughts on the storytelling bias and as it relates to property descriptions. Yeah, that's something that more often than not, when we will when we write or I try to again, trying to rewrite trying to figure out what the right thing to say was, everything that was there was what I could see in pictures already. Okay. The living room has a couch and this and that and a flat screen TV and stuff like that.

Cool. You're talking about the amenities. I think we have an amenity list over here. So it is, you don't have to talk about the six bedroom, four bathroom part of it. That's already there. The, you know, how many, how many people sleeps? Okay, these aren't moving the needle. And if that's all you can, that's the only thing you can talk about with your listings. Yeah, people aren't going to book them. It's the, if the pictures are telling a more compelling story than you are, and they should, I think that's part of it. It's everything's complimentary there.

But that's where talking about those images. Okay, you've got your shining image, you should be using the kind of the photo gallery to tell the story. You can follow the walkthrough of the images and tell the story of how people are experiencing the rental there. You walk in through, walk into the front door, and you're immediately met by the world-class kitchen facilities where you can prepare meals with your family while you're getting away, something like that. Capturing the actual essence of why they're traveling. And maybe you do have to write a couple of different versions where you are giving people

the right information for how they are traveling. And that's more out there on some of those travel sites. I can remember writing about how you're going to travel with families, how you're going to travel for an outdoor lover, how you're going to travel for if you're traveling with a group, a wedding group, a reunion group, stuff like that. So you do want to tell those stories in different ways. But being able to craft a story and an experience that people are going to have with your business as opposed to just, hey, this is the house. This is the building. These are the structural areas where you will stay. Nobody wants that. Nobody needs that. And it is, again, match the house. This is the building. These are the structural areas where you will stay. Nobody wants that. Nobody needs that. And it is, again, match the visuals with the story you're

telling and put together something that people can feel like it is, that they can go into that experience and they almost know what's going to happen. Now, the other side of that would be, make sure you can actually deliver that experience. Don't write the story. That's not an experience that that's actually going to happen there. So maybe that's the one thing to keep in mind as you're doing that storytelling classes, make sure it's an accurate story. Don't throw a fable out there, I would say. Yeah, yeah, that is a good point, ultimately, because if you can't deliver on the experience, actually, this dovetails perfectly at the next one, which is social proof, you're going to get bad reviews, and that's going to be a bad thing.

So next one that we have up here on the list is the bandwagon effect. We'll call it the bandwagon effect. A lot of people will call this social proof, use the same thing. But basically, the bandwagon effect, also known as the social proof bias, refers to the tendency of people to follow the actions or beliefs of others, especially when they are uncertain about what to do. Recall a few biases ago where we talked about people having, they're ambiguous, they don't know what to do.

Social proof is an effective antidote, or the bandwagon effect is an effective antidote to ambiguity, right? Because you can show on your website, here's a bunch of reviews of people that have stayed with us and had a great time. Here is pictures. This is a thing with a lot of our clients on the resort side have not as popular on the vacation rental side. I see some clients using it, but a lot of our clients will use products like flip to as an example of a product that actually embeds physical images of people staying at the resort on the homepage of the website. And it makes it very real. It makes it very human. You can see people of all different backgrounds and looks and group compositions, a couple of family, et cetera, on the homepage of

a lot of clients we work with on the resort page. And I think that's actually pretty compelling. It's fantastic because what it does is humanizes the experience of staying there. And it makes you look at real kind of real world people, not perfectly staged models. We have a lot of those types of shots and a lot of those types of photos that we use in marketing. There's time and a place for those, in my opinion. But when someone's on the homepage, seeing that actual social proof of people that have stayed there and had a great time, I think is fantastic. So this is a small one. Wherever possible, do as much as you can to show the positive experiences that people have had with you.

I think this applies on the guest side. I actually think it might apply more on the owner side. So maybe Paul, you can go down that thread, but reviews, reviews, social proof, it helps so much. What are your thoughts? It is. I flipped you. First of all, that is one of those where that was a product that I absolutely fell in love with. I wish we would utilize the leverage it more because it is, it's that it's beyond social proof. It's helping to grow that social proof as well. It might semi-plug there, but yeah, there's a reason why Yelp grew to be such a big, there's a big reason why TripAdvisor grew to be as big as they are. People are looking for someone else. They don't, and maybe they're trying to overcome their own. We'll talk about

another bias here coming up here, their confirmation biases. But I do. I think on the guest side, it goes without saying. People are always looking for recommendations on Facebook and other social channels if they're looking there. Oh, you saw the picture of them being your friend traveling to X area. That's probably where you're going to at least look coming through there. On the owner side of things, it's almost, it is almost a necessity. It's one of the first things we ask about really is,

do you have any type of owner testimonial? Someone who's willing to say and tell the experience of what they've had with you. It's not just sing your praises, which I think is certainly important there, but it's again, painting that accurate information or that accurate picture of how you're going, what the experience you're going to it's, again, painting that accurate information or that accurate picture of how you're going, what the experience you're going to have is, hey, we had an emergency pop up and this, the owner took care of it, was there 24 seven, had the call, had all this information, setting the expectation of what that communication is going to be like, what kind of return you're going to get. I think that's where it gets a little dicey, but people want to know what someone else has experienced. I think you could make the argument that it's why Evolve's Facebook ads do as well as they do, because everybody's seen the ad that says,

George from XYZ made $113,000 in his first six months with Evolve. Find out how he did it. Find out how he did it. Yeah. There's not too many more effective ads, at least in getting people to the landing page, getting people to the table, at least having that discussion of, hey, X made this amount of money. Would you like to make this amount of money or find out how he did it? And if there's actually a story behind it, that's even better. And again, Evolve does a really good job of writing a three or four paragraph story talking about, hey, these are the problems, these are the solutions provided and going through with

the social proof behind there. So yeah, it's a non-negotiable as far as the value that it provides. But I think it can also go pretty negative in a hurry if all of a sudden you get some negative social proof behind the scenes and one one one star experience turns into two turns into five turns into people are now looking more for the negative than they are for the positive for you yeah no for sure i think ultimately this is a multi-pronged approach i think evolved does their facebook ads are fantastic because like you said their whole advertising is basically just that it's their whole strategy is just that really on the homeowner recruitment side.

A guest is a different story. But yeah, it's we've had proof. We're going to tell you it 10 different ways. But it's basically homeowner was struggling. Homeowner came to us. Homeowner no longer struggling. That's the basic. It almost combines the social proof with the storytelling aspect of it.

If you go download one of the case studies and read them, you'll see some solid storytelling. So research that. Maybe your model, if you're listening to this, is probably different than Evolve. And that's fine. It's more so just the mechanics of how they advertise that I think is pretty solid. We've talked about them before offline, which I think is fantastic. Awesome. Let's move along here. I know we're a little bit deep into it. And maybe there's a lot on here, by the way, we may not get to all of them. I'm fine with that. If this type of episode is appealing to people, drop us an email, let us know we can certainly go through there's a million of these that we could go through. We're just looking at the top handful

or so that we wanted to discuss today. So the next one up, excuse me, is the action bias. So this one, I like it more calling it the urgency bias as opposed to action, because I think there's different, a distinction here that I'll talk about in a second. But basically, it's our tendency to favor taking action over inaction, especially when there's no clear advantage over to doing so, especially when we feel like we're going to miss out on something. See, that's the important thing. When you have something that you want that is available to you, and if you don't take action, it's going to go away, you tend to want to speed up your decision making process and maybe not do the normal checks and balances that you might normally do. In the context of booking.com are the masters of

the urgency or action bias. If you go book a hotel room, although I'm assuming it works similarly in a similar fashion on like the villas side or the vacation rental side. I just have never booked a vacation rental through booking.com. I've only ever booked through OTAs as a test. I try to limit it when I can. But anyways, on the hotel side, booking.com are the professionals at doing this. If you go to book a queen room, it'll say we only have a few left, which is sometimes it's like true, but misleading. They'll be like, we only have a few left at this price. That could just mean that they're going to go change the price by one penny. And then technically they didn't lie. Like they only had one room available at $168 and two cents per night, but they could just go change it to 168.03. And let's say we only have one left at this price. So again, we'll do a different episode, maybe one day on dark patterns and bookie.com and how they do leverage some of

these dark patterns to create fake urgency. But the bias that they're using and leveraging to you, the booker, maybe who's considering using bookie fake urgency. But the bias that they're using and leveraging to you, the booker, maybe who's considering using booking.com to book property is that they're trying to say, hey, if you don't book this property, someone else is going to take it away from you. Years ago, when I was at the previous agency that we worked at, one of the projects that I was involved in that the programming team did a phenomenal job on was showing the percent available when it reached a certain threshold. So basically, you would do a date search on a summer market where things were mostly booked. And if it was like, I think it was 65% or more,

we'd start to show this little banner and the search results. And it was like, hey, 80% of the properties that are in our program are booked for the dates that you're looking at, which is the subtle nod to, hey, there's only a few left. You see the 12 results that are showing up here out of our 200 results. There's a lot of properties that are gone. Book now, check out what's going on here because you're going to miss out if you don't take action. We worked on the same thing later on where we had a little property counter, but it was the number of times that property had been viewed over a certain number of days. I've now seen them expand that and do a really good job on it. So kudos to them for that. But that's another way to have some urgency in there.

I'm looking at a property page on most websites. I see nothing. I see photos, rates, all the stuff we were talking about before on many property manager sites. Now I now see 85 people have viewed this property in the last three days. It's, ooh, that's a lot of people looking at the same property I'm looking at. I hope they're not looking at my dates. It gets your brain going a little bit and it makes you want to book. So that's a simple one.

But I think that whenever you can drive urgency, I think it helps quite a bit. A lot of our clients, we're sending over quotes, right? They get a phone call, they get an email. Hey, here's my dates. Here's my stuff. And I, a client a while ago, I encouraged him, put an expiration date on those quotes. I don't know exactly what makes sense for you, like you tell me, but make some, put some sort of artificial deadline in place and say, hey, maybe if you send us 50 bucks right now, we'll hold this property

for you for 24 hours. The $50 is totally refundable if you decide not to complete your booking 24 hours, but I'll block it. I've seen people do that. There's a small token payment, which kind of, now I've already put $50 down. I may as well, right? I may as well finish it. And I have this 24 hour deadline. If I don't call John Doe or Jane Doe on the reservations line back at 12 o'clock on Tuesday, then they might give my property to someone else and they're going to take my 50 bucks or something like that. So if you put people not in an uncomfortable position, you don't have to be like boiler room penny stock sales here. But if you just put people into a little bit more position where they need to take action, they're going to tend to do that if it's something they want. And let's be honest,

they want to book one of your vacation properties. So this is a simple one, but I like it quite a bit. What are your thoughts on it? Yeah, this is what I mean. Every time I go to the Minnesota Twin site to find some tickets, that's exactly what it is. You select it. Usually they give you 15 minutes. So you have 15 minutes where you are at the liberty of, or at the mercy of the ticket master or whatever that is in that case. But I think it's universal

for any really booking, purchasing e-commerce thing of if there's some type of, someone's going to put, whether it's a timer on you, I can remember on Google ads, we would run more of the special type of ads where they had the countdown. At one time, Google ads, you could put in the countdown as a headline and kind of make that more of a, I would say, responsive ad where people, you could actually create that sense of urgency

and making sure it doesn't take something that's actually moving. But I think the clock makes people feel like there is certainly added actually the notion that you need to act soon. But I love the idea of even putting a 24-hour hold on or doing something like that. I think you can do it in a lot of different ways. We would do it where end of month savings and doing stuff like that. I think a lot of people in the hospitality space try to avoid flash sales, but I think the flash sales exist because of an action bias. That's why they are effective. You're trying to push people and, okay, you've got 72 hours. Let's make it happen.

That's it. Let's play on those biases and let's make sure that we're hitting people as frequently and as hard as we can. And it is. It's now, are you getting the most revenue out? How you're using those action biases and how you're making the most money out of it, I think everybody's going to do that different ways. But certainly you can see it in just about any purchase you make online, really, I think period right now is that they're putting some type of additional emphasis on making sure

you complete the transaction. No, I like that quite a bit. Ultimately, this probably is one of the ones that you can abuse the most. So as with all these things, you can abuse these and put these in a way where they actually lose their effectiveness because you've lost trust. We have a client who has done stuff like that in the past fake, fake flash sales or flash sales that have no meaningful distinction. It's like everything's on sale for the next 72 hours. And it's wasn't it on sale the last 72 hours. That's where I think you can get some trouble. Maybe we'll do a different episode on

what not to do when it comes to these leveraging these biases but yeah we didn't get to all them paul but maybe let's put a bow on this one we can come back and do a part two down the road if people want to explore further this piece good show today though for sure it's a bias that would make us really happy the happy heads in bed show bias would just be leaving us a review leaving us a review on yeah on apple podcasts itunes wherever you get your podcast from you can go in there leave a review takes you very little time would make us super happy maybe we could try to leverage a cognitive bias here to leave get you to leave a review but or maybe you just got value out of what you've listened to today and you want to leave a review there so either way we appreciate

the review no no tricks needed just please leave us a review and it would mean the world to us thanks paul for joining me as always great episode today we will catch everybody next week we're going to come back and i believe finish up our three- mini series on GA4 unless we have a bonus episode playing down the road. I don't know. Stay tuned and check that out. But anyways, we're back next week with our GA4 kind of full breakdown. We'll have more to share then. Otherwise, thanks so much for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode.