Heads In Beds Show - The 60-Day Booking Window Is Dead - Here's What To Do About It

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk all about the death of the standard 60 day or 90 day booking windows and instead tell you what you need to work on inside of your vacation rental business to drive more demand and appropriately market your properties for maximum revenue and occupancy. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads of Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. We're live. Paul, what's happening? What's going on with you this one?

Well, it is a master's week as we're recording this. So we had to do our requisite 30-ish minutes on golf. That was good. It's a, this is, this is a fun time of year because for me, it actually looks like I could golf at some point in Minnesota. This is the exciting, that type of exciting time of year, you usually coincides with the masters. I don't know, that's maybe lucky, maybe unlucky. Is it going to be 51 degrees for you tomorrow, according to Google weather? I don't know if that's accurate or not.

It's supposed to be 70 on Sunday, I think. Oh, yeah. So we'll see. Again, you just wait 15 minutes. You don't like the weather. You'll kind of see a broad spectrum of results when we look at the weather here. So you don't have quite that inconsistency weather. You're getting a little closer to normal-ish for you.

Yeah. Yeah, 100% great weather here right now. I think it's a good time to be here. It's like slightly, slightly cool in the morning. You know, this morning, I think it was 47, which is probably cold to say. It's been this week. But then the moment the sun comes up, it gets into the 50s and 60s very quickly. then midday, it's 75 or 80 or whatever the case may be. So great time to come here in the

spring. And yeah, I got that, I got that trip coming up this weekend that I told you about, Takeua. So that'll be, yeah, and it looks like good weather. So, you know, knock on wood, it looks good so far. So that'll be, that'll be very fun. You know, it's funny. You know, I think weather can impact bookings, things outside of our control can impact booking windows. So we thought we do it. This was Paul's idea, a great idea. So I kind of grabbed it and we're kind of putting it together today in the episode, the idea of the death of the 60-day booking window, this idea that there's a booking window and that you can neatly fit your properties into said booking window and that it's very predictable and logical. A lot of data now to indicate that is not the case,

right, Paul, these booking windows are so fungible. Remember NFTs? Anyways, these things are so fungible now when these booking windows change a lot. So we're going to kind of talk about it today. How does it impact your marketing? How do you take action when booking windows are changes? What can you do about it? What data do you collect, that kind of stuff? So this was your idea. I think it's a good one. But where do your thoughts here at a high level as we dive in? Yeah.

I mean, it's like, I remember this is something. It might have been at Google Marketing Live like six, seven, eight years ago. But they specifically were calling out travel every time. And they were talking about the number of touch points that took place. And at that point, it was. It was 40, 50, 60 touch points that were taking place according. to their pretty in-depth keyword, you know, not even research, it's their keyword knowledge. So I think it's undeniable that we're trying to drive people into a funnel.

But the funnel itself really has a lot of fluctuation points and they're not at like points in the buyer's journey necessarily. It's based on what we're talking about. Like here, the individual property, the inventory, you know, as I've gone back and listened to, As we've recorded a lot of these things. I mean, we've got 150, 60, 70 plus episodes here. And all of them are different things that are impacting the booking. So I do.

I think that there's just so many things outside of our control as marketers. But so many things kind of outside of our control, even as property managers, that we just have to try to make, you know, our rules. around this. So yeah, the fact that people are spending all this time doing all this research, I don't think that's the case, because I don't think we have the time to do that anymore. We are stuck in that 15 second, 30 second blip of time where that's how we're taking our education in here. So I think because of that, and as a result of a whole different other factors, OTAs and meta-search and just the way we do search and now allows an AI, oh my goodness,

this is going to be a big one. it is. These are things that are impacting the way people are fundamentally purchasing and going through the process of booking. So a 60-day booking window where everybody knows exactly what they're going to do this far in advance in today's world seems unlikely at the very best and who knows where else. So I think this is. This is a fun conversation. And I think it allows us to really showcase some of the things we've seen behind the scenes. Because, do have these tracking. We do have some of these numbers and really understanding how this buyer's journey mirrors itself year over year in some cases or completely flips itself upside down on its

head. I feel like there's always this disconnect. And we've talked about this on previous episodes in the past about how people feel versus what the actual numbers say. Like I've had clients say, for example, they feel like demand is way down and then I go pull the numbers and, you know, demand might be down extremely modestly, like one or two percent, you know, in terms of the actual search is occurring or number of bookings made on the website or, you know, rates are way down and then I go look and rates are down $8 a $8 an ADR or something like that. You know, maybe some weekends are very soft. So how we feel versus what is real can be very different, I think.

But I think the data and the dose line up to this that the idea of generally speaking booking windows are lower. And I always get this extreme example that I've talked about before where when I first started this industry, we had when I was at the previous agency, we had this client at the time, Mike Carrington, who's kind of out of our space, I guess, a little bit now. But at the time he kind of talked about, this was when he used a topsole. And it was April 1st or March 1st or something in that range. And he'd say, well, that's how the summer's going to go.

You know, something to that effect. Like it was all the bookings for the summer remained January and February. And this is like a very traditional beach market. People book, generally speaking far in advance. In fact, many people book as they're departing, they're booking for the following year. We just had Jamie Lane on Art of Hospitality. And he said the same thing. That he has one of his personal trips is like that.

He leaves the property. As he's driving out, they book it again for the same dates the next year. So there are exceptions. to it. But yes, generally speaking, booking windows are lower or shorter, whatever term you want, terminology you want to use there. But I guess here's the piece that you need to pick apart from there. There are no hard and fast rules that are company-wide that are going to apply to every single listing in your inventory. And there's a lot of reasons for that we can talk about in the next few minutes. And it also comes down to how desirable is the property, right? So if I say,

it would be foolish to say that a three-bedroom in Myrtle Beach typically books 45 days out. Well, that's accurate, right? It typically books 45 days out. But there are three-bedroom homes that book much further out in advance and ones that book much closer in. to their actual check-in day because of the quality of the home, how desirable it is, how many reviews that has in the OTA platforms, how skilled of a property manager, you know, running that property is at marketing their property and promoting it and putting it in front the right people and reaching out to past guests and getting them to books. So yes, it's good to know what the trend is doing, what the overall data is telling you,

but you can manipulate it and control it a little bit, right? Like this is within your control in terms of the properties you take on, what type of similarities or homogeneity you have with your inventory can be a good thing, I think, to be more consistent. And then, yeah, your ability as a marketer or your marketing team you're working with and the truth is both, you need to have both a marketing team,

probably, whether an in-house, freelancer, contractor, or an agency. And it's your responsibility as a property manager as that is the job that you're hired for. I think sometimes people, I'll say they forget that, but they get so operational focus that I'm like, the bookings will come. It's like, no, they won't.

Like, that is not how this works. Like, you have to push for the bookings. They will not come automatically, even from the OTAs, even if the OTAs love you, they're not going to fill you 100%. especially once you get to any size or scale once you get past maybe a few listings. So yeah, a lot that we'll pick a part there as we go along here.

But you are in the driver's seat. Now you are not, you're driving on roads of which the conditions are varied and changing and things are happening. But you can steer the car to a spot where you can improve your booking windows or quote unquote get better rates and get more assuredy in your in your occupancy. But you have to do a lot of things to get there. It's not just going to fall in your lap. That would be my take on that as we get started here for sure.

Yeah. ultimately that's what it comes down to is that we know generally and maybe we start start out there that the further out those bookings come in typically the higher rates you're taking for those so that is something where no talk about cancellation flexibility stuff like that and then people updating their travel plans all those things but generally speaking when the booking windows are a little longer you are going to get a little a little higher revenue uh now again that's if you're actively managing those dates and rates and all that as well. But I think that's why people are ultimately motivated there is that they are trying to make sure

that they are getting the highest possible ADR for their listings there. But that's maybe an assumption. In some cases that people are actively managing or managing with that strategy in place, that they are going to take those higher up. Again, that's how we would do it. But have you seen people who maybe aren't taking as traditional a look at that when they're trying to piece together their revenue and rates and things like that? Here's an interesting. So I have a client that actually just spoke to you today.

It's a good timing. And they've essentially downgraded their markups on far out bookings. And it's been great for them. Like they still charge a little bit more than maybe they intend, then the final rate will be once they're close to that check-in window or the likely booking window. but they're like everybody else. I've seen situations where people are going, I'm going to charge double,

triple the rate because, yeah, if they're booking a year in advance, I got them, they're willing to pay anything. Okay, but it's all in the context. Again, there's so many factors there. It's all in the context of how unique is that property, how many alternatives are there for that property.

What is someone willing to pay to book that exact one? I think the truth is if I was making a far out booking right now, let's say I was booking for my birthday next year. Oh, next year we're going to go somewhere awesome for my birthday. I'm looking right now for June. It's June for reference, beginning of June next year. Like if I saw, something and I saw two properties side by side, one was 375 at night for my family,

and one was $1,000 a $1,000 a night property. And that property manager may say, yeah, you're looking way in advance. This is a big thing. You're planning it, et cetera. But I do want to add this in, which is that the cancellation policies change this a lot too. And that's been a push that's happened more and more over the last two or three years from where we were before. And I think back to like almost a free COVID time because I feel like that was the last normal time we had in our world collectively here. And every property manager had very, very strict cancellation policies. The whole idea was you book it. Sure, if you book 60 or more days out, maybe we give you something back because we can probably rebook it. But the moment things got within

that 45 day, 30 day window, almost every property manager that I worked with back when I started my business was, not, we'll give you nothing or best case scenario, maybe we'll give you like credit for a future stay or something like that. If you can't try to rebook it. You know, now it's what's the expectation of the guest. And this is just how things shift and change over time. The guest expects to be able to book it and they pay what they pay. And then they expect to be able to cancel it, let's say seven days before. 10 days before, 14 days before. Right.

So their expectation now was different than it was before where, and I remember reading stories and reading reviews of people who were like, I booked this a year ago, then I got sick, my mom got sick, whatever, we couldn't go. And this property manager was terrible and they didn't let us, you know, move our dates or anything like that. And the property manager would go, I'm not going to resell it. Therefore, I'm not giving you refund, you know, was their take on it because no one else was there to buy that week to buy that.

And both parties are right. That's the hard bar, right? Both parties are right. And that's why, in theory, something like traveling. insurance exists, which this is not a travel insurance podcast, but maybe that's something you should consider selling to mitigate those issues. But to go all the back to the throat to you open there, yeah, I think like you need to do research in your market, I suspect. And maybe it's worth considering that. You know, the idea of, yes, I'm charging a little bit more if someone's booking for in advance, but maybe I'm not as quote-unquote aggressive as my competition. And therefore, my property holds up really well. It's going to punch above its weight because it's going to look like I'm paying a little bit more. I'm paying a rate here that's fair. But it's closer to the rate than most people pay, you know, during that season of, of and it's less of this idea of, oh, it's way far out. Let me just jack it up and see what happens, which I think is kind of a common tactic. So the only way that we get some pricing power back and some booking windows back in our

control a little bit is that we have to make it a good deal for the guest, right? Let's be honest. If the guest goes and does a search way in advance and the rates are always a ripoff, why would they ever book far in advance? We teach the guest, by the way. I'll say several times today. We teach the guest to wait because we do what short-term rental, vacation rental, or Airbnb hosts, whatever you want to call it, do what we're told, which is that

as you get closer to check in, just keep dumping the rate, just keep dumping the rate, and then eventually someone will grab it. And it's like, well, I guess that's true, but is that like your strategy? Is that your marketing plan? You know, it reminds me of my favorite Seth Godin quote of all time. The problem of the bottom is that you might win. And that's a race you don't want to win necessarily all the time, you know, maybe in certain situations, but not all the time. So anyways, a lot of ranting there, maybe more so than I. When we're talking about and then kind of getting more into the marketing side of things, as we're thinking about that and we're thinking about kind of teaching that,

consumer that behavior of, oh, well, just wait, just wait, just wait. If you wait, now that's the thing. I think it does take into consideration, or maybe that doesn't take into consideration people's willingness to wait in some cases. I mean, there's some discount hounds out there that are going to wait and wait and wait. And if they don't take the trip, they don't take the trip. I mean, I think that brings into the other side of the equation is why people are traveling. Like, if you're doing some corporate travel that has to happen, you're going to need to be there regardless. So you are looking for maybe the lowest rate, but at a certain point, there's a cutout point. You know, for a family, a large family get together, you need to secure a certain number of homes or a certain number of people for 25 or 50 or something like that.

So I think that that's something where overall, I think that what I see more frequently is people are still marketing to the 60 day booking window or the 90 day booking window. where people are maybe not being as diligent in getting people down the funnel in a expeditious way, we'll say. There's the assumption of, oh, I have these multiple touch points that I'm going to get. I'm going to have an email. They're going to see my social ad. They're going to see my paid ad at like the two week mark or the three week mark or the three month mark or the, you know, something like that. And I don't think that that's quite the same spot as that where people are landing in their actual buyer's journey.

So I think that maybe there's some misalignment with some of the messaging we are using because we are using an older, not it's weird to say older methodology, but it kind of is. It's that concept that people are still doing this over weeks, months, as opposed to hours, days, maybe weeks in some cases. So I'll chew on that one for a little bit there. Well, yeah, it's a really interesting, I guess, piece to think about, which is that as property managers, we're looking at these numbers all the time, whereas marketers, you know, working with property managers, we're looking at these numbers all the time. But yeah, you're right, the guests, they talk about this guest journey, but how much of that guest journey is actually price comparison and price shopping? To your point, it's probably a pretty narrow window. It's probably a

three to five day, you know, window maybe for the most part. Maybe it could be a little bit longer than that. And maybe if you've been to that destination before, you remember what you paid last year, or you remember where it's that before. But yeah, it's an interesting point. Like, you don't, you never know in theory when that date rate is actually going to happen when that search is going to happen. And you better be competitive all the time, right, in terms of offering a good value for money, not necessarily offering low rates, but offering good value for money. And now, thinking about pricing and that being a major factor for, or at least the primary factor in the discussion for, let's say 60% of travelers.

You think about chat GPT going out and doing the travel experience for you or an AI bot from Expedia or booking.com. Well, I would say that some of those are going to be, I mean, that algorithm is likely going to be geared towards conversions. And that is likely going to be geared towards some lower price just because of the likelihood of, I mean, if it matches their, expectations, their prompt of what they built in, price is kind of going to be that last comparison. So really, that's something that I've thought about in and out. It just goes into that thought process of when everything else is equal in the eyes of chat, GPT, and those air quotes are very heavy there.

Is price the only defining factor? And is then it just a matter of that race to the bottom of when do we, hit him in the booking path or is booking.com going to know that no, no, no, no, don't book now, book in 45, or is there going to be built in? Or maybe booking.com doesn't. Maybe Expedia doesn't. But does chat GPT? Does Gemini?

Does Claude? Does a new agent down the road have that type of thought process where that's even more scary where then we're having to market at a different type of level and having to think of think of a different buyer's experience there because it isn't about necessarily what we're putting out there. It's making it digestible for the LLM to plan better. Could you not imagine a scenario, though, where this is already a thing, by the way, I make a booking on a airline or a hotel that's cancelable. And I tell my agent, hey, just check this once a day. And if the price gets lower, cancel my reservation and rebook it at

lower rate. That's already a thing. Right. So that is already a thing that exists. Could you not imagine that in every facet of travel planning from the flight down to the vacation rental down to the transfer service from the airport etc with the agent you know you have a little money saving travel agent and that little agent is just checking them on today and you know taking a five minute look at it because like are you going to do that once you book it now you know like not if you're a normal person with responsibilities and things to do in your life you're just going to move on and all right yeah I've got the reservation I got the confirmation ID I'll see in a few months or whatever that travel is actually occurring yeah you're going to do that right you're going to go look and

and see, and again, going back to one more idea that we said here, but just hammered that point home. If it was difficult to obtain that booking of the property, they'll never consider the price to be the factor. So I see this tag sometimes at Airbnb, I'm sure you do as well, where you put in dates and it says, like, Paul's property is rarely available. And you're putting dates. And I'm like, that's someone who has their stuff figured out on Airbnb. They are seeing this large booking window significantly further out, generally speaking, and probably a better rates than most other people. So they're booking and it gets pushed up the search results. It's kind of like it does become the whole K-shaped,

have-na have-na have-naz on Airbnb OTA platforms. Now you have to recreate some of that with your own direct booking website if you're a property manager, where if property's doing well, you keep pushing it, you keep pushing it, and it has a little bit more pricing power. But yeah, I could absolutely see a future where an agent, and I don't know, to your point, which of the software providers would do it. I lean towards something like a Gemini doing that or a Claude or a ChatTBT,

as opposed to the other layers. And yeah, you just are like, yeah, I booked this trip, go look at my email. You can look at the dates, just search that once a day or once every other day, whatever, if it gets cheaper than cancel and rebook. And that's the thing already. I can imagine that's going to continue to expand and be easier

and probably may just be a function of your phone maybe. Like, you know, could you not see Apple doing that on device? You know, where they just wakes up and it's like, here's your briefing from yesterday. Remember you have that trip coming up in a week? I just saved you 87 bucks. I canceled it and the rebooked it. And the property manager is going to go, ah.

You know, so then does that normalize the pricing a little bit over time if more people are using that? really fun, interesting debate. I don't know the answer. I think we'll figure it out over the next few years, but does not seem farfetched at all in the snow. No, that's the the future is becoming a reality and that's where it is. It's difficult to predict. It's difficult to project what this is going to look like in a year, in two years, in five years. Because the things that we, you know, I look back to five years ago now, that hasn't been a lot of change. I mean, it is. has been primarily, we'll say monolithic in that we're using the same channel.

It's not saying that we can't expand and do all these things, but a lot of the same strategies have still been effective. I think we just referenced that maybe we're not focusing on the right parts of the, or we've extended the buyer's journey a little bit in our strategies. But they still work. They're still reasonably effective. Most people are doing close to, similar things to drive people through the funnel.

So I do. I think the fact that now we're seeing really more rapid change with some of the LLM and the agentic experience. And we still don't know what that really looks like behind the scenes. We don't know what's driving those results outside of probably pricing and some of the algorithmic factors where if there is some advertising in place, I don't know how booking is doing that or Expedia is doing that. But I have to think that that's something that as chat GPT moves into ads and who knows when ads will show up in more Gemini results and things like that.

I don't know what that what does that search experience look like? What does that buying experience look like there? Because it does seem like we are now changing, truly changing, buyer behavior as opposed to kind of keeping the buyer behavior primarily the same, maybe attracting people through different channels. Now it's looking different with these agents and with these bots. And I think that's the unknown is where does it go from here? Because it won't stop here. There's another level to this. There's another ideation. There's another experience, I think, that Google hasn't quite gotten it down yet, we've talked about. So,

what's to think that Google's going to use Gemini to get it better? I hope they do. But I'm not convinced of that yet. So that's where I'm waiting for that other shoe to drop of what does it look like. I do wonder too, like I think everyone on LinkedIn wants to write the eulogy already for some people, I should say, want to write the eulogy for the OTA platforms. But it's like a lot of swings have been taken and a lot of them have missed at the big OTA platforms at the Verbo's and Airbnb's. I mean, look no further. You mentioned Google, so let's bring it up. Of course, we did a whole episode about this. I think towards the tail end of last year, Google vacation rentals has been a pretty objective failure. It has not been whatever maybe Google thought it was going to be. I think the

Google hotel product has been far more successful than the Google vacation rental product that driving revenue for Google. And, well, I mean, there really is no revenue coming from Google on the Google vacation rental product. And I don't see property managers being like, oh, man, you know, so glad we got that Google vacation rentals connection done. What I see is like a little blip, a little two to five to maybe 7% jump in reservations because they're on Google vacation rentals they weren't before. And keep in mind, this is Google.

Something that Paul and I talk about endlessly for years on end about how great the traffic is from Google and how we spent thousands of dollars on ads to get people to come to your website. And yet the core Google vacation rental product, again, it's been pretty much a failure. You've mentioned five years ago what's different from now. I mean, I would argue some prominent brands have failed.

Flipkey, being a good example, has failed. It has failed in the last five years. That's part of TripAdvisor. That should be, they are the most skilled, one of the most skilled companies of the last 25 years and driving organic search traffic and getting it to come to your website. And their vacation rental brand failed.

And it was a failure long before they official killed it off, whatever that was summer of last year, fall of last year, or something like that. It's been a failure for far longer than that. You know, when I first started back in 2014, I had clients that looked to me and said, Flipkey is so critical for us. It's so important.

And I didn't hear that after, let's say, 2017, 2018. Like they had a few year run there and then it died. Home to go doesn't seem to be driving meaningful traffic. Hopper homes came and went, in the last few years and they had some market share that all kind of evaporated. So yeah, it's funny, like you said, monolithic or I don't know what the word would be, triopoly, right? For the most part, you've got, you know, some demand from Airbnb, the biggest fish in the

in the pond for most of our clients, for our boat, depending on the location of market, you could see those flip-flop, but there's kind of your big ones. And then booking.com is kind of pretty solidly for most of our clients in that third position. And then it's direct. So it's, if you get those three and then you have direct, that's how your demand's going to go. Like, yes, there's, are you going to get a long tail of bookings from other places?

yes, but those things are where those things, the bulk of your results are going to come from. Certainly 90 plus percent are going to come from direct plus those three channels. So, you know, it's so funny, too. We talk about distribution and channel managers and all these things, sign up for these little random sites. And the truth is they just don't get a lot of reservations. They don't get a lot of bookings at the moment. And I want that to change.

But like, I'm also, you know, I'm a realist where it's like we need to look at this practically and say, okay, where are people looking, understand each of those platforms? And maybe I can go down this path because we were going to this earlier and I can finish this thought that we talked about. before, but if you have 20 homes and they're all the same size and general location and they have similar booking windows, your life is a little bit easier because you're kind of, you have a little bit of scale to your business, you're kind of, you know, marketing those 20 homes, you understand how they're going to behave. If you've got 20 homes, and first of all, there's 10 in

Arizona and 10 in South Carolina. And then within those 10, you've got two condos and one town home and one massive home that sleeps 80 people and one tiny home that sleeps two people and a bunch of four bedroom homes, your life's kind of held because you have, you have four homes and you've got, you know, 18 different booking windows. You're trying to keep straight in your head of how these things go. So if anything, this is just hammering home that point that we've talked about many times in the most recent past, we did the whole two market episode, which was kind of fun to do and talk about that and get those thoughts out. But if you have massive scale, you're good, right? Because you can have 10,000 listings. And if you're evolve or one of these big national managers,

Fakasa Casago, that's type of thing. And you're just setting pricing for all those listings, you can do it because you can set these things up. If you're tiny and you only have few, you can keep your hand on a few and it's not going to break you. It's that middle, messy middle, which is where a lot of property measures are, where it's like, you better have some consistency to what you're doing or frankly, you're going to drive yourself. I feel like crazy, trying to be like, how do I market? How do I get my heads around the idea that I have 20 properties and 18 different booking windows across different markets? It's really, really challenging. It is. I think that that's where if you do, if you have maybe five properties

market that are homogenous in that makeup of they're all three bedrooms, four bedrooms, or something like that. Maybe you can, you know, that's where you might not be pulling your hair out, but otherwise you would, you know, I can remove my hat and everybody can see what they know is under there. Not a lot. You're pulling it all out. It's gone. But I do. I think, like, going back to even talking about the booking window, we talked about, you know, further out, you're going to get more rates. Well, when we're talking about when they're coming more direct or when they're coming from the OTA, it's the same type of conversation of typically that profile of the OTA booking is a little closer to your booking window is shrinking a little bit people are when they're going to that point

i think that's similar to you going doing a brand search you're looking for dates and rates when they've gone to the ota pretty much they're down to dates and rates they're they're going to start looking for the dates that they know that they're going to travel and now they're going to compare the best rates in the location that they're going that's that's it and that booking and then that's where that window starts to shrink a little bit again dependent of market but i would definitely say that if you looked across the entire United States, most of the bookings that are coming from Verbo and Airbnb are going to be skewed to the, let's say, under 30 days. And anything that's coming from the direct side is probably going to skew over 30 days. So I think that's, that's just,

again, just kind of taking into consideration of that makeup of when you do, when you know that you're going to have, let's say, 25. Let's, let's pie it up there. 20% coming from Airbnb, 20% from verbal, 12% coming from booking.com, 15 to 20% coming from direct, you know, something else, you know, maybe you got Marriott Homes and Bills, maybe you got this, maybe you do come have something coming in from Google. You have to think of where those booking windows are going to range from. And then let's layer in what type of properties you have and let's layer in. I mean, we do. We start to really understand. I've got one one client that I work with that he's got that all behind the scenes.

And it's incredible to see two-bedroom motion front condos and three-bedroom homes and one-bedroom condos from this, proper that, and broken down. And when those bookings have come in, it's incredible. But I know that that's also very, it's time-consuming to keep that type of information. So understanding that those bookings are coming at a different curve and really being able to understand and visualize that, it's, it's, it's, It's some of the best times I have because I'm a nerd. I love that stuff and I love to be able to see.

Oh, wow, two bedroom condos have like a 70 day booking window. While these three bedroom over the last 12 months have like 120. Then you can really have some fun and understanding, you know, this is the window that I have. This is where we have to start marketing to people. This is where we have to really hammer home that this booking window is closer to 45 days. And if you know your numbers to that extent, you're going to be able to, market more effective. You're going to have a little more success with some of that type of stuff there.

Yeah. You know, to go back, I mean, we haven't said like AI in the context of like working on your business yet in this episode. We said it with other things. So here we go, you know, this many minutes in your AI. But is that not something that is so much easier now by just dumping out a spreadsheet from your PMS of choice, guesty, host away, hostfully. Owner, as don't care what it is. Putting that into and saying, I want to know when the property booked for that reservation. I want to know the reservation dates.

I want to know what they paid. And I want to break that out by channel. And then you're dumping that into Claude or chat GPT or like. I would highly recommend Claude. And you can then go do a deep analysis on what is my booking with or property, click a button, go get a coffee, come back by the time you're done. It's an analysis of last 12 months of bookings. And it's telling you, you know, anomalies or outliers or things like that.

Hey, this was an outlier. This particular weekend booked way in advance. Were your rates high enough? Was there something there? And does pricing software do some of stuff? Probably. And you should probably look at pricing software, but does it know. everything? No, I mean, pricing software, it's great and you should consider using it and is a great

additional step in the research process, but pricing software does not know everything. It's helpful. It's a great tool, but it doesn't do everything for you. It's still on you to understand what the booking windows are. So to tie it into marketing, all the things we just talked about here, maybe the last block we'll go through marketing ideas. Once you know, like you were describing second ago, the behavior of the property or property group and how it books, that ties back into all your marketing. So when you're doing emails and you're sending out to people to book the large homes and you have small condos, you're going to be promoting end of summer, fall, travel, travel, maybe right now for a large home campaign as we publish this in the middle of April.

And then if it's a small as condo, it's come next weekend. We're open. You know, we got availability. You know, and those things are the nuances, I think, that we need to, you know, continue to improve on as we go along here because, and we're a real guilty of this too. We'll awfully admit that. I think we've been a little bit too monolithic for too long with messaging and marketing. And I feel like the promise of AI, again, it's a good example of AI actually creating more workforce, not saving work. But the promise of AI that I think we, as marketers that we should be able to fulfill is the idea that I went through your record, Paul, and it's actually, it makes sense for me to actually give you a personal message because it'll cost me 25 cents

and call on tokens to do it. And I want you to convert better. And if I make your message more personal, it'll do better than if I just send you the same message I sent everybody else. And that's a thing that did not exist 24 months ago or 36 months ago, the idea of where it's personalized every single piece of app on communication, or at least put it into like we're saying groups or these are people to book this, these are people that brought pets, et cetera, and then get those to be a reality. So I think if your marketing agencies, thinking about how to do that or your marketing team is thinking about how to do that, you're ahead of the curve by a wide margin because I think of the future, the expectation will

be that hopefully not in a creepy way, but like you go stay with the business, you go book, you buy something, et cetera, and there's going to be a little bit better personalization into how things go. And it's going to look and feel a lot more natural versus like Amazon, where you get an ad or it's like, you've left this in your heart. It's just an image, a thumbnail image of the product, right? It's going to be more personal. So that's kind of my belief as we, you know, proceed or go from here, which is ultimately, this is a huge benefit to you. if you get the data right and then you use the data in a parade that's practical and tangible based on what you learn. And I think that the essence of marketing is always bouncing between

these two things. I got to get numbers and data so I know what's going on and so I can react accordingly. And then I got to get fun. I got to get creative. I got to get something to look cool. So it lands in their inbox. It not only matches hopefully their intent and they look at it and they go, wow, good timing. I was just thinking about our end or summer trip before they go back to school. And I better book it now because these properties are filling up and it looks cool. And then it's matching those things. And the companies that get both those things right are the ones that see such great success with marketing. Yeah, I think we know the head there. I mean, that's the better understanding of this window that you have. I think it is. Whether it's a 60 day window,

whether it's a 90 day window, whether it's a 20 day window, you have to know when people are actually making these decisions. And I think the better the understanding you have of whatever your booking window is or whatever properties you have there and it will vary property by property. It just makes your marketing efforts more effective. And it is. It's something, that it's not impossible to get this data. It's all right there. So I think that it's really important to be able to leverage some of those pieces. Again, I think we've said it multiple times.

Your PMS can be your best friend is one of your best marketing tools, whether it's the messaging you're sending out or the data that it holds for some of this information here. So are we ready to celebrate the death of the 60-day booking window? Yeah. Yeah, maybe I don't know. is it's is it going to be more if are we going to be more effective with our messaging when we understand that it's actually a 20-day booking window or a seven-day booking window oh boy hold on to your seat this is going to be fun if we're going to have to do that but yes you got to understand

this and and i think the better understanding you have the better we're going to be yeah yeah no 100 i think that's a good way too maybe we can put a bow on this one because i think that's a good length of, you know, pieces there. Yeah, talk to talk to people based on what they actually are looking for. Use your analysis and your data to get there. And I think your marketing is going to see phenomenal results. So the booking window, let's go ahead and put some dirt on the grave of the 60-day booking window. It's gone instead. Or it might be true in your case, but it's probably not true across your whole inventory, also all your properties. So do your digging, do your due diligence. That helps inform your marketing. And yeah, get better results. That's what we're all after here,

right? You know, it's those that build better solutions will, you know, win over time, build a better mouse trap, as it were. One thing that's not a trap or anything like that at all, Paul, is people leaving a podcast review. So go to your podcast app of choice, Spotify, iTunes listeners. You download us the most tens of thousands of times according to our data. But as I always say, we don't have tens of thousands of reviews. So it takes approximately 17 to 24 seconds, somewhere in that zone,

to open your podcast app. You're already listening. Click five stars, leave us to review. We appreciate that. And we'll be back next week with an awesome new episode. Have a phenomenal day.