Heads In Beds Show - The Direct Booking Ceiling: When Ranking #1 Isn't Enough

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul talk about all things vacation rental marketing, the changing value of ranking #1 on Google, the limits of SEO and paid search, creating demand through social media, building a multi-channel marketing strategy, why every market and property requires a different approach, and a lot MORE! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101LinkedIn Post🔗 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 and Bet 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. And we're live. Paul, what's happening? What's going on in your house today? Too much.

Too much, Conrad. Two and a half days. Anybody who's been out of call with me today, you know, two and a half days, and they've heard the countdown get more granular. I got to say, what I said, five weeks ago, same weeks. We are going portions of them. We're going to be hours here pretty soon. But summer is almost done.

And as I've said many times, I will be sad, disappointed to have my kids out of the house because I love it. It's a great benefit of doing what I do and being here and having this. But holy cow, this last week is really trying all those warm, puzzy feelings I have about my lovely children. So that's where we're at. They also say, though, what is it, like distance or separation makes the heart grow fonder. You know, distance makes the heart grow fonder. So they're railed, and then you're excited to see them when they're up your tail. all day. You're not so excited to see them every five seconds. Yeah, yeah, abs. I'm ready for the

absence. I need a little more fondness in my heart right now. That's what I'm telling. Oh. I wonder if Airbnb is very fond of hosts because they're giving them a bit of a lifeline here with this all test, not this isn't approved live yet. The direct booking cut down. So we're recording this by the way, September 3rd. So this came out last week, bad timing because I think Paul was out and we weren't able to do a quick reaction episode. But that's, it's all good. It's been beat to death on LinkedIn already. That's what Paul and I were joking up before we get record. So we want to mention it because it's not newsworthy and timing and stuff like that. It's not really the core topic of what we're talking about today. But let's go through it.

Like it's an interesting idea. Before we hit record, I kind of talked about it and said that seems like a heck of a cut to go from 15.5% commission to some hosts are seeing as low as 6% commission. I know others are seeing 10%. Why would they do that? What are your thoughts on that? What's the motivation from if you were reading through the lines? How would you feel like Airbnb is going to benefit from this new idea? It is. I think you can look at it through certainly many different lenses there. I think for the uneducated property manager, just the sheer number drop and maybe someone who's more of a hobby host, that looks great. Hey, awesome. I don't have to worry about, I don't have to worry about taking it. I get more of my money. Straight numbers. Hey, let's take a look at that. I think

any listener of our, if you're listening to this long, you know that there's certainly legs to that conversation and there's more else there too. But I do. I think that ultimately what we've been pushing back and what I've seen some push back, do you own that guest? And are you able to market to that guest down the road? And that's something. Because one thing you should add in there, Paul, is that they're using the word direct booking. They're using that exact terminology on some of the, that is the key caveat there. Yeah. Yeah. Which is adding additional confusion to the mix of people saying, I got an Airbnb direct booking, which is like saying I have a happy Patriots Jets fan. Like these two ideas are completely at odds

with each other. So that's complicating things, isn't it? But yeah, it is. These aren't direct bookings. Send your direct booking link. Your direct booking link to book. Not on your direct booking what? It is. There's some, some philosophical, strategic ideas, concepts there that, yeah, I'm struggling with it. I think the messaging is, could be powerful and it could move some people. But ultimately, I think that anybody who's taking this and feeling like this is a win for professional property managers, I don't know. I think they're wrong. I think at the very least, they're a little bit misguided, and I think that obviously

a direct booking strategy has to be part of it. Does it have to be the full thing? No, we're never going to get 100%. You don't want to leverage that way. But this is not increasing your direct booking percentage. But what do you think? What are your thoughts here? Yeah, a lot of the obvious things have been said.

And so I don't know if I need to add into the discourse anymore on the things that are relatively straightforward. There was a great graphic. Maybe I can pop this in the show notes as well from Gil over at Crafted States. And he put what you get. And he has this beautiful graphic that he put up on LinkedIn on LinkedIn, comparing from an quote-to-quote Airbnb link. Let's call it a referral link or an affiliate link, which is, by the way. That was what I said before I record. You are an affiliate for your own Airbnb property and they're giving you a discount your commission for using your affiliate link, which, again, is a good idea. I maintain for Airbnb, it's a good idea. Versus when you get a site, a booking on your website that you control. It's Conrad School, Cabinorrentals.com, and it's a site that you can control.

So, again, credit to gil, but these ideas make a ton of sense to me. You don't get the guest email address. You can't retarget that traffic. So if you do send, let's say, ads traffic or traffic in some form or fashion through your Airbnb affiliate link, you can't actually retarget people to go to that page and don't book. You can't if it was your own website. You can't follow up if they start the check-out process and finish it.

You can't upsell them early check and mid-stay clean, et cetera, if you do that. You certainly don't have the money. the list so you can't go back and market to them again through SMS or email. Obviously, you're sending them to one page. I wonder, too, how these links will work. And a few people were complaining about this. Justin comes to mine from your site. He was complaining about the fact that it's, I want to see one of these links. What does it actually look like? Just go straight to the page, just go to the host page. A lot of questions to figure out there. I have one more thing I'm one listing. Or can I send them to like my host page where I almost come merchandise all my

listings. If I'm a property manager, I probably have many, right? So that's another interesting kind of thing to think about. So yeah, all those things. What you do get those. Yes, you get this air cover fee and you get a lower fee on that one booking. So that is an upside. And assuming you you see value in air cover, which I know a lot of our clients don't see a lot of value in air cover, but in theory you're getting some level of support there that you wouldn't get purely on like a naked direct booking website that you control and set up and that sort of thing. So fair play to Airbnb. Two fun things that I have here. We don't need to spend all time on this like we talked about, but two interesting things. How skilled is the small host or manager going to be at getting people to

click on this link? And they don't actually have a way to reach out to their past guests. So I'm assuming one of the most common ways that someone to reach out of their past guests is maybe send the message on Airbnb, which now it feels like that seems like a decent automation to add in the mix if you're an Airbnb heavy host. And maybe even if you're only 20% Airbnb, why not set up some automation where it's like, hey, we're offering a deal to pass guests who come out and book on this link, whatever. If they come back and stay again, tap this link, you'll see a special offer applied just for you. Because I think you can share the discount with the guests is what I was told in one of the

articles. So that seems like a great idea. Yeah, why not get them to come back? I'm going to give you a little bit of discount for coming back and staying again. I bet that'll move the needle a little bit. But if you're trying to say, Okay, this is a good idea. I got my direct link now, my affiliate link. I'm going to go ahead and market this thing. It's like, how are you going to market it, dude? Like, you probably don't have a social page structure built out.

You probably don't have your own email list. Or if you do, it's fill of fake emails, not real emails. You probably don't have an SMS opt-in list. You don't have a website, obviously, right? Like, otherwise you would have been sending traffic there. So it's like they're putting this hands of people that don't really know what to do with it, which I find maybe a little bit funny. So that's one angle.

The second angle being, who knows how long this will last. Imagine you actually built a strategy around this. Because someone started their property management business today or yesterday. And maybe they got this email in onboarding. Who knows? We don't know because we don't know how that works. But what's their, okay, let me build a strategy around this. I'm going to, maybe they are going to do a better job of collecting guest emails.

I'm never going to build a website. Why do that? I can just send people to Airbnb, my affiliate link, get them to go ahead and convert. And maybe they see it as a good idea. Last thing I'll say, we have no idea how they're going to do attribution. It might be the case that if you click on that link and book right away, I bet you get the lower fee. That would be only fair.

And I don't think that Airbnb is unethical. But it would be very common that someone might click on that link and then go back to the search results. hey, what else is available that stay? Just because you're sending me's link and I'm getting a deal, it doesn't mean that it's the best value for my stay. Just because I'm coming back,

maybe I don't want to stay with you. Maybe I could stay with someone else. So you go back on the search results page in Airbnb, you put in the same dates, you look up the location, you're seeing all these other listings. Even if I then go back and click on your listing again and book, you did some shopping at that point.

Do I keep my cookie on that device? Do I still get that credit? Do I not? Obviously, these are all unanswered questions we don't know about, but it wouldn't surprise me if the cookie or sort of affiliate link style attribution was not very fair to the host

to the manager, that it's like, hey, if they book right away and click on this, you get your lower fee. But the moment they depart, or if it's 48 hours or 72 hours after click, we're not going to give it that lower fee. So this may not even really be much of a needle mover at all. It's just more of a little piece of candy in the dashboard for people to click on. So that's a lot of thoughts all at once, but just vomiting out there, my thoughts. It does feel like a weird kind of compromise between the professional property managers and more of the multi-property hosts. But again, I think you painted the picture very really clearly there of the people who are most likely to be able to market this link, the ones who aren't that interested in it where those who don't are as well.

I think when you look at the overall ecosystem, you hear that on the skiff side of things with AirDNA and stuff, that's still the bulk of where Jamie Lane talking about over half of the rental inventory that's out there is still these single property or less than, or zero to, 10 maybe 0 to 15. A huge chunk of them are 1 to 3. They're very small. Yeah. Exactly. So again, maybe that's, maybe that is,

that's trying to ensure that those people are staying hobby hosts or staying whatever they are, staying Airbnb hosts, call super hosts, and not selling and going under a property manager or doing some other things there as well. Let's go down that road for a second. If you're one of that 50% where you probably don't need, if we're being honest, you don't see the same value in a direct booking infrastructure that a larger property manager would say. We've said that before. So we're not here saying,

everybody needs to be doing direct booking. I don't believe that, to be honest with him. But let's say you're one of those small hosts. Ironically, might that actually, imagine those 50% get really into this idea and start any sort of marketing promotion they're doing using this Airbnb direct booking link. Because by the way, they were already using their Airbnb link before.

This might actually backfire where it's like, wait, we just took away like two thirds of our revenue on 50% of our business by making these smaller hosts aggressively start to market their link out there where we're taking a lower commission fee. Like in theory might help Airbnb because more clicks going into their site is better for them than not going to them. But I could almost see a version of this where it backfires where it's like, wait a second, this host, we were making X dollars of commission off of every year.

Then he or she got into the idea of marketing their little one or two listings or whatever, direct, and now they're a direct, again, affiliate is what I'm calling it, this Airbnb direct affiliate link. They're out there hustle in this thing. Now they're getting the same, maybe or similar amount of bookings on the Airbnb platform, but they're paying a third, basically the commission they were paying before. And then they, some guy sits down in a room for a second and wait a second. I don't know if we actually did something good here.

Like we might have actually, this probably is a bad idea. So again, I could be wrong on that. But I would have to imagine that there are millions of listings, 7 million plus listings. There's going to be some edge cases where someone who's a small host really gets into this idea. Markets are linked very aggressively, gets a lot of bookings from Airbnb and pays a 5% commission. And it's hard to argue with that. If you're one or two property host, that's not a really good deal on your behalf on your end. So, yeah, hard for me to argue the person would have been more effective doing that same marketing for one or two properties on their own.

It probably would not be the case to their own website meeting. So just a funny thought about. Agreed. It's fun. It's just the necessary evil, the evil empire, whatever we want to call up there, it's hairbeating. Yeah, if you're listening, you should probably not be doing this. But if you have done it or if you've gotten that email, send it along, we'd be curious to look at it. And Justin from your site is very eager to look at the actual link and stuff like that.

So post that on LinkedIn forum. I think you do them a favor when this comes out, tag him out there. It'd be good. All right, so let's go back to it. So dovetailing into a slightly new topic. This idea, this was not necessarily the most fun conversation that I've had with the client recently, but it was worthy, I think, of discussion. And it was this idea of we rank number one in Google,

and yet we are not getting all the direct bookings that we want. Hey, Mr. SEO guy, you sold this SEO. You have us ranking now number one in Google. Why are we not getting 100% direct bookings? And it's a fair question. It was said a little bit nicer than that, but it's a fair question. And here's my theory of my thought process. Every market has a pool of buyers out there searching on Google.

And every market's going to have a different size pool, right? Even if the markets have a similar number of listings, the size of the pool is going to vary from market. market. Each market's going to have a different level of search demand. It's also going to waver, go up and down with the seasons and things like that. And in this market, it's not a massive vacation rental market. It's a good vacational market, but it's not a massive one. Meaning there might be three to five thousand people most months searching for this particular market, like this market plus vacation rentals. So client ranks number one, they get anywhere from, let's say,

on their home page non-brand from best we can tell. They get anywhere from maybe 200 to 800 to 800 visitors a month on their non-brand terms. And they get a significant portion of their bookings direct, not all, but a significant. portion, let's call it over 30%, and SEO is their number one channel, number one refer, at least in analytics before they make a booking. So I would say SEO is doing its job, but there's just a limited pool of buyers out there that is causing it to where we are never going to reach 100% booking storement, which even going back to what Paul said a few minutes ago, is the reason that you should be looking to get buggies on Airbnb and run Google ads and run men

ads and market your past guests or email, because if you're trying to reach this maximum level of performance, you want a lot of eyeballs in your listings. That's going to tell you what your prices should be. That's going to tell you how your booking pacing is doing. That's going of help you get in front of more people that are going to come back. And over time, you're going to build the snowball really effective marketing. But unfortunately, the way the LICO system is today on SEO and the way that the search results have got pushed down a little bit, deemphasized with just blue links, I think it's very true. I think you cannot dominate a market anymore with just SEO. When I entered the space 10 years ago, I think you could. I think if you were number one in Google

and you had even a modest paid adage budget, a few hundred bucks a month, thousand bucks a month, you didn't need anything else. And I think now it's fair to say that the value of just ranking number one in Google, the SEO, is there, but it's eroded. It's a little. It's a lot of little bit less valuable today than it has been in the past. And it's not going to fill you to your satisfactory level of occupancy and your rates by just having one marketing channel active, any one marketing channel active, in my opinion, that's direct. So that's my one thought process around that. But yeah, tell me what you think I should have said differently or could have responded differently.

No, no. This was, I won't lie. As I was reading through this, this was a little PTSD to inventory times and doesn't. If not, maybe 100 plus conversations of. we can give it as much budget as we want. We cannot make more people do the searches for a vacation rental management company, short-term rental management company, Airbnb management companies,

and that's the management, that's getting the full build out of all those management terms, which are longer tail and a little tricky for us here. But it's the same thing. That is something that, I think, the line you have here, search captures demand, it cannot create it. That's something. I remember going way back.

We were working with a fishing lodge up in Alaska. And they did airplanes. Like seaplanes? Seaplanes, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Different letter. It's kind of the same thing. It is.

So they did seaplane rentals. The guy said, I want to give it 150 bucks a day in Google for Google ads. And we ran that campaign for a week, got three clicks, 50 bucks a piece and said, this is the dumbest thing we've heard. Because that was supply and demand. That's Google playing supply and demand with this. But truly, it does illuminate the fact that in some markets,

there's not a lot of search volume. And some of these really remote niche, beautiful markets, I'm not saying that I can think of some of these beautiful little villages that I've worked with property managers. And I do. to build, we still start to build out the search campaigns and it's just the matter of nobody's doing these searches and nobody's even doing searches at the next macro level up we were talking about what's the next time that's closest that's the largest as we were growing up.

If you don't have that relative marker anchor to be able to come back to there, plus just the obscurity of people doing searches and then working against Google on top of that, this is not a new development. AI is the new development, but we had the three, the local map pack coming in, oh, five years ago, six years ago, seven. This is not new that Google is pushing our number one result down, but the fact that it is, I think, in 2017, 2018, at that point, you had to scroll down on average. I'd seen a study. There was 10,000, they did 10,000 websites of different industries and everything like that, you had to scroll down on average to get past the

Google results. That's featured, structured snippets, featured questions, people also ask local things. That's on average. A third of the way down the page to get to the number one result. That would be a luxury to think of. Now we have to get through an AI overview. Now we still have to

get through that map local pack. Maybe you're going to be number one. But at that point on desktop, that's a couple mouse scrolls on the page. On mobile, Flick a flick of the rest. At this point. So I do. I think that

it is painful to get to that number one ranking or see the growth, see growth from 10 to 1 or second page to first page. Some of these things, things that we kind of hung our hat on as SEOs for a long time.

Now they're still valuable. I'm not saying, it's not saying that those are not still valuable, but the process, the buyer's journey is has shifted and the experience they get within Google, within Bing, and now adding in some of those other LLM elements, yeah, we have a continually fracturing booking process that doesn't always reward a number one or a number two ranking in Google anymore.

And that's, it's unfortunate. I don't know how you overcome that with traditional SEO, or for AI SEO for that matter, even. it's to go back to if maybe you're listening and saying, okay, what can I do about it? The answer is there's not a lot you can do. I will say you can expand your footprint of keywords you're targeting. So just because you've targeted this one set of keywords and you've got some level of outcome or success or traffic from it does not mean you cannot chunk up a little bit and find some bigger keywords out there or different types of topics. So the example might be, hey, my area is the best fishing in this particular market.

So I'm going to go write a ton of content about why city XYZ, like XYZ is the blah blah blah, blah, capital of state. So here's why we're the best place to go fishing. But honestly, I think this is where you go to meta and you say, meta, I know who my target customer is. If I show them the product, or I show them the property, are they interested enough to click over and become part of my funnel in that way? Because meta is not necessarily creating the demand in the sense of people looking for it, but meta can capture your attention, which then can turn into demand with the right piece of creative, right? So if I'm seeing a video that's actually interesting to watch a property that speaks to me, and then I look at it, all of a sudden I've got something there. I'm reminded of Isaac and the Live Oak Lake project that he did. I just text

him the other day because a client of mine wanted to connect with him. So I'm thinking again of his project, which was X number of people are searching Waco, Texas, vacation rentals. It's 20 because I looked up for him at one point. It's like, nobody searches. There's not really that much demand in Waco, Texas for short-term rental searches. He probably ranks well for that. He doesn't even really trying because there's not that many options in there. But when people see a video of the Live-Lake Lake property, the unique design, the setting, and there's many other other other good examples to two. Ben Wolf from Monerra is another really good example, when they see these things, they're naturally drawn into them and they go,

I want to stay there even though they weren't searching for it, and you create this new demand funnel. So if your properties are able to be essentially, you can create new interest by attaching your piece of creative to the right person who's looking for what you have to offer. Now that requires a level of thinking that's deeper than just your traditional SEO thinking of me see keyword, me want to rank for a keyword, me do SEO to get keyword ranking. That's kind of the caveman SEO thinking that Paul and I've done for a long time, so we know it very well. But again, there's a ceiling. You'll bump into it. Another call I had recently, same kind of question came up, which is this idea of how much can we spend? So if we really get this thing going

and we have a lot of ad spend, what's it going to spend? And I'm like, well, eventually you're just going to run out of searches. We have a client who spends $50,000 to $65,000 a month on Google ads, but there's months where if he told me to spend $70 or $5,000 or $85,000, hey, Conrad, I'll give you a bonus if we can spend $75,000 profitably. I can't, because we're pretty much maxing out the channel. He's the largest or second largest, but one largest property managers in that market. That's top three, top four in the whole. US and you really can't spend a lot more without hurting your profitability. We could spend more and just throw out in the garbage. Sure, if we want to be stupid, but we don't want to be stupid.

So there are these ceilings in every marketing channel that you have. Same with Airbnb. Airbnb, it's funny, the thing you've actually that old Vacasa, because Vacasa did very well in Airbnb, the old Vacasa. And they also did very well direct. They were good in both channels. But why? Because they had 40,000 listings that they had to fill. You better be really good at both. You better be really good at marketing at a lot of channels. And even some homeowners and people working with Vacasa would have said I wasn't satisfied my level of occupancy. and my level of rates that they were getting for me. Okay, that's fine.

But keep in mind, they're trying to fill 40,000. Are you able to fill 40,000 to a level of satisfactory occupancy and satisfactory rate demand to keep your turn low? The answer, obviously, was no. And that's why it went the way it went. But that's a hell of a challenge. So I'm not sitting here saying in some ivory tower saying, I know how to do it because I don't know how to do it.

We have clients that have 100 properties that sometimes struggle because they've got low-end inventory and they've got stuff that's not as desirable. And it sits and it doesn't run very well. And they need a lot more marketing channels active, but welcome to the curse of marketing. Okay, I've got a low-end property. That's not that. The booking values are relatively low. It's not that interesting.

It doesn't convert that well people see it. It's not booking enough. Let me go ahead and try to do direct marketing to it. And I'm like, guess what, dude? You're throwing a bunch of traffic, a bunch of dollars into a leaky bucket. You're going to put traffic in. It's not going to convert because people don't actually want the product. So the analogy I did with a call today to go back to what actually matters here.

We think about if we get rid of this marketing nonsense for a second, if I went out into the street and I was driving a civic and I tried to stop people in the street and said, well, you give me $100,000 for this Honda Civic, no one would say yes to me. They'd be like, no, I'm not going to get it's not worth that. Why would I ever give you $100,000 for a civic? But if I did the same thing with a brand new Ferrari, it might take me a few hundred asks, but I would find the one rich guy who wants a Ferrari and say,

also these Ferrari are $100,000, it's worth $300,000. And you would go, yeah, if he believed me and I had the title in my hand and that kind of stuff, right? So why? It's not my salesmanship that would be better with the Civic versus the Ferrari. It's because the Ferrari is actually worth $100,000. The Civic is not, right? So if we just go back to the idea of the properties are what makes the biggest difference here. I think we forget lose side of that sometimes here in the marketing chair,

because we don't pick the properties, right? We're given the properties essentially from somebody else and saying market this, get this thing full. But if it's not desirable, if it's not actually set up for success, then you're going to hit ceilings to go back to the podcast topic on a ton of different marketing channels. You're going to find that meta doesn't work that well. You're going to find you don't get a lot of rebookings. You're going to find the SEO isn't really a big channel for you because you get clicks. You don't get booking. So I guess just don't forget about that as I pop off my soapbox here for a second and think about what you're actually marketing because that is a huge portion of your success. And I think we probably

I don't say it enough as we talk about these topics. I think that that's, it's because we can't, it's one of those things. When we can't control it, it's, what are we going to do about it? Yeah, go to our client and say, fire this owner. He's like, wait, I just signed him. And it's like, I don't like it. Not a great way for us to retain business, but. Not exactly.

But I do. I think that's where, that's what makes all of this just, I think it makes truly any sales cycle in our space a little disingenuous. because what we're doing is we are comparing you to someone in your market that's also using the system or someone with a similar portfolio size, but rarely can we match. Nobody's going to be able to match what you have. That's just the reality. So any expectation that I'm going to throw out there needs to be taken with a lot.

grain of salt. And that's something that I think you can never predict. We've both been doing this a long time. We've seen a lot of things. I think if we were given a budget and asked to project what results would be, we would project better than boast. And we would still be 50, 60% of realistically in what the actual results would be. That is, there's just so much more that goes into it. And because there's so much more now that goes into even ranking number one. Like it is. Before, you could game the system. Page title, H1, put it in the content.

That's good enough. That's thin now. Like, that's just the reality is that we, I think we also kind of pulled back on the concept of content. We wanted to be really bookable. We did. We focused on the funnel. I appreciate that. But in focusing on the funnel, we forgot that then we got to drive back that, bring back

that traffic driving in. into the funnel and all that content that was helping people get into the funnel, and then you do. It is. It's, it's, we, I don't know why we do what we do, Takana, I don't. I don't know why we chose marketing. This never seems like a such smart idea when you really dig down and think about it. Yeah. But it is, it's trying to per solve that problem and really understanding,

even what are the needle movers to, yeah, to get to the funnel. and then within the funnel, and then getting them back into the funnel after we have to go do it again, because it's not enough to just get that one booking. And I think that's the one thing we haven't really touched on as much, that there are markets that if you are, if you're in an urban market, you're going to have a different success rate in that initial booking and a way different experience in that rebooking because people don't travel to those urban markets for the same reasons that they do to a traditional vacation rental market,

or something like that. So again, if you have people in Chicago and New York and L.A., and those may be great properties, but there's a chance you're probably only going to get once, and now you've got to find new business every time. And I'm not saying don't go into those markets, have fun. By means, God bless. But that's something that has to be taking consideration

in your overall distribution, operational. And then as you're putting together a marketing budget and a plan, that's it is that you can't rely on the same levers that work in Gatlinburg or in Myrtle Beach or in 38 or see also Scottsdale all these other places. So I do. I think that's something that even people, that was something when it was more, not just vacation rentals, but some small resorts and inns and lodges and things like that. you really got to understand that at deeper level that the stuff that works here it just doesn't work elsewhere and that's not because your content isn't good that's not because your site isn't necessarily good that's just the reality of travel and trying to attract travelers to your business or

homeowners to your business on vacation rental side it's a this happens to me a lot I'm sure this happens to you a lot as well which is that I'll kind of come up with a question for a client and it's because I'm trying to figure out I need a little more information I think to make a good decision here on what I think is going to work well and it's everything you just spoken about and I ask a question and they, a very common response I get, especially from people that are not the marketing people is, you guys are the experts and they lead into some responses. That's to the effective, I don't want to make this decision. You make this decision. And I see where they're coming from. Yes, I do position myself and talk about myself as if I am an expert, so I should feel

confident in calling myself the expert. But like you just said, not every single situation is exactly the same. Not every market's the same. Not every market is the same dynamic. So when I go in there and say, here's what I think based on what I know, but you give me a little more information, I might change my opinion based on the new information that you give me. I'll always remember this. And this will stay with me, I think, for my whole career of a client that we had in Hawaii with very low email open rates and very low repeat booking rates, but had excellent reviews. I'd never encountered that in my career. How do we have a guess list that doesn't care? And we have no repeat bookings, basically.

But we have a really happy guess. Why does that occur? And then it was my first time working in the Hawaii market. And I learned Hawaii is a bucket list destination. A bucket list destination is very low repeat booking rates, generally speaking. It's also way out heck out in the ocean. It's hard to get there all these problems. Yes, the West Coast people can get there a little bit easier.

P bookings will be a little bit more frequent. But your San Diego, L.A. based people are not going to Hawaii every weekend, maybe the Uber affluent are, but your typical working class family, even if they make a good income, is not going to Hawaii all the time. They might do it every other year at best. Your East Coast family is going to Hawaii once in their whole life. So they're going to have a great stay. They're going to enjoy it.

They're going to leave five stars. They're going to dream of going back to Hawaii. But you'd be well to do to get them to come back twice in their whole lifetime, maybe three times, right? And that's if they really loved it. So it's not anything you can really do to solve that. if you're marketing a Hawaii-based vacational company, you're on the middle of the fucking ocean out there in the very far away, and you might do well retargeting and targeting your West Coast audience to come back and again and again. But I'll be honest, if my wife and I were going to go to Hawaii, which is on our list at some point, we're going to love that trip, I suspect.

I think it's going to be awesome. And I bet we'll never go back. Or maybe we'll go back when the kids are out of the house or something 20 years down the road. It'll be a totally different experience. So that's just a good lesson or a good thing. I had to learn early on my career of I need a lot of information to take and then put into this and say, here's what I think based on what you described. So again, someone coming to me and saying, I have short-term rentals. Of course, I saw this for a while.

I'm a master-release company based in Philadelphia. I'm a master-release company based in Dallas, Texas, and I want to get a lot of direct bookings. And I'm like, it's going to be hard because there's not a lot of search volume. You're competing with all the big hotel chains on top of the short-term rental sites or vacation rental platforms, if you want to call them that, Airbnb, etc. And it's pretty much the hardest path to go. I think if you do want to have one of those short-term rental companies in a big city, you might be better off. Not abandoning direct book, but just not making it part of your core philosophy. I think having a brand, website, that kind of.

that kind of stuff capturing low hanging fruit is probably a good way to go but you probably aren't going to benefit tremendously from dropping 20 30,000 every quarter into ads unless you have proven that you can actually get those to convert really well. I think you take the bottom of the funnel stuff that's just going to convert anyways, brand some of the really high intense stuff work on that but I don't think you're ever going to be most of those companies a really high direct book company as saunders wasn't even that high of direct booking company and they had billions of dollars to spend on it and if they can't pull it off or they weren't able to pull it off the old version of saunder it's going to be pretty hard for you to do it as well if you're in a single market.

Yeah. I mean, I think that that's, it's painful because I've always seen that you guys are the expert, or you're the expert, it's kind of that, okay, the responsibilities on you. Again, it's a team. Like, this is a collaboration, it's a partnership. That's why I appreciated when I came in inventory and we call everybody partners. That felt right. It was a partnership.

We truly was. It's collaboration. I think that you can, as a leader in a business, it is easier to say you fail because your expertise did not match my needs, whatever it is, something like that. I can now, whether I would have helped or not, maybe it doesn't register with you. So on this side of things, yeah, we're thinking, you are the local. experts. I've been doing this everywhere. I can put together a high-level strategy, but what's going to set you apart is what makes you you. And if you don't know what makes you, we're just re-hashing all of our greatest hits here. But truly, I think that's what it comes down to is that,

yeah, ranking number one in Google is a great goal and a great dream. Does it have the same power that it used to five years ago, three years ago, two years ago, last year? That's the reality. So how do we have to refine our strategies, enhance what we're doing? What else do we have to do? I think you hit it. We have to be doing video. We have to understand where other people are doing searches. Yeah, do we want to show up in AI results?

Sure, absolutely. Reconfigure the whole system because of it? No. But we want to do what we can that still follows in with the standard content strategy. SEO strategy to make sure we're showing up. I think it is. Understanding that audience at a deeper level is really going to help you understand where you need to show up number one. Because you might not have to show up number one in Google. You might have to show up number one in TikTok. You might have to show up number one in Pinterest.

You might have to be, but there are some spots that you might have to be that you haven't even considered because that wasn't part of the playbook before. So maybe that's what we're coming to here more than anything else is that playbook is great. wash, rinse, repeat doesn't work. What you need to do is really bring it to yourself. Start with the playbook and then personalize it because the best template is going to give you template results. Yeah, yeah. I think that's very true. I think that I know we're up against the time I was here, but I think where I'd want to depart is this idea of marketing probably has got more complicated.

Certainly over the past year and a half because this sort of renewed interest in what is good SEO look like. How does that map to? I want to get recommended by ChatTBTBT. AISEO, L-M, optimization, whatever you want to call it. That's been, Paul and I have joked about in previous episodes a bit of a distraction. But it is interesting to think about a new channel popping up that has real users behind it, which if we're being honest, really hadn't happened in quite some time. We had our focus on social.

We had our focus on email. We had our focus on search. And that was my world for many years. And now there's kind of this new thing in a way, I think it folds into search in a way, but it's kind of this new idea that we didn't have before. And it's fun to try to figure it out. But it also leads to this idea of you better have a team behind you that's working on all these things. If your goals are lofty, your effort needs to be lofty as well, right?

You can't be putting in a part-time effort and expecting this awesome outcome. Because what I always tell clients is, like, if it's easy for you to rank number one, who's to stop the next company from starting up tomorrow and then taking your spot in a few months, right? Like, it should be a little bit hard to rank number one in Google for some of these court terms. Because then once you have it, there's actual value associated with it. So that's maybe a decent place to leave it. At least I have to today in terms of time. Got to get off one of these lovely client calls that Paul and I love so much.

I don't have a good ending. I'm just going to say it at the end. Leave us a review. Enough people. You don't leave us enough reviews. We have done these episodes for a real long time now. Thousands, tens of thousands of downloads. It would blow your mind.

This would fill a small Texas football stadium, the number of listeners that we've had. And we've got 30, 40 reviews. I don't know what we have, not a lot. So go to iTunes, go to Spotify, leave us to review. We super appreciate that. We're having some fun with it. Hope you have an awesome rest of your day.

And always book direct. Never book on Airbnb. We appreciate you. We appreciate you.