Heads In Beds Show - The State Of The Union With AI Travel Planning

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul unpack the current state of AI in travel marketing, separating the headlines from reality. They discuss where AI is actually influencing the guest journey, why trust still matters, how travelers are really using AI today, and why vacation rental managers shouldn't lose sight of the marketing fundamentals that continue to drive bookings.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 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. Paul, what's going on? What's happening? Oh, yeah, we're here. I don't know. Every day we get to this time of the week.

Sometimes I'm shocked that it's Thursday when we're recording. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised that it's Thursday. We've been talking, we've been sharing some war stories today. So I think that it is. We're in the heat of summer. We actually, who, it feels, gosh darn, near fall. I'm going to go Minnesota. I'm a bit here.

It's been back in the 70s after, I don't know, AQI last the time. I think when we were recorded in the 200s or something and the 90-degree heat where I'm reminded of why I live in Minnesota once again. So this is the moderate time of year, but how are you doing, sir, outside of potential storm damage that you're going to be incurring. Yeah, I was going to say, if you hear background in this episode, it's because there's a thunderstorm headed my way. So you might hear a crack of, crack of thunder, or I guess you can't really hear lightning. But that's the disclosure as we begin to record here. But yeah, same as you. I'm fine.

It's just, yeah, it's been a weird week for me. And I don't know, some weeks are like that. There was a Hormozia video I was watching the other day. And he was talking about if you have this average day, like almost no day is average, right? Where you're going to have as good days and bad days and they mostly lean out to be average. I've had a lot more bad days than good days lately. But it's like all in perspective. Like that I think, I don't know, our ancestors suffered. I'm like, oh, bad things happen to me on a computer screen. You know what I mean? It's just not the same thing. Whenever I do that, I just kind of can laugh about it and just move on. But I also think our brain like attaches to problems. So if we have problems, it's like we're wired to look

for problems so we can try to solve them, even though this is how rich people can be miserable. Oh, no. Like your brain just has to look for a problem. It can't be completely happy all the time. Otherwise, maybe it just doesn't function. So that's part of my thoughts there. But this is a outlineless, is that the right word, outlineless episode, which we rarely do, but we thought it was worthy of it today. Because this is more so a passion point maybe a little bit for me and Paul, which is that we see headlines, we see talking points, we see things published online. And we disagree with them. Sometimes just privately,

swinging back and forth and chatting back and forth. But I think it's because we don't often have the way to add in some duets or some context. And I think sometimes a headline can bury the context or bury the meaning of what maybe a study might say or research might say or whatever the case may be. And I also think we have to be careful

because we do sometimes look for information that confirms our own biases. I think everybody does this politically, personal interests, etc. You kind of look for stuff that agrees with you and you send to jet away things that don't agree with you. But it's basically our thoughts on the AI state of the union as it relates to guest travel demand as we sit here through the halfway point of

2006. So it's a also let's come back and check this again maybe in January or February a little bit and see how things have shifted and changed. But I'll start with this one, Paul, and then we can get to react to this. The way that people are using AI to travel to search and plan for travel has changed significantly more at the top of the funnel where very few vacational managers actually operate than the bottom of the funnel, which is what most people should be focusing on. So that's my first talking point as we get started, which is that AI is reshaping this stuff very differently,

but you might read a headline and misunderstand or misinterpret what they're saying and what they're talking about when they say 50% of all searches are done on these AI platforms. So that's my first talking point as we get started here. Oh, that's a juicy one. That's a big starter. But I think it's spot on. And I think that we've talked about that very often. And I think the most clear, anytime you look in Google Analytics, it's exceedingly clear, that is not where. the transaction they're taking place.

That is not where the bottom of the funnel is taking place. I think that in the best case scenario, the percentage of, let's break it down, percentage of traffic, percentage of bookings, percentage of revenue. Percentage of traffic, best case scenario, maybe on the AI assistant side of things, we're at 8 to 10%, and that would be an exceedingly high case. I just, I don't see those numbers out there very frequently. it's 2 to 5% if you're lucky in some cases, it's dozens a week if you're in a really competitive market. It's just not there. The traffic is not making its way there. People are, they're getting

inspired by the opportunity to let someone else do the planning for them. I think that's part of it. It's the freedom to say, in my busy world, in my day-to-day world, and I say this frequently throughout the day, I don't have time for that. I just don't have time. And to feel like you're letting an AI travel assistant do that for you, I think it seems fun. But ultimately, one of the things that, you've got one report that you're looking at,

I've got one report that I'm looking at, the one that I've got does have the statistic that only 27, or excuse me, 24% of the traveler surveyed here trust and AI generated travel recommendation. And I think that's where we are. We're still, it may not feel like we're early on in the adoption of AI a couple years into it, but there's been AI around for two years to and a half years through all the LLMs have been around. But how we actually can use it to get into the e-commerce side of things, to get into the travel side of things has, I would say, enhanced greatly over the past six months, 12 months,

three, depending on the time frame you're looking at. But I think that's where we are very much in that early adopter kind of phase for the travel side of things with AI. And there is. There's a trust issue. And I don't know an AI trust issue versus just a, overall trust issue seems to be something that may be harder to over it. That may be something like, I don't know if it's a generational shift or what it's going to be, because you do when you look at like boomers versus Gen X versus Millennials versus Gen Z,

obviously different levels of trust and distrust within those. And we move to a higher level of trust as we hit Millennials in Gen Z. Still only 33%. But I do. I wonder if you can't trust it to, if you can't trust AI overall, obviously, whether or not you're going to trust it to do a travel recommendation is more of a moot point there. But overall, yeah, I think that top of the funnel is where it gets exciting, but rubber hits the road, the numbers tell us, search, direct, organic, email, all these other channels are still more than leading the way when we're talking about traffic, revenue, bookings, everything, really.

Yeah, I think, okay, so a few things I want to agree with there and then just maybe offer, like, an alternative. view on that I think we're on the same page with. I do agree that the, a lot of, some users are going to have a hard time trusting the recommendations or results and they get back. I do think, though, that the reason that the AI is so fun to travel plan with in some of the respects of how behavior, like you said a second ago, is because you can give it these very long prompts and give this very long instruction, and then it gives you back something that you can work with or play it with as a concept, right?

So it's something like the example that we've done before on the show would be something to the effect of, I live in this area. I want to find a direct flight, show me direct flights that I can take or direct flights I can take out of this other airport to a beach destination. I'm looking for these five things. Give me some ideas of places that I can go or places that I could explore based on those concepts or whatever, something like that, right? So that's in my mind, like what an AI top of funnel activity might look like, where it would be more along the lines of help me find a new destination to go to or help me plan high-level travel, what it's going to look like. And I think that's

where your AI assistant type thing is very helpful. I'm very skeptical that we're going to see much movement anytime soon in, okay, now go book this specific one form. me specifically as a release to vacation rentals because vacation rentals are too unique to just let the AI system book for you. And by the way, may I add, if anyone's not actually tried this, by the way, go try to book a vacation rental through AI search. You can't do it, even if like you want to do it. You can't do it anyways. So you're just going to end up essentially getting jettisoned out at various points to a website, to Airbnb, to verbote, direct booking site to make the reservation anyways. So that's where I'm at with you as well, which is like people may discover us. Let's say they

just discover us through AI. Let's just say that's the thing that's occurring to some degree right now. there's some data to indicate with client sites that I work on. That might be the case sometimes. Let's even say they're more qualified. Again, common talking point. Oh, they've gone through this whole travel planning process with the AI. By the time they get to you from the AI assistant, click, this is going to be significantly more high intent traffic.

I'm okay to see that point as well. That makes sense to me. The question is not that. The question is that also like the bulk of how people are interacting with these things, or is that there's all these new use cases and travel is just one amongst many of them, right? Like that's more so my take is not that there's not people using these things or using these things even to help with parts of the planning process.

It's that most vacational managers are trying to execute, like, at best, middle funnel and usually more top funnel. And I use terms like top funnel as a way to describe, like, someone who's completely unaware of where they want to go. And I'm using bottom funnel to describe, like, I'm choosing between booking this place and this place. And that's ultimately where, like, most marketing dollars in my 10-year career have been worked on spending is people that are, like, in market, ready to buy, ready to book,

whatever you want to call it. And they need to find and we need to surface for them that we are a great choice based on all this criteria that we've, all this work that we've done, put it out there. And that, I just think that's not shifting very quickly. I think that there's still a lot of research

and a lot of very, quote unquote, traditional media stuff that's been, I said traditional. It's so funny to think about that now. Google search is traditional, right? Compared to doing AI search or whatever, just makes me laugh. But I think it's so true that there's a lot of users

who are going to get towards that funnel and then bounce around a little bit and then use these things to find a brand, find a company, and then book anyways. In other words, it's not like there's one path here where someone was booking through Google search, and there was one path here where they're booking through an LLM style search, and one was replaced with the other. It's almost like it's a piece of spaghetti in a pot, and it's got mixed together with all the other spaghetti in the pot. Like one of the pieces of spaghetti

is meta, Facebook and Instagram. Another piece of the spaghetti is the email list or the SMS list. Another piece of the spaghetti is like your brand reputation, like all those things have got mixed together. And we've seen a new piece of spaghetti come in here with the AI travel planning, but it's just the shifts are not as big as people have you believe. And I guess, my concern too as I think about this is that this idea that you should stop focusing on one channel to go focus on this other channel when there's like virtually no evidence that like this is actually what's moving the needle or helping you drive more demand. That's where my my sand gets in my eyeball a little bit when people are like this is the next big thing and they don't really have any proof or any core points to explain why this thing is moving ahead at a fast pace now and most people are probably ignoring other things they need to be doing in order to do that thing. That's probably where I just get my brain in a tough spot on. Like, it was a good transition before. You bring in the channels, there was a perfect transition. So I think it is.

I think it's easy to see the headlines from senior vice president of search from Google saying, oh, we are sending billions of searches a day. Do the average search on Google? They are. They're sending probably billions of searches out, out into their own ecosystem of YouTube and of all these other channels of... I think when we do, we can focus on the AI channel, but the AI channel is being driven by video

and being driven by organic content is being driven by all of these other things. So it is very easy to listen to that big number and say, oh, AI is sending all this traffic. It is. But the way people are getting into those zones, those areas, those spots where they can be shown, is by doing the traditional market.

that we just talked about and doing it effectively so that Google sees them or chat GPT sees them or Claude sees them, Anthropic, rock, all these things, are they're measuring, it gets back to that trust factor of do we know which answer is right? I know that's, let me get down to the best AI assistance in the world. They're trying to parse through what the best answer is. We, Google, they had this idea. They were going to organize all the thoughts. all the ideas of the internet into one spot.

And somehow AI has tried to complicate that, it feels like, at times. So I do. I think that's, that it's just the focus of thinking about that channel is actually being driven by other marketing channels that you may not be focused on. But again, we're looking at it in an inverted pyramid type of way of work on your video. You might have a better chance to show up than your AI results. But I don't know. I think that's something that ultimately, you know, when we talk about how people are using it, again, going back to this report,

this same, 50% for price comparison. Okay. That's something that absolutely, that's doing the research for you, for discovery. Yeah, finding those places, finding the activities, all these things. For customer service, 17%. Okay. That's something. People don't like, people like talking to a real person.

I know that. that's something that maybe we could go down that path for a little bit there of for those people who are using AI for customer service as opposed to other parts of the business trying to find more discovery content or something like that. How is that working for some people right now? What have you seen in that realm? And how has AI been, maybe impacted that overall trust score quite a bit in that area? What is trust, ultimately, right?

other than verification of other basically assumptions or ideas that you have based on your previous research, right? So it's like AI, that's almost the problem with AI a little bit too, right? It'll confirm. It can confirm often what you're asking for to do or the early versions of chat TBT are very bad over this. What are they called synchifance where it's like they just agree with everything you say. You can be like, yeah, I don't think it's going to rain today. And the AI is like, yeah, it's definitely not going to rain today. Then you're like, oh, no, it's raining right now. Like it is right now for me.

And then they're like, oh, yeah, things totally change. It's really raining now. I think that. So, yeah, if you're looking for, and the OTAs, we, we sort of demonize. the OTAs. That's a popular talking point amongst the book direct crowd is how dare they do what they do. But it's like for better for worse, they try to attempt to make some order out of all this inventory, out of all these homes. They try to put a ranking system in place. They try to put a review system into place. They try to rake things in a way that provides good service. And obviously they're doing generally speaking a good job, right?

People will not keep coming back to book on verbo, on Airbnb, on booking.com unless they were having, broadly speaking, good experiences on average most of the time, right? Or good or great experiences, the time on average. So again, we always hear about the bad things because we're in our little bubble is what I always say. But Airbnb has successfully, I would argue in many cases, replaced the concept of a short-term rental for a lot of people. I was in the phone, get this one. This is a fun one with my Google rep for my biggest spending Google Ads account, a short-term rental company, vacational company. And we were actually like chit-chatting five minutes before we before we started to like the actual Google Ads account review. And he said, yeah,

you need to go to this area, this part of the world that he lives in, and go rent an Airbnb in this area and then come explore this. place and how awesome it is. And I'm like, dude, at five minutes, we're about to talk about this company spending five figures a month on ads targeting vacation rentals. And this guy was saying, yeah, come up here and get an Airbnb in this particular part of the world. You're going to love it. Right. I just, I didn't say anything. I was just like, we have things to get to you. And I just kind of laughed over it. But here's a Google employee telling me, go get an Airbnb, right? It just cracked me up when I thought about it because I think that's going back to your old trust thing. It's like the OTAs

do have a lot of trust. P. They have a lot of brand loyalty. People look for them, et cetera, etc. And that's why I do remain a little bit skeptical that the broadly speaking, I assume the OTAs are going to benefit from the movement to LM search just as much as they're benefiting regular search now. The OTA platforms in general, obviously get a lot of traffic on regular, quote-unquote, regular old-school Google organic search because they should, right? These are massive brands. That's where a lot of the inventory is. Now, by no means does that mean that it's impossible to compete with them? I think you have to know what kind of game you're playing and what chips you're putting into the middle of the table. And I always hate that, by the way. That's one of my sort of ticks that I

half. Some people would say, you're never going to outspend the OTA. It's like, duh, that's not the point. The point is for your marketing to be effective, for your marketing to drive a profit. In that vein, it does not matter if you're outspending the OTA. The OTA has a completely different problem set than you. You're trying to fill up, 200 homes even. Let's say you're a large regional property manager. You might be trying to fill up 200 homes. The OTA is trying to fill up 20,000 maybe in that same market, of course, are going to outspend you. It's only rational, logical they would outspend you. But that's, again, that's not the point. I think it's just these things where a lot of this problem, this whole AI disruption really that we've had,

honestly, we've the last kind of three years now, has created a whole host of experts, these early adopters who are using it nonstop and think, that's how everybody else is behaving. Not true. They're using it nonstop and think, this is because I'm willing to kind of go through that, tolerate this kind of oddity of trying to book a vacation along Google search. Therefore, that must be what other people are doing, not true at all. And they're missing the forest of the trees a little bit because they're not going back and looking at the information of the data of where people are actually finding the site.

And they're misinterpreting different things to apply their own sort of feelings of how this might go and apply it there. And to be fair to all these people who are kind of seeing these things and saying some of the things that we're talking about today and talking about trust and all these platforms, we don't know where it's all going to end up either. So I'm not sitting here and saying I have some magic Paul, some magic answer that I'm going to know exactly how things are going to play out two or three years from now. Perhaps some of these people are right and the Google model is going to get completely disintermediated. Google itself will actually rip out Google search entirely. It's only going to be an agent doing all this stuff for you. I kind of don't really believe that's going to be the case, but I could be off on that.

I think there's going to be a version of that's more in the middle like they're doing now with AI mode in the search results. overviews in the search results, but the quote-unquote regular stuff is still there. And regardless, it's when someone wants to go actually book the rental, do you actually offer a good guest experience, a good user experience as a person on there? Because if you don't, then all the things we talked about earlier, the trust elements, et cetera, et cetera, don't matter. If they get to the site and they're not comfortable and they don't feel like taking out their credit card and clicking a few buttons and giving you perhaps anywhere from

$1,000 to $5,000 to $10,000, then everything we've talked about before almost doesn't matter how they found you. Whether it be through Google search, whether it be through AI, whether it be through a Facebook ad, if they don't get to that stage and they're not ready to go. and they don't believe in what they're seeing, then they're not going to book. And that's the problem we're all trying to solve here at the end of day. That's one thing we agree on, right?

We're trying to get people to book. We're not trying to get mentions in LLM. We're trying to get people to actually book the place. If they don't do that, then what value are your mentions in an LM? What value is a follower on Instagram? What value is they click from Google search? If enough of them don't end up booking, then this whole thing is for naught. And this is, I'm just going down the report right now as you're saying,

and it's just finding things. So, like, in this report, they're talking about total people in their thing who reported no AI errors in their travel recommendations. Less than half reported no AI errors, 47%. It's only 53%. But that means over half of people reported some type of AI error, and that's all generations here. That's a problem. That is a significant problem. And really, it's why it would be great to have a better understanding.

to have a better way to observe, to track and monitor your share of audience, share of voice, all these things. But ultimately, it is if I would rather know which topics I'm showing up for, which prompts I'm showing up for, just so I can see if what is being rendered is actually accurate about my business or if there's some hallucination that's combining content from this site and content from this site and all of a sudden putting it under my name because that's what I'm more concerned about. I have less fear of showing up for a prompt than I do of the actual information being proposed, shown about my business, displayed about my business, being accurate. Because especially in this new environment and it's only going to shift.

We haven't seen a whole lot, but I will say over the last 72 hours, as I've been trying to hit the Google Discovery, the little search bar on my granted Android phone. I'm not in the Apple. We're not going to play that game. But the experience did look a little different. It was definitely trying to go a little more AI mode, a little more like a big expanded text zone to start with. That meth definitely made me feel like I was going to be pushed more in that direction. I don't know. We'll have to test and see how that actually, we'll get a real time update here in three months, six months, whatever that is.

But I think that until we can resolve the error issue here, we just have so much more, we have so much more ground to make up there. It's just, it's, that's the scary proposition. I would love for if I went into Sam Rush for A. H-RFs and I plugged in a domain and I saw all the prompts that I was showing up for. I'd love to see what's actually the answer that's being shown. Because again, I do think that's the area where that zero-click search, we don't get that search. We don't get them to allow to come back to our website anymore. We have lost that opportunity in some cases.

And again, with that expanded search platform, Google's keeping you in their ecosystem. puts a pretty high priority on your Google business listing moving forward as a side note, I think, as well. But yeah, I just, that's the scary part, is that if the answer is wrong, people aren't getting back to your website to get it corrected. It's just wrong. And then what? Then you've lost it. You've lost your opportunity. Yeah. And I will say, yeah, going back to what you're saying there a second ago, with respect to getting a brand mention and then that being part of your brand building, it's, I did this kind of conversation with the client recently, the whole how do you hear about us concept.

When as much as I do like that idea in certain situations, it's so flawed. It's so flawed. And Brian Fishkin had done a study a little while ago where they did a how'd you hear about us in like a checkout of some e-commerce product. And they put things in, how'd you hear about us that they were not doing. So I think if memory serves, it was like a physical, it was like a food product. And one of the options was like, we heard about you on the Martha Stewart Show. And like they'd never been on the Martha Stewart Show.

But they were getting some percentage people to respond and say, I heard about you on the Martha Stewart Show. Self-select. Yeah, yeah. Self-slect. Exactly. Same thing. Self-selecting.

Really problematic from. Going back to what we said earlier, people self-selecting that they're using ad to plan travel. Again, I don't think these people are being like intentionally misleading or whatever. But also to your point, if it doesn't end to click, then the opponent to us may say, Conrad and Paul, how could you measure that? You guys are looking at analytics data. There's no click. So how do we know they're not being influenced heavily by the responses, the brand responses that are happening within the chat UPT or LM choice platform?

But they didn't click. And then they did a brand and search on Google, then they convert it. So it's in my head. I go, ah, see, told you, Google's the Google's what's. driving market area here, and maybe they heard about us through an LLM. Or the truth is, if we're being honest, they heard about us through a myriad of ways, right? That's marketing and brand building in general, right? There's not this one clear path. It's not like the car brands of the world, the drink brands of the world, et cetera, et cetera, come in and through this one angle,

right? It's like you heard about them through many different angles, many different platforms, many different places that basically capture attention. There's people that only do marketing in very narrow niches and worlds that people outside their bubble would have never heard of and built really successful businesses. How did you hear about? How'd you hear about? us. It's almost like as long as you heard about me, I don't care how you heard about us, right? If you're booking and you heard about us and you're having this experience and the marketing is working well enough that we are driving a profit with the marketing and advertising that we're doing, then it doesn't matter. What's good about the whole Airbnb thing, taking the commission and

the commission is now settling in this kind of 15 to 20% zone that we're living in now, and we have been living in for some time, is that we actually have a very clear cost of acquisition. So if you're doing marketing for your brand, whether in whatever channel, let's say you have an LLM strategy that fits into your 20% marketing, budget that you've got as far as gross revenue for that particular month, quarter year, et cetera, and you can feel like you're measuring something that's driving some level of appreciable gain from it, then sure, keep doing it. Who am I to tell you that you're wrong or that you shouldn't be doing that? My concern is, like I said earlier, always back to this concept of most vacational

managers are very small businesses. They don't have a lot of marketing dollars to deploy. So when we get distracted, when we have the shiny object, and we lose our focus on the things that seem to be driving the bulk of the results, and we are a thousand miles wide and half an inch deep, but, It's almost like a feeling where I'm just like, I want to shake people a little bit, almost through the camera, through the laptop screen a little bit and just be like, you are getting distracted by something that is not really that meaningful right now. You need to be doing 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x, the volume of what you're currently doing in these particular areas. And if you were, you would have significantly more interest coming into your website, traffic coming in your website. And I'm not saying we're never going to get to that, but that's not what you need to be focusing on right now. So if your business is not doing like a million a year in your revenue, if you're a manager, that means you probably need closer to five to seven million of action.

rental revenue, then there's probably three to four to five things that you need to be doubling down on tripling down on before you're like, oh yeah, we're going to become AI Bookable Native for the seven users of some random MCP that anyone really installs. It just doesn't make any sense. Here's, and here's the next statement. Just to put this out here, travelers are going to embrace AI. They're not embracing it on your website though right now. That's, I think again, your planning again, high up in the funnel, but not. on your website. I see enough AI chatbots out there. And again, looking at, even going that step further and looking at what those responses are with the AI chatbots, they're just not using

things the way they want. They're still using your website the way you expect them to. Yeah, maybe you have an AI chat bot that is making some recommendations and getting a few ancillary revenue. Ancillary booking is coming through. That is the exception, not the rule right now. And I do, I think that once they get to your website, that's the last spot you want to put the AI, but you put the AI in your operations, make your operations better. But as far as trying to create that AI bot or trying to have that AI experience, I don't think it's being embraced on the websites right now. I mean, maybe you're seeing something different, but that's not, at that point, they just want to get the booking done. They just want to make sure that there's a house for them to stay at,

or a condo or whenever. Is he also accommodation type over here? That's what they're more concerned about. But what do you think about that? It goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is maybe it's that Henry Ford quote. It's like if I asked people what they wanted, they would have set a faster horse and he builds the car. It's like, if you ask people what they want, maybe they say they would want A&A. Again, I think that's that early adopter mindset. They're the people who may say we want to play and travel through AI. I don't think your typical average, I always use my mom as an example. I don't think that people like that are like clamoring. for a more robust or whatever AI, agentic search experience to book a vacation rental,

I think they want a great property at a fair price, and they want good service. And they have their own mind, they have their own ideas in their mind of what good service looks like. They have their own ideas in their mind of mind of what that property should be once it gets there as firms of amenities and finishings and all that kind of stuff. They're going to look at your reviews. They're going to make some, again, some assumptions maybe on your company based on the reviews, good or bad, that's up to you.

And it's a weirdest thing because I do work with some property managers that have a budget product, and some might say a lower quality product. And I say some might say, because what's so odd about what's, working with some of those types of companies, large ones, is that they will get a five-star review, and it'll be the guest saying something to the effect of stayed here, awesome experience, was affordable, we got a week-long vacation at the beach, and everything was great. And then the next review says, this place was terrible. I didn't like it.

The front desk staff was rude. The room was not high quality enough. There was sand on the beach carpet as I walked in, et cetera, et cetera. And the weird thing is they're both right, because they both had maybe a different set of expectations than once they got there than they received. And as a result, it's up to interpretation. That's what a review is, almost to some degree. and it goes all the way back to brand perception

when people think you're a company. I don't know how you position your company when you offer a bunch of product to say this will be rough around the edges, but you're going to have a good time, basically, versus, and everyone will claim and say, oh, we're a luxury product, or we offer a luxury product,

and then they really don't even know what that means or what is, again, like Ashley taught us in the Art of Hospitality podcast, two to three percent of hotels are classified as luxury, the ones that actually do get some sort of certification or verification. So it's weird, right,

two percent of hotels are luxury, three percent of hotels, but like 80 percent of vacational companies are luxury. That doesn't make any sense when you think about that out loud. Yeah, how does the consumer decide how do they, and are they not the ultimate, are they not the ultimate barometer of what's working well? If they're going on your site and booking at a high clip and you're making money and your bookings are profitable, keep doing that. And if what you're not doing is not leading to that outcome, then keep doing that. I've heard so many strategies over the years of things that if I took that same playbook, copied it and pasted it out of this one location and popped it somewhere else, I genuinely think it wouldn't work at all.

And yet for that particular property manager, it's crushing. So it's like, that's just how it goes, right? like what works well for one brand will not work well for another brand. And it doesn't mean it's a bad idea of it just it's not the right idea for that person, for that company for that situation. And I think that's broadly speaking like where we're at right now in this kind of like AI travel booking journey is that we're so early on in it. It's going to change a lot absolutely over the next year or two.

I'm not disputing that. But we're so early into it that people are getting distracted by something that is not appropriate for 99.9% of people to get distracted by. And it's creating this, yeah, it's creating this waste of time and energy. And as a result, you're not making progress that we need to be making progress on. If this AI boom was happening, the same. time the COVID boom was happening, I almost would feel differently because it's, oh, there's so much demand, let's try new channels, that is what it is, in a moment where most people are struggling

and most people are down here over year, on revenue, on rep par, or whatever the case may be, it's like almost just can't afford to be this distracted by this shiny object and the woman in the red dress, and you've got to be more hyper-focused on what it is that you can control and that what's actually going to move the needle. So that's not, I'll give some credit. Hopefully it is. It's forward-thinking, hoping they want to be future-proof, but I think it's, it is just as easy to get sucked into the trap as opposed to feeling like, you feel like you're future-proofing your business while you're missing out on the present opportunities

that are available. So it's that delicate balance of marketing in an AI world that we just get to, I think the downside of all this conversation, it just feels like you're riding by the seat of your pants right now and holding on. It's even all of the good things we do, all the value, that we feel like we're trying to drive from AI. And I think we do.

We do a good job of trying to stay up with the latest and the greatest and trying to say where we can, like, where we would recommend you are implementing AI and where we would say, hey, this is more of a vanity spot than a true needle mover. I think that's right now because there's so much, it's difficult. You do want to try everything. But just because it's AI,

and just because the word AI is on it doesn't mean it's something that necessarily needs your attention. So I think that in anything that we're doing, anything is these are important updates to have every three to six months and who knows how much more frequently we need because that's the other thing is that pace accelerates more each day. And at that point it does feel like we're at just always in catch-up. mode and trying to figure out, okay, is this good? Is this relevant? Is this complete BS? And I think our BS meter is pretty good, but that's why we have just as many texts going back and forth about

what in the world is this than we do about sports. So it's all good. Yeah, it is all good. There we go. We can put a bow on this one and bring into a close here. I think hopefully the listener appreciated that meandering thoughts a little bit. We'll get back on a structure and dive into a more specific topic next week. But yeah, it was good to maybe this was a little bit of venting. both sides. But yeah, be critical. Be critical with your thought. Be critical with your time. Be very careful in how you approach these new things in terms of, is this worth it? And I think it's totally okay to stand the sidelines. You're not missing anything. Like nothing's going to race by you as you stand the sidelines for a minute. And I also think it's okay

to try. Like maybe you need 10% or 20 your budget to be tried. Let's try new things in this channel in this vertical and see what happens. And then when it all shakes down, review your marketing. Marketing is always a combination, I think, of the left brain, right brain a little bit, right? It's the creative. It's the fun side. What are we need to do? What are some new ideas? what are things that I can explore. I want that on that side of my brain. And then we've got to log into a spreadsheet and look at the cost and look at the revenue and figure out is what I'm doing.

Sustainable is it working. And the closer we can hop between those two things and kind of lobby ideas back and forth between those two different sides of the brain, I think the better you can be as a marketer. And I try to find my level between those things all the time. I think it's a fun part of it, to be honest with you. But you're always going to find people who will try to talk you out of what you're doing as a bad idea.

And just be careful about that, as it were. I'll put a bone it. Dear listener, one thing before you depart, leave us your review. go to your podcast app of choice iTunes, iTunes, Spotify listeners. You guys download the most. Therefore, a review there helps us the most. Apple podcast in particular, but you may be one of those two listeners.

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