Heads In Beds Show - The Vacation Rental 'Booking Window' Is Changing According To This Billion Dollar Company

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul review how the "window" for bookings is compressing over time according to data from Expedia.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Expedia Group Report🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Paul, good morning. how's it going fantastic you know it's a it's a happy week for for me you got to begin the day seeing me holding up a broom because good old mid or so the timberwolves swept their series against the phoenix suns that'll be my one sports reference but it's a good one. Oh, it's a good one.

I'm going to give you the stat of maybe the month, end of the month, so I'm going to say safe there. That is the first sweep of a playoff series in any Minnesota sports, in the Minnesota sports history. That goes back to the Lakers, North Stars, Timberwolves, Twins. Nobody's ever swept anybody so hey we're we're celebrating pretty heavy here in minnesota right now how are you sir no that's that's an interesting stat like which shows you that it's a it's a good team the

listeners listening this far in advance so they have heard that and they may know exactly what happened to the timberwolves perhaps they're hoisting the envy troper right now perhaps or not so all very good stuff that's probably going to we reference more stuff that's happening now and then these episodes come out a while later um anywho the listener doesn't care about that i'm doing great uh good week here it feels like um i probably wore pants for the last time yesterday as far as this year like i could have not worn the pants but i wore the pants when we went out there and um by day toll i regretted it you know i was like oh it's kind of hot you know i'm like sweating i'm like two gatorades in at this point.

And it wasn't very good. So other than that, doing great. I think we've got a fun topic today. You flagged this because I think you saw some of this data reference. And I think it's a good overall topic. I don't think we've done this before. We get so down in the weeds, right, on SEO and PPC. Sit here and debate you all day on the nuances of link building and how to set a PPC budget

on a daily basis and all kinds of fun stuff. But I think you brought up an interesting one here, which is that a lot of our marketing plays the role of these five different stages of travel. So we did some research and we kind of put together a little bit of an outline, some screenshots and some references from this report that you'll talk about in a second. But I wanted to lead with what these five things actually are that we're talking about, because people don't go, and I always say this, right? We have clients that get a lot of direct traffic. And by direct traffic, I don't mean direct bookings, but I mean, people go to their website and make a reservation. In fact, for a lot of our clients, that's the second most common,

third most common traffic source, people coming directly to the website. And I've always done maybe an okay job of being honest with myself in the past of explaining kind of what that means and what that is. And so, like I said, we put together kind of some of these ideas because that activity is what you want, but you have to do a lot of things outside of, you know, your overall marketing efforts to get people to actually go to your website and make a booking. That's like the final doorstep of a long journey that can take some quite some time, which we'll talk about in a second, exactly how long that process can be. So number one, the stage of travel, dreaming and inspiration.

I would love to go to, until a month ago, I would have said Italy. My wife and I always wanted to go to Italy. So we had dreaming inspiration for quite literally 10 years together before we actually made this trip together last month. That's an interesting stage. Maybe people don't dream and are inspired to go to, I'm based in the Myrtle Beach area. People love to come here, but I don't know if they dream to come here necessarily. So that stage may be very short. It's like, I just want to get out of the house and go to the beach. That's accessible. I can go there. So that stage could be a day, two days, five days, 10 days, 20 days. It could be 10 years in the case of my Italy trip, just for reference, but dreaming

inspiration stage number one, number two, research and planning. And now this is in my mind when they start to like, well, maybe we could go here. Maybe we could go here, right? Maybe we could go to Hilton head or Myrtle beach. Maybe we could go to, you know, Orlando, or we could go to, you know, insert other beach, Florida beach here, right? There's kind of like that research planning stage in my mind is like, what's out there, what's available. And this, in my mind, feels a little more concrete.

When you're at this stage, it probably feels like it's more like months out, one would imagine at this point, probably not, you know, weeks out, although it could be in some cases and probably not years out. Like I would love to go to Italy someday. I would love to go to Australia someday. I would love to go to Australia someday. Maybe I'll use that example. But I've not researched or planned anything about where to go in Australia or anything like that. Number three, decision making and booking.

So now the rubber's meeting the road, right? Now they're actually saying, okay, I've looked at units A, B, and C. I'm going to choose unit B and we'll go ahead and book it. So that's what we'll kind of spend the most time on because that's where I feel like we make our hay, so to speak, on the guest marketing side of things. Number four, experiencing and enjoying. Maybe we could tie that back into the owner marketing side of things. What do you put in the property? How do you get the right properties in your program so that you have guests that are enjoying the property and enjoying the site?

And then number five, sharing and reflecting, kind of like that post stay. Maybe we'll do a future episode on that, but it won't be a huge focus today. So let's go through the first three again really quickly, and maybe you can react to those stages and how they kind of tie into this overall journey. Number one, dreaming and dreaming and inspiration number two research and planning number three decision making and booking so what's your reaction to those first three stages and how they tie into our overall marketing efforts i think that's where we probably focus or on the traveler side the guest side that's that's where we focus most of our efforts um and it just kind of depends on where you're actually in your business. If

you're in one of the stages, the flyweight, the lightweight, the middleweight, anything like that, you may be focusing on different parts of those. If you're still trying to put that brand out there, maybe you're going to have a lot more people where you're catching them at the dreaming and inspiration level of the funnel. So I do think that that's, I think that that's an important one. And I think it's become increasingly important just because as we reference kind of the conversion path and how people get there, social media really has done a lot more recently as far as creating that dream and inspiration. I think with the advent of video and the heavy proliferation of video across all those channels, like it is, I think when people use TikTok more as a search

engine and dreaming and inspiration type of engine than Google, now that's not a hard and fast rule when we look at the overall numbers, but there's probably a lot more work that goes into that dreaming and inspiration phase that we probably could put a lot more into that. Ultimately, though, when we're tying it back to the money, the return on the ad spend and things like that, it really is getting people to that researching and planning and the decision making and booking phase. So it is, I mean, I think when you look at it from, if you're trying to match these with a channel, that dreaming and inspiration has become the social. Researching and planning is probably the SEO and the content building that we're doing

to give people a little more groundwork for what they're actually going to do with you. And then that decision making and booking. Yeah, that should be probably capturing people. Hopefully some of that branded traffic, some of the long tail keywords as people are getting a little closer there. And then your onsite, you know, how you're, how you're converting people there. So yeah, I think for just about every product that most of the agencies in the space sell, you can probably tie it back to something along this, along this booking funnel here.

So I think it's, it is, it's, it's important to understand it and it's important to understand the factors and the timing and really how to make sure that you're putting that right message in front of the right people at the right time. I like your framing a lot of, and this is actually a really good example of why the social media aspect doesn't have quote unquote the best ROI for the listener. I'm putting air quotes up on the screen right now, right? Because if you're in that dreaming and inspiration stage and someone sees one of your homes, let's say, or one of your properties, or they see your destination, a video, something like that, And they're in that stage, well, there's no action they're going to take in the next day or two, most likely that's going to

move them forward as far as booking a vacation with you. Again, that's stage three, as Paul referenced a few minutes ago. So if you're putting a lot of effort on the social, you're getting all these views and maybe your engagement or people are seeing what you're posting, but you're not seeing any sort of like progress or forward momentum, you know, in that respect, it's like, it depends on what you're optimizing for. It depends on what you're measuring. Right. I can give a very specific example actually for that number one dreaming and inspiration stage, which is we have a client in the Bahamas who's not on this exact Island, but you know, adjacent to it or nearby where the famous, you know, putting this in air quotes, again, famous swimming pigs are. I think the swimming pigs are one of those examples of like

an Instagram phenomenon. Like someone had taken one of these pictures of them interacting with the swimming pigs and went so-called viral on Instagram. And then people wanted to recreate that picture. And when we were traveling actually back in Italy, like I was thinking of, you know, we went to like the Trevi Fountain, for example, in Rome. And I was like, everyone is here to take a picture of themselves in front of the Trevi Fountain. They may not look at it again.

Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But one of the primary use cases of that photo for most people is they're going to put it up on Instagram. They're going to put it in like a social sharing platform. Hey, I'm here in a room. Look at this awesome background of the chart we found behind me, right? That was like one of the main reasons that they did that.

So, you know, how can we find the ROI if we're creating those sort of like social inspiration moments? Or is the vacation manager even responsible for dreaming inspiration? Probably not most of the time, but like your destination should be having those dreaming and inspiration moments or people don't want to come, right? Like how desirable is your destination is like a very valid use case for

like studying and understanding how well the other pieces underneath it are going to work. Because if no one is inspired to come to whatever market you're in, or if you're in like a third tier area in that market, if they want to come and be next to swimming pigs and you're, you know, a hundred miles away and that's not what they want, then it's going to be challenging to ever make progress into the stage three decision-making and booking process. So I like that quite a bit. So we pulled down some numbers and some data. So maybe Paul, real quick, you can reference this document that I think you saw on a show this morning and reference kind of where you found it. And then we can go through some of the numbers. And I have one little thing from Google that I found that we can kind of

bring in to crystallize this process. All right. Maybe the listener at this point understands the process a little bit. What does it actually look like in the real world? Maybe Paul, you could break that down. Yeah, absolutely. So I was listening to Good Morning Hospitality this morning with that team over there, their crew over there. They do a great job.

And what they were referencing was the kind of the Expedia group doing their pathway to purchase. So really digging in and getting some pretty granular data of how people are traveling, you know, the timing of when people are traveling, how long each of these phases are taking. And this does, this is something that if you've been tracking over time, it certainly has, I think the window is shrinking a little bit, but the number of touch points appear to be relatively similar to what we've seen over time. I think the pathway probably hasn't changed that much. It's just the channels that are contributing to that path more than anything else. But kind of looking at the numbers themselves, you know, as they're looking

at the travel purchase journey, talking about that inspiration phase, Expedia is saying that that's taking about 33 days right now. So when travelers first start thinking about that trip, in Conrad's case, 10 years, maybe skewing that a little long there. But that's probably about right. Is it hard and fast? It's always going to be that? No. And I think it just depends on what your reason for traveling is more than anything else. But that's approximately about a month is when you're going to start thinking about it.

And again, is it a glimmer or is it really you starting to see pictures, starting to see videos, starting to make those steps there? I think this is probably in that time where they don't know the destination. I think this is probably when people know they want to travel and they're maybe starting to think, oh, maybe mountains. Maybe I'm going to go to the coast. Maybe there's something like that happening. Then when we get into that research planning and booking phase, that time frame we're looking at is about 38 days.

So again, that makes sense. Now that window has probably come down pretty substantially. I think when we were talking about this in 17 and 18, it was closer to 55 or 56 days. So we're taking a few weeks off. I think, you know, rate management probably revenue and rate management probably has something to do with that. I think people are just more willing to wait a little longer because you can. The ability is there. more willing to wait a little longer because you can, the ability is there, you know, unless you are concerned about specific timing and things like that. If you're, if you've got some flexibility,

you can, you can kind of shrink that booking window and know that there's going to be something available there. So that kind of looking at that, we're looking at about 70 days overall, and then post-purchase, you know, the time that you're looking to kind of follow up with those people. You know, it is for the next two months. That's when you should be looking to kind of try to remarket, retarget, get those people back into at least a workflow of some kind. So, yeah, that's kind of how they're saying it breaks down. Some of the other numbers that really stood out, we kind of looked at the resources that people use for the path, or excuse me, Expedia looked at the resources people use,

and it is, I think it's OTAs still play a huge role. Same thing with the search engines. I mean, I think it's very difficult to say now, Expedia is probably taking into consideration a little more of the hotel side, the resort side, some of those standalone properties. So OTAs certainly dominate on that side of things. Search engines are still going to be kind of universal there. But social media being kind of that third spot, I think that that's telling because it is. It tells you just how much of an impact it's going to have. It tells you just how much of an impact it's going to have. Whether you're doing paid advertising or just doing something organic, I think it's a non-negotiable that you have to have something in place. You can choose the channels that work for you, do all that.

But OTAs, search engines, and social media, and I mean, when we talk about those three, it's search, it's social, and email. So it makes sense that all those kind of run into place there. But what are some other things that stood out to you here? Yeah, I think you covered those top ones well. I mean, we have, again, there's a movement in our industry to try to like get rid of Airbnb or stop Airbnb or something like that. I feel like maybe people are discounting how much Lyft has come from Airbnb's popularity, right? Like people going onto Airbnb and experiencing a short-term rental or vacation rental for the first time, and then maybe branching out and booking you there directly. There's a whole slew of customers today or guests that you're going to have here in 2024 that you would not have had, had it not been for Airbnb's popularity and rise

from let's say like 2012, 13, 14, maybe like that timeframe up until 2020 and kind of through COVID when the popularity obviously at the platform exploded and now they're a public company and so on and so forth. So the fact that OTA is number one on here, I guess like giant grain of salt that we'll drop into the conversation here is that this report was obviously done by an OTA, by Expedia. So all of their data is going to be reflective of people that strictly go to OTAs. But the fact that, I'll give a very tactical example. We have clients who get us, you know, a decent percentage of direct bookings when they, we had someone that we signed recently, I should say it this way,

excuse me. We had someone come to our way recently who was on an OTA platform. That's where the majority of their bookings are coming from, but they were already getting 10 or 15% direct bookings. And I'm like, okay, that's not like a massive amount, but let's break down kind of where those are coming from. Are those mostly past guests? Where do you think they're coming from? And they're like, no, they just find my website and book. And I was like, okay, interesting's not like a massive amount, but let's break down kind of where those are coming from. Are those mostly past guests? Where do you think they're coming from? And they're like, no, they just find my website and book. And I was like, okay, interesting. Because they weren't doing any SEO work, no paid search running,

no email marketing going out, no active social media. So I'm like, they're only surviving off of what, you know, Airbnb would call off platform. What Expedia actually calls leakage, which is a gross word we've referenced on the podcast. But it's the idea that basically you go on an OTA platform, and this is very common, I guess, would find the listing or the property manager maybe

behind that listing that they want to book with. And then you try to go out into a search engine, typically meaning Google or some other search engine, but Google would be the most popular, and just search for the name of the property, the name of the listing, or the name of the property manager. And that's how you might get your first 10 or 15% bookings. That's why it's one of the things that we have in Mastering Vacational Marketing, the book I worked on, where the first campaign you should work on is just making sure people can find your brand.

You know, when they search for your brand on an OTA, can they find you directly? So going back to stage three, decision-making and booking, you can kind of intercept at least a little bit of traffic, you know, at the end. I mean, it's never going to sustain you completely,

but you can get a little bit of that decision-making and booking traffic just by inserting your brand or inserting your property names into the OTAs and then picking up the people that are coming off platform and saying, hey, come book over here with me directly. And maybe I'll give you a little bit better rate or a little better service, or you could just talk to me directly. Some people have a little bit of skepticism of OTAs.

So no major surprises in this data or what I saw, but I think you brought it up well when you talk about the fact that people use social media. Again, they're not clicking off of social media and going to your website. That's not how it works, but their opinions are shaped, their views are formed. So much of what they think about is shaped by what they see on social media, even though it doesn't refer to traffic. Search engines is what refer to traffic. We've covered that many times now in the podcast. It doesn't mean that skipping over social is always the best play and you know assigning this roi value to social media can be problematic for that reason right it's hard to measure

influence and impressions and things like that you know in a very straightforward way so that was you know those were kind of some of my pieces i do also wonder too if some of these things are a little bit more biased maybe toward more towards urban travel like car rental or some of those other pieces in the study so i mean it'd be super relevant. And obviously this is all Expedia group. Of course, you know, the brands, the vacation brand that you and I, you know, know and tolerate, Verbo is in this group, but not necessarily, you know,

very specific to just leisure markets for vacation rental. So a little bit stuff here is different from like the core listener, maybe who's on the other side of the podcast today. But yeah, no surprises for the most part. The one that caught, I don't know if you said this one earlier, I was listening to all the numbers. I think I got this, the most part. The one that caught, I don't know if you said this one earlier, I was listening to all the numbers. I think I got this, but maybe not the one that really caught my attention was the 25 page views on the day of purchase. So when people

are making this planning process, there's, you know, they're looking, they're checking. And I say this to clients all the time, right. But it's good to see it validated with like real studies and real data. And I say, Hey, you kind of want people to be looking at five or six pages when they're actually looking for your vacation property. Yeah. But when it comes to actually that day of booking, like you want them to kind of know where they were trying to go and actually book it. But that last day, they're going to do a lot of research, 25 page views, according to Expedia

group before they actually make their final reservation, which was not a surprise to me, but it was just interesting to see the context there into that one. So yeah, that one kind of caught my attention as well. I like the journey ones. And yeah, maybe you could go towards the uh initial trip inspiration pieces like we talked about that earlier but it's not just social we talked about social but talk about maybe like families make these decisions you know just scheduling like hey we always make it this time here maybe go through that yeah absolutely well it is and i was going to just go back to the other

thing is you know the other number was 45 days prior to booking the trip over the course of that time, you're going to consume 303 minutes. So about five hours worth of travel content. That seems like a lot, but at the same time, it really doesn't seem like a lot. So, I mean, I think it just puts a premium on, you know, we joke about, you know, maybe time on site and some engagement and engagement you get with social. A 15 second engagement or a minute long engagement or a 90 second engagement. That is so important in building those little 90 second engagements. When you think about over the course of that four weeks, five weeks, six weeks in there, they're getting overwhelmed with information. weeks, five weeks, six weeks in there, they're getting overwhelmed with information.

So really it is. I think it's just very important to think about all of those little touch points along the way and how they contribute to that five hours worth of trip planning, which could go, who knows exactly where people are catching up there? Well, Expedia is trying to tell us that a little bit here. So yeah, I think resources for that trip inspiration. Certainly, Google and Bing probably want Surge Engine to be number one up there. It's not. I still think that's where you do have those trip advisors.

You do have kind of the marketing bureaus and the DMOs for what we know in the industry. But it is, I think those are some of those higher level sites where people maybe aren't making it to you specifically, but knowing that there are a lot of different options for people out there. And I think it is, this is something we've talked about with the distribution side of things is where do you want to be? Where do you want to be? Where do you want people to find you so that they are in the right intent, so that they are inspired in the right location, so that they can kind of find you in some of those lower portions or places closer to the booking portion of the booking journey? You know, I think it is some of the initial trip inspiration. 30% of the time, a conversation with a family member is going to be that initial interaction.

24% of the time a routine trip or holiday break. 24% for specific events and celebrations. I think that's something where maybe when you're in your 20s, you are. You're doing your travel more based on weddings or bachelor, bachelorette parties, things like that. And I think that's the other thing that we always have to take into consideration there is how many personas are we bringing into some information and data like this? 21% of the time, advertising, social media, or other content is how they've got that initial trip inspiration. So while social is still a part of it,

that's fourth on the list here after that referral. I think that there's something still to be said for that guest journey. That's why you want those referrals, those reviews. Google uses it as an organic ranking item on the GMB. That's just a reality. The tricky part is that 37% and that 21%. How many times do people see social media content for they saw a family member at a destination and now they're

going, they didn't necessarily have that conversation with a family member, but they got that family member inspiration off of social media. And now we're ready to plan our trip because, wow, it looks like they're having a great time as well. So I think that that third party validation is always going to be great, whether it's social, whether it's a coworker, whether it's a family member, that's what people are looking for. I think that that's, and that's why that follow up the post, the, the steps four and five of that booking window also become very important is you have to give people that exceptional experience so that they will talk about, they're going to be your best sellers. You know, OTAs are going to be great, but if 37% of people are having a conversation with a family member, that's going to lead them to trip inspiration. Boy, you better deliver on the

great experience for those, for those family members so that they can recommend, so that they can bring people to that inspiration phase and phase and kind of take it from there. I almost feel like maybe that's what our DMO should be actually working on. So the DMO is mostly, it's a function of advertising and marketing. In some respects, let me take in, you know, a thousand dollars from every member of our community. And then I'm going to take that, you know, pull it all up. I mean, the Myrtle Beach Chamber, for example, spends tens of millions of dollars every year to promote Myrtle Beach. Logical, like that makes sense. But the key, I think is, you nailed the key a second ago there, honestly, Paul, which is how can we get more people interested in sharing their

experience here? What would have to be true for people to be sharing their experience? It sounded silly what you were suggesting, but it makes a lot of sense. Why not have, like, I'm thinking of Nashville, they have like the angel wings photo mural stuff, like that kind of stuff is honestly probably a lot more impactful into like seeing something cool seeing something unique that you can't get anywhere else that's the experience people are after and then the the vacation rental adam norco says this all the time the vacation rental is just the tool to get them on vacation like they're here for vacation they're not you know they're not like man i can't wait to sit in that vacation rental for seven

straight days it's going to be there it's going to be an important part of the process, no doubt about it. And they, let's be honest, they can't sleep on the streets for the most part. They got to sleep somewhere. It's an important piece of the puzzle. But I do wonder if we often do ourselves a disservice by thinking, let's just take our same message and just blast it to more people versus like, let's make something worth talking about, or let's make something worth taking a photo of or something like that, which is a more maybe tangible way to get people to actually kind of lean into what they're doing and then tell their

friends about it, which kind of goes back to that idea of travel inspiration. So just a way for maybe the vacation manager to think like, you know, on their head a little bit of like, what could I, and this is why these so-called like viral Airbnbs do so well is that they get free advertising basically, free word of mouth. You know, we have a client we work with who has one of these notable, you know, notable, I'm putting this in air quotes, Airbnbs, notable vacation rental properties that's been written about in our architectural digest. And, you know, it's been featured on like the Airbnb homepage in the past

by Brian Chesky, he's talked about it and things like that. And it's like the property itself is cool and unique and 100% deserves a lot of this attention that it gets. But it gets all this free advertising. It gets all this free, you know, word of mouth, you know, promotional activity and stuff like that. If your property is more functional, going back to the marketing pieces, the reason that that property is always hard to market and advertise is that it's a commodity. Anyone can get a two bedroom oceanfront condo in insert beach market here.

In Hilton Head, it's not that hard to find a two bedroom oceanfront beach condo. Doesn't mean it's not a great experience. Doesn't mean you can't do a good job in providing that two bedroom condo available to your guests. That's not what I'm saying at all, but there's nothing about it. That's, you know, people are going to take a picture about it and said, I can't believe we got to stay here. I, you know, I get unbelievable, right? That reaction and that kind of reaction is going, you know, into what we're talking about here is what kind of helps you cut through a lot of this noise. And instead of just being a funnel that like, you know, a thousand people under the top, you know, 700 people in the next stage, 300 people in the next stage, all right, seven of them book,

you know, a lot of our advertising and marketing is like that. I think there's something to be said for leaning into how can I make things a little bit more interesting and notable? How can I get people to talk about this? And then they will do the marketing and advertising for me in some way and lift my overall efforts. It's not going to replace like the client we're working with still has to fill their other homes, right? Like there's still their advertising and marketing we're helping them with that I think they've done a good job on. But the property they have that's kind of this really notable one, it does market itself quite a bit. You know, it's not completely self-fulfilling, but it does, it gets you going.

There's some momentum in that process, which is sorely missing from some people we see. It is. And I mean, and it goes, I mean, they've got a direct quote in here. I mean, travel advertising can be extremely influential, especially at the start of the travel shopping journey. On average, nearly one in five travelers said advertising influenced their decision to make a trip. Booking was highest among travelers from Mexico, but vacation rental guests was also high up on that list too, ahead of hotel guests. We know we're being advertised to. It's just a matter of whether it's actually hitting on something that's going to be influential for us. I mean, the influential aspects of advertising, 52% beautiful images, 46% promotions or ideas, 41% content highlighting interesting

experiences. I mean, it's about that experience. It's yeah. You want those deals. You want, you want the promotions. Maybe you want an idea of what you want to do, but really, you know, at some point people are just looking for that, that lower rate there. So it's just something that we know we're part of the sales funnel right now. It's, it's a matter of, can you capture us? Can you, can you inspire us with your destination? Can you inspire us with your accommodations? Can you inspire us with the local area and recommendations for what you can do there? Do you need to use influencers? I mean, the fact that that's 40% on the content from social influencers on how you use social media on that pathway to purchase. I mean, obviously, there's some skepticism and you want to make sure you're using the right celebrities or the right influencers,

but this is, this is the world we live in. And if you're not taking advantage of those channels or, or that content by influencers and family and friends and all that good stuff, it's just going to be harder. It's not that you have to incorporate everything here or take anything with a grain of salt that we're talking about. But just building on some of these basic principles, I think allows you to grow more easily because you're leveraging the right channels, you're leveraging the ideas and understanding of the steps a traveler has to take along that path to purchase. The other thing I feel like that's related to it is that people don't has to take along that path to purchase. So the other thing I feel like that's related to it is that people don't want to hear is that marketing is a core function of

your business. Like there's not a time where you take off from accounting, for example, you know, so if you're listening and maybe you're not like all in on doing marketing as part of building your vacational business, Hey, look, the ground game, the operations piece, I am the first person to tell you how important that is. And the marketing, it's nothing if we can't deliver on the experience that, you know, people need to have or want to have in the property. It's properties not clean, then marketing ain't going to do a thing, right? To get more people in the door, long-term, short-term, sure we can stuff through some less than optimal, you know, marketing strategies that will get people in the door. But operations is number one. Like, I don't think you can, it's like on our side, that's indisputable, like long-term,

that's the only thing that's going to, you know to make you healthy. But marketing is an ongoing process. There's no end to marketing your business because as soon as you empty out 60 days later, we got to fill it back up again, right? Like every week we got to attract 7, 10, 15, 20, 100, 200 families to come and stay in one of our vacation properties. So it kind of is this ever ongoing thing.

And if you just defer your marketing down to the OTA, which is kind of a common refrain that we might hear from people, I'm just going to give my property over to Airbnb. Okay, that's fine. But you're then seeding all of your basically creative, you know, ideas and concepts about what your property and what your business could be to an OTA. And like, if that OTA you believe is going to always act in your best interest over the long term, I think you're very mistaken. I don't think you're going to find that to be an enjoyable experience, even if during the boom times, it was great. I think there's lots of so much room there,

so much wiggle in there that you're just giving up by saying, yeah, I'm not worried about it. Or like, oh, it's too expensive to get a booking director or whatever. Then you haven't done your numbers properly. Like if you can't afford marketing in your business and your business is unsustainable anyways, and just a matter of time before someone comes in that does no marketing is just going to crush you under their boat. That's my take on it. I mean, it's funny because as you were kind of going through that, I found one other little quote, and this is the one that it is definitely tinged with a,

oh, we're an OTA, so you got to have a little OTA love here. But it's the OTAs are used for cross-shopping regardless of where the purchase is actually made. And I would agree. Percentage visiting an OTA before any travel purchase, 80%. regardless of where the purchase is actually made. And I would agree like percentage of percentage visiting an OTA before any travel purchase, 80%. I would absolutely think that's the case. It might even be higher on the, on the vacation rental side because Airbnb does have so much of a presence out there. I mean, it has become synonymous with the term vacation rental,

unfortunately, but it is kind of that statement there. This speaks to the importance of having a brand presence, not just on your own websites, but across other channels and platforms like OTAs and ensuring your rates and inventory are accurate everywhere to stay on top of minds with travelers. I love that. I mean, that is revenue management. And yes, I think they're skewing it.

Oh, you don't want to just focus on your own website. That's true. That's what we're trying to tell you. I just don't like that they're, you know, they're kind of trying to push you more onto the OTA, I would say. That's something I think certainly on the hotel side of things, they're talking about if you, before you purchase a hotel side, that's 61%. On the car rental side, it's 58%. On the airline side, it's 52%. So I think generally speaking, yeah, OTAs are a part of the travel buyer's journey, whether it's you're going to a Vrbo or an Expedia or doing something like that, or whether you're going to, or maybe Google and TripAdvisor if you're talking about the

meta-search side of things, or if you're going back to just the direct booking side of things. Yeah, it's always going to be a process. There's always going to be multiple touch points to it. So I think we did a pretty good job, Paul, in kind of breaking down the study, what we think is really interesting inside of it. And to be clear, Expedia has much better data capability and much better results than you and I have sitting here in our room, so to speak with Google analytics and like, you know, a pencil, we have a lot more capability. So proud to them. We appreciate the study. We'll link the study actually in the show notes. If you want to check it out, you can go there, click there. And shout out to Good Morning Hospitality for kind of surfacing this. Paul saw this from watching them. He's a loyal listener.

If any of the Good Morning Hospitality folks made it all the way to the end, then you've got to make sure Paul Manzi, which is a good thing. but yeah all good anything else before we wrap here should we put a bow on this one i think we're ready to tie it up awesome well if you appreciate the episode um one thing that takes very little time doesn't take much of a five-step journey at all in fact it's probably like a five tap journey if i can be honest with you paul basically you would the first thing you do open your podcasting app of choice maybe it it's Spotify. Maybe it's iTunes, something like that. Step two, you would actually go to search Heads and Bedshow or the Heads and Bedshow, of course, with Paul Manzi and Conrad O'Connell.

Then step three, you would click five stars, scroll down to the bottom, click five stars, leave a little comment. Hey, we appreciate you guys. We love it. And then that would be, then you hit post. That's four. That's four steps, one fewer step. And I bet it would take you a lot less than 75 days or 33 days or 36 days. It might only take you, I don't know, like a minute, two minutes. And if you made it

all the way to the end, maybe you got some value out of today's episode. And the reviews do help us a ton. I joke about it, of course, always at the end, but the reviews help us. More people can listen, more people can hear what we have to say, which gets the message out and keeps us motivated to keep going, which we appreciate. Downloads have never been higher, which is awesome. So if you have any other questions, let us know. You can email either Paul or myself. I'm Conrad at buildupbookings.com. Paul is paulatventory.com. We would appreciate hearing from you, dear listener, and we'll catch you in the next episode. Thanks so much.