Heads In Beds Show - Using AI Search To Plan Travel Won't Hurt Direct Bookings

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into the world of AI search / LLM tools and ask a key question: are these going to kill direct 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 of Med Show presented by Build Up Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Paul. It's kind of like, what does Jordan have?

Jordan has the flu game. We're having the pollen episode today here on the Heads and Bed Show. Both of us getting assaulted by various ragweeds and, you know, pine dust and all kinds of other stuff. So enjoy the voices, folks. They're going to be a little bit scratchy today. What's going on? We are not at 100%. You know, it's still a fun time of year.

It's both of our respective basketball teams are playing. I got a hockey team played. The Bruins in the Stanley Cup. I think they are in the playoffs. This is showing, again, I think we've done... We're not hockey people. Yeah, I was going to say, I think we've done offline. We've done a hockey bit before.

We've not done it on the recording to my knowledge. I'm a bad Boston sports fan that I don't watch the Bruins And it's not that I don't like the Bruins. I just never, how I explained it to Paul in the past and how I've explained to people in my life before is that no one in my life was into hockey when I was a kid. Like it wasn't like my dad or uncle or grandpa or whatever was like, oh yeah, let's go to a Bruins game.

I never went. So they are playing to playing the Buffalo Sabres. Hopefully that works out well for the Bruins fans. But yeah, definitely watching every second of the Celtics game and haven't watched a lick of the Bruins. So I'm hoping for the best. What's funny is that they'll probably do well. And then I'll watch like the last little bit.

And you know, oh, this is kind of entertaining, bandwagon fan. And then I'll forget until next year. Minnesota is the state of hockey, but I grew up in southern Minnesota, which there wasn't ice around. So it was basketball. We're in the basketball portion of the state. So I just, that's always my cop out to be able to say, you don't like hockey? No, I'm not.

And I hope my kids don't play it. I hope that we've had this discussion as well. But yeah, I'm not a good Minnesota hockey fan like that. I'm commiserate through the rest of the sport. So that's enough. I was about to say, yeah. You know, sometimes the stereotypes are not true. You know, they're often true, but sometimes they're not true.

You know, it's like an Irishman that doesn't drink, you know, it doesn't make much sense. But there we go. Sometimes they're not true. You know what else is not true. Speaking of things that are not true, Paul, good segue into today's episode. A lot of the Dumers out there, you know, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on insert, social media platform or choice, YouTube. I get clients to send a YouTube video sometimes. And it's this idea that is not centered in much data that people are going to use an enlarged language model or whatever tool you want to insert here.

Claude, chat, GPT, Gemini, et cetera. to plan and make a booking through an OTA platform or make a booking in general and that Google is dead. And we've not actually hit this bang on the nose necessarily. And I believe, and I think you believe as well, although we'll take some opposing positions today too. That LM trip planning may not hurt,

won't hurt direct bookings. In fact, it may help direct bookings depending on exactly the nature of how things unfold over the next, let's call it three, six, nine months. I don't think we should go too far past that because these LM models are changing so quickly. So of course, it will be proven wrong, but I don't believe, you know, based on the data that I'm seeing right now, that chatypt

and Like are not going to kill your direct bookings. I think there's other things that may harm your direct bookings in the future, but I don't think it's that. And yeah, we're going to bring the receipts, as the kids would say. I don't think the kids say that anymore, but we're going to bring the receipts to explain kind of what we're talking about here because I have a lot of client data that I can refer to and talk about today. So, yeah, I feel like we're in a small echo chamber here together on this, Paul,

but your thoughts on this topic as we dive in. I think we've been so focused on the getting traffic from chat GPT and Gemini at that one 2% clip, maybe at best case scenario, but I digress. I think that even if you see traffic coming through, the reality of bookings coming through that channel is very low. And I don't think it's because people aren't getting to your website through that channel in a mindset maybe potentially of buying, but not consistently. That's that, this is still not the way people are using.

using the LLMs from what, you know, anecdotally what you hear. I mean, the data pans it out a little bit as well. And this is where I hear it most frequently. I planned my whole trip with chat GPT. Cool. She planned it, got the itinerary, got all that stuff. And then what did you do? Then they went back to their good old Google's urgent and did something like that.

So I think the process of how we're using the LLMs, let's rewind a little bit. It hasn't replaced the search engine. the search engine still plays a very important function in how we operate in daily life. So until that is the case, and until that is how, again, traveler behavior will change, and we'll talk about that throughout here. But that has been kind of my premise here is that, yeah, you can do a really good job of planning a trip and seeing and getting inspired and doing all these things. But when that rubber hits the road, there's still a pathway that,

typically gets taken. So yeah, I mean, think about that. Think about how the transition of planning these trips has changed over the last. I mean, you've been in the space for 10 plus years. What does it look like? How do you compare this to like, let's say, when we were doing travel planning and SEO in 2016, 2017? Well, I think, so I mean, we have a very good example, by the way, at our outline here about we've been told this before. I mean, we had told a lot of things before it that turned out to not be true. Let's rewind the clock to 2017. So good segue there again. We're just killing on the segue I said I. And let's talk about voice search because back in 2017, this was the rise of the, maybe I shouldn't say it out loud too loudly, it'll trigger for some

people, but the Amazon speaker devices, the Apple speaker devices, the Google at the time speaker speaker devices. And we were told that these voice interfaces are the way that we're going to interact with computing going forward. They made a movie about it. Her like the premise of her is basically based on this rise of the voice agent and rise of the voice. I shouldn't even say agent. Rise of the voice assistant was kind of the terminology that was coined maybe back at 16, 17, 18, maybe that era. And we were told that people would go on a voice-based interface at Buck of a Cache rental. And that's, you know, it just, it didn't happen.

You know, now, it could have happened in the future? Is there something yet to come there? Who knows? You know, but the version of it that we thought was going to happen back then didn't happen. I'll do a counterpoint, though. Google Glass did not take off in what year would that have been. I wasn't college. This would have been like 2011, 12, maybe somewhere in that range.

Sure. Like, there was nerds on stage wearing Google ass and it looked weird and awkward and off-putting and people were like, it's kind of strange. Maybe I see the future of it. It's not there yet. And then fast forward to today, what do we have? We have meta glasses that look like normal eyeglasses or sunglasses or whatever. Now, these are mostly recording based, though. So I would say even the Google Glass Initiative was more so-so like an augmented heads-up display that that fruition has or that kind of hasn't not come to fruition with metaglasses. But now we now have so-called, quote-unquote smart glasses as a

glasses wear. I don't have those things. But like I could see myself, I could see myself wearing one of those things because you don't look weird. Like you look normal. Like I saw a guy with meta-glasses on the other day. And I'm like, oh, this just looks like normal. I had to like, quickly study and then look in this tiny corner up here to see the camera lens. So again, do examples of like sometimes a trend is early and then it kind of circles back in later on in some other version of it. Sometimes a trend just doesn't really happen. 3D TVs would be another example I would refer to. Voice search killing SEO is another example I'd refer to. So it can take a decade or more for some behavior or some new thing

to materialize and become actually mainstream. And I think that, let's be honest too, most people are using LMs right now, if you have a paid account, you're in the top few percentage points of people that have these accounts. Most people even using chat TPT and like and similar platforms are not using a paid account. They're using a free version of it. So when I think of like your typical average everyday traveler that's going and booking a vacation to insert, you know, whatever beach or mountain destination here that you like, I just don't see them using that to replace the booking process. Now, to your point, this is, we've said this a lot, but just very very articulate with what we're describing here. You and I are not saying that people are not

using these platforms. And we're not even saying they're not using them for travel planning. They absolutely are. What it is is, is there's new activities that didn't happen previously with Google that are happening now. So the pie has gotten bigger, which there's some explanation. There's some like code for this or there's some framework that describes this, but I don't have it in front of me. Apologies for that. But yeah, that's what's happening is people are using these tools in new ways that they were not using Google for previously. And so as a result, I do think Google will see some downstream effects, but not on the booking process, really more so on informational content. So things to do best restaurants, things to do with kids, what to do in

summer in insert destination here. And we see that in our own content, you know, traffic that we have our clients. We see those articles getting much, much less traffic than they were before, partially because of the actual AI overview itself, partially because I think people are doing that kind of trip planning in these actual platforms. But I'm like you or I'm rean skeptical that you're going to see someone who's just like, just like the voice agent, you just don't trust that a voice agent to book a $3,000 vacation on your behalf. I don't think you trust the LM to do that anytime soon. And I think that that is, we're talking something that's going to take many, many, many years. And again, according to our kind of thesis today may never occur. I mean, I never be

that. Now I'm going to say, you triggered me when you said, said voice agents because I get at least three, four calls a day from people saying, hey, your boisesness isn't activated on the five major voice networks, which again, it's kind of fun for me because I do, I take the call every once in. And I do. I go in with the keyword experts and I say, well, that's not what I want. This isn't what I want. This is what I want. And it's, it's very interesting to hear how they try to spend and do what they're trying to do. And ultimately, I never buy it, but it's, you know, it's testing my skills a little. You know, I got to do that there. But it is. I think that ultimately, when you think of how people are using this to plan

the trips, you would think that it's going to be the expedias, the verbos, probably not the Airbnbs, but I think they've got coverage because they are going to have little plug-ins and they are going to have little bots. They are going to have little agents that are going to help that traveling process because I would have to think they can foresee that at some point it is going to be picking out a specific area and wrapping that whole trip into one. Now there's the accountability, there's there's there's this and that. Well, what happens if something goes wrong? Could I offer one counterpoint though, Paul? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could I offer Google flights as a counterpoint? Because I use Google flights a lot, but I'm never, I'm never almost booking on Google flights.

I'm just using Google flights as a search interface. And then I click over and I, book on the airline website. So could we not say a future where a user uses chat TBT and then it recommends, like you said, via plug-in via some richer text and image interface to say, okay, based on this trip, I think these three hotels would be a good fit for you. I think these vacations would be a good fit for you through a so-called Verbo plugin, through a so-called Airbnb plugin that doesn't exist now. But then I'm still clicking and I'm just booking on Airbnb. I'm just looking on Verbo, just like how Google flights works, right? It is. It's supposed to be a personal assistant type of experience. I think that's how it was originally idealized as it came into existence.

Now, I truly think part of it's that nobody really knows what everybody's dream travel planning experience is because Google, we know the reasons why, but they could still build a better experience than what they got. That's for me personally. The way I plan my trips or the way I go about doing the research or the way I want everything connected, is not the same way people are doing that. So, like, I still think of, it was so cool to see, like, the little destination pages popping up for things to do on Google in their little travel guides and things like that. Because at that time, it was very similar to what we were doing at Resorts and Laws.com.

And I was like, oh, Google's copying us. We're doing the right thing. Everything's awesome. But Google doesn't provide a better experience for travelers than does your direct booking website, then does JachyPT, then does Gemini, like there's not an ideal trip planning experience. Even the OTAs, I think ultimately, that's where the LLMs should be replacing those,

that experience, because they should be able to replace having to go through and having to have that inspiration and having to find the different areas there. Like, I have not seen a trip plan, and I've tried to do quite a few of them, trying to put together that trip planning experience where it provides what I would consider a match for a rental or a match for a hotel match for anything that's that's going on but again I

think that's because it's such a personalized experience and and I do think that for most people like it's going to stay top of funnel like you're never you're not going to have someone going into chat GPT and saying Conrad's cool cabins that's what the search is that's what the prompt. It's like, tell me more about that. But at that point, you know, you're, you're getting information. You're not booking through that experience here. So getting to the bottom of the funnel through the LLM, I think it's possible. But it's just, it's not built to do that. It's not built to take you from point A to point B to point C like our funnel sales funnels are, or our direct booking paths are, I would say. And obviously these things are changing, you know, all the

time. But the way you think about it too currently that JadDPT and these other models go and get new information is they just go do web search. You know, we've talked about this recently, you and I offline, was this idea that when what's it called rag, retrieving, it's a fancy way to say like they're just doing web search. So whenever the model doesn't know what you're asking about, hey, find me pet friendly four bedroom homes in North Myrtle Beach because I want to come and visit and I want to bring my dog with me. It's half the time it's doing a web search and then it's going on these individual websites, then it's going and finding that. Now, could that eventually be in. We can see a future where

within Expedia or something like that's queriable. I think the main thing, too, like a major blocker at all this right now, is that none of this stuff works out of the box, right? Like, if you have to go into your chat, TBT, interface, click connect, click, you know, Expedia, click authenticate, you've now made it so 90% of people are never going to do that. Of the remaining 10%, maybe two or three percent of those people are actually going to use it.

So the only way that does work, like I don't have to do anything when I use Google. I could be signed out. I could just do a search, and I get back results and I get back ads right away. Now they want you to sign in. That's what they want you to do. And that's fine. You may or may not do that. That's up to you, of course.

But that's the thing, right? No friction. I just open a Google web search bar and I'm in and looking at results really quickly. If there's additional steps that a user has to take in order to get back their Airbnb or Expedia results in the actual interface itself, I think there's no way that's going to see mass adoption. And that's kind of what we're talking about here is mass adoption. Not 5% of people do this or 7% of people do that. That's not really what we're talking about.

because of course that'll occur and it's just like any kind of third tier, fourth tier OTA right now. Of course, there's some people that prefer to use this platform. And maybe there's something to be said for trying to optimize your fourth or fifth platform out there. But again, 89% of what you're going to see is going to be from, you know, the major, your direct channels and then the major OTAs. You know, and mostly that's booking.com, verbo Airbnb, not in any order. If I was going to put them in order, it actually would be Airbnb verbat booking for most

property managers. Of course, there's exceptions depending on location and things like that. So that's your, that's your angle. That's your hook. those are your three channels, then you have direct, and those are going to sum pretty darn close to 90 to 99%, depending on exactly your location where you are. So that's what you should be focusing on. And there's nothing in these interfaces right now that to me indicates the fact that the booking phase, when they actually go to a website, they're putting in dates or looking at specific rates or looking at

photos. LMs don't do a good job at that. LMs don't even do a good job of displaying photos, really, for the most part. Or if they give you photos, just one photo, like the number one thing people look out when they go to a property detail page is they click through every photo, go look at it. get any screen recording type software and pop it on to any vacational website. And that's what you see is people just going opening gallery, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, looking at all these photos. So right now that is not there. And I think if you break apart these phases or these ideas into inspiration, you know, hey, where do I want to go? I think that's where your LMs are going to do a lot of work there. The moment you get a little

bit deeper in that process to, okay, I want to book three bedroom cabin. Okay, this is the location I've decided to go on. All that kind of stuff is the moment that you see this gap building, this gap occurring between how the LM actually works, how just kind of a clunky of a user interface that is at that stage. And the fact that I guess it goes like, okay, now I know where to want to go. Let me just go to either a Google search, B, maybe they will go to Airbnb and Verva directly and then they're making a reservation from that. It's funny. I'm just doing a, like I just did it. Just a silly little, I'm looking to plan a trip to Orange Beach, Alabama from May 1st to May 7th. My preference is the state of vacation rental. Can you provide me some options?

Okay. So where do we go? Obviously Google hotels, because why wouldn't we? You prefer to go to vacation, Paul. Are they going to make money off that vacation or click? No, are they going to make money off the hotel outs click? Yes. So we got to be careful. We got to be careful. We got to know what I digress. Orange Peace offers some notification rental and condo options.

First option is a vacasa. Second option is one that's listed. Now here's the thing. They're pulling in properties that are from Google hotels. And technically they could be some rentals. There could be some on-side property managers in here. But I can see it. They're all hotels.

hotels, hotels, hotels, and one Picasso listing that somehow is, I'm trying to figure that out right now, why they're showing, because they're, yeah, they're distributing through e-dreams. So that's how they're taking that booking. But I have, my preference is to stay in a vacation rental, and I have no vacation rentals there. So can you provide me with some free, you provide me with some vacation rentals? Let me guess. It's going to do web search and it's going to give you generic pages.

Yeah, which is just SEO. Yeah. We talked about, I think, the Neil Patel digital line, which is like SEO is just search everywhere optimization now, which I think that's a decent way to think about it. There are obviously techniques and things like that that appear to be more relevant to quote unquote an LM optimization compared to, you know, quote unquote, so-called regular SEO. But when you go do those searches, they're doing a web search, they're going to Google in many cases and just ripping back 10 results.

It's like, okay, well, that's SEO. That's all that is. You're just letting some new tool interact with it, but it's coming. back and giving you that same result. So yeah, that's where the day that leads us, right? Like it all circles back and it ends up back at a web search is kind of where we are right now because that's a great way to organize huge bulks of information and the Google algorithm for all of our complaints about it when it's not favoring us or favoring our clients traffic. Oh, Google's so stupid, what are they doing wrong, blah, blah, blah. But it is favoring us.

It's, oh, yeah, that's because I'm a great SEO and I know what I'm doing. Of course, it all lands back on that concept, right? Of like, where do users, how do users behave? Where do they go when they want to look? Where do they go when they want to book? And that's like the most important thing. So yeah, I guess what I'd say is like for right now, I could see a future where these things do shift around a little bit for sure within the interfaces. I do not see a future for most leisure travel where this decision layer will get removed. I think ultimately people like, I've said this to clients before, too. People like sifting through results a little bit. They like looking for something. Now, I don't, you know, you don't want to put stuff in front of them that's not relevant to them. They're not interested in. Of course, the more relevant the better. And that's where the OTAs do such a good job, right? Like as a traveler, the OTA is great because I can go look at 6,000 listings in a given location on one spot. But ultimately all these mechanics that have kind of come into play on the OTAs and how they work with regards to pricing, it makes the guests down a little skittish. Well, this is a good website to look, but I'm paying such a premium in many cases compared to where I'm trying to get this value by booking directly. And we seemingly have just accepted the fact that like, oh, yeah, it's 20%. That's what it costs.

Like, it is what it is. And it's a shame because, you know, the hotel space did that a long time ago. And then the hotel space spent a lot of time fighting back, you know, with loyalty and rewards and things like that. And I think that's when someone's successful. But think about how deep they got the OTA wormhole before they had to dig this. themselves out of the OTA wormhole, these big hotel brands. And the difference between a hotel and a vacation rental is that we can't dig ourselves out of that hole. Once you become very OTA reliant, there's not an easy path for you to undig out of it because you don't have the reach

of a loyalty program or the resources to build something like that, like a Hilton or a Hyatt or something like that would have to build. So I think you've got to be really, really careful. Or you've just got to pay this tax to the Airbnb and Verbo gods forever, which I'm assuming that anyone listening is not wanting to do that. They don't want to do that. I think there are going to be different ways to get people, you know, to find your way on to the LLMs. But it is. It's not going to be that straight trip planning process of when someone's looking for XYZ.

That's what we're going to have. We're going to have to do real marketing. I think everybody is associating showing up in LLMs with SEO. And it is. That's certainly part of it. But I think if we take a deeper look, I mean, we got it as a bullet pointer. It's all about strong brand recognitions. LLMs are going to learn your brand name if you are consistently being talked about, discussed, linked to in different items there.

Traditional SEO. But it is. I think that that's something where right now the people who are so focused on keyword SEO, I want to show up for ex-vacation rentals, vacation rentals in market. It's what we've done for so long. That is where we're going to have to start to adjust how we're creating. content, how we're creating answers to those traveler questions. Again, blogs, neighborhood guides, all those things. But people are going to have different questions now. It's not just, I want to find a vacation rental in Myrtle Beach. I want to find all of these things. And how can we

make sure, I think this is where Google probably had the writing on the wall with schema markup. And then now I think that will be a non-negotiable because that's going to be kind of that rich data that those LLMs and Google still should be able to read and understand if we are going super deep on the amenities side of things. And I think that that's something that it's not today, it's not tomorrow, but 2027, that may be more of a non-negotiable for us. And it may be before that. Again, three, six, nine months. We don't know right now when it is. But I will say that when I see more vacation rental schema markup in place, I do see those individual listings perform better.

And it's one z-to-z on the LLM side, but organically they perform better as well. So let's just take a look at how this overall planning process is going to go and see if we can prioritize some of those items and making sure that our websites are as visible as possible. Yeah, I just popped up in a client's GA to kind of back up what you're saying a little bit with trip planning. their blog content is down like 14% year-over-year-a-year-to-date, and their booking pages are up

18%. So, like, this is a client with 2.1 million page views over the last full months. So big sample size, right? Large, large customer in a huge market in Florida. So when you think about exactly what you described where behavior is shifting, that's always the question, too. Does it mean that we should never do that thing again? I think that's a fair question to ask. My take on this is that you're still getting some of the traffic. And I still think that if you want to be, if you want Google to see who's an expert, if you want the LMS to see who is an expert, how can you do that without proving it?

How can you do that without having content of your website that talks about what's actually novel and unique? You mentioned stuff yesterday, all that I didn't catch you caught this better than me. But Google doing a presentation at an event where they talk about like, here's examples of what unique content actually looks like now. And it's not 10 things to do in insert destination here. That's really hard to make unique now.

It is, here's my experience going and doing this one activity. Maybe talk through that really quickly because it ties into one. what I'm going down here. Yeah, I think that that's, they're calling it commodity versus not commodity, and that will be a future episode. So bookmark that one, guys, because I think that's going to be helpful. I mean, it is what it sounds like. I mean, you're trying to sell the concept with these lists, and they've been great because

that's how people do searches. I mean, it is. It's up to this point. That is how people, I want to see the top things. I mean, look in your Google search. I mean, look in your Google search console or your Google ad search terms, you're going to see best Vacation rental management companies, top vacation. Like, that is the way people do those searches.

However, now they're looking to, again, we're just adjusting the way we're asking the questions. We're going, ask Jeeves to Google, and now we're paying, some of us are painting a picture. Oh, that's the thing. That's not everybody. You can still go in there and do your long-tail keyword search, and you're going to get a result. If I go into space ghost vacation rental management and I just put that in, I'm going to see a list of results. That's not what people are looking for in the LLM's though right now.

So I do. I think that this is where you can take a look and see and kind of try to understand where that pathway is going, but we do. People are looking for that experience. And the LLMs are good at understanding and reading that content to be able to say, hey, I had this pain point. I implemented these, I mean, say it, bullet points, this agenda of what supposed to happen, and this is the outcome that I got. Okay, that seems like a very personal thing that someone could relate back to. Let's serve that response up more frequently. And I think it is.

Those are the types of non-commodity content of we can't generalize things anymore. And I think that this is going to put more of a focus on having someone locally who can at least acknowledge, you understand. Like, I can write content for Myrtle Beach. It's not going to be very good, but I can write the top things here because I can research and I can do this. But Conrad goes right next door, eats the pizza, and it's crap. And that's the number one on my list. It's over. So I do. I think that there's some, is the human nature of this all too that we have to kind of build into it and say, like, I think that is something that we kind of, we kind of been talking about for the last six months. What are the questions that your guests and your homeowners

are actually posing to you? Like, what are the support issues that you're having? Creating content around that and not just one piece of content, but one piece of content that can serve as five different pieces of content, because ultimately that creates an ecosystem, your internal echo chamber, or you do become the expert and other people can reference not just one, but all of these pieces together that are answering those questions. So I it's feeling philosophical, but I think that all of these LLM conversations kind of get there because everybody's you like it's not a direct one to one of people are using the, we're using a search engine. Now they're using the LLM. We know that that's not the case. That's the premise of our whole episode here. But I think it's just

understanding where that metamorphosis is happening and trying to get in front of it as best we can there. Yeah, is there a way to get in front of it or is it just, to some degree, you just have to react to what's going on. Yeah. Like I think that's kind of where we've landed before. But maybe what you should not do is overreact. Maybe that's kind of where some of our frustration is stemmed from a little bit as people, you know, Paul and I go pop open and analytics profile for a client. We look at source medium traffic. We look at influence. We ask people. You know, we look at the data and we're like, really, you know, chat Chb tea is so important. And then in the last 30 days, the site's gotten 800,000 referrals from Google, you know, ads and organic. And it's gotten 17 from Chat Chachabit. So it's like, if you make a claim, you better be able to prove it. And I don't know, it seems like everyone always wants to be the first of something. They want to be right. When something's changing, there's always someone out there who claims to be the expert in that new thing, that new changing thing. The sort of hottest thing that seems to be impacting us right now is so-called LLM optimization experts.

But there's so much evidence and data out there now about how we actually do tracking in LM optimization, that it's like the results change every single time you do them, which is not that atypical from Google, to be fair. But it is different. Like Google had more consistency to how they rank in order results. algorithm. The LLM is more like, I saw someone the other day explaining this Plinko, where you drop a disk in the top and then, you know, it goes down. So it's like if you drop a 10,000 desks, you'll see some patterns emerge or whatever, but there's an element of randomness to it, you know, any given time it pops this way and then pops that way, the board is fixed and

the disc is fixed. I was like, oh, it's a good way to think about it. It's Plinko, you know, and then there's X number of options at the bottom of what it might land on. So, yeah, couldn't agree more. And I think regardless, once you get the traffic to your website, regardless of how you get it let's forget forget that it's your job to make it awesome like it's your job to you know i did this on the um the webinar prep that i did the other day was um safe i'm doing a stay fire webinar in like two weeks and um i said honestly i think 40 percent of it is the property itself the property itself is desirable and it has the amenities that people want and it's like it's it checks a lot of boxes for a lot of people that's kind of step one that's 40 percent of your battle i think the next

40 percent is kind of like operationally and just like how you run and how you present that listing so that's like it's going to get good reviews because we do a good job of cleaning, housekeeping, maintenance, you know, all little touches are welcome information with solid. The way that we respond to the guest is solid. That's kind of your next 40%. And then I think your last 20% is how you actually promote it. That's how you, okay, I'm going to put it on this platform. I'm going to run ads in this way. I'm going to get this listed with 17 other properties that are similar and put them on the website. I think that's your last 20%. And I think that if you're a smart operator, the most important thing for you to do, like you said, is build a brand name, which

what is a brand. A brand is something that people choose over alternatives because they know and trust it to be, to fulfill its promise to the guest. Oh, it's a clean, safe, comfortable home. We've proven that because of all of our previous proof points that we've kind of gone there, you know, down there in the past. It's writing the destination content, not necessarily just for traffic. That traffic is eroded away, but it's a part of the process. It's looking at every step in that booking flow and saying, am I getting people from point to point be as fast as possible, no matter how they come there? And then I think it's to your best of your ability, building up more channels that you can communicate with guests with directly. Hey, I'm so happy you found us and you

booked with us this time, Mr. Guest. And I want to make sure, you know, we have the chance to chat with you again. And if you want to book again in the future, you are on our email list. You are on our SMS distribution list. These are things that are much harder for the LM to sort of intercept and get rid of until we're maybe at some point in the future where, you know, people don't want to see any marketing message whatsoever. But it's like marketing will always reach its way to you because people respond to marketing in a positive way. Like they want, in many cases, we have clients that desperately people want to come back and book again. You know, it's often something where They can't do that just due to family restrictions, but they want to.

So, yeah, an important piece of the puzzle for sure and something probably that we haven't always done a good job of explaining in this level of detail. Yeah, I mean, think about someone who does, who takes the time, takes the investment, takes the money, and invests in making sure that their website shows up in the LLMs. They're generating hundreds, maybe thousands, who knows, thousands of sites, site visits a month from the the LLMs, but it's only getting them there. There's no funnel within the website. And at that point, they've invested so much that they can't retarget. They can't do ads, they can't do anything. So I do. I think that that's, you know, trying to flip it on its head a little bit. What if you did go all in and try to show up for LLMs? I think the most realistic answer is that you're going to maybe get a couple hundred visitors a month and you're ultimately going to decrease the experience.

don't think like trying to optimize, trying to do these things. Again, we know what actually is going to threaten your direct bookings, a bad website, bad experience, like all these things that are actually going to deter people. Like bad content, obviously bad homes, all the things you just talked about there. Us not being in the LLM is a very small piece of the buy. And I think that the operators fix it on LLMs and ignoring conversion rates, page speed, email capture, that stuff actually. actually moves in the day. It's the truth. Again, it's if you have a bad experience, if you're

taking five, 10 seconds for your properties to load on the page, that is going to impact your direct book. Not showing up in the LLMs, it's going to move the needle, but not nearly as much as hitting those thousands, hopefully of people that you're getting through Google Ads, Facebook ads, email marketing, all of these great things, organic search. And if those people aren't having a good experience, why worry about this? The, the tab. tablet traffic that you're getting or the, again, this other 2%. Let's focus on that 98%. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to agree more.

So I think we beat this one up sufficiently. I'm hoping that's the case. Look at their outline, make sure we got everything in good shape. I think that's probably where we need to go. More to come. You know, I think that this is going to be an evolving conversation. You know, as much as I believe the like quartets, the marketing don't change that much, the finer points change all the time every day.

So I think it's fun to, I think it's fun to have the knowledge of the high level of what we're trying to achieve and think about that kind of 40, 40, 8, 20 breakdown of, like, property and burning it and ups and reviews and high level. And then I think it is fun for us to get down in the weeds and think about how exactly does the link show up in chat to BT? Because those things end up impacting what people say and how they behave. And I think the only way to kind of get good at the game that we play is do spend a lot of time doing it.

And yeah, we always struggle with the hot take artists, you know, who out there kind of saying things and don't back it up. So when we're saying that, we're at least making our argument. You can agree or disagree. That's fine. But we're at least making our argument that we want to. put out there to the world and you can have your own opinion and go from there. So hopefully you have a good opinion in the show so far because we're going to ask you one thing

before you get out of here to your listener. And that's to leave us a review. So go to your podcast app of choice iTunes, Spotify. Leave us to review. We appreciate that. And yeah, we'll catch you the next episode. We'll have a new topic next week. No worries about that. Thank you, listener. And we'll get you down the road.