Heads In Beds Show - What Actually Drives Direct Bookings in 2026? (Webinar Recording)

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

In this webinar, Conrad O'Connell spends time with StayFi, Mountain Mama Cabins and Pricelabs to talk all things direct bookings and how they are trending for most vacation rental managers in 2026. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesYouTube RecordingPaul 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.

Hey guys, Conrad here. I'm going to be kind of solo this week. Don't worry. Paul's coming back next week. We'll have a new thing in the hopper coming shortly. But this is actually an audio recording from a webinar that I did with the Stafi folks back on May 6th. The title of the webinar was what actually drives direct bookings in 2020. So I wanted to kind of share the audio here with you all in podcast form. It was myself, Arthur from Stafi. We had Price Labs in the building as well. A person over there named Amber Prickett. She was great to chat with. And then a client of ours, Eddie. from Mountain Mom and Cabins. So Eddie kind of tells the story a little bit about getting more direct bookings, you know, his story of working with different vendors, you know, on Price Labs for pricing, stay five for email marketing collection, obviously, and then working with buildup on the search and social media and other forms of marketing. And Eddie's been great to work with. I think he does listen. So if you're listening, hey, Eddie, appreciate you. But it's so good, I think, to get one of these kind of practical conversations, you know, out there into the world. It's so common, I would say, that we find vendors are willing, you know, vendors are on online all day,

you know, willing to talk about anything that they're doing. Hey, come sign up for my PMS. Hey, come sign up for my marketing agency. I get it. There's a lot of, you know, content that we put out there into the world for the, you know, for our audience to consume. But it's so great to actually get Eddie onto this recording and onto this webinar. And thanks to the Stafi crew for putting it together and actually make it something that you can hear from the operator. You can hear from the person boots on the ground. He tells, he tells a story on the webinar about driving currently about a million dollars a year of his bookings now directly, which represents, I think, about a third,

somewhere in that range, depending on the month of his reservations coming in there. So, you know, a lot of the techniques and tactics, you know, that we've worked on a mountain mama cabins are very similar to what we do for a lot of clients. But again, so awesome to put it here on the world where you can kind of hear straight from the horse's mouth about kind of how Eddie thinks about his business.

This was not an overnight success. He starts with the imagination. And Eddie deserves most of the credit, but we were there to help a little bit along the way, get him a little bit more traffic, and hopefully drive more direct booking. So a fun one here, please do enjoy. If you have any feedback or comments about kind of these non-traditional podcast episodes,

please email me. Definitely open to that. Somebody message and LinkedIn, open to that too. Otherwise, I'm going to roll the recording here from Stafi. And I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to see the slides or visuals that we talk about during the recording. Thanks so much. Have an awesome day.

So first, we're going to do some quick introductions. My name is Arthur Kolker. I am the founder and CEO of Stafi, which is a Wi-Fi, email and guest marketing software built for the short-term rental industry, and then I'll hand it over to Conrad to introduce himself. Yeah, thanks so much, Arthur. Excited to be here today. Conrad O'Connell, founder of Buildup Bookings, we're a digital marketing agency that works specifically with short-term and vacation rentals.

And I am Amber Perkett with Price Labs. I've been a Solutions Consultant at Price Labs for, I think, a little over four years now. We are primarily known for our dynamic pricing solution, but we are a full revenue management software. And I'm Eddie Love. I founded Mountain Mama in 2018. We're a vacation rental company with 30 properties in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, which is a largely a drive-to market for the Washington, D.C. area and the Mid-Atlantic. Awesome. Thank you, everybody. So today it's going to be really exciting because not only we're going to be able to talk about all the different strategies as it relates to driving, direct. bookings, what's been changing over the last few years. We actually have a fantastic short-term rental operator, Eddie, who is joining us. So everything would talk about. We can also relate back to

what he's doing in his business to be successful in direct bookings, and he'll share some of his own tips and tricks that he's found successful building this business over the last five to 10 years. But I'm sure Eddie will give full backstory of the brand. So we'll kind of do a quick overview first of the state of direct bookings today. Then we're going to talk about the different ways to increase your direct bookings, whether it's what Eddie has done successfully, in general, how to approach pricing,

digital marketing, data collection, email marketing, all the things that we all specialize in. Then we'll give some case studies, real-life examples, and then, of course, we will have plenty of time for Q&A. So first we'll kick off with the state of direct bookings in 2026. And so I'll preface this by just giving giving a little background on why are operators looking to drive more direct bookings in general? I think number one that we hear, at least here at stay five, is they want more control over their

brand and they want to reduce the commissions that they are paying to the OTAs. I don't know, Conrad, kind of like what do you find are the top reasons people are coming to you to build out their brand and drive more bookings for their business directly? I think the, you know, some of the more common talking points over the last few years. years. There's nothing new there, I would say. Like, everything you just said is accurate. Everything on the screen is accurate. I feel like a lot of markets, though, this isn't exactly, I would say, Eddie's case necessarily, but some other clients we work with are really just demand constraint. They just literally do not have enough demand coming from the OTAs in general to fill their properties to

like a satisfactory level of occupancy. So if you're demand constrained and you just genuinely don't have enough bookings to go around, you need kind of both channels working, right? Ideally, you have Airbnb working in your favor. Ideally, you have Verbo, booking.com working in your favor. But if you can add in direct and get even more bookings coming in. That's where I think a lot of operators are, particularly for in a market that's heavily saturated and has lots of listings. Like, you kind of have to stand out from the crowd a little bit. And if your market's seen a drop in demand and an increase in supply, as so many have, I think direct is one of your ways where you can actually just kind of get back to level a little bit of what your expectations are or what your

projections need to be to keep that homeowner happy and, you know, kind of keep going forward and signing more inventory in the future. And then for you, Eddie, was there a particular pain point or moment that you remember where you realized that you wanted to pursue building a brand or drive direct bookings or is it something you always knew that you wanted to do as part of your business? It is not something that I always knew I wanted to do. And I'll speak more to this when we get to our brand story. But I'm one of those newer operators that started as like an Airbnb and was pretty exclusively on Airbnb. And Airbnb, you know, like made me aware of the category even.

And so initially when we started, we were just on Airbnb. But after a year or two of that, I could see how we didn't have complete control of like the entire guest journey. We didn't have control of the guest data. and while Airbnb was delivering was bringing us bookings, I just, you know, it was a little uneasy about the fact that our entire company was being built on someone else's platform, which they could turn us off whenever they wanted to. And I'm sure we've all heard horror stories of that exact situation. And so for us, it was just a matter of, you know, shifting some of our dependence

away from the OTAs, which again can be hugely valuable and you really ought to be marketing through the OTAs. But to be 100% reliant on someone else's business, you know, just didn't sit well with me. And so that was a big part of the reason we diversified. And everything else that's listed on the slide here is true as well. Yeah, for sure. I feel like that's probably, you know, all of those reasons are what we definitely hear. And so I think the thing people might be surprised by when we look at like direct bookings industry-wide today is that they actually, for most size of property managers or operators, their share of direct bookings has been falling and is continuing to fall. So if you look on the right, we have some data from key data.

And you can see here, this is divided by the different property manager or operator size. And you can see in the smallest or the smallest segment here that they track, which is 10 to 49 properties, the share of all bookings that is direct when up one percentage point to 12% still pretty small. And then for all the other size categories, it's falling. But of course, what's also not surprising here is as operators get bigger, their share of direct bookings is larger. So that's definitely a trend we see where larger or more established property managers typically who dominate one market are the most successful at direct bookings. And then industry-wide, it's about 34%. But we've seen that fall over the last few years. And Airbnb is the share of from the OTAs

that is rising the fastest. Conrad, I think you wanted to add here or Amber. Yeah, I mean, I think you said it a second ago. Yeah, for key data dashboard, the data that we had here, because I'd never seen this data broken out. You know, I'd always seen aggregate data, like you mentioned, the first bullet point there. Maybe the average is. is that 34% number, which is accurate. But then if you look at it, you know, you realize, yes, one of the best ways to get more direct bookings is to get bigger. But this is also across a pretty large, you know, sample set.

If you have 40 properties in a market like desks that are Myrtle Beach, it's not really the same as having 40 in Harper's Ferry as that he can attest to. He has a significant portion, really, of the professionally managed inventory in his market because just the inventory spread isn't as wide. So, yeah, I think the key is like, like we're kind of talking about here, getting bigger. And I would look at this trend and be like, oh, there's no way to get a lot direct bookings. There are absolutely tons of outliers. We work with clients that have three listings that get 80% direct bookings, but typically as the properties are very unique.

So I think a lot of what you're seeing here too is just a perhaps a letting go of the wheel, you know, Airbnb take the wheel sort of mindset that's gone on a little bit with a lot of operators. And yeah, I think it takes a lot of effort and energy and work, let's be honest, right, to get more direct bookings. But you can see that the companies that do well and get large and, you know, end up scaling their business typically, you know, focus on direct and make it a priority because they realize the benefits that come from that in their overall business health. Yeah. I mean, I think as Conrad mentioned, it's very, you know, everyone's always asking like what's a good

number, what should my goal be, but it's so market dependent. The types of guests that you have and the type of market you in is also going to dictate how easy or hard it may be to drive direct bookings. And obviously, if you're in a market with a lot of repeat traffic, it's easy to turn those guests into repeat bookers versus a place where people only visit once in a life. time. It can be hard, harder to at least attract bookings on the repeat side, although maybe on the new guest side. There are some strategies Conrad will talk about that we can deploy. So when it comes to moving, you know, how to be success today. I thought we'd start with Eddie just kind of giving a little background of where he started and then how the

process has been to getting his bookings or direct bookings to now where it is today, where there's over a million dollars in direct bookings in the last 12 months. Yeah. So like I said earlier, we founded Mountain Mama in 2018. And pretty typical founder story, we bought a cabin out in this area and we couldn't really find anyone to manage it or anyone that we were confident in. And so we started managing that one cabin ourselves. And that went well.

We felt like we had a knack for the, you know, for hospitality. And so we bought a second cabin the year after that. in 2019. And then from there, as we came into the pandemic years, we transitioned from owning properties to actually managing properties for other homeowners. So that's the best majority of what we do now. We still just own the two properties, and then we have 28 other properties, which are part of the management portfolio. And again, early on, we were, we just listed on Airbnb. We were exclusively sourcing our bookings through there, but felt this need to diversify to not be totally reliant on just one channel. And so we added VRBO pretty quickly after that and then

added, you know, a couple other smaller channels, but it became clear that direct booking was going to be a big opportunity if we could really devote some resources and attention to it. So the first step was just to get a direct booking website up. And so that's, you know, step number one. If you do not have a direct booking website today, you need one. And even if that's just kind of an out of the box website from your PMS, start there. And so that's what we did. Our first website was just, you know, a PMS site.

But it got us out there. it enabled us to start taking very slowly our first direct bookings. Now, without any kind of marketing behind it, the direct bookings were very slow. We were definitely in that category of 10 to 50 property operators that had 10% or less, like we saw on the slides previously. You know, we were probably single digit percentages when it came to direct bookings for that first. year or two and and at that point you know Conrad I can't remember how long we've been working together it's been years now maybe four or five years and actually

you know we've we were early adopters with stafi we've been using price labs for years and so I can you know personally attest to all the different partners we have on the call right now they've all been important pieces of our own direct booking strategy and our in our growth there. So once we had the direct booking website in place, we needed to add some marketing to it. And so that's when Conrad came on as a partner.

And I think we'll, Conrad, you'll speak to this later. But a multifaceted marketing approach, which includes paid ads and includes a lot of, SEO and blog content on the site to make our website, you know, rank higher and be more relevant to people as they are searching for things to do when they're coming to Harper's Ferry, when they're coming to West Virginia. Email marketing is another big prong. And with the email marketing, you know, when you're first starting, especially if you're reliant just on OTA, bookings, you really don't have those guest emails. And so you need some way of capturing

those guest emails and, you know, operationalizing the flow from collecting a guest email to adding that to a guest marketing platform to regularly sending newsletters and staying in touch them. So Stafi comes in as that piece for collecting guest emails when guests are at the property so that you can continue to remark it to them after the fact. So between Stafi and Buildup Bookings, you know, we started this direct booking engine, which didn't lead to success overnight. but incrementally year over year we started to see significant direct booking traffic significant growth in the direct booking channel today we get a little over 30% of our bookings direct probably 30 to 35% and and it's just been a steady climb from

low single digits when we first started any kind of direct booking strategy and probably late 2019 coming into 20, 2020 and it's just required, you know, dedicated, dedicating resources to this can, you know, executing on direct booking strategy and sticking with it. So yeah, I guess that that's probably enough of an overview from us right now. I will say with Price Labs and with pricing,

you know, again, our users of Price Labs have been for years. I think it's the best pricing software out there. When it comes to direct booking, though, like the one thing to note on price is that you should always be sure that your price booking directly is going to be cheaper than what a guest is going to find on an OTA anywhere else. You need to give guests a reason to book directly with you, even if they first find you somewhere else. One way to do that is with price.

There are other levers. Like for example, you can offer a slightly more flexible cancellation policy with your direct bookings than you do with your OTA bookings, just to give an example. But you want to find ways to sweeten the deal a little bit so that if people do find you directly and then go and look and find you on Airbnb also, they have no reason at all the book on Airbnb.

you want them booking on your website. Yeah, so I will leave it at that for the brand story. Yeah, that was fantastic. And as you move more to talk about the website specifically, I'm just curious how do you take many bookings not over the website? Do you take bookings like over the phone or via email or are you driving everybody through the website to make the direct booking typically? For the most part, we're driving everyone through the website.

I would say we do occasionally take bookings over the phone or like outreach through a contact us form on our website. But generally, even when we get those, we are putting those, you know, we might put it directly into the PMS and then send a link to make payment and finalize it. We're never taking like credit card numbers over the phone. So even with phone inbound inquiries, we're still immediately either pushing them to the website or, you know, playing them straight into our PMS. And looking at the website homepage, I will just point out the two things here that I love

and that I always want to make sure that people have is number one. I know where this operator is located. I cannot tell you how many websites have come across where it's like Mountain Mama, something a name like that, but then it doesn't have a destination, which can be confusing because you actually have to go look at the homes. And then down below, you can see there is a person. persistent rationale about why you should book direct. Like what is the value?

And there's that save 10 to 20% when you book direct. And then actually when you click on here is why I don't have it here. But there's a nice pop-up that explains the fees that the OTAs take. So after this call, I would definitely recommend going to Mountain Mommacabins.com and checking out Eddie's website because it is a great example of what a website could look like. And I'm just curious, Eddie, who did you use a company to build this website or do you guys build it yourself or how to that? Yeah, so this website, the one with the screenshot there,

was built by Hudson Creative. Ellie's the man over there. And that was a really positive experience of great things to say about the Hudson Creative team. Not only because the websites, I think, look beautiful. We had he transitioned us from a different website. Well, let me take a step back and kind of go through the website journey a little bit. So like I indicated earlier, when we first set up a direct booking website,

it was just with the PMS and we use hostfully for our PMS. And it was just with their out-of-the-box website. A lot of these PMSs have, you know, you can just quickly toggle something on. You've got a direct booking website. And that's great as a first step. But then from there, we had another company in the space built us a direct- booking website which we used for several years and it worked for us. This is probably in like 2021 to 2024, I think, that we had that other website and it was good. We built a lot of our

search rankings and a lot of our content that, you know, drives has driven a lot of our organic search volume. We built it on that website and it was a good solution for us at the time. The one thing that that site lacked for us though was really good granular tracking so we wanted to be able to log into google analytics and see exactly where all of our bookings were coming from follow them through the funnel see you know what's feeding the top of the funnel the most but then better understand actually like how do those top of funnel leads convert which of those turn into bookings what rates and that could that helped us to understand you know where do we allocate more of our marketing budget so for years we were flying blind a little bit without good hard data on that and we

you believed in the strategy enough to to stick with it but but it didn't let us really optimize our marketing dollars and and put money to the sources that we're actually converting well so so now this is like fall 2024, we worked with Ellie and the team at Hudson to put together this beautiful website, which also has very good, robust tracking on the back end. And so now we just have a lot more visibility into not just where are customers coming to us. How are they finding our website? But then also which of them are converting and what's the direct booking dollar value associated with those leads.

Yeah, and the key thing for everybody here to make sure they ask for from a website company is, yes, you want Google Analytics, but you want to make sure you don't just have Google Analytics that you have the e-commerce tracking as part of Google Analytics. And some people will say they have Google Analytics, but they don't have the key e-commerce tracking piece. So since Conrad, since you spend a lot of time, obviously, in Eddie's Google Analytics, maybe just talk a little bit about the traffic data here and how, traffic source and its quality in terms of bookings can vary greatly, you know, depending on who you're working with and what they're doing.

Yeah, I think Eddie had a good description of kind of the timeline of events. I had to go look it up, by the way, Eddie, what month we started together because I forgot it had been sometime July 2022. So there we go. That's how long this journey has been. But anyways, to go back to your original question there, Arthur. Yeah, I think the tracking and like the fidelity of that information is so important. I was working with another vendor literally yesterday who does have the conference.

commerce tracking hooked up, but they don't have everything split out. So like even with any commerce tracking, you can sit there and get really granular, right? And the way that the Hudson Creative sites work, I keep mixing between, you know, Hum Runner and Hudson Creative. But the way that L.A. does it is really strong because actually when the booking comes through, you actually put through each of the revenue amounts in separate line items. So rent, you know, taxes, fees, all that kind of stuff. And there was actually a question in the chat. Maybe I could kind of kill multiple birds of one stone if you're cool with that, Arthur, here. It was a Sarah M. that asked this question. And she was asking, like, who wins on a direct booking?

is in talking about, well, the rate that I'm getting, you know, my website, if it's that much cheaper, is it really that financially lucrative for me to get the direct booking? And I think that, you know, I haven't gone as deep on this as some of our other clients have. I think there's a lot of arguments to be had for having a reservation fee or direct booking fee on your website that covers some of that gap, but not all of it. So you mentioned a few minutes ago, Arthur, this idea of the direct booking website should be the cheapest option. I agree. I just don't think you have to give up all your margin. You know, I think you can perhaps pick a number between five and eight percent and have a so-called guest fee or reservation fee on the website.

And then that will actually help you build some of your marketing budget so that you can then, because regardless of if you do marketing with me or you do it yourself or you hire some other freelancer agency, whatever, marketing costs money. It's either going to cost your time or it's going to cost actual hard dollars in the case of running things like Google ads and stuff like that. So you need to have that kind of built into your model of how am I going to generate a transaction, make enough revenue and enough profit, you know, on my side of the booking, on my side of the ledger so that I can continue to do more marketing.

And that's how you make your business more sustainable and you make direct bookings. something you can invest, you know, frankly thousands of dollars a month into, which we will have to do at some point as you get larger. So to tie in the traffic sources of like what works the best for Mountain Mama, I think that was kind of a secondary question that someone had asked, how do you go from 10 to 30 percent? The biggest one I would say for Eddie has been the organic search traffic. And we started with in a very straightforward way by just doing lots of blog content articles about all the activities, things to do, attractions, information about Harper's Ferry. What's unique about Eddie and I think what made his case study here pretty compelling is that he has a defined geographic area. I think this is

super hard to do if you have 10 properties in Harbors Ferry, West Virginia, and then 10 properties in Sedona, Arizona, both great markets, but I think that's really, really challenging to build direct booking and build brand when you have two completely different markets. We could have a discussion or debate about regional traffic, but like, in Eddie's case, he's so defined about what kind of guest he's going after and what market that he's in, that it makes all of our efforts here on getting more paid search traffic in the door, getting more getting search traffic in the door much more effective than maybe some people who are a little bit more split. Or this is kind of the terminology that I use on some of the stuff that I talk about.

The inventory and Eddie's website, if you go and look at it, has concurrency. Like, you could see someone choosing between the different options on his website. So not only within his market, he's got some variety in terms of like quality of home and size of home and things like that, which is great. But as you look at the site, he has a standard that he holds, you know, homeowners too. He enforces that standard and it makes the traffic convert better, you know, of the bullet points you're seeing on the screen. So those are small points, like not all traffic is made equal.

And then once they get to the website, they behave differently depending on what properties they're presented, you know, photography, a lot of other factors. you know, contribute, I think, to Eddie's success with direct. So organic has been super key. Direct traffic is always a funny one. I know we're talking about all direct bookings today. But what I always say is like, no one woke up this morning, typed in Mountain Mamacabins.com, hit enter and gives Eddie two grand for no reason, right? A lot of so-called direct direct traffic is kind of previous guest traffic. It's brand awareness from doing ads on other platforms like meta, Facebook, Instagram, Google, et cetera. And then people just recall the brand and they go,

oh, I know who I want to stay with. I know who I want to book with. And then they make, you know, a direct website visit and then make a reservation. But all direct traffic, is sort of just attributed to like marketing efforts, but it's never, it's something we often struggle with to attribute exactly to like, where did that come from? What's interesting about the next two channels that I would kind of say for Eddie, 15% of his traffic comes from paid outs on Google. The majority of that is search campaigns and performance max campaigns. And Eddie, I don't think we're giving away a secret sauce here when we say that what we're trying to get traffic on is what people search for Harper's Ferry vacation rentals,

Harper's Ferry Cabin. Both those concepts convert well for Eddie. That's the majority what those paid out traffic looks like for his particular website. And then the bottom piece that I would say their email. It's not the highest volume of traffic. It's, you know, less than 10% of our website traffic. But email for Eddie is a second best converting channel. So our paid search is kind of like a very narrowly defined set of keywords. That converts really well. Obviously, Eddie pays though. Every time there's a click on that ad, we're paying a fee and luckily it's profitable, but that that is a factor of that ad channel and how much traffic we get from it. But email for us, there's no real incremental cost in sending an email. And over time, working with

DeFi, working on that platform, the list that Eddie has gotten bigger and bigger. So the email traffic has gone up, which is a great thing. But the email, a traffic for us, us converts very well. So if people click from an email, it's like the second most likely thing that they would click on before they make a reservation, which is great because that number will only grow over time. So that's the mix of where, you know, the traffic comes from. And I would say this is a little bit typical. If I could nitpick a touch or just kind of, you know, say something out loud, maybe it would be that Eddie social media traffic is a little bit lower than other clients we work with. But he also gets way better conversion rates and other clients from other channels. So, you know,

there's a lot of ways to win. There's not only one way to win. And I think the formula you see on the screen is a pretty, pretty successful one that people can mimic. Yeah. And I'll just add one. thing to that question about, you know, how do you assess revenue from direct channel versus OTAs and whether it's profitable or not? The hardest piece of that puzzle is what Conrad mentioned before is that perhaps OTAs are not going to deliver you all the demand you need. So at some point, does your marketing produce incremental direct bookings that fill nights that otherwise would have gone unbooked? And obviously, theoretically, those. are much more valuable than just cannibalizing OTA bookings, although it can be hard to distinguish

what that Delta really is, because it's always going to be a mix of cannibalization and net new bookings that may have not occurred or kind of leading into the price labs, part of the discussion, may have occurred at a lower price at a date closer to that stay. And that's where the math, that's where the math Arthur can get really complex really quickly, because there is a lot of data out there. And I don't know, Eddie, I don't think we've prepared this for right now, but it's something probably worth looking out or thinking about. But if someone is a direct booking and they book further in advance, so that means they're probably booking at a higher rate, they cancel at a lower rate, and they leave us better reviews, and we have a less risk

of other bad problems happening, you know, a really bad guess or something like that. Some of those things we could put dollar signs next to. Some of those things we can't. So that's where the value of the direct booking does become a little bit more of like a, is it a company philosophy that we're going to focus on direct bookings and get them. And I'm actually more okay with it than maybe some people might think with this idea of people kind of ignoring the direct bookings and not focusing on it and focusing just on the OTA bookings, as long as they know the downsides or the risks of that strategy. I think what I don't like to see, and I'm sure you feel the same way, Arthur, is people who have this strategy, you know, of getting all these OTA bookings and they never kind of acknowledge

the other side of it. I just think you have to be very thoughtful about what your approach is. And I don't think you should like dip your toe in the water. You know, I think broadly speaking, if you're going to make this a focus, I think you have to make it a focus, you know, for it to really move the needle. Otherwise, you're just going to be getting, you know, that fiber percent, six percent direct. Yeah, and we'll talk more about kind of some of the pitfalls later, but definitely direct bookings, like Eddie mentioned. It's not overnight.

It takes even like the SEO organic traffic. That doesn't take a long time to incrementally build over time, same with an email list, same with building, you know, trust and loyalty amongst guests who come again and again. All of these things take time. So there's not one silver bullet that will lead to overnight success. So just kind of pulling back for a second, I'll just kind of reviewing. review at a high level quickly, kind of all the things we talked about. And then we're going to dive into some more specific case studies and examples.

So number one, obviously, is this all starts with if you are a professional operator, you probably have a property management software. And then all of those typically have a website tool. I know people were asking for the website for Hudson Creative Studio.com. I sorry, I said group, but it's studio.com. In those PMS though, if you go to the website builder section, they're going to have all of the partners that they can build websites with. Some are going to be less expensive.

Some will be custom and more expensive. And Hudson Creative Group is definitely a great one of those options. Pricing will obviously play in a role. How do you want to preference guests to book directly? Well, of course, not giving everything away. And then how does that strategy evolve over time? And then we'll talk a little bit more about the details of how do you actually collect more guest data, which

is very important if you especially are currently all or nearly all OTA dependent. And then Conrad also will kind of show you more of the details of what his services do and what the different types of marketing options are. So now I know we haven't had you talk that much as Amber, so I do apologize. But do you want to talk a little bit more about dynamic pricing

and the role it plays in this direct booking ecosystem? Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, I love the conversation that we're having today. I love being a part of direct booking conversations because I think it's so important to remember that as operators get, you know, more experience in the space and, you know, kind of similar to Eddie's story, you really, really want to start investing and having a direct booking website. And the reason I say that is that in general, revenue management can be defined as, you know, finding the right price for the right guest at the right time and on the right channel. It takes all of those pieces together.

And there are strategies around all of those pieces together that make up revenue management. And from my perspective, just to kind of sort of set the stage, so to speak, I think that the audience that books on OTAs is different than the audience that's going to book direct. I think that the audience that books direct is a loyal guest or a guest that has the strongest potential to be a loyal guest. And when you're talking about conversion and the, you know, forecasting and the odds of conversion, a lot higher with direct than with OTAs. So your direct shot, I know, this is, I'm echoing what has been said before, but I agree that your direct site should always be the lowest total price, not necessarily because of discounts, but because on the OTAs you're giving a piece of your commission away. And, you know, when thinking about that and trying to calculate that and would love to pose this question that we have at the bottom of the slide, it's like how many of you actually know what percentage of your bookings are direct? of you that know that how many of you know if your direct price is less than the OTA prices.

Because you really need to watch out for the OTA-specific promotions. Now, that can get complicated just from a solution like price labs because we are sending a rate that is not necessarily the rate you're going to see on the OTA if you're playing in that game of OTA promotions. I call it a game because, to I feel like it's a game. I feel like you have to pay to play on the OTAs. You've got to play this game and keep up with how their algorithm works to, you know, have decent rankings. And it's just, while I think that that is an audience that you still want to be, you know, investing in and you still want to get some of your bookings from the OTAs, I personally don't want to play that game all day. I want to make sure that I am somehow capturing the guest information, making sure I'm remarketing, making sure I've got this direct book. website and all the other, you know, amazing organic aspects of getting that traffic to your website. I want to invest more in that than continually playing the OTA game. And if you're playing the OTA game and you're using these promotions to improve your rankings, well, that's when you run the risk of having your OTA price cheaper than your direct booking price. It's also important

to point out that when you're, when you've got, you've captured this, this traffic to your direct booking website, you're not going to be cross-shopped, right? So guests can't compare you to, you know, necessarily this can get complicated now that people are getting really savvy with AI tools, AI browser tools. It can have multiple browsers open. And you can ask this AI to give you the best price possible on the browsers, or on the tabs you're on, things like that. So it's getting a little interesting and tricky when you bring AI tools into the conversation like that, but still, generally speaking, you're not being cross-shopped with your competition, right? So you've got the prime pricing power on that direct booking website.

And the last thing I will say is that using Price Labs, a tool like Price Labs, dynamic pricing really should be thought of as optimizing your pricing and not a way to discount, right? So using things like last minute pricing or occupancy-based adjustments instead of those OTA promotions can put you at a competitive price point with your competition while also still giving you that element of control to make sure that the OTA price is still slightly higher than your direct price. Yeah, and some data points I'll just add on to this, especially if you're relying on things like last-minute price reductions to fill, you know, empty, you know, know, rooms that have not been booked or empty properties. All the data that we have shows that direct bookings typically happen further in advance. And because they're happening further advanced, they're typically also happening at a higher price point than otherwise may have been booked at in the future. So I don't know, Conrad, if you generally agree with that direct booking can actually

help you from having to reduce prices using tools like price labs as those dates approach. Yeah, I think it's kind of one of the dirtiest things I've seen happen over. the last 10 years is like the pricing tools are doing what they should be doing, by the way. So it's not a negative comment on price labs or anything, but just this fact of the guest, we're incentivizing the guest to wait, unfortunately, aren't we? If the guest is not particularly tied in or, you know, excited about booking a specific listing or looking at a specific type of home, if they feel like, hey, there's going to be options available. Again, see markets with significant inventory growth. We reward them a little bit too much for waiting, you know, and then they can

book last minute and get a great deal. And I don't think that's just the software connected, you know, hosts that are doing that, property managers are doing that, I think that's everybody. I think that's all the OTAs that want that. You know, they'd rather sell it for something than sell it for nothing. That's the their business model works. And I think a lot of people see occupancy if it's lower than normal as a really dirty sign or a really bad sign, even though, again, I guess you're a lot of clients we work with that have, quote, unquote, below average occupancy, but significantly better than average rev par, you know,

in revenue coming from each listing because they know what to charge and when to attract those people into the mix there. So, yeah, I think you have to be very careful of it, right? because these tools are great. And at the same token, they do have some downside risk in how you're allowing people and what you're training the guests to do. The analogy I always do, it's kind of a dead company now. I don't know if anyone here is really with bed, bath and beyond.

Maybe some people might be aware of it. But they had these 20% off coupons that they sent. And it got to the point where people in my family, like my mom or my wife or, I mean, heck even me, like I bought stuff there before I went to college, you would not go to bed, unless you have the 20% off coupon because it was such a significant discount for the products. So you were demotivated to go to that store and purchase something, which is not whatever. the retail stores should be wanting you to do, right? Like in theory, we want these retail stores to be pushing repeat purchases, pushing more visits.

That's how you get more revenue because we train the customer on the fact that there's a 20% coupon coming right around the corner. So discounting and understanding what the rate is that someone's willing to pay is super important. You should absolutely use something like Price Labs to understand it. But I think it to be very careful of like, I think these tools are like knives and you can easily cut yourself on them if you don't kind of know what you're doing with them, unfortunately.

On that slide, let me just jump in and, echo all of this. I mean, these are all things that we're doing at Mountain Mama. So, like, we are never using OTA discount promos. There's no need because instead, we use price labs and we're using price labs to, you know, handle that last minute pricing, occupancy-based adjustments, etc. You can still execute on all the things that, you know, the OTA discounts offer while still ensuring that you're always cheapest on your own direct booking site. So if you're using a quality pricing tool like price lapse, you still have all that control. You still have that flexibility while still ensuring that the direct booking price is going to be

cheapest. And again, I agree. You don't have to discount a huge amount on your direct bookings. you're just accounting for the fact that you're now not paying that OTA fee. So if you're paying 15% of the total booking value to Airbnb, you can, just by removing that 15%, you can actually have a higher nominal price, like the rent price could actually be higher on your direct booking site, but because the guest isn't paying, you know,

because we pass on all those OTA fees, even if Airbnb is charging us, we're still passing those on the guests one way or another. And when the guest isn't paying that, they can get a cheaper price on the direct booking site while we actually are taking home more and splitting a bigger pie with the homeowners whose homes were managing. Yeah, and we obviously haven't even touched on where direct booking strategy plays into property management in terms of attracting owners, which I'm sure we can touch on at the very end, but it's also like, you can imagine if property managers who are more successful at direct bookings also have higher ability to attract and retain owners because they are typically financially performing better on their behalf.

So now, Conrad, do you want to just dive into a little more detail about all the specific tactics that you're running for Mountain Mama? And then I know on the next slide we actually have some examples of what these look like. Yeah, I would I take your thread you just open it. I'll tie that into the next few things that I'll say over the next minute or two. But I'll say this, we get to work with a wide variety of clients of all different shapes and sizes, right, in terms of number of units or managing and stuff like that. And whenever we get the opportunity to work with a very large client, like sometimes that we get an opportunity

to work with the biggest client in a given market, you know, these tier one, you know, high demand markets. I promise you, they're never lacking for homeowner leads. I mean, very, very rarely are they. So homeowner leads are distributed extremely unequally. It's actually like how dating apps work, by the way. Like matches are distributed very unequally. it's the same thing with how homeowners choose who they want to reach out to and consider managing their property because they are drawn to the company that has a really strong brand, that has a

really strong website, that has a really strong appearance of doing good guest marketing. We get debate in the back end a little bit of how strong those guest marketing things actually are, but why would a homeowner choose someone who's just coming up, who has two listings, who doesn't maybe have the same brand? Like imagine if I started a company tomorrow and tried to compete with Eddie, that'd be a very stupid idea for me to do. But why would anyone ever choose me over Eddie when Eddie has this, you know, now half a decade of experience? He's got this beautiful website.

He's all these reviews. Like it is significantly more, the homeowner is significantly more confident in choosing someone like in Eddie in Harper's Ferry because he has all the proof that he does a great job. So yeah, that's kind of what I would say on that, which is that when you're doing great job with guest marketing, the fun little side effect is that it typically does benefit your homeowner marketing quite a bit as well because homeowners are often very smart people. And most people don't get to the spot in life where they can start to buy second, third, fourth, fifth vacation homes. without maybe having some business knowledge or some marketing knowledge maybe in their day-to-day lives, what they might do. So they see a really strong big operator. And they go, I'm just going to reach out to that guy and then maybe two or three other guys that are pretty big in the market.

And again, that's why when we work with these big companies, we have clients to get 40, 50, homeowner leads a week. And then we might work with a smaller operator that's scraping by and getting one or two leads. And these leads are not distributed equally by any stretch of the imagination. So just kind of hammering your point home there. Yeah, going into like what gives any companies like Mount Mama that visibility, I kind of hit on these three points, which sometimes I feel like a broken record. If people have listened to any stuff that I've done before, maybe they've heard these three

before, search social and let's just call it outbound marketing, if we want to say that, email plus SMS. I know we've focused more a little bit on our conversation today on email, but a lot of our clients are doing SMS as well. But they're roughly in order. So I would say search for us. This is the analogy that I'm doing. And I know everyone kind of wants to write the obituary for Google and, you know,

platforms like chat GPT are going to kill Google. Here's kind of my analogy, if this makes any sense to folks listening in. Google is kind of like this massive. of glacier. Like it's sitting, you know, it's between these oceans and it's huge, right? Like it has all the search traffic, a lot of people that are doing their travel planning. The number one thing they're still going to today's Google. And then the analogy that I'm doing is all these LN platforms, pick your poison. I just put JactGPT in the slides here, but you can pick whatever tool you want are like a, they're like a boat pulled up on the side of the glacier

and they have like an ice pick. And they're like slamming at the edge of the glacier and they're chipping off like little tiny bits of the glacier. So I do think Google search is getting a little bit smaller year over year. But if we were to sort of Eddie's analytics data up on the screen, it'd be very similar to a lot of our clients where he might have gotten 5,000 referrals for the past few weeks from Google, both organic and paid traffic, and he might have gotten 40 from chat EBT, right? So it's like the imbalance right now is still so clear and obvious that like you're focusing on your Google traffic is the best thing for you to be doing. Now, I'm not saying that that means you should ignore or not think about the future and what the future might hold with people

using so-called LLM search models or things like ChatGibt, Gemini, Claude, et cetera, et cetera, to find and plan their trips. I think there's some of that that's already happening. I think that will continue to grow. But again, to ignore the glacier, you know, inexpensive, a few chunks of ice, I think is a bit of a misstep that a lot of people are making right now. And I think maybe it's just because there's some desire for something new. I wouldn't be great if we don't worry about Google anymore.

We can so-called try to optimize for Chat-Gibati or Open AI. So I'd be very cautious and careful of that. And the last kind of search comment I'll say there is that paid and organic focus together. I think is important. I think the truth is that even if you rank number one in Google organically for a keyword like Harper's Ferry vacation rentals or cabin rentals, as Eddie's website does,

you're not going to get all the traffic, unfortunately. The way that the search results actually come into Google now, 30 to 40% of clicks still go to paid results. So SEO is great. We want to focus on the organic traffic and we want to get what we can, but just know that like that's probably,

if there is something that's being picked away a little bit more aggressively, it's keywords like things to do in Harper's Ferry or best restaurants or, you know, top grocery stores to visit. that I think Eddie has one in mind that he could choose there. Those are all content keywords that have been chewed away a little bit more aggressively from the way that Google's laying out the search results.

Ads are still that valuable tool in the tool belt to come in and get more targeted traffic. So I would hate for someone to be too focused on SEO to where they miss the forest through the trees and they realize that 30, 40% of traffic on a very high-intent booking search goes to paid clicks. Don't ignore those because they're very valuable. Now you have to set up your website and all the tracking and everything we talked about earlier so that paid actually works for you. And that's not an easy task.

I can acknowledge that and recognize that. But there's some folks that I've encountered over the years and I don't know why. They're just like anti-advertising. They just don't want to do advertising. And I think that's a bit of a bit of intentionally handicapping your success that you might have with direct. If you're not willing to do advertising, you just got to figure out what's going to work well for your business, your model. The phrase they hear all the time is like, I'll never outspend Airbnb. And I'm like, well, that's okay.

You're trying to fill X number of homes. Airbnb is trying to fill Y number of homes. So of course they're going to spend more because they're trying to fill a much wider pool of demand. So it's sort of a non sequitur when people say that. never like that. Social, here's kind of the way that I think about it. Social media is 100% interruption content, but that doesn't mean that it's not going to capture the right people,

but it's not necessarily in their moment of booking, right? So I think the way that I think about great social content is it creates desire. They see a photo, they see a video, they see a gallery, they see a nicely edited reel showing off Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. They see that content, and then they're drawn into it, and they want to click in and learn more about it. So they didn't go on Facebook or on Instagram to look for cabin rentals. They would probably do that on Google.

All the data indicates that, but it doesn't mean that we can't show an ad to someone, or show organic content to someone that, you know, can create desire and makes them want to travel to a specific location. We could probably do a whole hour and what that actually format actually looks like, but just know that like that is a very valuable tool in the toolbell. I think that if you're smaller, you're probably best focusing the majority of your paid social media budget on very bottom funnel content. So what I mean by that is you call it whatever you want, warm audience, people that are likely to book. But in my mind, if you're going to do paid at first on

social, you're focusing on your website visitors, your email list of past guess. You can actually upload your Stafi email list to something like meta and then re-target people that are on that email list if they have a Facebook account, about 60 to 70% of email addresses that you'll put from Stafi probably will, by the way, according to our data that we work on when we get an email list from Stafi. That's kind of the typical average. So you're able to retarget people who are a warmer audience. You're not showing into people that are like never heard of you, or not familiar with you, that sort of thing. And in a market like Eddie, he actually knows, by the way, what type of location people are typically coming from, maybe some of their age

characteristics, what they like to do, that sort of thing. So in meta, in Facebook and Instagram, you can build audiences that are so-called cold audiences, but they have a significantly higher chance of conversion than if you're just blasting ads out, you know, without any care in the world of who they're showing to. So I think in a perfect world, you have both paid and organic content rolling, but you're going to start with something at first on paid social media, running meta ads. I would focus on that bottom funnel, your email list, website, visitors, and people that already follow you on social media currently, Facebook, Instagram, that sort of thing. And then email, I want to be aware of time here. Arthur, again, I'm sure we can do it now

just on all the email tactics that you could use once you get the email addresses from Stafi, but I think this is kind of my new three things that I say a lot, collect, customize it, and then message it. I would say we have work to do on those last two bits. And AI, I think, is going to play a super important role in that. But I think collect is the most important. You want some kind of offline collection tool. Obviously, we're big fans of Stafi. I think that's the best one out there. There are other ways to collect offline emails, but they're all subpar, in my opinion, to using Stafi. So I'd highly recommend that. Then I think you want to do the best of your ability, customize messages going forward. Here's properties who might be interested in. Here's content from my blog about

information, things to do, that sort of thing. And then ultimately use your email list. Like, I will take someone who's sending quote unquote subpart emails and is actually doing it consistently over some people that we deal with. I'm sure you know that people, Arthur, who collect their emails endlessly and they have a list of 5,000 people, but they never actually message them. Because what actually happens at email list over time is that the quality of it decays. It actually gets worse and worse over time if you're not actively marketing and messaging it. So couldn't be more of a fan of like, just send your emails. I want them to be great. But if they're not great, you're actually better off sending something that's okay.

And just kind of figuring out from there how you can make it stronger as you go along. Yeah, I'll only add to that. I think you want to be authentic to your brand with your email marketing. And if you are a solo owner operator with two listings or a smaller property manager, no one's expecting you to have the most slick, branded, professional-looking email marketing. And with tools like Stafi or MailChimp, you can make emails that are still very professional looking with no email marketing background. But don't be worried about it being perfect because being overly perfect.

perfect and manicured, it probably is not going to align with like your authentic brand anyways. And then, Conrad, I do have some just some general examples here of what Mountain Mama looks like across all these different types of advertising and organic platforms you mentioned. Yeah, just a few examples. So the four screenshots on the left are all different ad units that Eddie has active right now. So whether you're, and this is run through Google ads in what's called the Performance Max campaigns.

So if you're searching, you're going to find Eddie on Google, just regular search. If you are on, let's say, a news website or a sports website, you're reading an article, you're going to see display ad. You know, if you read content or you're focused on Harper's Ferry, you're going to see an ad for Eddie. If you're on your Gmail inbox, you might see an ad from Eddie in there as well. If you are watching YouTube, you might see an ad pop up to click over and book as well. So those are kind of those screenshots on the left. Those are all performance max Google ads campaigns. The screenshot on the right is actually a search. If you do a search on Google, Harper's Ferry Cabin Rentals, not only you'll notice is that Eddie ranks number one in Google search.

That's obviously great. He actually has the knowledge panel, which is very rare. We have very few clients that actually achieved that knowledge panel on the right side. So Google is literally recommending Mount Mama as the best cabinet. rental company in Harper's Ferry. And that's through a lot of the content work and other project work that has occurred collectively, working with Eddie over the last few years. But yeah, he does well there and he gets a significant portion of his traffic through Google organic as well. And I will say the 747 five-star reviews here on the business profile. It's super impressive. It's something that Google also is looking at for SEO. And in Stafi,

we do have a like a text collection tool, which will help you collect more five-star Googles and Google ratings. And then personally for me, I always find that. that Google, you know, once you have a pretty well-established local brand, I do find that Google tends to prefer it in organic search over the big OTAs. And I think they probably would never say this, but I think it's because they obviously want those OTAs to spend a significant part of their marketing budget with Google. You can see the bottom of the screenshot there, can't you, Arthur, right? Eddie is outranking Airbnb, Verbo, Home to Go.

I don't think there's ever been a Bacasa that's been that prominent in his market, but in many of the markets we have we're outranking Bacasa, another large national brands. And I'm not saying a thing negative about those brands. I'm just saying that Eddie's one market, one manager, and one market. He does not have all the inventory. He has a good chunk of it. And I would argue some of the higher quality inventory, but he's not of all of it. And he's out ranking all those folks. So this idea of, oh, I'm small, I have no chance about ranking the big guys. Here's an example right here. Here's your proof right here. But that's absolutely possible. I know we're a little press for time. So I'm going to move through these slides pretty quickly,

but essentially I just kind of want to pivot to data collection because I know Conrad mentioned like Annette mentioned that part of your marketing strategy has to be how do I actually collect data from all the guests? And there are a ton of options out there, including Stafi. And obviously, we're best known for collecting data through the Wi-Fi, which I'll show you in a second. But there are also other great tools. We have this within Stafi as well, which is to collect guest emails

with different types of forms that you send to the Booker in advance. This obviously is an adequate solution. But I will say that it tends to only yield the Booker's email and information, and it's harder to get after the non-booking guests, which obviously if you are using Wi-Fi, you're going to collect non-booking guest data. And then when you have larger properties, that can be a significant number of people, as I'm sure you guys know. There is typically some email data that you can use in your property management software already, especially if you are getting a good mix of non-airB

reservations. That's one thing that's if I can help you pull out as well. And then finally, if you do have a website, whether it's built through the PMS or through one of these partners that Eddie mentioned Hudson Creative Studio or any other partners in the PMS ecosystem. Typically, you want to integrate sign up forms, pop-up forms on your website, because if you are spending money on social media or in advertising or an organic search, if you can just capture emails on your website, it kind of extends the value of all of that marketing, because if the guests don't book in that moment,

they may book after receiving some amount of email marketing from you. This very quickly is what the Wi-Fi guest data collection experience looks like. So guest selects your Wi-Fi network. Then the splash page will appear on that device. And here's an example from Mount Mama, which can be branded by home. Then we take guests to a page where they can kind of gather or look at essential resources, things like a guidebook, book this property again. And then of course, you can right away start automating marketing to those guests, whether it's text messaging or emails or both to everybody, immediately after you start collecting. So in Stafi, I know in this case, Mountain Mama uses MailChimp, I believe.

In Stafi, we also have a very similar email marketing tool that you can use. All of these tools are fantastic. And my number one recommendation is if you are using email marketing tools or you purchase one, make sure you are sending content regularly. That is the biggest mistake that we see. And then when it comes to what to set up first,

I always recommend people set up automation first, or a drip campaign as it's sometimes called because basically when you start collecting data, you want to make sure guests are receiving some number of emails on a regular basis. And automations are the best place to start because you can set up one campaign and it'll be automatically sent to everybody through all the different lists that you're collecting. So with Stay 5 for instance, we often, we always have a Wi-Fi welcome campaign that you can kind of launch that's already been pre-built for you, a campaign that goes out post-departure, And then we also have an automated stay anniversary campaign as an example where we send

an email like six, seven, eight months post their last reservation to remind them to book again. And you can see here on the right, the state anniversary email for this operator has over 70% open rates. So triggering emails based on some data point of collection or milestone in terms of anniversary will yield better open rates and click through rates than just the monthly newsletter, which is also important. So that would be the other thing is once you're set up automations to make sure you're clicking, you're sending an email when they log into the Wi-Fi or sending an email when they submit data on your website. Then after that you want to layer in at least one newsletter per month. I would recommend doing this once you have around 500 people on your list. We, you know, I say two times a month more popular with our customers who are the most successful.

And then in these campaigns, you can send general newsletters. So things to do in the area, three reasons to visit XYZ destination, all of that typical content. A lot of the times if you are doing blog posts related back to the blog post, what you just publish. Promo campaigns, that's also very helpful. If you don't have Google Analytics, e-commerce, promo codes are kind of the next best option for attribution. Because if you have a code that's unique to certain number of emails, you always know if you get a direct booking with this code that it came from this. campaign. And then finally, we do have a very cool feature in Stafi where you can search your calendar, see which properties are available, and then insert them automatically into your emails.

And this way you're making sure that you are not just advertising your properties, you're advertising the properties that need bookings. So a lot of the times, especially folks I saw here, we have people with smaller inventory accounts. What you don't want to be doing is sending a lot of emails, sending folks to properties that are fully booked because then they're going to be disappointed. So we want to make sure the demand or the properties that we are advertising in our newsletters and campaigns are able to be booked by guests for the date periods that we're advertising. Like if you're sending a July 4th email, make sure, you know, with this tool or just make sure of using any tool that you can actually book those properties for July 4th. And then you can

actually fill those dates where you're looking to actually get bookings. I don't know if we want to, I feel like we can maybe skip this part, Conrad, as we're kind of running. close to the end of the end of the webinar here yeah for sure maybe in after people can check out this slide later if they have questions just message me for sure yeah yeah um i will just add a few other things here that we see people do successfully um other tactics um in general in terms of how they're downshifting their Airbnb dependence one very popular one i would say popular one we see some people have success with is they actually open their direct calendar before their OTA calendar whatever length of time that is. So letting their email lists know their loyal audience,

hey, for this very popular time of year, maybe it's July 4th, New Year's, Christmas, whatever it is for your destination, it's just available on the website, and then we release it on OTAs. The other one is if Airbnb is the one you want to get away from the fastest, it's not just, is my direct price less than my Airbnb price. It's Airbnb is the most expensive than other channels than direct. And the other thing I would always make sure is that when you Google, the names of your properties on OTAs that your direct booking website is listed pretty high up in the results for that property. So we see a lot of guests getting pretty savvy. They are scoogling the names of properties and it needs to be easy to find that property on your direct website.

Yeah, so now I will just kind of, we actually talked all about all the things that's what's working and not working. We covered kind of all of these different topics throughout the presentation. So I think we'll just kind of go to the end of the presentation now as we're at the hour to the question and answer section. And before that, we do have some great promo codes for you guys. So for State 5, we have promo code Roundtable, which is 50% off the first three months. For buildup bookings, we have code, which will give someone $500 off the setup fee. And then for Price Labs, we have Roundtable PL for Price Labs for 15% off first three months after your free trial. So feel free to take a screenshot, photo of this, if you want to use these.

Now, if people have a few extra minutes, happy to go through some of these questions. I know we answer them already. I try to grab what I could, Arthur, while you were going through some of your things, at least for things that were relevant on my side. Yeah, I guess the question for you, Conrad, is that I know we have some people on this webinar that have one, two, three listings, maybe are an owner-operator. Obviously, probably can't afford like a more boutique service like you offer. kind of where would you recommend someone who's on the smaller side, it doesn't have much of a budget

start? I still think that your best wins are going to come from your warm audiences. So, you know, reaching out to past guests and having that be a key part of your strategy, like, I think Stafi makes sense, truly, and I'm not just saying that because you're here, Arthur, whether you have one listing or a thousand. I truly believe it does make sense. Because having the ability to reach out to the guests and connect with them directly and offer them book again, I think that's, you know, absolutely something that can offer a lot of value. I guess I'd be curious, too, like, is their goal to grow? You know, as their goals may dictate a little bit of the strategy going forward.

If there's like, no, we've got these three listings. It is what it is. That's all I have. Then that's kind of one thing. I see one of the questions that you put up here live. I think I know the context of the person asking the question. And yeah, like I think from memory, she's in a very competitive market. There are many larger property managers in that market.

It's, I'm not going to sit here and say that, oh, this is all super easy and straightforward. You know, I think some of these things are actually challenging to do. I'm not going to dispute that. I think the world we're in now, though, that we were not in two years ago is you have a pretty skilled marketer available for about 20 bucks a month. And his name is Claude or her name is Claude, I guess whatever you want to call it. And I think that as a small manager, if you're sort of saying to yourself, like, don't have the budget to hire a freelancer or an agency or a specialist to do at least full-time work, I think you can get really far with using some of the

resources that a lot of people, like, I like to think that we put out a lot of free resources, people can check out and learn from. I like to think that you can learn a lot from communities groups, going to events like VRMA, and then implementing a lot of that with, you know, learning at and doing it through an AI system like Claude. Like that is not a thing that existed 24 months ago. And now I think truly you can make a lot of progress doing, you know, emails now. You can design emails in Claude and paste them into your Stafi thing and do a lot of work there. So my tenants don't change like search social and app on traffic.

I still think are the things that you can focus on. Your quantity is going to be lower. But again, you need fewer bookings. Maybe for you winning with direct bookings might be getting 10 direct bookings a year for each listing. That's something that you can do and maybe a few hours a week. So yeah. I'll just add that in Stafi are email. marketing tool is totally free once you connect your PMS. And if you have under 200 or I can't

remember, either 200 or 250 contacts. So you can connect your PMS, upload your list of 150 past guests that you might have and start emailing right away for free. And as part of that, you can use our pre-arrival forum, so not the Wi-Fi tool for free as well. So you can start collecting data at least from the Booker on a pretty regular basis. So I would say there are free-ish tools. so that at least starts out on a free plan until your list grows to certain size that you can get started with because the warm audience whose book with you stay with you loves a property that's going to be the easiest one to go after yeah and i think we answer pretty much all the questions in the chat and of course as i mentioned before thanks everybody for attending and i like to thank conrad amber and eddie for being here and taking time

out of their wednesday to do this webinar i think it was super helpful and the final thing is if you miss part of this or want to go back, it will be published on the Stafi YouTube channel pretty shortly thereafter. And of course, if you're interested in any of these products, you can of course go to any of these websites, use these promotions. And I'm sure there's contact information on those websites if you need more information as well. So again, thank you everybody so much for attending and I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thank you. Thank you.