Heads In Beds Show - What Is The Future Of Direct Bookings (With Arthur Colker)

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Welcome to our second-ever guest episode! We're joined by Arthur Colker to chat all things direct bookings, OTAs vs direct booking "sourcing", what percent of Airbnb listings are direct bookable and a LOT more topics.A special thanks to Arthur for reaching out and joining us.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Arthur ColkerStayFi🔗 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, what's going on? What's happened?

Well, we are not alone this week, so that's a big change. You're never alone, Paul. You're never alone. But we actually, you know, this is the second, second time we've had a guest. huh? We, you know, this is, this is rarefied air for today's in today's guests. You know, we don't bring just anybody on. So this has got to be important. But, uh, how are you doing, sir? And we'll flip it over to our esteemed guests over here. Yeah, I'm doing pretty good on my side. It's, um, the weather is like snap from like warm back to cold. Now it's back to warm again.

Should be good. There was a wedding this weekend, um, that I'm going to. So I had to go to the, uh, the barber and get all the hair chopped off, which had not been that long since high school. So that was kind of fun. Um, not really that. fun, but that's what my wife told me to do. So I'm having a grand old time here. There's been some challenges and some other things that I'm dealing with on the buildup side, but hey, it's all good. We're doing good. So Arthur, welcome. I'm not used to welcoming guests on this show. So we'll do our best to try to get things smoothly dialed in here. What's going on in your world, Arthur? What's happening? Yeah. So if you guys aren't familiar, I'm Arthur Kolker, founder and CEO of a

business called StayFi. And really excited to be one of your first guests on the podcast, hopefully not the last after talking with you guys. But yeah, no, we're just like you guys, we're 100% focused on helping our customers be successful with direct bookings and building their brand. And it's kind of the focus of what were new things that we're launching and things that I'm excited to talk with you guys about today. I mean, Stafi, I would say, Paul,

has gotten probably a dozen free mentions on the podcast before. So we've definitely done some. My affiliate link has done some work. I think Arthur in the past because like maybe for those that don't know Arthur, maybe like the elevator pitch for Stafi, what it, what it does, the benefits of it too from like a data collection standpoint for most host managers out there. Yeah. So the purpose or why short-term mental operators use Stafi is because they want to collect

guest data and market to those guests so that they come back and book with you again. It's a pretty straightforward value proposition. Our method of collecting guest data, I'd say is probably one of the unique things about the business is that we do what. coffee shops, hotels, airports, etc., have done for years, which is use a captive portal or a splash page. So essentially, when a guest joins the Wi-Fi, they have to enter in certain information like name, email, phone number to get online. And in that process, they can also get introduced to your brand. And that way we're expanding data collection outside of just the Booker, but to the entire

guest reservation, which again, in a vacation rental could be 5, 10, 15, 20 plus people. And then later on, as Davey developed, we added it a bunch of additional tools, especially around remarketing. So not only can you send data to third-party tools like MailChimp or Constant Contact, we also have our own proprietary email and text marketing solution that's built for short-term rentals and also integrated with property management software. So you can import properties and availability and just make email marketing much easier, especially if you want to do it yourself as part of your business.

Yeah, 100%. You know, and a lot of our clients, I would say, are using Stafi, and that's why I recommend it, because the list growth that they see before using Stafi versus after, I mean, it's night and day. Like, you can just tell when you look at the size of a list and where the people are coming from. And the quality of Stafi is high, too. Like someone coming in, signing up from a, from a Stafi link, particularly if you're getting a lot of bookings from Airbnb today, it's such a big difference. Because with Airbnb, you kind of get this fake hash email. It's not really anything you can actually do anything with. When you have Stafi in there, you get the real email.

So, I mean, Paul, we've hit that drum a few times. We can kind of fold more so into the topic today. but, you know, it's kind of a half an ad read for a stay-fi. You should probably use stay-fi. It's really good. I mean, we've both been in this industry for a while. And Stafi's, and this is, you know, it's one of those companies that you just don't hear bad stuff about. And that's very, very rare.

Someone's always got something bad. Maybe because they all have that Minnesota mindset of we're going to talk about people behind the scenes here. But I do. Like, it's just there's not, there's no negativity here. It's really all positive. And I think that that's when you can get that type of reputation in this industry that can be a little, you know, a little tough, little cutthroat. There's something to be said for that. So you've obviously got something that you've harnessed.

And I love being able to talk about it when there's other people and when there are. There are people who are using your product. Yeah. Yeah. I think honestly, Arthur, the only like, you know, thing that I hear from folks sometimes is just like the only blocker in them getting more things installed is just like the physical hardware installation. They'll just be like, yeah, especially you have to talk to a large property manager. though like it's just going to take me time to get them in all the properties. And what I tell them is like, cool, start at your biggest, most occupied ones and then go down the list.

That's kind of what I normally tell them. Is that most commonly what you tell people if that's, they kind of cite that as a reason maybe why they're not installing it? Is that kind of, yeah, I mean, we were intentionally very flexible in terms of like how someone comes to us and signs up. And we, you know, we don't sign long term contracts. Everything is month to month. You can do some inventory, all inventory. It's like totally up to you as a property manager to decide like what makes sense for your business. We've also worked very hard to offer lower cost hardware options.

So we've introduced some new products lately in that area. So last year we launched something called Stafi Express. So that's a device that plugs into an existing Wi-Fi system, like a TPLink Deco or an Amazon Ero, and we'll turn that system into a Wi-Fi network with a captive portal and a splash page. And then we have like a new hardware line that's going to, come out next month that will be cheaper than the equipment than we have today. So, you know, I understand like the hardware can be one of the hardest hurdles because unfortunately there's no way

for us to like transform with software alone, like the home router you get from Spectrum or Xfinity, I wish we could. There's no way to transform that into a device with a captive portal reliably. So there's always some kind of external hardware piece that you need to make this work. But we've been focused on A, making that cheaper and B, making it easier to install. in a lot of properties. Yeah, yeah. Now, I mean, I think it's just something for people to be aware of, but like the long-term benefits of this stuff is so high that, like, yes,

there's a little bit of setup, but then once you're through that setup, you know, you're off the races, you're going to have a lot of upside from there. So it's not like property managers don't have experience setting up other types of hardware devices, whether it's noise aware or door locks or all sorts of equipment that has to be put in the home. And as operators, we're in the property pretty frequently. And so we try to make it so that anybody, no matter their skill, level can plug this device in and it comes ready, just plug in and we'll like pre-label it for the home.

So we've done a lot of work trying to make installation as easy and as seamless as possible, no matter your property count. Yeah. I forget when this was Arthur. I don't know if you recall this. You sent me one to put in my own house. So I could like see what the process was like. This was like years and years ago.

And like, I don't know. It took me, I don't know, maybe it took like 25 minutes to get everything up and running. And that was probably like V1 of your hardware. It probably take you five minutes now. So, you know, we worked a lot on that process because I understand it's like one of the biggest sticking points. Yeah, yeah, but it was so funny because, like, my wife is like, why am I logging in to go to her own Wi-Fi? Like, she'd get back to house later that day.

I think she was, like, out working or something like that day. And I was like, oh, I'm testing something. This guy, Arthur said it to me, it's fine. She had no idea what I was doing, but, yeah, it was not hard for process. And if it's even easier now, then, like, no excuse, to your point. There's clients we work with that inventory forks. So if you can inventory a fork in a vacation rental, I'm sure you can sell stay five, get a ton of marketing benefit out of it, for sure. But maybe Arthur, what stem from that and kind of more so the goal of today's discussion is to talk about like what is the future of direct bookings like you know if you go online you read so much chatter like so many different opinions out there everyone's what's that expression you

know a lot of people have an opinions and most of them stink or whatever the case may be I'm editing that slightly um so people have these opinions about you know direct bookings and where it's headed and you know you hear all these kind of um sometimes more so advocates and then people who kind of claim oh this is too hard it's too expensive it doesn't make sense just get a look from the OTA what's like your opinion like if you just say zoom back for a second if you were if your best friend or you know, a family member was starting a vacational business, they were going to try to get more direct bookings. What would be like advice you'd give them as they kind of start in their journey?

Well, I mean, I think, that's a very big question because I think what is true today might not be true in a few years. So I think that's kind of like one thing to grapple with. I also think like as an industry, a lot of people think the OTAs are going to go through a period of disruption right now in their stock prices have been vacillating a lot, kind of reflecting what people think, might happen with LLMs and AI travel assistance.

And I think it's interesting that like even Open AI is like going all in and now kind of trying to pull back out of wanting to do like travel fulfillment or booking, right? So there's like some interesting tension there. But from my standpoint, I feel like we have the powers industry to kind of help shape the future of what direct booking looks like. And it's kind of like how do we try to remove intermediaries and connect people with direct inventory leveraging these new AI search tools that people are using to discover where to travel. So that's kind of where my head's at in terms of like where I want to be as a business is.

How can I help basically people discover direct inventory no matter where it is? But if I were starting out a business today, I would tell someone that they do need to list on all the OTAs. That's always step number one. I think the thing you talked about is you need to get bigger. The bigger you are, the easier it is to be successful with direct booking. which is definitely number two. And then number three is I think you need to focus on the lowest hanging fruit, which is return guests.

And then people discovering your properties basically through billboarding, which is they find you in an OTA and they search for you and then they find your direct listing. I mean, that's really the best ways as a small operator to drive direct bookings. And then the other one is if you have something special, like a special inventory, that's where I think social media can come into play. But you have to be something has to be unique either about you, and your ability to tell a story about writing a short-term business, or your property has to be so spectacular

that, like, featuring it and social media will drive interest in bookings, because those are properties that are also very highly directors, like kind of spectacular tree houses or interesting cabins or people that can articulate, like, a real backstory of their short-term mental business. And those folks can also be very successful, but that type of operator is very unique

that can be very successful through driving direct through social media. Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, a pop all seems like topics we've covered a lot. One word I would pull out of Arthur's answer there was tension. I think that's a good one. There's maybe tension between these different factions or groups. You know, what's kind of your reaction to some of those pieces? Yeah.

As he was saying some of the words, like, oh, yeah, we've talked about that. We've talked about that. We've talked about that. I think it is. I think size of the business certainly impacts, you know, some of your ability to drive more of the correct bookings. I think we've also talked about the market you're in. It impacts your ability to drive more of those directings. bookings. But I like that concept of, you know, the reality is that when you're starting off,

one to five, five to ten, there's not the cash. There's not the money to be able to invest in some of those more direct marketing efforts maybe that we, you know, that we recommend on the Google ad side of thing. So email, you know, capturing that email using socially, using some of those low-cost options are always doing something is better than doing that, you know, not letting perfection, getting the way of getting something going, I think is really important there. So I think some of the suggestions you've got there, Arthur, are really important for people who are trying to get some of the foundation in place. And when we talk about that foundation is that it is.

It's people are starting their businesses at varying levels of foundation. You know, some people just fall into it. And then they're trying to put some of this foundation and bedrock in place. So I do. I think that when you're thinking about some of those early channels, to focus on, certainly you've nailed them there, but when you take your content. You know, it's so funny. People always cite these statistics around email marketing, where like email marketing has a 37 to one ROI or something like that,

and they, they like don't dig under the surface on what that means. And what that means is that as your list gets bigger, your costs grow very incrementally, very modest cost increases. So when your list goes from 1,000 people to 5,000 people to 10,000 people, yes, your cost does go up, but not that much. But the impact of like your email marketing, as you're doing it goes up, you know, can go up 10x or 20x more. And what's also cool about that is that it doesn't take you more time to do that level of marketing as well. Like we put together newsletters for clients to go out to a list of 10,000 people and 2,500 people, and it doesn't take us any more time to do it. You're designing something one time you're clicking the sun and then the infrastructure,

whether it be stay fire or otherwise, is, you know, sending out the actual message to people. So I think it's really important that people understand like digging under the surface on everything that, you know, you just said there, Paul, everything that Arthur just said of like, why wouldn't an operator do well with, you know, getting some direct bookings if they're small? And like uniqueness is certainly a factor that we've talked about many times before. you know, certainly what is good, like, what is your skill? Like, maybe there's things that you're good at that you could do a good job of on the website side or getting more traffic through or getting social. Maybe you're skilled at creating content and you are going to get some traffic from SCO. But like the data is super clear. Like we were talking before we hit record about the key data dashboard data that was presented at Durham in December. So it's, you know, a few months old now. But I doubt it's going to change that much. It basically says that if you're a small operator, you're under like, I think it's like 29 is their bottom cut off. You're probably getting less than 10% direct booking somewhere in that range. That's the average. Now, of course, there's outliers to like Arthur's point. from a second ago of people that may be getting much more direct bookings. But if you're in that small bucket, it's like, it's really just the bigger you get,

the more this ammo is going to help you. But bigger could mean multiple things. Bigger could be higher quality properties. It doesn't just necessarily always mean signing more properties and having more undifferentiated condos. It could be having five homes versus having eight condos would be better for your business, you know, in that situation. And then it's getting your email list bigger, getting more past guests, you know,

that you can market to or just that know your brand. You've had good reviews. Like those are all things that I think mean getting bigger also like gives you more brand authority. and that's kind of how things go. So yeah, that was, I kind of be my thought process. You mentioned a few things there are after. Let's go back to the AI stuff because everything's AI nowadays. You know, if you just go online and look around, like, everything is AI.

You mentioned a few things there about like, and I just remember like when that first came out, like chat GPT doing some kind of integration with Expedia, everyone was like, that's it, it's over. You know, and then like the data is so clear that that's definitely not it. But when I look at analytics data, probably more than almost anybody in the space and like Google is still sending us tens of thousands of clicks as we've started this call. My clients probably gotten thousands of clicks. You know, it's their website from Google. So, you know, this idea of like Google versus LLMs, maybe, Arthur, your thoughts on that because how Paul and I see it is like, the LMs are a new thing. It's not necessarily chewing away all this pie from Google. It's that people

use the LLMs and they still use Google depending on the use case or what they're trying to do. What are your thoughts on that? How do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I think where LLMs are today is that people definitely use it for like search and discovery and planning. I think some of the limitations are, it's like not very good for shopping because people like a lot of options. It's like people like Airbnb because they have unlimited options. Just the dynamic of an MLM and how it returns like if you ask it to return vacation rentals in this place, it can return like three or it can return like three websites to go look at and then go shopping with inventory, right?

So it's not really well designed today for like the shopping experience, which is why I think chat, GPT, or at least OpenAI is leaning more into these like app integrations. where maybe then it can expose more of like a shopping experience with like booking or Expedia or if Airbnb wants to cooperate. So that will be interesting to see how that evolves. We right now are building our own Open AI application because that's helping, which is part of our new project called StayFinder as a way to surface direct inventory to book. Of course, I think the thing that nobody knows is A, will we be approved and then be like how will the model decide to surface this result first another result and then at what point are they going to monetize that because that is like you know obviously

if people are searching to purchase a product or searching to know we recommend hotels or vacation rentals you know are those all going to become monetizable recommendations that the lm serves up and they see it as a revenue opportunity because right now like their business model like requires new sources of revenue because it's, you know, it's currently not like they don't make any money now. They're hugely expensive models to run and their enterprise businesses are not large enough to like support all the consumer use of the product and the subscriptions being paid. So I think that's kind of where my thoughts are is kind of like how how do the integrated shopping experience will it be through third parties or will they design it or try to do it themselves

and then how will that be monetized and leveraged against you as a new intermediary or a toll that you have to pay in order to get a booking? Yeah. Well, and one thing we've covered too extensively in previous episodes about these LLM things. And I think people understand this, but just to like state the obvious here, it's actually significantly more expensive for a quote-unquote search result or a prompt to come back from chat TBT than it is for a Google search to go, Google pays fractions of a penny to generate a search result page. So like if you go do a search on Google and you search, or it'll be to vacation rentals, it's costing Google like three tenths of one penny or something to actually generate

that page and return it back to you. And by the way, they're selling the clicks for a few bucks. So like pretty good business model, right? If you can sell a click for a few bucks and it costs you a fraction of one penny to actually quote unquote like generate that, you know, result for the consumer to the end searcher. I like that business model. Probably why Google is one of the best businesses of all time.

But if you go back and look at the chat Chabit piece for a second. First of all, it's slow. You didn't say that, Arthur. I would add that. in as one extra thing. Like if you're just thinking of it, like, as a user, and you're like, hey, I'm looking to go to this place and whatever, and you click a button. And then you're getting this response stream back to you.

Like, it's just slow versus Google where like you could click a button and the search result comes back in less than half a second too. So it's cheaper and it's faster, which like in business or just like in technology, we have to think that still the Google search result is like a vastly superior experience for like you said for like shopping or kind of looking for a product to actually purchase or in this case like book, that sort of thing. But it doesn't mean that like what this is my thought process on it too a little bit too.

I don't know how you feel about this, Arthur. what I use an LLM for isn't what I use Google for anyways. Like if I'm doing a transcript of this call, when I go to write the show notes, I'll drop the transcript from this call into an AI tool that will summarize it for me Nestle and so that I can write the show notes for it. I would never do that on Google before. Like that was just a tool that didn't exist. Like Google's a hammer.

But what I'm describing there is like an Allen key. Like it's just not the same thing. So I think that's part of it too. Yeah. I feel like the thing that may be coming in the next 12, 24 months is more what we see where people basically have agents operating. on their behalf. Like, you know, you have Claude or you're like agentic companion. So, you know, in that area, I wonder more if there will be more, I'm a person where a believer is we'll have

more specialization in terms of agentic assistance as opposed to like general models that are supposed to like do anything. Because I think when it comes to travel in particular, like if you had a agentic travel assistant, you'd wanted to know everything about your points program, your loyalty program, your preferences, your family, what you guys like to book. And I think something like that is much more equipped to make like actually valuable recommendations and even book things on your behalf. And that's where I wonder like if we see a rise of more agents doing things on behalf of consumers, how are OTAs, etc., going to basically allow agents to like shop on their sites?

And like what does that process look like? Where essentially, you know, instead of human shopping, we have agent shopping on our behalf. and they're presenting us options that we can approve or deny or even we are approving on our own. So that's when I meet like people that are working in like the AI space. When I meet people that are working on cool projects there in travel, I see them more building those types of specialized agents. So I think that is one potential thing or phenomena that could emerge. Obviously, I don't know if consumers will prefer that style of a shopping or travel planning more akin to like a travel agent

than what they do now where they're kind of thrown into the pit of here. is 10,000 results. Now you go screen through everything on Airbnb and find the one that works for you. So I have more optimism about like agentic travel being successful than kind of like this chat with a generalized LLM model. Yeah. Do you agree, Paul, with that kind of general assessment? Like, the one thing I'll lead you into Paul a little bit is that Brian Cheske's talked

about it before is that he has a matching problem, that he has enough properties in the website to satisfy most demand most days. But if he just needs to match up the property with the person who's doing the search, what are your thoughts kind of on that? And then what Arthur's saying, how the agent can play a role in that. I think it is. I think that that is the, that's that next step. I mean, I think a lot of it is just buy-in, user buying. We just don't have that many users that are, we've talked about, using chat GPT to its fullest potential, using Gemini to its fullest potential, using Claude to this

to its full's potential. So the way we're doing it, we're just, we're doing the Google search, we're just putting it in a different channel until that experience is a little better like Google has given us and it's still not good. We know that. It's still, especially in the vacation, side of things. We're an underserved industry overall. And I think what Arthur was talking about there and where agentic can get us closer, but I still think it's a lot of it comes down to, people have to see the experience that they're about to have. I think that you could give a travel agent all of your destinations exactly what you're looking for, but you're still going to need to take a look. I don't think you're going to put your full trust in a human.

I think you're going to be even less likely to initially put your full trust in that agent, that AI bought, whatever that looks like moving forward to do the whole process for you. Because again, then who's accountable? Who's responsible if something didn't go right? If something didn't match, you know, if maybe the property wasn't verified, maybe the property didn't actually exist, but, you know, we know how the space works. We have phantom properties that are living out there. But Paul Airbnb is going to verify every property.

They said it like three years ago. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. I'm so waiting for Google to verify all the advertisers too. but that's home and under scenario. I mean, I think that user adoption is going to play the biggest role in how successful AI isn't any vertical, regardless of what we're looking at, but especially in the travel space because there just are so many options,

meta-search, OTAs, everything. Like, Google has its own infrastructure around the hotels that is almost untouchable, I would say, but trying to bring agents into that experience, I can absolutely see a better experience. We don't have that yet. And I do, I think, until we have a better aggregation experience. And I think that is like that, I mean, the concept of stay finder really is exciting there because we need a better aggregator.

We need a better spot. We need that verified, you know, whatever it is. It doesn't have to compete with Airbnb necessarily, but we need to get more people coming directly to those websites that you can book directly with. because at some point, you know, the costs, the lack of control over your own inventory, defaulting to travelers. I mean, these are things that are going to impact, I think, Airbnb's overall long-term ability to keep all of that inventory on the site.

It is. It's easy to get it on there. I think at some point it's going to be just as easy to get it off. And that's when, you know, Treski talks about bringing more hotel inventory on and doing some things like that. I think it's going to need to be out of necessity because, like, you're saying, he doesn't have what's needed to fill the ultimate desire of what that travel audience looks like, 12, 24, 36 months down the road. Do you think Arthur is bringing the hotels

in the mix on the Airbnb side? Do you think that that's Airbnb betting on the fact that there's just traffic here that we're not converting well enough? And if we have hotels on there, we'll convert more. Is it that simple of an answer? Or do you think there's more into the hood there of like quality and a boutique hotel is more quality than a small-time Airbnb house? What are your thoughts? I think they look at bookings, stock performance, and they compare it to it to that. their own and they're like, we need to copy booking.com, which is we need to have all accommodations to we maximize the dollar and send of every piece of traffic. And then actually because we drive a lot more direct traffic, like our will be more efficient than booking.com because

they have to spend a lot more on search. So I don't think it's innovative. I think it's like actually quite looking in the rearview mirror in a way. Copycatting. So it's not like an inspiring like a mission or thing that Airbnb is just doing. But I understand the rationale behind it, which is like they have no, they're an innovator dilemma trap where the new things they've launched to have all, I don't think Airbnb experiences has done much, if anything, and I don't think they make any money from it.

So, you know, they got to look at what's working and copy it, which is, you know. Have they done anything, are there, other than their core product of short-term rentals? Like, they've tried several things past that and like they haven't hit one yet. Yeah, they tried property management. And they tried to like launch their own short-term rentals.

rentals that they were managing. I forget the name of that brand. Wasn't it lucky or something like that in Paris? Yeah. I didn't try it. I was I got a few flavors of that. Yeah. Um, they don't even have a loyalty program or credit card. I think that's coming. I think we're going to get loyalty credit hotels and we're just going to look like an OTA. Yeah. Like dot com. Yeah. Yeah. It's with a different sort of veneer on the front, the front door, you know, but it's, it's that element of it. Yeah. I mean, they'll have more unique inventory than booking. So true. True. Yeah. I mean, like if you, if you, if you, if you, if

you listen to the detractors of Arthur, you know, of Airbnb, I think on the guest side, what they would say is I tried it one time. I had a bad experience or I tried it, you know, a few times and I had a mixed, you know, level of quality experience. And I think it when you go look at the predictability on the hotel side, it's like, we had Scott Eddy on the art of hospitality feed like a month ago. And he said, we offer space not service. That's what like a vacation rental is. Like, hey, you get a lot of space here. Service isn't very good, but like you get a lot of space. And that's like stuck my brain since then. I've almost played that back every day because I'm like, that is kind of true. Like with Airbnb, you don't really know what you're getting. A property

can be a 4.5 something and like it's just a complete coin flip on whether you're going to have something decent or whether you're going to have something really rough around the edges. And that's challenging. Like that's a huge challenge versus like the hotel, even a boutique hotel, maybe I feel like it's more predictable. Like I know I'm getting with that experience and maybe there's value in that stay. So yeah, I think that an element of what you're saying there's true. Go ahead. Yeah. And I mean, it's my, I mean, that's the whole purpose of building a brand, right? we're going to have some attributes about the experience that consumers will intuitively understand if I book a four seasons versus a holiday in, like, I know what's going to be like approximately

within some reasonable bounds. And I think there are interesting vacation rental brands out there. I think it's unfortunate that some of the bigger national players like really couldn't succeed because it like shows that the industry really struggles to scale beyond one market. it's very hard. So I definitely feel like brands are the best the best performing brands I still see in short-term rentals are all locally oriented. And I'm probably you guys see that in search performance and like who dominates traffic in this destination. It's going to be X beach vacation rentals with 250 listings that's specialized in that market. I feel like they're still the strongest performers both on the direct side, the brand side and like ability to retain guests and like

maintain quality. Yeah. Yeah. So, so. a small pivot then over to StayFinder and kind of what you guys are doing over there. So the premise being that aggregation, like Paul said earlier, is a problem, knowing, you know, what price I'm paying is a problem. Like I don't want to pay more than I need to, certainly. Walk me through like kind of how the StateFinder website works. If I'm going there as a first time, let's say I am a traveler for the sake of this argument, we can talk about the other side a second if you're a property manager.

I had to get listed on there. But walk me through that kind of process of like, why would I use that over just going on Google and digging around and searching? Yeah. So for Statefinderer, like the problem to solve for the book. or the prospective guest is to be able to show you all of the inventory with a direct booking match with a website and what that price is and then let you sort and filter through it to find the property you want and getting the best price first booking on the OTA.

So for any destination you search, we will return every Airbnb listing and then for every Airbnb listing that we can find a price match or a price, you know, a price from a direct listing, we will then show you that price as well, the savings, and then we will direct you to the direct booking website to complete the transaction. So it is a meta-search platform because we are not involved in the booking. The booking is still between the consumer and the direct brand, if you choose to book with that operator. And so building that A was not easy. There are some folks out there that have tried to do it, but it's very, very hard because there are a lot of different types of direct booking websites of varying quality and usefulness. And finding them all is also

not easy. And then once you find them, then you have to match them to an Airbnb listing, which is also very challenging because they may not share the same description or title, but often the images are the same. So, you know, one issue was scraping everything. And then B was building algorithms to then match all of the inventory, which we've done. We've probably matched between like five to 10% of Airbnb's listings, we found a direct match. We only think the max is probably 15 to 20%, like 80% of Airbnb inventory does not have a direct listing or a price that we can return. So that's kind of like our goal is to get close to that 20%.

We've done the United States. Now we're starting to do overseas. So that's the advantage for our guests is we're going to deliver you the best price for any listing that you want to go stay in. We also have a Chrome extension so that when you're on Airbnb's website, we will actually show you next to the listing with the direct prices as well. So if you're searching there, you can see all the listings that have direct websites and what those prices are as well.

Yeah. So does that make sense for like why a consumer to want to use the product? Yeah. And the analogy I was going to do. Did you ever use the Chrome extension called Honey before, Arthur? Yeah. Like same with like racketon, honey. Yeah.

All of these folks like you're on Amazon. It's like, oh, you can buy this cheaper on Home Depot or like whatever it is, right? Yeah. That's when I first kind of saw the website and you sent it over, Troy sent it over to me. I was like, that's what clicked in my brain instantly. is like, oh, it's like honey, but for vacation rentals, so maybe people know that brand. I think who bought them PayPal or Capital One or some other kind of,

I think large financial institution bought them in the primary service. But like, yeah, I mean, that made sense because they were doing affiliate income. So I guess the sticky question that Arthur is, how do you make money doing this? Like, it sounds like a good thing as a consumer. I get a better deal. But how does a stay finder benefit financially from like that click or that transaction? Yeah, I mean, our main, well, so the reason why we launched the product

is one to solve this consumer problem. but for our stay-fi users, the other thing that we wanted to help them with is direct discovery from people that haven't stayed with them before. So, like, the Stafi product was very oriented around you have people that stay with you. Now we're going to help you get them to re-book. But the question is always like,

okay, we have all these people that stay at vacation rentals. How do we help them discover other users direct inventory to book? And that was kind of like why we built StayFinder for our users. So it's very much the benefit for using Stapfinder, and being a StateFinder member, which we'll talk about, is then all of your listings are listed first in the StateFinder result. So if you use the StateFi, if you use StateFi, then you'll be listed first in StayFinder. And the way that we drive traffic is that for those people that want to be StateFinder members, then in addition to opting into the operator's email marketing program, the guest also opts into our email marketing program for StayFinder. So in exchange, you're getting listed first in StateFinder.

you're sharing your guest data with us, and then we market to that larger pool of hundreds of thousands of people to go find your listing and other listings on StayFinder. So it's really meant to increase the value of having Stafi and help us drive more Stafi acquisition, if that makes sense. No, yeah, it makes complete sense. Paul, I feel like we're beating Arthur up a little bit here.

Does it all make sense on your side so far? I feel like I'm kind of concept to see where we're going here. Absolutely. I mean, it is that collective marketing effort and really allowing more than just your business to grow, but it is. I love that concept. I think that's truly the model that works with one of those directory, meta-search sites. That's something that having seen behind the scenes of a few of those,

that's what makes it effective there, is really being able to fill in all that inventory and then be able to market collectively bringing up the entire directory as opposed to just focusing on little pockets there. Yeah, and when I tell operators that are a little hesitant about, like, oh, do I really want to share my data with you? It's like, number one, your guests are going to look on Airbnb and Verbo, and they're going to see all your competitors anyways. And if the price is better and a competitor for a similar listing,

they're going to book there, right? So we're not increasing competition for you by taking someone to StayFinder. And the second thing is by then showing this data with us, you're going to then get exposed to the hundreds of thousands of guests that's data with other Stafi users. And so we're going to help everybody work together. together to try to disintermediate Airbnb and provide people access to direct listing. So it's like a rising tide will lift all boats and help everybody involved.

And so you just kind of have to get past that ultra-competitive mindset and realize that like this will benefit everybody collectively. And we'll all be better off than if we didn't do this before. And the hope is, you know, if OpenAI accepts our application, then when you are looking for short-term rentals on chat GPT at least, we'll be able to, you know, the LLM could serve up the information. These are,

this listing is available on Airbnb for $399 and available here for $350 at night. I mean, that would be the information we are providing the model to them to provide to users. So hopefully it would think that is valuable for somebody to know, but obviously it's hard to know

how the model will use the application that we're providing it and when it will surface it to users. Like, that's all definitely a black box. Yeah, 100%. I mean, like, I don't know, also you mentioned Claude earlier. I don't know if you're much of a Cloud user, but it's like you can actually call a skill in Claude,

like you can reference the exact skill name. But what I'm noticing using Cloud more and more lately, even so far this week, you know, a few days this week, is that now it's calling skills just based on my prompt. So like, I'm not even needed to call the skill, it just does it. And I wonder if obviously, I'm not as, candidly, I'm just not using ChatT as much as I was because I'm kind of been on the Cloud train recently.

But if, you know, one would wonder if Chat TipT would get that direction where I'm like, I see what the user's trying to do, I'm just going to go plug in StayFinder and or potentially other alternatives. right? Like they're going to plug in that extra extension or I forget exactly the name connector or whatever the case may be and say, okay, there's users trying to accomplish this job. Let me bring this tool in. And then boom, now I'm answering it with that particular. Yeah. I don't know. For Claude right now, it's kind of like we can build Stayfiner in a way where like these LMs can like use the website on their own and get the data back. You know, I don't know if they're going to have a similar process of like, do you want to provide like more of an experience for shopping?

Like little simple things, like little image previews. Is that what you're thinking? Like stuff like that? Yeah, it's kind of like how, you know, just kind of like, it's a little bit different than an SEO, how you can, you know, decide what the meta tag is and you tag this and it will return this image first and all that stuff. It's kind of like what way of building the website or what kind of integration, I don't know what to call it product that you would have that would help the agent interpret what it is

that you are providing and provide it in the best way to the consumer, right? So there's kind of a whole murky area there that we're trying to decipher so that when people do want to discover rentals and find the best price that the agents learn about, A, Statefinder, and B, like, how to use it to provide that information to the end user. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing we had, Brett and Bliss, too, on the Art of Hospitality probably, again, like two months ago at this point. And his sort of his sort of theory or thesis to some degree was like it makes the most sense for the LLM to partner with Airbnb or to partner with some of these large OTIP. platform is because they can make one API or they're using MCP and API, I guess, kind of interchangeably in this context. But like they make one call to that server and they say, give me this data based on what this user is looking for, dates, you know, location, you know, that sort of thing.

And then they go, yep, cool, great. We have hundreds of listings. Like, we're going to port you back seven or eight. Go put those in the in the feed of the user. So one would assume that, like the most optimal outcome here, Paul, would be that a user would get access to one feed, like one tool, maybe stay finder could be that tool where they go in there. They make a request for dates and they get back, maybe both options. Hey, here's 20 properties in my future criteria. And there's our Airbnb, but we found seven that actually are on Airbnb, but also are listed here. And like, then the user can decide what they feel like they want to do. And like, obviously, Airbnb's fees and pricing, obviously they've changed that recently. But like even in the past,

when they were charging the guest fee and it was visible, wasn't that much of a hindrance for their growth because they were charging that guest fee for a very, very long time. And they were growing like a weed the whole time. So like the guest does not like the fees, but at the same token, it must not have been that much of a detractor because they're still willing to book on Airbnb, even when the fee was more obvious and it was like a separate line item. But I guess Paul, your thoughts on that. Most users were not aware of an alternative option to book the same property, right? Yeah. At the end of the day, right? Like if everybody knew that, you know, they could Google the property and find it without the fee, it probably would have been, you know,

not as easy to be successful with those properties at least. Although there is some people think that booking through Airbnb is like a safer option for them as a traveler, I get as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've said that before too, right? Like, Paul, we've talked about the fact that like people like the middleman, as much as it pains me to say that on the marketing side or, you know, the property manager hearing that may cringe a little bit of like, oh, why would you want the middleman? The middleman causes me a lot of stress and anxiety. You know, the guest feels like, well, if someone goes wrong, I can call Airbnb, they're going to try to fix it. What they do or not is a whole different discussion. But yeah, your thoughts on that, Paul, from your son.

Yeah, I mean, I think that that ultimately it's, uh, wherever, there's a reason why people choose Airbnb over and over. That's that, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, thing. Whether it's their marketing, maybe. But I think that is. We've seen repeatedly that trust is when they're surveyed. It's one of the top factors. And I have questions about that too. But when you continue to side with the traveler on disputes, yeah, that's going to build some trust over the property manager and trust with us. Different story. But this is why we kind of have the, I don't know, schism that we do and trying to really everybody is trying to everyone acknowledges that Airbnb is a necessary evil that you need to maybe grow your business initially but you're ultimately trying to

decouple yourself as much as possible and i think there are the b either arthur you nailed it on the head is that because people don't know because people i think that is it's getting this in this option in front of people now it's it's making sure people understand okay getting that extension and allowing people to see that as an overlay of, okay, yeah, you can go to Airbnb, but work directly over here and get a better option. And if price is a qualifying offer, that should be a no-brainer for them to go through and say, yep, this is, I can build the trust with this individual owner. And then they get to market down the road. We know the downstream effects of that. And it's exciting to see something like this, because we can all see how that marketing cycle can

kick off and really potentially run down the road there. Is the vision down the road, Arthur, that like someone will be able to sign up even if they weren't a Stafi customer and like be promoted or be boosted or be boosted? Or like the goal is still, you know, in the near term to be like, hey, you want to get boosted on this platform. You got to be a Stafi user in order to get that. I'm just curious to your thought process. Yeah. So I mean, we have kind of four tiers properties. So we have at the lowest tier are just properties that we've found matches for and we list them. Then we rank above those people that have created StayFinder accounts, which we have We haven't quite, we're in the process of building that flow of coming in to StateFi just for the purpose of StateFinder, but you can have this free account and soon we'll like you, we'll see analytics and claim your properties and edit them. And then above that are StateFi paying customers that aren't sharing data. And then above that are paying StateFi customers that are also sharing data. So we do intend to launch very soon in every property management software marketplace, a standalone stayfinder tile and onboarding experience so that someone can come and just basically claim the properties on StateFinder

as well as see how they are performing. And I imagine some benefit to you there too, right, is that then you're getting directly into the PMS data so you can like verify all the details and make sure it's accurate and probably even improve your data accuracy and you're matching even further. You mentioned that you've done a lot of work on it. I'm sure it's good. But like it would be more accurate if you knew that information. Yes.

And we would also discover more properties because, you know, when you import all of your properties from your PMS, we would. We will attempt to get every direct listing and every Airbnb URL and soon other OTA URLs from the property management software. Not all of them provide that data in their API, unfortunately. It's a little annoying. But we may have discovered eight of your properties, but you actually have 10. So then you will be able to add the two additional pieces of inventory to the StateFinder

experience. And then all we need to do is create a match is we take your Airbnb listing and your direct listing. Once we have that, we can create a net new listing for you. And I think that's one of the reasons why StateFinder is possible now is that we actually take those two listings, feed them to Anthropic and build you a net new listing based on those two listings. Okay. Yeah. You mentioned earlier kind of like the matching being something that, you know, maybe there's only 20% of listings in Airbnb that even have a direct booking option. You know, in that in that world, I wonder what your thoughts are on this.

Is it that those 20% are potentially two like higher quality listings in a way because they're most likely run by a more professional property manager or they're run by someone who? has a direct booking site, even if they're a small hosts, like, do you have any judgments or, like, data to back up kind of like the quality of those listings as opposed to your quote unquote Airbnb only type of host or type of manager? I think the Airbnb only host, it's such a wide range of types of operators and people that it's, like, very hard to know personally. I don't think we have any, and we don't know yet, like, oh, if I looked at this pool, are the ratings on average higher or lower than the other pool, right?

I guess theoretically we could look at that. We haven't yet. I think there's even, you know, there's always this debate around like, are professionally managed properties versus like mom and pop properties, are they more consistent? Do they have on average higher ratings? I think it's still a little bit. I don't know.

To me, the jury is still out on that just because it just varies so much by market and operator and who the people are. So, you know, I don't have any general view yet on like what the differences between those groups might be. Yeah. I'm talking to a property manager right now, kind of a client, someone we're doing some project work for, and he's in a market where kind of like the only way you can do short rentals in this market is if you have like a commercially

zone property, that's what he focuses on, obviously, or you live in the property. And then you're renting out like a separate space or like an attached space, an ADU, that type of thing. It's kind of, it's on the West Coast and that's kind of the rules in that market. So a lot of the, you know, RBO style renter or hosts in that in that market are people that like live on site or they live right next to the property. And so they give many of them, especially the ones of very high reviews, give like unbelievable personal service. like they're like oh like you're coming and staying in my house you're staying like something attached to my house so like they're there like they're going to be there and as a legit Airbnb

experience yeah in a way right experience yeah and so as a result he's like yeah like I'll be honest like it's hard to beat that experience I am using commercially his own properties he has like 300 listings kind of somewhere in that zone and if you go look at his ratings they're excellent like if you were to go contrast them with other 300 unit companies and other places around the country you'd be like this guy's like top 5% top top top 2% type of ratings and reviews and things like that but yeah like it's just hard to match like you know susan coming by with like fresh cookies and being like, oh, I hope you're enjoying your stay. Like, that's just really hard to match at 300 units. Like, even if you really care about it, like this particular host does,

it's just a very tricky thing to manage that scale. So like a well-run, you know, RBO style or, you know, Airbnb host style listing is pretty hard to beat if you're a professional manager because they're doing things that don't scale because they have one listing, right? And it's just like their side hustle personal income. So that's kind of mine. As I've learned more about it, that's kind of the journey that I've been on from there. We've talked about a lot of things, Arthur. Some other things that you're kind of thinking about with the stay finder. What have I not gotten to so far? We talked about kind of like some AI impact. We've talked about how users find the product, how you get listed, what the problem you're kind of trying to solve.

What are some things that we haven't gone into yet or functionality that's coming. Maybe you can sneak out of the hood on. I mean, there's like so many things we want to do. It's kind of like an endless list wish list, right? Whether it's integrating, we really want to integrate checkout into the experience. So like you're checking out with the property manager. But on the stay finder web page to kind of increase conversion and not also not rely on like the booking engine. that we're sending people to, which can be of extremely varying quality and trust appearance,

right? Right. As well as just the email marketing side. Like, once we collect this data, how do we effectively market to the audience? And that's another big challenge because now we're approaching, you know, over 200,000 people in the stay finder list and it's growing 30,000, 50,000 people a month. And it continues to grow faster and faster. It's a lot of data, a lot of history about.

about where they stayed, you know, how do we start, instead of just sending generic email, how do we start to segment it, how do we start to trigger emails based on people's behavior on the website, cart abandonment, all that stuff. So we have a lot of, you know,

as much as we, you know, our email marketing specialist in a way as a business, you know, there's a whole new level of email marketing once you're dealing with millions of guest data records. You know what I mean? That's like a whole other level than what we're traditionally used to doing by making it smarter and more intelligent about how we target people with certain properties. You know what I noticed too a little bit is that like when I get like emails from Airbnb

or from Verbo and stuff like that, they're often not that personal to me. They might reference last day I did. I think the last Verbo booking I made was for Charlotte, North Carolina for a concert that I was going to. But it's like I don't travel to Charlotte regularly. That was just kind of one thing I did with my wife. And then it's like, you know, our next trip that we have planned is for Aruba. You know, it's happening in June. So it's like there's no correlation between those two things. How would they know I'm planning a trip to a Rubah unless they look at my search history and stuff like that? So it's a really tricky problem because just because they stayed over here in Florida doesn't mean they want to come back to Florida. They could want to go somewhere else next time.

So it's hard. Yeah, I mean, I think our objective with email marketing is like a little different because you know about verbbo and booking. Like we're trying to build brand awareness. So I mean, it's like it's a little bit of a different challenge because when they're emailing you, I don't the email marketing is worth as much to those companies because when people are in market to travel, they go look there anyway. typically. So yeah, I think for them, I don't know what like their, because I don't really, I don't really subscribe to their emails. I don't even know how much active Airbnb emailing even does as a business. Yeah. It's definitely like not as important to a large OTA to do email marketing than it is for someone who's smaller or somebody who's trying to build awareness

with consumers where you need to be in their inbox a lot so that then they were reminded to use your service when they're in market to book a stay. Yeah, yeah. It is funny, right? Like when you think about the the mechanisms that grow, the OTA is often not what you should be doing as a smaller host or property manager. I think that sometimes put people's brain in a pretzel, you know, where they think, well, this is why Airbnb, you know, gets that percentage of that commission. One thing we didn't touch on before, it was like in my notes here, just in my thought process, and we went a different direction is when they did that percent change back a few months ago, a lot of hosts and property managers didn't actually change their rates. There was some data

that, AirDNA had released about that where I forget the exact percentage offhand, but it was like a sizable chunk. I think it was like in the 20 percent, 30 percent range of people. just basically ate that fee, like that 15.5% fee that they kind of swap things around on. They just kind of ate it. So that to me is shocking because if that person gets to the end of their month or at the end of their quarter, they start to look at their numbers, like wouldn't they realize that like a lot of money shifted out of their coffers and into the other side of the coin, like one would assume? I think that just reveals like what percentage of the inventory is very much like casual hosts or the types of people that you described earlier of maybe they're not even renting all the year. Maybe they're just like renting their home when, you know, this music festival. festivals in Austin. Like I don't have a good sense of like how much of Airbnb's inventory is like intermediate or seasonal or run by like very casual people that are doing this, you know, one or two times a year. Yeah, definitely in the side hustle vibe. Yeah, but I think, you know, I think for folks that are using a PMS or channel management software or pricing software, I feel like most probably did adjust for that pricing change. But yeah, I mean, that's,

That's the other crazy thing that we see is like when we look at people's properties, now that we have StateFinder and we see their direct and Airbnb prices. Like so there's more people than you think have higher direct prices than Airbnb prices. And again, it's just a lot of because Direct isn't a priority for that business, they don't really look at that. So, you know, I told somebody who now we have like their 100 properties on StateFinder and Direct isn't a priority for them. I'm like, just so you know, like all your bookings are 20% more expensive when

your website than Airbnb. And so like you're definitely not going to drive any traffic from us to get those booked. And they didn't make some adjustments, but they were like, I don't even know if we want direct bookings. Like it's so much of a hassle. So we're always like overcoming that mindset of like, if you took this seriously, it would make much financial sense to put some effort into making direct bookings make sense for your business. And accepting them and pricing them accordingly. There was a presentation that Chris Walker did from direct booking tools. I think it was like a back in the summer. I think he did it with the VR Nation crew. And he's a property manager himself. And he also has this product that helps people, you know, see the price comparison tools.

A little bit of kind of what you're talking about earlier. And he's sort of talking about all the benefits of the direct book gang. Well, like, hey, I've done analysis and I get a little bit better reviews. I get a little bit better here. I get to keep that cash in my trust account. Airbnb makes almost a billion dollars a year off interest income. So just holding everybody else's money. Like, they make a billion dollars a year off that. Like that alone could be a pretty good business. Right. Just like, there's someone whose job it is at Airbnb. Just like take the money coming in every day and put it into an interest sparing account. Right. And it's like, yep, we're making tons of money here, guys.

I say, you know, like, what an amazing business to it. Let's find ways to hold on to it longer. Yeah, yeah, like as long as possible, right? Until, like, the moment that we have to, but, like, you know, push people as far as we can before they get angry about it. It's all good. Well, cool, Arthur. We'll put it all on this one and we're coming up against the time-wise.

We could have kept going just because, like, you have an interesting thoughts, and we don't have a lot of guests here on the show. So it's good to kind of expand things out. We'll just some links in the show notes, Arthur. Best thing for people to check out would be Stayfied self. I may even put my affiliate link in the show notes. So that wouldn't be a bad thing, Arthur. but they should definitely sign up through my link.

That way I get credit for it. We'll put a link to stay finder. Obviously, people can reach out to those particular things. Follow Arthur on LinkedIn. We'll put a link down there in the show notes there. Also, one more thing for each part, leave us to review. Go to your podcast, off the choice. Leave a five-star review.

iTunes, Spotify, we get most downloads. Super appreciate that so we can get more downloads in the future. Thank you so much, and we'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks, all right. Great seeing you.