Heads In Beds Show - What To Consider When Building A New Vacation Rental Website

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, we break down the questions to ask when building a vacation rental website in 2025 and beyond. Scope, pricing, vendors to work with and a LOT more...⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 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, we're live. What's happening? Well, you know, it's another lovely day here. You know, I got to tell you, I thought five games into the NBA season, we would not have the same record, given the opportunities available for both of our teams.

And yet, here we are sitting at two and three, two and three, happily musing along. I hope you enjoyed your former, your Boston Timberwolves experience last night because it feels like what you're getting a little bit of right now. But, you know, this is, like I said, we're trundling along. How are you doing? Yeah, well, just such an up and down experience, honestly, so far. Three of the, like, most horrible losses that I've ever seen, and then two really good wins back to back. So I'm just like, what is this team right now?

I guess we'll know 20 games in, right? I don't know if we know right now exactly what the team is. I feel like that's just, I'm just life in general. You know, you just don't know exactly how people behave until they get further into the actual sample size. And basketball is such an interesting sport to watch because it is very star-driven. when your stars down, it's like what's going to happen to everybody else on the team.

And for a few games there, you had to think, like, what is, the answer is they're just going to give up and tank and give it all up. And then all of a sudden, Jalen Brown drops, whatever, 38 or something like that and is on fire. So I don't know. I mean, look, they're not winning this year. We all know that. I mean, best case scenario, they, you know, they might be able to get into the playoffs and, you know, make someone a little uncomfortable if Tatum comes back.

But I don't think that that's going to be the case. I think there's better teams in the east. So I'm just going to watch it and enjoy it and see what happens and, you know, go from there. It's a fun way to live. when you're not chasing a championship. So that's good. There's a team this year that I think does have a chance to play well and maybe be a bit of a threat.

And it's the one down in Foxborough. So we'll see if that continues. My irrational, you know, Drake May sort of enthusiasm. I try to keep it temperate at bay. And then it keeps throwing these 20 to 5 to 45 yard, you know, perfect, literally perfect throws that hit people like on the tip of the fingers, like flawlessly. And it's hard to, it's hard to, you know, contain the excitement.

It's honestly, I hate this. This is going to sound crazy. Not a hot take. He honestly throws the deep ball better than Brady. Brady was never a massive deep ball thrower other than Randy Moss, 07. We'll put that in its own bucket. Outside of that, a lot of it was poke and prod and, you know, get a long slot receiver come inside and the straight make kid.

It's just like, no, so he's down there. It's kind of the anti-meam of like, you know, whatever. He's down there somewhere, chuck it. Like, it's not bad. It's like, oh, I know. He's down there. I know exactly where he is. Let me throw it to him.

And he'll catch a 30-hour touchdown pass. So, again, we shall see. Anything you change in a moment's notice. but it's all good right now. And then your young guy's coming back. So we'll see JJ. How he's doing. We'll see.

We'll see. We'll see. You know what else? A lot of people say we'll see about sometimes, Paul, building a website. We're going to build a website and we're going to go, we'll see what's going to happen here. So that's today's topic. What to consider when building a vacation rental website. And we've got some interesting ideas here.

So, you know, full disclosure, I guess, has we get going here. We are building websites and have been doing that for a few years now. It wasn't how I started build up. I started build up really on the marketing side of things. And then recently we added more website development capabilities. That's been fun. It is by no means the biggest area of our services or of our revenue. But building websites is hard. I'll just say it. There's a reason I sort of avoided for a little while. There's a reason why it hasn't been just straight down easy street. So if I'm,

you know, if I'm saying something here, I will admit that like buildup doesn't do all these things perfectly. I will admit that if I'm criticizing a vendor, whether it's a specific vendor or just the idea of what these vendors battle with, they have a hard job too. So I'm not saying this is a negative thing. But I do think that what I don't want to have happen, whether someone buys a website from us and chooses us as their partner or they choose one of the other, you know, vendors in our space, is that there's not misalignment, that there's not an expectation of one thing and then a output of something else, because that just everybody loses in that scenario. The agency did their best and tried

to build a website, presumably in good faith for you to be happy. If you're a vacational manager, you didn't get what you wanted, you're unhappy. And then you have to deal with sort of an unhappy customer. That's not a good feeling. I don't like that feeling. And then on the other side, if you spend a lot of money on this website, a lot of money is somewhat subjective, we'll go through that in a second. And you feel like you didn't get what you wanted. That's a crappy feeling too, you know, like, oh, I thought I was getting this and I didn't get it. You know, you may feel a little bit, you know, turned off, whatever the case may be. But I think the reason that this is, this shopping is hard, honestly, Paul, is that people

don't buy websites that often. They buy them every X number of years. Some people, many people buying a website have never done that before, so they don't really know what to expect. And they come into their head with all these ideas, what it should be? And then the reality ends up being a little bit messier. So what's kind of your read here as someone that, to my knowledge, doesn't build websites.

You're working with some vendors that do that as well. What's your experience? Yeah. This is something that, you know, I was kind of an ignorant bliss for a while at travel out because we were building websites, but I just didn't touch that side for quite a while. Not your team, not your department. That's great. It wasn't my team, wasn't my department.

And, I mean, I did. I started just writing pure content. So really, it was, I didn't see that side of things. Then I did. And then I didn't really want to anymore just because it is. It's a process. It is a truly a different type of relationship. It's a different type of experience.

It's a different type of project. it's and the service, a managed service behind it, there's just a lot going on. And you're right. I think it is the fact that people usually haven't, people fall into these businesses. People, you know, they don't have a PMS, they don't have this, they don't have that. A direct booking website is kind of something that eventually happens or maybe doesn't happen in some cases. I think as you're scaling the business and getting that maturation level, These are the points that when do we add the website, when do we add the PMS, and you don't want to have to change it.

You want to be able to, you know, update or feel comfortable that this is something that's going to support you for quite a while. I mean, whether or not you're using the same company, yeah, you might change websites a couple times over the course of five, 10, 15 years. Who knows? Redisines. That's the type of thing. But you still want the bones behind the same. scenes, the infrastructure to support your business. So I do. I think that that's something that it does. It adds to the complexity because these two things do have to speak well in tandem.

I mean, your PMS and your website have to be in lockstep. If they are not, that's where we see a lot of these issues that ultimately come up down the road or, you know, a whole lot of other things there. So yeah, it's it's something that I think I don't think there's a perfect website out there. I don't think there's a perfect website provider out there. I think everybody has some things they do really well. I think everybody has some areas that they would all acknowledge our opportunities for growth and improvement over time. So yeah, I think that that's ultimately it is the last thing you want to do is have two separate vendors or two separate agencies or which is a feeling like they're battling each other because ultimately it's the property manager

that gets left out in that point. So I think that that's the other thing is that if you are using multiple different people in the space, very common, you know, just kind of making sure that you are at the forefront here. Ultimately, this is your website. This is your project. This is, you know, you have a stake in all of this. So making sure that that is at the forefront and that we're trying to build the business. Now, there's responsibility from the property managers as well, but we'll talk about that a little later here. So chew that, spit that out, do whatever you

want with that. What do you feel about? How do you feel about that? Yeah, I think you bring up a good point, which is that if you're we're assuming at this point, you're choosing to leave the template world of your PMS. And some PMSs have a little bit more solid template website they give you. Others just don't change much over the years. Like, they've just kind of been the same. Like, I'll just say very candidly, the guesty template website's been the same for quite some time, the actual booking pages. I know they have a product now that is,

a little bit more advanced on the front end to like essentially like it can be almost like a version of a WordPress.com or a version of a wix or whatever kind of builder you want to simple metaphor. It's there. But the actual core booking pages on guesty have been the same for some time. They're not inherently like bad, but they just haven't changed much. Like if I can, and that's not a slight. That's just a fact, right? Like we have a lot of clients that we've taken on on a rez template websites and they've done pretty well for themselves actually. But that's, you know, something that they added more recently. They didn't have that. They used to have like little widgets only and then they expanded to have the website some time ago. And now it's another product

they have available. Some platforms don't even offer website anymore. I think Escapia is one a little while ago, not that we have many clients on Escapia, but they'd no longer offer it. And I remember, I think this was years ago and I was still at the agency that I used to work at. I think they were sunsitting it way back then. So if you use Ascapia, you literally have no choice. They're not going to give you a temple website anymore. I think they used to, but I don't believe they do anymore. And they say, hey, use your API work with it. I think Barefoot's the same way. I know barefoot, and I don't want to misspeak. So if this is incorrect, then the teams here can correct me. But that's one where, again, they pretty much advise you or encourage you to work with a developer to build a website, run their API, and then go from there.

So, yeah, we're assuming you're graduating past one of those template websites because even the ones that are more solid are still pretty limited. You're not really able to change as much as you want to. It's kind of like a what you see is what you get type situation. And you can change a few things, the logo, the colors, the fonts, a few things. You're not completely in the dark, as it were. But for the most part, when you make this decision, it's like, all right, I'm trying to get something. I'm trying to move out of a starter house and move into a house that I'm going to live in for some time. you know, I think that's the weight that you might place in that decision.

So I think that's a good way to go about it. I mean, I'll start heading off some of our points here. So is the agency specific to the industry? Like, it's very rare that I can think of any examples that have gone that well where someone's like, I'm going to hire an agency. They're out of whatever. They're out of New York City. They're out of, you know, I'd someone hire someone out of Croatia a little while ago

or something like that. We're going to hire this agency. They're good. They have a good portfolio. But they've never operated in a vacation from the industry before. And I think that some of those people think, oh, it'll be easy. I'll just be popping a widget on the page. it's not going to be that hard.

And then they get in the process and they're just like, there's kind of a reason that we do have specialists in our space because integrating with number one, just all the different APIs. And number two, getting the functionality to work, step one, step two,

step three. I think people will come at this like not having any vacational knowledge almost always, it either, if they get it done, it takes way more effort, time, energy than they thought it was going to take them.

That's very common. One project comes to mind that, you know, we can talk about at a high level. I don't know if I should say the specifics of the hard agency, their portfolio look great. They knew nothing about vacation rentals. And then once they got further in the process,

they were like, wow, this is like 10 times more work than we thought to integrate with the guesty API as the API they were integrating with. And the project got there, but it was just way late, way overdue, you know, and the client was super frustrated. So I would just have a really hard time, like, you know, letting someone else be, you're the guinea pig for some other agency to help figure it out. Again, whether you choose us or not, you know, that's irrelevant to this discussion. But by golly, I really don't think you want to go down that path if you can help it. That's for sure. It's always a New York agency. Like, it's always, or L.A., I've had a couple of Chicago, too, but it's always like a big,

agency and there's that or they go cheap and they go overseas yeah that's a whole other conversation yeah but it is i do feel like the you mean just hitting it on the head with the new york one that is that's what like the expectation is that like a big city is going to have the better people better resource but i don't know like we have jaded ourselves to thinking that websites can only be built on the coasts in major metropolitan areas and or that's maybe that's that's the panache we need. I don't know what it is. But it's maybe it's one of those,

well, it's the beautiful people's club. We want to be a part of the beautiful people's club. Well, in the vacation rental space, we do have a pretty solid beautiful people's club, but it's the agencies that are currently built. So, yeah, I can only echo that the only people that I have seen choose an agency out of the space have had to choose an agency back in the space within 12 months.

So there's, I mean, that just keep that in the back of your mind that if you I mean it's I think maybe at some point there will be the opportunity to do that it's AI driven and all those items but realistically no this is this is not it this is not the way to go so I get I remember another one comes to mind I work with this project years ago out in the outer banks um actually we were pitching the proposal we never actually got it and this company again came from it from outside the space and they ended up figuring it out along the way. And yeah, they were just,

they were super interested in the aesthetics of the website. They understood the functionality. They thought they did. And it just took forever, you know, eventually it got done, but it was a bit of a mess. So yeah,

I put in the chat, I see you laughing on one that we worked on closely with it. And I'm like, I'm training the developer. I'm like, yeah, like, you don't have an API call that's working properly

when I put in dates. And they were like, what do you mean putting in dates? Like, they just did they didn't understand. So I really don't think you want to do that. Again, is there a time in a place for maybe like getting design help from outside the industry? Maybe that could be an interesting conversation.

You know, if you had the ability to say, I'm going to go outside the industry and get inspiration for a logo, for brand, for a look and feel, et cetera. And then I'm going to come back and I'm going to give that brand elements and guidelines to someone who has built a website like this before. But unless you're just in it for something that has to be custom, that is so abnormal, that's so different that it has to be custom, I would just strongly advise you, like, pick someone that's done this thing before. I just don't think you want to be the guinea pig, you know, regardless of which vendor you. I mean, even like, and I think of like some hotel specific hospitality specific even those closer you know like a white stone milestone something like

that those those bigger names in the hotel side but i don't think that even they are comfortable with the complexity that you bring in when you have not just it is it's it's five five room types as opposed to 500 room types oh boy here comes that complexity at a whole new level there and that is i think that that's we really are kind of the unicorn when it comes to websites in that there's just more going on there there there is a need for a more complex larger website to satisfy the needs of travelers and potentially homeowners there so yeah yeah 100% so yeah we read there one like sub point i'd have here as we go along is like ensure you own the website to the best of your ability or ensure that if you don't own it why why do i

not own the website what am i actually buying or not buying and i think some people and we'll come to this in a few minutes so i'll just maybe i'll hit on it now and we can you know if at the end we have time. We'll cover this as well. If they're hosting your website, that's fine. If they're hosting something that's a very custom CMS, that's obviously relatively common in our space. Also fine on the surface, that's fine. But I understand that if you're building on their CMS and they own the whole thing, you are locking into that website for the life of that website. So if you pay a developer and you're paying them to build on a platform that's not active anymore or not maintained or whatever the case may be, there's a lot of reasons. By the way, they could build it on

WordPress, which is the most common CMS out there, but they could still in their contract, say, I own everything and you don't own anything. So just know what you're buying. No, could you that site somewhere else. Could you have anybody else work on that website? Or are you essentially marrying this particular vendor in perpetuity? That's quite common. And it's not inherently some negative horrible thing, but you should know what you're buying and then look at the upsides and downsides of that and understand what cost you're buying into, that sort of thing. Because I think what you don't want to be is completely locked into the point where you can't ever leave that vendor. Or if you choose to leave that vendor, if you get nothing out of it, if you're just like,

yeah, I'll just delete all your files from my server. It's just a really tough pill to swallow unless you've got some amazing price for doing so. So I have a hard time with that. I think if someone wants to leave our service, for example, I give them a zip file. I send them the WordPress, you know, with a file. And I say, you can host this wherever you like, you know, it's all good. Now, they can't resell that code in our contract. They couldn't take that website and then resell it, give it to someone else and resell it. I think that's reasonable parameter.

You can agree or disagree, but that's how I've got our contract written up on that side. But if you want to host it somewhere else, you can do so. Now we're not going to support it. That would be the line that I would draw on this in. So you can't say, hey, I'm going to go host this website somewhere else and then I still want your help on working on it. That's, you know, now we don't know where it is. similar to how, like, a lot of warranties work.

If you buy a new car from Ford, from Chevy, from Honda, that sort of thing, and then you go take the engine apart by yourself, and then you put it back together the wrong way, and you go back to Honda and say your engine's broken, Honda, this is the analogy I always do in my sales calls, Honda's going to be like, well, yeah, dude, you took it apart, you shouldn't have done that. So now it's not working, and that's not our fault. So that's kind of how I think about it from that perspective. But yeah, understand what you're buying, understand what you own, understand, ask them right away, what would a breakup look like? I hope a break it doesn't happen. If it were to happen, how would you proceed, how do you handle that, and, you know,

get to the truth of the matter and i think you'll uncover a lot during that you know initial sales process on that side yeah i mean i think that that's that's one of those things that it is it's a scary thing to not be in control of that's i think the equivalent because we don't have a standalone building that's that's like moving your hotel the the brick and mortar of your hotel because this is how people access your business that this i mean we've talked about it before we don't have in the vacation rental space unless you're putting signs up in front of your houses i still think that's there's some value there depending on how tacky it looks but um that it is that's we don't have that billboard effect we don't have that opportunity it's a digital

billboard that's what we have we have a digital brick and mortar um so not owning your digital brick and like that's that's not owning a very substantial part of your business so yes anything and the custom CMS and there's some other aspects that certainly add in complexity, but you, it's an asset. It is your business asset in making sure you understand if you don't own it, why you don't own it. And like you said, that kind of that, that breakup message of that breakup process, that offboarding, I don't like, no, nobody ever assumes they're going to churn.

But I'd rather know about it up front as opposed to being surprised with it as I give you 30 day, 60, day, 90 day, 180 day notice, whatever that is. Yeah, yeah. It's not, I mean, I'll hit on this now. I'll hit on this later. I'll just hit on it now. Understand what your total cost of ownership is of that website. So when you're going and looking at vendors, you cannot look at the front end price

because the front end price can be, and there's a competitor I'm coming up against a lot now who's taking the front end price and I would say obscuring it heavily with essentially it's cheaper up front and it's way more expensive in the long run. That's kind of the tradeoff that they're making. So, you know, I'll give you a scenario. Again, let's do a car scenario, just to have some fun with that. If you went to the BMW dealership and they would say, hey, go ahead and take this brand new M3 off the lot. It's going to be $25,000, which is, by the way, this car goes for like $100,000 if you were to go buy one.

So it's $25,000 a month, or $25,000 to buy the car, but then we're going to charge you, you know, a $2,199 payment every single month for whatever, for security and updates of the PMW software. You'd be like, okay, wow, that's going to add up if I have this car for five years. Sure, I'm getting this car way cheaper up front, but then, you know, you do the math on it. it doesn't work out in your favor. Whereas Mercedes, let's say you went and bought whatever equivalent car would be at Mercedes. And they said, hey, the car's 110,000 up front. And then we shake hands and move on. You're like, oh, okay, I'm paying way more upfront, but there's no cost in the back end. Again, how's that going to look if I own the car for two years, three years, four years, that sort of thing. So just do that. Like, understand what your total cost of

ownership is. Understand they're charging you for hosting, you know, hosting website. What is hosting include? That's a key factor as well. Try to do your best to give some sort of apples to apples in comparison. You're never going to be able to do it. I'll just be honest right now, but you can get closer because, you know, there's, there's a lot of companies in our space that will sell you hosting for a fee, whatever that fee happens to be. And there's really no support included. That's fine. But then there's companies where like, with their support, they're including a little bit of extra or with their hosting, excuse me, they're including a little bit of extra support. That seems reasonable to me. But again, start to compare it where

you go, oh, if I'm going to be putting in one or two tickets a month, I need a few changes with company XYZ, and they're charging me back out $250 per hour. That's the hourly rate for one of the big vendors in our space in Colorado, 250 per hour, something like that. And I put in two, tickets a month and those tickets are two hours a pop, basically I'm paying $500 a month for posting plus, you know, a few tickets every month, whereas the other company may say, hey, it's $300 a month, but it includes up to two hours of support every month, you know, with no additional charge. So if I need a little change here and there, they're not going to bill me extra. So again, just do that math. Understand what's your support costs, what's your

hosting costs? What's your recurring monthly bills you may be paying? And I'll be honest, we're working this right now a buildup, you know, where we're losing deals, to be frank, like very candid here on the podcast because people are charging way less than us on the front end and they're charging way more in the back end. But people don't do that. that total cost of ownership calculation, and they think we're a lot more expensive. And then I show them, like, in a spreadsheet, like, okay, over two years, you would have paid X for my website offering. You would have paid X plus $12,000, $15,000, $85,000 for this other person's offering. Like, again, I'm not saying that we're going to beat everybody on price we're not going to. Sometimes we're

going to be cheaper. Sometimes we're going to be more expensive depending on the scope and that sort of thing. But just understand your total cost of ownership. Otherwise, you're going to walk in with the wrong expectations if you just look at the front end cost and you don't look at these big hosting bills in the back on. I think part of that in my mind goes back to how like the sales process goes and everything as well because it is. The discussion has had about support and hosting, but that is such a minuscule part of the overall building project and everything like that. Again, once you've thought about it at the end. It is. Oh yeah, by the way. Right. I mean, but certainly, especially on the support side, But one of the more critical parts of the whole relationship is, how are you going to support?

So I think that that's really understanding how that breaks down. What is the hosting cost? What is the support cost? That's something we drilled into on some of these conversations with the sales teams and saying, like, where does that break down? Because there are some internal support levers. There are some other items. So it's what you're getting. It's understanding what you're getting because once you get into building the project,

Once you get into approvals, once you get into all this stuff of actually getting that beautiful front end product, you do. You forget that most of your recurring costs moving forward are going to be relating to hosting and support. Like that's that upfront cost is is no longer. It's a sunk cost. Now you did it. It's done. Now what are you going to do to make it up? What are you going to do to actually see a return on that investment?

So I do. I think those are probably the ones that are glanced over. glazed over in the overall proposal, but probably are going to have the biggest impact on how happy you are with not necessarily the website, but that agency moving forward. Yeah. And again, the salesperson, you know, he or she is going to do the best they can to sign the contract. That's their job. I got people on my team. If you book a call, you're going to talk to a salesperson, right? It is what it is. But at the same token, I think it's your responsibility to understand, you know, like you said, what you're getting into. And I think

a lot about ratios. And I think there's two ratios that you should be trying to understand. Hey, how many websites you guys kind of host or manage right now and how many support people do do you have? You know, there's a, there's a common tactic in the industry or people will post a lot about the fact that, hey, we respond to support tickets in X number of hours or X number of, you know, timeframe. Okay, that doesn't really matter, to be honest with you, though. The question is, how long does it take to resolve the issue? So if it's an issue and it's not something it's a one second fix, it's not like, oh, there's a typo on this image and I can't change it to the back end. Can you change it for me? One would hope we could get to that

pretty quickly. But it really is not, you know, I see it all the time. And there are certain vendors where it drives me crazy with it. They respond right away. They respond very quickly, but they never solved my problem. That is so frustrating because in their back-end ticket system, I'm sure it says, hey, dude, we respond to your ticket like every single day within a few hours or maybe worst-case scenario. You put it in on Friday at 5 p.m. It wasn't marked as urge and we got to it Monday. Okay, that's fine. I don't care about that any of that. But if you don't solve my issue, it's maddening, you know, on the support side of things when I'm doing marketing for a client. And certainly from a client themselves that they're putting in

issues and you're responding to things, but you're not fixing the issue. It's pointless. So I think it's really good to understand, like, the quality of support you receive. Timing matters, of course, to some degree. But I'll take a response one day later that fixes the issue over a day, over a quick, the same day response, but it's never done right. Like that is so frustrating to me. And I think the truth is, unfortunately, you don't know until you get into it exactly how it is. That's why you should probably go to VRMA, go to Darm, et cetera, and talk to other people to use that company and say, hey, what's it like when you put in, you know, five tickets, how quickly did they respond? And do they actually

fix the issue. Well, I mean, just go back to her. One of the best conversations, funniest conversations I think we had was one of the, you know, one of the people at the property management company saying, yeah, well, I had a ticket that was open for a year that they finally just closed. I think he said they didn't even get a resolution. There was another couple jokes we made about that particular support ticket. But a year. Like, all between the couch cushions, like, you know, like a quarter out of my pocket. And again, having some experience with that particular company and having seen their support system, not, I mean, just having been on the receiving end of some of those responses back from a support team that just, it's just like, you can tell. It's moving,

and I had to write response. I've been on that support side too, and I've written those responses. We're still looking into this. We're still doing this. And I do. I think that that's, that's one of those things that yeah time to first response we always want to be within 24 hours time to resolution was a completely different game and again it's the complexity of your if you do if you have a template website your time to resolution on most of your items should be reasonably quick it's as you get more customized more you know truly you're up you're upgrading as you're leveling up the business there's going to be more complex items you know that you need to have in place to ensure that you're supporting everything that you need on the traveler's side,

I guess, I don't know, homeowners side, all that stuff. And I do. I think that that's where, yeah, we've all seen some experience or had some experience of just waiting a week, two weeks, a month. And my hope is that that never happens to you. But, but yeah, that's the most painful thing, especially when you're paying an hourly rate for that same support. Again, the assumption should be.

that at some point there's a resolution sooner as opposed to later there. To be fair to the vendors, because I'm on that side of it too. Like we have a ticket that's been sitting for longer than I would care to admit, and we're both aware of the issue and what it is. Essentially, the clients were asking for something that their software does not support. So it's like, I feel very differently about that. Then, again, I'm waiting on these WordPress, WordFense, two factor authentication ticket fixes, one with the main vendors in our space right now.

Someone's been waiting for for quite some time. That's more frustrating because it's like log in, click this button, do this thing. I just can't do it because I don't have the access to do it. That's more frustrating than the client wants basically to submit emails to their email marketing tool of choice with only a phone number, no email. That's what they're asking to do. So it's not that really matters for the context of the conversation. But it's like they're asked for something that their system does not support. So we're trying to get it to work in the pop-up.

Our pop-up software can't figure that out. Hey, can we pass in a dummy email? We've tried to come up with all these ideas. So it's like, hey, they kind of understand that. That's more of a clear understanding of we're very much trying to put a square peg in a round hole. It's a little bit frustrating, I'm sure, for the client. but they know that we talk about it every week because we have a weekly meeting with that client and we go through it and we're like hey we've tried this we've tried this we've tried this we've tried

this we tried this there's a laundry list of things we've tried and it doesn't work so that's part of the equation too right to be fair to the vendor are you asking for something that can be done I would put that in a very different conversation different bucket then again log in and do this thing that will should take you very little time or it's an issue that requires you know two hours of debugging but I need a more senior person to debug it you know the junior that's you know responding to things and I get it you know your big company these companies are hiring a lot of support people. I'm sure some of them are going to come in with more knowledge than others. That's somewhat understandable. I think the moment you're letting someone respond to a ticket on

the front line of your company, better or worse, I'm going to judge the company based on the quality of that response. So if you give someone no training, they have bad information, bad advice, and they're responding to tickets with bad information, then naturally it makes things a little bit frustrating to deal with. I'll remember one vendor sticks out to me as I suggested that we implement a schema dot a work markup for a client, and they just like paste it in like a response from some other website I could tell where it's like, yeah, it doesn't really matter that much. And I'm like, honestly, I don't really care what you think. That's not what I asked necessarily. Like, I asked to implement this markup on the website. So please do so. And if you have

to bill us, then bill us, that's fine. Like, the client was aware of that request. And they were just like, yeah, like, in my opinion, that's not a good idea. And I'm like, cool, didn't hire you for your opinion. Don't need your opinion. You know, and I said that in a professional way. But yeah, that's a whole different discussion, right? Of like, just copy and paste the script in their web. It's, I mean, and I do, I think that there is, there's a, there are a lot of things that people want to do that we can't do. And this is not a commercial for downsizing your tech stack, but the more complex your tech stack, the more complex things are going to be behind the scenes to make everything

work. So I mean, your website being a big part of that, everything's kind of got to feed into that ecosystem. So I do. I mean, I think that that's kind of one of the bullet points we have here is how exactly does your PMS integrate with the website, does tracking work? Is the UIUX solid, you know, looking for something. these different examples here yeah that's i think that you know we talk about secure payments that's

certainly important multiple payment options um yeah direct bookings just generally i mean the seamless nature of those direct bookings that we've all seen some that you're taking five six clicks to get down to a booking page and it's it's too far so but that just may be how the system is built. So I think that's one of the things you have to sit down, kind of have the conversation specifically about your system. And most sales is pretty good about that. But I think more often than not, you get a little high level. And it's more of a general sales. You really want to, I mean, this is just like the intensity you should use when evaluating and vetting your PMS is you should be looking at the same thing with the website. These are two, I can't say equally critical, but

equally critical for different reasons, parts of your business, I mean, as we just kind of laid out there. So, yeah, I mean, keep handling a calendar sync, availability, avoiding double bookings. I mean, that's something that certainly a lot of people have dealt with, you know, understanding are you going to own that booking data? Are you, you know, where does that going to go? Are you, do you have some proprietary systems that could potentially hamper your marketing later? Conrad, would you like to jump in with some conversation about anything like that and any experiences you've had relating to something like that. Yeah, I mean, again, I think it goes back to the whole CMS conversation from a moment ago, right? It's like,

what are you buying into how custom is what you need? And is it going to cooperate with you long term? You know, or is this something that we're going to do one time? And then it just works in perpetuity, probably not the case. What's most likely going to happen is you're going to have ongoing repeated needs for changes and improvements and support and all that kind of thing. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's always a, it's always a conversation, right? Of like, what, what it how is exactly is this going to work and I think like the idea of having like a one call close like there's someone that I see you know all the time talk about like one call closes with a website of any complexity I would argue of a complex website if you do one call close you are being

very foolish because you're actually not walking in on both ends with full a full set of information you're walking in where a lot of like hey there's a big gap in my conversation my knowledge between what I thought and what you thought you were getting and then that person just fills in the gaps of what they think is the case and I'll be honest it's happening with a client right now we have a client right now who's doing a website with a very prominent vendor in our space who I think does a good job overall by the way like I've worked for this vendor a few times I like the website so websites do well we have one right now doing very well with this particular vendor so I'm happy overall with them but they had a sales call they talked about a lot of high level concepts of maybe what they might

want to do what I think happened is that wasn't communicated into a scope they then signed a proposal that didn't have what they wanted and now they're unhappy because they feel like they're not getting what they wanted and it's like okay you had a sales conversation that you then got a proposal put in front of you that I think, to be fair to the client, to be fair to the vendor, excuse me, the client didn't read with enough detail. Then they signed on something, are now working on something that is not working wealth for them, according to them. And they're unhappy. And it's like, again, that's not a good thing. You want that, like you said, you want the vendor and you to be on the same page. And that may require saying no to a few things. And that's never a fun

conversation to have. If you're a vendor for your salesperson, you hate that now to be the one thing that's going to quote, kill the deal. But more than hating that, if you're on the sales side, what you should hate is selling something that you know is not what they want. And then knowing that it's essentially a grenade is what you're doing. You're putting a grenade or a landmine in there that's going to get blown up by the client success person or the project manager later on. So if you do that, you're frankly like a bad salesperson. But it's very common, I would say in our space that people on the sales side say what they got to say to get the deal done. And then it's like, yeah, we don't have the function, but you know, whatever. Like, we'll let the project manager figure

that out. And that's cancer in your company, man. You've got to cut that out if that's happening. Because all it leads to is a break of trust. And I'd rather say no to 10 things that a client ask me and say, here's the five things I can do. Here's the 10 things that you're asking that I can't do, or I can't do at that price point, maybe. If you want these 10 things, we can quote them, but it's going to be individual quotes. And that way, we're walking in and you know what you're getting and I know what you're delivering.

And those things are as close as reasonably possible, you know, with some reasonable level of, you know, margin, if you will, some wiggle. It's conversations like today that I'm kind of happy we don't have live video because it is. This is, I mean, this is just one of those that. Reading our teeth today a little bit. Oh, boy. it's I mean it just it brings back a lot of them just memories long memory it's it's it's hard to

have there so I think ultimately you know a lot of those difficulties the the hiccups that happen are understanding like some of it is just the groundwork of you know kind of hitting on another bullet point who's moving stuff over so we've got content importing content and we've got blog posts. Blog posts are incredibly important to SEO, so we're making sure that we're moving those over with everything else and making sure we're mapping everything back. And I've seen a lot of really good websites lose a lot on the SEO side, on the organic side of things, because there wasn't an understanding of how content was going to be moved

over, in what format was it going to be moved over. Is it going to be a page now? Is it going to be this? Is it going to be that? And then redirecting to just a general URL. as opposed to redirecting to individual pages there. And it's painful because that's maybe in the whole process, the last six hours, eight hours, ten hours, depending on how long that launch is,

24 hours before you go live, that's it. That's the period in which all of that happens. But that can have long-term effects on the overall website. So I do. I think that this is that transition. from one to another is a critical stage we you and I certainly know this as we kind of go through these processes it's it's tough and the bigger more complex the site again the more you're going to have to really dive in to ensure that you're not losing because in a lot of cases if you are

if it is a true transition you don't have a low as you you've put in some SEO equity you've put in you've written content for the primary pages on your website you have a blog you have a lot of pieces you don't want to lose all that work you put in you know in a lot of cases we talk about it so often SEO is a long game so you're not just doing it for a month or two months this is a year two years three years you know you could have dozens if not hundreds of blog posts that need to be moved over and those are all contributing to top of the funnel queries that bring people in. So that starts the whole funnel for us.

So this is one of those things that I think being abundantly clear on who is doing what and then keeping up that timeline is so important. But what are you need is what are your thoughts there? Yeah. I mean, goodness, we could do a whole hour on just this thing. Again, the more complex the website you're carrying over, the more buffer you have to build in as far as how much work it's going to take just to just to move over what you currently have into the new thing.

And then honestly, that can be a detailed discussion as far as moving over what you currently have and deciding if you want to change what you currently have. So, for example, I'll give you a reference point right now. We did a site import a while ago for a client where they said, hey, I want to get rid of a lot of stuff when I do the site import. I'm going to get rid of old content, old blog posts, old properties that are kind of hanging around on the website. I want to get rid of them in this new version of the website. Fine, but that triggered essentially a whole new content audit, you know, in the scope of like, okay, then that means that someone's going to have to look at all this stuff. Who's going to look at it? What is looking at it mean?

Are we going to look at every single page? Are we going to look at stuff that has under certain traffic level? You know, that requires pulling additional data from analytics, from search console and so on and so forth. So what sounds like a simple request, hey, let's clean things up before we move them over from a custom CMS into a WordPress based CMS. It became like really a 10, 15, 20 hour project collectively on our side.

Plus the client was chipping in a lot too. They were chipping in another 20 hours themselves. So the bank of the website, like, there's a reason these things end up really complex over time because you might be importing 472 blog posts, but you only want 200 of them. okay, that means we got to delete 270 and then move over the other 200 takes a lot of time. So things like importing past content, pages, blog posts, et cetera, images, the work that comes from that is a copy and paste where I'm literally like copying a blog post, carrying over

an image, putting in the back end, that sort of thing. Super time consuming. So like we have a VA team that can do that kind of work. We've done it before. But I remember we did a project for a client a few years ago. And we found one of our formatters from working with this person on Upwork. But he logged like 400 hours moving over content. This site was thousands of pages, all like hand-coded.

HTML pages and they were moving into like this custom CMS that their developer had built. And yeah, like 400 hours. Where did I, luckily I budgeted hourly. You know, I wasn't giving a fixed quote. If I did, I would have lost my tail on that project. It would literally gone broke, you know, funding this project. So it became very messy and, you know, can get very messy. Redirects, you mentioned that.

That's a big one. You know, again, if you're taking a website with 400 properties, like the one that are working on collectively right now together and you move it over, that's 400 redirects minimum plus another 200 blog posts, plus another this, plus another that. It can be a lot of work. So if you don't understand what you're getting into, you can find yourself pretty unhappy. I know we're up against the time-wise, but, you know, I guess last thing I would say is, like, in my mind with the website, both parties are accountable. So what doesn't work well is like one team rowing and like one side of the boat is rowing and the other side is not.

And I've seen both. I've seen the vendor do a great job and trying to get the client to do what they need to do and the client being off and never, never land. And I've seen the opposite where the client's been like doing what they need to do, responding quickly, getting the feedback in to the vendor and the vendor is taking their sweet time. So in a perfect world, we can figure out how to balance this perfectly. At least, again, with some reasonable margin, that's okay. We can all understand that. But what doesn't work is, hey, I'm going to put in all the effort, you know, and then get none of the upside and then vice versa, the vendor doing everything.

You're doing nothing. Not going to work either. And I've seen some people that were very unhappy with their website. And then I look at how they treat their website vendor. And I go, yeah, dude, you're the problem, not the vendor. So I'll be honest when I see that. We say it in a more professional way, but that's very common. So very much a collaborative thing.

And very much thing that is really important to your business. but it's one of those things that's really hard. So that's kind of my thoughts on websites before we come to a close here. But any parting thoughts on your side, Paul, before we put a bow in this one. This was more ranty than normal, but I think we need one of those. We've not a ranty one in the minute. It was. We're due to have one every once in a while.

It is. The accountability does rest on both sides. That's don't, I mean, it's, it's true. You can't be combative within the relationship while you're building the website. It's just like if you say, oh, we're waiting on you, we're waiting. It's not going to get a good end. product out of it and the relationship isn't going to last that much longer, I wouldn't think anyway.

So, yes, keeping everybody accountable, both sides is critical for success in the project. Yeah, 100%. You know, if you work with a vendor in good faith, they want their website live. They want to get paid. Let's be honest, right? You want your website live. You want it to work well for your business. And if you get that, then it can be an awesome relationship.

And we've learned a lot from our clients. Our clients have taught us some things. We've given, I know we've launched websites. So I was pulling a report the other day for a client that literally doubled the number direct bookings they were getting from their old template website that they were using to the custom website that site we did so this all may seem kind of risky and maybe somewhat you know stressful there's some truth to that but god you got that website working you know you can make several hundred thousand dollars more per year on your website just based on conversion rate lists alone

and you get more bookings which is what everybody's after one more thing we need before you depart to your listener a review go to your podcast after choice click five stars just like you know it's going to take us a little bit of time to build the website it's going to take you just a moment to leave us a review but it helps lots of more people can hear the episode appreciate it have an awesome We'll catch you on the next one.