Heads In Beds Show - Where Are We In The Innovation Adoption Curve For AI And Vacation Rentals?

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul talk about all things AI adoption, AI travel agents, the future of travel planning, changing guest booking behavior, AI search visibility, direct bookings, the future of OTAs, and a lot MORE!Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Bed Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. Paul, good afternoon. How are you doing? What's happened? What's going on? I got the dress code.

We're both wearing red golf shirts. Mine, as usual, I got all my own rider cup gear on because that's all I ever wear. It's comfy stuff still. Yeah, I've been better. Not the best week that I've ever had in my life. But that is okay. You know what I mean? they're not all going to be sunshines and rainbows and puppy dogs and that sort of thing.

Sometimes you're going to get life is going to happen as it were. And I talked about it before. And I have a LinkedIn post coming out tomorrow. This will be released next week. But I did not make my way to Verma, unfortunately, do it a death of the family. So I really wanted to do a Verma recap style thing where I would tell you everything I learned at Birbe. Or that didn't happen.

But no worries, Adam on the other feed that I have on the art of hospitality feed was there. He recorded a few things. So we're just going to make the art of hospitality fees sort of a verma recap. And Adam's going to have to run point guard on that. So bummer, you can make it. I could make it, which is a shame. I think we'll make our way back next year.

I'm assuming there's a venue at this point. I don't know, because I wasn't there. But I guess we'll figure out where we're headed. Let's figure that out as we go here. Where's VERMA 2027? You can tell we did a lot of prep for today's recording, which is all good. Okay, yeah, VRMA annual has been announced for October 24th, 5th, 6th, and 7, 2027 in Denver, Colorado.

So fire up here. Yeah, your legal weed and your Nuggets tickets, and let's do this thing. In advance, okay. Should be out of time. All right, Denver, there we go. Should be good. Yeah, I'm not flying high. as it were, speaking of Denver and everything.

But it is all good. I thought, so we're going to do shorter episodes today, had a bit of a fun one that I came up with. And it's based on Paul and I, just talking like we always do, before we hit record on some of these things, about kind of this idea, debate, discussion, whatever we want to call it,

of where are we on this adoption curve cycle? So there's kind of this idea, I don't know exactly where this was popularized from, but I'll throw the Wikipedia in the show notes or something like that. Aha. So Wikipedia says, there's a book called Crossing the Casm by Gregory Moore.

I'm going to be straight up honest with you. I've not read this book. But there's basically this idea that there's an innovation adoption curve. And this happens with every single form of like new technology or new things that come into our lives. And we can all think of ones if we just go back in our own life, 10, 20, 30 years, et cetera, of these things that happen. So you've got the innovators.

This is the top 2% to maybe 3% of people who hop on new things right away. So we could talk about that post positively and negatively, right, in the sense of people hopping on the innovators to cryptocurrency, the innovators to NFT a few years ago. And now we laugh about it because it's, what was that? I was never into that, by the way. You can scrape my Twitter going back. I was never one of these NFT or cryptocurrency type people. I did have a little bit of Bitcoin, but I even sold that.

So that doesn't even really count. Anyway, so there's innovators, the first 2%. These people love hopping on the trends. They're the early ones. Of course, now we can talk all about AI. That's kind of the premise of today. But what happens next, this is early adopter phase. So I think with AI, we're much more rapidly and quickly going to reach this idea of early adopters.

So these are younger, more educated, potentially even less prosperous people in the book is like, maybe these people who are like, I see something here that I think I can ride. I'm not first to it, but I'm early to it, and I'm going to ride this wave, and I'm going to figure out how to make money with this thing. So maybe it's my dad in the late 90s, mid-2000s, buying a computer. People had personal computers before that, but he certainly wasn't an innovator in owning a personal computer, but giving a computer to a eight-year-old, nine-year-old, hooking up to dial-up internet and saying, I don't know, I think there's something here, figured out, as it were. That worked out pretty good for me. So shout out, dad, for early

adopters, like in the age of the internet and the age of dial-up internet, getting me in there, but not waiting or whatever the case may be. So early adopters, this is about 13, 15% of the market, that sort of thing. Then real quick, you've got early majority and late majority and laggards. So the laggards is interesting. This is your last 15% or so of people. And these are people who, I have a really fun example for you. I'm sure you have some fun ones as well.

These people who are like just now are getting into things that maybe you and I have had for 20 years. So imagine my humor at our parents telling us they'll never have a Facebook account. Now signing up for Facebook accounts on their 50s, 60s, and 70s so that they can, whatever, join Facebook marketplace or connect with friends or family or whatever they do on Facebook, right? Look at funny AI generated beams nowadays, I'm sure, and click like. And hey, Paul, did you know that this is happening?

It's like, nope, grandma, that's just a, that's just a meme on Facebook. It's not a real thing. Let's call those the laggers. People signing up for Facebook today, founded in 2007. Here they are signing up in almost 2027. So anyways, just a fun little debate about where are we in this stage? What's going to happen? Maybe it would be an interesting kind of prediction as we head into innovator to early

adopter to maybe early majority, this kind of first half of the wave showing up. And what do we think is going to occur? So that's a very long intro. I apologize, but what do your thoughts on this as we get going? I think the one thing that we didn't hear in being at Burma was my team, all my team that went there for a lot and I got like 97 texts. And this is probably not the discussion that moves the needle as much, but I do think that we are.

We're at a spot. I think the people who were talking about AI last year, we're certainly probably in the innovator range. But I think we are. I think we're definitely in the early adopters range right now. And I think it's not just the people, not just the use, the users, but I think it's how you're using it too. And I think that those, the innovators now are pushing to use cases that are maybe beyond, but they had certainly entered the AI discussion. And the same thing.

The early majority is probably starting to even get into where some of the early adopters were six months ago, things like that. So I think what we talked about timing-wise, what does it look like to? to move down, as we see downhill here a little bit more downstream, is it 12 months, is it 24 months? Does the technology itself accelerate that timeline more so than we think? I think back to, I think, what was this, Simon Lehman's presentation at Darm last year, where he had some of the accelerating factors of what AI can do and could be. and I think it was just it was breathtaking to see how stark, what the 30x, the 100x, and how much power there is there.

I don't know if we're going to be that. I don't know if AI is going to play that large role. I think we'll continue to play a role, but I think right now we are. We are still definitely in the early adopters era where just sheer, again, user data tells us that some people are using AI. the vast majority are still using social media, using Google Search, using a lot of other ways to kind of get through, get into this travel inspiration process.

But again, I think the acceleration of the technology, I think the acceleration of everything, it felt like it was a big week for headlines. I think Google announced that UCP item for hotel center as well, which is going to impact us certainly down the road. Yeah, there's just, there's a whole lot here that, It probably is, it's a good thing to look at the timeline and try to predict where we are going to see some major boiling points. I don't know moving forward.

Yeah, it's, I think right now, again, my feeling is that we're not using AI to the capacity of giving people a better experience. We're not making the travel planning experience that much better. AI itself is not a better experience in planning. as we see it. But maybe how do you feel about that? If you, as you, as you, as in, and how do you pull the marketer or the vacation rental season vet out of you, unbiased, how do you see the AI travel experience right now,

travel planning experience? Yeah, I'm going to go back for one moment if that's okay. I want to answer your question. But yeah, you mentioned platforms. And I think platforms are the reasons why we're in this early majority. That's what, or early adopter, excuse me, phase already, because I think the idea of, let's just go back to January or February somewhere in that type range, when you could install this platform called at the time, what was it, Claudebot? And then it was re-labeled to OpenClaught essentially and purchased in part or like under the shepherding now of Open AI. But back then, that developer, Peter, I'm going to butcher the last name, so I'll just say Peter, who came up with the idea of you're going to run this agent on your computer and we're going to give it like terminal level access and it's going to be able to do anything.

And by the way, it's really good. Like it's actually effective at doing what you do. do. And you saw the explosion of, wow, this is really interesting. But this was a, this was very much an innovator thing. Like the fact that you had to open terminal and terminal install it automatically means it would never be a early majority thing. And frankly, a non-savvy user should not be scoring on terminal anyways. And that was the chief complaint that people had about this kind of stuff. Don't put this on your computer. And of course, I immediately put it on my main computer and with no regards for safety or security whatsoever. Because I like playing with this kind of stuff and it's

fun. But that is an interesting, comparing that to, so that's January or February. You have to open terminal, install it on a computer. By the way, it just crashed constantly. Like, I tried it for a while. It was working, but I spent more time maintaining it than actually getting it to work right. Flat, fast forward to, let's say, the summer, end of summer, and I'm using these herbes agents, and they never go down, and they never really have, I've had one issue, really, and maybe the last four months with them, and they do everything perfectly on schedule, and it's like, all those early kings are gone, and I've dedicated machines sitting to my left that runs these things and does them for me very inexpensively, by the way. I actually recently downgraded my

subscription, not because I was using it less. I was actually using the same amount, if not more than I was previously. But the tokens are so much more efficient now that I was burning a lot less of them. And I'm like, why am I paying $100 a month when I can buy me on this $20 month plan and get everything I need to get out of the Hermes subscription on their like dumber models? So really fascinating thing to think, okay, that's a little bit more easy to work with. But let's fast forward to today, the last month or two, two months or so. Let's say that. We've got, I think Meta's muse agent is a good example. You've got instinct. You've got all these platforms that are basically, you know, whatever you want to call them,

idiot proof for normies. If you follow people on Twitter, they'll talk about that concept. It's made for your mom. Doesn't want to go into fucking terminal and stall anything. Your mom wants to go into Mews, say, I'm planning a birthday party this weekend,

show me four restaurants around this area, and pick the one that's best for this thing, and it goes and does the research for you and comes back with it. The layer behind that, like you just asked, it's just a web browser running out of a virtual computer. You and I both know that.

But the friendly nature of something like a muse agent or something like an instinct, or that sort of thing that feels very native to you, reminds you a lot more of talking to a friend or a family member, even I would argue more so than chat TPT. ChatDB felt like a new interface when it was released, but it wasn't embedded into other things that you already used. It wasn't embedded into Facebook or your messaging app or things like that.

I suppose it's probably a little bit closer now. It was like a new thing. Oh, go into this little chat TBT garden and go play and message it and get responses back, which obviously made it so much more consumer aware than I ever was before. But I think with these things like Muse and the Like and Instinct and all these other platforms, so we'll see which one is going to win.

or maybe there's going to be like seven winners in the early days. Who knows? It becomes a lot more tangible to be like, I can just message this thing and it does things for me. And wow, that's a cool feeling of AI compared to a little chat box that can answer questions. Oh, what do you think about this? What do you think about this, that sort of thing. So I think that's where you're, to answer, go back to your original question,

what is going to move the needle is someone going into these agents, your instincts, your muses, maybe to some degree like your open claws or Hermes agents or those sorts of things, although I would argue those are more probably your early adopter type people and saying, I'm going to plan my trust. or I'm going to help research my trip with these tools, and I'm going to give it these very long prompts that have very specific criteria, and you're going to help me sift through the stuff that I don't want. I think that's like where it's really interesting, and where as marketers, we got to come back and say, okay, yeah, maybe to some degree we are making these sites for agents

to some degree, in the sense that we're not blocking them, that there's information on the page, et cetera, that an agent can consume and give back to a user, because now it might seem silly before to be like, let me list off the exact distance. This has, this house is from these 97 points of interest. But maybe that's actually logical to do. in an agentic world where you might have 97 different reasons of why someone would visit your house. And if you could list them out in a machine readable way, maybe there's something to be said for that going forward that as this early adopter curve continues to pick up, it's like, I want my site to be seen by people using Google and people using Muse and people using Instinct and people using OpenClawn,

people using those other platforms. So that's kind of my take on it of. I still think we're in the early days, hence the whole topic of this podcast. But you have to reasonably assume that this stuff is going to continue to grow in popularity. The question is, of course, what do we actually do? how much of this is conceptual versus how much of this is actual needle moving right now. And what I always want to caution the listener against is wasting your time a little bit, not doing the basics and then coming over here and playing with this stuff. But if your marketing is in good shape and you are a very established company and you're trying to figure out like where things are headed, at the very least, you can be paying attention

and checking it every few weeks or every month or two on this. And it's not going to blow all your time to say, I should check it on this kind of stuff every few weeks, make sure my brand, my website, etc., is accessible in a way that we're not blocking people who want to do business with us from doing business with us. So that's my high level thoughts right now. But I still think we're very early days. I think that if anything, if we want to call them even for the early adopter or they excuse me, the innovators right now, I'd say at best we can call these things research tools right now, is that we're going to plan travel. And I had to plan to travel for my wife this past week due to the passing of a family member.

And I'm like, why not? Let's see how this goes. So testing instinct and going, we want to be staying here. Here's what this funeral hole is. Look around a 10-mile radius where she's bringing her mother-in-law. We got a baby here. So we want to show me different options. And could I do that on Google or booking.com or whatever?

Of course I could. But it was easy to send a message. Put the phone in my pocket. It goes and does three minutes of searching. It comes back and says, here's my top three recommendations. I kind of like that experience, to be honest with you. But I didn't book with the agent. I didn't go and put in my credit card and say, go ahead, instant.

Go ahead and reserve it. I, like, researched it, found a few places. Chatted about the few places with my wife and then said, what do you think about these two options? Okay, we choose option two. Fantastic. We're off to the races. So I booked, if you want to call it that way, I booked a Hyatt Hotel this past week for this, this unexpected trip due to a AI agent.

But it wasn't like the AI agent did it for me. just like helping me narrow down options based on an area that I'm unfamiliar with and based on criteria that I set around like distance from a certain place and that sort of thing. And that's where we're headed. It's interesting, but I don't think that is this like upsetting and revolutionizing the whole industry? I think we have ways to go for that personally. I think it just struck me as you were saying it because we have.

I think one of my general concern about AI is the hallucinations. It's the fact that AI has certainly not. perfect. And now we've gamed AI to do the thing that we've always been doing. Now all it's doing is it's connecting a Google search for you instead of you doing. This is we've enabled it. Make decisions for us or at least help us in aiding, making decisions. Is that? Yeah. It's just, there's a little nervous listener. I agree. It's, it is. It's just very interesting that ultimately we're going back to the source of truth that we originally thought should. be the source of truth, which is search. That is the best way to organize this information.

And now that's how we're improving ultimately these AI systems as we're acknowledging that, yeah, we had the organization right. We didn't need to reorganize it with AI prettiness, because it ultimately wasn't delivering on the end product. And I think that is, now that we are getting into that type of agentic experience where ultimately you are, you're the part of scrolling through the 10 results that we used that people didn't like, let's just cause me, you didn't like going through the ads, we didn't like seeing that, like that was not an enjoyable experience. So now we've given that to the agents.

So we've said, hey, do a Google search for us and now do the exact same thing. Okay, awesome. The efficiencies that we can build in are great. Is it identifying the same right site source information in the hospitality space? I hope so. That's where being visible to those AI agents. And again, I think when you're laying out, yeah, what do you want to have data points? What is it going to be important?

Do we need to be completely comprehensive and probably the more comprehensive we can be, the better we're going to be able to pinpoint the right experience, the right property, the right, I don't. And then experience goes a little further. but it is. It's almost like if I could do a fishing analogy, it's just like throwing a few more lines in the water. You know, and it's like there's no guarantee that you're going to catch anything on those right now.

But also, if you have a line sitting there and it's not in the water and you could just put a little bit of bait on it and throw it in there and it doesn't disrupt the other lines you have in the water. Why not? Right? What's the downside in that scenario? It's really not. Yeah.

Yeah. So that was just like it just, it strikes me now that the way that we're trying to improve AI is for building a better. you have a better internet experience, which probably is, is, that's what we should have been focusing on.

And Google has been manipulating it and trying to get it to a point where it wasn't just 10 blue links. So maybe this should have been just the, the assumption that we were going to get to this point at some point, that it was going to be, feel more conversational and it was going to feel,

we're back to Ask Jeeves all over. Now we do have Jeeves. Gosh, that's funny. Yeah. They get to Ask Jeeves guys. Like, gosh, darn it. Like we were 25. years off, you know what I mean? But like, we could have nailed this thing.

Early innovators before they were in, now they're back to the laggard cycle to be the innovators. That's a funny one there. I didn't even think about that. That's a great cut right there. Yeah. Yeah, what do people want an answer? Which is funny, right? And to go back to it, like, how does Google lose in this scenario, right? Because if they've, let's go back to the Google mission statement for a moment, if you would. The fun one, not the evil one. Right. Evil, which they took out. Which is organize the world's information to make a universally accessible. What a perfect symbiosis for what an agent in theory can do for you well, right? Like it's, you're using your computer, you're interacting with technology, whether it be your phone or a computer.

And I think this form factor is really interesting. Is this going to last? I'm holding up my phone from the listener. Yes. Or is this going to get nuked? Because you have to wonder about it, right? If the glasses people are right, maybe you do interact with it through there. I'm wearing AirPods right now.

Are those people right? Are we going to interact with the way that we might book travel? Would it be with a smart glasses type deal and AirPods type deal, right? Where you're asking, I won't say it because I'll trigger it, but S-I-R-I, if you're asking that digital assistant, which currently is pretty stupid if you're going to ask that digital assistant to help you do things or Google on the Android phones or Alexa on the Amazon stuff or whatever to do things for you. Now it has a lot more like, I heard the analogy before too of when you give, have your AI connected to a lot of other tools and platforms and things like that through MCPs. It's like giving hands to your AI agents.

So instead of your AI agent, just being like a fish flopping around the deck and it's not really that good, you give it a hand. You give it another hand. It can go reach in and grab data, which that's very much why I feel like my Claude. I work with Claude today is that I ask it one. simple question, and it goes and pulls from 19 different things that I've connected or things that are in its memory to go get the answer to that question that I have. So if I go in and say, show me all the active clients that I have that are based in the state of Florida, it knows to connect to Airtable, because that's where Airtable holds my location data and my active client

client signed status data. And it can quickly answer that for me. Or as before, it's like, let's go do these things step by step. So yeah, really interesting, right? Because if the surface of travel booking is going to change and it's going to be smart glasses in the future, and now I'm going way ahead of myself, but it's going to be a different format. But yeah, you do have to wonder, how is it all going to flesh out in terms of how people book and which services, which platforms are going to win. And you've got to think still, like Google's in relatively good shape to take advantage of this.

And in theory, the agent, the best version of these agents should be, if I can just go access 19 different websites on the working with a manager directly, and I can disintermediate Airbnb or disintermediate any platform forbo just doubled their fees. We could have done an episode on that. We chose not to. But what does that tell you, right? Like the cost of all these platforms, they need to make money for their sharehold? Airbnb is making more money because they need to satisfy their shareholders.

Go look at their stock price. It freaking sucks. Their shareholders are not happy. They've not made any money. I'm sure Chesky's a billionaire and he's doing great. I'm happy for him. I really am. He seems like I'm pretty good dude, to be honest with you.

But yeah, like the only way that you get Wall Street excited about your stock, the only way you survive long term is you got to get people excited by the fact you're making more money. So that's why Airbnb is going to jack up their pricing. Is Airbnb providing you better customer service? Are they providing you a better guest? Are they giving you a better customer experience on the backside with AI? I don't really think so.

no evidence that I have in front of me to indicate that's the case, but they're making a lot more money. Did they verb up doubling their fees? Are they going to double their customer support? Do they're going to double their whatever? No, they're going to make more money. They've got to be more margin. The Expedia group is doing this, not for fun, not for charity, but for return on investment. So if the cost of marketing and everything is going up, agents do and AI does feel like a little bit of like a sliver that we can needle our way into and say, well, if we can get more people to use these tools, they're booking our website directly and we're offering a better fee and our cost for acquisition goes down. What a lovely thing that us marketers would love. It's going to make us

better if our cost per acquisition goes down and it's cheaper to get a booking from an AI agent versus getting a booking from Google ads or meta ads or something like that. That's what we dream of, as it were on our side of things. And that's really compelling. But, yeah, again, there's evidence that we're pretty early days in that, but it's a really interesting kind of idea. And the consumer, I think if the consumer eventually demands, I want my AI agent to be able to go onto 19 different websites and put in dates and do it.

The AI agent's not going to get bored or tedious or they're not going to get mad. There's, the AI agent's just going to be like, okay, dude, I got you. Yeah, I'll go to 19 different websites. I'll go to 127 different websites and click around. until I find exactly what you're looking for, you might need to give me 20 minutes because I've got to send all these other sub-agents out of there to do it. But the agent's not going to get bored or whatever the case may be. It's just going to go do it. So what an interesting, again, like reversal going back to it versus here's Airbnb, here's the Walged Garden, here's Verbo, here's the Waldgarten. Or here's my direct booking site.

Oh, but by the way, it's because we're being honest for a second. Not the best consumer experience because this is just one direct booking site. There's 30 of them in Galenberg or there's 27 of them in Myrtle Beach or there's 114 of them in San Diego or 19 of them in Galveston, Texas or whatever the case may be. So what an interesting kind of concepts that maybe we might throw the needle and actually benefit from this. But if it is, and this has also been my underlying concern. And when you think about all that is what motivations of travelers are going to be different for everybody. Yeah. How are you waiting motivation?

And does this turn into, does the AI experience? Again, being able to do 120 searches and find one that maybe you found the rate that got missed by the revenue manager or something like that, does it become a race to the bottom of the revenue side? That's something we don't have to worry about as much, but we kind of still have to think about that if that is the main motivation of an AI agent to find the lowest cost, how game at all is that?

Yeah. Yeah, well, that's an interesting thing, right? Because in theory, I don't know up against the time wise, like our AI agents may know our price. preferences a lot better. Did you see this Amazon thread last night on Twitter where you go into your Amazon settings and look at what your Amazon knows about you, like your preferences? And it has like almost oddly personal information. There was one woman that I tweeted and said, I kid you know, this word for word when I saw on Twitter last night. It said this woman had a very flat buttocks.

That is exactly what it said. And her Amazon preferences, I'm dead serious. And then another one was like frequently, frequently ships items back or returns a lot of items. So there was all this information that Amazon's collected about you. And there's this really rich personal profile about you. So in theory, yes, I see what you were saying. The race of the bottom is, as one of my favorite Seth Godin quotes of all time, the problem of the race the bottom is you might win. Great quote. But I do think that there's always going to be that budget consumers looking for the best deal. Hey, I'm going to use AI. I'm going to find the cheapest place. Oh, there's a little efficiency. This guy was desperate. He was one of the lowest price. I went and found a $150 a night

hotel room. It's awesome. But if every person like that, there's a person who goes, I'm coming. I have four kids. I want somewhere nice to stay. Here's what I'm looking for. So there's, in theory, and this is the chess case has talked about this before. AI, in theory, should be the best job ever at matching people together properly, matching up their requirements, their budget, their desires, their needs, their unique personal needs. Adam talked about this at length on the RF Hospitality Show about maybe people that might have a physical disability or want a quiet space. They have a child who might benefit from having acquired or space for them. They'd be happier, whereas we all want a quiet space, but for some people, it's not the biggest thing.

Some people would be like, oh, that's so boring. I want to be in a quiet space. I want to be in a loud, so I want to go to a hotel where there's a party going on, right? So for every, as the expression goes, for every seat, there's an ass to fit it, that sort of thing. It's an interesting way to think if AI can match us up better. that you end up booking something, I end up booking something, and it's both exactly what we wanted, even if we both pay $250 a night, and it offered us totally different things

because of our preferences or because of what we desire, although I think you and I have a lot of overlapping. But regardless, so there are people there that way we want different things. So interesting concept. We don't know where it's all going to go, but I think we're going to pay attention here and keep you up in it as we go along. We're up against the time-wise.

This is a short mini episode. Thank you for listening in. Go to your podcast, out of choice. Leave us five stars. We'll appreciate that. We'll be back with longer. We're flesh-hot episode next week. Hope you have an awesome rest of your day.