Heads In Beds Show - Why Is No Vacation Rental Manager Leveraging These Specific Marketing Tactics?

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad break down some of the most common "why not" marketing tactics that they do not often see in the real-world with vacation rental managers, but in fact can work quite well to get more bookings AND get more homeowners. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'Connell🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 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 Beds 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. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? You know, just another fantastic week, start to the week here. I got to tell you about my trip down to the farm, played a little golf, start to the week here. I got to tell you about

my trip down to the farm, played a little golf, got to see the kids on the tractor. So there's really nothing better than seeing a five-year-old push the throttle forward on the tractor and seeing grandpa and his brother just jump backwards. It's really, it's a fantastic little experience there. So we had a good time and it's always fun to get back down to the country roots, I would say. So how about you? Yeah, no, we're not nearly the same level of fun and excitement. My five-year-old, I don't have a five-year-old, I have a four-year-old, but a four-year-old and then the seven-year-old were at the pool. And it's amazing the confidence that they get. There's that one summer where they go from timid, afraid to, I'm going to just jump

in and do whatever I want to do. For the seven-year-old, it was last summer where that happened. Went from a little timid and afraid around the pool to now fully confident. And like you have to drag him out, take him in screaming. He'll stay in there all day. Love that he has his mother's skin, by the way, too. It gets nice and golden tan, that kind of stuff. Doesn't have this sort of look going for him. And then the four-year-old, so interestingly, doesn't like, doesn't trust himself maybe fully in the water.

Can swim okay, unless he has the mask on. There's these full face masks. doesn't trust himself maybe fully in the water can swim. Okay. Unless he has the mask on. There's these full face masks. I've seen them. Yep. And they have a little like snorkel above the head. Very confident when he has that on. You can literally push him to the bottom of the pool and hold his breath and he's fine.

But otherwise, he's not confident. The baby's still the baby. She's not there yet. But yes, it is interesting. Like, it's kind of like business or life or anything. You have that one moment where you get confident or that one season where you get confident or whatever the case may be. And then you come out on the other side a lot stronger. So yeah, it's kind of like business or life or anything. You have that one moment where you get confident or that one season where you get confident or whatever the case may be. And then you come out on the other side a lot stronger.

So yeah, it's good. Agreed. Agreed. Awesome. We have some pretty interesting ideas today. Maybe things that can help build your confidence if you're listening and you are a owner of a vacational business. I think we have a fun outline here on the title.

I put, why is no one doing this? And we came up with a few different ideas of things that it's a bit exaggeratory. Sorry for the clickbait headline there. It's not that no one's doing this, but rather policy inside of how many would you say, how many vacational companies would you say you've seen inside of at this point? I don't know what that number is. I would guess it's probably in the five to 600 range. We were 400 strong at TNS during the just pre COVID about 300 strong or almost 400 strong at inventoryNS during the just pre-COVID, about 300 strong or almost 400 strong at Adventory as well. And surprisingly, not as much overlap as you would expect there. It is, I think, I don't know just the connections and the partnerships and all that, but yeah,

it's probably in that five, 600 range. So it's always crazy to go back and think about like all the people that I have worked with. And when you see them on LinkedIn and doing different stuff, it's, it is, it's that point of pride of, Hey, I worked with you like five years ago or six years ago or something like that. And yeah, I do. I love that. So it's a big number. I know that consider myself lucky to have worked with so many and hopefully we'll work with a few hundred more before we're done. Yeah. That's a lot more than me. I think if I were to sum it up in ones that I've actually seen inside of, I feel like that number is in the high 100s, maybe low 200s. And like you, there's some overlap between different roles. And you and I

have overlapped with clients before. But for the most part, I feel like my number is somewhere in that range. And it's interesting, because I don't think you actually have to see that many to start to notice the same patterns over and over again. Really, today, these ideas aren ones where it's, I don't want to hear like a comment or get an email. No, this company XYZ does this. It's not that no one does this, but rather given the volume of people that we've seen, it's certainly not common. It's certainly not widespread. So I thought we'd dive in and we start with referral programs. So let's get into it. Referral program. I'll give credit. The first person that I've seen do this the best in my opinion is Avonstay. So my understanding of how Avonstay does it from looking at the email,

I haven't done this myself, is you can share a code that's unique to you and you get $50 off of your stay. So Conrad shares his code with Paul, Paul gets 50 bucks off his stay, and then Avon Stay sends me 50, but it stacks. In theory, I could refer many people to Avon Stay, or what I'm suggesting here is that other property managers consider this. So not a one-time code where, oh, okay, I give you one-time offer, but rather if I keep referring people over to you, I should be able to continually get rewarded with that with additional credits or discounts on a future stay to where, yes, it wouldn't be crazy to have a super affiliate, super referral person potentially earn a free vacation if they sent up business your way. So a lot of clients, the reason

I say this is a lot of our clients will shovel lots of money to Google. They'll shovel lots of money to Facebook for advertising. Great. That's that helps me. So thank you for doing that because we help run those advertisements for a lot of our clients. That's fantastic. But a very few of them actually spend time to build out a system like this. Part of it, I realize is the tech is hard. So some of these ideas are a little aspirational. I realize it's not something you could just snap your fingers and get built right away. But I believe there's a lot of power in this idea because what you're doing is you're taking that CAC, that customer acquisition cost, and you're saying, why don't I just, instead of giving it to a big company or why don't I, instead of in the form of service fees

or guest fees or something like that from a big OTA, why don't I essentially give that to the customer and then let them go out there and be my kind of advocate for me and help me get more bookings? So that's kind of my frame is on the booking side, this could work. But I imagine the same logic could work on the owner side as well, where it might be a little bit more common.

It is. And I think that's typically where a lot of people, we'll talk about it a little later, tracking and sourcing success. But it is, it's where a lot of people who haven't done an advertising or a marketing effort or done something like, that is how they've gotten it. They've gotten it, whether it's through realtor referrals

or just the homeowner referrals in the community. Sometimes those are closer relationships that you have in the HOA or whatever that is. But you see a lot of people who, I mean, it is 50 bucks for the booking side of things, 2,000, 2,500 bucks that here's a referral for every property that a realtor brings on., realtors need to keep selling those homes. So it's not a matter of if they see it and they understand it as a, depending on the market, a short-term rental opportunity or even a long-term rental opportunity for some of these property managers. It is. It's one of those things where why wouldn't you give some type of discount or promo code or whatever it is, or just the referral bonus to say, all right, every time you

get a home that you know is in this community, send it our way because we're a top provider. And I think it is, it's that thing where once you've got that really good relationship with a realtor, it could be an endless flow of potential leads that are coming through. On the booking side of things, I think you see it more on like the hotel and resort side of things where some of the more flag brands, but I do, I love the idea of not just the $50, but not just $50 one time. The ability to have a free stay, if you're willing or able to, as a traveler,

get 10 people to book, heck, I'll give you that credit up and I'll give you enough that hopefully you can pay or get a pretty good discounted stay or something else that you can do there. But I love the idea of referral programs. And I think they really do drive a lot of the top performing on the owner acquisition side as top performing programs because they are, they know in a lot of cases, these businesses know when the new units are coming into the MLS. So it's quick communication there and getting all that information out

and they're effective. We put together, at Ventura, we put together specific marketing programs for our marketing strategies for the realtor side of things, for those referral programs. Definitely something that crosses the chasm between guest side and owner side and something that I think people should be doing more on both sides of things. Because if you are just doing it on the owner side, figure out a way that you can do it on the guest side and get the same type of value of the loyalty of those guests, I would say. Yeah, I think like you said, and you built it out nicely there, it is a little more common on the owner side. But what I think is not common on the owner side is talking about it. One thing that I never see is like a page on a website explaining the referral program and how it works. Sometimes there might be some kind of an internal document or kind of a handshake type deal or like an informal email,

but I think writing it down, making it look nice on the guest side and then having a page. And then what Avon stay does, in my opinion, it's the bottom of every email to give 50, get 50. And it's this little persistent kind of call to action where you know about it. And I know about it, even though I've actually never actually stayed with the bonds day. So that's another way of approaching it is that building out their program is what we're talking about here, but also let people know about it. Cause you never know it's going to be that one day where they're ready to refer someone over their friend, ask them, Oh, where'd you go last summer? Where'd you go this past week? Or on the owner side, you never know when that one referral is going to

come through. So reminding all of your current owners, you mentioned realtors, which I think is the most obvious use case. But all your current owners might know someone else in that building or in that community or in that area who has the property. Yeah, there's so much validity doing that. And again, it's just not there's not a high sort of penetration here. That's the gist of what we're sharing here. These ideas are out there, but very few people seem to take advantage of them. Right. All right. So let's turn the page a little bit. So this is something we've talked about quite a bit on the other show that I host art of hospitality. I can put a link in the show notes to this kind of that show if people want to check it out. But what we said over and over again is that there's no human touch point at all before,

during or after a stay. This is very common and it's ruthlessly efficient. So I understand that from a business owner operator perspective, but I think there's something to be said for the reason that guests aren't loyal. We had a previous outline that we've been working on about guest loyalty that I don't think we're done yet. I think we'll do an episode on that in the future. But this came from that idea that we had discussed a little while ago, because ultimately I think guests aren't loyal because they don't have any connection at all with you or your team or your employees or anything like that. They just, they booked on maybe an OTA, maybe direct, whatever, but they booked, they got an email automated. They got a door code automated, the door code bunched in,

they checked, they walked in, maybe there was some kind of automated email that checked in on them when they arrived. And that's fine. By the way, I'm not decrying the idea of automation, I'm all for it. But I do think that you can't have it both ways. You can't love and embrace automation and all that it entails. And then also expect guests to be loyal to your completely faceless sort of cold feeling process of what it's like to book and stay in a vacation rental property. Yeah, I think this is just an issue. This is a problem. People aren't really addressing it that often from what I can tell because there's so many other problems. Now that the pendulum has swung back the other way demand wise, I might see maybe this pick up a little bit. And people have the resources where why aren't we doing that call when they book saying, Oh, we're excited to have you. Is there anything else that we can do

to make your stay better? That's something that could be added onto a reservationist plate now that maybe their plate isn't so full. And that could be something that could really add a lot of value. Oh, I learned that Paul and his family are coming to go stay at this awesome farm that his family grew up on. And that's amazing. And there's there could be something there, you could leave a box of Pro V1s in his house for him, and he would be over the moon. These are little things that sometimes can make a big difference. Certainly the one during the stay, I've actually watched people do this in person, but being at the office and seeing a company that does it well is really eye opening, because it's that they can see the door code that's been punched in, they can then call about

an hour later, maybe 45 minutes later, not right when they walk in. But hey, I see we're able to access the property. Hopefully there's no issues. If there's anything else I can do, just let me know. I'm Paul, I'll be here to help you anytime property. Hopefully there's no issues. If there's anything else I can do, just let me know. I'm Paul. I'll be here to help you anytime during your stay. Here's my direct line number. These things, these calls take 45 seconds sometimes. And I know the guest on the other end appreciates that and gets value out of it. So no human touch point, probably not a common doll on the owner side, but on the guest side,

I see this as an issue. Anything else you wanted to tie in there? It is. I think it's what I see more talk about this most frequently is Matt Landau. It is. I think it's what I see more talk about this most frequently is Matt Landau. It is he'll find kind of some of these more general, I would say, like the Fortune or the Inc. articles talking about Airbnb in the travel space and vacation rentals generally. And the one word that he did, like he calls out not being there is hospitality. Like it is it's truly we're still in the hospitality business. Yeah. It's all about travel and getting people in and out and revenue in that, but you're not going to get any of those things. If you don't have the hospitality in place to drive that loyalty, to drive people back, to, to make them enjoy that experience. It's not just going from point A to point B and then going back to point A at some point, it's really making sure that they're having that experience

that is noteworthy, that may have them coming back or telling you get these small human touch points in place, there's a much higher likelihood that they are gonna refer someone, whether you have a referral program in place for them or not. So I think that's critical. It is, a lot of the property management systems do try to make it feel like a human touch point,

but it's not. It's like those automated emails, the automated text. We know what it is. So really making sure that you're driving home on that and having someone see your face. There's something to be said for. I know the owner of the... Making yourself available. As the owner of a vacation rental management company, you don't want to sit holed up in an office all day because it is. It's really about making sure people see you, people know you, and people understand that you put your blood, sweat, and tears in some cases into this business. And really being able to put a human face to that, I think, is important. And I think there's something to be said for why Airbnb puts such a focus on hosts having pictures.

There's something to be said for putting a face to who you're going to be staying with. And that's a little more personal experience there, in some cases, right in the same home. But you do, you want to make sure that people know that we're not just machines going behind the scenes. Otherwise, you are. If there is no human touch point, I think you turn into kind of an OTA or something like that de facto because people can't attach humanity or that hospitality to it. I think in these scenarios too, what you're also doing is you're not driving any brand value because people have no affinity. What a brand means basically at its core is that you can charge more for a commodity. And let's be honest, a lot of properties that we market are commodity properties.

I don't mean that there's not an unlimited supply of five bedroom beachfront houses in the Outer Banks. There's a limited supply in some respect, but it's not that hard to find one either. Like you can go pretty short distance and find 10 other property managers offering the same thing. So when you offer nothing really that makes you stand out from the crowd and offers no sort of even chance for someone to have any sort of brand affinity, then what do you expect? And that's what I felt recently is what do you expect when your guests aren't rebooking at the same rate when you didn't do anything to make them think that they should be doing that? There's no real value there. We can't just slap a few emails back on our side on the marketing side and think that that's going to bring someone back into the fold if you've given them this automated sort of robotic

type service. So no human touch point before, during, after the stay. I think a mistake and one that I think now is going to be a little bit easier to correct going forward than it has been the last two years. And I'm empathetic to the reservationist because I see how hard that role is and I get where they're coming from. But now with things slowing down, I actually think this is an opportunity to open that door up and focus more on the hospitality angle for sure. All right, let's go the next direction.

We'll try not to offend anyone on this one. Connecting with local businesses and what I call true value add packaging or true value add experiences. So I'll do the rant that I did before you hit record in maybe a more friendly way, which is basically there's a lot of providers in our space that will love to sell you a portal or they love to sell you a link or a system

that offers you quote unquote experience upsell opportunities and you get a tiny bit of a cut and you're like lightweight affiliate for these services. To be clear, I don't think these are bad ideas. But I also don't think that they're actually adding a lot of value. I think you're just skimming a little bit of value in the middle, you're taking your two or three or 4% cut, you're not really giving the guests that useful or good of an experience. You're just saying, yeah, book through this experience thing over here. Here's my link. I'll get a few bucks if you do it. Okay, fine. But I think what I don't see doing back to

the kind of topic of the show is I don't see local businesses doing it in a true value added way. What I mean by that is when I go to a new place, I don't know who the best fly fishing guide is. So if you go and fly fish with 10 different guides, and you're like, these two are the best, and those the ones you booked me with, that's value add, I'm willing to pay for that. Or even better when I'm at checkout. Oh, yeah, I see you're arriving on Wednesday, you probably want to go on Thursday, Thursday at 1pm. Let me call and see if he's available. If so, we'll get it added and we'll charge you just, we'll just add it to your reservation and we'll get you on a fly fishing trip with John Doe. Cause he's the best fly fishing guide in whatever location. Those are

the things I think that add a lot of value. I don't see a lot of value in, yeah, here's a link, like pick out your fly fishing guide that you want to go with. In my mind, like this is the experience piece that everyone talks about, but very few people actually deliver on the experience because what they're doing is they're trying to figure out how to do this at scale, or they're trying to figure out how to do this in the most lightweight, light work, light way of doing it. I don't know if explaining that well, but they're trying to do it in a simple way, which part of me understands, but I think if you're going to offer it, make it awesome, make it where, Oh, I wasn't able to do that, but I was because I booked with company XYZ and then they connect me with this person and that was the best person to do this kind of thing with

i think the worst thing to do and in my opinion might even damage the brand is what i see a lot of is yeah let me just like spam you a bunch of links basically after you book with me and hopefully you book something through our services so i see this one pretty frequently i bit my tongue for a while on it but i think this is an area that needs to be improved upon i don't know if you have anything else to tie in there as well there was so there was one out in there was one manager out in wine country who it was he really prided himself i think he only had 12 units but that experience it was not i'm gonna set you up with going to these wine tours because you know drop of it's like up here you throw a ball you hit a best out there, you hit obviously the wineries and stuff like that.

So I do, I think it was his ability not just to pick out, but cater to their taste, to their needs, to what they were actually looking for. Or you want to go to a higher end or you want to go to one that focuses on red wines versus white wines. This guy went truly all out sending out a survey prior to just to make sure he was customizing the experience to the guest needs. He had a nice luxury SUV, drove them out to the wineries and took them on the wine tours, gave them a little tour themselves, came back, cooked a meal for them. That's going above and beyond, certainly. That's next level service. That's a whole thing. That was.

And this guy, I mean, he was getting some great, obviously, great referral business people. He didn't have to worry about people coming back. They continued to book and book and book. So he was getting all of that right through there. But you don't have to go to that extent. But it is. It's more than just... But it's a taste of what's possible. It's a little sample of what's possible. Yeah. Exactly. I think that's... It is. you send people to a page and you're taking out that human element, customize it, give someone something that you really want to know that you're hitting a home run. Singles and doubles are fine, but you want people to come back, refer that business. I think all of this is going to tie into maybe that loyalty discussion later, but it is all

going to tie into there. There's some type of holistic hospitality here that we have to put a focus on to make sure that we're truly giving people those experiences that they're looking for there. Yeah. A little, maybe a little extreme, but I think it's something that you can take bits and pieces of and maybe build it into what you do with your guests there for those value add packages. Yeah. Ultimately the, that's the word that I put in there on purpose is that a lot of people will offer these extra things and I don't think they actually add value. That guy that you're describing is adding a ton of value. That's a unique thing that I can't go click buy and get. And yet that's exactly what I think will actually work the best is the harder it is to get it simply, the more value you're adding, the more the guest is really going to respond to it and

have a favorable opinion of it. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's turn the page a bit here into a competitor analysis. I like this one because I can touch on both the guest and owner side. So doing research and understanding the flaw and the, what they do well, what they do poorly of each local competitor around you. And I would argue, maybe even some of the national brands, you might want to consider them. They are hybrid in some cases, local, and then they have national brand component to them as well. You know, what we're suggesting is maybe once a year, maybe twice a year, depending on your bandwidth and availability, why not sit down and go through and really look at each step of the process for the guest on the competitor side

of things? What are they doing? Well, what do you see that? Oh, that's interesting. I never thought they did that. Or I hadn't seen that. And what are they doing poorly? Because I will say this with confidence, your guest is doing the same thing. Your guest is going on, and they're researching. And if you rank in Google, and they're finding your website, guess what, they're not that's not the only website, they're probably clicking on, they're researching. And if you rank in Google and they're finding your website, guess what? That's not the only website they're probably clicking on. They're probably looking at other sites in the area. They're going on Airbnb. My wife just recently booked a short term rental for a trip that we're doing to go see family members. And ultimately she ended up going to multiple different sites. I think she ended up on six or seven different websites before she

ended up making a reservation, an area where we don't have a client and where there's not a lot of inventory. So it was her just trying to find something. But ultimately, she was able to poke around and find something that she present the right value proposition for what she was looking for. So if your guest is doing it, not saying that you need to react instantly to everything your competitor is doing. But I think sometimes I've had conversation with new clients coming on board, and they don't even really have a sense of what the competition is doing at all around them. And I think that's a mistake. I think you should have a sense and understanding at least a yearly by yearly check in to be able to at least understand the levels and the playing ground that you're on before you can prove things.

Some prompting ideas, things that we wrote in our outline, what promises or guarantees do they offer? On the guest side, that may be more of a cancellation. I've seen some people do like, I saw someone actually really interesting this year, they did a weather guarantee. So if there's a name storm and it touches the island at all, you can cancel with no penalty at all, the full credit is carried over to a future reservation. And you don't have to ask for it, like it's automatically done on your behalf. I thought that was pretty interesting. You can do the same thing in the owner side, I'll turn it to you in a second for that. And then yeah, how do you compare? How does your booking process work compared to how their booking process work? How does their signup process work

for the newsletter versus how yours works? Do they have something on their pop upup? Just sitting down and going through five or 10 companies, I think, in your market can really open your eyes. And a lot of people aren't doing this, and I think it's a mistake. So that's more so from the guest side, but obviously a ton to learn here on the owner's side. So what's the thought process there? It is. I think, and you hit it on the head there of going down. You can start it with a, call it with an SEO audit, where you're looking at the search terms for people and your local competitors. And that's important too. But when people are doing those searches, hey, let's take a look at the experience of what you're doing there.

Same thing. People are doing searches for management on any side of things. We want to understand what is your USP? What are your risk reversals? Is it the fact that you're going to make them more money? Is it the fact that you're going to keep their house in better shape there? I mean, at a basic level, we tell people to not only compare yourself to the local competitors, compare yourself to what Vacasa is doing, Evolve is doing as far as once they get to the landing page experience of

how easy is it for people to get a quote or information or a ROI estimate from Vacasa Evolve. It's pretty easy. Is it that easy to get that from your business? Is it that easy to understand how you are going to set yourself apart from the other local competition? It's, I think, on the owner's side, because people do focus so much on, I'm going to make you more than X, Y, and Z. Okay. That's what everybody's saying. So really, how, I'm going to make you more than X, Y, and Z. Okay. That's what everybody's saying. So really, how are you really going to make yourself stand out and set yourself apart there? So any tools that you can offer for inventory, we have the ROI calculators.

I love the ROI calculators because it gives people that ability to play with the top, play with the toggle, play with the lever. See, okay, I have a two bedroom home. No, I have a two bedroom home. No, I have a three bedroom home. If you're looking at investing in an area and you're considering, okay, how much of a difference is it going to make if I buy a three bedroom home versus a five bedroom home? Maybe it's going to make about a $30,000 to $40,000 difference on the gross booking revenue side of things. So having that insight into what's going to happen, I think it's huge because it is, it's going to help you differentiate that a little bit more, but it's not just about that. It's truly about how are you

going to ensure that they're happy with their experience with you, that they're going to, again, that they're going to feel confident putting their home, which it's an asset. There is value there. And in some cases, it could be $1 million, $2 million, $3 million homes in some of these markets. So how are you going to protect their asset? And a lot of people do it in a lot of different ways. But making sure you understand, are there ways to improve it? Are there ways to streamline it?

I think it's something for us as marketers who are in it every day or as business owners, you think you know your website pretty well. marketers who are in it every day or as business owners, you think you know your website pretty well. Have someone else completely outside of it do that analysis and go through your booking process or go through your owner page and see how they see it as opposed to you've got your biases already in place. Oh, I know if we click here, you know where those clicks are, but does someone else know where those clicks are? That's the other reason looking at, we use Clarity and Hotjar as an option, but really understanding where people are getting stuck. Those session recording or heat mapping tools are great for kind of understanding your own, but then doing the competitor analysis and seeing, making the assumptions of, okay, my

owners, my travelers are getting stuck here. Can I go to the competitor website and have a similar experience? Or is it a more streamlined experience, a little easier experience? Is it six clicks instead of 12 clicks? Whatever that is, it's something that over time, that's certainly going to help you understand and optimize the experience that either guests or owners are having when they're coming to your digital presence.

Yeah. We didn't say it there too, but I think the hardest piece in all this is being honest with yourself. Oh yeah. I think the most challenging part and everything we just described is being able to look at what you're doing. And like you said, zoom out almost and go backwards and be like, okay, I know this is intuitive because I've done this a dozen times.

Is it actually intuitive? And then, like you said, getting an outside perspective perhaps is the best thing to do during that process because then you're getting someone who's viewing it for the first time i think there's something to be set there i will say this here's a fun one when we were booking said vacation rental we use the national manager perhaps we will do a review of this process after we've arrived back this might actually be a fun episode idea we use national manager one you've heard of but not a v branded company i'll'll leave it there. So a different one. And it'll be very interesting to see because my wife really struggled on the checkout page.

So we ended up booking directly with this National Manager. It was about $200 cheaper on their website directly versus Airbnb, which is where she found the property. Okay. And she filled out all the form and she was like, where's the checkout button? She's scrolling on her phone. She books on her phone. She's scrolling on her phone, can't find it.

It was a next button that was on the bottom. And she realized that next meant, you know, next step of the process. Like it was great. It was hard to see. And I was like, when people get to this last page of this company's website and struggle with that checkout experience. So interesting. We'll come back to that perhaps down the road. But yeah, again, I think to put a bow on that idea of competitor analysis of research, the hardest part there is being honest and truly evaluating it for how it is and not coming in with a bunch of preconceived biases. No one would sign up with, you know, I don't know if there's a real company,

but like Harris and Jones property management company, they're terrible, whatever. That's what's gonna get you in trouble is bringing in all these biases. It's looking at it from the first time and going, how would someone evaluate this? What can I learn from it? And going from there.

I like this next one, tracking or sourcing success with previous, or previous success from either owner leads and signup, which is where I see it most egregiously, or sometimes guests. Like it's actually surprising to me really quick on this, and then I'll kick it over to you with all ask the client and like a discovery call or a kickoff call, you know, what percent actually is direct versus what percent is OTA. And they don't always know that number. So like knowing your numbers, and really, you know, the thing that I don't see often is just measuring that having a simple spreadsheet, doesn't it be fancy, just a spreadsheet

updated once a month is perfectly fine. But just what's coming in? How does that compare to last year? How does that compare to our projections? What's the sourcing of things? Five, six, seven, eight numbers can make a huge difference on the guest side. And then on the owner side, I know this is something we've talked about before.

People just don't know where things come from. So what's been your experience here with that content? I think it's this basic premise of why you have a CRM in a lot of cases, because you want to understand how you're getting the leads in place. You want to have the information about them. And so you can customize the experience too.

But for so many people who do that, they've gotten to 25, 50 rentals just because it's something that that's certainly a question that we ask a lot. And yeah, they're, they can exactly point to. They sent a postcard two years ago and that got them a couple. Okay, that's good. They get some from referrals or anything like that, but really to understand where you're getting your leads from, if you're doing any type of marketing, certainly you want to have some type of tracking, some type of sourcing to understand where you're getting owner leads from. And I think that's where having a CRM and using UTM sourcings. And if you are, if you're doing both offline or direct marketing and digital marketing, really being able to pull that all in together. And

that's when we're doing our postcards, inventory side of things, obviously we're using QR codes and we're UTM sourcing that. So we understand not just that it came from a postcard, which postcard it came from, which design it came from, what month it came from, really understanding the lead time for some of these owners or some of these business owners or property managers who are going to send out postcards every month or every two months or every three months or something like that. You got to understand how much of a commitment or how much of a monetary commitment does that take? But what type of lead time does that actually take for them to come back and understand? Maybe you send it at

the beginning of the season, six months later at the end of season, that's when they're going to send the QR, they're going to scan the QR code. So I think it is, I mean, there's so much data that you can understand when you have the correct tracking and sourcing in place. And for those people who just get it all organically, I think there's still something to be said for just asking a simple question of how'd you hear about us? Or where did you learn about what we do? That's something that on the phone reservation side of things, certainly a lot of people, a lot of those coaches are going to tell you that's one of the more important questions you can ask, but it is, it goes without saying that if you can understand where those leads are coming from, you can put together new strategies around that, that sourcing and that tracking

there. So I ate it on the owner side. I think it's a little, it's a little more difficult in some case, or you have to do a little more work to get the sourcing and the tracking in place. But once you have it, it just makes the job of creating new strategies or getting more growth or more signups or more leads that much easier because you know it's effective and it's not effective. I guess maybe marketing 101 there, but it's just one of those things. I guess maybe marketing 101 there, but it's just one of those things. Yeah. And this is a huge miss that I see all the time where, like you said, you question them and they just, they don't really have a good sense of it. And ultimately, how are you ever going to get to the next step? Right.

Unless you know, like the path you've been on, that's going to lead you to where you are. So yeah, that's a little bit of frustrating one, but one that why aren't you doing it? I don't know. It's not that hard to do. It's something that could be done one time. And then, like you said, done going forward. And then the hard work's done. All right, so the last two things,

who analyzes and what are people doing to either increase booking revenue, or increase owner revenue? And how do they specifically break down each component of that? So the most obvious thing on the guest side would be with booking revenue, how can I adjust my rates to charge more? I think that's well documented with all the pricing tools and things like that out there. There's a whole economy of people that help on the pricing tools. I think one thing I don't see people offering or thinking about nearly as much is what makes this property more valuable. So they have the property itself. It's a three bedroom, two bath, whatever house or condo, whatever the case may be. And then they leave it there. Very few clients that we work with

actually have an active ongoing dialogue with the owner to upgrade the property. And it's just like whatever condition it's given in, once they approve it and say, okay, it's good enough for us, they tend to leave it that way. And I think it's a very valid discussion to be sitting down and saying, hey, you are a mediocre unit in this building. Here's the best unit in this building. And the delta between you all is $20,000 a year. This is a meaningful difference that could actually be exploited. But they don't have that ability, I think, sometimes to have that conversation. They just say, it might be time to upgrade your unit. I've actually seen a property manager send that to an owner. It might be time to upgrade your unit. That was the gist of their email, which I think is not strong enough from a copy or offer perspective to actually be successful.

That's one angle. Who's doing that? Who has a consistent, structured plan on how to actually increase rates with the properties they already have by upgrading and amenitizing. I don't know if that's the word, the properties. Let's roll with it. We can make up our own rules. It's our podcast. Fees. I think this has been well documented on the fees side. How do you break down the fees? How do you explain the fees from a copy perspective? We actually did this for a client recently. During COVID, we did a lot of this work too. It wasn't a cleaning fee. It was a cleaning and sanitizing fee, or it was a cleaning and sanitizing experience that we were going through when we were doing this exact thing. So i think the way you describe your fees makes a

lot of difference my wife this was so funny again going back to the story of her booking rental she saw the airbnb guest fee on one listing but not another listing because obviously the host was eating the fee and on the one with the listing she was like how do i opt out of this she's like tapping on the phone i don't want i don't want that i don't want to airbnb to provide 27 24 7 support and i'm like babe you can't opt out of that. How you explain the fee, the guest is going to sit there at that moment when they have the credit card in their hand, and they're going to be reading those fees. And you better have a good justification for all those fees. So obviously, increasing them is a valid thing to discuss. And there's ways of doing that. But you better explain them pretty well,

too. And I find very few people, they're just tacking them on there. I see one all the time for payment processing. That's the new one, payment processing. And okay, that's fine. I get that's what you're mostly using it for. But how do you explain that? How do you break that down to the guests so they're comfortable and at least understanding and accepting of the fee, even if they don't like the fee? Because the guest hates every fee that you put on there. So you have to explain it in a way that's logical, that doesn't hurt your original booking.

Length of stay. I will say I have some clients that do a really good job on this, filling gap nights, offering both the check-in guests and the checkout guests the night and offering them different sort of experiences. I find this is pretty manual though. Some of the clients that I know doing this are doing this very manually. I know there's some guidebook services out there that kind of do some of the automation with asking, and then they still have to go to the PMS to actually execute upon it.

But again, not a lot of people are doing this. I think there's more validity to be had in this kind of marketing where they're doing, going back to our second point, the human touch point. And they're saying, how can I add on a night here, fill in a night here? It doesn't sound like much that's detailed, kind of grimy, grunt work in some cases, but adding, getting 20% of people to add or either early check-in, late check-out type stuff that can really make a huge difference over the course of a year or something like that. I'll give you a direction for owners, but I think just my idea to put a bow on it is

what are ways that I can increase my booking revenue without the obvious of just getting more bookings. It's more so playing on the margins of how we're manipulating each area of these rates, fees, and length of stay. Yeah, I think it's very similar for us. For the owner side, it's more the commission and your fees and what services you're offering. With commission, it is. It's one of those things where obviously everybody's going to want to make as much money as possible on the owner side of things. Everybody thinks that they should be making all the rent or whatever that is there. But I think one of the things that a lot of maybe, again, top performing property managers,

they're not compromising on the commission fee. It is. They have to make a certain, the property manager has to take a certain amount of money in to run the business to make sure that your home looks fantastic and you're able to give that five-star experience so that people do come back and you continuously have the owner revenue. I think compromising on commission rate is so difficult because you keep going lower there and at a certain point you're getting what you're paid for. So that's a tricky one to say, oh, yeah, I'm going to bring my commission rate all the way down to nothing. But ways to do it, maybe you're tiering the commission rate over a certain period of time. Every six months,

it goes up 5% or 10% or whatever that is, or 2% or 3% or 100% or 2% in a way that it makes the owner where they're making a little more or as they're getting more bookings, they're evening out that number there. Fees on the owner side. Yeah, it's a tricky one. Nobody wants to get those. It's the same. It's my home. Why am I paying for all this? Do you want to have people coming in and continuing to stay with you, continuing to stay for seven days as opposed to two days or anything like that. And services, it is, you got to keep the house clean. You got to keep it well-maintained. I think that's one of those benefits of the short-term rental side is that if you are providing a good maintenance and housekeeping service, the home is going to stay in better shape than if you were doing a long-term

property management. That contract, we were working with a partner. She was under one of the franchising brands, but she had a really good way that she presented to people because in her market in the Northeast, the New England area, there were a lot of people who were doing long-term and she was trying to sell them off of the long-term, off of the mid-term into the short-term side of things. And she had horror stories of people coming through and saying, oh my gosh, nobody told me after eight months that after month one, something bad had happened to the bathroom. And whereas if you have those stays coming in or the stays coming in weekly, you have maintenance coming in weekly, it's going to get resolved right away. On the long-term side of things, that's not the case. So finding ways, I think you're talking about the positioning, making sure people can understand why they're paying the fees, why the services is as important as it is, and

why you're taking the cut that you are. And when you're dealing with the guests, when you're dealing with these vendors, when you're dealing with all of the other things that are going to happen that come into you making your gross booking revenue over the course of 12 months. There's 365 days that go into that and potentially at least 365 problems that you're going to run into during that time. So I think clearly understanding or explaining that to owners is going to help, obviously, keep those owners on, keep them happy, hopefully keep them earning the revenue

that they want to see. And if not, they'll probably try to find someone else who does explain it in a better way or provides a better level of service for them. Yeah, right on. And ultimately that's everything here that we've talked about should tie back into those things.

Like it needs to tie back into service. It needs to tie back into taking care of the homeowner, taking care of the guest and ultimately delivering a better experience for them. And all these other things are kind of details and ways that you can help do that. Anything else? Or does that put a nice, tidy present? We wrapped it up. I think we wrapped it up. Okay, fantastic. Thanks for listening. We appreciate everybody who always makes it this far deep into the episode. And they hear us beg for reviews. They must be tired of it at this point. But you know what would you know would give you a

lot of energy. If you just went to your podcast tired of it at this point. But you know what would give you a lot of energy? If you just went to your podcast app of choice, click leave a review, you put five stars, you hit submit, and then Paul would be happy. I would be happy. All of us would be happy. Why is no one doing this? No one's leaving us enough reviews.

We're not happy. We see the numbers, we see the downloads, and we see the review count, and there's a huge discrepancy between the two. So there must be people who are downloading and listening because it doesn't just automatically show up on your phone. You're doing something to download and listen. And then all I got to do is leave us a review and then we're super happy.

So I joke, but I do appreciate it. Thank you so much. We'll catch you on the next episode and we'll have some more stuff coming your way very shortly.