Heads In Beds Show - Your Google Analytics Funnel Has Changed A Lot: Here's Why

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

In this episode, Conrad and Paul revisit the five-step Google Analytics booking funnel through a 2026 lens to explore what's changed, where AI-referred traffic actually enters the customer journey, how it behaves compared to traditional traffic sources, what today's analytics can (and can't) tell us, 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. We're live. Paul, what's happening? What's going on? Lovely, beautiful day. Feels a bit like fall up here in Minnesota.

I'm not going to lie. We are back down. We were down in the 70s this morning. We're going to be like 70 in rain. Like, this is the time of year. I can sit outside, work a little bit, listen to the kids. at each other. It's just the greatest way to get...

86 is not bad. I've had too much, like, the 80% humidity dewpoint stuff, that's just, that's not doing that. I've had to experience that a few, too many times this summer. It's great, but oh boy, that's... The suffocation of humidity should not have the tape. Any little wind-shel wipers on the glasses? Yeah.

How are you doing? How are things going in your 86 degree neck of the woods? Not too bad. Can't complain. Everything's pretty good over here. I've taken some lumps this last, like a few weeks last month or so. But it's all in perspective. I think if you see certain things, and it's just, man, I've gotten kicked and I'm down, but I can get back up. And that's kind of how things have been for me right now. So all a positive outlook, even though things have been shifting around a little bit. It's so funny because things have been shifting around a little bit in my life. So too is your Google Analytics traffic, I suspect, if you're listening in. So today's episode is revisiting. We actually dug through our.

fancy new archives that I built with Claude and tried to figure out have we done this exact topic before. And the answer is we haven't. We haven't really done this precisely. So we need to do one on this anyways. And of course, we have a little AI talk. Paul and I before we record said, we may need to do a non-AI episode, but it leaks in everywhere. And it's like, and maybe it is like rain or like a hot weather. You can't prevent it entirely. You limit it and put it at bay a touch. But we're going to talking about AI a little bit. But basically, it's just kind of coming back to when you're looking at your website performance, putting this in our quotes, your website performance, your analytics performance.

What are you looking at? Are you looking at the actual steps in the funnel that people take from coming to the website to making online booking? Are you looking at each step of that funnel and measuring it properly? Are you segmenting or you slicing that data so you can understand how different traffic channels perform where they enter, where they don't enter, how they end up going through this process? Or are you doing the surface level, which is just looking at the overall sessions, maybe the

overall purchases, and just kind of checking the box and moving on because I've had up in my share of projects recently that I've worked on where the traffic flow has been, there's been gaps and problems and issues and things like that haven't fully been resolved. And sometimes the answers are not simple, by the way. Sometimes the answers are really hard. Wow, people really jump off this website on the property detail pages. It's because our photos aren't very good. We have 100 properties, all with poor photos.

Reshooting 100 properties is a monumental task. But that may be what's necessary to improve the performance of this. Then you have to sit with that and realize what to do with that. Anyways, I'm already going off on tangents. But we're doing a revisiting of the GA Google Analytics booking flow funnel with a little bit of kind of AI traffic stuff sprinkled in. So this was your idea to some degree, Paul. So walk me through this at a high level.

What do we, what do we talking about here? How does it apply to the vacation rental manager looking to get more direct bookings? I do. I think part of this is, let's hypothetically, if you have been working with a vendor in this space, if you're working with buildup for two, three, four years, or you're working with any of the other vendors,

we're not going to mention anybody else. But if you are, if you're working with vendors, like the likelihood, is that you're probably visiting the same kind of metrics that you have been for the past three, four, five years. And I think that's fine. I think that those are probably very important. These are leading indicators of success. I'm not a company.

I'm not going to be a negative way. But what I'm saying is that holistically, when you take a look at reporting across the industry, it's pretty similar. We're looking at the same things. We're looking at the primary things that Google is showing us when you look at the get your kind of first view of Google. So when you sign up, we've re-allocated a little bit. The data that's just in, in some cases, some people are putting it into customer boards that way. But the numbers themselves, like the data points themselves really haven't changed, even though the customer journey has changed pretty monumentally over that time.

So I think how we're evaluating performance of the website, and again, there's other complexities that analytics brings into things, too. But when you're just looking at it like that of just how the travel journey, the booking journey has changed, and we're still looking at the same metrics, then maybe we have to kind of shift that focus. So today, again, looking at how you are evaluating. One of the things that I've seen in some analytics is that we are. We're getting the different parts of the funnel, but we're falling out at very important parts of the funnel. And then those bottom of funnel moments where you never want leakage at the bottom of the funnel.

And it is. It's something that it's not like one specific website provider, one specific anything here, one specific destination. It's a combination of effects. So really, I do. I think it's a reevaluation of how we consider reporting on the website and how do you evaluate what that report looks like, what those KPIs look like, and how do you actually improve them move the needle and not just focus on? We're not going to say vanity metrics because I don't think. there are as many of those in Google Analytics, but, again, focusing on measuring what matters and moving what matters there. So hopefully that's kind of the way there's. And again, and where does AI search fall in?

Because you can't have a conversation right now without having that factor in because that's been a big shift in how the travel experience has changed. So we'll throw it back over to you. Let you dive in and chew on that a little bit. Yeah, 100%. I think that we've talked about,

I guess what I would say is trying to put this pieces together for this episode. is that if you're, if you focused on your marketing, you're now getting traffic from multiple places, it's very easy to look at that surface level, as you mentioned or talked about there a little bit, and say, I got 2,700 clicks from my meta ads. I got 2,200 clicks from my Google ads this month or whatever the case may be. And then my eye does this, too. You scan all the way of the right, and you look at how many people checked out or did a purchase event from that traffic. And then you just quickly make a judgment call. And so obviously, obviously, that's where most people come from when they make a booking.

And I'm saying this is a guy that sells a lot of Google ad services. But if you don't dive into the surface a little bit deeper, you'll miss a lot of the forest through the trees. For example, we did this recently an episode where we talked about the fact that email is much more of a top funnel channel. But people talk about it like it's a middle or bottom funnel channel. There's one exception, which is we have one of our team members are working heavily lately on a checkout abandonment emails. Those are bottom funnel. But your typical like newsletter style email that's going out to people that have stayed with you before, it really is more of a top funnel channel. You're getting people back to check you out the first time.

So if you get someone to go to this topic of today, if you segment your analytics traffic to only look at email or SMS traffic, pop open your funnel and then say, okay, 200 people clicked on this newsletter runs by website. 110 of them did a date search, 47 of them looked at a property page and two started the checkout process. Some people may look at that. It was a failure. It was a failure because you got 100 people who were not ready to be in the mode of buying, into the mode of buying, 200 people to click over. Of those, you got 40 or 50 to actually go look at dates and look at properties. and you got a handful of starting to check out. Those people who went from being very probably booking unaware

to like pretty far down in the funnel very quickly was the result of email marketing, even if they didn't convert in that browsing session. Once you start to look at how traffic behaves in the website, you start to think about it a little bit more in terms of where am I attacking them in different stages, and you start to learn to like the value of a meta ad, even if it's not driving a lot of last-click conversion,

or the value of an email, even if it's not driving a lot of last-click conversion. And it helps you understand as a marketer or as like a brand builder, hopefully, for your company, what's actually helping in driving value? It helps you put things in the right place. I think when you understand this data, when you don't understand it and you're not looking at it through the right lens,

you look at a meta ad that gets no last-click conversions, and you go meta-ads are stupid. And without realizing that it's the only channel, one of the only channels you can run, that's making people completely unaware of your destination who are in your target market, aware of your properties, and see more in a five-to-10-second video than they could see in 200 Google searches about your listing and what it looks like.

And once you realize it, it's like, oh, there's a really powerful tool. I just have to know where to use it. And the data has helped me understand how people behave once they come in from something like an ad on Facebook or Instagram. Maybe that'll take what you said and then build a little bit on top of it from there. Yeah, I think that that's a reframing. I think that's where when you look at Facebook meta traffic in that manner, it makes sense.

Like it does. It is a great way to do it. I think the problem is we lump it in with the rest of the marketing channels and think that, oh, if we're not driving that almighty right-hand column for both. Again, that default right-hand column in Google Analytics is revenue. You've got commercial rate revenue. And when that is zero and all of the surrounding line items have some revenue attributed to them, boy, is it difficult to say, oh, that's the be all and all.

But how are they getting there? What is still my favorite report, attribution path report, is seeing Facebook in there, seeing email in there multiple things, seeing different campaigns come in there, then seeing organic traffic organic searches come in, starting to see some of those AI assistant sessions coming in there. It's interesting that I assumed there would be a little more credit given to those. Maybe it is more a chatgy, B, do you think if we could see more Gemini come through? Maybe that will get a little more last click.

But I'm seeing it more in the early stages of that kind of booking path. Maybe it's step two of a five-step journey or stuff like that, where how do you quantify that? How do you really understand? I think it's where talking about what's actually moving the needle on these events. Like it is not just coming in, not just generating their revenue, not just being a step on the pathway, but truly identifying what channels are, we're going to get that session started. That's A number one.

We got the homepage view. But what channels are starting to drive those enterdates? What's getting people to the search results pages, that first level? What is getting people to the property detail page? Are we landing people from some channels on that property detail level page? And then what are they doing from there? Do they need? I think that's one thing with landing pages, listing pages, anything like that is if someone lands on the page,

if someone doesn't get there through traditional means of going to the homepage, doing a search, or getting to your destination level page and then getting done, into that unit page, have you given them enough context? Have we given them enough of an experience where they can drop into that page? And they're not going to abandon from there because that's another thing that you start to see is that when people are just dropping into that level, that might not be the right spot. It could be one of the things, I'm sure you've seen this a couple times where, for whatever reason, the canonical is a or the page that's being indexed more heavily for a high-level search.

term is a specific listing as opposed to your destination level page and then all of a sudden you've got some people that are really in the wrong level of the funnel and so i think that's where you can start to identify when you can see that in the report and say oh why do we have so many people landing on the property detail page but that's where they're abandoning what are we missing what isn't there is it the imagery is it the pricing is it something else on the page that's just distracting people from ultimately going to start checkout and finish that checkout as well. So I think that's where really breaking down those channels and understanding where they're landing and how they're making that path from there because we know that's not, it's not typical

that everybody's going to land on the homepage. It's a lot. 50, 60% of your traffic will probably do that, but not all of it. So where can we make that, where can we shore that funnel up there a little bit? Yeah, you bring up a good point, which is when people do come in on a category page or like any sort of like subfilter page, in theory, they might be a little bit more high intent. Because the example I would give is if someone's searching on Google, and let's say they search Destin Florida Vacation Rentals versus them searching the name of a specific building resort or something like that. Generally speaking, that person landing on the resort page or a condo complex page, whatever the case may be, does have higher intent than someone who's not coming in off that page. That's a fair assumption. But there's no guarantee of that. Like you said, they might have clicked on something.

look at Google's matching in PMAX if you turn on final URL expansion, which you probably don't want to do, by the way. But if you do turn that on, Google is just going to send random keywords to like random pages it feels like at times. And you're going to end up with a lot of like very confused visitors who are landing on these deep pages on your website. Like you were saying, property detail pages, category pages, et cetera. And they're like, dude, I just wanted to see all your stuff. Or they end up on a property detail page when they're, and then they think that's all you have. And they end up on one listing page. And they're like, oh, I guess this company has this cabin for rent. Well, that's not what I'm looking for. Then they're bouncing. And it's like,

oh no we have a hundred other cabins like if you just click over the search results page so i think that's an area of improvement that you get from looking at some of the things that you like you've talked before paul about things like clarity sessions and looking at recordings and looking at traffic sources this is tedious work but you can often reveal these kind of things once you dig through it in the past right it's not it's not fun it's not glamorous and truly your eyes go buggy looking at clarity but some of the things do you speed it up at least by the way do you speed it up when i watch oh yeah it's got to be at least like that is i'll do two x or four Usually it's 2x, sometimes it's 4x, just depends on how the length of the session and stuff like that.

But then if there's something happening, certainly, you've got to pull back in it and make sure you're understanding what's happening. But I think the thing about, like, you can watch the sessions, and I think it's helpful. It's to get to a certain length or hitting specific pages from specific channels, all that stuff. You can go down the rabbit hole of how you want to do that. But even at a high level, if you're just looking at scroll depth, if you're just looking at the heat, And you're just looking at that stuff. I think that's where even the visualization of the pages themselves, because so often my device looks different than your device,

looks different than your device. And I know that when we do, we did the little mobile drop-down when we were working pre-show, just looking at a thing. And I saw you go down and grab a different device than I would do, and then it is. Everything renders differently. And I think that's so important to understand that like how your site looks on one device is going to be very different, especially in the

mobile side of things. I think because there are so many different devices, you can break it down Apple versus some type of HP Dell. They're all going to show things, display things pretty much the same way. But if you're looking at these mobile devices, my goodness, it's very interesting. We talked about vibe coding. We talked about all the things that can factor in there now especially. But it's something that when you do look at, let's say, content that you're putting on a page for an SEO purpose, I think there are some websites in this space that do much better at expanding and things like that, some that need that work of improving that user experience.

And I think that we overlook it until we have a data point that doesn't match up. Again, you go in and you look at the drop-off when you get to a resort-level page if you're a condo, if you're an on-site property manager or something like that. Why would we see the drop-off there? It's because we put all this great content about the resort on the page and now people aren't getting down to the units and they're not actually getting to what they wanted to see. So I think that's something that it has. It's just it's opened my eyes quite a bit to trying to diagnose.

What is it? The reality is that there's a lot of websites that are. down right now. They're down, whether it's period over, month over month, quarter over quarter, the year over year, stuff like that. But they're experiencing some things that they don't like and they're trying to understand why it's happening. And I think that's the, we can't just look at organic traffic is down. Organic traffic is up. Email us down. Email is up and we're getting more chat GPT. All these things. That's good. That's really important. But now we do have take it down to that next level of understanding, okay, what kinds of people are hitting these

pages? Are they within the right intent? Do we have some leaking points that aren't allowing people to ultimately get that direct booking completed? Because why have the site? Why have the direct booking site if we're not going to actually drive those direct bookings that are coming through? Yeah, I agree 100% that the, I'll say it this way. I don't think anyone is poorly in tension when they're laying out these pages. I don't think it's ever an intentional thing where it's I think it can be what's that classic hippo thing where it's like highest person in the room's opinion or whatever is what often wins. The highest individual paid person in the room, there's some abbreviation there. I'm butchering it.

But basically it's like that can happen where people go before they look at our units. It makes sense that they would get this paragraph of text. The SEO team wants that. Then the gallery. Maybe someone in the company, we've got this videos that we shot and photos that we have at the complex. So it'd be foolish not to include those. But then you're right. It's like we keep pushing the units down and down on the page.

And then I agree 100%. You actually could probably see a lot of value in what you just described. of just looking at your funnel and just going piece by piece with platform and device and traffic source. Like those three that sounds simple in the surface. Oh, just look at mobile versus desktop and then look at your funnel and all the metrics and track that over a two or three month period, see where they're dropping off, start to measure it to compare it. Then do the same thing with Android versus iOS. Then do the same thing with coming from Google ads versus organic. Then do the same thing with meta ads traffic versus Google ads traffic. It just go through in those few ideas. And then you'll realize, wow, these people behave totally differently.

But again, it doesn't mean that like the ads that don't end to the conversion or a failure. all the a business ended in the conversion are guarantee us success or like there's nothing more you can do because there's so much nuance in it and people explore in such different ways. So you mentioned AI. I think we went decently far without having an actual AI topic. But my belief, and this is, and we talked about this recently, so like I'm beating a dead horse here a touch or at least limp horse. But you go, some people are talking about this huge surge in search traffic and people

talking about using AI for travel planning. And then I go look at our clients and like there's no traffic coming in from Jack JetGPT relative to other traffic sources. and there's big disconnect. I think how I'm squared at my head right now is people are using the AI in very much a travel planning mode that is it is not even top funnel

it's before they're even thinking of travel. So again, the prompt they might go into chat TBT with or Gemini or Claude is I have four kids. I live in South Carolina. I'm looking for a direct flight option and we want to go somewhere warm that has an awesome golf course

and places for the kids to play. Then they're going to get into the middle of funnel relatively quickly where they go, oh, you've got to look at Miami, You guys can fly there directly or Fort Lauderdale. There's all these places that are drivable. It's warm, et cetera, et cetera. Now I'm in the middle, bottom funnel pretty quickly where I go, okay, let's choose this resort or this resort.

And then all of a sudden, now we're price shopping. We're comparing. And then we're going to choose what place we made stay out, right? So I think that that's the disconnect of. It's not like there's an equal representation of AI traffic in each step of the funnel, that it's this 40% or 50% number that's been thrown out there by some people in the industry. It's a lot of that top funnel stuff that really you wouldn't use Google for anyways before. You would never go to Google three years ago and put in a,

200-word prompt about what you're hoping to travel and expect any reasonable page to come back. That just wouldn't work that way. You might use a little bit of a longer prompt. I remember when I first started doing keyword research, mining and things like that. We'd look for long-tail keywords that were both long-tail in terms of their frequency, which is what that actually means, by the way, but also long in terms of their actual query count, like word count. So it'd be like an eight sentence, like the one that always comes to mind. I think this has been done at the RMA shows now and stuff like that, but it's like a dog-friendly cabins in market with a fenced yard, like very specific searches. That was like a long-tail search where people had talked about that before. Great concept, right?

But now you could actually, in theory, send your AI agent and be like, look at every single dog-friendly property on this page. Tell me which ones have a yard, which ones have a yard, which ones don't, or which one is the biggest yard, because my dog, I want to let them out and let them run or whatever the case may be. So it's like, that's a new thing that it wasn't there before. I acknowledge it's part of the process. But it's not this like replacement, like people seem to think for the last click or the last step in the funnel. If anything, I think it's helping your top and mid funnel a little bit to some degree of like awareness, people are checking you out, going and looking at your website, maybe looking at a property page at some point. Like I think they absolutely are going to get there from chat chbtee and the like. But when they go to book, they're not really going to book. They're not really going to book. Anytime, certainly not now. There's almost no data to verify that. Nor is there seemingly, I think going to be a bookable solution in the near term. Let's say here or something like we're something like here or something like the power users, early adopters are going to use it. We'll use it. Let's say here or something like the power users, early adopters are going to use it. We'll use it. We'll, let's say, You see that in your analytics or traffic or something like that? I think so.

And it's reasonable that it's going to occur. But I'm talking like your 80, 90% of people that are actually booking vacation rentals don't want an AI agent to do it for them. I'm sorry, not in the R space. I'm not saying that's not the case for booking a commodity hotel and you just want something booked so you can just have one night in the airport before you. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a considered trip vacation rental with your family, friends, et cetera.

The one or three trips you might take all year with your family. I don't think you're just like delegating that decision to a bot entirely. I think at best you're working with the bot and with the AI to have. help you kind of narrow something down and place it in there. And you're still very much like your hands on the wheel in that situation. And I think you'll see that reflected in how people behave on the site when they come from these diatriphic sources. But what are your thoughts? There's a LinkedIn article. I can't remember who I've got to go find it now. But more on the hotel side of things, same type of thing. The people aren't delegating that a way. I think they want

to be part of the process. And that's something that I think we talked about the inspiration. It is more of a branding play. How well have you branded yourself? Because if you're, you haven't branded yourself and these systems don't understand what your brand is and what you deliver and what you do, then you can't really be a part of their travel planning process. But it's until, until there is, there's a AI driven platform that is, it's a vacation rental portal. we're not going to see it. I think still the glaring omission is that Google doesn't implement the caterer handles into its offerings.

Like that is the biggest place where I'm still interested to see. Like I'm starting to see more shifting of kind of that AI mode default experience and how those results are starting to render. for the life of me, I can never get, when it's prompting me to do a trip, and I'm just clicking in, simply clicking into the vacation rentals tab, I'm not getting results to show up. This is concerning for me as a marketer, as someone in our space, for a variety of reasons.

But I guess that's the most, that continues to be the most concerning part for me, is that where is the vacation rental industry space within the AI game? because Jack QBT, same way. Like, there'd be connections that have been made with Expedia. I've been made. Who is very high-level minute search aggregators or true OTAs.

Airbnb still, they're still on the periphery there, and the booking process just isn't there. So I just struggle with understanding where we really want AI in the problem. We want it to be, we want to be a part of the process. but because it is so ambiguous on where it is in the funnel, like we have zero idea.

And I don't think a cloud of understanding where we're showing up in prompt and where we're showing up for share of idea or share of authority or anything else, I don't think that's going to help it because ultimately we're not going to know what the prompt is specifically. We'll never have that. It's going to be a privacy concern that everybody will hide behind it. it'll be great. We'll synthesize proms ever. But biggest scapegoat ever.

But still, like, that's the, I think that is the most troubling part for me is that. Yeah. Yeah. I still think we're on the outside looking at thin. And if we are sitting there, that is a terrible spot to be. And I think some of that is already reflective in the numbers. Like, we should be at this point starting to see. indirect, like, not active.

We should be seeing hundreds of sessions a month hitting these sites. We should. If people are using it in the way that we think they are, if people are really driving into the travel experience more, and you do see that Google is saying people are planning that travel more within the system. But we're not seeing it. I'm concerned. Like, this is not a matter of these sites aren't organic.

aren't showing up organically, aren't showing up from an SEO perspective, aren't architected well, or the data isn't structured well. All of this stuff is true. But somehow we can't show up for the same types of searches, the same types of prompts that were happening previously. This is, I think AI is being used more than enough now that I do. I have questions as to whether it's stacked against us. That's a whole other big topic episode. But we are not favored by any means. We don't have favored status within any system right now.

And I don't know why that is. I don't know if it's because we have so many. So it's such a disparate ecosystem of software and all these other things. And we can't have that GDP or whatever, or global distribution system or whatever that looks like. But yeah, that's when we talk about the, obviously the creeping of the AI this is what the creep comes down to right now

is that we have to establish an ecosystem to not be showing up more yeah there's interesting thoughts in there it's a little bit off of like the analytics side of it but I think that you how would I say this I think you bring up a good point where what percent of vacational managers have a good enough

direct booking site to basically earn the traffic from an AI platform if it's it is easier this we had we had a Brennan on from Propelic on the Art Hospitality. This was like four or five months ago, which is a decade ago in AI terms. And he would love that opinion that basically the best deal for Chachypte to do, Gemini to do, Claw to do, is with a big OTA because they can aggregate and they can show thousands of available listings, Airbnb being the best example. So you do a prompt in ChatTBTBT, BT, and then it connects to the Airbnb plugin automatically

and starts to bring back rich cars, rich information inside of that system in a way that would be visually appealing. Now, again, we've also done episode recently about Brian Chesky talking against that, the idea that, no, we want you to go straight to Airbnb. We want to own basically distribution and the plumbing, if you will, of how you would plant travel using Airbnb. And you see what Airbnb is trying to do right now, right? They're trying to be this, like, super app by connecting to other third-party services that map out your entire trip. Now, is that actually what Brian thinks is the right thing to do? Chesky thinks is the right thing to do?

Or is that Wall Street pressure to say, well, if we do car rentals, we'll make some money from that. If we do hotels, we'll make money from that. So therefore, top line goes up. That's an interesting question. And Airbnb is not very transparent in the past with they're reporting about revenue. Because Airbnb's tried all these things with respect to activities and services

and all these things. And from what we can tell, they've very little traction compared to their core product of short-term accommodation, we'll say. Short-term rentals, vacation rentals, et cetera. That's our core product.

Now they're bolting in all this other stuff and it's like, are they going to... Every OTA will eventually have this life cycle, right? Of growth, stability, like more growth, maybe and then slip coming back into dying. And like with Airbnb, will this expansion be their undoing? I don't know.

It's funny, right? It was like a great public company. Or excuse me, a great private company. Maybe they're not a great public company because they're just not meant to do what they're trying to do. And I watched this video the other day on Twitter from Gurdley, that guy, Michael Gertley. And he talked about the rise of all of Airbnb. And I replied with a screenshot of like, I don't think we could say the fall of Airbnb

when they're consistently growing 10, 20% other than their COVID year where they shut down for part of the year in 2020. But other than that, they've grown consistently 20 to 30% really every year. for what, eight straight years now, seven straight years now, except for one. So I don't think we'd say fall of Airbnb yet, but maybe it's fair to say if the core Airbnb product is faltering and they're bolting in a bunch of other stuff to add into it, maybe it's artificially inflating their revenue compared to what they need to be focused on. And maybe that's the criticism of Airbnb and going back to this whole thing of like which

platforms are going to get the distribution. In theory, the one that's easy for the consumer to use, right? If it's easy for the consumer to use your direct booking site, you have a heck of a better chance to go back to our core topic here of getting them through that funnel, than if you go there and it's just not a good experience. And I think if there's some blame to lay out there at the feet of some people, it might be the PMS platforms. I don't know if they get enough criticism sometimes

for how generally speaking poor these direct booking sites are for most major PMS platforms. They're not very good. And luckily, it's popped up a whole industry of people, both in my own world and people that are competing with us as well to build these really custom-nized websites. So it's great business for almost like me and others. But if you're a major PMS,

would you not sit there and be like, how can I make my website the best that can possibly, how can I build in all this tracking that we're talking about? How can I make this thing like on par with Airbnb? And then distribute that feed. Like if you're one of these major PMS platforms to those different systems, it'll be a value engine for our clients, which for them, it's a property manager.

So that people find these properties easier. Like I just don't think they think that way. Maybe the PMSs are so dialed in row or so focused now on swallowing up other things. Oh, I need to be a pricing software. I need to be a this, I need to be a that, that they don't come back and focus on direct booking. But it's like a chicken or an egg scenario, isn't it? Well, we're not going to make our direct booking site better.

So more of our customers demand that our direct booking sites be better. But we're not going to spend time on that. The websites aren't very good. So we're not getting clients who get a lot of direct bookings off the template site that we provide. You know what I mean? It's such a fascinating thing when you think about it and like peel under the surface a little bit. If you just made the website awesome, you would automatically see this lift in direct bookings by making the websites a lot more customizable and stronger.

And some of these companies brag about how many engineers they have and with AI and all this kind of stuff. Why couldn't we have a way, way better off the show? solution that's quote-unquote free or included with your PMS because I know that's one thing you're probably not going to in the AI revolution that's the thing you're going to get rid of last let's be honest like the percent of people don't want a vibe code their own PMS you can probably count them on one hand maybe two hands if we're being honest the other 99.999% of property managers vacation rental managers want a system that works and that they can interface with it and that is a great system of record they don't want to vibe code a PMS so that's the last thing I think we'll

disappear but yeah maybe again we're way off topic here to some degree but that's because we're having fun with it as we i think we i think we dance around that a lot just like the reality of we and we and it's i think typically how we say it is it's a performance thing because there's really no way we can have really lightning fast website it's in the vacation rental space because you're always tying something in with an API to your list to the primary backbone of your website oh that was that i had a little PTSD just as you were talking about all that just thinking about like that that balancing act of websites versus the performance versus the SEO versus all these things and I think we're at a point now where it is too late like it is you'd have to re-invent

and redo a lot of stuff there you can do it I think it'd be worth it but because we built them so monolithically back in the day to retrofit some of this stuff it is they're making choices on what they want to retrofit. More power to them makes our jobs more exciting, more necessary, I think, at the very least, because it is. You have to be able to diagnose this stuff. I think you can't take referencing the blog post that we saw this past week, you can't take kind of the company at their word to a certain extent.

We don't want to play the gotcha game with a vendor. But you have to verify. It's a trust-but-verify system that we're in right now. And I do. I think that there's a lot of people in our space who've gotten really good at sales. Really good at sales. But ultimately, what's under the hood is what's going to get you off the lot there.

So I think people who can help identify what's under the hood was broken under the hood. I really what's going to help you set you up here. Your analogy is really fun there at the end, sorry. And because it's like finding that source of truth with your own business and looking at your website performance, looking at your direct booking performance, and getting the truth is hard. In the same way,

they're like finding a mechanic that's honest, is hard. We've all had a situation where it's like, wait, did I need to buy that thing? Or did I just get swindled by buying a blinker fluid, you know, from some guy who put $20 in my invoice and you're like, wait, I don't think I need blinker fluid. Like just that classic pain that we have.

But I agree, and there's some editors in our space that are great at selling. They sell a product that they, maybe they believe in it themselves too, but it's like the proofs in the pudding. And I think in the world of we have limited budget, we have limited time, energy effort resources, to come all the way back to the original topic of the episode.

You've got to go back and look at your own data, understand how people move through your process, have honest conversations with people that are running those different systems of how well is this working, what if we try something different, how would it behave differently? And also be willing to work with them. Don't close your ears off in your eyes completely and say, there's a big difference we were talking about before we hit record

between delegation, you're helping me execute my vision and abdigation, which is like, I'm just giving this up and giving it to you and hoping for the best. That is not a good strategy. So I think your key is to kind of find out what you can delegate when it comes to marketing, traffic, reporting all these things. But at the end of the day, like you are the CEO of your domain. You are the CEO of your business. And as a result, you have to figure out what's going to work

well. It doesn't take a lot of executive function, Paul, to do one more thing before they depart for the day. Let's leave review. Go to your podcast, App of Choice, iTunes, Spotify, listeners. You get the most downloads there. Therefore, we are counting on you as are warriors in crime here, or like warriors in tandem for you to be the podcast review bros. We look at all the download numbers. We look at those regularly. And again, there's tens of thousands of downloads of this podcast, which is awesome, we don't have tens of thousands of reviews. So that tells me that way more people listen than do a review. We know that for darn sure. So we thank you for your time today. I hope you have an awesome rest of your day. And we'll catch you in the next episode. Peace.