2024 Travel Predictions with Simon Lehmann

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and.

Welcome wherever you're tuning in from around the world. This is a very special edition of the Boostly podcast and this is an extract that was taken from the very recent book Direct Virtual Summit that I hosted in front of 5,000 hosts. This section was a very special fireside chat with Mr. Simon Lehman of AJL Italia. It went down so well that I decided to pluck it, drag it out from the Virtual Summer and put it as a very special podcast recording for you all to enjoy. So if you missed it, you if you watched it. But if you wanted a recap a few weeks later, this is a perfect chance to do so.

You can go and find out more.

About AGL Atelier@aglatelier.com you can of course go and find Mr. Simon Lehman on LinkedIn. His his portfolio and his background and his history is so impressive and as soon as he started saying some of the companies that he's been part of, I could just see the comments in the live video, just pinging and it was phenomenal to see. And then he came in and broke down a masterclass. He Talked about his 2023 predictions, what came true. He talked me through his big takeaways from attending all of the events that he has done so in 2023 and he shared his 2024 predictions that got a lot of people thinking in the room. So without more being said, let me hand over to myself and Mr. Simon Lehman at the BuckDirect virtual summit.

Side note, if you would like to.

See us do the book diary virtual Summit again in 2024, leave a comment below, hashtag summit Sumit or Sumit.

It's been a long day.

Yeah, absolutely. Markets is sensational to be here. Yes. My Christmas hat is already on my, my hat to get the festivities going actually. And I'm lucky enough that my 12 year old daughter is in the kitchen making dinner for me as well. So by the time we're done we can walk into the kitchen and my other three children are going to be home by then. Simon Lehman I'm a vacation rental enthusiast and passionate about this industry. I've been in the industry for 20 years. I had the pleasure to be the CEO of the largest property management company.

In the world for nearly 10 years.

And as you can see behind me, I was also part of the HomeAway board. We sold that to Expedia. So I've been in the online vacation.

Rental space for 20 years.

I've invested in several different companies and.

Now we're running agl.

AGL is a consulting firm, specialized and focused on short term rental and vacation rentals.

So we help any stakeholder in the.

Short term rental industry to navigate in this very complex and interesting hospitality vertical. And we love STR from head to toe, basically.

Amazing.

Thank you.

And again, so I don't know if you people pick that up, but can you just explain about the company that you sold to Expedia and just sort of how that came about? Because this is this massive. For those of you that just, you know, you're very blase, you did that intro but just explain about that very quickly.

Yeah, just very quickly. I joined the board of HomeAway at the time called HomeAway, which was probably one of the largest listing sites in the world and was listed on NASDAQ for, you know, US$3 billion and Expedia acquired that in 2015 for 3.9 billion. So and then eventually they took that over, started to integrate and then also rebranded it back to Vrbo. So now it's called Vrbo, but it used to be called HomeAway. But Vrbo was one of the acquisitions that HomeAway did and now Expedia rebranded it back to, to. To vrbo. So now VRBO is entirely owned by Expedia and was acquired in 2015. Unfortunately, I didn't remain on the board, but yeah, it was a pretty big transaction.

I don't know if you saw that comment that just came in, but somebody in the Facebook group just put holy moly. So, yeah, I see that.

I see the comments on my screen. So, yeah, this is pretty amazing. And I still love homeaway. I can say that publicly. By the way, the rebranding for me didn't do it. I'm still a homeaway boy. Obviously, I know the two founders very well, good friends Carl Sheppard and Brian Sharples. And I can't get used to verbo, but that's a marketing decision, right?

Yeah. So you can see the level of the guests that we have in here. And I'm so excited to be able to have Simon on my Rolodex. And when I put together the idea for the summit, one of the first people that I reached out to was Simon because I wanted to get him in front of everybody. Because today's little Fireside chat is going to be about predictions in the state of the industry. So what I love about you, when I listen to you on podcasts or see you speaking at events, et cetera, you, you're very, very knowledgeable, obviously. And let's just dial it back to sort of this time last year. So end of 2022, what were your predictions coming into 2023 for the trends and more importantly, what have you seen sort of come to fruition on the back of it? Those that have come true or those of haven't, if you can just sort of go down those sort of routes.

Absolutely. So let me start this way, Mark. I mean, I've having been in the industry for 20 years, we have seen a lot of crisis changes. We've seen SARS, we've seen 9, 11, we've seen subprime crisis where interest rates went through the roof, real estate markets collapsed. So we've seen a lot and we have seen how the market reacts to that, especially in short term rentals. So first of all, the good news for everybody in str, you are in one of the best and the fastest recovering travel vertical that is out there that can master Challenges the best now. And while we have seen so many different crisis or changes in the market from a macroeconomical standpoint, but also down to, to, to the level of a unit or two in terms of interest rates and investment properties, obviously Airbnb type platforms have helped to fuel the real estate market.

But overall, I think the biggest trend that we have predicted in 22, and.

I put that in a small analogy.

When the sun is out in the morning in 99.9% of the times, you forget the umbrella at home because you see the sun. So the umbrella is last on your mind. And I closed the conference last year with an umbrella on stage. While everybody had record years in terms of ADR, RevPAR, occupancy, everything was through the roof.

We couldn't do anything wrong in 2022.

Supply grow, demand grew. We had record. ADRs homeowners were spoiled. I took an umbrella on stage. It was actually in Miami where the weather was nice. I said, guys, don't forget the umbrella because it's going to get dark out there. And when, when you, when you, when you are celebrating your successes, you should think what is happening. And we've seen it before with COVID how, how hard it's been for the industry. You know, demand dropped immediately. Businesses collapsed. You had to restructure businesses. There was no cash flow. I said, guys, have we learned anything?

No, we're not, because we remain opportunistic, right?

So things came back up again. Everybody was hunky dory. We throw everything on Airbnb. We have that demand. But I said, guys, this is not going to, this is not going to repeat itself the same way. The ADRs will not continue to grow, the demand will not continue to grow because we as a short term rental industry are not capable to continue to deliver a consistent product experience to our guests. And we will lose a lot of guests back to the hotels and demand will drop. This means, and supply will increase. For the first time in August this year, we see supply growth overpassing demand growth. So that means immediately drop of ADR, drop of occupancy and RevPAR. So we said 2023, we will see more compression. Not for everyone.

It really depends on the market.

Is it urban, is it leisure, which destination has it regulatory issues? But overall we've seen compression and that has exactly taken place and it will continue to take place. So I think for the next 18 months to two years, we need to keep our hatches down and control our.

Cost and focus on profitability.

I've just Asked in the chat for everybody that's tuning in live, how is your average daily rate ADR varied over, over this year? Because it'd be really interesting because obviously you can look at this and you get to see this from such a viewpoint and it's really good sometimes just.

To say, okay, so how is your actual ADR varied?

And we've got people in here have been going for two months, we've got people been going for two years, we've got people in here been going for 20, 10 years, you know, so it's, it's really good to get a different vary. So this year then. So last year in Miami, Umbrella on made the prediction. You've been all the way throughout 2023 traveling around the world, speaking to many different people and you know, obviously speaking on stages. From every discussion that you've had and from everybody that you've been watching yourself on stage and the conversations that you've had at Masterminds, etc, what has been your biggest takeaway or takeaways from this, this year? Seeing that we're coming into December, we're coming into the final, final month of the year. What, what have you sort of know to be true now? And, and what can you share with, with everybody from everything you've been doing?

Absolutely. So first of all, here is the proof. So I've been to so many conferences for the last eight months. The only one I missed was VRMA this year in the US because this year I focused on smaller events which was quite incredible. So we saw the first vacation rental conference in Croatia ever. We saw the second vacation rental conference in Australia. We saw the fourth convention in Mexico, Cancun. So these side events just show how hungry new markets are to learn, to share, to do whatever. I mean one thing. So there's several things. First of all, my learning is wherever I travel, Mexico, Australia, Europe or the United States, we do the same thing. We connect guests with owners. That's all we do. Right. So in a simplified term, so everybody on the, on the chat today and who listens in, do not worry, your pain points are universal. Okay? So anybody from Argentina or Chile or Peru or Mexico will share the same pain points with anybody who rents out in Paris or in London with slight differences in terms of regulations, in terms of legal requirements, how do you do financial reporting or anything the like. And the boys in Australia do exactly same thing with the difference to have their 10 hours ahead of us. Right? So at the end of the day we are in short term rental and that's always for me, a nice takeaway to have had the opportunity to travel internationally to talk to these different markets and see what their, what their points are that they're challenged with on a daily basis. They're total universal. Now the second thing is each market are, have a different level of maturity, right. So certain markets, like a European market is, has a lot more maturity, has been around longer, the awareness of vacation rent is a lot stronger. Businesses have been here for a long time and there is new market. And I can see parallels. And for me, one of the highlights was for example, Croatia where the appetite for a conference was massive. To see people that have been competing with each other for 10 years, they've never seen each other. This was an amazing takeaway to see how much this industry is prepared to share knowledge and get people. We're not worried about sharing the secret sauce. We try to help each other because the industry will remain highly fragmented. And I went to Mexico with my last conference before darm in Nashville next week. Mexico was very similar, super active market, very fresh, still trying to get organized, etc. Etc. But the market particularities on any market you go to are the same. Regulation is a threat. The market will remain highly fragmented. Okay, these are all highly fragmented. Market action happens in the destination. Relationship to homeowners is key. There's no differentiation from any markets out there. Yes, Croatia is different because a Croatian.

Homeowner uses five property managers to, to.

Rent out their homes because they think they get a better occupancy through that, which is nonsense.

So this means Croatia needs to do.

A lot on education for homeowners. Right. So I had so many different takeaways. I think sustainability and regulations is definitely on top of mind. And I would like to add a third point. Sustainability, global warming. I mean, we see different consumer travel behaviors. The southern European markets in 2023 have lost market share like, like Greece and Spain and Italy because it was so much, it was so hot. So people went more to the northern markets which have grown. So we have data showed that maybe Jamie talked about it as well in his speech. So that was quite incredible to see. Then the, the urge of, of traveling and using a sustainable home, I think that's definitely increasing. We've seen stats from booking.com 76% of the users want to have a more sustainable business product here. It's, it's important that we're not just putting a stamp on, on something that doesn't mean anything because the, the future users will make sure that you're doing the right thing with it and the.

Third thing I want to share, which.

Is probably one of the biggest takeaways we that we've had out of emerging markets is the change of travel behavior and how people consume hospitality is significant.

And our industry, the short term rental.

Industry is very bad in adopting these new travel behaviors.

Right.

And we talk about digital nomads and remote workers.

Right.

And we need to separate the two. But interesting enough, we have seen reports from Deloitte, the last a large consulting firm, financial consulting firm Deloitte has put a report out.

How many days a week does the.

Average worker on a global basis still stay away from work per week?

Now in Covid it was 3.9 days.

Which is obvious in 2020. So people stayed at home and, and worked remote.

It dropped down to 2.7 and in 23 it's still 2.2 days. So the average worker out there in the world is still staying away 50%.

From physical work, from his physical location somewhere else.

So this means it has not gone back to the 2019 levels where we spend, you know, less than 0.7 of.

A day away a week from, from work.

It's still a 2.2. This means there's thousands if not million people who consume and travel differently than.

The way they have done pre Covid.

But that requires adjustment to the, to.

To your contracts and to the way.

You rent your property. So long term, 30 day plus midterm. How do you accommodate these travelers in terms of rates, in terms of amenities? Is there a separate space to work? Is there maybe even a computer screen and a comfortable chair and a desk to work at and then you can grab these type of customers. And it was interesting to see markets which actually could benefit from it, such as Croatia or Mexico are still in their old traditional travel view. We'll just get the travel guests to our places but actually filling in shoulder season expanding seasons will allow you to like will will make you address these type of travelers which give you higher occupancy and bring you higher returns to.

Either your own investments or to your customers, to your, to your owners.

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Really key three points. And I want everybody to sort of write this down because this is, this is obviously going to help massively. So sustainability, we've talked about it many times. Regulations, obviously, so many people and a lot of you in the uk, a lot of you in Scotland, Wales and obviously England coming up soon. You're going to be very much into the regulations. Chat soon. But new trends, consumer trends, digital nomads. I used to class myself as a, as a digital nomad. Me and my family, we used to travel around and this is 2017, 2018, 2019. There's definitely a new trend come out the back of it. And, you know, I was literally interviewing a new salesperson today and he is a slow, mad. He describes himself as a slowman. So he, he goes for one to two months to Peru. He's based out of Miami. He says, hey, rent in Miami. So expensive. He's a remote salesperson and he's now, you know, he's in Peru and he said he'll be there for a month, he'll be there for two months. He's. This, this new trend is, is definitely coming out. And, you know, you, you can look at, you know, you can look at what Airbnb are doing. You know, you'll go onto the app and they'll ask you to upload your WI fi speed in your property. They've, they've got a definite section now for workspace. So, you know that these massive companies have got the data, they know what's going on. And I think you're 100% spot on. So sustainability regulations, we've got to be on top of these new trends. So going with that in my name, predictions for 2024, obviously you've got those three that you've taken on board from this year massively. Do you have any separate predictions for 2024? What are some of the things that the people that are watching in what they can be sort of pivoting their model to, or what can they be sort of keeping an eye out for? 2024?

Yeah, I mean, it's challenging, right, to, to what we have seen and what we're talking about to talk about the future, Mark. But I think overall, what does that sort of digest to, you know, if you wish, what does that get down to when you, when you think about it is what is your end game, why you're in this industry. You know, build conviction. You know, it has been easy, you know, and listing on a site like Airbnb, buy a property, flip it. We have no entry barriers in this industry. Right, And I sound like a broken record. We have no entry barrier in this industry. You literally need an apartment, a one bedroom, a studio, and you're off to the races. Right, but what does that mean? You know, where do you want to go? You know, I see people who still have their day job, up to 20 properties, and then they collapse and then they need to think about what's their future. So you need to think about.

And I think while now it's not.

As easy to do that the way it has been in the last three years. Interest rates are growing. You know, we see that the recession is not going to hit us as hard. Some even predict no recession in the United States or just a mild one. Interest rates are coming down. You know, obviously inflation has been able to be capped. But hey, we've seen massive increases in many different things. Cost, energy, of energy and everything else. So we're in a tough environment and that requires you to think about why am I in this game? Number one? Number two is what is my end game in this industry? Is this just a lifestyle business? I have 20 units, I can make a life out of that, or do I really want to scale this? And I want to professionalize that. Because I think one thing we need to think very carefully for 24 is that we need to keep very focused on your, on the profitability of businesses. Because as you know, homeowners have, so we all know homeowners have been spoiled, so they're going to put a lot of pressure on you. So if you don't have good relationship to homeowners, get them now, make them to, to stay, because otherwise they move. There's no loyalty here. Right? It's an asset light business. Number two, do you know your operating costs, you know, where your expenses are going to? Do you know, where do you make money, where it is upside? Where can you save money? Where, how can you create efficiency? How can I adopt technology more effectively to, to run a tighter ship? You know, everything is sort of geared towards running a tighter ship and understanding your own purpose and reason why you want to be in this industry. And what's your end game? You know, because some of the market or the business particularities are not going to change. As we said earlier, this business remains hyper local. This business remains asset light. So it's based on relationship to homeowners, second homeowners who rely on property managers to manage their properties. And when things are not going to go as well as they have been, then you need to automatically think about all these different things to think, is this really worth my while? And where is this industry going to head to? And that's where we do a lot of work to talk to companies like that say, you know, what's your three year plan? Do you know your cost? Think about financial hygiene. And last, and I've talked about this, but definitely not least, it is the financial hygiene and the profitability that you need to focus on. I mean, you know, every natural person. Now we don't have, we have less cash in our wallets nowadays for obvious reasons. But you know, I always say you always know how much money you have in your wallet as a, as an individual. Right. And you need to do the same running a business. And sometimes we see property managers with even 50, 100 units, they have no clue where they're at. Right. Because accounting is not our strength. It's hospitality and you know, dealing with owners and guests and do fancy things. But then get a good accountant to make sure how he has your back to that if things are not going as well as they, they could. Because I would predict that 2024 is going to be a tougher year. We will see more supply, less demand. The world is opening up. Let's not forget Southeast Asia has not come back yet really.

So there's still a lot of massive.

Things that can shape our development of our industry. And I think we need to be very mindful and take that umbrella and forget about the sunny days and, and also, you know, people always say we need to spread this positive message. Well, not everything is that positive. We just need to be mindful about it and have a plan if things are not going as well.

Yeah, 100%. For those of you that are thinking, you know, I'm not very good at accounting, I'm not very good at that side of things, is a book that I recommend called Profit first by Mike Michalowicz. It's a book that I read years ago and really did help me personally. And I know so many people from the short term rental and from the real estate world can help them as well. And Simon mentioned about building relationships and partnerships and, you know, friendships with homeowners. If you are a homeowner who is, you know, running a short term rental business, it's still very important for you to build relationships and partnerships with Other hospitality businesses in your area, like build, like Simon says, a hyper local, a very local community. Because at the end of the day, the more that you can find these local communities within, within you, you know, even if like you may treat them as, or see them as competition, if you can work together, you can, you can definitely get some benefits out from there. And who knows, even if you're a homeowner and you want to maybe start up a management part of your business to, to grow your portfolio without having to get the capital to be able to invest in properties again, these, these tips are key and relationships come down to it all the time. It always boils down to relationships. How, how big is your network? Because your network is your net worth, obviously. But when it comes to net worth, make sure you, you've got your P Ls in place. As someone said Chris said here on LinkedIn. Mr. Chris Mar from iPreg, he said P Ls, PNLs, P Ls financial hygiene, however you want to call about it, make sure you've got all of that in check.

That's right. Chris was one of the customers I could never convince working with us, but it has its own reasons. But I totally agree with you, Mark and I, I think there's one more I would like to shout out here and that is regulation, especially with smaller owners like you talked about, the community market, which I think is extremely important. One thing we need to remember here as an industry, and that's something I am extremely proud of, a rental in a community contributes more GDP than a hotel room. Think about it, right? And people, legislator, regulators, none of them see that. They think we're stealing homes for people not to be able to rent. This is total nonsense. You could look at any market you want. If you look at the Barcelona market, a Parisian market, a London market, it's just not true. What people don't talk about is what is the value a rental creates for the community. People who go and consume food, go to restaurants, eat out, go to local grocery stores, bring food home and cook it. A vacation rental guest spends more money than a hotel guest. Absolutely. Hands down. And it creates more jobs because it's more fragmented. It's harder to clean. You need to have cleaners and maintenance people in the hotel. It's all in one building. So you need one maintenance guy for 100 rooms and for 100 vacation rentals you need, probably need five maintenance guys and, and so on. So one thing I want to allude here is that the single biggest risk the two Biggest risks that we have to our business next to everything. Of all the horrible things that go around us, we have two wars, we have like we're, we're maneuvering a lot of challenges right now. But for us in the STR industry, besides all the horrific things that are happening in the world right now is regulation and sustainability and in regulation. And that's maybe a shout out to your community. Mark as well on this call is don't think that somebody else will manage it. It needs everybody on the table. No matter if you have one property, two property, a hundred properties, thousand properties on the management, everybody needs to be on that table to talk about regulatory frameworks, regulatory issues. And this is not done by somebody else, it's done by us as a community. It requires advocacy, it requires engagement. Make sure you know who are the people in your community who are working on these things, understand the regulation that you have in your own market and support whatever initiatives are out there. I mean we have rockstar like Fiona in Scotland and other markets who are, you know, battling 24 hours. They need support because they are making sure that our SDR industry is put into the right perspective in relation to hospitality. And once again, you know, we are an incredible hospitality vertical. We have lots to offer but it needs a community effort to make sure that we're not going to be regulated out of the way for hotels for the wrong reasons.

So a question that's come in, which I think is a really valuable question and I'll share it on the screen. Is there any research or wording or blogs or any, anything that you can sort of put in the chat or I can share with the community that they can then take to their elected officials? Especially when you say that quote about a short term rental drives more GDP for a location than a hotel. Is there anywhere that people could go? Do you have something on AGL Italia or anything you can share?

No, that's a great question. And, and that again, you know, this is one thing that is super hard in our industry. You can't just be very general because every market, every location, every destination is different. So it's about digging into your local network. We are happy to connect any people on the call today with their local people. We know all the different associations. I just see a blog post here on Portugal as well. I mean we have relationship to Miranda and everybody who fights on the local markets, they're all local heroes. We know them in Italy, we know them in Spain, etc. We know the associations and we can work out stuff like that for us, what I, for me, what I just said is something that is still not getting enough attention in terms of value driver per capita or value driver per guest, STR versus hotels. To be perfectly honest to you, Mark, nobody has done substantial work on comparing these two. But I mean, everybody knows, you know, for obvious reasons that an STR guest has a higher spend rate than I would tell guests at the end of the day.

Well, this is what we'll try and do at Boostly. We'll, we'll try and make this happen. We'll try and get some blogs together. But yeah, again, everybody who's watching this, you do need to bring it to a local level. We're obviously talking as an industry as a whole, but you need to be in the room. And you know, this is where you've got to give a tip of the cap to somebody like Airbnb. Because one of the things that I met with an MP a couple of weeks ago thanks to Catherine Ratcliffe who came over from Canada to York and he said, you know, fair play to Airbnb because whenever there is a situation, they're in the room and they're in the room, you know, to obviously to help our short term rental industry because that is obviously a major part of their P and L. But they have to be in the room. And so many hosts aren't because I think we as an industry, on an individual level, we go, it's all right, somebody else is taking care of it that, but a lot of times they aren't. So as long as you're in the room, start coming up together, get local meetups together. And when regulation is becoming more and more a thing in your area, even if it's not hitting you right now, it will do. And all we ask for as a whole, and Simon will, will echo this is we just ask for fair regulation like regulation. And a common sense point of view makes sense. But as was explained to me by the MP that we met, when anything gets passed through and things are going up the chain to become a decision, we what you'll find is that people from other offices will just attach on their agenda to this one thing that goes up the chain and a fair regulation for it very quickly become unfair because other people are just attaching on in these decision making members of Parliament will try and attach on their agenda to make this overall thing come in. So we have to make sure that again, you do have a voice and you can make a difference. You just got to start. And there's not one thing that we can say to go and do you just have to start to ask the questions and if there is nothing in your area, start something up, arrange a local meet up, whether it's in a pub or a restaurant or wherever and start a conversation.

Yeah, I could, I could not agree more. The only thing I would like to add on here, Mark, and you know me, I normally need to have the last word, but if it's not, it's not Airbnb in the room. It needs to be all OTAs in the room. That's when we make a difference. And I think that's something that I am very close at heart. Being in this industry for 20 years, Airbnb is the new kid on the block, has overtaken some other platforms as well. But at the end of the day, we need have all OTAs in the room to make a change because you can't run a debate or a campaign with your own interest. It needs to be in the interest of the entire industry. And that requires a little bit more work. And we at AGL are trying to facilitate that as well and bring things together because we need to act as an industry. So for me, as a closing word, what I want to see, and that's what we're passionate about at agl. We help to professionalize the SDR industry. We need to increase professionalism and, you know, make sure everything that you have to rent, that you rent out to people are places you would stay in yourself and feel at home.

Simon, thank you so much for this 30 minute fireside chat. It's really good to have someone with the level of your experience and expertise come in and, and talk to us. We appreciate it. And if everybody that is watching live, if you can just come over, open up the app, tap that Love Heart emoji as many, many times as you can and say thank you and show some love to Simon in the comments. That would be great, Simon. I think the best place to get people to go to is LinkedIn. That is where you shine the brightest. So for everybody that wants to find out more about agl, what's the domain? Where can they go to?

Absolutely. So it's our domain name is ajl atelier a t e l I e r.com and the best way to find me is obviously Simon Lehman. L E H M A double N on LinkedIn. With AJL Atelier, I have over 15,000 followers and I would look forward to have many more. And we, and I look forward to meet anybody who's been on this chat today and and support them on their journey. Know what you're in for and professionalize your business. Short term rental is the best hospitality vertical out there. We still have a long way to go.

100%. I've always said this, that there are over 7 million listings on, on Airbnb and I truly believe that only 10% of them are actually any good. And the 10% are in this room right now. The 10% sign up to summits, they go to events, they, they're a part of masterminds and courses and they're always looking to improve. There's always going to be bad eggs. But you being in this room right now, you're ahead of 95% of everybody out there. So you are part of the good eggs. You are going to drive us forward. So it all comes down to you. Simon, thank you so much for being part of this. I will be back at 8:33 hours time for the final session today. Thank you so much for being part of it for day two. Thank you, Simon. And take care everybody. Bye bye.

Merry Christmas.