3 AI Tools To Boost Your Direct Bookings

One of the most overworld uses in 2024 was AI. Whether you like it or not, it is here and it is going to impact every business and every person in 2025. And in this video I want to walk you through the top four tools that I am using right now that is impacting my business as well as the thousands of other business owners that I coach. So my name is Mark Simpson, I am the guy that Airbnb do not want you to know about and I work with over 2000 short term rental accommodation owners and managers all over the world in how they can grow their business by not over relying on Airbnb, Expedia and vrbo. And one of the hot topics and one of the requests I have had more than anything else is to talk about the latest AI tools. And look, I get it, there are hundreds of to choose from right now. It's not just Chat GPT anymore. I wanted to boil it down to the top four tools that I'm using on a day to day basis and I feel like if you tap into these four tools you and your business will be better for it. So tool number one and this is something that I have been using I would say every day for the last year. So po is poe.com it is a free service which obviously has an upgrade so service if you want to, but I don't need to and I don't think you need to too as well. And with that it brings all of the LLMs which is large language models and it puts it onto this one website. It is an app as well as a browser. And what I'm able to do is when I go on there, not only can I ask an original question and use Chat GPT for example, I can do a follow up question but then ask Cloud or I could ask another model. There's hundreds to choose from and what I love about it is that it memorizes everything, every conversation and for me is the easiest resource that I can potentially find right now that bounces from one to the other. So the first one is po.com Next up is a tool that I have been using which means that I do not have to do any more research on Google. I find that the Google search experience as a present moment in time is awful. In the past, any question that I need, needed, anything that I needed help with, doesn't matter what the question was, I would always go to a Google search. But ever since they've been trying to adapt their business to this new world of AI and AI within Search, I find that it is such a shocking user experience. I've been using Perplexity because it is my opinion the best AI powered search engine that is out there. It is so easy to use, it's an app as well as the browser. And for me now on a day to day basis, if I have got any question that I am looking to find relevant and up to date information on, I'm going to Perplexity before I go to Bing, Google or any of the other search engines. So Perplexity, it has Perplexity Pro and that is the service that I'm using. It's a very low cost but again it's, it's a phenomenal tool. The next one is video and obviously by the time that you come to watch this, Sora S O R A which is brought to you by OpenAI is being made readily available to everybody. Hopefully by the time you watch this it is available in the UK and the Europe, but if not Cheeky VPN and then you can go and get access to it. Sora is great because it is text to video or it is photo to video. So again prompts that you can put in that turns any image or any idea into a video that you can use for B roll or promotion on your social media. Sora is fantastic. It's built into the of your open AI account but is very limited in what it can do. For example, they've got so many red flags around it. If you try and upload a picture of a human for example, and ask it to move, it will not create that video because obviously they don't want to get into any deep fake controversy, which is totally understandable. So for what I do and what I've been using for text to video or photo to video or video to video prompts with AI is Runway and Runway is great because number one, I pay $80 a month and I've been doing it for just one month. So you can basically do 30 days worth of content, pay $80 and you can do unlimited videos. So there's no limit to the amount of videos that you can create. Which obviously you have that problem with Sora as well Also as well there aren't so many limitations. So one of the things that I've been doing and I've been working with short term accommodation owners to show them how to do this is, is every single one of them has got quality pictures. So whether it's done by themself or a professional, whether it's interior or exterior, we've been uploading the pictures to Runway. And we've been given it a prompt to say take this standalone image, this static image and turn it into a 5 second drone shot of the property and it takes that picture and it turns into a really captivating five second video. Or we ask it to panic. And the reason why we're doing that is to stop the scroll. So if you were to put a picture up of your short term rental, people will scroll past it because they're used to seeing it. But if it is an engaging 5 second video, they're more likely to stick around. And not every small business owner, not every short term rental accommodation owner has got the budget to do a photography session and a video session. So they can do a very easy in between for a very low cost. Obviously the goal will always be to work with videographers. Obviously the goal will always be to have that extra engaging bit of content. But if the budget's not there, the budget's not there. And this for what, $80 unlimited videos we've been able to create really cool videos that they've put on their YouTube channel or their short term, their social media content. And even as well you can add videos now to Google Business Listing, Google Vacation Rentals. You can add videos to some of your OTA listings as well. And this is just a real cool use case of how we've been using it. There's also as well we've been doing text to video content that they've then used to show people having fun in their local towns or by the beaches. Again it's just creating B roll or just creating that content that sticks. And the final tool that we've been using on a day to day basis and I'm going to give a little shout out to a product that we've created which is the Boostly CRM. So this is exclusive to all Boostly customers. If you are interested in finding out more about working with Boostly. Again we give hosts the tools, the tactics and the TR to increase their bookings and grow their business on their on their own land. The tools are website design that I've spoken about before. One of the other tools that we provide is our CRM which is a customer relationship manager in there we've got website templates, we've got social media templates, email templates that any host and just copy and paste and use. But one of the things that we've been creating for AI is AI assistance. And this is groundbreaking, it's brand new. We're testing it on a, on a daily basis. And our thousands of our customers are using it and getting great results. And what we're able to do, we're able to train AI to read one of our Boostly websites and within minutes it's created an AI assistant. And that AI assistant we put as a live chat on the website. And it's not just text to text, it's text to voice or even voice to voice. It is included in the price, it's not an additional cost, doesn't matter how many listings you've got, it's free for every member that is part of Boostly and within five minutes anybody, doesn't matter what the skill level has been able to create it. All you need is data to be able to feed to it. And on the most basic level we've done it where it's just reading the website. For our more advanced users, they've been able to add in terms and conditions, rental agreements, they've able to add in digital guidebooks, we've been able to feed it as much data as possible. And these are having great results. Because now when a guest lands on a website and when they have a question, and I would argue to say 90% of people who land on your website has a question, normally they would have to send an email and wait for a response. If you have a chat box on your website they would ask a question. But it's reliant on you or a member of your team to be online to be able to reply. And the problem with that is that for every minute you do not answer that question, the amount of percentage that is going to convert to a booking gets lower and lower and lower guests. Now the consumers now want to be able to ask a question and get an instant answer. And the cool thing about this is that the AI assistant is 24, 7, it never sleeps, it never gets sick, never complains, it never revolts, it never asks for more money. It's literally there and you have trained it on your data, on your questions, on your Q and A. So it is going to give the most accurate responses possible. And we've been doing this on a day to day basis. So again, one of the tools that we've been using is the new AI assistance within Boostly CRM. Okay, those are the four tools that I am using. Obviously depends on when you watch this. They may be out of date or we may be using more. So I would love for you to let me know in the comments of this video what tools you are using on a day to day basis. Are you using PO Perplexity? Are you using Runway? Are you using the boostly CRM or what are you using? Let me know. Carry the conversation below. Before you do disappear, make sure you subscribe like this video and share this video amongst your peers to spread the word. And I'll be back next week for another video.