7 Tools To Boost Your Bookings

We've interviewed over 300 people on the Boostly podcast and there is a common theme throughout all of the hosts that we have talked to. And we've narrowed it down to seven key things that they wish that they had known before they got into the world of short term rentals. The first thing is probably an obvious one, but it's one that we have to state is that the booking sites do not care about you. And when we say booking sites, I'm talking about booking.com, expedia, Airbnb. @ the end of the day, these companies priorities lie with their shareholders and their guests. And it's as simple as that. You are part of their inventory that will then provide guests with a place to stay. You've all probably had an incident where you've had to deal with Airbnb support or VRBO support or booking.com support. And one thing is clear, that when you go into that process, when you submit the complaint or whatever you're going to do to chat to them about it, is that you know that you are are fighting an uphill battle here. It's not nice to hear that. It's not the best, obviously, but you've got to remember it. The most important thing that you have to do before you go and speak to their support about any issues is you've got to have everything well documented. If it is a guest complaint that you're having to work out, make sure you've got good documentation. The way that so many people fall down here is, is that they go into it that they haven't got prepared. And you know, moments like this, it's really important to remember your 6Ps. So perfect planning prevents piss poor performance. And if you want to save yourself from hours of going backwards and forwards with these channels and their support, just make sure that you get everything well documentated, present it well, use tools like Chat GPT to help tidy up your grammar and, and you'll more likely have an outcome that is favorable to you. But if you go into this thinking that it's okay, I'm covered, Airbnb have got my back, you're going to be very disappointed, I'm afraid. Okay, the next one, and this is a very common theme, is that hosts feel like when they first get started they want to appeal. And please everybody remember this, if you try and appeal to everybody, you're going to appeal to nobody. One of the best things that you can do, and we have talked about this on other videos on this channel, is to figure out who your ideal guest is. And for those that are watching this, that may have a few properties now under their belt, is that there's different properties that are going to have different avatars, different ideal guests. So what I want for you to do is to look at the properties that you have and figure out, okay, so in this property, who is the ideal guest? Who is it made for? Because when you can figure out who your property is for, who your business is best catered to, serving everything just becomes easier. Your messaging becomes easier. The guests that walk through the door will be ones that you want to be working with. Your, your marketing, your website, your listings, everything is geared up to speak to that person. And again, the biggest mistake that I see so many people make, the people that we've chatted to on the podcast and everybody that we've helped who's come through the doors at Boostly, is when you can figure out exactly who your audience is, your ideal guest to walk through the door, everything becomes easy. Number three, and this piggybacks off the last tip that I just gave you is as you grow or as you get going in this business, and let's just say you started off quite well and you know you've got a warm property that is got good occupancy, you're turning over a good profit, guests are going well, and it may seem to the outside in that you're performing really well. What will happen is opportunities will start falling on your lap so much more than when you were just getting going and nobody really knew who you were. And the problem with opportunities is that you feel like you've got to say yes to everything. And again, this is a real common theme with the guests that we've interviewed on the Boosted podcast series is that sometimes by saying no, it opens up a better yes. And the opposite of that is that as you're getting going and you, somebody will come to you and they'll say, hey, my friend has got a property that is in your area that needs looking after. Would you like to take it on? And taking it on is normally a management model, co hosting model, where you will look after the property for them. And then for every booking that comes in, you take a slice of that profit. The problem with that is that so many people, as they get going, they say yes to everything. And before you know it, and before our hosts know it, who we've, we've interviewed, they've gone from having one property to having 10 properties just because of word of mouth and you just saying yes to everything. And on paper it may look successful. You can say to somebody, I've got 10 properties. All of this revenue is coming in, et cetera, et cetera. But deep down, if you look at it, you scaled your business by saying yes to everything. You will take on properties that you should have said no to. And again, go in line with what we said in number two, is that if you can build a specific brand around a certain niche, you will bury yourself so far in it, it's room for nobody else. And niches could be that you are pet friendly, right? It could just be that in a specific area you've got properties that are catered for one or two beds. It could be that you specifically are set up for a certain niche, whether it could be bird watching or car groups. You know, it's, it's bizarre the amount of niches that I see in this world of short term rentals. But the biggest error I see people make is that they just say yes to everything. So instead of having a clear brand, a clear vision, a clear message, they've got 10 properties that cater for so many different avatars that their overall business brand is, is too messy to be able to understand. And with that, guests don't know if his property is going to be right for them. Okay, so the next one, number four. And again, this is a hard one for a lot of you to hear this, but guests don't care about you. At the end of the day, the guests, the people that are paying you money, do not care about where you got your furniture from. They don't care about how much time and effort you have crafted into creating this stay for them. All they care about is them. Which, which is fair. If you think about it, when, if you were booking a property and if you were booking a vacation, you're not going to care about the owner and where they source their stuff from and all of these things. They just care about themselves. And they want to make sure that their stay that they are going to have, whether it is with friends or family or a business trip, is going to suit their needs. And I feel like from interviewing people and from chatting to people and just speaking about this, the problem that we do as business owners, especially in hospitality, is that we pour a lot of time, effort, our hearts go into doing up these properties. And if there is, for example, an issue or if a guest complains about a specific thing, our instant reaction is to, is to take it to heart. But when it comes to reviews, when it comes to feedback, the advice that I give to so many people is that if 1 out of 10 complaints is about a one specific issue, let's just say the hot water didn't work or there was a train that drove past really loudly, you could ignore that as just one out of ten. You could ignore that as just random, that person having a bad day at that time. But if seven out of the 10 complaints come in and are about one specific thing, the same recurring theme, that's when you have to do something about it. So again, always remember, the guests at the end of the day will only care about themselves. And just make sure that everything that you do in your powers is to make sure that. And that's the best way to get through this. Okay, we're moving through this now and we're at tip number five, and we've got a few more to go. So this one is about scaling. And there's an expression that I learned in business long time ago, which is new levels, new devils. Growing a business isn't easy. If it was, everybody would do it. And as you grow and as you scale, you are going to have new problems. You're going to have new issues on a what could be a daily basis within your business. My advice here, and again, this is the one that we've seen so many people say on the podcast, is embrace it. At the end of the day, new problems within your business, as you grow in your scale are good problems to have. The opposite is more scary to me. Where life is easy, you're staying in your comfort zone and you're not pushing yourself to the next level because that means you will never grow. You will just stay stagnate. So embrace the chaos, embrace their expansion, and just remember, business. And growing a business isn't simple. One thing that I would recommend that you do as you are growing and scaling is make sure that you have got really clear sops in place. Make sure that you document everything about your business. Because as you do grow and as you do bring in people to help. Because remember, you can't do it all. You've got to make sure that you've got it really crystal clear, documented on how you do each task. Because you've got to be able to take a stranger into your business who can be plugged into what you do, and they need to be able to understand your ways. Number six. And we're really cracking on now. We've got two more to go, and this one, I think is very prevalent. As you grow your business, you are obviously going to see more revenue come in. And one thing that I was always chasing was that these revenue goals, but as I got more savvy in business, as I came to learn more about business, is that revenue is just a vanity metric. What you really want to be looking for is profit. So the, the, the old age saying is revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and cash flow is king. So as you are growing, getting these revenue goals are fantastic, but you've got to make sure that the incoming is a lot more than what the outgoing is. Look for those profit, look for that scalability while being profitable and then obviously making sure that your cash flow, whether it is one month out, two months out, three months out, is king. Just to give you an example, most businesses out there only have a three month cash flow. Whereas if every say like the bottom falls out, income dries out, they've only got a three month Runway until they run out of cash. So don't be too hard of yourself who you know as you're trying to get going. The advice that I've always been given and you know, you try and strive to as much as possible is to give yourself six months. I mean ideally you will not have six months where no income comes through at all, but give yourself that six month Runway just for whatever happens. I feel like in the hospitality industry we've survived lockdowns and covids, which, you know, if we can't survive, if we can, sorry, if we can survive where the whole world shuts down and travel stops, I feel like we can survive anything at this point. But just making sure that a revenue goals obviously have to be there. Remember that is a banditry metric. The true metric that you want to be tracking is profit and cash flow. So again, don't fall to that comparison trap when you see people on Instagram talking about all these big bookings because those are just numbers. At the end of the day, what you need to be focusing on is your own financial cleanliness. Making sure, yes, the revenue is coming in, but making sure that the profit is key as well. And the final tip, we've made it. And if you have got this far, please make sure that you hit that like button on this video. Make sure you subscribe and also turn on the notifications because we've got many more videos like this coming up. But the final, final tip on here is do not suffer the comparison game. So many people that I talk to where it's on the podcast, come through Bruce Lee taking part in the challenges that we do, they always, always, always suffer that comparison game. So for example, they can look over their shoulder and they can see other people achieving all of these things or judging by the Instagram game or the TikTok game, and they can suffer comparisonitis where they go, oh, well, I should be doing that. You just play your own game. The only person that you're in competition with is yourself. And as long as you can look back on yourself and on your business a year ago and be almost embarrassed at the person that you were or the business that you were a year ago, then that's fine. Do not look anywhere else outside of that sphere. Do not try and look at somebody in the same city as you, same town as you say mastermind group as you, and and always be comparing yourself to them because you will just do your head in with that game. So my bit of advice to leave you with is do not play that comparison game. All right, we've made it. 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