A new Free Tool I've discovered

Sa. Okay, everybody, welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, evening. Hope you're doing well. So basically I want to try something a little bit new tonight. I have got a Wheel of Fortune somewhat to make it a little bit fun on a Friday evening. All I want you to do is the first 20 people that leave a comment. I will put you into the Wheel of fortune. First 20 people. And I can see people are doing so already. Leave an emoji, leave a hashtag live, say hi. The first 20 people. So we've already got Nikki, Ginny, David, Hadil, Clayton, Daniel, we've got Georgina, we've got Cosmo and David. First 20 people, pop a little comment emoji, say hi. And then basically what I'll do is I'm going to show and introduce you to the Wheel of Fortune before we finish the live tonight. This is the week that was. Let's get on with the show. I'm going to introduce to you a new tool that I've discovered this week, but I think that you'll find is very, very interesting. Okay, so let's get on with it. Ready for my close up.

Good looking, let me tell you. Get more bookings. Aw, that'd be nice. Giving me tips, tools and advice. Yeah, you're gonna get them, hon. You're gonna sit back, listen to Mark Simpson.

Whoa.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard. And the tea is loosely making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect, you're better put direct.

Mmm.

Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

All right, everybody, so welcome, welcome, welcome. As you are all coming in, please do pop into the comments what you have been doing this week. Have you opened? Have you got guests in? You know, we've got people from all over the world. I know we've got a lot of people tuning in from. From England who have been able to open for the first time this year, which is exciting. Let us know your wins. Let us know what you've been doing this week, what you've been doing for fun. Leave it in the comments. Please do share what. What you have been doing, which is fantastic. And we've got, we've got lots of people saying hi in the comments, which is fantastic. So, hi, Nikki, Hi, Ginny, Hi, everybody that is tuning in live with me right now. So first and foremost, let me just explain to you what I do on a Friday. So on a Friday, I go live and just sort of Showcase the week that was I want to introduce to you or just share with you any interesting articles that I have read, any interest in podcasts that I've listened to, YouTube videos that I've watched, any relevant updates or stats or surveys, anything like that that I can share with you that you can then put into practice into your business. So that's one of the first things that I like to do on a Friday. And like I say, I want to try and make this a little bit fun. So I've had this idea. I came across an app that I could download and it's called the Wheel of Fortune. And the first 20 people that have commented I'm going to put your Basically you're going to be assigned a number and it's going to be the person that we're going to spin the wheel. First 20 people and then whoever's number is allocated about you will win a prize, little boostly prize in the post which is always nice. So first things first, let me just share my screen. What I want to do is I was listening to a podcast by Matt Landau. For those of you who don't know Matt Landau, he is the founder of vrmb. He's got a podcast called Unlocked. It's definitely recommended if you like listening to podcasts. And this week a member of his community was on the podcast. The lady's called Amber and she's got years of experience in hospitality and for a dissertation she created this. So go to demandiq.IO now it is very much in the beta stage, but the waiver she explained on the podcast was fascinating to me. Now when we look at our reports, our data and I will show you that website again. So when we look at our reports, when we look at our data, we're basically going all of the booked data so as in when a guest has made the booking, but for so many times that there's, there's data that's not showing you as in how many times did a guest maybe want to look for dates that weren't available. So say that they were looking for seven nights but you had only had five nights available at that time. So it's basically this tool and this tool which is free for the time being, DemandIQ IO will help in cover that. Now, I don't know the ins and outs of it. I'll be totally honest with you. I'm going literally off the podcast that I listened to this week. But it was such a really good idea. It literally got my, my, my brain thinking and I wanted to Showcase it to you everybody. So if you go to DemandIQ IO they're looking for everybody, guest houses, hotels, rental accommodation to come and put their name down to see if you would qualify for the beta, free beta program. So you come in, put your name, last name, email address, mobile number, come to 9 website, fill that in. It's pretty much as a one page website at the moment. Do go watch the video, the little cartoon video, two minute video. But it's really interesting to me how with what the tools that they've created, and this was literally done for a dissertation, how it can potentially pull out even more data that will help you get more revenue and it'll help you get more, more bookings, more solid bookings. The, the whole thing about 2021 is going to be to try and recoup any lost revenue from 2020. So if I come across anything, like I say, I'm no way affiliated with these. I haven't even had a chance to speak to Ambia. I haven't been able to find her on the socials. But I do want to, and I do want to find out a lot more about this. But I wanted to showcase it to you now because it is a free tool. Go and pop your name down on the, on the beauty program and let's just see what, what happens. So yeah, thank you very much, Michelle. So it's DemandIQ I O so that's the first thing. Now I want to introduce you to another free tool as well and another cool tool that I use. So this one is called pocket getpocket.com so I come across a lot of articles during the week. People send me things to read and all that lovely jazz and what I do is I don't read them there and then because a lot of the time I'm on the move or you know, chasing after a child, my child I must add. So what I do is I save them and this is a really cool tool. So as you can see, I've got a couple of articles that I want to read from Amy High Notes, VRM intel and I would recommend everybody checking it out. So basically it's a, it's a Google extension and it's free tool to use. And what you can do is you can store the article that you want to read and it will just pop it into here and you can have it on an app or you can have it on your desktop and when you come to read it, it gives you it in, in reader format. So as you can see, these are the sort of things that I'm going to be reading this week. Evolution of the property management software, key data etc, etc, etc. So again, I just want to introduce you to that tool. If you use it, let me know. If you use something similar again, let me know in the comments. In the comments. Which is fantastic. Carl has already gone and signed up for a beta, which is fantastic. So I am, I am hoping to reach out to Amber from Demand IQ and hopefully get her on a Boostly podcast and we can have a good chat about the beta program and who they want to be speaking to, which is, which is really interesting as well. Okay, so let's showcase a couple of amazing hosts as we normally do. So a big part of Boostly is website design and this week we've had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5 websites went live. So the first one I wanted to show you was Ryan, Luke and Luke Homes. So Ryan's got a very unique business model. He's got accommodation in the uk, he's just started to get accommodation in Dubai and he's also got accommodation in Portugal as well. Ryan uses uplisting as his pms. And what we've been able to do, part of our brand new Boostly API is link up the Boostly website directly into his pms. So there's a direct link, which is, which is fantastic. So now it just basically means that the guest can do 99.9% of the booking on their Boostly website. And also as well, because he's got multiple locations on multiple properties. This website has a. Definitely has a feel of a mini ota, which is the feel and the look that we want, we want to make it look to the guests like they're on an OTA right now. And like I say now that it links straight into their booking engine, straight in with the pms. It just works really, really well. So that's Luke. Luke Stage. Ryan. Luke, thank you very much for the trust in this. We've loved doing it and it's been fantastic to be able to now have our Boostly API link up to uplisting. Next, we have unique apartments just went live because of days ago. And again, this is a new part of the Boostly API. So unique. They use tokeet as their, as their booking engine. So what we've done here is we've been able to link straight in via the API into these guys because it's brand new. We're still doing some final, final tweaks. But again, it's good to get this up and running and live and and firing on all cylinders. Next up we have Heme Accommodations which is one of our Boostly one page websites which is looking lovely. I love to see this. And we're also working behind the scenes as well on some more variations of the boostly one pages. So for example, I'm working with a copywriter night right now and we're creating different one page websites for different niches. So we've got beach, we've got city, we've got rural accommodation. So again and we're just going to be really simply adding this into the Boostly onepage marketplace that's going to be coming up here which is nice so we can get a website for everybody. Next up we've got Atlantic Way Lodge over in Ireland. Again, lovely, lovely accommodation, beautiful places. I love this picture and I love the about us. So the big thing that I've been trying to figure out this week is the word about us. And again I've been talking to the copywriter about this, the word about us. The phrase about us doesn't really feel welcoming. So what I love about this and we're trying to tweak what we can call it instead of about us. Hello from your hosts. So what can you expect from us? I really do like that. I love that. So again have a look at your website, have a look at the terminology. What can you do instead of having about us? And we've got here Shar Abode again we've been working on this website for a while now, accommodation in the uk. So it's, it's good to, to get that live as as well. But yeah, some, some really good websites coming out. We've hired another two web developers which is, which is fantastic. So now we've got eight web developers working which is awesome, awesome to have and we've got so many people now who are upgrading their Boostly websites who are already team Boostly members who are upgrading to the new API. And we're also having some fantastic conversations with new people that have discovered us through word of mouth. So if you've told somebody about Boostly and the Boostly websites, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. Some of some great conversations this week and yeah, I totally agree Nikki. I like the hello from your hosts. So which is, which is lovely to have. Ah, all right, a lot of talking. Okay, what's next? So let's pick a win event, shall we? So let me just share. How can I do this? How am I going to share my screen? So I've got the app right here. What do we see. We're not going to see the right one. So I'm going to go from here and I want to go to sharing Spin the wheel. There we go. Fantastic. All right, so as you can see what we are looking at right now over here, we should have the app that I was able to download. So the app is called Spin the Wheel. I like to call it Wheel of Fortune. And as you can see, we've got numbers one to 20. So the first 20 people to comment were Nikki Hutchman, Ginny Coles, David, Barrett, Hadeel. We've got Clayton, we've got Danny, we've got Georgina Cosmo, we've got David, Liza, Carl, Jane, Michelle and a couple of other people. I don't want to go over 20. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. So Clayton, D, Ginny, Martin, Antona, Larry, Larry, Mandy, Andy, Michelle and everybody else, Jane and Carl as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to spin the wheel. The winner will win a special little boosted prize and thank you very much for all jumping in. Here we go. There we go. Number fifth, 15. So let me just count it down. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Mandy. Mandy. Mandy Lindley over at West Hell, glamping up in the northeast of England. Congratulations, Mandy. I will make sure that you get a lovely little booster prize in the post. Well, that was fun. I like that. If you'd like me to do that again, let me know in the comments and we'll do it again next week. Next Friday when we do that. The week that was. So. Yeah, please do, please do. Let me know. Mandy's in the comments saying hi and laughing, which is always lovely to see. So let me know if you'd like me to do that again and I'll do it next Friday. Mandy, please do look out in the post. And that was the week that was. But please do not leave it there. Please don't have it as just me. Let me know in the comments. Have you got guests? How does it feel to have guests? You know, for those of you that have been not been able to have guests for so long, how is it weird having people back in? Does it feel like it's your, you know, you've reopened again for like the first time in forever, you know, what are you doing differently? Have you changed anything? Have you. Have you just been again? I'll do it next week, Jody. So what have you been doing differently, have you, have you changed anything? Have you added new things in? Like, let me know what you've been doing, let me know what you've been doing in, add it in and let me know what has changed in your business. Post lockdown. It'd be always cool to see. I will go back on all of the body and, and I know there's some parts of the world that can't take guests yet, but you will, you know you will. You will be able to. For the first three days of this week, me, Laura and the boys, we went away. We went away, lamp a glamping, not lamping, glamping. And we're literally an hour away from where we live here in Spain and, and it was fantastic. And I just think there's so much pent up, people just want to go. People want to go. So, you know, if you can't take guests from further afield, how can you get guests that are going to be closer to you? So let me just, I'll quickly show you the place that we, that we stayed at. Let me see if I can share my screen again and I'll get on the right page this time. Google Chrome. So this is the place that we stayed. It was called Finka Finka Les Coves and it was just a lovely little glamping place. As you can see here. There's the, the tent that we stayed in. It was just perfect for the boys. That was my smears. It was just, just a really nice experience and of course I took the drone. But again, we will be back. So again we are literally 90 minutes, like less than 90 minutes away from from where we stayed. It was just nice to be able to get away and just check somewhere else out. And the couple were lovely, from Holland. They had lots of people on site. There was a couple of safari tents, there's a cave house which is really cool and they had some tiny houses as well. We stayed in the safari tent and it was amazing. It was just really nice. And, and again, that's less than an hour and a half, less than 90 minutes away. So I think the staycation, personally, I think the staycation is definitely going to be prominent again in 2021. The Boostly Academy, not the Boost Academy, our 90 day group to kickstart to become a direct booking machine. We were talking about customer avatars and how your customer avatar could always be evolving and changing and this year it may be a case of just really focusing again on guests that are up to three hours drive away from you. So how can you be getting in front of those guests that are close, that are local? And as Ginny has just said here, Ginny's just had a booking from people who live 10 minutes away, booking for them and the kids from Scotland. So. And again, how can you get in front of them? So what are you doing to get in front of these guests? How are you being proactive to get in front of these guests? What are you doing to get in front of these guests? Are you in Facebook groups? Are you, are you posting on classifieds in your area, for example, Gumtree or Craigslist or something like that? Furnish finder that's in, that's in America. But what are you doing to get local to, to people? Are you maybe posting in or writing in your newspaper classifieds? Are you reaching out to maybe local radio stations? Are you asking your local contacts to, you know, friends network? Do you know anybody who needs accommodation? Do you know any? This is a really important one. Do you know anyone? And again, Michelle has got property in Javier, getting bookings from Valencia. Again, everybody that was staying at that campsite was from Valencia or Alicante or Javier or just because in Spain you can't leave your municipal. So that just goes to show that people do want to get away, you know, and they will work while away. So again, focus on the WI fi, focus on the working locations. This workation thing is not going away anytime soon. So what can you be doing? What can you be doing to appeal to the local industry? And it's not just when we say post in local Facebook groups, it's not like the local guest will be coming to stay with you. A lot of the time, especially with lockdowns are opening up, you're going to be getting friends and family members coming to stay in, in the area needing a place to stay. My sister is going to be traveling back when she can from Manchester to Scarborough to see our family and she will need a place to stay. So she's staying in a local accommodation. So again, it's, it's not so much when you, when we're saying the post that you put up in the local Facebook group isn't always going to be speaking directly to the person who's going to be staying. Sometimes it could be speaking to a, a mother or a father or an auntie or an uncle or a sister or a brother for family members that are coming into town to stay. So think about that as you're posting. Do mix it up. Utilize these Facebook groups. You know, they're fantastic for like community. They're fantastic for speaking to like people that are going to see the post. But also utilize things like the Gumtree like those listing sites and also as well on your online travel agents, on the booking dot coms, on your Airbnbs, on your your VRBOs and any other one that you're listed on. Amend your listing to mention words like staycation. You know, take this time to make your your listing more staycation friendly and if it needs to change the pictures around a little bit, this is the time to do so. Really do stand out. Really do make sure that you are going to be seen first and if you've got them, utilize your email list, utilize your social media, get present, get popular. So that's what we've been doing. Please, please please do leave a little comment in this video. Let me know what you've been doing. Let's spark up some inspiration for people that are tuning in. Thank you so much to everybody that has tuned in live with me. Mandy, I will get in touch with you and I will get some a lovely little booster prize sent off to you in the post. I will do this again next Friday and have a good week and I just wish you all the best. Keep do getting those bookings in. Keep do letting me know when the bookings are coming in. I love to, I love it when you report back to me when direct bookings are coming in and I shall see you this time next week. Take care everybody.