Are you ready for #BookDirect Day on the 6th February 2019?

Welcome back, everybody, to the hospitality community. Whether you are watching this in the morning, the afternoon or the evening, welcome. The reason why it's so dark behind me is that I'm recording this. It's currently 5:38am in Bali and Alan is all the way over there in Denmark. So we're on totally different time zones. But we are making this happen because I wanted to record this video for you in here. All about Bug Direct Day. What Alan's doing, what Vacation Soup is. You may have noticed a lot of posts recently from Alan in the group. He's recently come in and he's providing so much content, which I'm massively appreciative. He's given lots of advice for you and for his members. So I wanted to get him on today. We wanted to have a chat, find out more about what he's doing, how he can help you and also as well, what we're doing for Book Direct Day. So first things first, I'll stop talking. And Alan, if you could just introduce yourself the name of your business, the name of your hospitality business and just let us know what your background was before you started getting into the world of hospitality, please.

Yeah, sure. My name is Alan Egan, I'm co founder of Vacation Soup, which we'll come on to later. I've been in the rental business about since 2003, 2004. Before that I was a project manager. Used to relocate big companies like bp, Hewlett Packard, Apple. Church of England was a pretty stressful job. So I retired when I was 40. I bought a yacht and went sailing.

As you do.

Yeah.

So where's your favorite sail locations then?

Well, the Caribbean takes a bit of beating. The Azores are amazing. If you've never been there, I recommend the Azores. It's easy to get to from the uk. It's like Jurassic park, the land that time forgot. Amazing place and easy to get to. Yeah, well, I'm in the 27 Caribbean islands, Dominica if you're looking for one. Not the Dominican Republic, but Dominica. That's pretty unspoiled.

So the beauty of the hospitality community and where we are right now is that there's people in from all over the world. And I know we have people down in the Caribbean, so if you are watching and yeah, you will know exactly where we're talking about. Yeah, nice. So what was the core factor in making you start helping other rental owners? Obviously you've got a bit of background yourself, but what was the core factor? What made you go, you know what I need to get out and I need to help people.

When I was sailing, I spent the first time, couple of winters in Algarve in Portugal, and I got the opportunity to rent a couple of places. I've never done that before, knew nothing about the business. I was making websites and somebody said, oh, if you make websites, you could rent out places. So I built a website, took these three properties on. They were very nice villas, luckily enough, and I was quite. Well, I was very good at SEO, which was more of an art in those days. So I was ranking incredibly highly for the terms that I wanted when I was fully booked. So I went from three properties to 30. Very quickly I started photographing places and specializing in photographing properties. But then I realized that I hadn't retired anymore and I was working a very busy job again. So I decided to stop and go across to the Caribbean. And I was sitting in Las Palmas Gran Canaria waiting for a weather forecast across the Atlantic, and I thought, what am I going to do now? And I had thousands of photographs, literally of before and after photographs I'd taken. So I wrote some books on photography. This was. Even though it was only 2008, 2009, the standard of the rental business was a lot lower than it is now. You saw awful photographs right across the web. So I wrote some books on photography. Wrote the first one, actually, while I was crossing the Atlantic. They were more like magazines. They weren't big terms. And then when I got there, I thought, well, I know a lot more about this business than just photography. So I started writing a blog. And once again, you know, that world's changed. At the time, literally, there was myself, Heather Baer and Matt Landau were the only people doing that. So I started a blog called Rent More Weeks. I probably wrote 1200 articles on that site. So, yeah, that's how I started helping people.

Nice.

There wasn't anybody else. There wasn't any information available. I mean, there's hundreds of Facebook groups, God knows how many blogs, et cetera, et cetera. But in those days, there really wasn't.

So then where's the transition then from Rent mall weeks to vacation shoot, where you currently are now? Where's the gap in between?

Well, really, that was driven by changes in the industry. You know, book it and they will come. When the listing sites were listing sites, when you just paid a subscription and you got business through them, and things were what I would call fair. That changed when big business really came in and owners have been given a pretty hard time since then. You never really meet A happy owner these days because they're not happy with either commissions, cancellation policies, whether the guest gets the deposit back or not is out of their control, no matter what the damage. In a lot of cases the list goes on and on. And I wanted to go back to something that was fair, that was really the driving force behind the suit. That and some quite good ideas because obviously you can't just not a listing site. Those half a dozen companies own that space. I mean there's no way, no matter what you did, you could never rank for vacation rental anywhere, holiday let anywhere, holiday rental anywhere or any of those gite. Those terms are owned but luckily enough those terms only apply to the booking stage of the process. And there's a research stage that's before that. And that's what the soups aimed at is giving people potential guests information before they start to actually look at where to stay.

Nice. And then what happened? You just created your website, you created a blog, Was it a phone? Like what was the starting points of the soup?

Well it evolved. There was a lot of bad advice going around about websites in general. There still is to be honest. And this in fact if you just take a step back there and just look at 90% of vacation rental websites are nothing more than digital business cards. They only show the property, they're not personal, they're all the same. So for a long time I've been making destination based sites which were based around their top six things to do in an area and wrote quite big amounts of copy and edit good photos and video to those pages so those pages would drive in traffic. And I also recommended that people write about what's on. So it's not only about finding the guest. The in stay guest also wants to know what to do while they're on holiday. And if there's a jazz club playing down the local pub then a short post will do. So these ideas were just to keep the website live like sourdough. You can't just keep it in the back of the fridge, it will go mouldy. And Google has a tendency to ignore sites because it's too busy looking at new content. So the concept was give your site new content on a regular basis and Google will pay you more attention, lots of attention in some cases. So that was the idea. So I started giving away. I made a website that fitted that concept and I was giving it away along with a video course that people would follow. So it was easy to make had people that didn't even know how to copy and paste made Quite complex websites through that course.

And that's the one that's still available now.

And then I had the. Sorry, yeah, well, that involved. So that first one was a pure WordPress with the classic editor. And then Elementor came on, which is a fantastic plugin which turns WordPress into drag and drop. So anybody can do it.

Because that's the one thing about. Sorry I was gonna say, that's the One thing about WordPress when you say to people, oh, we use WordPress is that. That's why a lot of them like WIX and Squarespace, because that is drag and drop. But this is what Elementor does for the WordPress world, is that you don't have to do the thing where you build it all in the back office, you have to see what you're doing and you have to go back and edit. This literally helps so much with that. And it's what I use for my. I was saying to you, off, off chat, that's what I use for my websites when I build them for people is Elemento. And it's a great way of post builders showing this is what we do, this is how you make changes. So, yeah, Elemento, definitely.

It changed so much for so many people. I mean, even though I've been making WordPress sites full time virtually since WordPress came out, before that was using other platforms. But Elementor made it childlike. Instead of having to look up or think about. There's no code, none, is there? I mean, if you want to put something, a particular object on a page, you just drag it into the page and there it is. It's so simple. So the site evolved, the three websites evolved into being easier to use. And then we had the idea, of course, that we could link all of these websites together. The idea being I live in a small Danish island, like you said, and there's only 40,000 people living and we have a local newspaper, but not that many people can read it. Obviously this is a small place and Denmark's made up of hundreds of islands and they've all got a local newspaper and they have a small readership, but there's a national newspaper that a lot more people read. And that's really the overall concept of the soup, where these small islands are websites and Vacation Soup is the national newspaper. So we take a bit of your content, a bit of this lady's content over here and this gentleman's content over there, and it's all bought into the soup, it's collated and syndicated out across various social media platforms. So you just get loads more exposure because we're an authority site.

So in layman's terms then, for people watching who may be thinking that all well and good, but what the hell is Vacation Shoot? If you could just sum it up simply in one or two sentences or lines, how would you describe vacation shoot for a rental owner?

It's the lonely planet with vacation rentals.

There you go. I like that.

It's a destination based information site with places to stay. Your places to stay, if you join. So.

So what I love about it and we chatted about this off call because I really wanted to find out more and dig a bit deep from the person who created it was you've got these things called travel guides. Travel guides for destinations all over the world. And this is how you have combatted against booking.com Expedia. This is like this is this to me. You may not think this to me is like your unique selling point. Like describe a little bit more how these travel guides work and how it affects people's websites.

You create content in your own website. As an owner, one of our websites, or wix or Weebly, in fact we work with as well. Now you can create content through the front end of the soup and share it to your own website, or you can make content in your own website and it gets shared to the soup. Individual websites are pretty lonely places and it's very hard to get exposure. Your blog post only going to get written out again, but there are neighbors around you that have exactly the same problem. You may think of them as your competitors, but they're certainly not as the OTAs are your competitors. So we get a cluster of people say in a certain area in say Florida, and they're all writing content. Instead of these individual posts going out, those posts come in and they're collated and go into Anna Maria island magazine or a Florida magazine or in fact both they go into. And if we've got 5, 10, 15, 20 people writing about golf, all those articles go into a golf magazine. So we're just a publisher really that helps people get traffic because these posts are read by more people than if they just sat on an individual site. Your property is displayed next to each article that you write with a book direct button underneath. And when somebody clicks that button, they go back to your individual website. Just giving potential guests the opportunity to get personal recommendations from locals and driving traffic back to the owner's websites directly.

So here's a question. Where do they write the articles?

Well, on their own, if they've got a WordPress site. Then, just like they would normally, we have a plugin which is free. You install a vacation suite plugin, it opens up in an editor, you write your blog post, and when you click publish or Schedule, it gets sent, not it gets published on your own website, and a copy of it gets sent into the soup, and it automatically goes into the relevant magazine.

So if I say I've got a WordPress website or a WIX website or whatever, and I've got a website already set up, it's not being created or not being associated with the soup so far. I could go and get this free plugin, put it onto my website, attach it to my website, write a post, but make sure instead of doing it via the WordPress dashboard, I go in via the vacation suit plugin and write it, hit the publish button, and then it goes. So I can. Now, everybody who's watching this grab the plugin, go and do it, write a blog post, and then you'll start to get the benefit.

Yeah, absolutely. There's a tiny little bit of setting up. You have to tell the plugin where your property is. And we prompt owners, and it's only a prompt. You can write about what you like. But when some people haven't ever written any posts, so we prompt some ideas. And if you have told the plugin that you're in Whitby, it will say what to do with the kids when it rains, and it automatically will put in Whitby. And if you're in Skegness, it will say in Skegness at the end of the article, and so on and so on. It also provides free copyright images, it tags the post, it optimizes them, and when they're shared, they're automatically put into each relevant magazine.

That's nice. Yeah, no, that's. That's amazing. And then people can start getting involved right now. And even if so, I like how it gives prompts because, like you said, people, hospitality owners aren't marketers. You know, they've come from loads of different backgrounds. And, you know, there's people watching this now are thinking, this sounds great, but. And the but is, well, I don't know what to write. So it's good that you give prompts. And a plugin that I love is the. Is the Yoast one. Because like you say when you write a blog post, what Yoast will say is, yep, no, change that. But this is, like, made for hospitality, because you can say, right, well, you're writing about Whitby or you're writing about Cornwall, you're right about whatever you're. Here's some license free images. Great. This is a little prompt. Great. Go and finish it here. And off you go. And it's gone to the magazine and then it's now helping not only them but when it goes on to. Because I assume that that blog post will then whiz off to Vacation Soup to your main place where guests go. But once you associated with Vacation Soup then people can then click back to your site to find out more. Is that correct?

Yeah, absolutely. We have nothing to do with transactions or anything like that. All we're doing is giving owners a collective exposure. So in fact you're helping anybody else on the soup. You hear about listingsight independence. Well, we wanted to have listingsight interdependence and that's all this is. We're working as a crowd to get more exposure. But when somebody clicks on a button to look at a property, it goes back to in your case your website or whoever wrote the article website.

So as this present moment in time, you can do the plugin on WordPress, obviously. Wix and Weebly.

Yep.

What about. Is there any plans to get on board with what Promote My Place and Squarespace are doing or is that a bit trickier?

Well, I think we could actually do it with anyone. I have spoken to Lodgify for example, they're quite interested. I spoke to Kego, they were interested. But we're still quite early days and so we just don't have the resources to throw at every platform that's out there. And in many ways I'd encourage owners to really abandon those free options and go for a WordPress site. I mean it's just such a more powerful platform and you're fully in control as opposed to dealing with the templates that are available. Wixes, Weebly etc are good solutions, as are the paid templates like Logify and MyVR and so on. Some good templates out there, they're quick solutions but we haven't had the resources to just build out for every platform out there.

Yeah. Here's a question that I get asked all the time is why? Why do I prefer WordPress? And it'll be interesting to get your opinion. Why do you prefer WordPress over every other in like simplistic terms?

Because if you can think of something that you want your website to do, you can do it and you haven't got to build it. Somebody's already built that function somewhere in the way of a plugin. You know, people. Maybe we should go Back a step. People don't understand the German plugin. If I want to buy a car, I get the basic model and if I want electric windows and a sunroof and maybe alloy rims or whatever, these are all extras. And WordPress is this basic car and the plugins, as you know, are the electric windows and the sunroof and so on. So it comes with functionality, but you can add to the functionality and if literally, if you can think of it, somebody's already made a plugin that will make it happen.

Yeah, that's a really good analogy with the, with the car analogy. And yeah, 100% it's. If you, if you want to be able to do something, it can be easily done. Where? With WIX or these templated sites. It's a bit tricky because it's, it's heavily regulated to like what you can and can't do. Amazing. All right, so let's, let's get on to what we wanted to talk about. Today was Direct Day. So as everybody should know by now, on 6th February 2019, hospitality owners from all over the world will hopefully be coming together to spread the word about Book Direct. And the whole point of this is to re educate guests. There's nothing as frustrating as when you get a regular guest come back and book with you, find out that they have booked via an OTA. To be fair, the OTAs, that's their market intuitive, they get the, they make the guest, they make Joe public think that we list on their websites for free. We don't have to pay them any money. If we do, maybe it's just a hundred pound a year subscription fee. Everybody who is in this group knows that is not the case. So we just have to educate. So this day, and I don't know who started it, I believe there's a lady at VR Mental or something like this, VR intel, something like that. I think they might have been the ones that first coined it, but it's just taken on from there and people are becoming more aware of it. So could you just let us know what, what, what, what are the soup. You know, the Soup is big on Book Direct, it's big on direct bookings. What, what is the Soup doing for Book Direct Day?

In some ways we're Book Direct Day every day, but of course it's a much bigger day. It was started by Amy Heinrich actually. We've got a visuals pack going out just with some nice visuals, you know, book Direct, save money, blah blah blah. We've got some slogans going out so if people are really pressed, they can just pick one of our images, copy some of the text and put up a headline. And we've also got a blog post going out which is the book Direct Blueprint, which I think you'll quite like, Mark. It's a new way of looking at your business without getting into too much detail. Because of time constraints, many people came to this business without setting up a business. A very large majority of owners in this sector already had a second holiday home and then heard that they could make some second income stream through letting it. The amount of people that said let's buy a second home and start a VR business are relatively small in comparison with the other group. So historically they didn't need to know any marketing. That's where the OTAs came in. Put down on Owners Direct, for example, they did the marketing. You dealt with the bookings, the changeovers, the cleaning, etc. So I put together a new way of looking at this business that takes in a better look at marketing that you can handle on your own. It's a relatively long post with some examples of the client we're working with where you can see what she's done. She's never listed on an OTA and she's not fully booked, but she's reasonably booked, so we're doing that. I'm also being interviewed by VRM intel about book direct in general.

Nice. So obviously you've done this for many years. You're very wise of how to say book direct every day. We've got people watching this in the hospitality community that fall under all different types of categories. We've got small hotel owners, B and B, we've got single property rentals, we've got multi property rentals. What's the one bit of your advice that you could pass on right now to somebody watching. Doesn't matter what they're doing, that could help them increase their direct bookings in 2019.

Think like a guest. Stop this. Nobody cares. You've got a rental. Nobody goes on holiday rental. No one has ever, ever gone on holiday. Rental people go on holiday and you hear a lot of people talk about the guest experience. Sit down and draw a pie chart of guest experience. The actual from when they arrive, to what they do when they arrive, to when they go to beds, when they get up them. And that sector of of them spending any time at your rental is incredibly small in comparison with the 24 hours of the pie chart. Start marketing the things they do outside of your rental because now you have loads of Things to keep in contact with them about. You can connect with them on a whole new level if you start thinking like a guest. If you have a place in the city centre, I'd be surprised if people spend eight hours of the entire each day your property, they get up, have some breakfast and they're gone. And they come back when it's late at night, they sleep and they go the next day because they're in the city, not for your lovely apartment, but to explore the city. So start telling them about the best places and things they can do in the city and you'll get way more traffic to your website than you will do talking about second bedrooms, ensuite bathrooms and anything in between.

As a little caveat to that, that is 100% the way to go. But you've got to cater it to who your ideal guest is. You can't just go out. If you, if Your property is 100 catered for families and you start talking about the best nightlife in, in Cornwall, then that's not gonna, that's not, that's basically not going to resonate. So make sure that what you need to do if, yeah, if you are, I mean, it's something that, if you're in the boostly academy, I talk about it all the time and it's called a customer avatar. For those of you who don't know what a customer's avatar is, it's basically your ideal customer, the ideal guest that you want to walk through the door. And for those of you that are massively going down the book direct route and you want people to come onto your website and book, you know, for when a guest is sent to you from an ota, you have got no control who's going to walk through your front door because they send you anything, it's just a number. But if your website is catered to, talking to your ideal customer, you're more likely to get the right people through your door. And what Alan is saying is 100% spot on. Start writing about. So when we say writing, it's not just a blog post now we're talking about Facebook, we're talking about Instagram, talking about the content that you're putting out, whether it's an email, whatever it is, talk about your ideal guest, put yourself in the shoes of your ideal guest. Don't just talk about you, your business and etc. Make sure you're talking about things to do, what to do, how to do it, what you do. So if you are your customer avatar, if you are a Young family and you like doing these things. When you get spare time to do it, talk about that, post about that, show what you do, and then that is how you will, you will crack this game. Amazing.

Another tip, I don't know if we got time. Couple of minutes maybe. Another good tip is to join Facebook groups where your guests would hang out. So join any Facebook groups that are involved or pointed to your area and look for questions that potential guests are going to ask. So if you're in France and people are asking about what wine tours should I do if I'm in Bordeaux and that question comes up repeatedly, write a blog post that answers that question. Talk about four or five vineyards in Bordeaux and the next time somebody asks that question, post a link to that post. Blogging isn't about the things that you want to write about. It's about answering the questions that people are searching for. That's the most effective way of marketing.

That's it. And this is the thing, if you're not a very good writer, outsource it. There's so many websites out there now. And again I preach about this consistently in the, in the academy, I even show you how to go and get an outsourcer because that's how I've grown this business and have the granary at the same time. And now it's a haja. It's. And if you can't do any of that, just, just do a video. You know, if you're, if you're more confident in front of a camera, talking non stop, just like I am, just get a video going so there's no excuses. And if you need the help, then this is where Alan and myself, and there's loads of other people like Matt Landau, etc. This is what we're trying to show. So there's definitely right and way even, even in the middle of August when you're running around like a blue ass fly, when you literally don't know if you're coming or going or what day it is, there's still time to do this. There's always time to do this. And it's really effective because you're not only affecting the short term. The cool thing about writing blogs that it's evergreen. And evergreen in simple terms means it sticks around forever. So doesn't matter whether someone's searching in 2019 or they're searching in 2025, they can still come back to this blog. And the one example I always use, and she's in this group, Annie's guest house, she's Based in Northumberland. And she wrote a blog which talked about things to do in Newcastle and the Life Centre. And I went onto Google and I typed in, I was in Middlesbrough at the time. I wanted to go to the Life center to take the boys. I Googled Life center voucher codes. Third on the list. Fourth on the list was Annie's blog, which had a little voucher code in there from four years ago that she wrote. And it took me to her website, to her blog, and I could have explored it from further on. So you never know what terms you're going to come up for, you never know how effective it's going to be. But with the thanks to the soup and what Alan's doing is that you can just plug it in to your WordPress, any website, pretty much for free. You can start adding content to it and it will just, it'll just help massively with what we all want to achieve here, which is Bug Direct.

And the more you buy it, the more it works.

All right, so in the, in the comment section below, I'm going to tag Allan and I'm going to pester him for this, but any links to the plugin, any links to the soup, any links to anything that will get him in below. But before people, we finish this video, how is the best way that people can reach out to you? Obviously we're going to get links to the soup, but if anybody wants to ask you any questions or anything like that, is there any emails or links or anything that people can go to?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the easiest way is to go to vacationsuit.com there's an owner's area and any page in that owner's area has live chat. And if myself or my business partner, Francis, Online, an email box comes up. You can just leave us your email address and we'll get back to you the following day.

Good. This is not going to be the last time that Alan and I do one of these. We're definitely going to be. I really want to help Vacation Soup just go and go and go. And this is definitely something that we're. We're going to be chatting about a lot more. So thank you very much for watching Alan. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Faz.

All the best this week.

Week.

And yeah, we'll speak to you all very soon.