Book Direct Day 2022

We're going to introduce ourselves of course, starting doing this, sharing data with you. We'll talk about what book Direct Day is, how it got started and try to think why people are interested in this topic nowadays. Are direct bookings actually cheaper for hosts? Is it as well, in a way, isn't it direct booking actually pushed by people who want to flog their direct bookings, Software, websites, challenge management is the whole conspiracy to get us to buy yet more services and software. Again, I'm the devil's advocate. No hate here. All right. So as I said. So Mark, maybe you want to introduce yourself for people who may not know you yet. Yeah.

So first and foremost, my name is Mark Simpson. I founded a company called boostly back in 2016. I've been in this industry of hospitality and short term rental for many, many years now. A lot of people in the Zoom Room will, I think they know who I am. But for those who don't, I was pretty much born into hospitality on a 200 acre farm stay bed and breakfast in Scarborough in the northeast of the uk. I grew up with my three brothers and sisters and I had one goal and that was to escape. I wanted to escape this small town. I wanted to go and travel and I wanted to be a soccer player, a football player. One problem with that, I'm not very good at playing football. If you, if anybody's ever seen me play football before, you will know why. So I fell into coaching, soccer coaching and got my qualifications, got my UEFA B badges and then got the amazing opportunity to go to America. Spent many years in America coaching soccer, coaching the football and 2011 ended up back in the UK, ended up in London of all places and my parents who had the business for about 25 years at that point asked me and my, my then fiance, now wife to come back into the business and, and that started me on this very crazy journey of helping that family business grow online visibility through websites and social media to then in 2016 actually helping a couple of local hosts in Scarborough how to navigate email social media, how to do a few tweaks on. We'll talk about the OTAs and from there I can't really explain what's happened from there. For the last five years it's been a bit crazy. Now we've got, we're doing this, releasing my book today. There's over 1,000 hosts that we've helped build the direct booking website with. There's over a thousand hosts who are doing the training side of Boostly all over the world and the Podcast is one of the top 2% of the podcast downloads in the world, which is crazy. And I say the book today and now I'm speaking to yourself here, to both. So it's crazy, it's been insane. And everything is being founded on one thing, which is direct bookings, which is why on today of all days being book direct day, hashtag bookdirect day, if you want to go check it out on social media. It's really important to have this conversation because there are still so many people who either don't know about direct bookings, don't believe in direct bookings, and I feel that everybody in the Zoom room with me is going to be a very one sided discussion to Tabol.

Let me tell you, Let me tell you. That's why somebody had to do the job. So thanks Mark for the introduction and again, I will show the COVID of your book in just a few minutes. So I'm Thibault. I hear you, Mark. You three siblings and you run away from your village as fast as you can. I had, I have six siblings run even faster than you and travel the world as well. So yes, so I have, I own properties in, on a French island called Saint Barts and as well in Bali in Indonesia. I've been with us for a while. I also worked for five years@booking.com. i know, I know some, some people. Someone had to do it. Well, actually what, what, what they wanted is that they were looking for. They, when they saw Airbnb growing so much, they wanted people from the industry to join them, explain to them what this whole vacation rental thing was about. Self catering places, what these small owners, they didn't know about, basically they know about us. So for five years I was at the headquarters working with them, trying to adapt the tools to the market. As I said, your book is being released. Anything else you want to add about your book, Marc? Are we good?

No, no, it's all good. It's available on Amazon right now to go and purchase the Audible version is coming later today. If you're watching this after the 2nd of February it'll be available now the Kindle and the print version is ready. So yeah, please go and check it out with the link that you can see booster.co.uk book all right.

Exactly. On my side, yes. So we've launched as well as I said, Rentalscape Launcher Network, the private network. I see a few people from there. Hello, Daniela. Basically we have a basic level that is free. Every Wednesday you get our newsletter, we talk about the Big trends, what Airbnb is up to or how to do a homeowner acquisition campaign. If you're a property manager, we talk about the big trends on the market, Book Direct versus OTAs, for example, new technology. And also we have a private network called Scale Network where basically we help people get results. Where we do masterminds, for example, we have private calls about investments or these kind of topics. So feel free to go to www.scadars.network.com to check it out. All right, data, so I'm going to share for you just like quickly, three slides with data. That's it. And then we go to the live debate and I stop sharing my slides. But these data comes from exactly as Mark was saying in Intro, this data has been shared by Amy Highnold. Amy Highnold basically somewhat, let's say, invented the book Direct Movements in the vacation Rental industry. We'll get into more details later. But she's really somebody to know here when it comes to the topic. And she owns VR, she runs VRM intel. VR. Intel is just like rental scale up, like an industry news website. And she's partnered with Key Data Dashboard to share data about the US Market. Precisely property management companies in the US in traditional vacation rental markets. So mostly non urban. I would say non urban us. And what they see here in terms of trends is that basically direct bookings generate a higher average stay value. Basically the booking values, the reservations are bigger. So the money, the amount people are paying is just more than 30 through let's say Airbnb, which is in big Furbo inblue or booking.com in green. Again, in the chat, if you something you've seen, if you've seen that your direct bookers were bringing, you were basically making bigger bookings. We're not talking about the profit you're making, I'm talking about the size of the booking. Let us know. One factor for that is as a second slide is that they tend to stay longer, apparently. And that's interesting because that's even through the pandemic. Basically, direct bookings, according to what Amy shared, is about 6 days on average length of stay, booking.com of course being the shortest one. As you may know, booking.com caters to people who are looking for both hotels and vacation rentals. So they tend to have a behavior closer to hotel bookers and to shorter stays. I should know about that. Again, if this is something you see, are your direct bookers also booking longer? That's interesting. And yet why do we have a debate? Because of what she shared today, she shared actually that the share of direct bookings, and I've seen that people in a comment have up until 100%, which is amazing. But that share for property managers in the US is going down. Especially in 2021. That share went down, basically. It was 35% of the bookings against 47% in 2018. What went up were basically, especially last year, Airbnb and Vrbo. Airbnb jumped from 13 to 17%. Vrbo went from 18 to 21%. So we'll talk about why this may have happened in 2021 and why people are in 2022. I've got a few ideas, but again, that's, to me, that's a source of a debate. Okay, it's bringing more money, great. But for how long? And should you negate the other channels? And it's just maybe just a source of cost. So I will stop sharing. And Mark, what did you think of the data? First.

I've listened to a lot of podcasts, YouTube videos, interviews that you've done, and a few people have talked about when it comes to stats. And I think something that you said is very important, is that with all the numbers that are being released and with all the stats that have been released, you've got to be able to sit back and look at the context around it. There's definitely reasons to why these numbers that are happening, but I feel that for everybody here who looking at those numbers, you've got to really sort of bring it home to not only you, your business, your location, but also your niche as well, because everywhere is totally different. There'll be people looking at this in the cities, for example, have got properties in a city. There'll be people who have got properties in a very touristy location, and maybe they're a guest house or there's people who've got a rental in a touristy, like, seaside location. And it's really important to always look at these numbers and have it as something to go. Okay, this is good. So you've got a bit of a benchmark, but you've really got to look at the context around it. For example, the reason why direct bookings in 2020, especially after, say April to August in 2020, would have dramatically gone up and the OTAs will have dramatically decreased is because if you remember, especially in the uk, Airbnb closed off all availability. So if you tried to book a property in the UK and you wanted to book it through your favorite ota, you couldn't do because there was none. So what people were having to do were having to think a little, go onto the Google and find people directly, which is what happened. And also as well, hosts. And I'd love to say that a lot of the hosts that are in here who were switched on utilized Facebook groups, Facebook marketplaces. They sort of worked out how to go outside of the OTAs to sort of put their business visible. And so the numbers are important. The numbers. You know, I think we're all fed up of looking at graphs since 2020 because we seem to be getting them on a day by day basis of charts and numbers and all of that jazz. But I think it's important to look at. But it's, for me, the one thing that I always do is look at the sort of the context from the numbers that we're looking at. And I feel that once, once you do that, then it really does help sort of take a look behind the number, so to speak.

So I will politely agree and disagree with you, Mark.

And this is what I love speaking to you. That's why I really wanted today, this is why I wanted today to be you. Because you are by far the most switched on person in this whole industry and there's loads of people talking, but you are by far the most switched on because you've got such a good viewpoint on this. Because I feel that you, out of everybody that I know, can, can offer this insight and it's perfect insight. So please agree and please disagree. And I love to sort of have a back and forth on.

Yeah, and again, I know I'm playing a room where you know, of course, you know, who hates direct bookings. Right. Again, as I said, but here. Well, what I agree with you is that again, that's why I pointed out the data. Whenever you look at data, exactly as you said, what's the source? Which market are we looking into? And here again, it's professional property managers. Professional property managers probably with more than 20 properties on average in the US in traditional vacation rental markets. Because that's where key data, which is a software company, that's where the clients are, that's where they pull data from. So to Mark's point, if you were in uk, probably it played out differently. Something I want to say as well, which actually could argue for you should be on the OTAs, that what happened in the US last year, 2021, could be, for example, that if you were there, Airbnb and VRBO have been investing a lot into advertising. Commercials on TV were big. I think actually vrbo in the first half of the year spent even more money than Airbnb on advertising. If you were on YouTube or on TV, you couldn't miss them. Even on the French market, which I know a bit, I could see Vubos, whose brand is Abri Tel in France. Anyway, they're everywhere, so they've been investing a lot. And what could have happened is that suddenly people were more aware that this company existed. Believe it or not, a lot of people actually have been introduced to vacation rentals during the pandemic and they don't know where to go. And the first thing where it will turn to is that we're used to booking hotels. Where to, for example, Expedia. Or they would look what's on TV to know where to have a choice. So they will look at vrbo. So in a way you could argue that maybe what happened this push of Airbnb and Verbal was due to advertising. But maybe what's happening is pouring the pie for everyone. Maybe people are aware and the first time they're booking with them, maybe next time with us, what could be happening as well is that maybe people thought that refunds would be easier for OTAs. Yes or no, could argue differently. Right? And so that's all the reasons. Another reason why is that maybe also vacation rentals websites like vrbo, for example, or large property managers like Vacasa, they can offer things that our websites cannot. For example, you can do things like book now, pay later. You have these companies like Klarna or a firm that allow you to buy now, pay later. This has come to our industry. So as a property owner or a small property manager, how do you offer the same payments and installments or through credit, how do you do that? That's also why it may also be hard for us to get here. More direct bookings is because people are expecting a bit more service, not just around the flexible cancellation policy, but even payment terms for some people, they can't just book with you if they have to pay so much money upfront. So that's to me, that could be explained the market and what you think of that.

Mark, I'm really glad you brought this up because this is something that I wanted to dig into to you directly with because you're dairy on the top of it. So Klarna is. Is not new. Klarna has been around for a long time and if anybody doesn't know what Klarna is, and I feel like it's maybe more popular in the. In the UK and maybe the US and anywhere else, But Klarna is basically paying installments. It's just like having a credit card, but there's no interest. So you very common phrase that you'll hear now is paying free or paying for. And for purchases, whether it's you buying some clothes on insert your favorite clothes store or whether it's a vacation, you've now got the ability to help with the budget and then not have to pay a one grand, two grand, three grand holiday up front and you can spread the cost out so it looks really, really good on the book in front of the guest. Now vrbo, the Expedia group have jumped on this and they have partnered with and they now offer that as part of how you book. I can't see it being that long until Booking.com and Airbnb catch up and they start to do this as well. Now the way it means for you, you as the host, you still get your money up front but then it's just they pay it in installments too via Klarna. It's just like PayPal, Klarna, PayPal have brought in their own pain free or paying for and everybody's sort of starting to bring it in now. Klarna are the ones that started it and it's very, very successful multibillion doll. And I think for me, I'm always looking at what these big guys are doing, how the big chains are doing and how can us as hospitality owners, property managers, how can we bring it into our business? Now this is where you're going to have to start potentially bringing the pressure into your property management software, your pms, the likes of your hostful leads and your UP listings and your guesties and they'll obviously then have to then work with the likes of Stripe. But how can you start to mimic this into your own business? Anybody who uses PayPal for example, to take payments, you can already do this. It's simple little setup. The other thing, I wanted to chat with you, Tebol. I don't know if it was on your things to discuss, but I heard you talking about Hopper and Hopper is really interesting to me now again, I've used Hopper for the last few years. It's an app on your phone and it was primarily bought in for flights and it was really good for me to try and find flights at a discount. But now I think since the back end of last year, 2021, the last quarter, I've had somebody reach out to me from Hopper who is, who is in the rentals world, which is their new sort of thing. That they're doing. But, Thibault, could you. I don't know much about it. I've had the person reach out to me on LinkedIn and I've said, listen, please, the first quarter, don't talk to me. I've got so much going on. But, you know, after the first quarter of this year, we'll have a chat and a discussion and see what you want to talk about. But Taba, I don't know if you've got any. Anything that you want to discuss more about Hopper. And I feel like for everybody who's tuning in, it could be good to be a first mover on this.

Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to quickly chime in on Hopper and then we'll go back to the questions we had, which is like, what is Book Direct? How did it get started and go through there? Because, again, it's really important. I think the context we had already, right. You can see there's pros, there's cons. What's important is, again, what experts say, right? And that's like always, where is the data from? That's why I'm so always big on data. What are we talking about? Because you know your market better than anyone else, right? So use the data, look at what they're saying and say, okay, okay. It looks different for me. Why is different? Right? So always what I learned here. So Hopper is interesting. I mean, we probably have a lot of Europeans here in the room today. So hopper in the U.S. well, hopper was the number one downloaded app, the most downloaded travel app in the US Last year, ahead of Airbnb, Expedia. They are really big. They're really big on capturing Gen Z. Gen Z, however you want to say this, Millennials, which obviously I'm completely a Gen Z person, as you can tell. So they're very big on that. And what they do, they are able. They've just launched Hopper Homes, which their holiday rentals offer. And what's really striking with Hopper, that they are again, able to bring a layer of flexibility. I just talked about, basically, Hopper is like a new form of ota, a new form of Expedia ish website. You can book flights, hotels, and now cars. And now as well, vacation rentals. They bring a new layer of flexibility where, again, it can be hard for us to compete. For example, for flights, they bring price freeze, right? If you. I know prices of flights can vary, if you like a price now. And if you pay hopper, let's say $5, they can freeze that price and you can book it later if you want at that price you saw, right? Or they could. You can sell you a cancel anytime option. So even if the flight cannot be canceled, you can Cancel up to 24 hours in advance of the flight. If you buy from Hopper. If you buy from Hopper, this kind of guarantee or insurance ish product, if you will. Imagine if it means this to us, even if our cancer policy is not flexible, non refundable, they can actually let us keep our policy but allow the guests to cancel because the case would have bought from Hopper a sort of policy or insurance, travel insurance ish product that pays them back. It's just they. So it's gonna be. It could be really life changing. And again between. Why are we talking about this for our debate? It's like the competition from these big channels has moved on into the way they can offer more services, ways to pay, ways to freeze prices. And maybe some of us are using dynamic pricing, but maybe some people want to freeze prices. How do we do that? It's a whole level of complexity. How on earth can you, how on earth can you be on that level? Just teasing you with that. But to get started though, to go back to the second part of the debate here, because it's already half of it, how this whole hashtag get started? How did it get started, Mark? The whole direct booking thing.

Book direct, sorry, how did it get started? I think we all know that it was Amy Heino and what she's doing at VRM intel who started the hashtag bookdirectday sort of bringing hosts together, which is a great thing as far as where did hashtag bookdirect get so popular? I feel like I may have a little bit to play responsible for that to a certain extent because it's something that we've been talking about. And the hospitality community, which is the free Facebook group that everybody's part of in here, has played a large part of it. Every Thursday we come together and we do a Thursday social where we spread the word on social media. We put posts up, we share each of us posts, we like each of those posts, engage other posts and spread the word of Dara bookings. And this has been my whole goal really since starting this in 2016, because I saw the lack of support locally in my local area of Scarborough and Whitby and North Yorkshire. And I could see a massive lack of support on a national and international level. So I created a hospitality community as a way of educating guests, so educating hosts on how to get direct bookings. But I knew so that with everything that I was teaching, if I could educate hosts on direct bookings, then in turn we would educate guests. And that's the big thing here, is that we're trying to educate the guests to book direct, and it's all about putting it in simple places that they can see and how they can be educated. When I came into the family business, one of the main things that I wanted to do is to really build our direct bookings, to really make sure that the offline word of mouth that we had came online and everything that I did was around increasing that direct bookings and educating the guest. Because. Because I don't know about you and everybody on the call here, every time I had a problem to deal with and I had to go to booking.com, i would much rather eat glass because it was such a tedious, strenuous process. And I always knew whenever I was going down the route of booking.com or anywhere, Expedia, Airbnb, they're always trying to side on the guest, which for me and the business and the family business, I didn't want to build my house on someone else's land. So it was really important to me to do that. And then in 2016, when I started it, this boostly the podcast and started the Facebook group and the blog, it was to help hosts learn that there are really easy and effective ways, but don't cost any money at all to increase your direct book. Because I know there's something that you do want to talk about, the time, the money, the effort, but we'll definitely dig into it. Why has it grown so popular.

I.

Think, over the last couple of years, and particularly 2020. And I think this thing that I'm going to say now is even more prevalent in the usa, because the USA and Canada, and maybe you've got the Americas, they're big airbnb fans, because obviously Airbnb came from San Francisco, it's one of their own. And a lot of people just listed a property on Airbnb, maybe got a couple of properties just listed on Airbnb and they're fine with it. But in March 2020, when Airbnb sent a message out to all of their guests and say, listen, you can cancel. Doesn't matter what the policy is, you can cancel, get your money back, I think that really pissed off a lot of people because a lot of people were down revenue wise, and there was no Airbnb, have now admitted that they were wrong. They shouldn't have done it, shouldn't have done what they did, and there's no heads up. They're not saying, hey, this is what we're going to do. They just sent out to everybody. I feel that after that, and I can, speaking from a personal point of view, as somebody that speaks to a lot of hosts that we have, you know, about 20, 30 conversations with hosts every single week with websites, I feel like on the back of that, hosts who are very reliant on Airbnb, just that platform are now going, right? If I'm going to have this business next year or two years or five years, I've got to get a property management software, I've got to get a website, I've got to build my own business here, because I can't have that happen again where I know people that had five figures literally wiped out in the space of 24 hours. And the business really struggled and could have struggled if, you know, if America had had the same sort of lockdown as that, what a lot of people in Europe had or, you know, Bali did have, and Australia and New Zealand had. But, you know, it could have got messy. So I think this is why it's really, really important that we talk about it. We talk about it today, we talk about it every day, and this is why we're doing this.

So I hear your points. I hear your points. Several of them, actually. Because in a way, I think most people here, listening here, or who have a vacation rental, either if it's their own property or it's investment, we all are sort of entrepreneurs, right? And telling entrepreneurs, hey, we'll give you find a way to have more freedom, to reclaim your freedom and have more control. More freedom and control is, I think, one of the first reasons why we even set up a company or become entrepreneur. So it is talking to us. It is attractive, I would say. But now, if you do the math right, we just saw, for example, that the average value of their booking was bigger. Okay. I would say one thing about it could be, maybe it's lower on the OTA channels, because what happens there, maybe it's on purpose, right? Maybe what I'm doing is that I'm putting, if I'm a large, again, that's data from large property managers. If you have a portfolio of properties, maybe what I'm doing on, on ota, I'm putting out there, not my whole portfolio, maybe just the ones that are less, that would be the hardest to get direct bookings, and I'm even ready to discount them. It doesn't work out. So it could be Just, again, just. I was saying, look at the data. What does it mean? It's a portfolio of properties. So maybe these property managers are. It's not that they're more expensive on their website, that the best properties are on their website. They keep their calendar open on their website and they close the calendars on the OTAs at some point and they use the calendar, the OTAs in a great way to get bookings in the low season, for example, or for the worst of their properties and when they're even ready to discount if need be, to even get to get some occupancy. Right. So when I see the data, oh, the value is bigger, direct, I'm like, well, I don't know, it's just some aggregate data. I don't know what to say here. What's your view?

I think when you look at data from the large property managers, it's just like looking at the data from a big chain hotel like the Marriott or the Premier Inn. You can't really take it into context about what we're doing. And I think the majority of people in here are between 1 to 100 properties, 1 to 50 even. And I think that when you get to that sort of level, they easily can wipe off rates and accommodation and sort of price per night because it's not applicable to them. If you look at a, you know, if you go stay at a Premier Inn, the reason why Hotel Tonight got so popular in the States is because for them it's more about getting bums on beds or heads on beds than it is the actual price per night. And they would just massively discount. And I think big property management companies are all well and good, the volumes and the numbers look amazing. But when you get to that sort of level, there's so many schoolboy errors that I see on an individual and sort of mass basis when it comes to what we're talking about, which is marketing. And I think for us it's really important to make sure that, number one, if we're going to talk about the price for a direct booking to the price on the OTA site, there's so many tools that are available right now to us small hosts, from one to say, 50 properties, that will really skew it back in your favor. And I'll give you a little example right now, you can go on to your property management software, whether that's free to book, guesty toke, whoever it may be, let's just say the good ones, you know, and what you can do is the rate that you give to the OTAs, you can mark it up 20, 30, 40, 50%. So the rate that's on your website, let's just say it's 100 and you can put it as for the OTAs at 150, okay, so massively skewed. And then with the marked up price, you can Then tap into bookings.com's opportunities and Tibalt will know this more than anybody else. The opportunities@booking.com in the extranet, they throw at you so many. Discount, discount, discount. You can literally then you can manipulate their system to then still make it. So say that you mark up your price, you send to the OTA by 50%, but then you knock 35% off that price that you see on booking.com and it's still a better rate on your website. Now, when I was doing this, I never had that advantage. I didn't have the opportunity to do the big markup that you now get. And so I feel that us hosts at a lower level between one and say, 50 properties, we've got all the tools that we have got right now is fantastic and phenomenal. I feel that the stats and the figures, that's what I said right at the very start, the ones that come from the big property managers and all of that, Jaz Vacastro and all of that, you've got to give into context is that they've got so many things going on, they've got so many spiderwebs going on. The rates that they give, they have not got total control or they haven't got a clue what they're doing when they get to that sort of level as much as what we can potentially do and we can play with right now.

So, okay, I agree with you on that point. And actually it's a question Jacqueline has. She's talking about either one, doing markup, sorry, on booking.com and I'm doing the same. I am this very thing, right? My direct price. I take my price on my website. The commission on the commission I'm paying. I don't know if you are property manager on property owner. On booking.com, you're paying like at least on average 15% commission. I mark it by 15%. I mean, right. And also that's also what some people are saying is that it's good to be on these websites because these websites are, you know, are a marketing channel. Advertising channel, right. It's called billboard effect. It's like a billboard. People will see your name and look out for you. But it only works this Billboard effect works for hotels because hotels basically have a name, have a brand location, right? Like Hotel XYZ in Brighton. I can just google the name of this hotel and find it. If your listing is like apartment with a sea view, how on earth can I find you? Right? So I'm okay with that. But if you don't even think that, you can use the billboard effect on the ta. But if you don't think of putting your brand name out there to help people find you, how can they do that? But let me go back to the math, though, okay? So let's imagine I am doing indeed my markup, everything. I'm doing this right, but yet it's not the profits in the end. What matters to me as an entrepreneur is my profits, right? I think it's in the end, booking.com will I put my list in there and it takes 15%. Oh, it's a lot of money. But I don't have to create pay update my website. I don't have to Pay Stripe or PayPal. I don't have to find ways to generate traffic through social media. Even if it's free. It's still my time on social media, right? And my time has a cost. My time has a cost. I could be doing other things, earning more money with that very time. And maybe also I'm also using a channel manager or I'm using maybe a dynamic pricing tool. So I have to pay for that, right? So how on earth do we make it so that the costs are actually even comparable with things. I'm going to take another example. In the U.S. if you're a small property owner, you pay 3% to Airbnb. 3%. And they bring OTAs, and they will, especially in Europe. Now, in Europe, it's very important, of course, to market in your traveler's language, right? I think Airbnb and booking.com website are in 35 languages. Is your website in 35 languages? Can you offer that? English is great. I'm trying to speak English today, but that's not my native language, as you can hear. And I think a lot of travelers actually, when it comes to picking places, looking at details, they. They like kind of having some information about this. So that's what my argument is like. Yeah, there's a cost, but even doing your direct booking marketing is expensive and maybe not as efficient for the reach to get clients. What do you think, Mark?

I was just waiting for you to tag me in and I would love this because this is just not me. Who's going to come Back to us, because this is a question that comes for a lot, I can see in the chat. Please leave your comebacks to that. So, okay, first and foremost, first and foremost, the comeback, the kickback to say, why should I do my direct booking marketing when I can just put it on Airbnb and booking.com and they will market the property for me. Maybe in 2019, you could do that. Maybe in 2018, maybe in 2017 or 2016. But as we move into 2022, I'm going to go into 2023. There are so many people who are coming into this industry. All you've got to do is go and check out Tybalt's episode where he interviewed Graham from Sykes, Graham Donahue, the CEO and founder of Sykes, and look at the numbers that he shared of how many new conversations he's having with people who are coming into this industry. I believe, off the top of my head, it was over 15,000 over the course of last year. More conversations they're having about people coming into this industry that want to use Sykes. And that's just psych, right? So if you're just going to go in that, that sort of method and sort of mindset, then guess what? You're going to spend as much time making sure that Your listing on booking.com or Airbnb is going to be visible. Airbnb will not do your marketing for you. Someone will come onto your Airbnb and your location. And if you're on page two, guess what? You're not going to get seen. And there's a really good example that I can share with you, and it's one that I've lived today and I've lived the last few weeks, and I'm going to be living for the next couple of weeks of my life. And this is with this book. This book right now is on Amazon, only on Amazon. Just because I've listed on Amazon doesn't mean that I'm going to get a book sale. I still have to market this book myself to then send people to Amazon. And Amazon is a really good example of this, because if us as hospitality owners share the mindset of what Tybalt just mentioned there, of just having it on Airbnb, then you got to look at Amazon and look at Airbnb. And if they keep going on the trajectory that they're going, what's to say that Amazon, that Airbnb can't turn around and do what Amazon do, because we all complain about 3% or 4% commission or 15% commission or 20% commission in the chat, Guess how much commission I have to pay for a book sale that comes in from. From Amazon? Have a little guess. Have a little guesstimate right now. Give me a percentage. How much do you think it is? How much percentage? How much percentage do I have to think that I have to pay Amazon? 70%? I only get 30% for every book sale that comes in, which is crazy. Now, what is? Not saying that. What is there not to say? The Airbnb, the more that they get bigger and bigger and bigger and they're getting the massive market share and they pretty much push booking.com out the way. And booking.com are playing catch up right now. VRBO are playing catch up right now. What's to say that they got turned around and go, you know what, Mr. Airbnb Super Host that you now rely on heavily on us instead of this? I think this is a bit of an unfair relationship right now because you're only giving me 15% or 3% for every booking. I'm going to flip that now and we're going to put it to 30%. I'm going to get 30%. Oh, hang on a second. Is it even more unfair? 50%, 70%.

Well, to be that point, actually, if you are, Airbnb is already taking 15% from people. If they are. For example, I have only right now three properties, but I'm using a channel manager to connect with Airbnb and because of that, I have to pay 15%. But why are they doing this? Because they have to align with booking.com and VRBO. Because with 15% of a commission, they do two things. They need 50% because then they can buy traffic or spend on ads on TV. And two, if they take 3% from you, it means they still have to take 10 to 12% from the guests. And they want to remove the booking fee for the guests. They won't remove that because it's just not competitive. People hate paying fees. Makes sense. So they have to get the money from someone. Has to be you. So it is a tricky game for Airbnb. And right now, yeah, maybe they will go to 15%, but it is tricky because problem are French. But they pissed off a lot of people when they betrayed hosts when they forced them to massive refund. But are they going to be able to do that? I don't know. But yet, even at 15%, that's a pretty good cost. And I can see in a comment will say, yeah, but I'm reducing my commissions. I'm like yeah, but have you increased your marketing spend? And is your increasing marketing spend more than proportional to the revenues you've been making? Again, I being here, devil's advocate, Right? But something I could say, let's imagine, let's imagine in 2020, 2021, maybe in your markets people wanted to book direct. Let's imagine. But maybe now things will come better and maybe they will book through OTAs again. I know. That's what I'm hoping. When the travel reopens in Indonesia, people will go back to Airbnb and all the websites and book there. And I don't want to spend money to get these travelers because they come from so many different markets, by the way, I much prefer Airbnb booking.com spending money on that to catch this. And maybe again, when travelers reopen, maybe you have a lot of domestic travelers at the moment, but those international travelers, again, the OTAS will bring them to you. And I politely also disagree with one of the comments which was like, you only need to market in the main languages. I'm like, I'm sorry, I mean, if I speak another language, you have to market in my language as well as well, because my language is just as important as yours.

Yeah, tag me in. Tag me in. Because I want.

I muted you for some reason.

It didn't tag me. You muted.

Look at that. I don't want to hear your argument.

Okay, so this is the second part of what I was going to say, and this is really, really important. The time element and the aspects of the costs. All right? Now, first and foremost, if you get this book today, you will not have to worry about cost because everything in here that I show you is how you can get direct bookings and not have to spend money on Facebook ads or Google Ads, etc. So we're going to eliminate the cost, go and buy the book. It's $15 and the return of investment is huge. Secondly, my family business was a 200 acre farm stay property in the middle of nowhere. The village that we were based in, population 100 people. And this is really important why I'm telling you this. We would never have grown to the level of visibility that we had done if it wasn't for booking.com now we've got to repeat that. We would never have grown our business to the visibility that it had done without booking.com but I did not put all of my chips in the booking.com bucket. I didn't just rely on that channel because, yes, the visibility, the Europeans, the people from overseas that saw Us, because of being on there was great. But I use booking.com like I use Facebook, like I use Instagram, like I use Twitter, like I use LinkedIn. It was just another channel. And I had many conversations with people@booking.com over the years and I've, I've, you know, unofficially they've said that, listen, we totally understand that when a guest books a property and they book with us and as soon as they land in your property, it doesn't matter whether it's a bed and breakfast or a rental or a vacational or an apartment or a year, as soon as they book in, if they were ever to come back, realistically, they should always be booking with you directly.

The host, I could vouch for that. It's exactly what Booking Outcome employees say. Exactly. We help you get your first booking. Now it's your job to try to get them loyal, which is something that's possible. But not in Bali, for example, people come once in a lifetime in Bali and they will come back. So that doesn't work in my market. Haha.

Take that Mark and back to me. Right back to me. But yeah, I totally get what you're saying. There's going to be lots of people around here that don't have a repeat industry, a repeat destination, and I totally get that. But you're missing a major part here which is social media. With the world of social media growing as much as it has done, there's no six degrees of separation anymore. You all know what six degrees of separation is. If you don't Google it with social media, that's down to one degree of separation. And if you do it right, and if you follow the tips in this book and everything that I've been saying over the last five years, it doesn't matter if To Bolt comes to my property and never comes back again. Because if you do your job right and if you tap into the mindset of how people use social media, think of it right now, when do you mostly use your social media? It's when you're on vacation because you like to show off that you're not in your normal nine to five. You're on a beach in Bali or you're doing X or Y or Z or you're having to fight off the monkeys in the forest of Ubud, okay? And that's when you're going to use social media. And if you do your job right, and if you do your job well, To Bolt will be your marketing channel for you. So it doesn't matter if he never comes back to the island. But he will tell his friends, his families, his co workers. And it's how you do that is how you get the guest to post on their social media or to tell their friends about you. And not saying, oh, you know what, I booked this amazing Airbnb, you've got them to say, I booked this amazing property from the business called X, you should give them a call. So it really doesn't matter if you've got repeat trade. Everybody that stays with you has got a friend or a family member or somebody that they can show off to online. And this is what exactly is in this book. It's exactly what I've been talking about. And again, it doesn't have to take you a lot of time, it doesn't have to cost you a lot of money. And I'm very annoying when I come to this because any objection to book direct or how to get direct bookings, I can back with not only my experience, but over a thousand other hospitalities that you experiences in the last five years. And there's so much proof behind it right now is insane. And I'm looking forward to the back of this book and to seeing everybody else's experiences moving forward for the next five and 10 years because we can really dig into this.

Well, thanks, Mark. And question time is coming, right? If you do have questions, make sure you post them in the comments and I will agree with you. As you know, I'm also big on Instagram as well. And for example, for St. Bart's we have one of the biggest account. I just have two properties there, but my account is bigger than a lot of the famous hotels. Why? Because we're there, we're active, we don't spend too much time. Also, I use Instagram to convert people into newsletter subscribers, so then I can email them and tell them about the island. What's new, what's happening? Is the island open to travelers? What are the curfew rules, all this fun stuff. But again, they learn to trust me and depend on me. And also that can of course show them my properties and give them some discounts if they want to explain to them the book direct. So I do it myself, but I'm still staying on the OTAs. So to close it, what do you think? Should you go direct completely? Should you balance it out? What do you think people should be doing?

Yeah, you have to balance out. You have to balance out. And just before I go into that point, just to bring it back to what you said to Bolt, you became the Go to. That's why it was so popular. And you've got a really good podcast episode and a video that you did where you talked about this and you laid it out with what you did on Instagram and how you did it for Saint Bat. So do go and check it out, everybody. But you became the go to. So when people were sort of looking for advice on travel and whatnot, they came to you. And I see Damien, Mr. Damien Sheridan in the audience from the book Direct Show. Do go check that out. He has got a really good example of this with a blog that he created for his property in Spain. He created a blog about bus stops and about bus routes. And that blog was put together really well because he's very good with his SEO and it was able to direct so much traffic to his website and to his business from literally from people googling what is this bus route, this journey in where he's based in Spain. And again, this is just like one example of how to do it. But it's about becoming the go to. It's about becoming the place and the recommendation that people do. And it's so, so easy, easy, easy to do. It's just you only know what you know or you don't know what you don't know. And this is why I put this book together. So I want everybody now to sort of not have an objection, say I don't know what to do because it's literally written in 222 pages right here. You don't have to go and trawl all of my podcasts, the 400 plus podcasts, or the YouTube or you don't have to invest in the, in the Boostly Academy or anything. You can literally just pick up this book and get started. And there's literally a tactic in there that will, that will help you now to go back to the percentage. I personally believe and I know there's some people, Heather Bayer, for example, amazing host based up in Canada, properties that are in America and Canada. She is 100% direct buckets, which is great for her. She's got 20 years plus experience, got all the marketing channels going on. I feel that for the majority of hosts you've got to have a balance because there's an argument that if you go 100% direct and if you turn off all of the OTAs, well, what happens if your market stops? What happens if your referral stops? And you've got to start literally from scratch again. So you've got to balance it out. You've got to have an active listing everywhere. And again, this book shows you exactly how to do it. You've got to have an active listing everywhere. You've got to have a visibility everywhere. Like the billboard effect of what we're talking about. You've got to have direct and you've got to have third parties and you've got to have a referral network in there as well. So if you are 100% direct, fantastic. If you can make it last for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, fantastic. But please don't go cold turkey. Please don't turn off any of the other channels. Please don't delete your accounts because that would not be good just for those rainy days.

Yeah, and I agree with you, right, also on that again, taking off my. You have a hat, but I'm taking off my hat here. It's really, really important as well that your site may go down. You may have a provider, any kind of reason. You may have happened to me, I forgot to renew my domain name. How stupid can you be? I'm so busy I forgot. I managed to get my domain back. But still, if that happens and you have deleted your accounts, your listings on the others, it's just too bad. For example, you may have garnered reviews on these OTAs. Keep them. I think what the advice here is just you can have an active listing here, but you don't need to give them your full availability. Right. You don't need to give your best dates to the OTAs, but do you know for shoulder season, off season? Why not? In that case, if you think you might not be able to catch people usually. Right. That's my advice. I also want to give a shout out to Daniela. Daniela who hello, Daniela who says also book direct, of course is better for sustainability or for supporting local community because the money is staying in local area. The money is not flowing back to San Francisco or to Amsterdam or San Francisco for Airbnb, to Texas for VRBO or to Amsterdam for booking.com, where the money is staying locally, which also is good because after all, guests will be using those very roads. So if you're paying local taxes, your guests are benefiting from that. So you want money to stay at that.

Yeah, do go check out Daniela's Instagram. Daniela's Instagram is a really good one to coincide with what you've done for St. Barth's Daniela for Marbella. Fantastic. Please put up your link in the chat to your Instagram, Daniela, because it is one of the best and I just want to very quickly say very Very quickly, someone's messaged me directly on Zoom to say, can you sell me the book directly without commission? And this is really important. It brings me back to what I was saying before. I have not got any avenue or potential way of selling you a book directly. This is how much Amazon monopolized the book world. And this is scary. You know, this is why it's scary to me. But if we keep letting Airbnb grow the rate that they're growing at the moment, they're saying 15% because they have to play on par with booking.com and VRBO. But what happens if they keep getting bigger? This is with Amazon right now. I have not got any way to do this directly. I cannot get the book to you through Kindle directly. I cannot get the book to you. I'm literally saying Kindle. Kindle's not a thing. That is the business. It's like I'm saying Coca Cola right now instead of saying frothy beverage that will melt your skin. I cannot sell this book to you directly because it has to go through Amazon. I literally cannot do this directly. So this is why it's really important. So, you know, I'm having to take that cut because there's no other revenue. You, as hosts, as property managers, you have still got this ability. So make hay while the sun shines. You know, I'm a son of a farmer. Make hay while the sun shines and take advantage of it. And, you know, I'm preaching to the choir, because everybody in this room is doing direct bookings in some way, shape or form. After this, I'm going to be speaking on another podcast, which is very much Airbnb, and I'm going to have a much bigger battle than I have in this one. But this is why we have to keep talking about it. So important.

And to conclude here again, you mentioned Damien, who's at the Book Direct show. It will happen again this year. There's multiple resources, but if people don't know your community yet, Mark, how may they reach out to you or be part of your community? What could they be doing?

The best thing to do right now, just go to booster.co.uk book, get the book, get started, and then once you've got the book, you'll be introduced to my world. So go to booster.co.uk book, go in there, grab the book. It's literally today, which, if you get it on the second, the paperback version's got a special discount for the publishers. Put that in there today. The kindle is only 799lbs. So it's like $10€8 and then you're in the world. Once you're in there, then you'll open the door to all the Team Boostly and there's so many Team Boostly members in there in this chat today, which is great. Just out of instance, if you are part of Team Boostly, put Team Boostly in the chat very quickly for me just to see everybody that is in here. So Jody, I can see Tracy, Daniela, Christina, which is amazing to see. But Helen, fantastic Hadil, nice to see you.

And I will add as well is that when registered to this show you got either live or watching replay. By the way, you had access to a Dropbox folder shared by Mark where you have these resources you should be posting today because they actually about to point to helping guests understand that they should book direct or why they should. So make sure you are using the resources today because today is the day is the bookdirectday. Mark, thank you so much for your insights today. I don't want to run too much over time. Is there anything else you need to say to conclude?

No. I mean obviously this is booked direct day and if you're tuning in now, if you're tuning in now with us, please do post out on your social medias about, you know, book direct. If you don't know what to post. T Bolt's email that he sent out to everybody has got a link to a Dropbox in there and yeah, please go take advantage of it. Thank you to everybody that's tuned in to all 35 of you. It means the world to me that people spend time in their day to do so. I know there's loads going on. So thank you very much for tuning in and for anybody who is watching on the replay, yeah, please do, please do get involved, please do go get the book. My goal is to get this to the number one on the bestseller above all the books that are on Airbnb. There are so many books on Airbnb, there are none about direct bookings. So let's get this above the Airbnb books and the only way we're going to do so is by leaving a review and going to get the book, whether it's Kindle, Audible print, you name it, go and do it. But thank you.

All right, thank you everyone again for attending today. Thank you, Mark. Thanks to the Boostly community, the rentals community as well. For more rental go to rentalskillup.com and you will find there actually also article we wrote with Mark about the book, Direct Movement as well. They are there on the website. Go check them out. It's the day and I wish you all a great day. If you're watching, I hope it was interesting to you as well and have a lot of direct bookings this year. Take care everyone.