Book Direct Virtual Summit - LIVE 🔴 Wednesday 27th March

One and all again with a load more amazing content, amazing education, fun games, prizes and everything else in between as you are dropping into this very, very special live video. Please can you say hi. Please can you put hashtag live? And as well, can you please tap that love heart emoji button that is on your screens right now as many times as possible. Let's get this show on the road. Wherever you're tuning in from in the Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever you. Welcome aboard. This is Wednesday. This is day three. Let's get this started. Let's show them how we do.

I like to rhyme my words when I speak. I take two from the seven of the week, Monday to Friday. That's the five days. It's the challenge. And you know it's provided free. Yeah, that's where the start. It's day one free. So you know it's gratis. Look, I spit fire while I'm good looking. I'm gonna tell you. Get more direct bookings. Not circuitously through a tribal agent. One that's come to you. You sit there in amazement like wow. Mad respect to the guy with the hashtag bookdirect. Not a gang sign. It's a pound. In the US we call it hash over here. Running through this book directly, it means that you go. Not a book from a library. Oh no, bro, you need to understand words. Please heed. Use Facebook to get more leads. Like a dog with the collar with the multiple leashes. More leads. That's the pun. It's hard to believe it. I punch hard like Bruce Lee. Probably the only rhyme I can think with. Bruce Lee. Like an orange I squeeze it cause it's so juicy. And Mark Simpson not orange but he could be yellow like the fellow in the Mac groaning show. That's the Simpson thing. Mark my woe rds. That's the words when I fill it out. Here's a little thing. Pay attention you louts. Don't over rely on booking.com or Airbnb. Cause that could be gone. Cause the pandemic shut down everything. Airbnb offices, the phone don't ring anymore. But over reliance is not required. Yeah, I see you're not silent and saying. Chris, can you shout to me how to save money in commissioning fees? Well, I can't explain but I know what doo doo does. Mark Simpson not like Bart with the buzz sore haircut. Let me make this clear, he's not from the Simpsons. Guys, please lend your ears. Romans and countrymans and all the viewers. Get your guests to book direct and you will see your coffers swell and swell and grow. The guests all go, they're like, wow, I'm glad that I watched this show or this podcast. And they'll enjoy their holiday. I'm gonna go and book direct right away. Admittedly, I'm not. There'll be a stage, slight lag. But when you do book direct, don't forget the hashtag bruh sipping a virgin mojito. And there you have it, a freestyle wrap from me, Chris Turner. Do make sure you check out Mark Simpson and boost Lee's free five day challenge to get more direct bookings.

Peace out.

All right, thank you very much, Chris Turner and the amazing animation team that put that together. My goal by the end of the week is to get you to memorize that rap, freestyle rap, and then you'll be humming it in the car, in the shower, on the dog walk, wherever you like to hum. All right, so today we're back Wednesday. If you thought yesterday was good, just wait until you see what we have got planned for you this evening or this morning or this afternoon, depending on whether you are in the world. I saw somebody in the chat earlier saying, why is it 8 o'? Clock? Why is it at this time I want nothing more than to do 8 o' clock in the back with a glass of wine? And I said, well, you assume that this time zones is only in this time zone. People are tuning in from all over the world. And I'll be honest with you, this is what works best for me. This is what's best for me. Getting the one year old to bed, getting the other kids to bed and then you can all just jump on if you can live and so many of you do. I can see so many of you jumping in, which is fantastic. But if not, then you can get us on the replay. And listen, I know what it's like. Having to watch a free or two hour replay can be really tricky.

So.

So I made life even easier for you yesterday. Let me show you what I did. I took the full recording for you and I popped it into my AI notetaker and it has been broken down into segments for you so you don't even have to do anything. It's also found some sound bites as well, which is pretty, pretty cool. So if you want that link, I've made it available. I've already posted it out. There is a Facebook group chat going on right now for Wednesday and I've just popped it in there. You can go ahead and do that. I've invited you all in. I've also put it in the WhatsApp group link. I've popped it in there. You can go and check that out and I'll also make sure that it gets into these comments has section as well. So that's all of the transcription broken down for you. So you don't even have to worry and about that. So that is that. Hopefully you all like that and I'm going to do the same thing for today and for tomorrow and obviously for, for Friday as well. Now we are also running a pretty big giveaway this week. This is where you can win number of prizes. I think we've got nine prizes in, in total and that means we've got nine winners, which is really cool. Now this is separate from Spin the Wheel and yes, we will do a version of that very soon. But you can come and enter this at any time by going to boostleague.co.ukforward/win@ any point. You've got until Friday to do it. You can win one of these prizes. Two passes for the short stay. Summer in London, A VIP spot at the Touch Day workshop. It's either going to be in Boise or Barcelona. A marketing strategy session on how to get in front of Gen Z's, which is a good one. Free month subscription to Folio partnership with a professional revenue management company. That's huge. A personal Zoom session with Mr. Dave Goodfellow, including access to his latest course, one on one direct booking, mastery session via Zoom revenue and pricing audit call with Mr. Jasper Rivers and one year's membership to BNB Tribe. If you've already entered, keep going back. Every single day I'm adding in new ways to get more names into the hat that somebody said I've gotten 69 entries already, which is amazing. So you've got to be in it to win it. Just go to boostly.co.ukforward/win. All right, the winning doesn't stop. We are going to do Spin the Wheel very soon. So please, can you, please can you start giving me your looking numbers between 1 and 10 and we will do that very, very soon. But before we do that, I just wanted to show you what is coming up today. So we have got the phenomenal, the Fantastic, everybody's favorite, Mr. Paul Anderson, aka Social Media Hotelier. It's got another session on Instagram for you with a big announcement in that as soon as Paul is done we're gonna zoom over to the team at Turno who are going to show you all about operations. It's a massive, massive Thing your operations behind the scenes. We, we can focus on marketing as much as we like, but if you haven't got your operations dialed in correctly as you scale, then it can become a bit tricky. And then to finish with, you know, I don't want to say any session is the best or any session is the one you know that is better than the others, but I recorded this chat last week with Luca from Journey 9 from Guest Guru. There was Sam from Bestie AI, there was Cole from Host AI and there was Clive from hello Hosty. While my memory was good there. And it was a roundtable discussion about AI, about the hospitality industry, but more importantly about AI assistance. Think about all of the times you've had to answer a question from a guest at 10 o' clock at night, 11 o' clock at night, midnight, about the most trivial things that you know that a robot could answer. Well, this is what's happening, this is what's coming. And the way that they were talking about it is going to massively impact us in 2024. It may even massively impact you in Q2 of 2024. And the I don't want to spoil too much about it, but one of the final questions that I asked was how far is Voice AI assistance away? And I won't spoil the answer or the surprise. You're going to have to tune in to watch it. But they were very confident, very, very confident with their answers. So we've got an action packed night for you all. We're going to strap in well in two hours, two and a bit hours it's going to be for you. And again, just like yesterday, if you have to jump out for whatever reason, come back in, we're going to be here. It's going to continuous live and it's all happening in the group we had. One of the members was in the WhatsApp group, was in the Facebook chat saying, where is the live video going to be every single day, every single night? It's right here, it's right in the group, so you can't go far. Okay, so let's go ahead and do one more thing before we do spin the wheel for this evening. Yesterday we did spin the wheel and it was lucky number eight. And the winner was Hadil. Hadil Kusak over in, in Filey. And I sent her a message, I said, hadil, congratulations, you've won. Send me your postal address. I want to send you some pretty cool and I want it to arrive tomorrow. She messaged me back saying, mark, this is fantastic. Thank you. Listen, my, it's my little boy Liam's birthday. I believe it's either today or tomorrow. So anything you send, if you could just pop something in for him, that would be fantastic. So I got thinking, got thinking, well, what would a, what would a boy similar age to Alfie and Charlie like? And I came up with an idea. And so the present arrived today about 12 o' clock and I got a lovely picture in my, in my Facebook inbox. Let me share this with you. So there's little Liam, the little superstar. And we sent him over a little birthday badge, Star Wars, Lego Minecraft Uno and some, and some little party blower things. So Liam, have an amazing birthday this week. Thank you very much for taking part and I think, I think you're tuning in right now. So happy birthday, you little legend. And that is just part of the fun. See, we like to give you education, we like to give out prizes as well this week. So we're going to do it again. We're gonna do it again. Please give me your numbers between 1 and 10. 1 and 10 in the, in those lovely comments. Now the rules are as the rules are, okay, so remember, you're gonna give me a number between 1 and 10. If you correctly guess that lucky number, it doesn't mean that you are automatically a winner. It just means that you can send me a message on Facebook, on my personal Facebook and just say, hey Mark, I was looking, number, whatever. And then at some point this evening before I go to bed, I'll put all of your names into a hat and I'll pick the number out and you will be that lucky winner and you might get something sent to you tomorrow. Now, since being doing this, I've had some of my friends in the industry reach out and say, hey, I'd love to donate a prize. So I think tonight is the prime time to do it, which is going to be perfect timing. And in fact I can let you know what the special prize is going to be because the person who got in touch with me is going to be your next guest speaker. So the prize tonight if you win, is a one on one Instagram audit call with Mr. Paul Anderson. Let me just do this. I should be this. So that is worth, just to give you an idea, he charges over 250 pounds for these Instagram audits and you're going to get it absolutely free, one on one. If you win tonight, spin the wheel. So you've got 10 more seconds to do this, 10 more seconds to get your lucky Number in. As you can see, my voice is going a little bit croaky already, which is not good, seeing it is only day three. All right, we've got the spin the wheel up here. I'm having fun with my. Having fun with my soundboard, as you can see. Let's get the Jeopardy music on and let's spin that wheel. Number two. Number two. Number two. Okay, so if you were lucky number two, if you pop down number two, then that doesn't mean that you are automatically a winner. What does it mean? You have to send me a message on Facebook on my personal account. So just to give you an idea on where that personal account is, you should know it by now. Come and find me, Mark Simpson. It's got the hospitable host badge around me. Come down here, send me a message and just say, hey, Mark, I was. Yeah, lucky number two. And I will put all our names into a hat. And you may win that phenomenal prize with Mr. Paul Anderson. Now, before we go any further, there's somebody else I'd like to say thank you to, and that is to our Boostly ambassadors. Now, our Bruce Lee ambassadors are amazing. They've been helping so much. If you've got a question, I've been pointing you in the right direction. They are, of course, Jones, Laura Muse, Liam, Caroline and Melanie Benwell. So thank you very much. Can we all give him a big round of applause? All right, and we're good. All right, so thank you very much, ambassadors, and to our sponsors, it's. We literally couldn't do this without you. All of this education, all of this that we do this week is for free and it is for you. And so because of that, the sponsors basically help put it all together. So please, can we give him a little love heart emojis? If you drop into the comments for me right now, just tap that little love heart emoji button as many, many times as possible and then we can get on and get cracked on with the show. Okay, so here's how it's going to work. So Paul has got his session coming up very, very soon. Then we're going to go into turnout and then I'm going to come back, make sure you're all with us, go for a few things and then we're going to get into the AI session now at points through this evening. If you've got questions, please pop it in the chat. Paul is with us. Paul is live with us and he will be able to answer your questions as we go. If you are tuning in to this from maybe YouTube or LinkedIn and you're thinking, how can I join in the chat? How can I get involved, come over to Facebook, come over to the group, you should know it by now and come and get in the group. We have passed 1,000 members, so again, that's. That deserves one more of these. And with that being said, let's get on with it now before we, we start this evening, before we get on with the, with the main guy himself, I just wanted to drop in a little Boostly video. Now, what I, I asked a couple of weeks ago is I asked some of the members if anybody would be up for recording just a little testimonial video, just about what it is like to work with Boostly because we've got so many Team Boostly members that are in here this week, but there's a lot of people who are, who are new to Boostly, new to me, wondering what is going on and basically what we do and what we aim to and our mission is to help every host that works with Boostly to get to 65% direct bookings. The reason why that is so important is because when you have got 65% of your bookings coming in direct instead of from Airbnb, booking.com, and VRBO is that the business is built on your land, you are in more control. And this is all about the book. Direct Virtual Summit is all about direct bookings. And like I said this week, there's no, you know, special offer, upsell or anything. If you want to book a call with us, then please just go to boostlead.co.uk. there's a calendar button. We've got call slots available this week, there are few left. But if you'd like to speak to us, we would love to speak with you. So with that being said, let me just play this little video and then we'll get straight on with the main man himself.

Hey, everybody.

Dave here from Nokia Station wanted to say a massive thank you to Mark and his team over at Boostly for.

Getting the brief on our website. Absolutely nailed on.

We know how important direct bookings are going into next year. We're really looking forward to working with you in the new year.

Boostly is the best.

Listen, if you're in the STR space.

You need to do direct bookings.

There's no other way.

You can't rely on the OTAs only.

To fill spaces in your calendar.

That's it.

You should be direct booking, you should be booking direct.

There's no other way. You have control, you save on all the fees and you just have a much better business. And the only way to do it is with Boostly.

They take you from A to Z design and marketing.

There's nobody that does it like Boostly.

Highly recommend it. This is Gary Gregory with Kristen Captain's Escape, Boost Lee. There's just no other option.

Good morning on a crispy Yorkshire icy morning. I'd like to offer this testimonial to the team at Boostleigh.

They've been absolutely instrumental in supporting us.

To get our holiday cottage business off the ground. The guidance, the advice, support that we've received has been absolutely amazing. We've got a Booster 2 website so we continue with that. We've not actually gone on to Booster three yet but we do intend to do so. We are just in the process of completing on our third holiday cottage on the coast and again, just want to.

Thank Booster for where we are at.

We've had such, just such inspiration from.

The team and the confidence that we've.

Gained in getting the booking direct from.

The OTAS has just been a game changer.

So thanks to Mark, thanks to the team from Ketlan Valley.

Hey there, it's John Papa here from Papa's Getaways.

Coming at you from beautiful Canada. Our experience with Boostly has been great from the start.

Liam jumped on with us on a.

Call and made sure that we had all the information.

What was also great is the developers in the background. Anytime you kind of report a bug.

While you're trying to onboard your website.

They'Re very responsive and they fix it right away. Definitely something that's out of my scope.

And what I understand.

So great to have them there for that.

The tools that come with Boostly on.

How to then get people onto your website are the part that I'm looking forward to now.

Now that I have the platform that.

I want with way more information than.

My direct booking platform had before, I.

Look forward to this elevated service of.

Now getting people to my website along.

With all of Boostly's help. Morning folks. I'm Tracey Tillman and I run Bryn.

Woodland House Guest House in Colwyn Bay, North Wales.

And I wanted to pop in rather than jump in and say a massive.

Thank you to the team at Bruce Lee and Mark Simpson.

I have been following and been part of Bruce Lee now for about four years, might be slightly less. And before that we totally, totally relied.

On the online travel agents and the.

Third party travel agents to get our bookings. Obviously then the pandemic hit and we were all told to stay at home and we, we were one of the partners, as we are called, for the third party online travel agent and they literally just whipped our bookings from underneath us and it was like, what do we do?

So being part of Boostly now, we.

Have managed to support ourselves with direct bookings. Our website is amazing, does need a bit of update and we are now converting and getting more direct bookings through that way.

We're converting the online bookings too and.

By doing that we have managed to.

Reduce what was about £12,000 in commission.

A year down to well less than half of that.

We're probably paying. Our biggest commission I think for this.

Year was just under 300 pounds sterling. And that is amazing.

And that's thanks to people like Mark from Bluestake, the people that are in.

The team and for other people that.

We follow along the way that we found because of Bruce Lee. So much love and thanks so much for all the help, the encouragement and.

All the trainings that you have provided us.

Take care and I hope the summit.

Is as good as I'm finding it right now. It is absolutely fantastic to be back at yet another awesome Boostly virtual summit. I genuinely love nothing more than being able to give host value. In fact, an opportunity just to talk shop is a blessing. Normally when I begin to talk about the accommodation business or Instagram, my friends just mysteriously vanish. So thank you for tuning in and thank you Mr. Simpson for inviting me back in case this is the first ever video of mine that you watched before and you have no idea who I am. My name is Paul Anderson. I'm an accommodation business owner and an Instagram marketing expert who funnels around 30% of his website traffic from Instagram. As the social media hotelier, it's my job to help hosts drive website traffic and enhance brand awareness. I've helped over 5,000 hosts to successfully gain more direct bookings, make more money and enhance their marketing strategies using Instagram through webinars, bootcamps and summits just like this. I've also coached over 50 short term rental business owners through one on one coaching and I'm an international bestselling author. The last time I was here, I demonstrated how we can use AI to create our own bespoke social media manager for our businesses. Today I'm going to strip things right back. So whether you're starting over on Instagram, starting fresh for the very first time, or looking to overhaul and uplift your Instagram presence, this video is for you. Let me start by saying that it's still absolutely possible to grow and funnel traffic from Instagram. Whilst you might have encountered negativity out there telling you that Instagram is dead and the Instagram coaches are the only ones that are growing anymore, that's absolutely not true. One of my favorite clients, Ruth Manfredi of Sanctaire Vacation Rentals in Italy, more than doubled the number of followers she had last year. She regularly secures bookings from her Instagram audience and is living proof that the strategies I'm about to share can and do work. Ray Winfield has a holiday cottage in Sussex, England, and With fewer than 400 followers, she recently messaged me to say she'd just taken a 2,000 pound booking thanks to Instagram. Cheryl McConaughey, a lucky dreamer lodge in Belize, trebled the monthly page views on her booking website from December to this January and credits these awesome results to executing on the Instagram strategy we built together and then also applying it to Facebook. But don't worry, I'm not here to sell you on one on one coaching. I'm here to tell you how they did it. It's fundamental that we as hosts appreciate that Instagram, and any other social media business for that matter, is not a social media platform. It is an advertising agency, pure and simple, and our relationship with it is purely transactional. Here's how it works. We create and publish content. Instagram then shows it to a few people. Some of those people consume and engage with it. So Instagram shows it to more people just like them. They then engage with it, and Instagram shows it to yet more people until interest dries up and the algorithms stop putting it into people's feeds. The algorithm's sole function in life is to show content to accounts and people that will value it. Why? In order to keep them on the platform for the longest possible. Why? In order to put as much paid advertising in front of them as possible. Last year, Meta who own Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp generated over $134 billion in revenue. Okay, great, that's a big number then. Let me point out that just shy of 132 billion of those dollars came from advertising revenue alone. That's over 98%. So what does this mean for us? It means that the algorithms are our friends. If we create content that our ideal guests will appreciate, people who fit the profile of our ideal guests will consume and engage with it. And then the algorithms will show this content to more people, would you believe, who fit the profile of our ideal guests. This increase in the number of ideal guests. Our content is shown to is an increase in our brand awareness. We can then use this content to direct to funnel our ideal guests onto our profiles. Profiles that are optimized for our ideal guests to follow us. Or better yet, hit the link that's in our bio. Instagram permits only one place for permanently clickable links and that's in our bio. So the aim of the game then is to lead our ideal guests from a compelling post to a targeted profile through the link in our bio and onto our booking pages. Get them there and we have the undivided attention. Better yet, arm them with all the information they need and they'll have just three questions where is the book now? Button do we have vacancies when they want to travel and can they afford our rates? Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat. Sun Tzu the Art of War Use hashtags Don't use hashtags. Short captions perform better than long captions. Long captions keep people engaged for longer. Put hashtags at the end of your captions. Put them in the comments to boost engagement. Links Figures on stories are great for getting people off platform and onto web pages, but Instagram strangles the reach of content that takes people off their platform. Use an eye catching logo for your profile picture. Oh, people buy from people. So use a headshot. Use a link tree. Avoid link trees. They overwhelm people with choice and it goes on and on and on. When hosts come to me for advice and guidance, they're almost always preoccupied with tactics, with chasing the algorithms, the latest trend to come from the Instagram gurus. What's often missed is an underlying strategy to underpin these tactics. Last year I came in for a lot of flack off the back of a blog post I wrote called F the algorithm and prioritize your audience. Granted, perhaps I shouldn't have done and most of the flack came from dropping an F bomb. But the principles bear out and the results speak for themselves. The best way to gain the algorithms is not to run after the latest trend, but to focus our content on one singular individual person, our ideal guest avatar. Doing so means that the algorithms learn who to put our content in front of and we attract our perfect guests. The ones that come back time and time and time again leave five star reviews and tell all their pals about us. All successful marketing begins with understanding intimately to whom we are marketing. We can think of it almost as defining your niche. So Part one who are we posting for you should try to know everything that you can about this person. When I start with clients and I ask them who their ideal guest is, I hear things like 30 to 55 year old parents and their children. Now whilst this is a good first step, these aren't specific enough because parents in their 30s are very different from parents who are perhaps empty nesters in their 50s. Parents in their 30s from say the Midwest are likely to have younger children, different accommodation needs, different traveling concerns and challenges than an upper class family, say of eight living in Rochester, New York. The reason I say this is because when you get crystal clear with who your ideal guest is, it makes it easier for you to create the targeted content that they will value. It makes it easier for that ideal guest to find you and to follow you. And it makes it easier for the algorithm to learn that, oh, this is the kind of person this business account is trying to attract. This is the kind of audience that enjoys this person's content the most. Let's make sure that this person's content, AKA you, your content, is shown to that type of person. The more wishy washy, the less specific you are with who your ideal guest is. The tougher it is for you to create content, the tougher it is for them to consume it, and the tougher it is for the algorithm to recommend you. The best part, you get to decide who your ideal guest is. They can be designed from experiences with previous guests, they can be created out of thin air. They're your ideal guest, they're who you would most like to host. So you need to get crystal clear with that ideal guest audience. Part 2 what are we posting? What are we going to be talking about?

About?

You could be talking to the mother of a young family with two preschool age children in the Midwest. So what are you going to be talking about to her? Now, I use the word talking because often when I say things like what are you going to help them with? Or what value are you going to give them? Hosts are like, well hey, I'm, I'm not giving anything. I'm not trying to help people. On Instagram, I host guests, but recently I've been trying to make my content more broadly accessible by saying that it's the what you're going to be talking about. Of course you might not even be talking. You might just be showing off your amenities. You might be doing tours of your property or properties. You might be listing the guest benefits of booking direct rather than via an online travel agent. You're not necessarily talking, but I just like to use that word talking. Because there's got to be a topic, right? In marketing speak, these topics are referred to as content pillars. For our purposes, they're nothing more than buckets of topics we know our ideal guests will appreciate hearing about. Then within these pillars there has to be some sort of focused subtopics or sub pillars for each post. I often hear things like location, amenities, service, decor, and these things are broad. These things are generic. Again, we need to get specific. So rather than our location, what about how to get here from insert travelhub or we're uber close to insert local attractions. Instead, perhaps they're focusing on all the amenities your property offers. Maybe you're just going to highlight those amenities that your ideal guests would appreciate. Whatever it is, again, get crystal clear on it. I coach my clients to define their ideal guest in as much detail as possible and then create four to six content pillars or buckets of topics the ideal guest will always appreciate. Write them in a spreadsheet or in a notebook with wherever. Then when a content idea strikes, you pop it into your list under the appropriate pillar. Would you believe that you will now have started to create an ideation sheet and will no longer struggle for content ideas because you have them all noted down and they're all categorized? Here are five content pillars that will fit the needs of almost all short term rentals and their ideal guests. Service and space what you do, how you do it, where and in what environment. Nourishment. All travelers need nourishment. Local restaurants, cafes, stores, suppliers and hyper local, I. E. What facilities do you provide to prepare and consume a meal? Local activities. Again, local and hyperlocal. What can people do in your property if it's raining cats and dogs, for example? Reviews and testimonials it's far more powerful when others say that we rock and we're awesome than if we ourselves tell others about how great we are. Share those awesome reviews. Final one Book direct. Telling our guests what they stand to gain, they book direct rather than use an online travel agent. Bottom line is, you can't set up or optimize an Instagram profile and post effective content until you know what you're going to post and who you're posting for. But once you do have your ideal guest crystal clear and you spent some time thinking about what they need to know to book with you, it's time to set up your brand new Instagram account or overhaul your existing account. So how do we do that? If you're starting anew, the first thing you're going to have to pick is a username. This is your handle. If you already have an account, then this is a tick first, job done. But should your brand be your username? I would say yes, especially if it includes keywords specific to what you do. Smoky Mountain Vacation rentals, for example, or Lake Como Holiday Villa. You get the idea. Including keywords such as vacation rental or your location or your address and your username is not necessary. But it can help you out in the future with SEO and it can help you out. When new people land on your profile, boom. They immediately know who you are and what you're going to be posting about. One other pro tip as we move on from the username is to keep it simple. Don't try to make it super long. Don't feel the need to add random letters or symbols. Try to avoid those. Some ways that you can do that is including periods or underscores in your username. If you find that your preferred name has already been registered, you'll then need your profile picture. I recommend either using your face or your brand's logo as your profile picture. But make sure that the logo is designed to be a profile picture, not a logo that you would slap on a banner or put on a signpost. Because those types of logos are longer. They have full words, they have small text, they maybe have your tagline, they might even have your phone number and your contact information on them. Think about it like Google. Google's profile picture doesn't say G O O G L E and have a little rainbow font that they use. It just has the rainbow G. That G was designed to be an icon. It was designed to be a profile picture. So if your business doesn't currently have a profile picture version of your logo, consider using a platform like Canva to create your own. Of course, if you're like me, you personalize your brand, perhaps because you've always been the face of your business. Then you want you, the face of the brand to be in your profile picture. But do make sure that it's a close up, a well zoomed in, well lit selfie. And replace the background with a brand color so that you really stand out and pop off the page. It makes you look a lot more professional and it allows your Instagram profile picture to stand out from the crowd. Don't use a family photo. Don't use the picture of you with your bestie. Use a singular photo of you super close, cropped in. Really I would say from the mid chest up. And if not just the neck and the face. So we can really see your face and be drawn in. Moving on from the profile picture, the next most important line, which is a line that many, many people overlook, is what's called your name line. That's what Instagram calls it. At least what I call it is your Instagram title. This is the bold text that is below your profile picture and above the text in your bio, because this is called the name line on Instagram. Of course, most people just put their first and last name in or their business name in, and they think that's what they're supposed to do. And while Instagram might tell you that that's what you're supposed to do as a marketer, I can tell you that there's actually a lot more you can do with this. I go as far to say that for discoverability, this might be the most important thing to get right. Your Instagram title is one of the first places Instagram's thousands of algorithms will look to when returning a response to a search query. Yes, people search Instagram in much the same way as they might search Google. And so getting this little section right is a vital key to the lock that is discoverability. That title field, that name field, has recently been expanded, so now it can have up to 64 characters, which means you have a lot of space to include not just your name or your business name, but, and here's the key, some keywords that relate to your account, your ideal guest, or to your business. So, for example, if you look at the account of one of our newer clients, Chris, you looked at his Instagram title, his name field, it used to say Merlot Cabin. It now says Family vacation Mountain Cabin in Vermeer, Canada. We built it that way because that's likely something that Chris's ideal guest is going to be searching for. For those of you who are concerned about Meta Verified, you might be thinking ahead and already be worried about, oh, but Paul, I might want to get meta verified. So don't I have to put my name on that line? Yes, great point. Just put your name and then put a hyphen and then put the rest of your title up to 64 characters. Moving on. Below the name line is the actual bio. The bio is where you tell people what to expect from your account. Think of it like a billboard, because the amount of time people are going to spend reading your bio is very similar to the amount of time people will read a billboard when they're driving past it on a highway at 70 miles an hour. Basically, it's like two or three seconds before they make a decision. So we don't have time to mince words. We don't have time to use insider lingo that no one else is going to know unless they already follow you. We're not going to use acronyms that people don't know unless they already follow us or unless they're already an expert in our field. We're going to use layman's terms. We're going to use terms that are understood by our ideal guest. That's number one. Number two, we're not going to include any miscellaneous, extraneous information. We're not going to include fun facts about how many kids we have and how many pets we have and how we love skiing and our favorite kind of wine and how we're a Virgo and all these other different passions and interests and hobbies. People don't care when they're reading your bio when they are reading your bio, it's because they saw one of your posts and they thought this was a great post about say, relaxing in a hot tub at a short term rental in a place where they're planning a trip. So they clicked on the profile and now they're quickly skimming your bio. If your bio is like sleeps 12, family friendly hot tub, enjoy nature, moments from town, book now, then they're like, oh, I can expect more about this awesome looking short term rental from this account. I'm hoping to vacation there soon. I should follow them. But instead, and I'm going to exaggerate for effect if they see a great post about relaxing in a hot tub on vacation and they click on the profile and they read skin that your name is Karen, you have a cabin, you love to ski on the weekends, and you have two fur babies. They're like, okay, that was a great post, but I'm not likely to follow this person. I'm not really going to get any more content like that. I can expect to get photos of the kids and their dogs. So your bio should be no more than four lines. And that's because if you go past the fourth line, if you go onto the fifth and sixth line, Instagram will truncate it. It will cut off your bio with a More the last time I checked, there isn't anybody taking the time to read your fifth and sixth line of your bio. So keep it to four lines or fewer. And really there are just three key lines that you need to make sure you hit right. Line number one, articulate who and what your niche is. Basically Tell us who you host, your ideal guest and how. Mountain cabin, beachside condo, lakeside villa, whatever it happens to be, and do it in one sentence or less. The second line is where things can get a little bit more creative and needs to go deeper into how you host. What are your unique selling points? What pieces of information do you want to succinctly communicate to your ideal guest? Your ideal guest should then respond with, wow, this could just be the place for us. I'm going to follow them. Or better yet, I'm going to hit that link in bio and then on the third or fourth line, depending on how you structure it. The third element though is a call to action. Basically, the bottom line of your buyer should tell the people what you want them to do next. Do you want them to make a reservation? Do you want them to visit your website? Do you want them to send an inquiry? Do you want them to check out all the properties you have in the area? Start planning first day, you tell them here what you want them to do. You do that in the last line of your buyer. And this brings me full circle to why we should keep our buyers succinct. That call to action is so important to guide an Instagram look at to becoming a real world booker. We definitely don't want that last part truncated because we blathered on earlier in the bio. That's the profile and the bio pretty much the majority of the whole account setup or optimizing process. Some people would call Instagram profiles a bottleneck. I would call them portals. Portals through which we must lead our ideal guests in order to get them onto our booking pages. In order to derive any return on investment for the time and effort or money spent on content marketing. Optimizing your Instagram profile and your bio therefore is crucial to successfully leveraging Instagram to funnel more bookings. Okay, so how do we get people to visit our profiles? We need to create and publish content. I'm forever being asked how much should I post? And my response is always the same. You tell me. You tell me based on what you can sustain, I could give you an ideal goal and if you need me to, then sure, I'll set you a goal that five posts per week. However, that's just a kind of random number. Consistency is king. And yes, it is statistically true that the more you post, the more brand awareness you will gain providing it's valuable and targeted. However, the first thing to do is to decide using your content pillars as guidance is how frequently you can create and publish content consistently. Not Constantly, consistently and sustainably. I. E. Until you either sell or close your business. Little like working out at a gym. It's far more effective to do it once a week for five weeks than is to go every day for a week and then not at all for the rest of the month. So instead of giving you a number to shoot for, instead of giving you a universal goal, I want you to base your decision off a few things. The Instagram gurus out there who are recommending daily posts with an extra three reels per week and three to five stories every day, do this for a living. It's their bread butter. And many of them will have teams of graphic designers, copywriters, videographers, content strategists working for them. We have accommodation businesses to run. And whilst marketing is an essential ingredient for our success, marketing is just one essential ingredient amongst many others. So rather than worrying about what number someone else recommends, focus on what you can sustain. Or can you realistically sustain creating and posting forever? If you're in a very busy season of life, then maybe you're only going to sustain two or three posts a month to your feed, and that's fine. Maybe you're in a season where you're all in on Instagram and you're totally focused and you can pump out a post every day. That's awesome. It's all good. Bottom line, be consistent with your frequency and the targeting of your ideal guest. If your content isn't going to be appreciated by your ideal guest, or you're just posting to get something out, don't post. Another question that I'm asked a lot is about what's the best time to post. There is no universal best time to post, so post when it suits you. Personally, I always publish or schedule my content to go out. When I'm in the middle of the school run, I'll drop the kids off and I can take some of my walk home to engage on Instagram. There are so many theories and so much day Farewell what type of content to post and when you should post it. But when you cut to it, only two consistent truisms can be discerned. It's not a good idea to post content when your audience is likely to be asleep. And if you post content when you know you will have 10 or 15 minutes to engage on Instagram, then you can avoid developing the habit of what is known as posting and ghosting. So we covered how much to post, we covered when to post, we covered what post by looking at content pillars. So let's talk about how to post or rather how to create effective, compelling posts. My successful clients, the one who gain the most from their Instagram efforts, create their content like a magazine editor. Oftentimes hosts will find or take a pretty picture and then try and craft some words around it. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This process is completely back to front. So I'd like you to imagine yourself queuing at supermarket cash out. Your eye wanders over to the racks next to you. What do you see? Can be because supermarkets like to mess with parents and magazines, an interesting cover catches your eye. You shift your focus to the headline, maybe even read the little snippet of the article that's on the front cover. You get to full article on page seven and you realize that it's your turn at the cash out. Grab the magazine you put on the conveyan belt and the magazine editor has done their job well. So when it comes to our content creation, let's have a think about how the editor achieved this. They started with an article written by a journalist that's perfect for the magazine's ideal readership. The editor approves the article for the front page and sends it to an editorial team. They then do two things. They write a headline and they ask their archivist, the photojournalist, for an image to back up the article. Once it's done, this all gets laid out on the front page and it turns out that the full article won't fit. So they add a call to action. Full article on page seven. So let's think of Instagram in these terms. The feed is the magazine rack. Your post image is the magazine cover. Your hook. The beginning of your caption is the magazine headline that entices people to read on. Our Instagram captions are the journalist article and our call to action. Book now or link in bio like if you appreciate this that we ask for in return for that value is the equivalent of a full article on page seven. So create content in the same way as a magazine editor does. First, write the caption that gives your ideal guest sign like your value. Then craft a compelling hook for it. Add a call to action, then a scroll stopping image and hey presto, you have a post that leads your guest from an image through a hook into targeted value. Right at the very end of that value, you ask for something in return. A call to action. Because we've crafted our caption to speak directly to our ideal guests to give them value in the same way that a journalist writes a magazine article, the ideal guest responds to this call to action and engages, or better yet actually does go to our profile and moves through the portal to hit that link in bio that takes them to your booking page. On the flip side of that, the algorithms are seeing your ideal guest Personas engaging with your content so they show your content to more people just like them. And so the cycle continues. This is how you leverage Instagram into your marketing strategies and funnel traffic from Instagram and onto your website. This is how Ruth regularly secures bookings from Instagram. This is how Ray takes 2,000 pound reservations with fewer than 400 followers. And this is how Cheryl tripled website visits. Ideal Guest pillars information topics that you know the ideal guest is going to be interested in, optimize the profile, turn it into a portal and then create consistent, targeted, value driven content. Of course Instagram is a beast and there's only so much we could cover today. This session has been a whistle stop tour of the journey my clients take from floundering around in the swamp of generic Instagram advice to growing their followers at pace and funneling direct bookings straight from Instagram. We've only just scratched the surface, so I've secured special permission from some of my clients to pull back the curtain on our private coaching sessions. This is to help me craft InstaBooked, turning posts into profits with Instagram, a comprehensive training program that not only shares the secrets to their successes, but also equips you with everything you need to replicate their results. This won't just be a course, this is going to be a guide through proven strategies personalized for hosts to empower you to captivate your audience and convert followers into bookings. Now, transparency and candid honesty is at the heart of everything that I do. So I want you to know that InstaBooked is currently in production with a launch date planned for June 2024. This timeline ensures that every piece of content, every strategy and every insight is not only relevant, but revolutionary, offering you the most current and most impactful methods to transform your Instagram into a powerful booking engine. What sets InstaBooked apart even more is that the first four modules are designed to transcend Instagram. They apply across the entire digital marketing landscape, from all social media platforms to websites, hero images, blogs and more. This foundational knowledge will not only enhance your Instagram game, but elevate your entire digital marketing strategy. With InstaBooked, you're not just signing up for another online course. You'll gain access to an evolving ecosystem of strategies, insights and support designed to grow with you and your business. Here's what you'll receive beyond the 10 core modules, you gain foundational knowledge that applies universally across all digital marketing channels. Access to tools tailored to hosts like my Pillar Ideation Template, Content Calendar Template, Metric, Measurement tools and more to streamline your strategy implementation. Exclusive access to a vibrant Facebook group for live Zoom sessions, including deep Dives into Principles, the latest Instagram updates, account audits, and live Q&As. This group has been created as a hub for accountability, sharing challenges, celebrating wins, and accessing additional resources as they become available. I'll also share access to all of my previously recorded group training sessions and so, with three hours of lessons on everything from diving deep into who your unique ideal guest is to leveraging AI into your content creation process. All of the video content will be downloadable as audio files so you can learn on the go and it's lifetime access that's free. Lifetime access to all course updates and early bird opportunities for future courses, ensuring that InstaBook remains your indispensable guide to digital marketing. Today is the first time I've publicly spoken of this program. It's been quite hard to contain myself, but I've worked hard to get this announcement out today and give you the first opportunity to be part of what will be a transformative journey. My clients currently pay me over $2,000 for 10 hours of my time one on one. When I launch InstaBooked in June later this year, the price is going to be $997. Today I'm offering exclusive early bird access for just $397 and this is just for the first 50 hosts who sign up. This never to be repeated offer is your chance not just to invest in your Instagram success, but to significantly elevate your broader digital marketing prowess. Your next step? Head over to thesocialmediahotelia.com earlybird and grab your spot before it's too late. I'm so excited to embark on this journey with you and I can't wait to see where it takes us together. Your transformation can begin now. Together, let's revolutionize not just your Instagram, but your entire digital presence. Thank you for listening. I've been Paul the social media hotelier and I hope to see you again soon.

Peace.

Let's show them how we do.

I like to run my words when I speak. I take two from a seven of the week Monday to Friday. That's the five days. It's the challenge and you know it's provided free. Yeah, that's where the star is. Day one free. So you know it's gratis. Look, I spit fire while I'm good looking. I'm gonna tell you to get more direct bookings. Not circuitously through a travel agent. One that's come to you. You sit there in amazement like wow. Mad respect to the guy with the hashtag bookdirect. Not a gang sign, it's a pound. In the US we call it hashtag over here, running through this book directly, it means that you go. Not a book from a library. Oh no, bro, you need to understand words. Please heed. Use Facebook to get more leads. Like a dog with the collar with the multiple leashes. More leads. That's the pun. It's hard to believe it. I punch hard like Bruce Lee. Probably the only rhyme I can think with. Bruce Lee like an orange. I squeezed it cause it's so juicy. And Mark Simpson. Not orange, but he could be yellow like the fellow in the Mac groaning show. That's the Simpson thing. Mark my woe rds. That's the words. When I fill it out. Here's a little thing. Pay attention you louts. Don't over rely on booking.com or Airbnb cause that could be gone. Cause the pandemic shut down everything. Airbnb offices, the phone don't ring anymore. But over reliance is not required. Yeah, I see you're not silent and saying, chris, can you shout to me how to save money in commissioning fees? Well, I can't explain, but I know who doo doo does. Mark Simpson not like Bart with the buzz sore haircut. Let me make this clear. He's not from the Simpsons. Guys, please lend your ears, Romans and countrymans and all the viewers. Get your guest to book direct and you will see your coffers swell and swell and grow. The guests all go. They're like, wow, I'm glad that I watched this show or this podcast and they'll enjoy their holiday. I'm gonna go and book direct right away. Admittedly, I'm not. There'll be a slight lag. But when you do book direct, don't forget the hashtag sipping a virgin mojito. And there you have it, the freestyle wrap from me, Chris Turner. Do make sure you check out Mark Simpson and boost Lee's free five day challenge to get more direct bookings. Peace out.

Greetings everyone. I'm Brook Sparks and I'm super excited to introduce Turno to all of you today. I've been working in the short term rental industry for the last eight years and honestly, Turner is one of the most fulfilled and exciting tools I've worked with. Yet in this space I have the privilege of working with hosts and property managers every single day to meet their short terminal cleaning related goals and I've enjoyed this conversations a lot so far. So Turmo has been operating for several years now. We've grown very quickly in the space now with over 30 plus customer support specialists available 24, 7 which is clutch and 50 plus developers working to improve the tool every day and we now total over 150 employees across seven countries and we can continue to grow every day now. Turno is a single platform to source and manage the entire vacation rental cleaning life cycle. Our goal here with Terno is to help our partners streamline the whole cleaning management experience. From finding cleaners to automating and streamlining all of the cleaning related processes, the major vacation rental data companies over the last couple years have reported major increases in short term rental supply worldwide. The amount of short term rental companies continues to grow and the supply continues to decrease every year. So it has never been more important than now to make sure you're delivering a five star level clean every single time. We all know how devastating bad cleaning reviews can be, so in a market of more and more competition, we have to find the best cleaning management process to ensure 5 star cleaning reviews every time.

Now.

Turno is your ultimate sidekick for hassle free scheduling. Say goodbye to the chaos of juggling cleans and hello to smooth sailing. With Turno, it's like having a personal assistant in your pocket always ready to help you manage your clean cleaning calendar like a pro. And with Terno you can easily connect to your PMS or booking channels to sync calendars and then automate scheduling and payments to the cleaners. Plus its friendly reminders make sure you and the cleaners never miss a beat. So why stress when you can turn oh it up and make scheduling super easy. Inside of Turno, you can also create custom checklist that can be made mandatory for your cleaners to check through as they clean the property. This can promote consistency and peace of mind no matter if the clean is done by the primary cleaner, the backup or a brand new cleaner from our marketplace. For example, you can even add photo expectations for the properties if you need something to look a specific way in the property, maybe like some throw pillows on a bed. And you can also make it mandatory for the cleaners to take photos photos of certain things in the property to make sure it all looks good. As the cleaners go through the property checking off the checklist, they'll have the Access to your inventory list to make sure everything is stocked up in the property. And if they notice any issue in the property like broken items or missing items, they can snap a photo of it and turn over Cleaners app and add commentary if they wish. So you can track it in the problem section of Terno. And Terno has two apps, Turner for hosts, Interno for Cleaners, which streamlines the host side of things when you guys are on the go. And it makes it very easy for the cleaners to get their schedules and access all the info to actually complete the cleans. In addition to all the great cleaning management automation that Turno offers, we also have our cleaner search which allows you to get gain access to the world's largest cleaner marketplace to help build out your cleaning team. All of the cleaners on our marketplace are background checked and have been vetted internally by verifying that they have completed short term rental cleans before. Our Cleaner marketplace helps tons of hosts and property managers every single day looking to expand their cleaning staff, find cleaners for new markets, backup cleaners, or even finding their very first cleaner. To take advantage of the tool, all you have to do is log into your Churner account and put in a cleaner search for one of your markets. Then the cleaners in your area will place bids on that cleaner search to join your team. As you go through the bids, you'll be able to see their qualifications, experience levels, reviews from other hosts in your area, which is really nice. And then after experience accepting those bids, you can communicate with the cleaners for expectation, setting, interviews, price negotiations and even in person walkthroughs of the property. And once you have done your additional screening and determined that they're a good fit for the team, you can assign them to the properties as either a primary cleaner or a backup cleaner. Then the automation of the cleaning process takes over from there. Turno is the smart way to schedule, pay and find vacation rental cleaners. And I'd now like to introduce my colleague Jaya, who will take over from here to show you how the tool works.

Hi everyone, I'm Jaya, I'm an account executive here at Terno and today I will be walking you through kind of all the buttons on the site so that I can help you get started. Now here at Turnow, we automate your cleaning, calendar your payments and then we also have a marketplace where you can find cleaners and build the team. We do also allow you to work with pre existing cleaners if you already have one in place. Now the way that this works is you connect your booking site so that we can recognize when you do get a booking, so that we automatically create a cleaning set for when that guest is going to check out. We then send it to your primary cleaner to either accept or reject based on their own availability. And if they reject it, we open it up to your backup cleaners and from there it's first come, first serve. Now, we will get into finding cleaners in a second, but your first step when creating an account is to link up all of the booking sites that you're on. You can do so by clicking your initials in the top right corner, or it'll be your profile picture if you've already changed it. I'm clicking on Integrations over here. If you are on a PMS or a channel Manager, you can scroll through this list to see, you know, go and find yours. All that this integration really does is pull through your booking and calendar information so that we know when to create these cleanings. But if you're not on a channel Manager, you can just connect directly with whatever other booking sites you're on. Now, once you have that all set up, we can go look for the cleaners in our marketplace. You can find it here under Cleaner Search and you will be clicking New Search over there in the corner. It's going to ask you for some basic information here. You know, bed, bath, square footage, address. Then on the next page it'll ask you know, how long you think it might take, how many turns you think you might need in a month, if you're providing the supplies or if the cleaner is. And then if you need linens and towels done, you can also attach a checklist if you'd like to, but if you don't have one quite yet, that's no worries. We can build one out later. Now, when we click Find Cleaners, you've placed the search and we send it out to all of the cleaners we have in the area. And if they're interested, they place a bid and you get a list back that looks something like this. Now, from here, you can click in to read their BIOS reviews. You can see how far away from the unit they are, how many cleanings they've done. On Turno, all of our cleaners are background checked, but some will have extra qualifications like licensing or insurance, so you can see that here under the badges section. Scroll down to read their reviews. You will notice we have two separate ratings here. One is a host rating and the other is the Airbnb guest rating. Host ratings are from other hosts on Tourno leaving their opinions. Whereas the Airbnb guest rating is directly from guests who have stated properties that Katie has cleaned for before, who have rated the cleanliness on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. We pull that back through and link it up with her profile here. Now, the most important thing to note about our marketplace is that we do only give you 48 hours to either accept or reject these offers. You can see it here in the corner, expires two days from now. But the most important thing to note about this is, is that accepting an offer is non binding. So accepting someone from the marketplace does not mean that you have to work with them. It's not going to lock you in any kind of contract or pay them immediately or show them your calendar. All that accepting an offer does is make it so that they don't expire and so that you're allowed to send your phone number. So my suggestion is to place your search, wait about a day for most of the bids to come in and then go through and accept your favorite two to five candidates. Now, at this point, you'll be able to reach out through the chat over here in the corner with any questions you may have. Technically, you can keep all of your questions in the chat, but most hosts like to start with a phone interview. So you can, you know, clarify expectations, you can send photos of the place, you can negotiate pricing, you can ask what services they offer or if they work solo or in a team. You can, you know, schedule a walk through the property or a test clean, whatever it is that you'd like to do to vet these cleaners, you can do once you've accepted the bid. And then if it's not a good fit, you can always disconnect. But the goal here is to find a favorite to make your primary and then one or two backups as well. Now let's move me over here. All of the people who you accept from the marketplace are going to pop up over here under the My Team tab and they're going to start off looking something like Tina. You'll notice Tina is not added to any properties in the beginning. So set up like this, she has no calendar access, she can't see any of the upcoming cleanings we've created for you. So she's basically in a little waiting room deciding, or I'm sorry, waiting on you to decide where she's going, if she's staying, if she's not staying, if it wasn't a good fit, you can remove her with that trash can icon. But if you did like her. You can decide if she's your primary or backup cleaner and add her to the property. So you'll select the properties that she's cleaning, primary or backup. And then like I mentioned, pricing is negotiable. So if you guys came to a different number, it'll be you who adjusted on your end here. And then once you save it, she's basically in line to receive these cleanings as they come in. If you do already have your own cleaners, this is the page where you can invite them by clicking Invite Teammate, you can send them a text or an email, and once they accept this invitation, they will look just like Tina again and you'll just plug them in where they need to go. Now, the last feature we have on this page is our Co Host tab. And this is for any anyone who might need access to your side of the Turno account. So you can invite them on here. And I will also mention we do actually allow you to invite on people other than cleaners. So we only have the marketplace for cleaners. But if you already work with a maintenance person and would like to schedule them through our platform, you would invite them on the same way you would a cleaner, just via text or email and just add them to the properties that they might need to service in the future. All right, guys, now once you have your team in place, you'll be spending most of your time over here in the Projects tab. We call each individual cleaning a project on our platform. So this is basically your calendar and you can look at it list or schedule view. We'll take a look at both. We'll start in schedule, I guess, and in Schedule view, you can actually see the bookings themselves. So the property name is over here on the left. The gray line is the booking, and then the colorful one on top is the cleaning. If it says no Teammate, that means you're waiting on someone to accept it, whereas if someone's name is in there, that means that they have accepted it and are ready to be there for you on that day. Now, I prefer to look at the Projects tab list view. It's the same information just formatted a little differently. And in List view, your cleanings are separated into pending and accepted projects. Pending projects are all of your upcoming cleanings that have not yet been accepted. And this view is very similar to what your primary cleaner sees when they first log in, except on their end it'll say project requests. So they would be able to scroll through, check out the dates and times, hit accept and reject and this is where if your primary cleaner does reject something, then that particular cleaning opens up in the request tab of your backup cleaners. Now, to learn more about what we share with the cleaners themselves, you can click into any of these gray rectangles to open up the project card, which is this gray box over here on the right. So we are showing your cleaners the start and end time if it's the same day arrival, so that they know to stay within that time frame. This is where your checklist and inventory will live, which we'll get into in just a second. So we were covering the checklist in the inventory. The project card will also have your address, any notes you may want to leave them, and in your account it will also have the next guest information. So how many people are staying in the next reservation? Now, your goal here is really just to keep an eye on this calendar to make sure that eventually all of your pending projects move over into the accepted projects tab so that you know someone is committed to being there for you on that day. We will send you notifications though, if these pending projects are sitting here for too long, so you'll know regardless. Now, one of the last features we have on this tab is our manual project button. And manual projects are for anything you might need done unassociated to your booking calendar. So this would be things like deep cleans, test cleans, midstay cleans, and this is also how you would schedule anybody else that you had invited on. So earlier we mentioned inviting on a maintenance person. So if you wanted them to come in, you could just pick your dates and times. You could even create them a special checklist, select the property. We do also allow you to create repeating projects. So if you know you want a deep clean done, you know, twice a year, you can set it up like that, you can leave them a note. And these manual projects work the same way as normal ones do, in the sense that they can still accept or reject check in, check out, get auto paid, all the same. Speaking of autopay, the way that that works is day of the cleaning, your cleaner has a check in button. So they check in, you're notified that they're there and that they've begun. They do the cleaning as normal, take any photos you've requested, go through your checklist and inventory, and when they are done, they check out, you get those photos back, and the trigger for their payment is that checkout button. So once they finished, it'll pull from whatever card or bank you have on file and start processing that for You. All right, next we can jump into checklists. And checklists are basically just instructions for your cleaners. So by clicking New checklist in the corner when it loads up, we do start you off with a basic outline. So if you were to click New checklist over here, you would get started with something that looks just like this. All right, now from here, to add in any extra lines, you can click this plus sign here. And then if you click the three dots over here in the corner, you can either require photo documentation, so you'll add this camera icon to each of the lines you need a picture of. And you can also add an image. So if you need something to look a particular way, you can provide them with that reference photo. We do allow you to create one checklist per property so that you can highlight specifics. And once you've built out your checklist, you can make it mandatory. So if you want those photos taken every time, you can set it up so that they are unable to check out and get paid until they go through the entire checklist. We do also offer some popular checklists, so if you're looking for any inspiration, feel free to click around. In here, you can either copy and paste the ideas that you like, or if you like the whole thing, you can use it in its entirety and then kind of edit down from there. Depending on your relationship with your cleaners, you don't necessarily need to add every little thing within your checklist. You know, I would discuss with your cleaners what their standard procedure looks like. So rather than you writing things out like sweep the floor and make the beds, you can use your checklist more for things that they wouldn't necessarily know to do off the top of their head. Just what's a bit more concise? You know, the longer the list, the odds are less that they go through, you know, every line of your 200 line checklist. So the more concise you can make it, the odds are better that they're actually going through there and, you know, taking a look at all of your. Your requests. All right, now, alongside checklists, we have inventory. And inventory is basically you asking your cleaner how much of something you have left. So things that you're providing to your guests, like toilet paper, shampoo and conditioner, whatever it is, you can add this here. We can do an example here. Let's say we provide t at your properties. You can track it precisely or by estimate. We'll go estimate for this one. Then select, you know, a couple or all of your properties. And then if you would like to be notified when T is running low. You would set it up just like this, with the report problem button ticked on and then whatever threshold it is that you're setting, and basically what will happen is every time they come in to clean, they'll fill this out. And if T comes back as low or under, you get a notification over here in the Problems tab. Now, this Problems tab over here is where both low inventory and any other issues will be reported. So if your cleaner were to come in and something is broken or wrong, they're prompted to take a photo, leave you a caption, it'll look just like this. And from this page, we allow you to directly text or email. So if you wanted to send this out to whoever might need to see it, you could text or email them. This person does not need to have a turn of account, it'll just send normally and then either you or whoever you sent it to would be able to mark it as solved once it's handled and all of the solved issues will filter over here. We do also allow you to report your own problem. So if something comes up and you just want to take note of it so you don't forget, you can plug in your own problems here and mark them as solved the same way, just to stay organized. All right, now, in regards to our Properties tab, most of this information is going to be pulled through from whatever integrations you started at, so Channel Manager or just Airbnb itself. So there's not much that you need to change in here, but there are some things that you can adjust if you'd like. So for example, on the general page here, if you have a door code that you'd like to share with your cleaner, you can punch that here under Access code. If you would like to share your WI fi, this does help with the image quality within the checklist, so you can consider that. And then calendars. I like to point out this button here, it says make projects visible, and in your account it'll be set to immediately in the beginning. So set to immediately. What this means is your cleaner can see out as far as the calendar goes. So if you were to get a booking for, you know, two years out from now, they would be able to accept that as soon as you got the booking. So some hosts do like to adjust this a little. You know, obviously you want to give your cleaners notice, but maybe just a month ahead so that they have a better idea of what their calendar actually looks like. So when they are accepting things, it's more accurate and of course, you know, if you do hook up with a channel manager, we're pulling through all of the bookings sites that you have set up over there. So you wouldn't need to add them on individually, we're just pulling it from them. But if you're not on a channel manager, you'll have to connect them, you know, one by one. If you're on Airbnb, you'll start here and then you'll add your VRBO as.

Well.

And then check in and out. Make sure that these times are accurate. This is what we are basing your cleaning window on. There are a couple other options in here as well. For example, when you would like the cleaning scheduled, 95% of hosts prefer that the cleaning is scheduled for when the guest checks out out. But we do allow you to schedule it for before a guest checks in. So if you have a lot of time between bookings and want to make sure it's as fresh as possible, this is an option that we give you as well. And then checklists, we covered this already. But if you're working with a bunch of properties, it is typically easiest if you title the name of the checklist, the name of the property itself. For example, this one, once this loads up, Bocashic, you want to make sure that Bocashic is active on Boca Chic, just so that it's easier to organize. Otherwise they'll all just be called your name's checklist. And it gets a little confusing there. In terms of inventory, you can create kind of a generalized inventory that applies to all of your properties. But if different places have different things, you can come in here and adjust accordingly and then teammates. This tab is very similar to the My Team tab, but like I mentioned, when you first accept someone from the marketplace, or even if you invite someone on yourself, we don't immediately place them on the property because we want to give you a second to decide where they go. So once you've made that decision, you can add them to the property here on the My Team tab, or you can come property level teammates and add them this way. And then payments. We'll actually talk about payments right now, but we do allow you to pay for different properties with different accounts if you'd like. Otherwise it'll just pull from the one that you have on file. Alright, so hopping into payments here, in terms of our marketplace cleaners, they are always going to be paid automatically through the system and the trigger for that payment is the checkout button. Now, if you were to invite your own cleaner on you do actually have the option to pay them on or off platform. So if you have a system in place that works for you, you could continue to do that if you'd like. Otherwise you would invite your own cleaner to set up their Stripe account so that you can start doing autopay through Turno. And it'll work the same way as long as they check out of that cleaning, it triggers the payment. Now, in regards to pricing breakdowns for our Marketplace cleaners, our platform fee is 5% if you are using a bank account. So if they were to bid $100, you'd be paying 105 total. Or if they, yeah, if you are using a card, it'll be 8% per clean. So $100 bid 108 total to you. And that only happens when a cleaning has actually been completed. And Stripe is our payment processor. Stripe will actually provide them with a 1099, so you wouldn't need to worry about their tax paperwork. In regards to your own paperwork, we do have this reports tab here, so feel free to come in and, you know, select whatever information it is that you're looking for. These will all save down here and you can rerun them as time passes. I'll also talk about our newest automated project type. It's called our Check in Welcoming project. Not everyone you know has a need for this, but you might. Our Check in Welcoming project is a project that we place in the beginning of a stay. So the cleaning happens when the guest checks out. This one happens right before they check in. So if you have someone that you send off to the property, whether it be to, you know, maybe write the guests a note or leave them flowers or just check on the place to make sure that everything's doing okay. You can turn this on and we will automate a new project type for you before they check in. So you can consider that in, you know, your process. We also have our quality center. I don't have it fully built out on my demo account, but you will once you hook up your Airbnb. This is basically just a metric system to keep track of your cleaners cleanliness ratings. So on Airbnb, when you're get when the guest checks out, they are prompted to leave a rating one to five stars about cleaning cleanliness and choose a couple of different tags. We pull that rating through and pair it up with the cleaning that was done for that guest just so that you can keep an eye on if your cleaners are doing well or if you got a bad rating, you click in maybe look at the photos and see what might have gone wrong there. All right, guys, heading over into our project settings. Just a couple buttons I like to point out. First being this one, it says show projects automatically to all backup cleaners. So in the situation that we send your primary cleaner a project and maybe they forget about it or they're just letting it sit there for too long, I suggest you turn this on to say if my primary cleaner does not accept or reject X amount of days before it's scheduled, please just open it up to the backup so that someone can pick it up for me. This is just a nice little safeguard for you there and then here as well. Mandatory checklist completion. If you want that done every time those photos back, you can turn this on here and they will have to go through it before they're able to check out and get paid. And I always like to end my demos in the notification settings. Make sure you come in here and adjust to your liking if you haven't already. I would also download our app Turner for hosts. Our app is great for daily tasks. I do suggest the computer just in terms of setup so that you can kind of follow along with everything I just taught you. All right, so that is about it for the demo today. If you have any more questions, please do not hesitate to reach out and contact us. We do have a 24.7customer service chat that you can find in your account by clicking on this little question mark and then contact us. But when you sign up for a Toronto account, you will also be assigned an account executive so that you have someone to directly call or text if that's what you prefer. All right, guys, thanks for your time. Have a good one.

Wow. So Turno is basically the operations behind the scenes and it is one of those secret sauces that I like to talk about. And I love seeing Paula's chat. As we were going, she was saying, I'll check this in a bit. We finally might be able to come Digital nomads. It is a tool that is one of those secret sauces that so many people don't talk about. But when you have it in your life and you know there's, there's, there's a few providers who do this. Turno used to be Turnover BNB before they turn changed to Turno. But yeah, when I reached out to Mike about a year ago saying, hey, I'd love for you to be part of, you know, the boostly world in some way, shape or form, it was like, yeah, absolutely, we, we, you know, we're going to be making more waves over in, in the, you know, around the world. And you know, he's currently right now sat in Australia. He's just being at a couple of conferences. There's Mike is one of the BDMs there and you know, he's, he's a, he's a fantastic guy. The team have been amazing to work with and thank you very much for helping sponsor this week. So can we all please just show Turno some love in the comments? Just hit that love heart emoji button as many times as possible. And again, if you've, you've never checked them out, just go to turno.com make sure you tell them that Bruce Lee sent you, which would be awesome. Okay, this is it. This is the main event. This is the, the grand finale of Wednesday and this is the one that I am, I want for you all to sort of shake it off. Shake it off, get ready. What I would love for you to do right now in the chat is put hashtag AI or hashtag no AI if you have been playing around with AI over the past year. So have you been playing around with Chat GPT, have you been playing around with all this cool technology? Because by the end of it, if you haven't have heard of any of these companies that are going to be in this roundtable, you're gonna want to be. Now let me just share my screen. Let me just show you the websites to go to. As we're doing this, as we're doing this roundtable. So the companies that I've been able to get together were Host AI. We've got Bestie AI. Hello, Hosty Journey, J U R N Y, which is a property management software tool that really taps into AI and Guest Guru. Okay, now please make sure you write them all down. Host AI, Bestie AI. Hello, Hosty Journey and Guest Guru. Write down those names, do a bit of googling and you can go ahead and book some demos and all that good stuff afterwards. You are going to want to get one of these companies into your world at some point in 2024. And when I reached out to the founders and, and the co founders of the companies and I said, hey, I want to do this roundtable, I want to have this discussion. My one rule is that even though you are all competitors is that you come onto this and have a collaborative mindset. And they did it. To, to be fair to them, they were all amazing. And you know, I've gotten to know each and every one of them from the conference circuit and just from chatting over the course of the last year, 18 months. And you know, I just wanted to be the moderator. I just wanted to ask the question, sit back. And I just wanted them to like showcase their excellence. And they, and they just did that. Please, please, please, please make sure that you watch this with an open mind, make sure that you pay attention, but most importantly, set a plan out to act on this if you can do it in Q1. Well seen, I've only got a few days left. Fantastic. But definitely put this as a plan to be implemented into your business in 2024. Q2 of 2024. Now, don't worry if you missed the names. You're gonna hear them over and over and over again over the course of the next hour and you're going to find out a lot more. And when I come back, I'll repeat them. In fact, let me just do this, let me just pop. Okay, I've just popped it in the chat. So if you're watching in the group and then again if you're not in the group, come on over, come on over to the group because this is it. All right, everybody sit back, get ready. This hour is going to be pretty good. Let's go. All right, go ahead and Clive.

Okay, so my name is Clive. Clive Titmous. I'm the founder CEO of hello Hosty. But prior to hello Hosty, which is an AI assistant to property managers, prior to hello hosting, I've been a property manager for around 15 years. So I built up a property management company. We do, we predominantly do short term, although we do also do manage long term lets and midterm. We've got a portfolio of properties that we manage around the world. And hello Hosted was really born out of a. In, in my business life, what I really like to focus on is automation and systemization. It's enabled me to grow and to do things that wouldn't have been possible had I just been focused on solving every small challenge myself and not automated. And there was one challenge that wasn't systemizable, automizable. Even though we've got team and we've got staff, it wasn't possible to completely automate guest communications because when that guest call comes through or when that message comes through, you've got to be there. And with the birth of generative AI, we were able to create something which could carry some of that burden. So yeah, there's a bit about me and a bit about hello Hosty.

Come on, name all fly is yours.

So I started off managing service apartments in Cambridge in the UK and then expanded to various other cities and then got into leasing apartment blocks, finishing them, subletting them. And then when Covet hit, I started buying hotels and managing hotels. And last year we got into weddings as well and bought a wedding just outside London. In terms of software, as the management business was growing fairly rapidly and quality of service was declining, I got into developing add ons to the PMS we were using and that turned into a full PMS and channel manager over time. So that's Zebu. And then last year one of our Zebu users was telling me about the SKES score and wanted integration and how great it was. And then two weeks later I heard they shut down because Airbnb discontinued the boarding message service. And he said, are you interested in buying it? Can you please buy it and sort it out? So I said fine. And that's how I ended up getting involved in the app.

One day I would love to have Naima money where someone just says to me, hey, go and buy it. And I go, okay, yeah, that's fine. All right, Cole, coming into you.

Hey guys, I'm Cole Rubin, co founder, CEO of Host AI. Been building, managing vacation rentals last four years. Got into it right at the beginning of COVID Basically like was with my buddies, everything had been canceled. Looked to travel to Joshua Tree and I was like geez, this is really expensive. Looked on Zillow what these houses were trading for. Worked in commercial real estate, so could do the back of the napkin math. Looked at this and was like this is really good deal. Bought my first house at 21, snowballed into a portfolio developing purpose built vacational homes, managing for others and then just through managing my own portfolio and for these other people, saw all the inefficiencies around the industry and how much AI could solve, which is where the idea for Host AI came from.

Nice Sam.

Yeah, so originally from Canada, I live in New York now. Prior to this I was the co founder of a software startup for e commerce brands that's still kind of running, but we actually pivoted into the space like last August. So we had sold to big Shopify brands like Peloton and Taylor Stitch and basically had a AI algorithm that would figure out the highest converting images and then also generate variant photos. So we're using like old school style Gan and like way before like you know, all this dolly and stuff came out. We've been working with LLMs like back when everyone was talking about crypto, but in the image space, image generation space back in like 2019, 2020. And we basically just decided to throw the cards in when we hit a few, like, major bumps with like Shopify and distribution. So meanwhile, I had, since I was around, same kind of age as Cole, buying properties with my brothers, turning them to Airbnbs, started managing properties for other people, did like a small arbitrage thing. One of the people in Canada, had a bunch of listings in Germany, started doing it in Germany. And then basically these two things collided. You guys as founders, like, you get it. Like, you just like either have it sometimes or you don't. We just didn't have product market fit. So we gave up and I had these properties like, as like a good, like with API access. I was like, what can we do? And then basically just started looking at the market. I tried, met with Coal, like, tried software. I had heard of guest guru before. Like, pretty interesting story. It's nice to meet you too. And then just been growing since then. Similar thing, like adding new PMSs. Same kind of pitch you guys pitch probably guest communications operations, upselling all that stuff.

Well, man, Luca.

Hey guys, nice to meet you everyone and nice to see you. A couple of you. Founder and CEO of Journey. Been in the industry for 12 years now. Originally born, raised in Italy, moved to US, live there for 15 years. LA. Specifically started the industry super early on. Airbnb wasn't even yet a thing. My first business was a landing page about luxury homes in la. Made several pivots from there to try to figure out really what the next scalable big thing could be in the industry. Prior to Journey, I met, I grew a management company to 300 units. I was kind of on the race of the lyrics and the sounder, not. Not raise as much money as they did. But was. Was going after that game and realized that probably the biggest issue of the industry from a PM perspective was the fragmentation, especially in the technology, the different technologies not talking to each other and the lack of automation that existed because of this. So we start building at first, like kind of like a middle layer, which then in turn into a vertical integrated pms, which is now Journey. And from there, because automation has always been the first goal for, for the company, we start getting more and more involved into the AI side of things. The fact that we had a centralized system also helped a lot. And then now we're pretty much a pms. We say this AI enabled and we're pretty invested in AI.

Nice. Well, thank you very much. All right then, so let's, let's crack on with this. So we'll jump straight back to you Luca. So obviously Journey similar to obviously the. You can see a massive viewpoint of the industry. Obviously you've got lots of hosts using the service and obviously you've tapped into this world of, of AI. What was the deciding factor for yourself to go to go in on this? You obviously saw it was being more widely used, obviously what November 2022 it started getting more widely used and now where we are now, obviously last year I saw Journey make that pivot to where you are sort of talking more about AI. What was the reason for it and what have you done specifically behind the scenes to be helping hosts tap into like pivoting and working along property management software, but using AI as well?

Well, I think a couple years ago we started seeing really the potential on where this could take the industry as a whole and, and how AI could fill a lot of the existing gaps within the industry. From day one I was like how can I almost fully automate my whole operation back when I was a host? And I think I've been upon intended in that journey since, since 13 years ago. And so like I found AI being probably one of the best, probably the best tool to, to really fill up all these gaps. I think there's several things that, that we can do with this technology but the most exciting ones for me are one the new way. So software has, until today it's been really much limited from UI UX and I think for the first time outside of like obviously Chatbot is the number one thing that people can think with AI today because of ChatGPT. But if you think beyond that, I think one of the biggest applications going to be in software is changing the way you interact with software itself. Meaning you can have a straight up conversation. I'll give you a perfect example like reporting. You're not going to find a PM that is going to have the same requirements in terms of reporting. Everybody's going to have some type of complaint or whatever features you're going to be building in the, to the reporting. Guess what, if you now have a intelligent agent or a series of intelligent agents that can interact with your database and people can ask you for specific custom reporting and they ask within a conversation whether it's chat or voice to an AI agents to give that custom reporting or to give you even some type of specific calculation those reports and now the AI agent can speed up that specific reporting for the specific request. That means that now you didn't have to build a UI UX that probably took months and so you're not limited to those, those boundaries. So that's the first application and obviously the second one is in general in the automation of things like Guest communications is number one. But there's a lot more in my opinion that we can do with the stack.

Amazing, thank you. So I will just jump quickly to name obviously you founder of Zebra. You've got Zebra, which is a big, very popular pms. Obviously the story is very cool. One of your customers and I think another customer you're talking about mentioned about Guest Girl, you've gone and purchased it. What was the reason why you went ahead and purchased it? Why did you go ahead and pull the trigger? And more importantly, what have you been doing since then to to sort of integrate it more into Xevu or whatever you've been doing to sort of tailor the needs of your customers?

Yeah, I mean the reality is that obviously like everyone else thinking we have to get into this AI game somehow and unfortunately we were in the middle of a huge transition. We that we're just finishing off and changing the interfaces, even redesigning everything. So we didn't really have the resources to do it in house. When this came up, it was almost like a shortcut to get to where I wanted to be. And I thought these guys have done, you know, fair amount of work and because they the service had shut down, they actually managed to get it for a very good price. So it's not like I had a whole lot of spare cash like around market, but worked it out in installments and so on. So since then we've, we managed to integrated Zivu and various other PMSs. So we started off the channel which got, gave us access to tens of PMSs and then we integrated to Guesty and I think Houseware, Hostfully and Tokit or something else. We've got three, four PMSs now integrated and of course Boostly with direct booking websites. So we, we built the chat function out so that you can actually have it on the website, on your WordPress website with boostly and so on and interact or direct bookings with it. And we've added various features. We hired some AI specialists over the winter to improve the quality of the bot responses and we're now looking at currently restructuring all the data, the categorized information that's being fed into the bot and looking at future development in terms of automating replies to reviews as well and potentially also going into the route of automating task management through AI. Yeah, that's where we're at.

Thank you for that. We'll go to Clive next. So you're obviously coming at it. We're scratching your own itch. Property management company, you know, having to deal with all of the questions. As we all know, anybody who's dealt with any questions from, from any guest, you know that it can get very repetitive. I can get very boring and sometimes as well, depending on the, the tonality of the person you're talking to on the other end. It's very easy for your human instincts to kick in and want to turn around and tell them to off, which obviously you can't do for all professional reasons. So obviously you've, you've scratched that itch you put together. Hello, Hosty. So what was like the deciding factor? How did you go about it? How did you go about creating it? What, what did you do to build it out? Have you got a big team, like just sort of like break down the, sort of like the, the, the first parts of this?

Well, there's quite a lot in there, so yeah, let's unpack that really. The, the, the first, the first step in all of this. We were, we were looking at doing some, some building some of our own software and then as ChatGPT was kind of came to prevalence, it became very clear that Chat GPT was able to, to formulate responses to, to guest messages. So we were actually using chat GBC in a kind of a very long way to, to respond to guests. But we're producing incredible, incredible responses to these messages and like you say, removing ego, answering every single section of the, of a guest message with, with reason and, and, and foresight to get, to provide really, really incredible answers. So we've got, we've got a team based in the, in the uk. Our team are kind of like our business all over the place. So we've got people in, in the uk, Sri Lanka, Poland, US who are working on this project with us. Where we, where we're going at the moment, what I, what I've heard from both Luca and Nae, I kind of felt that what, what I'm hearing and the way that I'm feeling about this, that the product we've got today, the, where we're going to evolve to, it's going to be solving all kinds of challenges and I think chat is, is just the very, it's the very first step in, in what will be quite a long road with AI. I mean we're at the, at the birth of this new technology pretty much and, and the challenges that this new technology is going to be solving for for me as a property manager and for the industry overall, it's going to far, far exceed what we're seeing today with with regards just to being chat what those things are we can dive further into.

But no, I love that and it leads me on nicely to what I wanted to ask Sam is that we're noticing now the loads of verticals are being brought, are being created around AI. There's, there's lots of different aspects where companies are creating a solution for different verticals that are out there in the world. Now you've done a few but you've settled on this which is hospitality. But most importantly, you know, short term rentals communication. Why did you sort of stop doing what you're doing with the other company and dive all in on, on hospitality? What was like the, what was the thing that kept dragging you back to hospitality? Why did you decide to come all in on this?

Yeah, I think it was honestly just LLMs on the text side. Like we've spent two and a half years working with LLMs on image like and motion and it's such a tough like our eyes are so much more critical on visuals than we are when it comes to like the difficulty of just text files. So I think like just the, we were basically like the right, like wrong business, right time I guess I should say because like we were pitching legit. Like when we did our first fundraise it was nobody cared about generative AI. Like if you were doing this in 2019, 2020, literally nobody cared. Like we talked to everybody, tier one fund and nobody really cared. So like I think like now moving into the tech space, like the fact that it wasn't anything too, too advanced as far as our thinking. We just had like very limited Runway and we weren't like taking off and I had this little like starting point where text was such a big, big piece. And then also text is, is the most important thing is programming itself right, like function calling. You know there's a lot of this really cool stuff that I know everyone on this call is really familiar with but we won't go too much into for the sake of the discussion, but there's some just really mind blowing stuff happening on the text field, text space that the, the observation here so far is none of us are engineers and here we are building. AI think I can speak for everybody here that we're not. We picked up some stuff and we're savvy enough but the fact that we can even be in this space building means that it's just like A a really cool way because we have like such an acute. Some of you guys been running multi hundred units, like I got whatever 35 units. But you understand the problems and the missing points in each PMS and things that you wish you could build and then you build them yourself. Instead of like asking some product manager at a pms, you just do it yourself. So anyway I thought that was a cool way that like I, I have something industry expertise in and also just kind of got burned in the image space specifically for AI.

Nice, Cole. So Sam was mentioning there that, you know, when he was talking about this in 2019, 2020, no one really paid attention and obviously you've come on board of this, but more importantly you've come on board of this and you've also been picked up by Y Combinator. Like how did that come about? How did Host I get on that platform? And what have you found as being the benefits of being part of that big organization? That big. Why sure.

So always one of my cousins, he's a partner on Host AI. He's running the head of product. It's kind of just something we always talked about being a part of. And then my co founder pun, who's the CTO, we were working on this over summer 2023 and he had to work at Google, he's on a H1B from Thailand, so he couldn't continue working on host AI. So basically had this product shipped with no CTO. And really the only way to get him full time was to transfer his visa. So applying to yc, YC has really good resources to help help with that. So that was one of the main drivers for why we applied, ended up getting accepted, got his visa transferred over and just through like the mentorship guidance with them, I've really been able to drill down on the tech, improve the response quality and think a lot bigger in terms of what we want to go after. YC does a really good job of getting you to narrow down on a certain thing, talk to your users, continually refine, don't overthink it and then ultimately getting you to go after a bigger vision in the end.

Nice.

Just been super grateful to be a part of this.

Amazing. Okay, so we've got three big talking points that I've put together and the first question and it's going to be an open roundtable discussion. There's no rhyme or reason you can jump on in, don't be afraid to, but in etc. And all that good stuff, you can just go ahead and add in your Talking points. So the first thing that we're going to talk about is this. How can AI driven technologies be tailored to enhance not only the guest satisfaction, but also employee satisfaction and retention? Especially considering the automation of repetitive tasks could free up staff to focus on more meaningful and rewarding aspects of their role. Who would like to tackle that first talking point?

I can start. Well, I think we know number one in hospitality there's like many jobs that people don't like to do or there's they are at a high turn. Guest support is probably one of them. Anybody's ever built a guest support team, you know that it's a high turn. I mean you, you could do a lot in your company to, to build that culture. But I think what's interesting is that I find this technology actually making people being better at their job and removing a lot of the repetitiveness and the grinding stuff that goes around a specific job. So like I don't think guest support will be completely eliminated, but I think it's going to be more. There's going to be someone who's actually really good at it, managing possibly multiple agents, at least for a long time. It's going to be that way. And to answer the question about how also will improve the experience overall for everybody, I think this is a misconception. A lot of people say, well you know, you see that ChatGPT answer and you're like okay, if that's going to be the answer I was going to give to my guests, it's not going to be damn good. Right? I think there's two variables to consider into this one. I'm pretty sure you guys found the same AI is so much better being very good at like you can train a specific agent or your specific AI at doing one specific things and it's going to be much better than doing broad things. We found that to be very true. And actually we found AI to be very similar to human like skills like responds well to humans like hierarchy and responds well to be very specialized in doing specific tasks. So that's, that's very interesting. And once you do that, I think what, and that's one aspect, the second aspect I think a lot of people don't consider is like how fast this technology is evolving. I mean, I don't know if you probably guess all like what, what was announced today by Nvidia and by computing their computing power boost that we just got with the new release of their new graphic card. It's, it's pretty mind blowing if you consider those two things. And where the technology is already today, when you are specializing your AI for specific tasks, you can already be better humans. One, because of what you guys mentioned before, it doesn't react to human emotions like way a human does. You could be in a bad mood. AI is not going to be in a bad mood. B, following protocols, like once you train your AI properly and you create the proper infrastructure is going to be so much better at following protocols. Yeah, it's missing a little bit of critical thinking. Yeah, there is a little bit of hallucinations and I don't want to dive too deep on how to get around that. But I think we're all working on fixing that. And I think even with today's technology, we can already very much improve. We already seen that, for example, in the review management and auto review management, how it's much better than humans already are doing that. So. And we are the very, very, very beginning of this.

Great answer. Who wants to go next?

I'll just say one here.

Sorry, Go ahead, go ahead.

Okay, sorry. Yeah, I think, I mean, like everyone on this call, we're focused on using AI for chat, but I think where the real shift in industry comes in with AI is in the back office. Like, AI is really good at the payroll tax, accounting, tot, all this really repetitive tasks that are done in the back office. AI is going to be able to automate a lot of these tasks and lower the barrier to entry into this industry, which in turn is going to raise the bar for competition and directly improve these guest experiences. And the hospitality operators are able to provide with all the time that gets freed up and not having to spend so much capital on the back office tasks that no one really even sees.

Yeah, and I was just going to say quickly, like it's funny. I'm sure we probably get a lot of the same. Because it's interesting when the industry moves forward, it's because of having a bunch of vendors that are constantly communicating demos and conferences. And we're basically evangelizing this into an industry that people are going to be. They're going to have the distribution of people that are super tech savvy and really interested in people that are more skeptical. I think the big thing is like, I don't want to have a robot respond because I care so much about the hospitality. Objection. Because I'm sure you guys have heard that a million times. It's interesting when you like actually dive into that a bit more because you're arguably like the. When people talk about hospitality, the first thing they think about is guest messaging, let's say. But there's only so much good or bad job, good of a or bad of a job you can do when it comes to that. Like, like how nicely you give them check in instructions but they don't read it and you have to resend it and then get them the message right away. The speed is the most important thing. Like you could be as nice as you want or as polite as you want, but if the place is dirty or there's like missing amenities, like, that's going to be a 10x bigger issue. So my argument would be like, well, if you can reduce your opex meaningfully and not to zero, of course, like you, I think what we're seeing is you're going to have three or four days or on site people 24, seven. You go down to one, for example, if you want to pocket that extra savings as like and not even worrying about the revenue stuff, just talking on cost savings. You get to choose if you want to put that into the experience. Like add things to each unit like a wine bottle, champagne, you know, glass, like something nice for them to have. That's actually going to bring the experience up. I don't think it's because it's just an interesting, interesting objection. I don't know if you guys get that a lot. We're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And of course the product decision of giving a draft versus sending it on autopilot is like an easy feature to toggle between. But it's kind of funny. Like I'm just curious, like you guys get those like big objections when really like the guest messaging people think of it immediately as, oh, I don't want to hand it over to AI but it's really something that AI is going to be really good at, maybe even better at than humans because of how quick it can be. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I would agree with Sam that like the, the argument that like AI is worse than a human is not so true. Like you get those guests booking five minutes advance, they send you the welcome message, like, hey, like we're booking for our anniversary birthday. Five months down the line, you're not going to remember that that's why they booked. But the AI is going to know and be like, hey, like, we hope you're excited to celebrate your anniversary. Do you need help picking a romantic dinner tonight? And then they start going back and forth making plans with the AI. And I'm arguing that this is like providing better hospitality than a human would just because it's so on the ball with everything.

Just.

Clive, you've. Your AI that you've created has got a name, right?

Yes, Alina.

And she gets mentioned in reviews, right?

Yeah.

We've had several reviews of ours and of users that have thanked Alina for being so responsive. Interesting. Sorry, go ahead.

No, I just said that's hilarious. That's so cool.

It's. Years and years ago I was, I was at a home away conference in London and a takeaway that I took from that conference was that staff attentiveness was the number one factor in achieving a good review. And staff, well, we've got AI staff now and the attentiveness that AI can provide to, to the guests and to the guest experience, it's phenomenal in terms of speed, in terms of accuracy, removing ego. So to answer the question on, on guest experience being improved, I'm both host and guest, often traveling and booking places myself. And if I'm outside of property and I want to get inside, I don't, I don't really care if it's a machine or a human. I want to know that information. I want to be able to open that door or turn that AC on or figure out the information I'm trying to get to. Yeah, it's nice for somebody to remember that I came for my aunt's birthday or whatever that. And that does give you that personal touch without question, without. But ultimately I believe that that information that someone's requested at that moment is, is the most important thing to be answered accurately and timely, which I believe AI does. Alina certainly does.

That as well.

Go on. Name.

So I feel currently the biggest advantage, at least from what we provide and what I've seen out there, is maybe helping smaller operators in getting a break in the evening, for example, so they don't have to be glued to their phone and wait for that Airbnb ping to come. Some, you know, hasn't checked in yet and didn't read message and messages again to say how to get in. I'm not sure whether it's mature enough yet to be of a great assistance to large teams. So, for example, we've got 24. 7 cover. So yes, it can reduce the number of messages we have to reply to, but ultimately, at least our app still escalates things. When it doesn't know how to deal with something, then a human has to sort it out. The real value I add, I can see in the future is if instead of just replying to questions, the AI can help solve things and going the extra Mile. So from my experience in operating, one of the big problems is tracking requests and tasks and so on between team members, ensuring this follow up when things actually get sorted. And it's one of the things we're working in our pms, for example, to build in a task management into the communications and it's been on the roadmap for a number of years. But if AI can come into that and then help translate requests into tasks and assigning those to staff and maybe even helping keep track of KPI's run staff performance on those, I think that's where the real value app will come. Both for staff who are more happy and you know, their colleagues doing what they're meant to be doing and for guests to actually get what they're trying to. Well, there's a high, higher chance that the guests will end up receiving that extra service that they're requesting. Then if there's a human at the other end who, while they're taking call is also meant to create a task for the colleague and make sure it's follow up next morning.

Just a little, I was going to say question to add on top of this before you answer is what? So there's going to be a lot of hosts management companies. People are watching this maybe with one property or 100 properties or anywhere in between and they're thinking, you know, how can I keep a nice balance? Because at the end of the day we are selling two things. Number one is a good night's sleep that's caught what we're selling as hosts and property management companies. But number two is hospitality. That is why people come and stay with us instead of going to the big chains. You know of your, your Hilton's, your Marriotts is why people come and stay because they want to stay like locals, etc, so where is the balance? Because everybody can see the shiny object of having a robot deal with guest inquiries. Right. But at the same time we want to make sure that we don't just go fully down the rabbit hole as we all have done and they want to keep that element of, of hospitality, that personal touch. What are some good business practices? As we're answering this question, and this is a great question to delve into, but what are some good business practices that people can be doing to sort of make sure they don't go all in and they can still have that personal interaction?

Well, I think you guys mentioned it before, but it's like a lot of it in my opinion goes into the personal touch of the unit. A I think, I guess in general, generally speaking they care about getting when they talk to customer support is because they want to get something solved as quick as possible and that was mentioned by everybody else before. So I think responsive time it's, it's one of the most important thing. And what kind of create that sense of hospitality. Yes it could be a little bit on the gas communication but I think the majority of it comes with the experience within the unit when they walk in into that unit. And I think if I host and this is speaking from my personal experience when you're busy managing your tech stack, managing guest communications reviews logistics of the business, you're not busy really taking care of the unit. So making sure you elevate that guest experience and that experience that they're going to have when your guests when they check inside of the unit.

Yeah, yeah I would just building on that I think like if we're like you know if, if I'm a property manager listening to this and I think most listening are going to be relatively down to try these tools and we can all agree with the like use case around the guest messaging. But like thinking a bit further out as far as how it can really be what's the what's like what can an AI brain do to really give a game changing experience? I think of like now that you have this thing that can make several decisions in a row instead of just passing back an answer to a guest or to a you know back as an internal function is like hooking it up to Amazon, hooking it up to doordash, hooking it up to stuff where the thing I do love about hotels I will say is just getting that phone and like being like can you bring a pack of cards up so I can play cards like on the roof or like you just like room service. Like you're going to have an AI that you could literally just say look like I got it, I forgot a pair of socks. And it's like hey we got the first order shipped, it's coming, it's going to be added to your bill at the end. Like talk about the kind of magic stuff that would have required a human or you would have ordered yourself but you need to put in the shipping details and the access to the building. Like I think that that's the kind of stuff that's going to be really like next level because there's only so much we can do for guest experience. Respond fast, be accurate. But the best guest are the silent ones that you never hear from. They're in and out. They're clean and they leave a good review and then AI responds to the review and it does it. Like all of that's fine. But I actually like, I wonder if you guys thought about like, what are the, like, what are the ways that like AI also internally with like the whole talking to your pms, building that as a conversational thing, Update all my properties, change my listing descriptions, update amenities. That's all really cool. But I'm kind of curious if you guys add like any of those like things where you think AI is just going to be a total kind of game changer. I don't know. I think that's maybe similar to that. Some of the, like you're not to hijack the question mark, but I'm just kind of curious.

I jack away, hijack away.

I think it's a question of when this is, this is coming. I think that the technology is gonna, needs to, needs to do a bit more developing. There needs to be, it needs to.

Develop a little bit further than what.

We see today available with AI. But there's no, there's no question as with the property manager, hats on the way. I see that things are playing out at the moment where things are going pretty much all, all tasks that are taken care of online or by, by someone with their fingers on a computer. This is, this will be one day. This will be AI taking care of this challenge. Just a question of when. It's just a question of when.

Yeah.

To jump on like how can AI improve the guest experience? There's all these platforms out in the world like Yelp OpenTable with these open APIs where we can build on top of into our platforms. And like when that guest wants a dinner reservation, we're calling the Yelp API. Seeing what's available and actually booking it for them. So they don't even have to leave the platform. They're booking the reservations just via chat like you would with a concierge at a high end four star hotel.

Yeah, that's another great example. Yeah. Restaurants like activities. Yeah, that's great.

And then to circle back to that point where we're maintaining that human touch, making sure AI is not fully taking over. At Host AI, we implemented this urgency tagging system where if guest is unhappy in danger, something's broken. Automatically tags as urgent cools off. Operator gets a notification that they need to manually respond. And then in addition to our default tags, you can add as many tags as you want. So we see operators adding like the pool heating when the guest wants that they need to know that they need to heat the pool, guest wants the golf cart. They need to know that they need to verify that this person is of age and eligible to take the golf cart. So just these tags we put in place help maintain that human touch and make sure that AI is not fully taken over.

Love it. Anything else to add on to that? Anybody? Going once, going twice. All right, let's move on to. Well, there's two more questions really, I've got.

And.

And then we can talk about the specific companies and what you're going to be working on in 2024. But the next question is we're going to talk about Airbnb and their acquisition of Game Planner AI. So how might this integration of advanced AI technologies transform guest experience on that platform? And what implement imp the implications, implicit implications does that have for smaller hospitality businesses in terms of competition and the need to adopt similar technologies to remain relevant? Who would like to go first, talk about Airbnb and Game Planet AI?

I could maybe tease some stuff up here just because I was pretty close to the. I have some background in it. I just for like, for the. I'm sure everybody's heard of it at this point. Like Airbnb, I, you know, since 2011, I think they've made something like 20ish acquisitions. I think this is their second or third. This is actually their first one since going public, which was interesting. And like, meanwhile the found that it to me felt like kind of some sort of really expensive aqua hire to just buy up a bunch of talents similar to like Microsoft's investment in open AI. It's like an option call on the whole AI thing. I think when you look into the founder, he was the, he was the founder of a company that became like Samsung's voice assistant or. Yeah, I think he was also the founder of Siri and prior to that did the Samsung's voice assistant. So this guy is like an OG in the whole, like, LLM space. But then at the end of the day, like, Airbnb has shown no indications of putting anything outside of like, the design first guest, first experience. So I have to imagine it's just going to be a game changer as far as like, planning and personalized notifications on where to go and what your preferences are and stuff like that versus it being something like. I think that's more likely than it saying, oh, we're going to give you a chatbot for hosts. Like, I would be, I would personally be shocked if like Airbnb were to go that route because, like, aside from Maybe their own little dynamic pricing thing. Like they haven't really been in the, in the game of like adding host enablement tools even though the majority of their users are these single, you know, two family home hosts. So I'm, I think like as far as the role for it's, I think it's going to be all on the guest side. I'm curious if you guys disagree, if you think it's going to be more of like a host centric tool. But I just saw that and I was like, oh, that's interesting. But like, like I didn't find that it's going to be a huge impact for us on like the host side, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, I'm kind of thinking it's going to be all more guest facing features like initial things that come to mind is just being able to search properties by natural language. Like six people looking for a house near X with the pool. You type that in Airbnb, get your results. And then another front I see this coming into play is on the trip planning, like looking at experiences on Airbnb and trying to drive those experiences to the people just booking stays. So building out like a full itinerary, restaurants, activities for these guests, staying at the Airbnbs.

Anybody else?

Yeah, and yeah, I think it's interesting, definitely. I tend to agree it's going to be more on the guest side, but I also don't think that big innovation is going to happen from the large companies. Large companies are going to develop LLMs or generally like large models, but the innovation is going to come from small companies because they're going to take bold decisions and large companies simply can't. So I think Airbnb are going to be very careful before disrupting their own business. Like we saw Google being forced to Release Gemini by ChatGPT, otherwise they would have not done it that early because they will cannibalize their search business in their own business. So I think it's interesting. I think they have to make moves, they have to show that they make and sometimes they associated these large dollars just because it's finance, because they have to show that they're buying some big pieces of technology that are worth a lot, ensuring that they're actually making moves just to say that they are. But I, I don't, I don't see. I mean this is obviously my opinion, maybe I'm going to be completely wrong on this, but I don't see massive innovation coming from there. I think the disruptors are yet to exist or they're just more.

I've been having some conversations with Airbnb since we bought Guests Guru about the messaging and trying to get access to integrated them directly and so on. And I know that they've had a focus since about a year ago on improving the guest experience. I agree that they've probably purchased this to try and achieve that. And the second part of Mark's question I think is still quite relevant because ultimately how can a small operator was trying to get direct bookings through replicate whatever features Airbnb is giving them and the guest experience in the booking process or you know, during the stay or whatever it is that they will end up implementing. And how can we as tech providers who are essentially working for the host rather than the guests, help the host deliver that same experience so that they can then win over the guests and ensure they're building long term relationships with the guest is happy to come back and book through, you know, the direct website or through the app or whatever it is that the host is offering. So yeah, I guess it's a question of waiting to see what they have to offer. We're trying to play ahead of the game and seeing what we can offer that Airbnb doesn't offer yet.

I would, I would jump in and say that I, I agree with Sam. Airbnb's behavior in the past has been very guest centric. It's, it's going to be a guest, a guest facing product thankfully. I mean watching whether Airbnb behaves in the relationship with host and guest, it's the, it's the guest that they seem to put most focus on. I'm obviously would say that as a property manager but I believe it will be a guest facing AI tool.

So I think the one thing that I could see doing a quick, little quick Google is the brought in this new photo tour which has got AI capabilities. So there's obviously some things that are going on behind the scenes which can help like instantly place things here and there. But it is, it is super interesting to see what they will do. Like Sam was saying, it's maybe it's a, an acquiring of talent and it's very interesting that one of the main peoples of talent has done a lot of voice who knows that maybe some they could be tipping towards. But yeah, I agree, I don't think it's going to be anything too major obviously. Well they've got all the data you could possibly need and they can obviously shape a lot of stuff around it. But it is super interesting. And what is also interesting as we look to close this out is looking ahead and this technology has, has moved leaps and bounds over the course of the last 18 months. And the next question is I want you to get your Mystic Meg hats on. If anybody knows who Mystic Meg is, there you go. But basically we're going to look ahead to the future. So basically the question is this, and this is an open ended one. Anybody can jump in. But specifically I want you to speak about you and your companies as well. So looking ahead, what emerging AI technologies or trends do you predict will have the most significant impact in the hospitality industry over the course of the next five years? And how should businesses prepare to adopt these innovations to stay competitive and enhance guest satisfaction? But most importantly, I'd love for you to talk about what you are doing within you and your companies. What's on your product roadmap over the next, you know, quarter, next year, next five years. Any sneak peeks that you can throw in on this roundtable, any sneak exclusives would be much appreciative. So anybody who wants to go first, dive on it.

I'll jump in. I think like, like I said previously, what, what we've got with Generative AI is ultimately a brain and that brain is evolving and developing and that brain serves to take on admin challenges for those serve to take on admin challenges. So the way I see things rolling out is any task which can, which can be handled by a human sat behind a screen on the other side of the planet or wherever they may be, can be handled by AI in the future. That can range from task management like maintenance, that can be guest concierge services, that can be your accounting, your, your listing generations, you're managing your, your guest communications, the whole suite of the, the role of a property manager. As a property manager, I see the business divided into predominantly two main halves. So you've got the physical element which is the property itself, which requires maintenance, it requires furnishing. And then you've got the digital side of the business which is the marketing, the managing, the administration, communications and that 50 which is online in the in the future. I don't have a set date for you yet, but that 50 will be reduced down to such a minute amount that it wouldn't surprise me if there'll be one individual that can manage a thousand properties on that side. That's the direction I think I see things going maybe that within that you could maybe pick apart a sneak peek as to what we're thinking about doing and what we're looking at. So yeah, I think it's a very exciting time for this, for this industry and for and for this technology.

Yeah.

So just before you jump in, when you said one person managing a thousand properties, everybody was nodding in approval. And the guarantee there's going to be people listening or watching to this at home who are like, wow, that's like crazy. But everybody here is on this who's obviously thinking this far ahead and thinking along this sort of lines are all nodding their head. So definitely gives you a way of where you should be. Definitely changing your mindset. Well, yeah, great answer. Who's next?

Sorry, No, I was just gonna say that, yeah, it's like Sam Altman said the other day that there's going to be multiple one person, billion dollar companies. And it's like, that is such a, like I build 100. Anybody who spends time in the space could see how that's possible. I think specifically one thing that people can look forward to, that, and I'd like to hear what you guys think of this, because you're probably working on it too, is just this idea of. So everybody is familiar with ChatGPT and all that stuff. The next big release was this thing called function calling. And function calling, I want to just take a sec to explain it for the audience, is that you can think of like, essentially like a function as a, as a recipe in a cookbook. And the function is make spaghetti. You know, chatgpt, when you talk to it, you, you send it one question and answers. But if you were to tell a robot to make spaghetti, it would have to understand boil water, get pasta, make the sauce, whatever, you know, all the seasoning, get the plates, all of those steps in a row. So function calling is kind of like you can instruct an AI to actually go and do multiple steps in a row and come back to you with the answer. So instead of it just being a call and answer, it could be a, like some of you were alluding to. Like, it could be, go into my PMS and look through, for example, give me a review score for my 20 properties. That's all you'd have to say to an AI. And then it'll be able to go through. And essentially, in order to get the reviews, I need to look at the properties, what are the property names, and then I need to look at each of the reviews, and then I need to look at the private and public feedback and it's. And then I need to summarize all that into a bullet point list that I can bring back to the host. Like that Specifically I think like we might all have different versions of that, but that's like actually possible in all these categories outside of just this industry. So I think when people talk about like I've heard property managers say, Well I have 200 properties, like this week we're doing all of our new listing titles or we're freshing up all of our photos. Or I'm like, that could literally be a five minute conversation with a bot. So that's one like piece. We have a version of that live in guesty. It's really limited right now. It can do like review responses, like summarizing reviews, it can change listing fields, you can create new fields. It's very limited too. I wish I was in your shoes, like owning a PMS where you have like, you don't have to be beholden to the API rate limits. So it's much easier if you're, if you are a pms. So I kind of wanted to tee that up just because I think that as a PM, like if you're going to be a thousand person, 1000 listing company, that would be impossible unless you had something like that. You could just command somebody to do stuff that doesn't complain. And that works 24 7.

So yeah, I'll share some insights as well of some of the tech that we're working on, but I want to start first with, in almost any business that you are in, if you're not looking, start looking seriously into AI and understanding how it works, you are going to be in a serious disadvantage very, very soon, much sooner than people think, because you have to understand the technology. It's like using ChatGPT and saying, well, whatever. I tried to write an article, wasn't that good? It's because you don't know how to do a prompt. That means you need to learn how to prompt, right? But it's just like you need to start diving deep into understanding how the technology works and how it's going to apply into your business. Because maybe the tools are not there, but they're going to be there very, very, very soon. I think for the first time I see actually infrastructure being developed slower than technology itself. And so what's very interesting I think is that this technology is already capable of doing a lot more than what it's showing because the infrastructure is not built. So I want to say that piece second thing is from I completely agree with the fact that there's going to be a one host hosting a thousand properties and we're going to be there. If I could make A rough estimates about three years, not that long, that's nothing, right. So if you're not starting to work with and getting familiarized with this technology again, it's a real problem and how we're going to get there. I think there's two things and I always talk about infrastructure. For us we start working on centralizing data because what you guys describe is kind of like having this autopilot that helps you to accomplish tasks. And so for us one of the most important pieces was okay, I need to have control what's going on with the locks, access codes and generating codes. I need to have control where whether I have an integration with a pricing software to make changes on that pricing software. So we start centralizing a lot of the controls into a single place. And again I'm giving away a lot of different sauces here on what I think is making our product special. But I, I through truly believe in the evolution of the industry as a whole. The second piece is how we're going to get there is with specialized agents. You Sam, you just talked about it kind of briefly with the ability to accomplish specific tasks. Right. But what we found very interesting and I don't, I've not heard a lot of people working on this, on this type of tech is creating different personalities within your ecosystem that have different function within the same ecosystem. And those different personalities start talking one another. We already have developed what we call a multi agent system and they think and behave very much like humans. It's kind of pretty mind blowing. And so that's where you can start getting functionalities of where like you have let's say one agent is specialized in pricing. You have one agent that specialize in reporting. You have, one is in guest communications, one is in concierge, one is quality control, one is in FAQs. And then you can start giving a. You can customize each agents to your liking and making them more more just like having employees straight up having employees. But the only difference is you usually have to train them only 1, 2, 3 times and then they learn and then you don't have to explain things things again. So it's really mind blowing. So we, we can see that path already happening of this multi agents working together into a single system. And so you, you want to have almost like an army of the eye working for you within a centralized ecosystem in which you can actually give commands to this ecosystem so make actual changes for you as a host. This is, this is what we're building. This is what we see honestly changing the game in hospitality.

That's crazy because one of the big things that most hospitality owners make when they start hiring, as in hiring humans, is that they'll, they'll find one amazing virtual assistant, they'll find one amazing employee and they'll try and turn them into a Swiss army knife. They'll try and make them do a little bit of everything and that person gets burnout and they, they leave. Right. And what you're saying is don't do the same mistake with AI. Have one AI agent that is phenomenal at doing A and then B, C, D, E. And they're going to bring, create this ecosystem of agents just similar to like a team who can then chat to chat to each other, etc. Phenomenal. I love that. Great work. Anybody else want to bounce on that or anything else they've been working on and visioning and all the good things?

Sure. I'll jump in and talk about some of the things we're working on. Big one being the voice AI. So phone calls, answering that. We started with building a VoIP system integrated to our unified inbox. Getting the latency to be really low for that real time voice and going through all the data you have to find that specific answer for the guest has been quite a difficult challenge. We have it out. If you request the voice AI, we'll give it to you, but still working on it internally. Other thing is with that integrated VoIP system, we now have all the transcripts to call, look for potential maintenance issues for. So we're scanning all the calls, reviews, messages for maintenance items, creating a ticket and then you have the task manager within host AI that's live as of last week. And then last thing we're like continually working on is upsells. Like creating the upsells is one thing, but like knowing when to sell is the biggest component of it. So knowing that like that guest was out late Sunday night is high odds they'll, they'll go for that Monday late checkout. So just working through how we can upset upsell in a, a way that's not overselling the guest is, is a real big thing we're working on right now.

How does, how does that the AI know the guest was out late Sunday night?

So it would have to be like they were conversing over plans and they knew that this guest was going out. They wouldn't like we're not like, not like calling their like GPS on their phone. It, it would have to be like know that this was what their plan was.

Yeah, they see the ring doorbell go at 1am in the morning and they're like drunk walking in saying, hey, I think you need a late checkout.

No, nothing. Nothing weird like that. But part of it too is just like getting all this data to know, like, when. When these upsells are hitting, like, what was the parameters that warranted this one?

Buying voices? Voice is interesting. Did you all see Air AI that sales thing that was like being basically sold around the Internet just turned out to be one massive scam. But it's like, really, really interesting, like Voice and how you can bring Voice into this because, like, this is like the evolution of it. Like, it starts off with text, but then we all know that if somebody's outside and they are locked out, they're gonna call. You know what I mean? It's like there's nothing worse as a host looking at your phone and seeing 10 missed calls from the same number over the space of, like, you know, one minute. And you think, thinking, oh, what's happened? So if voice can come into that, then. Then that's super cool. Anybody else want to add on to anything else that's being said?

Not something we're currently working on, Mark, but something that I think could be interesting again on direct booking side would be AI helping shape the guest experience digitally. So whether that is putting out there, you know, multiple different designs of your homepage or swapping around the fields that you get in the search bar or whatever it is, and then assessing the. Basically. Basically doing lots of a B testing all the time and continually improving what the guests are seeing and how they're interacting.

I want to give a shout out to a guy called Rudy at Mavericks who is working on that with. With their company and they're doing direct booking websites and they're working with, I want to say Webflow or something like that, but they are actually doing that where the page dynamically alters, depends on the search parameters that are being put in. And it's phenomenal to see. And he's doing all of this, obviously, with AI and machine learning. So, yeah, shout out to Rudy at Mavericks for that.

But that is.

That is definitely cool. Shout out Rudy. Anybody else? Anything else to add? Anybody else want to add in? Anything that we're working on? Any sneak peeks, any. Any cool things?

How about when we get to the point where the AI will write the software itself and we can all sit back and just say, I want an app that does xyz.

Done.

Yes.

But not podcast hosts now that. Don't worry. Don't worry, Mark.

How do you know that I am actually real and I'm not just the AI deck plan that I have created?

That's a big question.

That is a good question. There's only one way to find out. But with that being said, I want to say thank you so much for all of you for giving up your time. We're at multiple different time zones speaking at all different hours and I really do appreciate we all could come together in this and have a like a really solid one hour discussion which is one that we can keep going back on hopefully time and time and be able to sort of look at this. So I appreciate it all. What I would like to do to finish up with. We'll start with Clive and then go Nim and Cole and Luca and Sam. But can you just please give your business that pitch? So talk about the domain to go to. Where can anybody go to find out more about you and your journey? What's the socials? Give it a good minute. Just, yeah, pitch away. Tell everybody where to go.

Okay, so starting with me. Hello Hosty. We have a product called Alina, an AI virtual assistant for property managers built by me and a team of smart software developers built upon the premise of being able to solve the challenge of guest communications. So our AI assistant Alina learns about the properties from various different sources and then responds natively to the guest, no change for the guest with all of their inquiries in, in a non egotistical timely manner and solving solving the challenges when they need it. So you can find out more about us@hello hosty.com and we have a free trial set up so you can, you can check us out.

Amazing. Are you going to be at any of the conferences coming up this year? Any, anything on the horizon that people can come up and chat to you all in a team up?

Yeah, we'll be at the Short stay Summit in April London so if you're, if you're there be pleased to to come up and please do come up and have a chat with us. We'll be friendly to you.

Nice.

Thank you very much. Perfect. N so again same thing. Where can people go find out more pitch Zevu Pitch Guest guru pitch all.

Companies that you have as those might be using ze have you at some point might know and as you might have picked up I haven't really been talking about much of a long road map because, because I, I'm a strong believer in collaborative development and taking on feedback from users as to what, where we go. So I can tell you what we've Got now I can you probably heard some of the thoughts I have as to where guests will be going. So yes, we've got a chat but we'll be looking at doing reviews, possibly task management. This on the other but ultimately we're looking for people who have ideas and would like to contribute to building guest world to be something that will help them solve real life problems in the hospitality business. So yeah, look us up. Guess Guru AI Social media handles guest guru and you can find me on Facebook LinkedIn. Feel free to drop me a line.

Are you going to be at any events this year and your team's going to be around?

Nope, we've stopped doing in person stuff.

Wow, you're taking it fully virtual. Check you out if you are a Zevu customer as well and if you want n to buy another company just go and hit up his inbox and tell him all about it and who knows he may go and buy it. All right, thank you for that. All right Cole, we'll come to you then Luca then then Sam tell us all about the business, the domains, how they can find out more about you and all that good stuff.

Yeah you can check us out at Hostai app we integrate to all the systems you're using, automate your messages, maintenance detecting upsells and integrated VOIP system and what you can find us at booth 410 at Verma in New Orleans and then don't have the rest of the year planned out but definitely a few more conferences.

I hope that there's more attendees at Verma Spring than there was in Verma Paris because I heard there's like less than 100 people so I I hope.

I was gonna go I didn't have going no worries.

All right Luca, Luka Luca, here we go. Journey tell us.

Yeah well we are Mercy Crema we try to bring different best in class all into a single solution and we try to make it all ni enable AI enabled mainly on the gas communication right now and review management. There's a lot more coming very shortly. Some of it was was was mentioned in school. You can find us on journey.com j-u r n y.com and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn so you can find me or the company or actually pretty active there. It was actually just the Vermont Harris not a lot of people they invited me there to speak so I just went there will be probably the short.

And why no one came.

Oh yeah, we'll be at the at the shorties award and we'll be speaking VMA International and probably a bunch more so good, good, good, good.

I was, I was at the Vermont International in Orlando. Whenever I walked past the journey booth you were very, very busy. Always, always chatting. The team were always about which was. Which is always a good sign. All right, last but no means least Sam, tell everybody about the business, the domain where they can find out more about you, the Journey and obviously any conferences are eventually going to be at for the rest of this year.

Yeah, yeah.

So we're heard this pitch a few times today but we're also an AI copilot as the way we position ourselves an operating system that sits on top of your pms. So no third party inbox. We integrate directly whether it's guesty, hostaway, hostfully or the three that we're live now we're launching on seven new PMSs in the next two months so that's a handful that you can find out more on our website. Actually by June 1st we're looking to have all seven live so it'll be on a total of 10PMSS which is a big been a big blocker from going all these conferences just to find out you can't integrate with the customers. You know our product is everything you'd imagine in an operating system that's powered by AI. So guest messaging, conversational upselling, you know our we have five different revenue automation tools averages about a half a booking extra night per listing per month Right now across all of our properties our number one focus is on enterprise grade so we consider that anything above 100 listings, our average user has about 100 listings now really focusing on that higher tier just mainly as an early stage startup getting the feedback loops from those big operators to build a better product and then trickle that down into the to the smaller operators. So of course we do have some smaller folks as well and yeah that's pretty much it. I mean where you can find out more about us. We're Bestie NYC if that's probably easiest to remember. Bestie nyc that's B E S T Y not Betsy most people call it. They think it's Betsy. They think it's a woman like assistant basically. So that's happened to us too actually with Alina. Alina is a much better name though. And then the rest you can learn about us. You know your podcast STR unfiltered Good morning hospitality. This like talk. We are going to the Skift AI Summit and I think that's June. We're doing the short stay summit in London so I'll be flying Over. So hopefully gonna see you guys in person doing IMN in June as well and then Vermont in the fall.

Nice, nice. Thank you, thank you very much all. Before we leave, I need you to give me a nice big smile so I can take a picture for the social medias. On the count of three. One, two, three. Look at that. Love it. 2 hours, 32 minutes and 5 seconds. We did it. We absolutely did it. Thank you to everybody that is still sticking around. There is over a hundred people and there was a bit of a drop off with the, with the AI chat and I totally get it. With AI there's going to be three brackets and I've always said this, the first bracket all in like Paula absolutely love it, devouring it. Gonna, you know, basically be ahead of the game and there's going to be those on the other side that are gonna absolutely hate it. Just go head in the sand. Nah, this isn't for me. And then those in the middle that just sort of toy either side wherever you sit. That last hour of a conversation was so important and there's so many little takeaways, so many clips that obviously my team are going to take from that and turn it into social media content. Would be crazy not to over the course of next couple of months. But the big takeaways for me is that number one, if you don't use this you are going to get left behind. Number two is going to become a case in point in time where there will be a one person, one man band, not including cleaners, obviously not including handyman that could potentially run a a thousand properties which is insane. But also as well there's going to be AI become created for you that will be able to take part in the different roles within your business and they're going to communicate and chat to each other. It's going to make lives easier for business owners, it's going to make life easier for, for hosts. That is an absolute given how it looks, what it looks like, is it going to be one of these companies that we had on today or is it going to be somebody else that comes up? Who knows. But what I wanted to achieve from the summit this week, what I wanted to achieve from this and presenting it to you all is just to get you thinking a little bit, a little bit differently. Always be thinking who not how, always looking to embrace it. And as always, when this new technology becomes available, we as in Boostly will be the first to to showcase it to you. Every single person you saw on that roundtable has been a guest on the Boostly Podcast and you can go and grab a copy of the Boostly podcast by Spotify, Apple, YouTube, you name it, go and just type in Boostly Podcast and you can add it to your favorites, your downloads and all that. That good stuff tonight has been a big one. So first and foremost, Mr. Paul Anderson. The comments and all of the things, as always, was amazing to see. He has messages afterwards and he's putting the kids to bed, but he just wanted to say thank you to everybody for all the kind words. Again, there's a constant theme coming up here. There's a constant theme with Rose and with Paul. Tonight. It's about knowing your avatar, knowing who you're speaking to. Don't try and appeal to everybody. Jen said it as well last night. Don't try and appeal to everybody. You know, speak to a few and just to piggyback on that, you know, some of what somebody said to me way back when I first got going is, you know, you want to bury yourself so far down on a niche there's room for nobody else. You know what I mean? So bear that in mind. Let's have a little look at what's coming tomorrow because tomorrow is again, it's another good one. It is another. Another good one. So we're Gonna start with Mr. Jamie Lane. We are gonna have Laura Muse who's gonna come on board. You're gonna love this. Again, pre recorded, loved it and I can't wait to showcase you. And we gave a little shout out to this gent as well. In this chat, just being with AI Rudy from Mavericks, he is the chap that I was talking about and he's going to show you exactly how AI can influence your direct booking website moving forward. We've also got the Extend team in as well which is about hiring. So we've got a lot to pack in tomorrow. Make sure you are back with US sharp. 6pm 6pm UK time, back of a shop. We're going to be on for two hours, maybe a little bit more. We are going to announce the winner of the Spin the wheel and we've got some more fun and games for you all as well. But with that being said, thank you very much to every single one of you that is watching this live and has stuck with us for the full duration. I really hope you are getting a lot out of this. We are putting this on absolutely free, no charge to you. And all I hope is that you're taking something away and you're looking to implement it next week. That's all we ask a massive thank you to the sponsors of this week for helping putting this ahead and on. And yeah, just really looking forward to seeing what comes to us on on Thursday. If you want to find out more about Boostly, you absolutely know by now, hopefully on where you need to go, just go to B-O-OOstly.co.uk B-O-OOstly.co.uk find out more about what we're doing, how we can help you get to 65 Dive both bookings and you can even book a call in with our team. There's some very limited, very limited spots left now for us a week. Y' all have been very busy tonight, booking calls, which has been, which has been great. So without, without further ado, thank you very much, good morning, good night, good evening and all good stuff. And we'll be back tomorrow. That wasn't the one I wanted. Show them how we do.

I like to rhyme my words when I speak. I take two from a seven of the week Monday to Friday. That's the five days. It's the challenge. And you know it's provided free. Yeah, that's where the star is. Day one free. So you know where's gratis. Look, I spit fire while I'm good looking. I'm gonna tell you to get more direct bookings. Not circuitously through travel agent one. That's come to you. You sit there in amazement like wow. Mad respect to the guy with the hashtag book direct. Not a gang sign. It's a pound. In the US we call it hash over here. Running through this book directly, it means that you go. Not a book from a library. Oh no, bro, you need to understand words. Please heed. Use Facebook to get more leads. Like a dog with the collar with the multiple leashes. More leads. That's the pun. It's hard to believe it. I punch hard like Bruce Lee. Probably the only rhyme I can think with Bruce Lee. Like an orange, I squeeze it cause it's so juicy. And Mark Simpson. Not orange, but he could be yellow like the fellow in the Matt Groening show. That's the Simpson thing. Mark my woe rds. That's the words when I fill it out. Here's a little thing. Pay attention, you Laos don't over rely on booking.com or Airbnb. Cause that could be gone. Cause the pandemic shut down everything. Airbnb offices. The phone don't ring anymore. But over reliance is not required. Yeah, I see you're not silent and saying Chris, can you shout to me how to save money in commissioning fees? Well, I can't explain, but I know who doo does Mark Simpson not like Bart with the buzz sore haircut? Let me make this clear. He's not from the Simpsons. Guys, please lend your ears. Romans and Countrymans and all the viewers. Get your guest to book direct, and you will see your coffers swell and swell and grow. The guests all go. They're like, wow, I'm glad that I watched this show or this podcast. And they'll enjoy their holiday. I'm gonna go and book direct right away. Admittedly, I'm not. There'll be a slight lag. But when you do book direct, don't forget the hasht.