Boost Your Bookings with AI – Live with Bart-Jan Leyts

The waiting room on Zoom. All right, everybody, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome. This is very, very special what we have got planned for you over these next couple of days. Do me a massive, massive favor. When you can hear us and when you can see us, just drop a little hi in the chat. If you're in the Zoom, say hi. Please do not be shy. If you are watching this from all of the other channels that we are streaming from now, YouTube, where else? Facebook, LinkedIn, even and even X. We are. We are there. We are streaming. We are around the world. Thank you very much, whoever said hi in the Zoom. That means we are live. All right, so these next three days, this AI Boot camp with what we are doing, I wanted to bring to you all actionable tips that you can be doing right now. And there's loads of people talking about AI that has been for the last two years now. And I feel like we've got to that point in time with AI where it's about to plateau a little bit. It's about to level out. So those of you that are maybe feeling that you're a little bit left behind, this is the perfect time to get start. I don't want to show you how to make cute images on chat GPT that doesn't impact you in any way, shape or form. I want to show you over these next three days how you can bring it into your business, into your hospitality business, and how you can actually make an impact today. And the cool thing is about all of these things that we're going to show you over the next three days, these are tools and these are tactics that you can get going pretty much instantly. You don't have to wait, you don't have to, you know, learn how to master this tool. You can pretty much get started. So that is the plan, that is the goal. It's Gonna Be Live, 6pm UK, 7pm in Europe, 1pm in Eastern Time, 12pm Central, 9pm in Dubai. Every single day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So it's just three days. It's just three hours. I understand totally that you've got a lot going on. I know there's a busy, busy, busy times, but if you can just put aside this hour to join in with me live, you and your business will be at a much better place for it. Now, if that sounds good, just give me a little hi in the chat or just tap those emoji buttons. Liam is tuning in from Norwich. Hi, Liam. Mel in South Africa and Emma in the uk. Laurel, I believe in the US Let me know where you're tuning in from, which is always good, and let's get started. Well, shall we? So to my right is somebody that I've had the privilege of meeting quite a few times now. We spent a couple of days in a big house in Liverpool together where I got to find out much more about this young chap. And then he left us to go off to the, to an award show in London where he won the rising star of 2025 in the short term rental industry, which is phenomenal. A very, very clever chap. And he has a tool that he has founded with his team that is helping everybody rank higher on the OTAs. And we're going to dig into why that's important, we're going to dig into why he created this tool and everything else in between. But before we crack on, just give us a little breakdown of, of the tool that you created, your sort of background in getting into property management etc and, and sort of where are you right now with the business in what, September, October 2025, please.

Absolutely. First of all, Mark, thank you very much for having me here on today. It's an absolute pleasure. Always when we shared the stage, it was always fireworking. I remember the conference back, the short stay was an amazing one as well, maybe for the audience as well. To introduce myself. So my name is Bartian, I'm from Belgium, which is a very hard Flemish name to pronounce. So if you ever come across me, if you ever meet me, Bart is perfectly fine and it's way easier than saying my Flemish name. So I'm 25, I'm the founder of Automizer. Automizer is a company that specializes in OTA performance for hotels, short term rentals, hosts, property managers and so on. We started actually three years ago out of the purpose that, out of necessity, actually. My dad, he is an entrepreneur and he jumps to projects, he jumps to new opportunities and he had the unique opportunity of managing a bed and breakfast in the city center of Bruges, where my hometown is so picturesque city in Belgium. And he said, look, I will be honest, I have no clue how to manage a bed and breakfast. I have no prior experience in tourism, I have no clue I can run a business, but I have no clue about this. I didn't, I had no prior experience as well. I just graduated from my master's in finance at the university in Ghent, so in Belgium. And he said, look, while I will figure out how hospitality works, can you please figure out how to make money with his bed and Breakfast and, and you're good with numbers so you will probably figure it out. Go and find somebody. So this is where I got engaged in everything being revenue management. How do you make revenue? Just, you know, the core of revenue management. Not dynamic pricing, not upsells, just how does a property make revenue. So then I got into the sub elements. Dynamic pricing, upsells, early check in, late checkouts, lower commissions on ota, higher commission. So I got to know everything. I used hotel revenue management solutions, I used short term rental revenue management solutions, I used it all. You know, we quickly got to a quite okay level of revenue. But I experienced, there was a plateau, there was, there was a ceiling. We couldn't get any higher. Like every percentage we had to do was marginal compared to all the hard work we had to take in. And then this is where I got a friend of mine involved which was in AI AI geek. Before ChatGPT ever was front page on the BBC. It was, you know, he was an AI geek before it was a mainstream thing. And we dove into the concept of okay, why are some days, can we ask crazy rates and it sells and why on some days not. And why are we on some some days where the market is absolutely not full, why are we full and why not? And this is where we come or came across our OTA performance. We managed or we saw in the data that on some days or OTAs and in Belgium it was heavily reliant on booking.com on some days or positioning on booking.com was just very, very good and on some days it wasn't. So this is where we started debugging. Like why, why is booking.com putting us at a certain place in day one and in day two on place thin. And then we noticed the concept of ranking search results. You know, we, we thought let's just contact booking.com and ask them to put us on page one. They said no, you can, that's just impossible. And then, you know, they, they started the whole talk about yeah, join genius, go give more commission to us. But we didn't want to do it because we didn't want to be just a pay to win. We wanted to have something more substantial. So this is where we started to look at what really drives ranking or your positioning in search results. So we found options where we could manipulate or optimize ourselves within those searches. And from some manual labor there came a company, from a company there came two tools. One for short term rentals, which is called AutoRank, which will be covered today. And one is the Company called Automize which serves hotels and short term rentals. So from a, from a real life or something I have witnessed with the property of my dad came a company. And now three years into the company we are 40 something people and we're active in over 12 countries worldwide. And I'm having the pleasure of sharing the stage with Mark. So what else do you want?

Awesome story. We love it and it's a tool that is growing all the time. So if you want to go find out more about the tool, obviously we'll give you more links and stuff along the way. It's Auto rank, is it autorank.com like what's the, what's the best domain to go to? Autorank.com autorank.com so obviously like we want to. I wanted to do this session because AI is massively going to shape how these search engines, including the OTAs appear. And the cool thing about what I've heard you talk about is how hosts can a do it themselves but also b tap into technology and tools. Before we get on though, obviously you know, everything boostly related is all about this good old thing called direct bookings. And obviously the goal is to get everybody to be direct bookings as much as possible. When, when we talk about Auto Rank and you know, we talk about direct bookings, how do you bridge it When a host comes to you or a potential customer comes to you and goes by, you know, I love you tool, I love the idea of it, but I want to get more direct bookings. What's like, how do you sort of combat that, that, that turnaround when someone says that to you and why is it important?

That's a very good question. It's, I always reply it's not or it's not or OTAs or direct bookings. It's always. And an OTA is ideal for capturing your first guest. In an ota you have a very predictable, you know, acquisition cost of your guest. It's very predictable. But what we see is properties that engage in a good OTA performance also see the impact of direct bookings increasing. It's a stat and we will cover it later as well. 65% of all people who are booking direct have come across your OTA listing at one step during their booking journey. The other styles say for example, four and 10 people who actually booked your property go to an OTA to find information. So it's not an, it's not this or that, it's always. And how can you combine those? Of course, you know, direct has a Lower and in the majority of cases has lower acquisition costs. But it's also harder in some cases. But if you can combine those, we have seen wonderful, wonderful use cases where people an optimal mix and they're benefiting from both parties.

Well, let's kick on then. So obviously we've got a lot of people here who are thinking, right, I want to give this a go myself. So we're going to, we're going to share screens at some points and let me know when I need to flip this button so we can share the screen. But the question that I wanted to take into first, and this is probably relevant to all the people that are watching, whether it's live with us now or on the replay. When people try and rank or boost their listing on Airbnb, birkin.com, vrbo manually, what's the biggest mistake that you see that hosts are making from, from your point of view?

I will have a lot of people who will hate me for this, but one of the biggest mistakes I see is going to YouTube searching how can I rank high on Airbnb? And following someone who claims they can do it. Because what works in one market never works in a second. How the. And we will get into how the algorithm is computed, how the Paris search results are computed is completely different than Myrtle beach or than Manchester. It's a different type of guest. And Airbnb adapts its search results to the guests. So there are no quick fixes. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as do this and you will rank high. It's a combination, it's a strategy to rank high. It's not a quick fix. So what I often have is discussions with starting property manager, with listing owners who say, look, yeah, I have read I have to do this and then I will be top of the searches and then we look at the data and they are not. Of course, some of the tips can help, but there is no one fits all solution. Just as dynamic pricing, there is no one fits all solution.

That's massive. So if anybody here has ever gone onto YouTube and found somebody with a lovely smile, an American accent who's talking about how to rank higher, it is literally only applicable to potentially their city or town where they are based. It doesn't mean that it spreads to other states in the U.S. never mind across the pond, is that right? It really does depend on guest and data and location specific.

Exactly. And everything happening in your market. Maybe you're in a very dense region where booking.com is taking 60% of all bookings. Then your Airbnb algorithm is computed way different because your not sending the same availability. So all those different factors need to be taken into.

Okay, so this is something that I want to throw open to the chat and if you have joined us in the Zoom room, you get exclusive chance to ask questions to our experts. So if a question is ever comes up between now and the next 30 minutes, please drop it in and I will ask about the questions as we, as we go. Okay, so let's have a little look at this. Are you sharing your screen? Let me flip this over. And what I want for you to do is to answer this question. So when you get a new client and you're analyzing a brand new listing, what are the first sort of things that you should be looking for? And hopefully now everybody can can see the screen. So but yeah, just let us know how do you, how do we track tackle this?

Yes, can everyone see the screen? Maybe if someone can give a thumbs up then we can be ready to go and I cannot see the chat.

So yeah, we're good. There's thumbs up everywh. I'm gonna monitor the chat. So get these questions coming and give us those thumbs up. Brilliant.

So following what I was sharing earlier, it's when, when it comes to OTA performance and just revenue performance is visibility is everything. Just getting people seeing your listing, it's about getting demand and, and your listing can be in a peak demand area. But if your listing is not seeing seen by someone, you're not getting booked. You can compare it to an E commerce store, you can have the best prices, best product. But if your listing is not, or if your E commerce store is not being seen by potential guests, you're not getting booked, you're not getting any reservations, you're not getting any purchases. Same goes with it with an Airbnb listing or just with a short term rental. And an interesting stat on that is on the ODA 75% of all positive click behavior. So click behavior that indicates or will result in a booking go to the first 15 listings. And that's only increasing year over year. If you look at different generations, I'm a Gen Z or Gen Z is even more shorter there they don't go to page two anymore. So it's increasing and increasing the importance of that of that ranking. But let's before we start and before I give you a lot of complicated stuff and then we will see where that leads, let's just start with Guest Journey. How is a guest journey or how does a guest on Airbnb now book, how is it really going? And let me just put it maybe full screen so it's more visible for everyone. So a guest, when they go to Airbnb, and this is a very simplified version, they enter a search. For example, I want to go to Manchester to. To. To watch the Derby. I want to go to New York and, you know, stay there three days with. With two persons. They enter a search, enter their query, enter their filters, then they click on certain things. So they. They enter the filters, then they click. This is from the moment they see the listing. This is the listing. You know, in the example, they click on the listing from the moment they have seen a listing. And this is a very simplified version. We will get to a more comprehensive one in a bit. They have a couple of options. They can contact the host, they can send a request to book, or they can book. This is just, of course, they can also not book, but this is very simplified. From the moment they book, that's okay. Everyone's happy. Host, happy, guest is happy. From the moment they send a booking request that gets rejected, okay, this can also happen from the moment they contact and they get a response or they don't get a response, everything can happen. But what I want to show to you here is from the moment a guest engages with your listing, a lot of different things happen. A lot of different data is gathered, a lot of different data is injected. From the moment he searched and your listing is showing up, and he clicked and he indicates booking. That's gold. That's what you want. You want to have a very short cycle time. You want to have someone going to your listing, clicking, booking, and being happy, and preferably also leaving a good review score. But unfortunately, not every guest is like this. To complete my story, let's first look at the following example. So this is another guest. The average user does more than 12 searches on multiple days before they actually book a listing. And that depends, of course, if they're booking a big home, small home, small apartment, big apartment, and so on. But let's just look at average here. So on the first search, they see five listings. Listings. Okay, they like it. They like some of them, but let's do a second one. On the second one, you know, they have certain filters and they see here, the second one is also popping up. Airbnb predicts, okay, this one will be there for you. Then they narrow it down. They narrow it down, and then ultimately they book a listing. This listing is chosen over five different searches. So meaning over that, five different Searches, they rejected multiple others and they chose this one and they booked it, which is golden. Let's now look at this example. This is a mobile experience of Airbnb. So the guest searches something, they see a listing, they see a listing, they see a listing, they click it. Second search is they click a listing, see listing, see listing, click another one. Second third one is they click a listing. They went here to fulfill a booking request, it got rejected. They click one and they see another one. So you see all those little things is gathering data for Airbnb. And this solves one of Airbnb's biggest problem they had when launching their search results. They wanted to have hyper personalized search results. But of course they couldn't do a hyper personalized search result because the majority of Airbnb users only makes one booking a year or when they make more bookings a year. They are not the same traveler type. One time they do it for business, the other time they do it with their family, the other time with their mistress or whatever they can do to make booking. So their traveler type is never the same. So Airbnb thought, okay, let's not use as an output variable of as a target variable. Let's not use bookings. But that's all the tiny behaviors they do, they do behind of that. You can see it on the screen. So all those little instances, all those little behaviors is something which is called in the algorithmic world of Airbnb utility, Just a quick disclaimer. I will give you one more complicated slide after this and then we will move to practical tips. Those utility is what want to be maximized and you want to have the highest potential utility usage use case for your guests. So every little booking behaviors that booking intent can yield to a maximized utility. Because Airbnb is all about maximizing that utility. The guests just, you know, gathers data clicking on listing, not clicking on listing, scrolling through pictures and so on.

So here's a question for the, for the audience who are watching in with zoom. Did you and give me a simple yes or no. There's no right or wrong answer on this. Did you realize that this algorithm was as complex as this on Airbnb booking.com this is why like Bart was saying, it's, it's, there's no, there's no like one easy fix. You know what I mean? If you're going to do this, this manually. So yeah, but there's a lot of people saying no, we didn't have a clue. It was this complicated.

I can imagine. And it's it is complicated. There is no one fits all solution. And you know, my aim for today is to help you guys understand why it is like this, why they do it and to come back to the slides. I was talking about that utility. So Airbnb is all about maximizing that utility. Maximizing that utility for, you know, a guest. When they see a listing in the function, you know, in, you know, the output they are gathering, there is listing fees, features, guest features, also the query features, maybe they're coming with two childs, three charts and so on, but also something called rejection probability. And again, this will be the most difficult slide of today. And then we will move to something more practical. But this is real insight on how the algorithm of Airbnb is made. And please drop it in the chat if I'm talking nonsense or if you, or if you think, okay, let's skip this. But it's important for you to understand that the output of a search ranking algorithm is the positioning you have. That positioning is constituted or is made out of two main models of AirBB. One model is called the base model. Bayes model, very simple. Giving a guest the best probability of staying with a good property, you know, with a property that will, you know, result in a good review score. They want to just have the best property for the best guests. So they get the highest, they get the highest 3B score. But at the other side, and this is where Airbnb is so unique in the OTA landscape is something which is called the Twiddler module. I have no idea who invented the Twiddler module, but it's named like this in the Airbnb code. Twiddler model is decreasing the probability of linking a host or connecting a host with a property that will not result in good review scores or in a positive state. So it's important. Why is this important? Because. Because this highlights all the good things about listing. So every time you have positive booking behavior, this accelerates you. But every bad review, and some of the people who are in the audience will have seen this, can crush your listing. Because one bad review sends a very strong signal to Airbnb something might be wrong here. So this is that Twiddler module coming into play that doesn't connect your listing with other guests anymore because it can yield for them in, you know, in code way to bad reviews. If I, if I just summarize it, Airbnb has a hybrid of, of, you know, when they, when they come up with search rankings with long term signals and short term Signals for, for them to compute their search rankings. Long term signal is okay, what's the booking history of a guest but also the listing. How many, how many bookings do they have, how many reviews that they have, how many positive that also the guests have? They left a lot of reviews, a lot of bad reviews. But also what's for example for the guest was their search friend over the last months? Always when they search for something with the swimming pool that they actually book it. If the answer is no, then they are just dreaming and not booking something with the swimming pool. But also short, short term for a guest. What are the recent searches for? Which days have they maybe in another tab opened some flight and they already booked it. Okay, does this mean he's definitely going to. How many clicks are they doing during a session? Are those clicks intended to book or is it just, you know, to scroll down? It has to be for, in some case for more than 30 seconds. So all those different, different actions guests make contribute to where your listing is placed in those search rankings.

I've just got a super quick question and this is something that has always fascinated me. Yeah. I see on these Facebook groups all the time where there's posts that come up saying wait list army. And what they do is when a listing goes live, they ask everybody in the Facebook group to save it as a, as a waitlist. So that little, a little plus that little heart button in the top right hand corner. So basically they get a lot of people to save it to a waitlist at once. You know, the algorithm probably more than anybody else I've ever spoken to. Does that actually boost the algorithms? It's a lot of people save it as a wish list or a waitlist on, on, on Airbnb. Or is that just engagement farming on these Facebook groups, in your opinion?

It's engagement farm on the Facebook groups. But it does have an indirect effect. Maybe where the wish list thing originated from in the version of Airbnb's algorithm five to six years ago. It did have an impact because again, Airbnb had its issue that they couldn't collect other data. They couldn't collect those micro behaviors against set. But you know, over the last five to six years, Airbnb's data team, Airbnb's algorithm, Airbnb's data capacities have evolved so much that they don't put weights on it. But why those Facebook engagement things are still going is when someone goes to the listing, they click on the link, they add it as a wishlist, you get an extra view Those views then are, you know, perceived increase because of the wishlist, but it's because people click on it and every registers of you.

So it's we've got the answer, we've got the answer. So if you've ever been asked in a Facebook group or you ever thought it was a good idea, don't worry about it. Here's another question that's something that has always been on my mind and Robert has just timed it perfectly in the Zoom chat. Can you just quickly talk about the separation between Super Host and Guest Favorite and what does it actually mean to the, to the algorithms from, from again, from where you can see from your viewpoint of looking at this algorithm more than most.

Yep. For that it's also important to understand that the history there. So Super Host of course was there for way longer than Guest Favorite. So in a couple of years ago, when you were Super Host, you know your listing was going to get, you know, you were fine. Then Guest Favorite was introduced and they took over that completely. When we look at the ranking, the majority of those are Guest Favorite, depending on the market, depending on the searches. Again, but Guest Favorite is always winning over Super Host. Superhost has a higher tendency of getting your listing in Guest Favorite. But Guest Favorite is today the the new gold on Airbnb.

Okay, so you want to be a Guest Favorite. So thank you very much for this. We've got some other questions, but it's not directly related. So let's jump back into the slides and let's go in the good, the fun stuff. So what's this next slide we're looking at?

Yep. So just also for everyone to quickly summarize, how is that algorithm now computed in human language? Four key elements. Your content, your reviews, your listing composition being what is in your listing. Do you have a pool? Don't you have a pool? And your price. Four key elements. Today I will discuss with you the listing optimization fly bill, what we see happen so much in the market and then five unique tips I prepared for today for anyone to walk home with and to hopefully implement in their listings. So what happens a lot when we look at the market? So hosts, property manager owners, they set up a listing, they think of a beautiful description they want to make and they never update it again. You know, their listing gets off. It's okay the first month they get good bookings. Then, you know, conversion rates start to drop because their listing is not in demand anymore. Their listing is not tuned into. What does the guest of today want to read? Why their listing is not tuned into what the guest actually converts on. So what happens? Conversion rate drops, ranking drops. They have a lower probability of receiving bookings because ranking is probability of receiving a booking. What happens then is a revenue manager or revenue management software sees, okay, there is no pickup, occupancy is lower, let's lower the price. What happens? Ranking is impacted by average price or by your price. So your average price compared to your price of today. So your, your decrease of price will get you a spike in, in, in Airbnb rankings, which will suddenly lead to a lot of bookings. And then everyone will praise the revenue manager, oh, the guy did a really good job or the person that really amazing job. What happens then? What we see a lot is you get overpaid. You get too many bookings in a too short time frame. It which is something you want to avoid at all costs. Leading too many bookings, you don't send any rates and availability anymore to Airbnb, leading to again, a lower average rank, lower booking probability for the upcoming period. And so goes to the flywheel. Third, and again, a price decrease. And this is what we see happening a lot in the market. But now that I have given you guys all the theory, let's get to how you can actually make a difference. A main one would be, and this is, you know, I just make quick tips for people who are not engaged in this on a daily level. Adapt your listing to the search trends. Go to your local area, go to, if you're from Manchester, go and look. Why are some properties ranked higher than Manchester? Click on 10 of them. Look at what other similarities. Maybe they're using bullet points. Maybe they have beautiful blue pictures on the first look at it. That's a very important nuance to know. How you compute your description, how you compute your typo, how you compute your summary, but also think of your guests. Let's say you're in a ski, you're in a ski area. Then in the winter, when people are starting to book for the winter, they don't want to see that ski resort or that ski area and summer picture. So adapt your listing at least to the different seasons, because every season has different amount of guests, has a different type of guest, has different guest behavior. So if you have time, please, at least four times a year, change your listings to what's happening in the different season. It could be just, you know, changing the title to Perfect Winter Retreat or all those little things when people who are booking for something in the winter, they can click on you because guests, you know, they they book for their trip, they want to, they want to go.

So here's a question. Obviously now we're coming into the winter, we're sort of thinking about November, December, when should a host be looking to change their listings? I've got a feeling you're going to say depends on the lead time and it tends on location. But is there like a rule of thumb that you sort of look to if it's like right now is the time to be thinking of November, December or is how do you sort of break that down?

I always say one to one time and a half your average lead time in the market. If everyone's booking 20 days prior, then do it 30 days prior. Everyone's booking 10 days prior and do it 15 days prior, then you know you want to capture the majority of the curve of guests who are booking.

Here's a good question for the Zoom. What is your current lead time on average for all of your listings? Don't just think of one, think of all what's like your current lead time. So that's from the point of booking to the point of arrival. What is your average? Pop it in the Zoom chat. Let's see who is on it with their numbers. Lewis, just had a very quick question. What is rna? You mentioned RNA on the other slide. What's that in simple terms, please, that's rates and availability.

So Airbnb prior or Airbnb favors listings who send them enough up to date rates and availability. That's also why for example, having a dynamic pricing software can lead to a better Airbnb performers or just a better performance in search rankings because you sent them more updates, you sent more, you know, changing price so you send more updates. Availability stands there. You know you want to give Airbnb something to sell. If you only give them one night a month, in an extreme example to sell, they will not do a lot of effort to sell you. If you give them 30 days a month to sell you, then they know, okay, we have 30 days of availability here to sell this property. So we can also make 30 days worth of money on on this property. Of course, in a lot of markets where booking.com is very dominant or VRBO is also there, it's a bit different, but it's important to always, you know, have it up to date as possible but also there. And this is a tip that is not included in the slides, but get your property open as far as possible. If you can get it open 24 months in advance, please do because that is availability that you send to them, you give them 24 months of dates to sell your, your property.

And what's crazy is I used to give the advice before seeing slides like this that you should be changing your listing, you know, for two seasons. You know, your spring, your summer, your fall and your winter. But what's apparent now is you've got to be doing this a lot more with fall, winter, spring, summer. And it's not just your pictures. It's your title, it's your description. It's the, the thing that they see as they're reading your listing. So, you know, the good news is, is that, well, the pain is you're going to have to do it. The good news is, is that, you know, if you do it and you bank it, start in a Google Doc or whatever, you can just rinse and repeat every year. But it's very, very important to do. And also as well, what's the data showing? For example, if somebody's got a property in Palm Springs and you know, once a year or twice a year, you've got Coachella that comes in, is it worthwhile to put big events, big festival, big, big things that are happening in your title, in your description? So you get that Google SEO benefit or does it not really matter?

Absolutely. It's an experiment. So I'm from Belgium and we have this festival called Tomorrowland, which attracts a huge amount of worldwide visitors every year. And we see from the moment that, you know, ticket sales of Tomorrowland and you know, the ticket prices are released, the amount of traffic that is coming to Airbnb then to book a property is amazing. But we did an experiment that fe includes so Property X close to Tomorrowland or close to the venue that they always over, over achieve in revenue than others. So it's, it's, you get the additional Google SEO. But also again, people are getting lazy. They sometimes they search doesn't start on Airbnb, but on Google they search Tomorrowland, Airbnb, Coachella, Airbnb. And then they will go and then, you know, they will have a predefined search already. And then this is where it so also getting in tune with your, with your, with your events happening in your season.

I wonder as well on Airbnb search, I wonder how long it will take for where the search as we know it is just taken out and it'll just be like a search bar when you rock up on it. And it'll just be find me a place near Tomorrowland for four people on these dates. You know what I mean? So it's like you won't have to put in your departure, your arrival.

I reckon they are testing with that. I'm not sure but that's. I agree with you. That's potentially the future.

There we go. There we go. Who knows, this may be an exclusive. We can come back to it in all these years times and just say we called it on this live. Okay, so let's. This is really good. For those of you that are wanting a copy of these slides, we'll let you know later how to get hold of them. I'm also taking screenshots and uploading them into our WhatsApp group chat that you should all be a part of. So this is really quality stuff. But thank you very much. Can we all just show about some love in the chat? Just say thanks Bart. Maybe comment on how Club Bruges are such a good soccer team. So you can do that in the chat as well if you like. Just. And as you can see, he is in Belgium and the sun is going down. So appreciate him for doing this. So we're all saying thank you in the chat, which is fantastic. Okay, next. Next slide please.

Yes, the next slide. So everyone is always telling, you know, make sure your first pictures are okay. And this is not really a tip, but more of a why. This is actually how Airbnb analyzes your first picture. They have this algorithm which detects what is present on your first picture. So they have, okay, There is a 99% probability of you having a bet. There is an 85 probability of you having a window on those pictures. But why is it important? This fuels back to my story where I was telling that booking intent. If everyone clicks on the property with a pool and the last 100 searches, everyone clicks on the property with a pool. If you have a pool that can be detected in your first picture, you will have also a higher likelihood of showing up. So for your first picture, please find a picture where a lot of amenities are because those amenities will fuel you higher in search. Of course, you have to get a balance between a picture where the majority of your amenities are and a picture who is mobile optimized. But if you have a picture where, for example, you are near the beach and you can see your from your from the balcony of your property, the beach. And you have balcony, beach already. If you can put there a chair, then you have chair, balcony, beach. So think of all those little amenities you can put here to maximize your search. Then this is also a myth. And it's not a myth because it's true. But the more flexible you are, the higher your rank. This, this, this, you know, taps back to the, the story I was telling about rates and availability. The more available you are on Airbnb and the more searches you can pop up, the better you will be ranked. But I have debugged for you and I'm not sure if you guys can see it.

Yeah, we can see this.

Perfect. I have looked at what is the real impact on a global scale. So these are global numbers. What is the real impact on occupancy, bookings and revenue? And I see I made the typo there. When you, for example, are instant bookable or you decrease your cancellation policy with one cohort, it's always positive. And I will focus on the revenue part. If you decrease your cancellation policy, it's from an 11% increase in revenue to a 10% increase in revenue on Airbnb. But the importance there is the reason why Airbnb, when they compute your search rankings, they take an average of all your different rankings on different days. And if you send them more rankings, they have more data as well. And this will fuel into you having a higher revenue because you're getting a higher probability of getting booked.

My head hurts here. This is where you're making my head hurt. And you, you're so clever and you know I'm a dum dum. So when I'm looking at this, so that the. Explain this to me like I'm a, I'm a 10 year old, what is the, the best way to get around this?

This is, you know, flexible can. When we talk about flexible, this is of course cancellation policy instant bookable, but also minimum length of stay. A lot of operators or hosts, they're restricted by two night minimum length of stay or three night minimum lengths, just because operationally it's otherwise impossible. But a quick tip how you can actually be flexible and thus rank higher. For example, if you have an orphan night, yank your prices up with 1000%. No one will book it, but you will send more availability towards Airbnb. So if someone is looking for that one orphan night, they can find your property. That's so genius, getting those availability to Airbnb. And the more flexible you are, the more likely you are to comply with a lot of different criteria.

Okay, so here's the question. In the chat as anybody, is anybody doing this? Is anybody Give me a simple yes or no, who's doing this? Let me know. In the chat. It'd be really interesting to, to sort of know because this is a genius and it's something you can easily, easily do. Just before we go too far on, there was a really good question Maria put in the chat. When it comes back to pictures, you're talking about getting as much amenities as possible in there. There's some people on their first picture, they go to Canva, they create a cool little collage and they put four pictures in there. Are we talking about doing something like that and just really filling up that first image with loads of mini pictures on Canva or do we have to use the raw one, just your best one with loads of things that you can fit in?

A good question we have, I will be honest. We have seen numerous results from those tests In a lot of markets. It works absolutely wonderful. In other markets we see that that is penalized because it's too confusing for a guest. They don't see it clearly because the amenities are too scrubbed. So they don't click on the listing where you just get lower ranking. So that's, I think the main story I want to bring here today. There is no one fix all solution. It's about testing what works in your market and that will yield results. For example, what could be an answer if the collage doesn't work? Try maybe a two picture collage, maybe that will work because then it's visible for guests. But you don't want those negative booking clicks.

Yeah. And I've always thought when you start dabbling with things like Canva and getting creative, I always wonder how Airbnb reacts to them because obviously people who get creative with Canva, they are more likely to add things in texting. So along the lines of, hey, come on, find us direct or you know, all the things you can do with Canva and getting creative. So it's interesting. But yeah, test it, test it, test it. Robert put. So I asked a question, who has done that tactic? And Robert said yeah, he put it really high and he actually got a booking. So he put whacked the price up, got somebody pay a large amount more. Which is, which is one of the benefits of doing it. All right, cool. All right, I'll let you crack on. How many more slides do we got? Because I want to be wary of your, your time here.

We have about three to four slides left and then it's all about question answering.

Love it. All right. We are doing really well here. Cooking with gas.

Perfect. This is very important in a lot of different markets and price penalties for different prices on other OTAs. It's a concept that arose from the hotels actually in the hotels Whenever you had a price on booking.com and Expedia was lower or higher, your ranking get penalized because they know, okay, a rational guest will compare those two listings on those different OTAs and they will book the cheapest one. Of course guests are not rational. Guests are very irrational and a lot of the guests don't take on the whole booking journey. Fortunately some of them do. But it making sure that you don't get those penalized. You don't get penalized like this. So if you ever see this pop up on your Airbnb, make sure that Airbnb is lowest priced or that for example booking.com or any other OTA is the value package is different. They get free breakfast or free check in earlier, you know, because they only scrape on price, not on total value package. So it's about when choosing to do this or not to do this, what is your more dominant ota? If the answer is Airbnb, make sure that Airbnb is always 1% lower than booking the so you get favored as well. Because Airbnb penalizes you and not in all markets. They're still experimenting with this. But Airbnb penalizes you when booking.com has a lower price. But they always also favor you if they know you give them the lowest price. So it's making sure that also for the OTAs, you game them, you give them exactly what they want. If they want to have the lower price on booking.com give it to them. And then I'm not sure because I cannot see the chat. But a question I can imagine it's about direct. Are they also scraping direct on short term rentals? I have not seen that case where they are also scraping direct. Websites legislation in a lot of different countries worldwide is different. In Europe it's not allowed. In the US and in other parts of the world it's always bit gray area. But I have not seen any instances where they actively do it. But to overcome that, I also have a tip for you guys. If you have for, you know, if there is a brand guideline where you have to get parity between different OTAs, make sure that Airbnb just cannot find you. Make sure that your titles on bookcase.com and Airbnb are different. In this instance I showed the same first picture but make sure you have different first picture on different OTAs because those things will make it way harder for the for the robots of Airbnb, the scrapers of Airbnb to match your listings. Because that's the hard part. Why this isn't enrolled at a larger scale compared to hotels. It's very hard for a scraper to find a listing on Airbnb and match it directly to booking. If you have the same title, it's very easy. But also game those scrapers make sure it's not easy for them.

Love that.

And then as a last tip of the day and it's my slides and numbers are wrong, but this is actually tip 5 and this is where we started with. It's the billboard that effect. So 65% of all direct bookings come from guests who saw it first on an ota. These are hotel stats that are very much in line with short term rentals as well. It's making sure that again that discoverability. When someone finds you on Airbnb, make sure that they can easily with one simple search, go to your direct website, maybe always include it in your title and say, this is a listing by Mark. The brand is called Mark. So they go to Google and search listings by Mark and they land on your website. So look at all those little tips and tricks to get your listings also seen by guests who can find you on an ota. It could be something in your description. For example, please contact us for all your question and then we might do it. Or you put a little watermark on your picture. So make sure that guests who want to book online, you give them all the options to book online.

Love it. That's obviously a tip that we love here at Boostly. Do we have any more little gems or can we talk about autorank for a second in a little bit more detail?

We actually can. So maybe first for everyone, bits elevator pitch, mindful of time of autorank. So autorank is actually a solution that optimizes your Airbnb listings automatically. And now what I am seeing, it's actually really getting dark here in Belgium. I see myself lighting up here on video. But other rank is a tool we plug into your PMS and we make sure that your listings are automatically optimized so you don't have to think, okay, what keywords do I have to inject in my descriptions? What keywords do I have to inject in my title? When do I have to add local events? When do I have to add local attractions? But also, and this is what I'm showing here on the, on the graph is you don't want to oversell your listing. What we are doing is we are gathering the insights of your reviews and incorporating into your descriptions, your title into your overall listing composition. Because when guests give you A bad review is because they expect something more. They had certain expectations when entering the listing or entering the unit and when they left, you know, their, their expected expected values were not met the X. The expected values were not met with the perceived value. So this is experimented and changing how you sell your listing into your description. And we found that in this, for example, in Aruba and in Orlando, a case where we found that when we change those review insights into the listing, into actually how the listing is composed, that the accuracy tab, part of the review tab on Airbnb starts to increase because guests give you a higher score on accuracy. And then a last slide of the day and then I will give you all my credentials so you can just ask me any question you want. Is where is off rank really leading into? Of course we're picking interviews. So this is a case from a property manager back in the US and they were struggling. So you're seeing here on the graph, the black line is the views his listing or their listing got. The dotted line is their competitors. And you saw they were struggling a bit. They were always a bit above the competition, always a bit below. But when we implemented their views marketed because their views kind of, they got more eyeballs on their listings. When they have more eyeballs, they will have, they will get more bookings as well. So that's what we do. We make sure that you get more eyeballs and you don't have to think of those difficult optimization things I was telling you about. But those few also lead to higher ranking. But also make sure that your ranking is managed optimal because you don't want to. You know, there is this belief that you always need to be ranked number one, but that's also not true. You need to be ranked optimal. And that's exactly what we're doing with AutoRank. And now I'm going to my last slide Mark, here it is. And now I give the floor back to you. So thank you guys, everyone. If you need me, just drop me an email. I think if you scan it, you go to my LinkedIn.

Nice. So can we all just please give Bar a massive thank you in the Zoom chat, tap that emoji button all the times. Quick question is coming from Lewis, who has 40 odd properties. Does AutoRank, does it link in with pricing software? Does it link in and integrate with everything so it works smoothly? How does that sort of work on a sort of a backend level?

So right now we don't have a direct integration with pricing software just yet, but we do have a revenue management solution or service. We also offer where our revenue managers in house link or data to systems like Price Labs, Wheelhouse, BMW Beyond. So it's taken into account for your revenue stretch strategies, because ranking is a predictor of revenue. And if we can include that, that's wonderful. Right now, we don't have a do it yourself module for that, but our revenue managers can do that.

I think the main thing that I want everybody to get across with this is that, yes, you can do it yourself, but when you are doing so many things within your business, in your life, and there's all those plates that are spinning, if you can just hand it over to a tool and if you've got the budget to do so, 100, you should be digging into it. And this is where auto rankers come in. And it's worked for a lot of. A lot. A lot of people. And yeah, it does. It works. It works everywhere, which is. Which is massive. And there's so many things that you just got to keep aware of, and there's so many things I've learned in this of things that you've got to keep aware of. But at the end of the day, it's business 101. The more times that your business can be seen, the more times that people can buy from you, doesn't matter. You can substitute that for Airbnb, substitute for any business that has ever been created in the world. The more times that your business is being seen, the more likelihood that people will do business with you. So thank you very much for that bar. Let me just see if there's any final, final questions. You've got a chance for two good ones. I'm gonna let you put it in the Zoom chat, only the people in the Zoom, because we've got people asking questions on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, which was amazing. But Zoom, if you've got any final, final questions, this is your chance to, to do it. And I saw one from Matt and he put it in capital letters to get my attention. He knows how to get my attention. If you put things in capital letters. So pricing. Here's a question about pricing. Do you include cleaning or not include cleaning? And also discounting for direct booking. So what's like, how do you sort of work around that? Seeing that one of the indicators that Airbnb goes on is pricing, how are you sort of judging clean and seeing that they're making all of these changes behind the scenes?

So let me just rephrase the question. So I'm 100 sure I understand it. So When Airbnb incorporates pricing and you know, their, their output, which is search results, the question is do they include cleaning or don't they? Is that the question?

I think so. Again, it was very, it was like the actual question itself is maximum 10 words. So Matt put pricing in like capital letters, including cleaning or not including cleaning. And then it was discounting for direct bookings. So I guess we can just assume what the question is and go from there.

Okay. Airbnb looks at a total price. Yes. So they look at what's your average price actually of the last 30 days? And this will, this will fuel your rankings. If you for example, have an average price of the last 30 days of €200 or dollars and today you have 150, that's actually positive because Airbnb will, will highlight. Okay, this properties, is this property. There is something. This is lower than normal. So they will give you a boost but they look at the overall price, especially now with their new.

Here's a question. Are you obviously aware of what's happening with Airbnb? Hotels are going to be coming up on this, on the search in Q4 in the winter updates. Obviously you have come from the booking.com world, which is more hotels, which is obviously optimizer. This is what you do. How are you taking what Airbnb are doing potentially with search, bringing in hotel rooms into Airbnb, like what's your take on it from like your personal opinion on how you see and what you see Airbnb doing in Q4 or Q1 of 2026?

It will be interesting because you know Airbnb's algorithm is all about binary inventory booked or not booked. Well, where whereas rooms there are not binary. They have multi occupancy which will be interesting because if you get one booking, okay, you can get another. So if you have a good ranking or a good positioning, you will stay there, which is kind of unfair because you will be able to get more clicks, more reviews and so on. So I'm curious how Airbnb will tackle this. What I can share with you is how booking.com tab tackle this. So booking.com you know, was all about pursuing Airbnb stock. They wanted to get the short term rentals but issue they faced was those short term rentals, they couldn't compete with hotels in the search rankings because those hotels had way more prices they sent to booking, they had way more rate plans, they had way more pictures, they had way more rooms, way more reviews, yada yada yada. So what they did is they applied something which is called a short term rental boost. So when you go to booking.com, you could see hotels and short term rentals mixed in each other, which also created the situation where you had some apartments who got booked and then vanished from the rankings and so on. So my two cents is that they will look at how booking.com did it and try to do it better.

It's everything that is happening this year on Airbnb with all of the policy changes and now the fees making it really simple where by the end of this year where everybody will just be paying a flat rate of 15.5%. I feel that now when you sort of, when we look back at the end of this year, it's super obvious why they did this. Because they want to really put themselves as an OTA. They really want to put themselves alongside booking.com and they really, really, really want to eat into this hotel inventory and without absolutely destroying its original business model that made them so popular in the first place. So it's fascinating to see from, from, from all angles of what they, what they do Airbnb because obviously then the reason why we talk about them is because they are the biggest, right as biggest short term rental provider that is out there. They do a lot and they are affecting a lot of people. So really interesting. But any final words of wisdom that you would like to leave us with today? That domain is autorank.com you go there, you can reach out to bar on LinkedIn and all the good things. But any final words of wisdoms you'd like to share?

Yeah, don't underestimate distribution pricing, you know, it's, it's a trending topic. Dynamic pricing, revenue management. Everyone is talking about it and it's getting adopted. We see more Google searches to Price Labs and Wheelhouse than it is to any other pms. But don't forget distribution because you can have the perfect price. If your listing is unblockable or not to be seen, you're still nowhere. So don't forget distribution. Same go. The same analogy goes with direct bookings for, for you Mark as well or for all the boostly audience, you can have a perfect price. But if your direct booking engine just doesn't exist or is not optimized, you're still nowhere.

I feel like my main takeaways from today is a. You cannot just set and forget your listing on, on these OTAs. You need to have at least one different variation of your listing per season. So spring, summer, winter, autumn, and that's an easy One that you can go and do. Yes, you may have to splurge a little bit more on photo shoots, but it'll be worth it in the long run. B, you can't just have the same title, the same description, the same copy, you've got to amend it and adjust it according to suit. And the last one is go and open that calendar up as far as you possibly can into the, into the future and take advantage of those orphan days. Like those seem to be just a gold mine of extra money that you can, can have out there and obviously it'll make you more visible as well. So there's lots to get started with. Obviously this is all being powered in the back end by AI and algorithms that are way more clever of them than we will ever be. But I wanted to bring Barton because he's somebody that I've chatted to a lot over the last year, 18 months and he's impressed every single time. And I wanted to let him loose on the boostly audience, which I feel like you've just absolutely hit a home run and only 25 as well. Like last time we did one of these boot camps, we had Haley Marie Anderson coming from the States, 22, 23 year old, who's absolutely killing it over there. You've come in here and the, the youth, this Gen Z man, they're powering the future of this industry, which is awesome to see. So, but thank you so much. We've got lots of, lots of lovely comments in the zoom for everybody that's with us. Really good session today. We'll be back tomorrow at 6:00 clock talk. I'm going to be walking you through exactly how to set up chat GPT to run your business and your life in the best way possible. So where there's no annoying emojis and no annoying M dashes, but you can still really, really make it work for you. We'll be back tomorrow at 6, but thank you again. I'm gonna end it there. Thank you so much for tuning in.