This is a transcript excerpt from 'Boostly Podcast Season 8 Highlight' (YouTube, Aug 28, 2020) featuring host Mark Simpson and several guests discussing hospitality-business responses to COVID-19. Key themes: how to handle cancellations (offer credits/gift vouchers, phone outreach with honesty), retention and human-centered communication, pivoting marketing to capture direct bookings (email marketing, Facebook ads radius targeting, LinkedIn as a content platform), scale advantages of multi-unit operators for direct-booking marketing, protecting cash flow and engaging banks, and practical, actionable tips for short-term and longer-term lets during Q3–Q4. The tone is practical, peer-advice and cautiously opportunistic given pandemic constraints.
Chapters
Foreign. This is season eight, episode one episode two episode three episode four episode five episode 15 episode 42 final episode season eight 44 episodes in ever since the March 17th, we've been doing daily live videos on Facebook.
Good looking, let me tell you. Get more bookings. Oh, that'd be nice. Giving me tips, tools and advice.
We go through many, many, many different points tonight, including how to deal with cancellations, how to go about finding new bookings, how you can stay. Top of mind for when lockdowns get lifted in your area. Get ready for that upturn. I would contact them by phone call and make it personal. What I would be looking to do and what I would be looking to achieve on this is just be 100% honest, just be 100% vulnerable and just say, listen, you know, we're really looking forward to your stay. What I wanted to do is I wanted to offer you a credit and this is a credit. Call it a gift voucher, credit, whatever you want to call it, but you can put it to any time in 2020, 2021. You can use it whenever you deem fit.
Cancellations are not the end of the world. Retention is something that is possible and actually, you know, if we talk through a few of the skills that you need over the coming week, there are definitely ways that you can do this. And I think, you know, we have to remember at this time that humanity is a huge part of what we're currently seeing.
Can you just break down your how you saw it and what you think is going to be the plus side, especially from the world of hospitality on the back of what's being said?
I mean, I think the plus side is that it seems that Rishi Sunak's plan is to give us all the money, which we always like. The reality is that Q3 and Q4 life is going to change and it's going to look hopefully slightly more normal. And that means that people who've got events, people planned for Q3 and Q4 are probably not looking to cancel them yet. And that means for you as hospitality owners that actually you should be looking at LETS during that time. Short term accommodation lets it might be even long term depending on family conferences are going on in your area. And you can actually be looking at marketing that to businesses now because they will be experiencing some kind of financial relief to some degree depending on what they take up Right now.
If you're an Airbnb and you don't have an you have your empty, wouldn't it be nice if you could communicate directly with your past customers, say, hey, do you want to pre buy for the future? Or B, maybe you can actually offer them something else. Is there a physical product? Is there a food? Is there another, you know, another service that you can recommend? And so email marketing, what I found is I've been doing Internet business world for 20 years and I found that this is the only place and only way that you can communicate at scale with your audience. And so we've built with appsumo and an eight figure business just off of email. And so for me, I was on Mailchimp just like you, and I'm paying, you know, 3, 400, 500 bucks a month and it took me like an hour to create every email. And so I think the best way to run a business, the best way to run an Airbnb, is just make the Airbnb the way the one you'd want to go to.
Let's talk about another one of your hashtags. StrongerTogether.
One of the. And it really is back to getting direct bookings. And one of the reasons we are probably above averagely successful when I say that versus one person with one property. So one, if we take Glasgow, where.
We might have 64 units, it's kind.
Of the same market and budget and energy and resources to fill those units as one person with one property. So it makes sense for us to market when we have big. So the more properties we have on, the better. And my. I suppose the proposition is we would make you more money.
3, 4, 5, 6. Quick fire. Questions. Are you ready? Yes.
I don't do quickfire.
I'm just testing out my sound effects now. So number one, if you could be isolated with one celebrity on lockdown, with one celebrity, famous figure, who would it be?
That's a good shout. I wasn't going there, but when you mentioned United, I think as long as I could keep him safe and well and didn't make him ill, I probably would choose Ferguson. I wouldn't want to make him ill, but I'd love to sit. Imagine picking his brains for a month of isolation.
Jesus Christ.
You're doing some stuff.
Yeah, you're gonna get them, hon. You're gonna sit back, listen to Mark Simpson having a blast. Gonna get it on the Boosley podcast.
Wherever you are in the world and however you've been doing your marketing, whether you've been, again, heavily reliant on third parties or you've been actively looking to get your own bookings right now, then there's definitely a lot of things that you can be doing to be proactive on this. So number one, what you can do is if you are active on Facebook and particularly Facebook ads, one of the cool features of Facebook advertising is that you can set a ad radius. Now what does that mean in simple terms is that you can go onto Facebook and they give you a map and you can draw a big circle of 200 mile radius or 100 mile radius or a 50 mile radius around your property. You say, oh, you should check out LinkedIn. What do you think the biggest misconception is? When people talk about that platform, they.
Think that LinkedIn is just a place where you go to get a job or you sort of upload your CV to get a new job. And it's a fair, you know, understanding of it because that's what it started at. It started as somewhere where mainly for recruiters and people searching for jobs where you go and you get a job or you apply for jobs. Whereas now it's completely evolved into this sort of social media powerhouse. It's so much more than that. Now for some reason we get this mentality that LinkedIn's a business platform which is known for a B2B platform, but people get in this kind of corporate mentality where they need to be very stiff and have no personality.
All the things that you've learned over the years, you know, everything that you've done since then have achieved since. And if you could go back to that 21 and 2012 year old self and just give you that one bit of advice, what would that be?
I wasn't aware of this at the time, but I think I fell into really good timing and positioning. But follow the vacation rental path. In the early days it was just getting started. Now, even despite the fact that it has blown up, it's still at the very, very nascent stages. We have more tools at our disposal right now than any entrepreneur in history.
Let's get started. Where are you based? Based in Scotland. How many years have you been running the business for? 4? 6. Which of these best describe your property? Single rental property. Tell me about your business. What is your unique selling point? So again, it's remote luxury.
I used to speak on stages a lot, but now I'm not allowed to see anyone, so I don't speak on stages anymore. Until this. Well, I've now stopped calling it the coronavirus. I've called it the corona crisis because those things are new. Literally, it's killing business.
What is the one bit of advice that you could give to everybody that is watching right now who has got a business and they haven't called the bank manager, they haven't done anything with current loans or anything like that. What's the one bit of advice that you would say just go and do after this? You've listened to this. The first thing that they should be.
Doing, well, it's about protection of cash and making sure you've got something that you've got something to come back to. There is no point in just trading for the sake of trading if your income is turned off. Close your business down and look to.
Save the money that is watching these live videos you have got all of the marketing advice that you need. Now we've been doing this for six weeks. We've shared everything from how to save a cancellation, how to be proactive, how to post on content on social media. You know, we've had marketing advice about productivity, we've had finance, we've had everything.
