Boostly - The story so far....

Hi, my name is Mark Simpson and I give hosts all over the world the tools, the tactics, the training, but most importantly, the confidence to go increase their direct bookings and cut down on their over reliance on the OTAs. I'm very fortunate that I've been able to help over 1,000 hosts make a difference to their hospitality business. But what I wanted to do in this short video is rewind show you exactly how I got to here. In the 90s, my parents decided to transform their 200 acre farm into a four bed and breakfast property. I loved it. I was able to grow up with people all around. There was always somebody to play with. And also as well, I was able to grow up in an environment where I was living and breathing hospitality. I was serving on people at breakfast, I was helping people check in, I was helping change the beds and doing all of the other tasks in between. However, growing up I wanted to do one thing and that was escape. I wanted to go and travel the world and I was very fortunate to apply to do soccer coaching in America and I got the job. In 2002, I dropped out of college and I jumped on a plane and I went into Tennessee, America. That was the start of what became my new obsession. Every year for the next six years, I went and traveled through every state in America, coaching soccer, meeting new people and making friends for life. Towards the end of my time in America, my best friend was finishing university and he wanted to go traveling. We both booked a one way ticket to Bangkok, Thailand and that began two years of extended traveling all around Asia and Australasia. In Australia we ran out of money and we had to work in hospitality to basically pay our way. After Australia, we did a little bit more traveling, but in 2009 we ended up back in England and most importantly, we decided to not stay in Scarborough. We went down to London. It was in London that I fell into a job working for quite a quite, which was later acquired by Yelp, was one of the biggest review websites in the world. And that is where I learned my marketing background. I was there as a sales role, but I spent so much time in the marketing department, seeing what they were doing, how they were working and learning all Things Social media, TripAdvisor, Google, you name it, I totally geeked out on it. This is my new obsession. In 2013, my parents asked me and my wife and my eldest son Alfie to move back to the farm. They needed help by bringing in new blood into the business to help get it into the 21st century and getting it Online I applied the tactics and the training I had learnt down in London into the Grainery family business in under two years. What we were able to do is to grow the online presence of the granary so much that we had become the largest independent followed business on Facebook. We have become a top three category on TripAdvisor and our direct bookings and our online visibility had gone through the roof. In 2016 I started to help other hosts in the areas increase their direct bookings. I was working on a one on one basis to help them navigate through social media, online travel agents, their websites, email marketing and much more. As I was doing this, I created the Hospitality Community Facebook group. I'll be perfectly honest, when I created this I thought it was going to be just for Scarborough and Whitby businesses. But just like with anything that is popular, word of mouth spread. We had people apply from York, from Edinburgh, from Newcastle, from Manchester and before we knew it we had people coming in from further afield. France, Germany, America, Australia. Everybody was wanting to join. In 2017, after answering loads of questions every single day, sharing tactics and knowledge with posts from all over the world, I decided to do something about it. I started to create training videos, training videos on YouTube, on Google, email marketing, Facebook, Instagram, you name it. I created a tutorial video for it. I uploaded it to a training website and I asked a couple of the hosts for from the hospitality community if they would like to test it for me to see if it would help them in their business. Five people put their hand up and those are the first ever members of the Boostly Academy. Fast forward now and we have become the biggest online training platform for hospitality businesses in the world. We have over 600 members in the Boostly Academy and I am thrilled and excited on a daily basis to be able to help hospitality businesses increase their direct bookings and cut down on the over reliance of the hospitality community. We've also created Boostly Website where we create websites that are built for mobile phones first that have been structured and styled to increase direct bookings and get more heads on beds and also as well on the back of members requesting this. We have also created Boostly Content Creator. This is where we will create for you every single month your social media content for you as well as email templates and videos that you can just copy, paste, personalize and post so you don't have to worry about creating content for your social media channels every single day. My big goal is to make the OTA stand up and take notice of the little guys. I want them to start treating us more like partners like they say they are. I want them to decrease their commission costs and I also want them to share more data with us, the host. To do that, we need to make a stand. We need to make a difference. So this is my plea to you. If you want to increase your direct bookings, if you want to feel like you can get more control back in your business and start welcoming the guests that you want to see come through your door, then please join the book Direct Movement. You can get started today by by downloading my free five step guide on how you can get more direct bookings. Please go and download the guide by going to boostle.co uk. Five tips join the movement, Join the community and together we can make a difference.