Convert OTA Bookings to Direct Bookings🚀

There's going to be a lot of people that are on the end of this that are really going to reassess partnership with booking.com, partnerships with the OTAs, partnerships with these third parties. Now, I'm not advocating leaving them, I'm not advocating getting rid of them off your platform, because at the end of the day, they spend so much money when all of this is over and the upturn is that they are going to spend and heavily invest so, so much money in ads and ad spend to getting people back onto their platform. You need to have a listing on there, you need to have a presence and an eye on there, because if not, then you will literally believe in money on the table. I am going to be massively stepping up how we can convert OTA bookings into direct bookings moving forward. This is what we have been doing this week and this is how we have been converting potential OTA cancellations into a direct booking. And it was something that Jessica Lorimer said on last Fridays and it was change, not cancer. Okay? When you get a potential cancellation coming, there's very little you can do, especially if this is dealing with an ota, but you get a bit more power if it is with a direct booking. What I like to do, if an email's come in or a potential cancellations come in, or even if you get that little notification to say booking.com guest is cancelled, we have got their details. The first thing that I'm doing is I'm picking the phone up, I'm giving them a call and the conversation is going along the lines of, hey, what I would love is that we could just change your booking. So instead of it being, say, next week, let's just change it to a date in the future as a gesture of our appreciation, is that we will give you a 10% reduction. And what we'll do is we'll book it directly with us. So you've got no fees to pay. If they've booked through Airbnb and we don't have to pay the commission to Airbnb, let's say we'll show appreciation, we'll give you that discount.