This is a short YouTube interview (Boost hospitality podcast) where host Mark Simpson asks Chris Maughan (i-Prac) for the single best tip to increase direct bookings. Maughan's main recommendation is to "display credibility and confidence" — implemented via third-party verification and photo/web checks — and he explains how rental fraud (fake listings, reused owner photos) harms both guests and hosts.
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In your property, you will increase your direct bookings. Right now though, without further ado, I just wanted to quickly thank the Hostfully. They are our sponsor of the Boost hospitality podcast. Go check out more, go to booster.co.uk guidebook. You can then go to Hostfully and put get two months free when you put in Boostly 2. Without further ado, let's jump in and get on with the show. What is the one big tip that you would pass on to a hospitality owner when it's about getting more direct booking?
Simple. It's, you know, display credibility and confidence. If you haven't got that, then your conversion rates are just far too low. So credibility and confidence. So the only way really now is by giving all of your details just to a third party verification system and saying check me out and then show me a verification.
How can you increase direct bookings by showcasing trust and confidence. So as we sort of mentioned it then and I think a big problem at the moment if you anybody would be looking in the news articles. Over the past month to six weeks, Airbnb has been in the news a lot about rental fraud. And it, you know, it can work both ways, the guest and the host. So could you just take a few minutes to explain how it works both ways for the guest and for the host and how that fraud may harm their sort of experience.
Let me start with the consumer first. I mean the consumer, obviously they're booking properties through people they don't know. So whether it's from a booking platform or direct. So let's talk about direct. When you're booking somewhere, whether that you don't know, that's when the problem can come because you're paying in advance for a property that you don't know. So that's where the consumer can be affected because they just don't know if the property is going to be there when they arrive. They've created their own new fake listing which they will then throw onto somebody else's platform and start renting it out as a fraudulent listing. That's one of the reasons how we get with the verification process of photos. When we can Google verify where the photos are on the web, you can see whether and owners photographs are being used in various other listings and we can find out whether that owner is aware of that to know whether it's a fake listing or not. So there's a lot of, there's a lot goes on behind the scenes. But I think that's the main areas of where consumers and hosts can get, you know, can experience a level of fraud.
So I guess the next question is, like, what is the one most common mistake that you've seen? I mean, you've been doing this for a long time. You know, you've been property yourself and now you're doing eye practice to, you know, since. Since the middle of 2000s tens. What's the one mistake that you see accommodation owners make when they start to list their property online? And when it comes to.
