Hospitable: Can I Use A PMS For Direct Bookings?

Hey. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the new episode of the Boostly Podcast. Today I am really excited because we've got very special guest and often I see the question in Facebook groups all the time of what PMS should I go for? Or is there software that can help me automate and help me with guest communication when I'm taking direct bookings? And today we're going to dive into that subject. So settle in for the next 20 or 30 minutes and, and enjoy this one. So if this is your first time here, you're listening to the Boostly Podcast, the podcast that gives host the tools, the tactics, the training, and most importantly, the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings. Today I've got Andrew Shaw, he's the director of product there, and I'm excited to, to dive in today. So, Andrew, take it away. Please introduce what is hospitable and what does it do?

Yeah, so we're basically, I mean, we don't even like to call ourselves a pms, really. We're, I guess, a channel manager at pms. Sure. We started out mainly focused on messaging, so I think that's what people know us for best is the automated messaging. So we're pretty good at that. And then we do kind of everything else in that space. So operations, smart lock, automation. We say our mission is to gift hosts their time back. So basically that is our founding ethos, is to do everything we can to give hosts our time back. And then, yeah, I've been focused mainly on the direct booking side, like you mentioned, so we've got kind of unique offering there and then we've got some kind of secret projects cooking in the works as well.

That's cool. That's cool. And just to give people an idea of what those services are, as I know so many people listening understand, you know, what a PMS is and, and how it works, but there's so many people, again, who just don't understand that. So how does it really help the host? What kind of aspects does Hospitable cover? Yep.

So on, like, the channel management side, we're working with Airbnb, booking.com, vRBO. So we kind of help you just, you know, maintain your operations across different platforms. So that's, you know, it's. Some of it is content management, some of it is, you know, I want to have the same, you know, set up my greetings, my, my answers to frequently asked questions all in one place and not repeat those across, you know, every, every different platform. But yeah, I think, I think where we get unique in that aspect is we're targeted at the smaller scale host generally and we have hosts with over a thousand properties. But our, our secret sauce is mainly focusing on hosts that are just getting started out on their journey. They may never become a property manager. I think our average host size is like 2 1/2 free properties. Most of them are owners, not operators in that sense. And so we make different decisions, we try and be unique, we try and do things just a little bit differently in the industry, which I think generally focuses on the property manager side. So we do, yeah, little touches. I think we're very easy to use and we have to be affordable at that range. So I think a lot of hosts appreciate that. We start out pretty affordable.

That's really cool. And often when I see people in groups, their question is what is the best pms? And that always is a question that worries me because everyone just puts down what they use. And of course some of these people might be property managers of hundreds of properties which, you know, they've got some of the softwares which cost a lot. Whereas if you're a host and you're just thinking about diving into software or you've got a few properties, then this is a great way to get started, isn't it? And Boostly have partnered with you guys for the website side of things, which it works really well, doesn't it, with you guys having the. All the guest messaging, the kind of managing the book inside and then the website which can come through the Boostie website, which is cool. What would you say has been the biggest win so far for Hospitable? For Hospitable as a company, we've had.

A pretty long history. I've only been here for just actually just coming up a few days away from a year with Hospitable myself. And yeah, thinking back through the history of it, one of the recent ones, I don't know if I can speak for the entire history we did, despite what you might see on LinkedIn from other people, we had the first ChatGPT implementation in the industry. So that is something where I think we were early on AI, even before the ChatGPT wave and did a really good job automating messaging. And now we have something that was just wildly popular with our host is you can just reply in the inbox on any channel and we'll generate it. And I think over 50% of those messages get sent without any editing. And that was just like the V1 for us of AI in the Inbox. And We've got all kinds of different improvements coming to that. I think it's going to enable us to do some really interesting things. And especially going back to, you know, our focus on giving hosts their time back, we're trying to do zero setup, like really use AI to get to, you know, where you don't have to set up any of these features for them to work. And that fits also. Yeah, targeting you know, small hosts that don't have a lot of time and maybe aren't professionals at this. It really fits with, with our mission.

And the AI side of things is just blowing up at the moment, isn't it? I mean, as we record this, this August 2023, it's really, you know, there's, there's a lot of people come up with different AI kind of features, but sometimes you see features which are great, they don't necessarily save people time, whereas what you've got there is something which ultimately is going to save people a lot of time. Because that guest communication side of thing just takes up so much time. There's nothing worse than a lot of the hosts who will be listening to this will understand the pain of, you know, eating their dinner and they get messages from guests or things coming in and just having that quick speed response is, is fantastic. When it comes down to the guest experience, how does it help get a five star review from say, a guest? What is the difference from a guest's point of view? Does a guest know that the host has got this software connected at all?

Yeah, we try and make it as natural sounding as possible. Right. And I think generally a normal reservation, you're going to have a mix of both automated and personalized communication coming from the host. But yeah, our founding pain point was that the anxiety you get as a host when you know, you want to be fast to respond and you might be out with, you know, at a movie with your partner and you're still checking your phone, you know, during the movie, you can never get away from that. So that, that anxiety was very real for our founder, Pierre, not me. And we just went from there. So we started expanding from there. And how do we, how do we really give the quality of life back to the host? And that does get you five star reviews. And so, you know, you, you can iterate on, they kind of become your sops as, as a host, you know, you, you kind of iterate on what are the questions I'm getting, you're improving your answers to those questions as you go. And I think the guests can recognize that and appreciate that. And then you're automating things that, you know, the platforms the OTAs are judging you on. So, you know, we help you automate your reviews so you make sure, you know, you're giving out good sounding and yet automated reviews for every guest. Unless you say, okay, this is a bad guest and we'll do a little bad review feature that you can actually, you know, mark up during this day and that'll go out in like the last 30 seconds of that, of that booking window on the OTA. So you're not going to get, you know, a retaliatory review in case the guest sees that and is reminded, oh, they want to submit a review too. So this is kind of the fun things that we've done.

This is one of the things which a lot of hosts talk to us about when they come to Boostly. They say, you know, I understand I can set up automated messages on Airbnb, but how do I do it? How do I manage that entire aspect when I'm getting direct bookings? And this at that stage they start to understand the power of piece of tech, piece of software, like hospitable, isn't it? Because they can really see how much easier it makes the journey for everybody coming to their business.

If you're struggling on how to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start, then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boostly and our team right now. We can walk you through exactly what we're offering, how we can help you and give you a portfolio of websites that we have worked with that are matching not only your niche, but could be in your location as well. Boostly has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world increase their direct bookings. And if you are interested, then all you need to do is go to Boostly. B O O s t l y.co.uk call and book in an appointment with one of our sales team.

What are some of the things. I know you guys have gone through a bit of a change recently. What are some of the new features and the new changes or the things that you're excited about coming along?

Yeah, so I just, just dovetailing on your point about making it easy to start. I think that also fits in with how we work with Boostly. I think you guys are kind of more of the advanced option in this space for, for like direct booking sites. Right? We make it as easy as possible to spin up, you know, just a starter site to get you started to start experimenting because again, we're we're at that smaller scale host end of the marketplace where you might not be taking direct bookings currently and you just want to get started. And that's where we'll just, we'll take all of that content that already exists and you've already spread across your other OTA channels and we'll, we'll help you spin up a business in 15, 20 minutes flat. And then as you get good at that business, then you start to invest in more advanced tools like Boostly and can start to really grow a proper business out of it. But that's the side I'm on, on the direct booking. So that's normally what I get excited about, is just what we're working on. So we just rolled out promo codes. That was one of our most requested features. I think the direct stuff that we're doing, the direct booking stuff is still a pretty nascent product. I joined the company basically to get that to market and I was just floored again, going back to like the, we make unique decisions, we try to be different. We wanted to take a different tack with direct booking and kind of be a hybrid. And I think what we saw in the marketplace was a whole bunch of what we have as our direct basic offering, which is we're going to give you a site and we're going to plug in payment processing to it. And we said, hold on, there's actually a lot of things the OTAs do that are interesting. And that was where we kind of came up with, okay, let's, let's try not, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let's keep some of the risk management things. And so that's why we are the merchant of record for our direct premium offering, which means we're protecting you from chargebacks, which is actually what I spent a good deal of my time on lately, as that's, that's a whole interesting topic in itself. But then, yeah, giving you, you know, guest vetting protection, integrated, built into the product for every reservation, giving you $5 million of damage protection with every direct booking reservation. Again, that really makes it easy for a newer host to experiment with these things where they might have some anxiety about, you know, opening up their home and, and not having Airbnb or Booking.com's protections in place as well. We're going to meet you kind of halfway with this hybrid option.

I think you've hit the nail on the head there, that that is the number one thing that people, other than how much extra money can I earn from Direct bookings is. The next thing is, well, what is the protection like? And of course, you know, when you're getting the benefit of the direct booking, you are losing the air cover or the perceived benefits of some of that air cover. Whereas when you've got direct bookings, there's several ways to be able to protect and also, you know, verify guests and things like that, which is amazing. So that's amazing that you're looking to build it. And you mentioned chargebacks for people listening who might not know what a chargeback is. What is a chargeback and how does hospitable help with that?

Yeah, I think I would have included myself and that audience of not knowing much about it about 60 days ago. Yeah, we just started getting ours in and man, it's a learning experience. And I can't imagine going through that as a small scale host. You know, these guys are sophisticated. We're seeing chargebacks for fraud. And, you know, we're working with a payment processor, massive payment processor. And like, the fraud scores on a chargeback are minimal. So like you have like out of 100, it's a blocked charge from a credit card. We're seeing like 20, 20 fraud scores, like, very, very clean. They pass through guest vetting, they pass through this, and we're still getting it. It's a stolen card or it's an unauthorized card. And so we're evolving to that. But all along the way, our stance is that as the merchant of record, that's our chargeback, it's not our host. So our hosts get paid out. I'm dealing right now. We had, I guess, a ring of them that just did three chargebacks, about $6,500 across two different hosts. That's us. We ate that. That's a learning lesson from us. We keep expanding and growing. Our hosts don't even know that this ever went to chargeback, so they got paid all the same. And then again, put yourself in the shoes of that small scale host that just took a big booking. They were all excited. And then, you know, a week after they check out, you get a notification from that from the credit card company that you now have to defend the ability to actually get this payment that you thought was all locked up because that was a stolen credit card. And you know, we're using all kinds of different sophisticated tools and they're still getting through. And so no matter how good you think you are about this, you're going to be losing thousands of dollars on bookings that you thought were already bankable. And you've got this 90 day chargeback window. And that's again, Pierre talks about this. Our founder, he said, happiest day was, you know, when we got the first chargeback. And we said, look at how valuable this is for a host. Yeah, you know, sucks losing a few thousand dollars, but we can stomach that aggregated across our entire direct booking business. If you're a single host, that might be your last direct booking that you're willing to take and you're out of the business. And you say, I'm just going to stick with Airbnb.

That's really cool and a testament to Hospitable for, you know, doing the, the awesome thing there and still paying out the host and taking it as a learning curve. There are ways like you can protect, but ultimately business comes with risk, doesn't it? You know, like any. So it's an interesting topic and one that we could definitely dive over into. What I'd love to know, Andrew, is what would be your top tip for hosts? A lot of people listen to the Boostly podcast to get direct bookings. What would be your top tip for hosts to help with their direct bookings?

There's such a, such a plethora to pull from and I don't know if I can improve a lot on, you know, what I hear Mark talking about, you guys are such great thought leaders in this space. But I mean, my tip, I guess, would come from just working with startups generally and saying that, you know, don't think that direct booking is this binary thing where you have to get all your ducks in a row to even get started. I think what we try and do and what you should do as a host, regardless of whether you're using Hospitable is, is just get started because it's a learning curve for you as a host as well, and you want to build up that business. And obviously I've talked about kind of the founding pain point of Hospitable, but the founding pain point of Direct was Covid. And I think a lot of hosts in this community realized that they weren't really in charge of their business and they, they lost a lot of their autonomy and how they operate their business. And that's the kind of the spirit of direct booking is that. And so I think everybody should get started and it's not expensive to get started. So my, my tip would be, you know, get started as fast as you can. Make sure, you know, you've got some protections in place. There are, there are a few things to do. So do do your due diligence, but don't, don't make it like a 2025 project or a 2024 Q3 project to launch my direct booking. You can get started in a week if you want to, and you're going to learn a lot more doing that than you are trying to bundle it all together in this big, far off project that maybe never gets off the ground.

Fantastic advice and I fully agree with get started Now. And it is my, again, just my thoughts, my theory, but I think people who aren't getting involved in direct bookings and are kind of, you know, sort of closing their ears to any opportunity for direct book, and I think they may get left behind as more and more hosts get used to taking direct.

Bookings on the guests. The guests get used to it too. Right. You know, you find all the guests that you know are just savvy, that I recognize, they got a brand that they're showing or they had a name in the photo. I know they've got a direct booking site, they're going to come find you.

And we found a one, the website hi chi.co.uk or hygie.com where it actually compares the Airbnb prices and that searches out the direct booking price and things like that. So the more hosts who have that guest, they're getting savvy to this and so they'll be searching for what is your direct book and price. They know they can save money. You as a host make more as well, which is awesome.

Yeah, we're thinking about even adding that to our direct booking sites that you can just put on a book on Airbnb, button on there and show the price and we're fine. If you want to go book on Airbnb, fine.

You want to pay more. Does your service, does it allow a markup? If there is on Airbnb, does that, does that mark it up for that?

Yeah, so we, we, we encourage our hosts to do markups because it allows your customers to do the most fair price shopping. So what we do with like on the direct premium, we don't take anything from your payout. So everything is, is kind of front loaded as if your payment processing fees are there kind of your, your risk management kind of fees for the guest vetting, the insurance, those all are a guest service fee. You get 100% of your payout. Airbnb is going to take 3%. The other, you know, the other OTAs are going to take their percent. So we encourage you to, for Airbnb, in that example, add 3% markup to your base price. And that's the most fair price comparison then is that you know your payouts are equalized across all your OTAs. So you don't care actually what channel is your guest is just going to pay less if they book with you through through Direct.

Nice. Nice. Yeah, that's, that's an interesting concept, isn't it? I know everybody's interested in knowing what, what to mark up and how to do it, so it's great to get that feedback.

Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two mostly books that we brought out, the book Direct Playbook and the book Direct Blueprint, are two of the top rated and the best selling in the hospitality category on Amazon for just two pounds. You can grab both of those books right now. The foundations and the structures that you need to put in place is in the Blueprint and then for 101 marketing tactics, that is in the Playbook. So go and grab a copy on Amazon. Now just type in Book Direct Playbook or the Book Direct Blueprint and we'll see you on the other side.

One of the things I often see people ask is when they're looking to softwares, they're wondering about the support, the aftercare and all of that stuff. Now, I know you guys have got an awesome Facebook community and awesome support going on, but can you talk us through what that looks like after somebody's signed up? So if somebody's listening to this thinking, do you know what? I'm on Airbnb, I'm on vrbo and I'm thinking, let's take the plunge, let's go and check out Hospitable. First of all, can they come and have a demonstration with you guys? And then what does it look like once they're signed up, what is the support like?

Yeah, so we do a two week free trial and during that time you are treated as a customer. As far as support goes, we do group demos every week. When everything is, as a startup, everything is in flux and changing. Like we're actually improving that program right now. We went from, I think two salespeople to five. And the primary focus of that was to do a better job having kind of, you know, implementation onboarding on Direct. I just hired my own support team so we can help onboard hosts, specifically direct bookings. We kind of have a specialized team for that. So if you have questions, you know, getting your site set up, getting your, your payments set up, going through the KYC process, you do getting, getting that set up, we've got specialized team during your working hours ready to take you on. I think half our company, a little over half our company now with support. That was something that if, if we do have hospitable customers listening, we did have a tough time. I think the beginning part of this year we lost some people and we were not meeting our goals and we went through a process. I think we hired probably 12, 15 people over this year to really build up that because we, yeah, support is important and our customers tell us that. I think one of the things that, that attracted me to joining hospital in the first place was how transparent and open we are. We have town halls every two weeks. If you're not happy with us, you can get on our live stream and you can complain to us and we'll listen and we'll hear you. And that was something that we kind of taken a task for, was our support. Times were slowing down and we fixed it. So it's, it's back. I think we're averaging an hour, hour response time on, on live chat, which is pretty good when you're looking at a product that starts about 40 bucks a month to use. So, you know, support's expensive but we're happy to pay for it.

That's amazing. And Andrew, what was your history? You've, you've joined obviously hospital a year ago. What did you do before this? What was life like before Hospitable?

Yeah, I have to give you the short version. I, I, I'm American. I spent 15 years of my adult life in China. Some companies over there. And I didn't even realize how aligned they were with Hospitable when I left. So I, my wife is Italian and we wanted to get out. After 15 years I was, I was ready to go and we relocated to Italy. And yeah, then Covid hit and then I was like, okay, well this is going to be tough to run businesses, you know, in China, from Italy during COVID So I kind of wound myself out of those businesses. I was like, okay, I haven't had a boss ever. So started looking for companies where I thought that kind of autonomy and ownership would still be respected. And that was the primary concern I had. And then I wanted to learn from a boss that was doing, doing a good job, company culture with, with building a team. And so yeah, Hospitable attracted me. That and yeah, I had been in hotel software and kind of messaging, AI space and didn't even realize what a dovetail that was with what Hospitable was doing. They actually had to Tell me. Oh yeah, and your previous company too also like, oh yeah, not even mention it. This is a good fit. And yeah, that was, that was a year ago I jo joined and it's been great. I still don't feel like I have a boss. So it's a, it's a great company to work for.

Amazing. Amazing.

We've.

Before we share the details of how people can get in touch with yourself in Hospitable, is there any other things you want to share around Hospitable or any other advice you want to leave the, the listeners with?

I did tease a secret project, so I should probably mention that.

Yes.

And we don't, we don't keep anything under wraps really. I mean, yeah, we'll, we'll tell you how much revenue we're making if you join a town hall, our salaries published on our website. But yeah, one of the other things that I'm super excited about is we do have kind of a secret R and D project that's coming out which is basically, it's now called Platform. We're starting to basically have a vendor product that will eventually morph into some kind of a marketplace. And yeah, right now it's kind of more on the B2B side of it. But the goal again, going back to our mission to target the smaller scale hosts. There's a lot of the software industry that they're underserved by. If you're not using a PMS that is integrated with a tool that you want to use for whatever niche use case, you know, if your, your finances, your back office, your cleaners, you know, if they're not integrated with the PMS you're using, you can't use them as a small scale host. Right. Or if they don't have the PMS integration you're using. So we're trying to basically do a run around on that and say, okay, as a small scale host, I want to be able to connect instantly to any service I want to with my account. And so we're trying to kind of build that secret, secret sauce in the background right now with a whole bunch of vendors and then eventually have a marketplace that, that no longer needs to.

Yeah.

And on the vendor side, we no longer ask the vendors to integrate with 15 different PMSs as a go to market strategy. We'll give them a way to just cut straight to the chase and be able to onboard their customers and not have so many users fall out of the funnel when they, when they go to the, go to the vendor and realize that they can't use them.

Awesome. Well, listeners, you heard it here first. You know the secret project, the cat's out of the bag. And watch this space. That's going to be amazing, Andrew. And I'm excited for, for you and for Hospitable. That's, that's going to be awesome. So just before we share those details, a couple of fun questions. Where do you like to travel to? Where is the number one holiday destination that either you've been to or somewhere that you'd love to visit?

Well, I live in Florence, Italy, so I'm kind of spoiled for small villages to travel to, but I just got, just got back from Ireland and the uk which was lovely. The, the wife wanted to see some shows. She's a, she's like a London theater person. So that was a great trip. Dublin.

Dublin. Oh, excellent. So if we've got any Dublin people listening, then let us know. Andrew's Andrew, any deals in Dublin, send them to him on LinkedIn.

It was, it was, it was really out of a trip of necessity to escape the heat here. Things have gotten really bad.

Dublin is lovely. I've been a couple of times. So what would be your karaoke song of choice? That question seems to flow off the back of the last destination.

And since I'm half Chinese, given how much time I spent there, I've spent a lot of time in karaoke bars. I mean, it's a bit trite, but I'm a sucker for Piano man, which usually clears out the room.

So, yeah, Billy Joel. Classic. Okay, so let's give the listeners the answer on how they can get in touch. What's the ways to do so where's best to come and follow you?

Yeah, so we're, we're@hospitable.com. we're on all the channels, pretty active on Instagram and definitely on YouTube as well. We're sharing lots of, lots of great content to help host out.

Amazing. Okay, cool. And we'll put the links around this somewhere around this either in the comments if you're watching on Facebook or YouTube or in the show notes if you're listening to this on the Boostly podcast. And that leaves us with the, the last question. What mantra or motto would you live by?

I might, I might have to stick Italian here then. I'm a Machiavelli kind of guy, so I guess it works as a business quote. But yeah, follow the path trotted by great men. If you do not achieve it, you will at least, you know, have some taste of it. So maybe these get updated to be gender neutral in that sense. But yeah, follow the path of great people. Even if you do not attain to their greatness, you will get some tinge of it.

Amazing sentiment. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. Maybe one day we should put all of these quotes because it's a question we ask everybody. We should put all these together in one, one big long sort of podcast. That would be quite insightful. So thank you, Andrew, for your time today and for sharing Hospitable with us. I'm sure there's going to be lots of people who reach out. And thank you again. If you're watching on the Live or listening on the Boostly podcast, we know there's lots of places you can put your attention. We really thank you for putting it with us. We hope off the back of this, you go and investigate Hospitable, you go and get some more direct bookings and ultimately you push your business forward. So thank you very much. And that's it from me. And thank you to Andrew. Bye for now.

Thank you. Bye, everyone.