How Data-Driven Marketing Turns Travelers Into Direct Bookings

Okay everybody, welcome. We are here with another episode. Uh, I've got the fantastic Amber Knight with me from Bookings Cloud. Amber, welcome. Uh, thank you very much for joining us. Excited to have a discussion today about marketing, which is always a, a popular topic on the podcast. But before we get going, uh, can you please let us know a little bit more about your journey, about Bookings Cloud, and what you'd like for the users and listeners today to get out of this episode of the podcast?

Um, yes, thank you so much for having me here. I'm excited to be here. Um, so I'm Amber Knight and I've been in this industry for probably, I think, 12 years now. So I've kind of done the full gamut of, uh, vacation rental property management and software. So I've done, uh, corporate development at Vacasa, um, LiveRes, and Inhabit. Launching revenue management services with, with Rented. Just so kind of working through a lot of that. And so right now, really what I'm excited to do is to kind of look at that next frontier of short-term rental management, which is driving demand, right? So essentially at Bookings Cloud, we're launching this business. We help vacation rental managers turn traveler demand into direct bookings by matching what guests are searching for with the exact properties that are ready to book, and then sending that traffic directly to the property detail page of the website.

Yeah. And who are the sort of the people that you normally work with? Where, where are they based? Like, what sort of portfolio do they have? A mix-up? How does— like, how would you describe, like, your ideal customer, and who would you say is, like, the most common one that's coming across your doors?

Yeah, um, I really— right now I really like— and this is going to be an interesting term, but I'm going to say the curious, open managers who are like, what is new in the space? How do I shift my business to, uh, the changing dynamics of, of, of the industry, right? Um, but definitely for sure, generally over 50 properties. But really what I'm looking for is, you know, are, are vacation managers that are profitable, that understand their unit economics well enough to know if they're profitable or not, which is not always the same thing, right? And that are looking for, I'm going to say, higher quality, quality portfolios that, you know, really looking at that managers are going past just the straight up unit count to revenue per property and profit per property. Um, so, and I know that's a big kind of vague answer, but I've seen really— I've seen large operators with high unit counts and low unit economics that don't always— they don't always have the bandwidth to be able to invest in something.

I've, um, I've chatted to a lot of people over the years, and the ones that say that they're data-driven, right? And I'm sure that you, you've seen this a lot. So they'll come up to you and go, Amber, you know, we're data-driven. But when you like look under the hood It literally is like occupancy and, and revenue. So when you plug in a portfolio into Bookings Cloud, say, for the first time, what would be 3 to 4 data points that would usually shock people? Like the things they've been completely overlooking, or, you know, even killing their potential for direct bookings. Like how— what would you say those 3 to 4 data points that you're like Wow.

Um, you know, a really interesting thing that I see right now is that we look at data, um, by booked data, right? So we're gonna say, how many bookings did you get last month? How many bookings did you get by booking source last month? Um, or, you know, or, and what do you want Pace to do? And most managers are looking at— they look a little bit about a booking pace, but they're really looking at How much money did I make last month? And how much money do I think I'm going to make next month? And not what am I putting on the books for the future? So that actually is one of the really surprising things for me that we look at is just the decisions that you make today so often are reactive of the— I didn't do as well as I thought last month. And so I want to fix my business based on how I did last month and not what can I— where am I today in building for the future on that booking page? So there's very, very few softwares I'm seeing that have, um, how many bookings did you do last month by booking source, right? How much money did you spend on OTAs last month in OTA fees? Very like in new bookings and not in like arrival dates, right? Because arrival dates, like, that's done. Those were booked months ago. Um, what can you do this month? Like, how much You know, right now, like, the conversations we're having with our clients are, how much did you book? Or like, how much did you book in June of last year? And how much better do you want to do this year? Right? Just that question. And what was your booking source dynamic last year? And how are you shifting it this year for this month? Right? Those are big conversations that we're just not having in this space.

Yes, they really are. And I feel like it always boils down to— I, I talk about reactive and proactive marketing, right? You've got your reactive marketing that, you know, is, uh, you just turn a listing on, on an OTA and you just wait for these bookings to come in like magic dust. And then you've got the proactive marketing. And like, can you speak to that? Like, the people that you speak to, and obviously that you really do dive into the data a lot, but when it comes to reactive and proactive marketing, what does that mean to you? And, you know, what's some of the stories that you can sort of share on, on on that? It could be like customers that you've worked with that you've sort of changed things around, or just people that you've seen, like your sort of viewpoint from the industry. Like, how would you speak to that?

Um, yes, it's a great question. Um, so one of the things I do see is that marketers, like established professional full-time marketers in short-term rental businesses, they will come in and they're used to being reactive, and they're used to working with revenue managers and the revenue management team in a reactive way where they're saying, hey, I've got this property that's underperforming and I need this weekend booked. Can you go book it for me? And then the marketers go and they try to book this property at a fire sale or whatever, and they're not even talking about the rates, but they're both working together on this reactive situation. So revenue managers are used to bringing marketers in at the end, right? And so, but really kind of what we're looking at is like, what happens if you can drive demand to your properties early when people who are looking for a very specific property and are willing to pay more for it see your property and you can book it at that longer booking window for a higher ADR and a longer length of stay. And that's really— it's a very underutilized section of marketing in, um, in the vacation rental space, and very few people are working on it from that perspective of let's use marketing to increase the revenue per booking and the quality of bookings we're getting instead of let's let's frantically put out a fire.

Yes, I totally, totally agree. And, and again, it's a massive misconception is like they're just doing marketing or proactive marketing just to like put out a fire or to get a property sold, where if you do it the right way, you can actually earn more, much more, if you do it proactively and do it the right way by using the data. Um, obviously you deal a lot with Meta ads, right? Uh, yes. I'm sure that over the time you've had a lot of people come to you and they're gone, listen, I've got a I've got a, a beautiful listing that's running a very run-of-the-mill Meta ad campaign. They could even be just hitting that boost button. So can you just walk us through a real example, like one of your favorite stories where you've took a portfolio that looked maybe good on the surface, but you plugged it into Bookings Cloud, made a few sort of changes, could be data-led changes, then it actually really moved the needle for you, talking about that you know, that ROAS, that return on ad spend, that direct bookings, etc. Have you got anything that comes, comes to mind?

Uh, yes, I have a great example. Um, first I do want to talk really quick about Meta and talk about kind of the differences of different ads. There's different ad types, right? One is organic social. This is you, you know, just writing a post, wanting likes, engagement, um, all shares, all of those things. Then there's boosting a post that you wrote organically, and that's, you know, a $50, $100 thing. This is still getting engagement on your, um, your main page of your, your Meta, like, Facebook page, right? Um, and then there's paid ads on Meta, and this is an entirely different beast, right? Because you're able to use Meta's, like, advantage, like, all of their algorithms that they have to say, how do I reach the people who are looking for what I need or I have, right? And so when you do that, you've it's an entirely different game, right? And this is— it's hard to do it right. Um, and one of the things that we see here that kind of shifts on this, um, is that you, you need a lot of data to do that, right? So we have a client in North Carolina in the US, and they were, you know, they understood enough about meta to know that it was— to do it right was very time-consuming. Right? How do you give Meta enough data and up-to-date data to refine the algorithm to send the right people to your website consistently, right? And to then to measure those bookings on the other side of it. And so when they found Bookings Cloud, they literally— it was like one of the— it's still a really kind of a rare occurrence for people to understand what the algorithms look like, how to help Meta build a custom audience for you instead of trying to tell them exactly who you want to book, um, and working through that. So they were fully on board. And so we connected to their property management software. We pulled all the amenity details, all the property details, all the photos, all the content, all of that data, um, you know, all their historical data, and really match that up with their website. And so that they can look at their website and, um, essentially train Meta on how to send people who are going to check out on their website, right, and create a booking, and then send that data back. So it's kind of this virtuous cycle of, of data to continuously send people who are looking for properties that look link there to their website. Um, you know, and they were, they were behind their markets, um, when they started with us. And in 6 months, they increased their RevPAR, um, so revenue per available, like, room night. Um, they increased that by $60 in a, in a year where their, um, the rest of the market went down by 17%. Wow, right? So that's what that looks like. You get in front of people early, you get in front of people at the right time, you end up becoming the most resilient operator in your market.

And yeah, yeah, I was going to say, it's so easy to go into— well, it's very easy to hit booster button, right? Because you're literally just— we pretty much just setting money on fire just, just to get a bit of awareness. But it's, it's so hard to do the bit that you just talked about. I guarantee maybe 90% of the people that, that are watching or listening to this have never gone into like Meta ads, the proper backend, because it is so confusing when you look at it for the first time. And this is where you really do need to work with a company, um, it's because if you do it well, it is like printing money, right? And if you do it wrong, you pretty much should be just setting that money on fire, just throwing out the window. And when you do have an agency that know custom audiences like inside out and backwards, that are always fighting your corner, it can work so ridiculously Well, and I've seen it so many times for our customers that, that use services like, like your good selves, and those that try and sort of scrappy do it together and it never sort of works. It, it is night and day. But my final question really is, not everyone can, you know, plug into a full marketing platform like Bookings Cloud. So for the people that are scrappy, whether they've got maybe 1 unit or 150 units, but are really serious about direct bookings and getting the most out of, um, I still think it's a massively under-tapped resource in our industry, which is, you know, Meta ads, paid ads to get people aware of your business. What could be like 3 actionable steps that you can recommend to them that they could do over the next 30 days to be more Bookings Cloud ready? So, you know, the data is like clean, reusable, and could potentially scale.

Um, yeah, I'm gonna say a couple things that you can do is the listing, your property detail page. Managers don't really look at that as like their proprietary data in an asset that they own, right? But it really is. And so you want to look at that property detail page on your website as the— as almost like a merchandising piece, right? Like, this is a page that represents all the work that I do to have a property ready, have it photographed, all the amenities, all the details. Like, you know, they even down to the really technical things of like, do you have enough chairs for the occupancy type situation, right, that everybody talks about? This is such an important piece of, um, of your, your infrastructure and your assets in your business. And so often we hand it off to like the most junior person on our team and it's an afterthought to rush and put it together. So make sure you have that listing page detail. Make sure you have your photos tagged. Like treat it like an asset and not like an afterthought is the first thing I'm going to say to do. And then the second thing I'm going to do, like Bookings Cloud and Meta and all of these search results, they're driving qualified traffic to your website. If they don't trust your website to book the property, they're not going to book it. Um, depending on the markets, we see 20 to 40% of the time people will click on one of our meta ads, they will go directly to the website. They don't trust the website for their, their booking for whatever reason, but they trust Airbnb. So they will go within 30 minutes and book on the Airbnb after running a quote on the main site. They don't care if it's more. And so get your website in order. I think you can speak to that pretty well.

I think we can help with that.

Yeah, trust, building trust on the website is absolutely critical and a strong guest experience because you can send all the traffic you want to a website, but if it's not converting, it doesn't matter.

Yeah. Oh, 110%, couldn't agree, couldn't agree more. You can spend all the money in the world, but if you're sending them to a page that isn't built to convert, then again, it's going back to the, um, going back to the, uh, you might as well set your money on fire sort of analogy as well. All right, very, very cool. So tell me a little bit more about Bookings Cloud. What does your 2026 look like? What are you— what are you hoping to achieve? Like, give us like the breakdown and anything you can reveal.

Yeah, um, I'm hoping to make sure that every vacation rental manager understands that guest acquisition is no longer an afterthought, and just fully handing it off to the OTAs as an easy button does not build a resilient business. Right? In all the changes that are going on and everything else, it's time for us to rebuild that guest acquisition muscle and start to work on that and invest in our own websites, our own traffic. And that, you know, unfortunately it costs money. A newsletter feels free, right? But that only gets you so far. And so really helping to understand like, what are the tools? How do we measure that? How do we help marketers better use data and the same data that the revenue managers and the owners of the business are using in order to, you know, make business decisions, right? So a lot of this is just awareness in that idea that, um, guest acquisition is worth investing in and it's worth spending time on. And that's— that awareness and that education is Booking Slots' main focus right now.

Nice. So where can they go to find out more? Say they listen to this, go, I want to find out more, where's the best place? Where's the— where would you like them to begin?

Um, absolutely. Go to bookingscloud.com, um, or you can email me. Uh, my email address is a.knight@bookingscloud.com.

Fantastic. And for those who want to find out more on social medias, follow on the journey, where, where do you like people to go? LinkedIn, Instagram, where would you like people to—

um, LinkedIn is great. I think that's a, it's a big piece of, of our space, and we are actively posting there. Um, we are, we're doing a lot of the conferences in the US this year, so, um, definitely definitely we will be there. And yeah, reach out to us. We'd love to have these conversations and really make sure that we're building a product that, um, short-term rental managers can use.

Amazing.

In their business, improve their business.

So this is May 2026. There's been a couple of conferences already. What's the plans for the rest of the year? Which conferences can people look to find you at?

Um, we are going to be at the VRMA for sure. Um, we'll be at the Streamline conference. And, um, I You know, uh, the Data and Revenue Management Conference. Nice.

So that's VRMA in Nashville. We'll be there as well. So looking forward to seeing you there. And lots of stuff happening, which is fantastic. Amber, thank you so much for today. Please everybody go and check out Bookings Cloud. And if any of this has related to you in any way, shape, or form, go ahead and book a call with the team and see how you can work together. That'd be fantastic. Doing lots of good work. Uh, I'm gonna thank you so much for coming by, and we'll see you on the next one.

Thank you so much.