How STR Vendors are adapting to the world of AI

Welcome back to the Boosie Podcast. We are now well past 600 episodes, flying on to 700. Not bad for a podcast that is six years old. I just want to say thank you to everybody who's part of this journey and in this video, in this episode, you are going to find out all about AI, that big buzzword that everyone's talking about it now. I'm not just going to talk about Boostly. What I wanted to do is instead I wanted to go to the whole of the short term rental industry and find out how they're adapting to the world of AI. Because all of these vendors are going to be impacting you in some way, shape or form. And so I reached out to tons of my friends, I Jumped into the DMs, I jumped into the slack DMs, I sent text message and emails out to all of our partners, vendors, buddies in the industry and asked them the one question, how are they bringing in AI into their business? And you're going to hear from all of them in the course of the next few minutes. Before I do that though, please make sure that you find out more about AI Chat GPT. All you need to do if you want to get started, there's a real good resource, just go to boostly.co.uk forward/robot that'll take you to Facebook Messenger. Just tick the box and say you're happy to get a message and it will send you a Google Doc of all the latest news, what's going on, prompts to use and all that good stuff. But without further ado, let's go in and we're going to start with our first friend and vendor from the industry and they're going to explain how they are adapting to the world of AI.

Hi, this is Rafael, Marketing manager at ovonetwork. When it comes to AI. At overnight work, we saw a big opportunity to cut down on time spent when it comes to repetitive tasks. So we integrated ChatGPT into our systems in a way that allows us to deal with our guest reviews much more efficiently. And what that means is when a guest review comes in, ChatGPT will automatically correct the grammar mistakes and it will then translate the guest review into French or English depending on the original language. And this has greatly reduced any time spent on guest reviews by our account managers, which now allows them to deal with much more important matters.

Hello, Eduardo Mandri, co founder and CEO of Angel Host. So how do we use AI? How do we use ChatGPT in our day to day operations? From day one when we started this company, we always considered there would be two things that would allow us to remain competitive and to be a force of good for our clients. One of them was having the best technology and number two, having the best team. And when it comes to technology, we cannot ignore AI and we cannot ignore ChatGPT. It's something that from day one we have started incorporating into our day to day operations, for example, in the creation of listings or save replies. But more recently, we actually collaborated with another IT company in the creation of a new tool that allows us to respond faster and better to all the guest inquiries. Now we're not replacing our guest services team. Our guest services team is now powered by ChatGPT. We still need a human to make sure that whatever the AI engine is suggesting does make sense. That strikes the right tone and with the right answer.

With the rise of AI, one thing is clear to me. It won't be AI replacing people's jobs, but humans that use AI will replace the humans that don't. And that's because AI makes you 10 times more efficient. And the reality is, AI personalization has been used on us for over a decade. Think about your social media experiences, your Amazon. All of those customer journeys on every OTA are personalized to you or whoever's using it based on their purchasing power, preferences, affinities and so on. That way they're able to show everyone properties they like on their website, marketing and more. At Adaptive, we're democratizing this technology so smaller businesses have the same ability to level the playing field and personalize every customer journey, increasing the velocity of their current team to double their revenue without doubling their workforce.

Hi, my name is Francois and I'm the co founder and CEO of Enzo Connect. We're a guest experience platform for the vacation rental industry. We've been using different functions of AI since day one, including sentiment analysis, context analysis, and now of course, Chat GPT. So how does this work for Enzo Connect? Really simple. We've got, let's say three or four different verticals for AI. Sentiment analysis allows you to track the sentiment of your guests throughout the conversations you have. Context analysis allows you to categorize the types of conversations you're having so you can better predict the problems you might face. Chat gbt, well, you guessed it, a full indexing of your data so that we can predict the most accurate response. And then content generation, creating upsells, creating content for your guidebooks and anything else that you need to write, but embedded in your systems.

So one of the products that host fleet offers is the guidebooks which are to enhance the guest experience and service by providing all details about their stay from check in, checkout, parking, wi fi, where to go and eat, what to go and do. They can. You can upsell the. The manager can upsell and offer loads of features within the guidebook. And one of the ways we're adapting to AI and chat GPT is we now offer an AI planner so the guests can go in here, put in their details and it'll plan a trip for them. So you can put in many different details. They click plan the trip and here's an example. So it comes out with a lot of recommendations for the guests to go and do during their stay.

Hey there Svetlana from Journey here. What Journey currently is doing is something very unique. We've basically taken the concept of a traditional PMS and flipped it on its head. Not only have we built the first vertically integrated platform with direct access to the best in class providers for guest screening, guest communication, revenue management and housekeeping and maintenance who are true experts in their respective fields, but we've also taken a step further and launched an advanced AI assistant built on ChatGPT4. Essentially want to make our technology accessible to anyone out there. That's why we offer the first free PMS with direct integration to Airbnb backed by chatbots to help property managers to streamline their guest communication while improving operational efficiency.

Hi, I'm Markus from Hostaway. Hostaway was the first vacation rental PMS to implement ChatGPT. At the moment it reviews the descriptions and titles of properties and we plan to expand this into guest communication as soon as we're able to feed the data that's relevant to giving the answers. So far the industry hasn't seen much success in this. Turns out it's incredible, incredibly difficult giving right answer to a guest because the context matters and it seems like it's hard to know when which context to use. Guests have different expectations and the language they've used in asking previous questions will have to be analyzed in order to choose the right approach for the next answer. And that's something that we're working on to figure out right now. Stay tuned.

Hello everyone, how are you? My name is Miguel from Hunters United and Power Host. Since May, we've been starting to enjoy AI creating our first AI driven tool. Check my listing Here we analyze users, customers and potential customers for free. Their Airbnb provider profile. The AI will go into detail from your description, your reviews and your pictures, giving you personal recommendations for you to improve this improvement will mean one first ranking higher in Airbnb, two more bookings and three, an increase of revenue.

So, AI and the vacation rental industry I think the AI camp in general, but definitely in the vacation rental industry is split into multiple camps, both of which are extreme. One camp views it as a marketing gimmick, really doesn't help products. It's more jumping on the bandwagon and trying to boost your products with certain words or certain advertising campaigns. The other camp is also extreme in thinking that AI is going to solve all of the product problems, all the service problems, and kind of take over and replace all the interaction now that you have in vacation rental interfaces and channels and other things. I think really the answer lies in the middle and this is where owner Res is focused on AI and that is using AI to empower the communication piece between hosts and their guests. I think if you're a small or medium operator, there's definitely a need in after hours time or if you have another job or something else where you're not able to interact all the time with guests to step in and provide answers in a human relatable way where you can, where the AI piece can ingest and then send communication to the guest for things like amenities and rules or even with properties are available and what the pricing is that you can have a meaningful communication there, I think even at some point, probably on the phone. So that's the part that we're looking at and we're really interested in, I think the business operations side of AI where you actually book the dates and exchange credit card information, signing renter agreements, I think that's probably further off down the road, but definitely in terms of empowering communication, AI has a real future and some real potential here in the near future. So we look forward to working with it.

Hi everyone, it's Francois. I'm the CTO at Guest Ready. As some of you may know, we are both property manager and PMS editor with our all in one solution Rental Ready. So recently in Bordeaux we gathered all our product team together and we've run a small accatom on the AI topic and in particular how we can actually implement ChatGPT to help as much as possible our operation and improve our guest experience. Out of this Akato we have found and deployed four projects that we thought were the best use of this tool and the first one being automated answer that you can see here, assisted answer. So improving existing answer, correcting grammar, improving the tone to be more in line with the guest ready value, generating itineraries for our guests and generating dynamically SEO page. So lots of cool things, a lot of cool usage and we are looking to Deploy and use ChatGPT more and more in the future. Thank you.

I would say that Wheelhouse has been doing AI, not only doing it, but publishing our work for eight and a half years. So Wheelhouse builds a machine learning model to help people understand how to price their home perfectly. We actually publish all of our research. You can see here, this is a white paper. If we were to scroll through it and read it slowly, it would take more than 30 minutes to read. But we're going to tell you all the approaches we've learned to basically answer this incredibly interesting question of how should we price every unique home every single night based on whether it has a porch, pool, patio, wifi, park, pet parking, pet policy, et cetera. So I would say machine learning has been alive and well and therefore AI has been alive and well in Wheelhouse for eight plus years. Again, AI, large family, machine learning, a small component that's really good at big data sets. Now ChatGPT is a little different, right? It's a large language model, so it's usually used for designing chat interfaces so people can interact with systems and potentially data. How could Wheelhouse incorporate that? Obviously we could use it for sales or customer support. I think there are more interesting questions to be asked around revenue management. So for example, could we allow someone. Let's just go back to the calendar for a second. And here we're going to see a calendar with someone's listings. I'm going to load up about 50 listings here in a second, all their listings and you can see their listings here. You can see how their price recommendations scroll out in the future, wouldn't it be interesting to be able to ask a chatgpt like model, what five properties should I pay the most attention to? We think that'd be pretty cool.

We've integrated as a company chatgpt into elements of our back office. But I'm actually going to talk about ways that I've used it on a kind of a day to day basis. I use it as my sounding board. I kind of throw ideas at it and it obviously comes back. It's just a really good tool to just ideate and come up with ideas. Very useful in that way. It also helps me kind of proofread certain emails. So if I've written an email, I just want something to go through it and highlight things that we actually want to maybe emphasize on more. It's a really good tool. To do that. One thing that I've not tried extensively is that it seems to be able to do quite a good job at interpreting spreadsheet data. So if I take a property performance report, which is just a spreadsheet and slap it into ChatGPT, the formatting looks all wrong, but it actually does manage to kind of analyze the data and also interpret it by saying this is maybe, clearly the difference is here or there may be a problem here or here, which is obviously really quite useful. And then it also helps me schedule stuff like meeting agendas and things like that. So I provide a bit of context, talk about who the person is, talk about the goal of the meeting or the interview, and then the ChatGPT basically provides me with a full agenda, even specifying If I've got 15 minutes meeting or a 30 minute meeting. It just basically manages to stick to the time and highlights all the questions that I need to ask. And obviously you then to build on top of that. So yeah, I think it's good at saving time, I think it improves your accuracy, it streamlines decision making, and it's good at enhancing communication as well. And I think that the main point and the main takeaway that I'll kind of make here and emphasize here is I think that we need to look at it as a tool. It's not going to do things for you. I think it's going to help you do things in a more efficient manner. And that's what I'd encourage everyone to experiment with. Because at the end of the day, let's go back to the idea of diffusion of innovation and what are we right now? Are we early adopters or are we the early majority? Well, regardless, we need to get on this thing because it's happening. So pick up your phones, pick up your computers, talk to it, use it. I think you'll be surprised. You'll have some terrible surprises, but you'll also have some good ones.

So happy chatting, having a blast.

Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee Cuz it's so hard and the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.