Kevin Poneskis, who runs over 60 serviced accommodation units across the UK, explains why most hosts leave money on the table: they only list on Airbnb and ignore corporate guests. He targets business travelers who stay longer, uses meet-and-greet staff to identify them, then converts them to direct bookings through his website with discount codes.
Questions this video answers
Remembrance Day 2011
In excess of 60 SAs
£15
Swansea and Plymouth
Chapters
What it'd be interesting to know would be what are the common mistakes that you see a lot of your delegates or mentees make when they first get into sa? And particularly, let's try and focus this question around reaching out and getting new bookings.
People do not make as much money as they could make with their serviced accommodation properties, certainly, and that comes largely out of apathy. It comes out of laziness, taking it for granted. Take the bookings for granted and just putting them on Airbnb. Some people only do that. They don't even put it on booking.com, so you actually want to target the corporate guests because they're the people that are more likely to book for longer periods of time.
Boost Hospitality Podcast My name is Mark Simpson. I'm the founder of Boostly. Welcome to Season seven, Episode four and today we're going to be talking about how to get corporate bookings. You're going to learn all about the routine that Kevin Paneskis of the Property Soldier went through on how to get business bookings, but most importantly how to uncover how every booking that came in, whether it's from booking.com or Airbnb, was actually a business booking and how he then ensured that they came back, but not only came back, but how they came back directly. Kevin is a fantastic guy. He is doing amazing things with progressive property and his own brand, the Property Soldier. You're going to find out how he came out of the army with property already on his portfolio, how he turned that into serviced accommodation or short stay accommodation as I like to call it. And we're going to find out more about how he is future proof in his business moving forward. So sit back, relax, have a drink, have a cup of tea or if you're watching this while on the move this, then enjoy the latest episode of the Boostly podcast. Please make sure that you rate, review and subscribe so you can check out more. And as always, go to boostly.co.uk podcast to find out more. Okay, welcome to the Boostly Podcast. We are in season seven, we're in episode four and today we're going to be talking how to get those business bookings.
Sam. Yes, my background, why and how I got into property. Well, actually I joined the army aged 16 and I've been investing in property ever since I left the army aged 40. But because of the portfolio that I built I was able to leave the army with without the need to get a job, which is nice. And so I left on Remembrance Day 2011. So 111111 and I haven't had a job since. I'm now completely unemployable. More recently recent years, I'm focusing more on service accommodation than anything else. And I'm a trainer and a mentor for property, so I teach people how to invest in property and I mentor people too, and I partner with Progressive property to deliver the training and the mentoring.
So if you're wondering there what Kevin was mentioning when we're talking about the different types of properties and he mentioned that Service accommodation world. If you want to find out more, if you go to the boostlead.co.uk podcast, check out season six, because that whole series was dedicated to service accommodation. You can find out a bit more about that terminology, but this is a really good chance to chat about corporate bookings and business bookings. Prime focus on that is getting those corporate bookings. And that's what we're going to talk about today. What was the one bit of advice that you wish that you had received from your peers when you were getting started into this essay world with anything?
Go and get training. It's not simply a case of getting a property and just whacking it onto Airbnb. There's an awful lot more to it than that. Getting the right training and potentially having a mentor as well has always been fundamental to my success, and I notice it in the success of others as well.
What would be interesting to know would be what are the common mistakes you see a lot of your delegates or mentees make when they first get into sa? And particularly, let's try and focus this question around reaching out and getting new bookings.
People do not make as much money as they could make with their serviced accommodation properties, certainly. And that comes largely out of apathy. It comes out of laziness, taking it for granted. Take the bookings for granted and just putting them on Airbnb. Some people only do that. They don't even put it on booking.com so you actually want to target the corporate guests because they're the people that are more likely to book for longer periods of time.
I love that sort of the way that we go down. And have you got any success stories from your properties? We haven't really unraveled about how many properties that you have in the essay world and whatnot. But have you got any success stories from doing this method that you can think of? There's not a top of your head that you'd like to share with us about how you did that and what.
Were the benefits on the back of it? Well, in terms of getting direct bookings, yeah, we've had, you know, we've got properties scattered all over the country now, SA properties. So our main personal gold mine areas are Swansea and Plymouth in terms of sa, but with SA management with jv, with people all over the country now. So it's in excess of 60 SAs in total. That doesn't include our other properties in the portfolio. But the point I'm going to make here is that somebody. There's lots of work to be done with service accommodation. It's just you shouldn't be doing it. And so meet and greet, we pay £15 for somebody to go and do a meet and greet. The main people that do it are ex cleaners of ours. 15 quid is a lot of money for somebody that's used to scrubbing toilets for an hour and they're quite happy to go and sit in a lovely service accommodation unit with WI fi and the heating on and watching telly, waiting for someone to knock on the door or to send a text or to ring or what, because they need to be let in. Now what the meet and greet person then does is have the conversation with the guest. Why are you here? How long you here for? What's the contract? Oh, wow. Would you like to book for this direct from now on? Here is the website and here is the discount code that you can use to get the discount, etc.
Do you have a system and a structure set up in place where they report back to you after the meet and greet just to say, hey, so we've got a business guy who is.
Staying in the area, but they're looking.
To get more, or do you simply trust that person then to do the upsell, so to speak, and to get them to come back more?
So depending on the meet and greet person, some of them are more experienced and more skilled than others. So our main sort of meet and greet person, yes, she can do an awful lot. Otherwise if it's just one of her guys, they can just obviously let us know that what they've gleaned from the guest and then one of our team can just reach out.
So do you have the systems and structure in place then, Kevin, to recognize business bookings before they even arrive? Or are you gathering all of this information on the fly with the check.
In process, by the way, just in case any of your listeners or viewers are wondering what happens if the guest is arriving at a really unsociable time? Well, that's fine. In those circumstances you can issue the key code, access because you literally don't want someone doing it at 1, 2, 3 in the morning. Clearly, with Airbnb it's a lot easier because you're able to open dialogue with your guests with Airbnb a lot easier and quite often they will inquire to you and ask you questions. But yes, with Airbnb you can open dialogue with people and establish why they're coming, etc. That's core and so you know before they come that they're business. It could be quite often the PA to the MD or whoever in HR is tasked with booking accommodation for the team, for the contractors, etc. And often they're just using Airbnb as that platform in order to source essay. With booking. Com, it's a lot more of a sort of faceless transaction because people don't need to open up a dialogue, they can just book you direct. So with Airbnb you can be inquiries only, that sort of thing. Whereas with booking.com basically you just get told you've been booked and someone's come in.
