How to get started with Hostfully with a Boostly Academy Member

To celebrate the launch of the new sponsorship with Hostfully for the Boostly podcast, I wanted to record a quick video which just shows and explains a little bit more how it works. There's a couple of sides to Hostfully. One is the PMS and the channel manager and the integration. And the other side is where I'm going to focus on is the digital guidebook. Now I've explained in my podcast episode why I believe digital guidebooks are crucial for everybody in the short stay accommodation moving forward. But I just wanted to show you exactly what it looks like in action. Now I've reached out to a Boostly Academy member, Paula Butler from Cockington Cottages down in Torbay in the south of the uk and she's very kindly agreed to share her guidebook that she created for free with Hostfully to give you a better idea. And what I'm going to do when you stick around to watch the rest of this video, I'm going to show you how you can get started for free and get creating a guidebook that you can then share with your guests to increase their experience. All you need to do then to get started, go to hostfully.com forward/guidebooks. You'll come through to this page and what you're going to do is you're going to get started. So you're going to click on the sign up, you're going to fill in your details, you'll set your password. Once you have done all of that, you'll come into what is known as your dashboard and this is where you can get started. Now let me just quickly switch over to the finished product and this is what you can expect when you get a Hostfully guidebook. Now normally when you associate a guidebook, you associate something that is physical, something that you can hold. A digital guidebook is different because it is all on the Internet. It's something that someone can check on the phone or a computer or a tablet, but it can be accessible pre, during and post day. Now, as you can see here, this is what the guest will will see. So straight from the off you've got a map which is very prevalent on your screen. This map is full of local attractions and places that Paula and Leon have recommended for the guests to go to, whether it is the water park, steam train, national trust, etc. But the reason why this is good for the guest is that number one, when they arrive at the property, the first thing that I do, first thing my family does, and I know you will probably do the same, is you're just going to look for a place to eat. You know, when you're on holiday and you may not want to cook, then you'll want to look to eat out. And if you don't know the local recommended places to go, you, you look on TripAdvisor, you look on Google, but then do you trust the reviews on, on, on some of these websites sometimes, or is it really easy to find? But what thing that I've noticed over time and something that has really helped our reviews go through is that we've recommended our favorite places to go and our customer avatar, our ideal guests are who we want to be visiting with us. So I'm confident that who we recommend and where we recommend to go, local businesses, our guests will love to go. Now again, if you didn't have this section, then they would just go to the nearest chain, Nando's, you know, Pizza Hut, McDonald's, whatever, they'd go there. But the reason why we want them to come to our local area is that we want them to experience local businesses. So this section right here is fantastic because instantly the guests who are staying at Cockerton Cottages can find one of these great locations that they may not have heard about before. You know, Rose Cottage Tea Rooms. Would that little tea rooms be known to somebody visiting the area? I don't know. But now, thanks to this, they do now for you as well, you can start up relationships with these local businesses. You can go to the Rose Cottage Tea Rooms and say, hey, we get X amount of visitors come see us every year. We've put you into our guidebook. We'd love to recommend you. Is there anything that you can offer to our guests when they come and stay with you as an incentive? So again, it's a nice little way then of making sure that the guests can get a discount, the local businesses getting the money. And as well, it just all feeds in nicely to the book direct mantra that we keep and keep preaching. The reason why we want people to book direct is that there's more money staying into our local economy, more money that we can invest into our local economy. And again, it just, it's just all that sort of book direct shop local. So this is a large part of it. Places to recommend, things to do, places to see, places to shop. But also as well, a large part of it as well is arrival information. So where do they get the keys from? Is it a meet and greet facility? Is it somewhere where they have to pick up keys? Is it a key nest? You've got the house manual, so it could be WI fi codes, it could be things to see, places to do, how to do breakages, it could be smoking policies, etc. These are all crucial part of the guidebook and it even tells you what to do on departure. So my biggest bugbear in the past when I've stayed at rental properties is that I've walked in and say, we want to do a bit of cooking, but I haven't got a clue how to understand how to use the cooker because it's different from what I have at home. There may be a guidebook, there may be something lying around, but it's. Unless you know where to look, it's hard. So by having this and by making it really obvious that this is where all the information is stored, your guest experience is going to go through the roof and you're more likely to, number one, get that great review, but number two, you've got a talk trigger, something that will encourage them to say, hey, you know, I stayed at this place, these cottages in Torbay, and they had this amazing digital guidebook, something that we really loved and appreciated and again, they could just somebody it's doing something different from everybody else is doing and these are absolutely key to it. So you can actually go on to Hostfully now and you can get started for free. Your first guidebook is absolutely free. Now, if you've got two properties, three or four or five properties, and you want to add it, then obviously there's going to be a fee. That's their premium model. It's a paid service, but it still is so cheap in comparison to the others out there in the market. So I've used hostfully, I know Boostly Academy members have used Hostfully and it is super simple to get started started. Literally all you need to do is click on here, click the plus button and you can go in and you can start amending all of the details right here, right now in your Hostfully guidebook. Now, if you want to get started today and you want to subscribe to their premium model, if you want to get two months free for just watching this video, all you need to do is type in Boostly B O O S T L y the number 2M in the promo code section and you'll get two months free to just for being a Boostly member. Now, before I leave, what I would love for you to do right now is to go to Hostfully. You can go via boostly.co.uk guidebook. What you will do then is you will be able to get access to your one free guidebook. Just like Paul has done here. I want for you to get your link. So create a link. Create your guidebook and I want you to send it to me. I would love to see what you've created. I love to see really creative hostfully guidebooks. Please go ahead and do that. You can send it to markously.co.uk or you can send send it to me as a message on the Facebook, on the Instagram, the LinkedIn, or wherever you contact me. Most thank you so much for watching this video. I'm looking forward to seeing what you can create with Hostfully. And again, just thank you to the sponsors. Hostfully. It's amazing to be working with you and I look forward to working with you for many years to come.