How to increase your direct bookings with confidence with Chris Maughan (10 Minute Highlight)

Foreign. Season 7 Episode 13 and today I'm going to show you and talk to you about how by showing confidence then you will increase your direct bookings. Now, what does confidence mean? It's confidence in the guest that by booking directly with you that they are going to turn up to a property. There's been a lot of news over the course of the last sort of couple of months, Airbnb bookings that have gone wrong, people signing up and booking directly with a property that they think is going to be there. But after spending a lot of money realizing they're turning up to a fake listing, now I invited on Chris from iprac. He's the founder of iprac. He's been based in the south of France and he's been involved in the rental industry for nearly 20 years. In 2014, he will tell this story. He had a family rock up in Cannes in France, spent over £15,000 on a holiday on a booking for for it to be a fake. Now, with a heavily unregulated industry as the one that we're in, there needs to be something done about this. And Chris started IPRAC 2014 after that experience. And what he's trying to do is he's trying to create a platform for guests and hosts to have a safe place where people can make a booking, check that they're validated and and just have that peace at mind. He'll go on to talk about a lot of things in this episode, but I really want you to go and check out IPRAC www.ipracprac.com. go and check out the work that they're doing and if you're not yet involved, please do reach out to them, have a discussion and see if it's worthwhile you putting your property on their service and their website. I think that it's amazing the work that he's doing. We had a great chat and I'm really looking forward to seeing what he achieved over the next few years. He's got an ambitious goal that he'll tell you about and he'll also let you know how you can find out more about the work that he's doing and what IPAC are doing. Now, Chris is actually going to be speaking at the same event as me. In one month's time. We are going to be in London for the More Direct Bookings conference. You can go and check out more by checking out the show notes, but we're both going to be talking. I'm going to be doing a talk all about email marketing and how GDPR should not have scared you off from doing so. And obviously Chris is going to be talking about rental fraud and how by displaying confidence in your property, you'll increase your direct bookings. Right now though, without further ado, I just wanted to quickly thank the Hostfully. They are our sponsor of the Boost hospitality podcast. Go check out more, go to boostly.co.uk guidebook. You can then go to Hostfully and get two months free when you put in Boostly to him. Without further ado, let's jump in and get on with the show. What is the one big tip that you would pass on to a hospitality owner when it's about getting more direct?

Simple. It's, you know, display credibility and confidence. If you haven't got that, then your conversion rates are just far too low. So credibility and confidence. So the only way really now is by giving all of your details just to a third party verification system and saying check me out and then show me a verification.

How can you increase direct bookings by showcasing trust and confidence. So as we sort of mentioned it then and I think a big problem at the moment if you anybody would be looking in the news articles. Over the past month to six weeks Airbnb has been in the news a lot about rental fraud. And it, you know, it can work both ways, the guest and the host. So could you just take a few minutes to explain how it works both ways for the guest and for the host and how that fraud may harm their sort of experience.

Let me start with the consumer first. I mean the consumer, obviously they're booking properties through people they don't know. So whether it's from a booking platform or direct. So let's talk about direct. When you're booking somewhere, whether that you don't know, that's when the problem can come because you're paying in advance for a property that you don't know. So that's where the consumer can be affected because they just don't know if the property is going to be there when they arrive. They've created their own new fake listing which they will then throw onto somebody else's platform and start renting it out as a fraudulent listing. That's one of the reasons how we get with the verification process of photos. When we can Google verify where the photos are on the web, you can see whether and owners photographs are being used in various other listings and we can find out whether that owner is aware of that to know whether it's a fake listing or not. So there's a lot of there's a lot goes on behind the scenes. But I think that's the main areas of where consumers and hosts can get, you know, can experience a level of fraud.

So I guess the next question is like, what is the one most common mistake that you've seen? I mean, you've been doing this for a long time. You know, you've been property yourself and now you're doing eye practice since the middle of 2000s tens. What's the one mistake that you see accommodation owners make when they start to list their property online? And when it comes to what we're.

Talking about from property owner point of view, I think they think they're too eager to accept the booking. And I think that comes from a varial, you know, various points of view when I mean, listen, most people who are looking to rent their property, they're not doing it for the. Because they love it, you know, they're doing it for the incomes. Let's be honest. Some of them want to maximize their incomes and do as many rentals as possible. Some choose certain periods to minimise and just pay certain taxes and different things. But I think generally is that they tend to not do enough checks on whether these people are the right people. You have to cash the caution because checks just, you know, we all know the difference in checks. But the day you cash the caution is that's when you know that your client is serious about protecting your property and doing the right thing because they know the caution is going to come back at the end on checkout. So make sure you get the right documents and follow the point of making sure that they pay the caution.

Can you just explain a little bit more of exactly how I PRAC works and who and how it benefits from both the guest and for the host. So yeah, big chance here just to sort of delve into it.

I realized that something had to be done that could protect consumers from fraud. And the way to do that was by building an eye, building iTrack. But I mean it certainly wasn't overnight. You know, we had six months of research to find out whether there was anything on the market that was doing what we thought, what we planned to do. We certainly looked at the costings of it. How could it, what was the metrics of it, how could it be built, who would it benefit, how could it benefit? So there's a lot that went into that. And then when we came up with the platform, it turned into that we could protect consumers but also offer a platform for legitimate operators to show their credibility through the IPAC approval through the IPRAT logo and online verifications.

How does it work in terms of when the booking is made? So say somebody comes and finds it, makes a booking, booking goes off to the pms, the channel manager, the booking engine at. What part do IPRAC get involved in this? Part of the booking process?

One of the ways, because this was part of our development when we were building iprac, we had to find a way that could verify the booking. And when you go onto the IPRAC website, you will see there's a section on there which says register booking. When you go to that point on the page, you actually put in all of the details of the reservation that you have with that member and you put in the ID number of that member and register the booking. And when you register it, IPRAC receive a copy, the owner receives a copy directly and also the consumer receives a copy. And that booking then becomes guaranteed under the IPAC guarantee. So that's. But if you don't register the booking, then we can't do that.