How to Make the Most of Direct Bookings

I'm here with Mark of Boostly. Boostly specializes in direct bookings, which means outside of the platforms, outside of booking, outside of Airbnb. I met Mark at this point. It was pre pandemic. So at least three years ago we, we met in Bali and we were helping a resort kind of do direct. He was helping them do direct bookings, I was helping them on Airbnb. We had a week stay for free or something. And so I want to introduce Mark here, let him speak a little bit and then what we're going to do is I'm going to take you, the viewer, on a journey through the direct booking process. As I've experienced, it started with Airbnb. Direct booking interests me. I started doing direct booking. I've made a bunch of mistakes. I have a bunch of questions and Mark, is it too much to call you the best in the world at direct bookings at this point?

I'd say one of. I'd say one of. I would never like to take the crown of the best because there's some amazing people in this industry. But let's just say one of, let's say I'm the go to, I'm the go to person when it comes to direct bookings.

He's bashful. I've done some research and I've determined that Mark is my guy for direct bookings. So Mark, give us a little bit introduction to yourself and then I'll, I'll take it back over.

Yeah, a hundred percent. Okay. So I'm one of the very few people in this industry that was born into hospitality. I class short term rentals, Airbnb, whatever you class this industry is, I class it as hospitality and I was born into it. I'm from the uk, as you can tell by the accent. I grew up in a 200 acre farm in the middle of the North Yorkshire moors in the uk. Basically where, where we grew up, it was just fields, field and a couple of other houses. But in between we were, we were nicely settled and located between two of the most popular tourist locations in England. Now London is obviously the most visited tourist destination in the uk, but after that it's, it's the North Yorkshire coast, which is Scarborough and Whitby. And so the thing about that, the reason why I say that is that it's a very touristy destination. One in four houses is pretty much a hospitality related business, whether it's short term rental, hotel or guest house. So I just grew up in a very touristy area. I was so used to having strangers in my house the whole time. When I first went to go play other friends houses, I was confused why there wasn't, you know, other people there in the kitchen. So I was, I've grown in it, grown up. And it lived and it worked, it breathed it for so many years. 2002, so a year after 9, 11, I got the opportunity to go out to America, which scared the life out of my mother. I was a soccer coach for seven years. I traveled all over the States, had an amazing time coaching soccer. But in 2009 I came back because I realized I was never going to get my green card and I wasn't good enough to get any visas. Came back to the uk, ended up working in London of all places in sales and marketing for Yelp, which it was quite at the time, sort of big review site, yelp. And in 2012, just after we've had our first child, Alfie, he's the eldest of four. When he was one, we moved back to the family business to help them get everything online. Because at that point in 2012, my mom and dad were still doing everything on pen and paper in a book with tip X and pens and all that craziness. And they had 14 guest rooms in their bed and breakfast. And then we just had planning permission to build free holiday cottages on that plot of land on our, just on our farm. And so it was our job to get everything online. And then from 2012 to 2016, we grew everything, we grew everything through direct bookings, we grew everything through our own business and our own plan. We were 80% year on year, direct bookings and then 20% always came from others and others is on online travel agents. It was booking.com at the time that was really popular in the UK. The Expedia Group, which now owns VRBO and Airbnb, was like the up and comer. And so in 2016, I read a book by Tim Ferriss called the Four Hour Workweek. And at that point I was very proud to wear that busy badge on my, on my chest. I was doing everything and everything. And then after reading Four Hour Workweek, I was introduced to outsourcing and virtual assistants. And that's when I was able to help me take a step back in the family business as much as. And it was at that point when I started to go to other tourism meetings in our town. And at those tourism meetings there was other hosts, Airbnb hosts, short term rental hosts, hotel hosts, and they were all there and they were the opposite of us. They were 80% reliant on third parties bringing in their bookings and 20 direct. And I was just asking them questions, I was curious, like, what are they doing to actually drive bookings? And they just looked at me blankly. And it was at that point I had that little light bulb moment where I was like, I can, I can do, I can make a difference here. I can do some. And so Boostly was founded in 2016. I created a Facebook group called the Hospitality Community that's still around to this day. And I set a goal to help hosts. And this is what I've been doing for the last six years now. We started by doing training, so like virtual training. And then we pivoted and we started doing websites and. And then more recently I've started doing books. Boostly now has got over 2,400 clients. We are like classed as one of the go to direct booking experts in the industry. And the team, boostly is now 40 members of staff. So it's not just me. We've built a company, built a team. And my goal now is to help 1 million hosts cut down on their over reliance on Airbnb. So that's the story and thanks for having me.

Okay, there was a lot there, a lot that I didn't know, but there's something that I want that I hope that the viewers must pick up on. If you are similar to me. Okay. Mark at Boostly, Boostly has a bunch of free material. They have a whole training department on their business. Education. Free education. And I think that's so important that when you're going out and you're seeking whatever it is you're seeking, not just this specifically. Does that company have an educational department? Because then they're staying current, they're staying relevant. Mark lives what he does. You should check out. I'll link all the relevant things in the description. The Facebook group you have. I know and I've checked out on Google. What's the name of your cottage farm stay?

So the, the business is called the Granary. It's spelled G R A I N A R Y, which is my number one big tip to everybody. When you're deciding on your business name, make sure it's easily spellable and Googleable. The granary is not an easy one. That's our biggest mistake that we ever made when naming our business.

Yeah, I actually, I remember when I was first searching it after reading your book, which if you have it, I have the Kindle version. It's not as beautiful, that blue cover. Do you have the actual book?

Yeah.

Show it up. I, I remember searching a few times and there it is. I read it. I did a video review as well. I'll put that in the top, top right corner for after this video. You could click it open. And so that, that's what I wanted to say. He, he. An educational arm is very important if you're, if you're learning from an expert, but that expert doesn't provide free education. Well, are they still an expert five, six years after the business has gone, or now are they an expert in selling what they did six years ago?

Okay.

Additionally to that, Mark, at this point, Market Boostly has the only. You don't only need a vacation rental website if you want to go direct. You don't only need a vacation rental website, you need bookings. So a lot of these PMS platforms, they provide direct booking websites, pictures, because their clients demanded it. And that's great, but that's like 10% of the puzzle. Okay. And there's a lot of companies out there that provide websites, beautiful websites. But the more important thing I found, as I go through this process and we're about to get into my process and how I, what website I went or what mistakes I made, I realized that the community and learning how to get direct bookings is the actual value, not so much the website, because the website is kind of tried and true. You know, we know what website works. So with that, about a year ago, 14 months ago, I made a purchase here in Colombia. I'm currently in Medellin, Colombia. And I went airbnb. Oh, let's back up. So I myself wrote a book as well. And in that book, one of the most controversial chapters was about how you should only use Airbnb. Okay. So I want to. Back then, my stance was you should just use Airbnb. You should build up reviews there. Because going direct is work. It's another job. And if you just have one listing, it probably doesn't make sense. I've changed my tune a little bit here, actually, a lot, and a lot of it due to reading Mark's book. So what I want to get into is when it makes sense and when it doesn't make sense. That's something I want to talk with you about. I know that your stance is basically, it makes sense for everybody. I'm going to challenge you a little bit on that. We're going to get to the bottom of this. So Mark has websites, and I decided not to go with it because I wanted to like the Picasso of websites. And it took me about six months Thinking about this website, thinking about it and never actually pulling the trigger. And in Mark's book, he says, I think you even use Picasso. You're like, it doesn't have to be the Picasso or something, you know, just make it functional website. I totally agree with that now. A hundred percent agree with that. I should have went with Mark from the beginning. But what I did instead is I created a Instagram, I created a YouTube, I created a Facebook page, I have a Google listings page. I have a lot of stuff. And then I realized, like, I'm not getting any bookings. So the first thing I want to talk about is, you know, tell us exactly what is direct booking for people who don't exactly know why you might want to do it? What are the advantages and what are some disadvantages?

In my opinion, a direct booking is when somebody comes directly to you to make a booking. Now back direct booking could be they give you a call or a text, maybe they've got their phone number from your website, or it could be an email, it could be a social media message, or it could be if somebody comes onto your diary. Booking website in an ideal world and we talk about the booking process a lot in the playbook, it's the last part of the book. It's one of the biggest parts of the dives into like the five steps of the. The booking process that a guest goes through in an ideal world to make it a smooth transaction as possible. Because money loves speed, it hates friction. Is that when someone arrives on your website, they can make free clicks and they've made a booking. To do that, you need to have some pretty cool tech behind the scenes. But that's what Boostly helps with. But in the most simplest of terms, a direct booking could be when anybody comes to you direct and. And if you've got, for example, stripe set up, you can create an invoice in stripe. You can create it all, you can send it, they can pay you via stripe. And so there are some tools that make it really easy now to. To actually create and make your own direct bookings. That is what is a direct booking compared to an ota, which is where they come to you via a third party.

I used to think that direct booking was only good if you're going to brand your space if you have a bunch of units in the same spot because it takes a lot of work. Nowadays I think that most people can do direct booking. The strategy will be different if you just have one place that's average. You might go to the hostels around you, or maybe there's some schools, some parents coming in and maybe create some local connections. If you have a property management company with 50 places in the same spot, maybe you can now go to some bigger companies, but you definitely need a website, start branding it. Let me know if I have that right. And I want to know specifically who might this not be right for? Because I want to save people's time. If it's not right for you, I don't think it's right for every. Everybody. Probably not. You know, I even, I even have strategies on my end and though they work for 80 or 90% of people, there's a segment of people who it's just not right for.

So let's go. Who is it not right for? Direct bookings will not be for you if this is like a hobby for yourself, in my personal opinion. And what is a hobbyist host is somebody that, where this isn't your main priority. Let's say that you've got three or four splits, pinning you got three or four revenue streams and there's three more that, that take up more time, attention, money, resources than your one property. That's totally cool. Like if you literally are looking at this as just, just, just my spare place, it's my spare room, whatever, then stick to the OTAs. So the people that I say that I help the most are those where this is your business, this is your main, your main focus. And so for, for them, if this is your key focus and this is where you want to sort of spend the most of your time, your resources, your money, etc. Then direct bookings is 100% for you. Doesn't matter whether you've got one property or you've got two, three, four or five. Now if you've got one property, people saying, you've said to me, well, is this really something that needs to be focused on direct bookings? And I think it all depends on your mindset. So if you've got one property and you want to stay at one property, you don't want to grow, you don't want to add number two or number three down the line in the future, maybe four or five, and you want to keep it at one, then your tactics, like you said, is 100% spot on. You're lucky because you've only got, let's just say for an example of this purpose, is that you've got a minimum stay of one week. If that's the case, you've technically realistically only got 50 bookings to cover you for the whole year, because two of those 52, you're going to be wanting to do uptake and maintenance, etc. So realistically, you've just got to get 50 bookings. So how are you going to get 50 bookings? Well, you may not need an old fancy, all singing, all dancing website. You just need to have something that is functional, something that provides trust. Because if you're going to go to somebody, whether it is to a friend of a friend, or you're going to approach a local hostel or whatever, and just say, hey, this is my business, this is my property. If you haven't got anything to show them, where's the trust? It's literally like me walking up to you and just saying, hey, give me, give me 50 quid and trust me for it. It's like it's just not going to happen. You need to have that trust factor behind it and you need to sort of have a place to show somebody that will portray that trust. And that is what a website does. You know, we, I've said this for many years in this industry. We are so lucky because it is an in demand industry. We're in, in the, in the industry of making memories. And because of that, there are certain dates in your calendar that you could sell four or five times over, that could be a national holiday, or it could just be something busy going on in your town or sea. And because of that, you can get really busy. There's no other industry like it. For example, we do website design. There's not a website design listing site that I can go and put my property on my, my business, on my website design business and be guaranteed to get revenue. It doesn't work like that. So this industry is very unique in that respect that you can just pretty much put it on Airbnb and be pretty much guaranteed to bring in, in, in revenue. But even at Property one, you need to start to put the foundations in place so that you can have that direct booking business. Because this is the route that most people make, is they get one property, they put it on Airbnb. Because Airbnb's marketing is phenomenal, is so good that it just makes you think that you just need them and that's it. It's like as simple as going on there and that's it. So everybody starts with Property one and they put it on Airbnb and then say, for example, two months down the line, they're not getting bookings on Airbnb. They maybe jump into a Facebook group or they hear somebody else Talk about another listing site called vrbo. And so they sign up to vrbo, but they have to connect your calendars, because if you don't connect your calendars, you could run the risk of a double booking. So what do you do? You connect your ical from Airbnb to vrbo. So that means that you are reliant then on Airbnb. Now, say, for example, you then add another property and another property and you do the same thing. Then you literally build in your house on that Airbnb land. Where the flip side is at property number one, if you get that property management software tool, let's just say hostfully, okay? And you've got hostfully as the main core place for you to store your business. That's the hub. The hub is hostfully. And then you connect it to your Airbnb, you connect it to your vrbo. And that is the base of where you build your direct bookings. Because then you can add in Stripe, then you can add in email, then you can add in all those other things, and it's all built from that property management software. So for me, if even at property one, you've got to be putting the foundations and the structures in place to be able to grow and build this business, great.

The key there for me was, and I don't recall reading this in the book, but it's genius. And I'm going to start saying this now. I'll attribute you, if it's a hobby, if you're just doing it for a hobby side money, retirement money, you don't have any plans to really professionalize it, then direct booking is not for you because there is extra work and direct booking that needs to have a return on investment. If it's more professional, your main income, you have, like you want to scale it, then direct booking is definitely where you want to go. And you want to use a hub like a PMS property management software. There's a bunch of them out there, hopefully being one, one of the good ones. So I bought my property in August 2021. My idea was I was going to go around and film videos here in places where I thought my clients would be, do, do review videos on hotels and whatnot around here and then post them to YouTube. I have done that and I have gotten a few inquiries, but not many. So. But what has happened though is I've. I've noticed at these early stages that I have spent a lot of time that was just wasted, you know, because people are reaching out. Do you have this day available? No. It's not going through back and forth. I gotta check with my friends. This is the price. So that's happened to me a lot. How do I avoid that? Because on Airbnb it doesn't work. You come, you know the price, you know the dates are available, et cetera.

So there's a, there's a couple of things that you can do. So number one, and again, this is the advantage of having a property management software tool in place is that somebody messages you and they reaches out to you on, say, WhatsApp, or they reach out to you on email and they say, do you have X date? One of the things that I love to put in, and again, this is something that I learned from Tim Ferriss, is having a solid autoresponder. So obviously you don't want to be online all the time, but with a solid autoresponder. So an autoresponder is when somebody sends you an email, they get fired, a reply straight back. And all of the big companies have it and you know, it's pretty standard and straightforward to set up. But in the autoresponder it could be, hey, thank you so much for your email. We will look to reply to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you are looking to book accommodation with us, here's a direct link to our availability calendar and here's a direct link to our FAQs, because what you will notice, and the more that you go down and have seasons, so I talk about seasons, as in like a year. So the more seasons that you have within your hospitality business, you'll find that there are 20% of questions that get asked 80% of the time. And you just find yourself if you don't put the systems and structures in place, always answering the same question, whether it's parking, whether it's WI fi, whether it's, do you accept pets, pie, smoking, whatever it may be. I know because we did, we did this hospitality business for over 20 years and I know exactly the questions. I still get PTSD from doing it. But it wasn't until we put in frequently asked questions and FAQ page on our website that our problems evaporated. Combined with a good autoresponder. Because then the guest doesn't have to wait for response to that question. They can go to the FAQs and then they've got a live booking calendar. And again, if you've got your systems dialed in properly, they can not only find your calendar, availability calendar, but they can also go and book directly on that site, pay, instant book, and it's all done through your pms, which is, which, which is pretty powerful. There's a level up from that where you could get a live chat tool. So again, the technology that's available to US now in 2022, going into 2023, compared to 10 years ago, is unreal. The potential of technology that we've got access to as small business hosts and paying very small amount for is wasn't fathomable 10 years ago. So things like live chat tools where you can have keywords that are installed into it, where they type in a message and they mention a keyword and they give them instant response, back the level up from that is where you're then ready to outsource. So when you would have a virtual team member that you would hire and it can be anywhere in the world and they would be your response, they would be the person that instantly applied back to the people instead of a machine, etc. But it's all about leveling up. Business is all about leveling up and there's different levels to everything and it's just about getting those right systems and structures in place.

Something you mentioned there brings me to my first mistake I made going through this process by myself and that was when you build a website, when you go to a website developer, you will, they will charge you extra if you want to accept payments on the website. For me, what I did first was I said, let's not do that. Let's just gauge the interest. How many messages am I going to get? I realized, well, so two things. I want to highlight this again, really. I'm trying to be as authentic as I can. I know I have a discount code and I'll provide that in the description. But if I could go back, I would do, I would just go with boostly because number one, at the end of the day, the website delayed six months plus another like three months. I think it was like 10 months in total. It just was delivered in August this last year. And I'm going to have to redo it because the payment platform, the calendar availability, the plugin that I use just isn't working well. So saving you time, just go with a professional website builder right off the bat and go with accepting payments because for someone who is not you, doesn't know that you're, you know, trustworthy, they're just a little bit sketched out, like, okay, how am I going to pay you? Oh, PayPal. Just send me some PayPal. It'll be good, I promise. And it will be. But they don't know that Mark probably is laughing about. You probably don't even offer websites. Oh no, you do. You, you do offer websites without payment, right? That's the basic plan.

Yeah. So basically, and again, any website design, this is why we got into this, dialing it back 2018. The reason why we started doing websites is because we had so many people coming to us in our community, the hospitality community. We're talking about the website designers and how they were putting charges on top of charges and just making it really impossible to do this. And the main thing is that most website designers do not understand hospitality and I stress this enough, is that I would never try and build a website for a gym, I would never try and build a website for an E commerce site because I don't know those industries. We know hospitality inside out. And so most website designers, they do try and make a Picasso Ramona Lisa out something that needs to be functional. I mean just go look at Airbnb. It is a bog standard website, but the core thing behind it is they understand the booking principle to a T. They want somebody to rock up onto a site. They want to do click, click, click book. And that is what the consumer wants as well. And with a direct book inside, that is what you need to have. So what we do at Boostly, we have that, we add a website. We are, we are the website, but we are Nothing without a PMS. So hostfully, logify, you name it, guesty for host, etc. What we've done in our unique selling point and our sort of special relationship is what the relationships that we've built over the last six years with all of the PMSs and no other website designer has done this. So you won't find any of a website designer who's got a connection and a relationship with hostfully, you have a. Anybody else has got a connection and a relationship with guesty or logify or hospitable, we do. So that what that means is that our website is connected to all of these property management software tools so that we can do payment on site, we can do guest verification on site, we can link up to super hog, we can bring in live chat tools, we've got the latest reviews coming in and it just makes that your website is one that will build trust, it will turn lookers into bookers. And you know, we put a money back guarantees, we put our money where our mouths are that we guarantee it will get you a return of your investment of what you pay us all your money back. And that is why We've been able to do this and this is why we've been able to grow to be the biggest, the biggest website design agency in the, in the short term rental industry. But you'd never catch me ever trying to do a website for a gym because it's a total different buying method and total different methodology to put in one of our sites together.

Now I just want to highlight a few things that when I was going through this process, I was like, oh man, that is a headache. Now I have to research that. Now I have to research that. Payments. So I can accept payments, but I want to accept 50% now, 50% later. Okay, that's another thing I have to research. You've already done that. I'm confident if I want you, you've. You already know how to figure it out. Security deposit. I want to secure deposit. Maybe I can collect it now or later. But that's an additional cost on the calendar cost something I had to figure out. Extra person charges. He mentioned also, you know, you might want a contract, a separate contract, which, yeah, you might want a separate contract. You have that figured out. Guest greeting. You have that figure out. So all these little things. So I wasted a lot of time doing this and so I hope to save some of the viewers in their experience going direct bookings. And I want to share my next error which was collecting email addresses. I am going to use a company called StayFi. Do you have experience with Stayfi?

Yeah, I know. Well, I recommend them very.

Okay, I am going to use them. I am a little bit on the edge at the beginning because they haven't responded to any customer service inquiry. I reached my Instagram on Twitter. I think I even sent them a support message and I got no responses back. So that was a little concerning. But we'll see how they work out. I know they're the industry leader and what statefi is for people who don't know is when a guest wants to sign in. You know, you go to a cafe, you have to give them your email address to sign in. That's what StayFi is. You get emails and emails. Emails are interesting for me because they're like the first piece of Internet tech and they are still the most valuable no matter what you're doing. Your email list is the most valuable asset. Your email list. So I have an apartment and I. It has a lot of guests and I missed a whole year of doing emails. I probably would have had 500 emails. Guests, recurring guests, prior guests, visitors. One guest had. Okay, one guest had 27 visitors in one night. He paid most of the extra visitor policy. But what would be more valuable than that? Getting 27 email addresses? Yeah, yeah, so that was an error. I'm sure you have that built in already. Email getting emails from the start.

Well, we don't do the what stayfight do. This is why I recommend them so much. And I love what they do and I love what they're creating because it's progressed now from just email. It's doubled up the text message as well. And the next stages are going to be building in a full email CRM and they're going to be building in email templates and all of that. What we do at Boostly, when you join Boostly, you get access to our content creator. And part of that is we've worked with a copywriter and we've got so many different email templates because one of the easiest things to do is to grow an email list. One of the hardest things to do is to know what to do with it. And I know people that are sat on 10,000 database but haven't emailed their guests more than once in the last year and that was over a Black Friday sale. So the key is having a list and knowing what to do with it. Because you're right, it has, it will forever be and is the best form of marketing that is out there. The trick is to know what to do with it. So what we do is we work with a copywriter and an excellent copywriter and they've put together so many different email templates. But yeah, definitely you're 100% right. If you've got a property that has got, you know, a larger property, for example, or even if you've got more than 4, 5, 6 people, StayFi should be 100% what you're using because those 23 people, they want to be using the WI fi, especially like Gen Z, they're always wanting the WI fi And what's the first thing that they do? They try and find a WI fi and they can do it. They give the email address up and then you know, you've got, you've got them in your, in your contacts and the text messages now as well, which is just as powerful now state how.

You just described them. Sounds like a future competitor. Booster.

Competitor, not a competitor. We actually work really well. We collaborate very, very well. If they start doing websites, I mean, me and Alpha will start having words, but I don't think they are anytime soon. I know Alpha really well. I know the team at ST Fi really, really well and I love what they do.

The host has a lot of options when they do this. Sometimes it's really annoying. Go to an. Go to a cafe. I got to enter in my first and last name. You know, my birth date, my address, my sex, my have to answer some questions. They. They send me an email confirmation how much my perspective the reason why I didn't do this was because I just wanted it to be easy. I have a QR code. You scan it in bam. Easy. How much do you recommend? Do you. I know that stay fight they can actually confirm that it's a real email. Do you just. Is it basic name email and if you enter a wrong email fine. Or do you recommend going a little.

Bit more first name email, phone number. Tick to say you happy to get communication. People will give that up. The way that people go wrong is they try and get more and more and more they try and get more data. There's easier ways to get to get more data. The main thing is again you want to keep it frictionless. Phone name and all you need to do is you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Go and look what other people are doing. Go and look to see how Starbucks do it or insert name of chain or whatever. When you go there it's always first name cell phone number, email tick box to say you're happy to get communications and. And that's literally all you need to get started with Now.

I will be receiving that any day now and I will be setting it up in my Airbnb called the Belmonte Penthouse here in Medellin, Colombia and I'll do a video on that experience, setting it up, et cetera. Speaking about competitors or future competitors. How does Lodify is probably the most well known in terms of name I think would be. I don't know that for sure, but I think what differentiates Boostly from Logify.

So again, Lodify is a collaborator. We partner with them because their websites aren't WordPress like every PMS. The reason why they put in the website part is because like you said, their customers wanted it and it became an easy sales tactic. That's all it is. And all of their websites are build on nothing more than just glorified landing pages. They aren't customizable. You can't do much to it. It's just there because it's free. Our main competitors again are good buddies of ours. Icnd, which is icoastal Net and Signal, which is part of the Beyond Pricing brand. But again our USP is that we partner with over 20 different PMS providers. So Lodfi hostfully, etc. So what that means is that if you have a logify website and you've had it for two years and you've outgrown logify, so you maybe want to go to a guesty or a hostfully so it's a bit more money, but you get more money for your book. If you've built everything off the logify platform, you lose everything. So then you have to start all over again by having the website that hostly give you a guest to give you. This is the main reason why people come to us, is that once you've got your boostly website Here, your main WordPress website, you can change your PMS as many times as you want in the future, but you never lose what you've built here. So your SEO, all of that good stuff, it stays there because we've got those partnerships, ICND and Signal have got four partners. Guesty track, whatever, we've got 20. So it doesn't matter how many you change. And whatever it is about this industry, people love to change the pms. They bounce from one to the other for whatever reason. But then we're that where that website you can come with and you can just say, hey Mark, we're moving from guesting to hostfully. That sound. You can still keep all that base that you've built up right here. And that is I. That is our unique selling point. That means that we've got no competition. I've always said there is no competition. Competition is when you look at another company that is better than you. And so I feel like we've got no competition because there is nobody better than us at what we do.

Okay, for those who aren't super familiar with what we're talking about, I want to put it in a different frame. So if you use Lodify, you're using Lodge service that we call it hosting. So you're hosting your website with Lodipy. Just like Airbnb, you're hosting your listing with Airb. Marcus saying, Create your own WordPress website. I think something like 70% of the websites are by WordPress. Create your own website, you own that and you can connect that to all these different tools. If you start with Logify and you decide it's not right for you, then you have to start over with a brand new website which affects your SEO. Search engine optimization. Now you also mentioned that people switch PMSs. And I believe that people switch PMSS because they go into it, not understanding what they might need at the beginning. And then they start using it and they realize, oh, this is not good. This is not good. This is like, I want. I want this feature. It's not there. So to that point, I have a bunch of tutorial videos on various PMS softwares, both of the ones you mentioned, plus a bunch of others. I have Guesty for Hosts coming out. Guesty for Guesty for Host yet, which is three or less listings and a few others. So check that out. There is one last question I want to wrap up with and then we'll give away the. The discount code and. And talk about some final things. I just had a guest. He. He checked in. It was from Airbnb. He wanted to extend another night. He paid $400. I refunded him $200 because he actually couldn't stay. Someone else booked before he paid me, but he had extra guests, So I refunded 200 of the 400. What he did that was via PayPal. That's important for the story. What he did later on was he went to his credit card and he did a chargeback. So now what that means is PayPal is saying, this $100 charge, the guest wants back. So what do you have to say about that? So I provided my support. At the end of the day, he could have gotten my $200 refund plus an additional 400 bucks. So he could have stolen $200 from me. And he knows that. So how should I accept money? Zelle bank transfer will be the best. You can't do anything there. But I don't want this to happen again.

Chargebacks have been, like you say, a very common practice where a guest gives you whatever through PayPal, whatever, and then they charge back. The main thing to do is just have your systems and your structures and your documentation perfect. Because as long as you've got that and the customer has got nothing to fall back on, the best and easiest thing to do, if you're going to be doing a booking like this, just have, you know, obviously email confirmation from you and him. I have it written down. And then if you're going to send out an invoice, they're going to pay via that invoice. I mean, I would be using Stripe, which is probably one of the most commonly used ones. And again, this is again, comes back to the property management software tool. You've got a property management software tool. You can send an invoice out. You can send a proper invoice out via your pms but by your property management software tool to the guest and they will pay you via that. So it is all documented. So if for whatever reason, if they try and be a bit cheeky later down the line and try and claim it back, you just put the documentation through and they won't be able to get away with it. It's all about documentation. I believe on that one.

But is there a method that I can just avoid doing this so I don't have to document a bank transfer? I know if they do a bank transfer it would be, it would be an intensive process for them to try and pull that back.

Yes, I mean bank transfer, the more that we move into this world, this is where web3 and cryptocurrency can play a part, which is obviously I know what so many people are trying to figure out how they're going to make that work in the future. But yeah, I mean there are more tools and things put into place now but it will protect. I feel like again it all comes down to point of view. This person was already a guest, it wasn't like he hadn't made the booking. So it wasn't so much a case of cutting out the friction. I definitely would have said, you know, bank transfer, etc. Moving forward. But again I would simply would have just put it for the property management software. That would have been the easiest thing. And then if he had tried to charge back again, it's just a simple email back and it wouldn't become an issue.

Great. Well, going to wrap this a call up. So I want to re emphasize the reason why I like Boostly is because not only do they provide a website but more importantly they provide a community, a Facebook group, they have some courses you can take, they have free education which means they're staying up to date. I have a discount code, I believe it's 5% and I don't know if optimize works but even more than that people, this is not cheap. I think it's 4,000 bucks.

We've got two prices. Yeah. So the code is optimized with a Z or you can use Danny D, A N and Y. They both work the same and you get the 5% discount. We've got two packages, two simple packages, two simple pricing. If you've got one to five then you're on the light package which is £1,000 which is depends on currency rates, about US$1,200. And then if you want the pro which is if you've got seven plus properties then that's the 4,000 pound one. But that comes with a proper done for you service, a personal project manager. Everything that what seven plus properties needs and wants. If you're at one to six, you need a slightly less model because it suits your buzz budget, it suits your revenue and it all fits around you. So it's just two simple prices, two simple products.

And the thing that I really like is you guarantee if I spend a thousand bucks or 4,000 or 7,000, you guarantee I will make 7,000. But that's not the goal. That would be that, that would be, that's the minimum goal. But what percentage of purchasers do you have to refund money to because for this guarantee.

Oh wow. So We've got over 2400 clients been doing this for six years. I've only ever had to refund six people over that time. And that was right at the very start as I was figuring this all out. Now we don't have to refund anybody. My vow is to help Everybody get to 80% direct with 20% OTA reliance. But the legal promise is that we will at least get you back over one calendar year what you've paid us. And we do that through tracking our websites. Just to give you an example is on cost to bring in $5 million in direct booking revenue over the course of 2022 in a calendar year. So we know what we're doing. Our websites work. They look the same. They look very templated because they are. Because guess what? We don't reinvent the wheel. If you want something that is customizable or Mona Lisa, then you know, go find somebody else to do that. But we know what works and this is why we put that money back guarantee there.

If there was any questions that I didn't cover that you were, that you were curious to know, put them in the comments down below. I will respond or I'll ask Mark to come on when I publish the video and his, he, he, he or his team will directly respond. So Mark, thank you for coming on. This has been an interesting experience for me doing direct bookings. It was just, it's honestly, it's kind of fun, you know, getting a direct booking. I have gotten some direct bookings. So great. I'm glad that you're along. You know, I'm glad that you're here and you're helping hosts and I think that Airbnb has created the market. I do think that in the future it there will be more direct bookings. There's just the problem is there's no like platform for direct bookings. That's the main platform. That might be another topic that we can go to. I mean, Google. Google Vacation Rentals does it, but they're still new, so. Any final words? Give it to us here and maybe we'll do a part two.

Yeah, definitely. Well, if you've got any more questions, please pop them in the. In the comments. And if we get a lot of them, then definitely we can do a part two. We're looking forward to it. Thank you for having me.