How to price your property post COVID 19 with Anurag Verma of Pricelabs

Sam. Live. And welcome everybody. And thank you very much for tuning in to another Boostly Live video. Tonight is a very, very, very important one. As I put in in the title, we're going to be talking about pricing post Coronavirus. And it's a question that I have had a lot in the hospitality community, in the Boostly Academy, Facebook group and other Facebook groups that I'm a part of. The question that comes up a lot is when this is all over, what should I be doing with pricing? How are other hosts around the world dealing with pricing right now? And as I do with a lot of these live videos that I, um, I'm running ever since the 17th of March, I've invited in guest speakers, people to help. And today, very much so, if I was to have anybody to come on to talk about pricing, it would be Price Labs, because last week I watched a very, very insightful webinar that they ran and we are basically going to dig into that a little bit and just go through a few other things. So let me just quickly unmute our guest today. And so thank you very much for coming on board. You may recognize Price Labs from the past because we have done a podcast, I think it was in season six or season seven where we spoke about Price Labs and the ins and outs of it. And if anybody wants to go and dig into that a little bit more, you can do. But if you could just take a couple of minutes, please, Anurag, just introduce yourself, let everybody know where you are in the world, what you do. Price Labs. Just give a little bit of a brief background of what Price Labs is all about and we'll get started into the episode.

Absolutely. Hi everyone. I'm Anurag Verma, one of the co founders at Price Labs. We are based out of Chicago, but as I was speaking to Mark earlier, we are fairly distributed team. So we have folks in Europe, folks in India, folks on the west coast, but most of us are in Chicago, which is under at home models. Like most of us right now at this point, I would guess so Price Labs is pricing and dynamic pricing software or solution. We started about five years back before Price Labs. I was doing something similar for United Airlines. So building pricing and revenue management tools there. Yeah. So one of my co founders was a host in Chicago at that time and we felt like there's a need to build tools that are similar that are used by airlines or larger organizations, but are not always available to individuals or smaller organizations that can't hire five data scientists, for example. So we thought at that point, there's a need. I mean, my co founder had a need. And so we started off. It's been a journey. Like, we started off thinking Airbnb is the industry, because back then, that's all we knew. And as we got into it, more and more, we realized that, like, okay, Airbnb is a small slice of the industry. It is not the industry in some ways. And I guess, Mark, you're nodding vigorously because you've been in this for 20. I don't know your family.

Long time, Long time.

It was pretty new to us. But, yeah, we've learned a lot over the last five years on how things work, what the industry is made out of and things like that. So, yeah, awesome.

Well, thank you very much for doing this because I imagine you get a lot of questions regarding pricing, which is what Price Labs is all about. Can you just give us a bit of an insight on how many clients, how many members that you currently have all over the world right now at Price Labs? How many people are you serving and helping?

Right, so we serve about 3,000 property managers and hosts around the world. And this is a mix of different types of managers and hosts. So there we have property managers which manage upwards of 1500 listings or properties, and we have a lot of hosts who manage just one, and then it's anywhere in between. Like, a lot of our customers are also. Not a lot, but some of them also have guest houses, for example, or hostels and things like that. So it's a fairly broad mix. But I would say the major chunk is property managers who have, I would say between 5 to 100 properties is probably like the course.

So obviously this is being recorded on Wednesday 22 April, and the dates are important because as we all know, over the course of the last, say, five, six weeks, every day there's something new out there. Specifically in the world of hospitality, Everybody in the UK will know. Just yesterday, Tuesday, the 21st, booking.com sent out an email to everybody in the UK to let everybody know that they've blocked off the whole calendars for the UK on that platform, which is brand new for a lot of people that are just sort of trying to figure out how they could potentially get bookings from key workers right now. And this has just been one of many things that has happened since, I would say, since March 13, where it really started to notice. So the first question that I have for you, buddy, is from what you've seen on your records and data, how. How much is the sort of the new bookings changed over the course of say, the past month or let's just say since March 14th.

Right. So I guess the. Can I share my screen and I'm going to pull some of the data that we have been sharing on our pages.

Anyway, so if you are watching this back on the on the replay or if you are tuning into the podcast, the audio version, I would just say to make sure jump onto YouTube at some point, go and look at the videos. This is available on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, even TikTok. So come on, have a look at the video because we're going to be showing some slides with you today. And again, if you miss anything, this is obviously being recorded. If you are one of the many people that are tuning in live right now, please do come back and catch us on the replay. So, buddy, it's all yours. Let's see. Let's explain what we're looking at.

Yeah, so I want to cover and it won't be too many slides, I promise. But I want to cover two different things. One is what do we see in our booking data? So we have two data sources in some ways. One is people who use us. We directly get a look at their booking trends. So we aggregate them and see if there are broad trends that can be used. And then second is by looking at different OTAs and trying to figure out what kind of activity is happening on different OTAs. So I want to cover a little bit of both. But the first part is going to be reservation data. And this is there are two big trends that we saw when that happened over the course of March and late February. Right. So what you'll see here is each column here is a booking date and then the length of the column, the total length is how many bookings are happening on that day. And then the colors are the lead time. So most of you probably know. But if you don't, the lead time is how far out are people booking for. So if somebody books in April for a stay in October, the lead time is six months. If somebody books in April for a stay in in July, then in the lead time is three months and so on. So we're trying to break it up by lead time. And what we used to see before COVID hit is people were booking a ton of stays that are a little farther out. So people were fairly liberal with not liberal, but I mean, people would want to book early, right? Because what if the dates get booked off or you don't have anything or good options left anymore and things like that. And then there Was obviously going to be some folks who find out that they need a space to stay last minute so they would book these last minute stays. That's what you see at the bottom, that's the gray. And then last week is the blue. The big change, the obvious big change that you don't need me to tell you is that the volume of bookings has just dropped off like it used to be a lot higher. I think it's dropped off 80 to 90% around the world. But the nice, not nice, but interesting part is a lot of the bookings that have dropped off are these really far out bookings where like people are just not booking for six months out or four months out anymore. The bookings that you might see are probably people who are changing their stay dates. They use. They were planning on coming in April end or maybe May or June and now they're like, hey, can we move this to October? The bookings that are made last minute, we are still seeing some of those come in like it's not completely evaporated like the far out bookings. And Mark, to your point, it might be those essential workers, right? Like people who need a place to stay starting tonight or starting tomorrow. And because they just, I mean they are essential for whatever reason, they might be medical workers, they might be some other kind of workers that need to stay in a place where their home isn't available. The second big thing we are seeing, so this one is all bookings. The next chart is the same chart as the previous one, but we have removed any bookings that were shorter than 14 days and pretty much across the world. So we have seen this in uk, we have seen this in US not as much as in Spain, France or Italy, but in US and UK we are seeing that after the full impact of COVID started coming out, there was a slight, I wouldn't say slight, there was an uptick in the longer bookings. So it seemed like weekly or monthly bookings. The number almost doubled. That's beginning to come back now. So it was really peaking out in late March and now we are seeing that it's beginning to come back. It's still higher than what it used to be. So yeah, this is the kind of stuff that we are seeing in our data pretty much around the world. We are also at the same time trying to figure out, trying to create some tools and I can show those later of how, I mean, you don't want to see the world data. You want to see like what's happening in your neighborhood, right? And then we're trying to see if we can show later but these are the two big trends. Like people are still booking. That's the. So we were expecting to for this to be almost zero, but it is almost zero. But we were like hey, who is booking right now? And it's probably those essential workers but they're only booking for last minute stays and then those days tend to be because they are workers who are not coming for a weekend stay, they tend to be longer.

Yeah. Which is really interesting that the amount, the length of stay is obviously increasing which would make sense with the data from what we know that the people that are booking are key workers but also as well they are really looking for last minute style bookings. So and again this data that you have is from all of your clients that are from around the world. Many, many properties are all all over the world. This is not just a USA based search is not Illinois.

Yeah, we have customers in about I think 97 countries or something like that. Yeah. So this is pretty much everything and we have tried to break it up by country. If I were to like on this one, like I said, US and UK are seeing something very similar but. But not Spain and not Germany and not France for example. So in Germany and France this increase is there but you have to look for it kind of like in this chart. If you look at this for US and Europe it's obvious that they have increased. Yeah, yeah.

So with, with this in mind, what are some of the tips that you're passing on to hosts so that you could be applying to their business right now? So then when all of this is over they are in a stronger position to bounce back quicker than people that aren't looking to do anything right now.

Right. Fortunately again from our previous webinar like for price apps customer, I have something ready for this. I'm just going to flip over to that.

If you want me to talk, I will talk. Oh, there we go. We've got another screen. Love it. It's already brilliant. This is like blue like when we made earlier.

No. So like I said there are two major trends. One is people are booking longer stays and for all kinds of reasons. What's important there? So usually before COVID we would see a lot of people have weekly discounts of about 10 to 20% depending on their risk tolerance and monthly discounts of somewhere between 20 to 30%. And the thought when doing such things was as a short term rental operator you would generally depending on the season you would expect out of the month maybe 2025 days to be booked and there are going to be days that go unbooked for a variety of reasons. Right now if you get a monthly stay, then it's guaranteeing you 30 book days. So it's a good thing versus if you only took short term bookings, maybe you were going to have five unbooked days. So maybe there was some merit to giving 15% discount to say, hey, I'll get about the same amount of money and I'll have fewer operational headaches in some ways. Right. What we are seeing now is people are, and what we are recommending as well is to just go a little more aggressive on those discounts. You're given the situation, it's going to be very hard to have 20, 25 book days on your calendar. It's probably going to be much, much lesser. Maybe 10 or 15 if you're doing great. In that case, giving a monthly discount and trying to attract some of these longer stays is not just financially a good call, but also probably from an operational perspective, you don't want to go in five times a month or you don't want to Send your cleaners 5 times a month to do a cleaning when you can get about the same amount and have only one cleaning operation. Also if you can get longer bookings right now, try and get those. It just reduces your risk. It gives you some cushion of trying to make it through this situation. The second one there is coming from that lead time thing that I showed where you're just not seeing people book too many far out stays. What we are telling all our users is, and what we have done in our system is on a rolling two months basis still situation improves. We are going discounting the prices, but we are not doing it beyond two months. Like at this point, I don't know, I don't think anybody knows how this is going to rebound or if it will rebound or how quickly. But given that not many people are booking far out anyways, there is. It's better off to just hold your prices there and only adjust prices in the last, in the last month, two months. On the same topic, flexible cancellation policy, I mean this has nothing to do with pricing, but then a lot of OTAs are going to force it upon you anyways. So even in your direct bookings right now, people are not sure if, even if they book, if they'll be able to travel. So from our perspective, and as I think of a guest's perspective, it kind of makes sense to book things given how much supply is out there, given Nobody else is traveling. If somebody is booking, they would probably have a choice of places that do offer free cancellations. And yes, it's risky to offer that, but then the choices between not having a booking versus having something that, that might really materialize if, if things don't improve and they have to cancel anyways, then it doesn't really matter. The cancellation will end up happening anyways. Yeah, last one is just fewer restrictions. Like at this point, again, on a rolling two month basis you can go ahead and reduce your minimum stay if you can. Again, what we are saying here is you want to attract longer bookings, but given that people are only booking for the next week or so, even if you do get a short booking, it's some money and then that booking will get over soon. So hopefully your calendar will be wide open for a long booking again. So if you can try and do those things, also see if you can shuffle bookings around. If you have more than one listings, you consolidate them on one property and then have the other one open up for longer stays and things like that. I've heard of people doing or trying those things.

Yeah, definitely. And there's so much to unpack with what we're looking at here. Now obviously this is what we're talking about right now. So if you can take bookings from key workers. I know there's people that are watching in countries that can't open at all right now, but there are a lot that can. This is definitely the tactic to be looking at. And I think the main thing here is our unique selling point. And I say this a lot. Our usp, the things that we use to sell our property or properties used to be in the past, you know, comfy bed, you know, beautiful views or all of those sort of things. Now it's worry free cancellation policy, which is a big thing, you know, safety. So again, how is the cleanliness in your properties and these are sort of things that you're going to be really focusing on. I talked a lot recently about a study that was done with over 15,000 travelers, tourist guests and one of the key questions was what is your biggest pain point right now? What one word sums up how you view travel over the course of the next 12 months? And the big, big word was safety. So again, safety. And the next one was when can we travel? And you know, and this is where that worry free, having a worry free cancellation policy, which for a lot of you will mean totally ripping up your current policy and having something that's such flexible. But again, if you can get a direct booking on a worry free where they can move it at any time. Pretty much having credit. As long as you've got availability, you've got a bigger chance to doing that than if you just rely on booking or Airbnb that will just cancel it like that and they'll just refund the guests without sometimes without even telling you. So you know, you need to be doing, you need to be doing that. And it's really interesting about last minute discounts. So hold on your price, be brave. But again, I think a main takeaway for me looking at this and I know there's so many people who are tuning into this, whether it's live or on the replay, they set and forget their rates. Which is one of the reasons why I wanted price labs to come onto this because obviously they've got a tool that helps with this. The one thing that I want everybody to do on the back end of this coming out the other side is being more proactive with your rates. Don't just set them and have them in stone and never even look at them again. You've got to be proactively doing this. And you know, specifically with now people are looking at a shorter lead time from booking to arrival. So you've got to be, you've definitely got to be on top of that. Have you got anything to come back on that with, Anurag?

Yeah. So two things actually. When I said flexible cancellation policies, I did not mean fully refundable. It meant if you can't travel, you, you, I mean if it's your direct booking especially, you can, you can make this as, as you want. Right. You can have it where if people want to, can't travel anymore, you, they can still change the dates maybe next year or something like that. Yeah. That way at least you have, you have things on the book. Yeah. Second was now talking about recovery. So all of this partly touched on it. So length, last minute discounts are kind of also saying that, that right now there is a lot of supply. So last minute discounts become important. But as you come out of it, you don't want to change your far out prices as much, but you still want to be able to monitor how your markets are doing. So one of the things, actually a couple of things that we have put out, one is just publicly available, you can just go on our landing page and you can look at data for different countries and if you're in the US in different states, just to see what kind of trends are we seeing in terms of new bookings coming in, what's the lead time, what's the length of stay? But the second, I think more useful thing that we are trying to put out, it's not live yet, but we are hoping tomorrow or day after it will be live. And it's a free resource we are creating where you can order up to five extremely localized reports so you can go in and put in your address, your city, your country and give a radius and it'll ask you after that like, is this the area you want to look at? And it'll show you how many listings are there and things like that. And it takes five to 10 minutes, but then you'll be able to track. So for example, I have a report open here for in Bend, Oregon and if you look at this report, it will show you, for example, how is the future outlook looking. So it seems like there was a major event here that got cancelled. So all of these big red spike is a lot of people canceling their stays. It also shows how have new bookings been coming in. So this is tracking 340 listings and it's saying over the last week 110 of them got at least one booking. So this page will keep refreshing every day so that for the next 60 days, for example. So you'll be able to come in and see, hey, is this beginning to come back up? If bookings are happening, the green line here is bookings and you'll see that pretty much nobody is looking right now. But as bookings, when recovery starts happening, you'll be able to see what dates are people actually booking for to be able to then say, okay, are my prices correct or set fine for those dates at least now that people are back to booking their stays. As an example here, like it seems like there is a thin green sliver of hope right here in late August in Oregon. So things like that might be useful. So if you guys want to explore, this will be live in a day or two.

Yeah, we are obviously recording this on the 22nd of April, so if you're watching this back on the replay, this will be live. And we'll make sure that all of the links in the comments and the post above and it'll obviously be on boostly.co.uk podcast but to be honest, if you go to Pricelabs Co, you'll be able to navigate and direct to all of these, which is really good of you and really cool to have these reports available. And again, where are you getting this from? Is this data from your clients? Are you looking further afield Right, so.

So the data we saw earlier, that's from our customers. Yeah. But the data that you're going to see here is, is worldwide, which means, like it's pretty much going to cover every corner on the Earth. Planet Earth. But that does mean that it's not from our clients. It's by looking at different OTAs, which is, I mean, and which is why we try to say, look at this as a directional indicator. Like don't look at the absolute numbers and say, hey, think I should be able to get this, but look at it more directionally to say, hey, for example, like you will, you will probably see in UK that all the listings in certain areas are just completely blocked off. Right now we have algorithms that go in and try and identify these block dates or mass block dates and remove those. But you'll be able to see that, hey, after that removal, it looks like there is still something that's blocking off. So you'll be able to see that. Yeah, there is. The algorithm has done well, but then it's not all the way there. That's where your personal localized input also comes in. Like somebody who lives in Bend will know exactly what happened here, right? Somebody who lives in Bend might not know that this is about to happen. Like it looks like people are beginning to cancel something for these dates as well. So this is where it comes in. Like it's, it's showing you data that's useful but also allowing you to interpret it based on what you know about the area to see. Hey, yeah, is this a sign of recovery or not? And then you can also track prices. So here there is no estimation. These are just, you can look at different types of units and see how are other people reacting to prices to be able to understand, hey, is my strategy in tune? Maybe it's not following the same strategy, but if you have a reason to do that, then great. But if you haven't thought about your pricing and you're seeing that, hey, everybody seems to be putting in deep last minute discounts, but I'm still up high, then that might mean. Okay, it's worth trying to tweak your prices a little bit.

This is a really good one. Just to hold on just for one second. So can you just explain this graph in this chart and what we're looking at? So you've got 75th percentile, 50th percentile, 25 percentile. Can you just break that down in layman's terms what this means, please?

Right, so I've selected here three bedroom units and if you look up here, there are 99 three bedroom units that we are tracking. What it will show you is, for example, on any given day, 184, that's in the blue line, is the median price. So what that means is half the properties on May 3rd are priced above 184 and half are priced below 184. So that's the 50th percentile, meaning half and half either way. Similarly, 75th percentile means 375 the price 375. Like there are one fourth of your properties in the area, three bedroom properties are priced above 375 and the remaining three quarters are priced below 375. And so similarly, you can say the bottom 25th percentile. Like the 25th percentile means the bottom quarter of the listings are all priced below 190 and then the top ones are priced above 190. So it gives you a sense of the spread of different types, of how different units are priced. Of course, not all three bedrooms are the same. So if, Let me go find. Not all one bedrooms are the same. But it looks like on the top end here there is not much differentiation. Like the top 75th percentile and the median are looking very close to each other, but the bottom ones are really competing for price here. So it gives you a sense of how your market is laid out and how. And you can try and find out how your pricing is compared to this. So if it looks like your prices are all way below the median, way below even the red line, that means you're priced in the bottom 25th percentile, which is not to say that it's the wrong thing because each unit is different. Maybe, maybe your one bedroom is really small and if you price it like, like the blue line, you'll never get booked because it's so small. Yeah. On the other hand, maybe your one bedroom is a penthouse, in which case it's okay if it is above the green line as long as.

Am I right in thinking that people can come and get access to these reports for free? Is that right?

Correct. So you can come in and my account is showing nine credits, but every new account will have five credits. Mine is a test account. Sorry. Yeah. Every account will have five credits where you can put in five addresses. So let me go into here. You can put in an address, you can, you'll get a sense of how many listings exist in that area that we'll track. Yeah. And you can do five of these. And from that day for the next 60 days, we'll keep updating these so you're not generating more reports. Essentially you get a dashboard for the next 60 days to come back and check. Have things change, are things improving and things like that.

That's amazing. And obviously you've got say 3,000 plus members around the world. So when you become a Price Labs member, so you upgrade to the next level, what's the next step up? So what other support, what other features are you providing for Price Labs members right now? And these are the paid ones.

Right. So the one that I just showed that I'm on right now, these are the market reports, these are the free ones. At least the first five are free. So you don't need to put in any payment information, nothing. You just come in and create those and you can report, see those. The other is just our regular dynamic pricing service, which essentially for this one, again, there is a one month trial. You don't need to really put in anything. Yep, let me go on my real account here.

And just while we're going in here. So basically with Price Labs, like we say, you get the first five reports absolutely free, which is fantastic, which will help a lot of people. And you get access to that for 60 days again, which is, which is superb. And then once you decide, and if you decide, we may have people watching live or on a replay that are current Price Labs members, if so, please, please make yourself be known. I always love to see people that are using software, specifically pricing software, because I think you can gather from this interview on the other end of Coronavirus, on the back end of this, when we're on the out, then I think pricing is going to be one of the major wins. And if you're active and proactive with your pricing and you're not in a reactive mode, you are going to bounce back quicker than everybody else. So please do be aware of this, please do go check out pricelabs co. But yeah, so what are we looking at right now, buddy?

Right, so this is our regular product. So you'll see the market intelligence is not here. It will get added in a couple of days. But in a regular product, you essentially, you can come in, you can import either your Airbnb listings or we integrate with about 35 different property management systems. You might recognize some of these names here. But once you do that, all your listings from that account will show up here. That doesn't mean that we are updating your rates. All that means is now you can go in and say, hey, I want to see price recommendations. For this property and the price recommendations are a mix of two things. One is our own algorithms, which are based on the data we see, which are based on the data we see in the market, which are also based on the data we see on your listing and its reservations. But equally importantly, it's also based on inputs that you provide us because we can't possibly know every single thing about how you perform or how you operate. So two people in the same area might have very different needs on how their prices or how their pricing strategy should look like. So for that reason, we have a lot of these customization options to say, hey, on my property I want last minute discounts to look a certain way. Or you also have something fairly cool that we built out. It's called occupancy based adjustments and it has a setting called coronavirus. Oddly enough, it's pretty cool in my opinion in that it looks at your property and it says, we are going to monitor your property on a rolling basis. If the next 15 days are not booked at all, we are going to give a deep discount. But as bookings start coming in, we are not going to keep the prices low. We will automatically bump those up. Similarly, 31 to 60 days out, it says, hey, if the calendar is completely empty, reduce the rates and see if you can get a booking. But once you start getting bookings, take those discounts away because looks like this might be a sign of a recovery where you don't want to keep those low rates forever in some ways. And if people are beginning to book, then the rates automatically come back to normal.

So that's what we're looking at here. Where you've got again, we're talking about lead times is really low at the moment. Where normally you may get a lead time of 30, 60 days, right now it's around seven days. So in the top left hand corner of this, what we're looking at, this date range, as you can see, the discount is a lot higher. And then as it slowly gets more full, or as it slowly goes out for a bigger date range, that discount is decreased. Now the question that I have is if we were to do all of this, do you automatically sync up to property management softwares and channel managers so it can all be done automatically where we don't have to do this manually ourselves? And if so, how many PMSs are you currently thinking and working with as a partnership?

Correct. So once you have done all of this stuff, so you right here, you're essentially reviewing your rates. You're saying, hey, my rates look fine here, but you might come in here and say, for these dates I need to make an adjustment. So you can say I want to make a minimum stay of three and apply a 15% change and things like that. So you do all of these adjustments fine tune, you look at the recommendations, see if they make sense and if everything looks fine, then you can go in and say, hey, I want to go in and start updating my rates. So once you turn the sync on, we pretty much go into the PMS every day and update those rates. If you make a change to your strategy or certain dates, you can also click Sync now and that means we'll update those rates within five to 10 minutes. So you don't have to like wait overnight if you made a change. Important thing to note there is we send this to the PMS and then the PMS in most PMS is you can apply what are called channel markups or commission rates so that those get applied on top and then this gets sent to different OTAs. And then a lot of people for the direct booking websites, they don't apply any commission so that they have the best rate on their direct booking website and things like that. So in terms of which pms, it's a fairly long list. But if you go to our homepage again, you can see all the integrations right there. It's about 30 of them I think.

But yeah, always add in new ones all the time.

Yep. Yeah, so pretty much add two to three every month.

Good work. I really, really like this. And again, I think that what I'm encouraging everybody to do is to just get proactive with your pricing. You know, there may be somebody that is watching who's only got maybe one property and they want to take advantage of the free reports, then you can do, just go to pricelabs Co if you want to go ahead and look at more paid options. Then if you go to boostly.co.uk forward/pricelabs, you go and you can sign up via there. We've got, we've got our own little partner page which is, which is awesome.

Note there, Mark, regardless of whether you're going from the free one, for the free reports or anything, use, use the link because if you later decide to use the paid stuff, then that referral code is still going to be useful.

Okay, amazing. So yeah, just go to booster.co.uk Pricelabs go and register, go put your details in. You can go get the free reports, you can go do all the things and then if you feel like You've got a good, good value for it and you can see the benefits of it. Then you can just go ahead and upgrade it in the future. But I definitely would go and take advantage of the free reports. Like say you get five, five of them and you can use them and it's available for 60, for 60 days. If you could just do as a favor, buddy, stop sharing your screen and we'll go back into full video mode and move on to the next part of our chat. So what have we discussed tonight? We have discussed number one, the current situation. We've looked at reports, we've looked at the current booking window, we've looked at the sort of the rates that people are averaging right now. But we're also looking at the lead time, which is really key. We're looking also as well with the free tool that Price Labs have, you can look more specific to your area. The main report was obviously worldwide and that's based over a ton of data. But what you're able to do coming out of this on the back end, you can see your specific town or you could see your specific county because you can drag that circle to the area that you need and then you can base your pricing off the back of what everybody else is doing, which is really effective. And again, it's not just going in blind on this. You're not just like plucking a number out of the sky. You can actually look at data and stats. And what I love about Price Labs as well is that there's tutorial videos, there's, there's a guide on how to look and how to break down all the data that, that you see, which, which is awesome.

Also we have, if you email supportricelabs co we answer a ton of questions every day.

So I can imagine. Alright, so as we like to do with, with all of these podcast episodes, live videos, we like to finish on some quick fire questions. And what I always say on this doesn't matter whether you're watching live or if you're watching back on the replay. I encourage everybody to get involved in the comments. So make sure you leave a comment in there. Alright, first question, Anurag. If you could be isolated or on lockdown with one celebrity or famous figure, it could be alive or dead, just one, who would that be?

I think right now I'm going to bet this on Tom Hanks. He's already recovered. He's also a well grounded person. So yeah, funny guy and he would.

Have some great stories. I like Tom Hanks. That's the first shout for Tom Hanks. But I like, I'm a big fan of that. Next question. So if there is one movie or TV series that you've had a chance to catch up on now, but we're on lockdown, what would that be? And have you got any recommendations for anybody watching?

I will not have recommendations. I have a three year old at home who cannot go to daycare or school anymore, so I'm not watching anything.

What is the three year old watching? I've got a four year old and a one year old and a seven year old. So interesting to see what they're watching.

There's a show called Llama Llama that I've been watching on Netflix because, you know, I wanted to see Parasite for a while. I'm not a big movie buff, but every year I try to watch like one of the movies that are nominated for Oscars after all of this has happened. Like, I don't see them in the same year, but yeah, someday.

I like that. Good, good. So we've got Llama and we've got Parasite. Good, I like that. Thank you. All right, next one. What is the one thing that you have missed the most that you haven't been able to do since being on lockdown?

So many. Just like, yeah, having my day back. I feel like. Yeah, I said right now I think at least I am doing four hours of daycare at home with the kid and my wife takes up the other four hours. We both work and then we. So I think the answer is sleep. Yeah, I mean, we work the rest of the rest of the night is. Is what we work in. Yeah, sleep.

I can totally relate to sleep. All right, so over the past six months, what has been your best purchase, your most recommended purchase? Under a hundred dollars. So something that you purchased in the past six to 12 months that has been that one thing that you're just like, yeah, that's fantastic. Or under a hundred dollars.

I'm trying to think what have I bought?

Could be even just a book.

Yes, on a whim, I bought this book by. It's called 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which is a sequel of a book called Sapience by Yuval Harari. Yep, yep. It was amazing. Like he, he puts a twist on things that seem pretty normal till you start thinking of them from a different perspective that he does present really well. Like, like we all think of like different political systems or different historic events a certain way with certain emotions attached to it. And he tends to like, take all the emotion out and like, okay, this is an important event for you, but it has happened 15 times before. Just that.

Yeah, yeah, this repeats Sapiens is definitely Yuval's more popular book and it's more well known. But. And I, I absolutely adore that. And I haven't got around yet to reading that one, but that is a very good recommendation. Thank you. Okay, so two questions to go. The next one. Do you have a favorite podcast or YouTube channel that you like to put on when either you're not doing daycare or working? Do you have something that you like to tune into?

Yeah, it's an American show on NPR called. Wait, wait, don't tell me. Okay, it's a. It's a comedy show. Like, they have three comedians on the panel and then there is a host and they have people who dial in. It's a funny show.

I mean, when you do like to switch off, you like to switch off proper, put a bit of comedy on and not think about work and pricing. And final one, final, final one, which is one that I love to ask everybody specifically from the hospitality world, is what is your number one piece of advice that you could pass on to anybody listening who would like to increase their direction bookings?

One, have a good website. Yeah. Two, Market. Like, think of if you do end up having a good website now, the commission, the 15% commission that you used to give to whatever OTA, you can at least try putting a part of that into marketing and see if you. I mean, so this is going to be different because now you on OTAs, you only get charged that 15% if you get a booking versus marketing. It's, it's a bit of. You're trying something and you might not get a booking out of that marketing dollar, but it's something worth trying, even with a small budget in the beginning. And I'm no expert on marketing, so I don't know where to market and how to market, but that experiment might well be worth it. So do experiment 100%.

And this is a podcast, which is all about increasing direct bookings. And the best place to start, and the first place to start should always be your website. Because if you're going to talk about how good your property is, and if you want to drive people there instead of going to booking or Airbnb, then your website has got to be the thing that is super simple to use, super simple to navigate, and yeah, 100%. And again, with what price labs can help with, it can make sure that you get really good pricing, get the pricing sorted. So if you get somebody to land on your website, they love what they see. You get them to click into your pms, your booking engine, so they're doing all the things and then they get to the pricing and then if the pricing isn't right or they think they can get it somewhere cheaper, then all of that good work will fall down because they'll bounce and you know, stats are there. If they, if they bounce, they never come back. If they leave, they never come back. So, yeah, really good. And again, I just want to say thank you so much for this. So they want to, if anybody wants to go and get the sign up for free to go the five results, just go to boostly.co.uk Pricelabs. Put in your details, put in your data. You'll get, you'll see about five credits in the top right and you can literally get started. If anybody wants to go and find out more on social media about price labs, do you have YouTube channels? LinkedIn, Facebook? Where's the best place for somebody to see start the journey?

Find out more. We have a ton of content now on our YouTube channel. I know last time we spoke we were talking about how we don't market too well, but we've been trying to get better at putting content out. A lot of content there. We also, if you just go on our landing page you'll see there is a section with one Covid but also a section about webinars where you'll see a lot of stuff there about, you know, how things work, how different things work in specific topics as well. The best way still is to just email us. We are super active on our support email support, so if you do that, yeah, we'll, we'll answer any questions and point you to the right resources. We do host like weekly webinars on just about the product itself where you can ask questions afterwards. So if that works better for you instead of like reading, then that's an option as well.

Amazing. Thank you very much. Have you got any final words or anything to say? Big beef before we let you go?

Hang in there. Yeah, right now just see what you can to just stay, stay on top of things. One of the things we have been trying to do on our end is really focus on things that we thought we wanted to do six months from now or we were always pushing out like, hey, you know, this system needs to improve. Now is the time to improve that system. Like, yeah, amazing.

I really, really appreciate you coming on today and thank you very much to everybody that has tuned in like Anurag just said there, hold on in, you know, use this time, this quiet time to, you know, educate yourself, do training, delve into things that you never thought that you would have done in the past, like pricing. Have a, get a try and handle on it, get to use, to use Price Labs. You know, there's loads of amazing software out there. And again, if your PMS isn't integrated yet with Price Labs, then the first thing you need to be doing is to contacting your PMS customer support and saying, hey, go link up with Price Labs because we want to get this in. You know, they're always adding loads and you could see on that, on that screen, grab there that we saw that there are a lot of PMS's that are linked up. So it needs to be done because it is super important because on the other end of this pricing, if you get it right, it will just give you that such big advantage over everybody else in the area. And again we will bounce back and everybody that is watching these live videos, you have got all of the marketing advice that you need. Now we've been doing this for six weeks. We've shared everything from how to, how to save a cancellation, how to be proactive, how to post on content on social media. You know, we've had marketing advice about productivity, we've had finance, we've had everything. We've even had Janet Murray come on and do a mini workshop of everybody on how to pivot and how get new ideas, how to bring in income that's not even hospitality related. So you've got it all there and you can go all back on it at any time by going to boostie.co.uk boost podcast. Go on there. Whilst you're there, please go and subscribe on itunes or Spotify. Go and follow on YouTube. Go and follow. So if you want, if you prefer video or audio, doesn't matter, just go and subscribe, go tell somebody about it because I said we're doing all of this for free and Price Labs are helping the industry. I'm helping industries as much as I can, but you know, we can do all of this, but we need you to help share it. So if you can do one final thing, whether it's live or on the replay, all I want for you to do is say a massive thank you to Price Labs in the comments and then hit that share button, bottom left hand corner. You will see it, hit it. Go and share it in a group that's hospitality related or property related. Go and share it on your personal wall. Just share and tag somebody in and tell them about it that needs to see it because this is a really important topic. Alright, I'll be back again tomorrow with another live video, but until then I'll see you on the other side. Thank you so much. Please make sure you rate, review and subscribe wherever you're tuning in from and we will see you again very shortly.