How To Really Impress Your Guests and Increase Repeat Bookings

So one thing which I absolutely love at the moment is the amount of tech and the new and exciting things which is happening in hospitality. And obviously Boostly, what we want to do is promote more direct bookings and ways that you as a host can stand out and make sure guests always remember their experience when they come and stay with you. And our guest today helps with exactly that. They really help both with the experience, but also so you can really impress them and get more direct bookings for the future. So this is the Boostly podcast. If this is your first time here, the Boostly podcast helps hosts with the tools, the tactics, the trainings, and most importantly, the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings. Today we're joined by a very special guest. We've got the CEO and founder of Enzo Connect, It's Francois. I'm going to be terrible pronouncing this Francois Coelho. Is that right?

You got it.

Superb. Okay, so he's here to tell us all about the latest things happening with Enzo Connect. And if you haven't heard of this before, do stick around. You're going to have a great time finding out about this product and how you can get involved and put this into your hospitality business. So welcome along. Francois, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me. And I love talking about everything, book direct and so on. So I know you guys are the. The OGs in this space, so I appreciate you having me on the podcast today.

Thank you. Thank you very much. So before we dive into the product, which I know everyone's going to be excited to find out about, give me a little bit about your history of, first of all, where you are in the world, your history, and how Enzo Connect came to be 100%.

So I'm currently based in Toronto in Canada. Originally from France, but raised in England and in the US a bit. So traveled a fair bit with family, which is always an amazing thing. And I did my studies. You know, some people might see me on this and might be like, how old is this kid? So I'm about 26 years old. And I started Enzo Connect right out of university. I studied computer science, cognitive science, focus in computational linguistics, literally working on models like ChatGPT, Transformer, as we used to call them before OpenAI, kind of brought their own version of it, and then did a Master's of entrepreneurship at Cambridge in the uk. Enzo Connect was. I was never meant to start a company. It was a pure accident. In fact, I was supposed to go get a job like you know any normal person after university and figure out what I was going to do. But instead, I started this company out of pure accident because I was in a course and we had to come up with a solution to an entrepreneurial problem. Now it had to be robotics focused, and I absolutely hate robotics. So I went up to my Prof. And I said, can I do smart home devices instead? And he reluctantly said, yes. But he said, you're probably not going to win the $10,000 cash prize at the end of the course. And I was like, wait a minute, there's a $10,000 cash prize at the end of this course. Challenge accepted, Mario. I'm going to do everything to win this. So I don't think I attended any of my other courses. I just focused on that one. First weekend, my best friend calls me up and he tells me, francois, you're trying to become Canadian, You're French, and you don't know how to ski. So we're going to go to Mont Blanc and we're going to learn how to ski. So it's a Friday morning, early afternoon, and we drive towards Montaumbl from Toronto, which is about a four or five hour drive. We book a vacation rental on Airbnb. Maybe the first mistake, I don't know. And we get an automated message that says, keys under the doormat. Here's your check in instructions. Have a nice day. And that's about it. We get to the unit, keys frozen under the doormat. We finally pry ourselves into the unit, and we noticed the heating system was per room. We didn't figure that out until the checkout. So we just ended up staying in the living room where it was warm and we could make fire. And then throughout the state, we're asking basic questions. How do I get pizza delivered in the middle of nowhere? The millennial that I am, how do I do this? How do I do that? And no answers whatsoever. Five days after checkout, we get a text message from the host saying, we left one of the windows open in the kitchen. Kitchen pipes froze. We owe him $5,000 and he's sending.

Us to small claim.

So that's kind of the birth story of Enzo Connect. We did close those windows. Message coming in five days after checkout. Could have been a different guest. I mean, it was a whole ordeal. And we decided to solve the check in problem. So we started with a very, very basic proof of concept. And the idea was everyone has data about them. We know basic information. Now, as much as an OTA might restrict emails and phone numbers, and such we know certain key information that should allow you to make the checking process seamless. So we built a very small proof of concept. We actually brought in a door which I still have right here on my, near my, my desk, and we are shareholders now to sign it. And we built a proof of concept. We ended up winning the ten grand. And then I was starting a master's of entrepreneurship and I was like part of my French, but fuck it, I'm going to try and do this on the side and see what happens.

What would you say is the experience from a guest? So if you had Enzo Connect when you were checking into that Airbnb, what would your experience have been like?

Well, you know what, I'll tell you what my experience was. A week ago I went to Montreal for a festival. Not very professional of me. I wish I could tell you it was a work trip, but no. I went out and partied at Oceaga and I decided to book one of our clients properties called Simplicimo out of Montreal. So same destination, different client. And I got to check in using our platform. And what was really cool about this is we drove from 6pm and arrived at 1am and the check in was smooth. So I got the information at the right time. I got what we call boarding pass, which is kind of a web app that encompasses all the different links that you would usually send to guests. So things like guidebooks, upsells, verification, check in information, smart locks, all in one, branded and designed in your way kind of web app, no downloads required or anything like that. And I got to check in and the process was smooth. It was step by step, picture by picture, check in instructions, with the last element being a unlock door button, unlocked the door, took a shower, went to bed, and then went and partied for the weekend. So it was a great, great experience. Also a great way for me to see certain items of the check in experience that were not the way I would want it to be. So noticing that, you know, an integration with a smart lock generates six digit codes instead of four digit codes. So just being able to understand how clients use our platform, what are some limitations, what we could improve? But definitely, I think it would have made the check in experience and the upsell part way more convenient.

How much effort does it take to set up something like Enzo Connect? What's the, the time involved?

I guess so I'll take a step back and I'll give you a bit of the story behind the boarding pass and how we got to that point, because this was developed a year ago and it's evolved so much from all the client feedback that we've gotten. When we first started, it was really just collecting data and a guidebook, and not a great guidebook at that, to be quite honest. So we've developed it since to account for more. When we first started Enzo Connect, we actually started off as a unified messaging platform with different AI capabilities. Not ChatGPT at the time, although now we've finally launched Enzo AI, which is ChatGPT in your inbox. And it was a basic inbox with text, email, WhatsApp and Airbnb message. Something which at the time was lacking for many property management systems. We would centralize the information, create different automations, and we would focus a lot on the concept of if this, then that. So if the guest sends this kinds of message, or if this happens, or if that happens, then send a message. What we realized this was about a year, year and a half ago is people were setting up a ridiculous amount of workflows of these conditions and logic for their guest experience. And effectively it wasn't actually reducing the amount of questions guests had, it was just automating their tasks, sending out messages, but not necessarily responding to the overwhelming number of guest questions. And so the idea shifted from, well, let's not think about automating guest messages, let's think about removing them completely. Why is it that when I book a hotel, I don't interact with anyone until I show up to the property. If they're not self check in, then I have a front desk to just get my I.D. and you know, get the key and so on, but I don't have any questions. And that comes to two things, trust and the way operators communicate with guests. And so the idea was with this web app, our goal is to remove all of those questions so that it's all answered already. And it's kind of a self serve model. So the boarding pass is a web app, super configurable, using the same if this, then that, that can dynamically change based on conditions. So if it's an Airbnb reservation, I don't need to do ID verification, but if it's a direct booking, I need a safety deposit and ID verification. Things that Airbnb offers as an OTA that I can't offer as, as a direct booking channel. So being able to tailor the experience according to different conditions and then running the guests through that guest journey. So it's, it's through what we call our Guest Journey editor. Literally you just go through every stage of the guest journey, and you set these things up. So booking confirmation. What do you want to do? Pre check in. What do you want to do? What do you want to say? What kind of upsells you want to have? Check in. And we just run through the whole experience, hit a button that says go live, and that's it, you're done. And then you just obviously have to actually manage the guests and the rest, you know, through our inbox, your pms, or any other tools that you might be using. So that's kind of the setup, if you will.

Having a blast? Gonna get it on the Boost Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, Like Bruce Lee?

Cause it's so hard?

And the tea is loose leaf? Making up those rhymes? Don't write it, just do it loosely.