If your website isn't doing this, then you're going to get left behind

At the show, I want to very quickly say thank you to our podcast sponsor, which is Hostfully. So those of you that have been.

Hiding under a rock for a very.

Long time and don't know who Hostfully are, they are one of the market leaders in the digital guidebook world. If you haven't yet got a digital guidebook for your hospitality business, please make sure it's the thing that you do today. The best thing about digital guidebooks is it is free. To get started, go to H o s t f U-L-L-Y.com and you can get a free digital guidebook today from Hostfully. What you can do from there is you can inform your guests about any changes that are currently happening in your local area. You can tell them WI FI codes, you can show them how to use the dishwasher and all of those amazing things. It's not just for rentals, it can be used for bed and breakfast as well. So go and get your free digital guidebook by going to hostfully.com there is a freemium option you can upgrade to get more digital guidebooks and more features where you can when you do that, if you'd like two months free, please put Boostly 2M B O O S T L Y 2M in the coupon code section. You'll get two months free. I'll be back later in this episode just to mention Hostfully one more time, but just want to say thank you so much to all of the team at Hostfully for continuing to sponsor the podcast. It means the world, so let's get on with the show.

So there was a very recent report put out and in this report it was created by hootsuite. Hootsuite, you may know, is a very popular social media scheduling tool. And in the report it, it basically wanted to do a big social media, how everybody's using the Internet, etc. And one of the really key things to me, and I'll just bring up the report now on my screen so you'll be able to see is, is that digitally around the world unique mobile phone users, 5.27 billion for our 7.85 billion on this planet and 67% of them are using their mobile. Now this is a massive shift, even more so than what it was in 2020 or 2019. More and more people are using their mobile phones to do what they need to do, whether that is buying something, whether that is watching something or booking a vacation or a holiday or workation. Now this brings it back to something that I've been talking about for a while is that if your website is not built for mobile phones first, then you are being left behind. Now, my name is Mark Simpson and I give hosts just like you the tools, the tactics, the training, but most importantly, the confidence to get direct bookings. And if this is the first time that you're checking out one of my daily podcast episodes, then all I ask for you to do is to hit that like button, subscribe and tell a friend or a fellow host about what we're trying to do here. My goal is to help 1 million hosts increase their direct bookings and cut down on their over reliance on Airbnb and booking.com and VRBO. Now, what I really want to stress to everybody is that a lot of you will have a website, a lot of you don't. Now, when you come to create your own website, you're going to do it on what I'm using right now, which is a laptop or a desktop. Not one of you, I guarantee. This is building it, thinking about mobile first. Now, there's a real simple tweak that you can do here, is that when you are creating your website, you've got a little preview mode to basically build it out with your phone at hand. And this is something that we've done at Boostly for years. Every single one of our mobile, our websites is built mobile first. We've designed everything knowing that when the guest first arrives on your website, they're going to be doing so on a mobile phone. So that's why our websites is such a smooth, seamless transition from the home page to the property page, to the room page and then to the booking page. And that's what you need to be doing as well. Now, if you haven't got a Boostly website and you've got somebody that has designed it for you, whether it's a web designer or a friend or whoever, I'd be texting them right now and saying, is our website built mobile first? And if you don't want to wait for an answer, get your phone out.

And just test it.

This is something that so many people don't do, but it's really key is go and run a dummy booking through your website. So right now, go and head to your, your website and put a little coupon code in your PMS, like for 100 of the booking, and go and try and run a dummy booking through and see how it works. See how easy it is, See what obstacles there are. It may not be that your website is the problem. Maybe that your property management software that you use is the problem and you may need to fix it there. But this is something that I recomm people do all the time is to test, test and test. If you test your website, make sure that it's all up to date. Make sure that it's working. Then your guests will have a great experience when they're coming onto your website. It's very important that your guest has a great experience when coming into your website. It's as important as that experience when they first step into your property. So please make sure that everything that you do from now on your website is built mobile first. If it isn't, it's going to get left behind because more and more and more people are using their mobile phones to buy book their next vacation staycation workation all right, I'll be back tomorrow with another daily podcast. Bite sized little tactics and tips that everybody can do all around the world. If this is the first time that you're tuning in, thank you. Please make sure you subscribe so you can get more of these daily podcasts. Please make sure as well that you tell a fellow host and what I would love the Question of the day. Leave below in the comments section. Let me know. Is your website built for mobile first and if not, what are you going to do about it? So please do that. Question of the day. I'll be back tomorrow for another daily podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you want to go find out more boostly.co.uk podcast Take Care.