Insights & Takeaways From The Hostaway 2023 Report

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome wherever you're tuning in from around the world. My name is Mark Simpson, giving hosts all over the world the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to boost your direct bookings. I have got a very special little insert from a recording from the book Direct Virtual Summit that we hosted a few weeks ago. It's a fireside discussion with Mr. Marcus Rader of Hostaway. He shared some phenomenal tips and, and a little sneak peek to the Hostaway Short Term Rental 2023 report. By now you tune into this, the report is up and you can go and view it on hostaway.com please do go check it out. Whilst you're on Hostaway, do go and book in your demo, go and have a chat with them. Marcus is a very, very gifted, talented chap. I've got the pleasure of knowing him more and more over the year and in this he's going to talk about findings from the report, a little bit of what to look out for From Hostaware in 2024 and everything else in between. So without further ado, let me flip the screen and let's hear from the man himself.

Thank you very much for having me on here, Mark. So my name is Markus Rader from HostAway. I'm the CEO and co founder of HostAway which is a PMS that got for those who didn't know it before this year, maybe the news about 175 million we raised sort of established that yeah, we're, we're one of the, the biggest players in the world when it comes to vacation rental technology. My job and my dedication and passion for the last eight years that I've been working on this is knowing everything I can about the vacation rental space, both technology properties, real estate macro trends and of course the landscape of OTAs. And thank you Mark by the way, for leading, leading the battle for direct bookings. I'm actually, we have a bit, bit of a surprise here because we, we do an annual survey among our clients and we, we haven't released anything before because our marketing team has been very lean. But this year we're going to release our 2023 short term rental report tomorrow and I'm going to be able to give some, some data there and yeah, we'll, we'll get back into that later but that's, that's who I am.

Fantastic. So the, the, the sneak peek and the little teaser that I was mentioning earlier is that there's going to be a big report released tomorrow by Hostaway and We'll let you know how you can find that tomorrow. But tonight, for those of you that have tuned in live, you are going to get the sneak peek. And the cool thing, when we have a report from somebody as huge as Hostaway, just, just remind everybody how many listings are currently or properties or businesses are currently using your, your platform, which is you say just on, on average.

Guess it's, it's crazy because it's grown so fast in the last two, three years. We're now over 100,000 properties and almost 10,000 property managers are using us.

Wow. So as you can imagine, there is a lot of data there. There's a lot of bookings coming through your platform on, on a daily, a weekly and a monthly basis. And when you have that big of a data source, you can really sort of spot trends. And obviously where this industry is, is going now obviously when we had Simon here talking yesterday, he was, he was talking from a, you know, a 60, 000 foot view based on, on his experience and talking events and being at events where. Now what we're going to be looking at is, is that, is that cold hard data. So thank you very much for, for letting everybody get access to this data early and for going through the report and we're going to be teasing out some things. So I, I guess the best place to start would be you looking at the report. What was the, the first thing that, that you, that, that really stood out to yourself when you've looked at that report fresh with your eyes.

What, what really stood out is something that I think everyone is aware of and also Simon mentioned it's more competitive out there. There's a lot more supply, but there's also a lot more demand. But what I found really interesting was that more than I think, I think it was 70%. Well, we'll see the exact numbers tomorrow. Said that it's, you know, either the same or more competitive than last year. But then when asked, okay, what about your ADRs, the average daily rates. Remember these respondents, these are not based on facts. You know, someone asks are you making more money this year than last year? It doesn't mean that they go and look at their bank accounts. No, it, they give the spontaneous response, which is why I find this type of data so much more interesting than let's say real qualitative data that you get from example transparent and air DNA which analyze all the data, but they only analyze the facts, not the feelings. And in business a lot of decisions are made based on feelings. So what was so interesting to see was that most people felt that the ADRs were the same or slightly higher this year than last year. And the reason I find that fascinating is that quite often what people do is they come up with a narrative that's easy to stick to, but then there's also reality and sometimes those don't match. So to try to put it fairly or say it as simple as possible, things are better this year than last year, but people think things are worse.

That's, that's very. Well, let me throw it open to everybody that's in with us right now. And there are a lot of people tuning in with us live right now compared to this time last year. So compared to, let's just call it December 2022, would you say again, without looking at the cold hard data, just from how you feel right now, would you say that you are better or worse than this time last year? And again, with your ADR average daily rate, would you say that it is higher or lower than this time next year? And why? That'll be really interesting and cool to see as well. So again, sentiment is that, which is cool. What else stood out in the report from you looking at it again, from like fresh eyes looking at this report? How else has this report hit you?

So one of the really interesting aspects there was AI adoption and specifically how larger property managers are using it more than smaller property managers. I think AI is something that should be on everyone's minds right now. No matter what type of work you're doing, whether you're a property manager or maybe you're a dentist or car mechanic, this should be on top of your mind. Because especially if you're running a business and a small business, you are going to have to find the tools to become more efficient. Because when it comes to vacation rentals, the demand and supply, they're pretty good. They're not artificial, you know, they, they live. If more people book, there will be more rentals available and if nobody's booking, rentals will go offline and so on. Now what it means is that your competition can move in any day and they might be doing things more efficiently, which means it could mean that they can do things better and cheaper than you can. And this is something that I was actually surprised that I think 52% have tried or use on a regular basis. AI tools within Hostaway I think we were the first PMS this year to launch our ChatGPT or OpenAI generated responses to guest questions and at first I was quite skeptical. How's that going to work? How they're going to know the responses. But actually it works really, really well overall. But this is something that property managers should keep in mind because especially as you run a bigger business, when you start having five employees, that's when you know hiring your sixth employee versus buying a tool that, that helps your current five do the work of six or maybe seven people can make a massive financial difference and that will give you the edge over the competition.

I think that's a really, really interesting point. 52%. So it'll be really interesting. Obviously Chat GPT as we know it isn't even a year old. It was literally 30th of November 2022 when, when they opened it up to the public. So it's really interesting to see how far we've come in a year. How many people took the survey? Just out of interest, do you have that number to hand or what are we.

I don't have the exact number now, but I think it was, it was fairly small. It was a couple of thousand.

Brilliant. So a couple of thousand people, which is a real nice data set and over half of them are using AI in some way, shape or form. Again, let me open it up to the chat and please do put this in, in the comments as you are watching along you. Yes or no? Simple, hashtag yes, hashtag no. Have you used AI in your business in the, in the last year? That would be really interesting to know. And, and again, if you've got time to tap and put in a bit of a detail of what you're doing, whether it's guest comms, helping with X or image, whatever it may be, let let us know because it is, it's really interesting. You're right. Those that do it will really help for time more than anything else. If it's time for you or time for your staff members. We did a big session on this last night in one of our VIP sessions, we went over AI and what some of the latest AI tools and, and yeah, a lot of people were buzzing as they left the session. We finished about 10 o' clock at night and I got a message from somebody saying I couldn't sleep because I was buzzing with ideas. So it's, it's really is fascinating for, for, for me to see this. If you're struggling on how to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start, then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boost Lee and our team right now. We can walk you through exactly what we're offering, how we can help you and give You a portfolio of websites that we have worked with that are matching not only your niche but could be in your location as well. Boostly has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world increase their direct bookings. And if you are interested then all you need to do is go to Boostly. B O o s t l y.co.uk call and booking an appointment with one of our sales team. So we've got AI, we've got sentiment. Is there any other things that you've been able to pull from the report that surprised you or looking forward to 2024 that you go, okay, well this is where this data or this, this is where this trend is going. Is there anything else you're able to pick out of the survey?

So something that was for me, I'm very biased, I'm in the software space but I was very excited to see both good news and bad news. So the good news is that over 80% of the property managers that were surveyed, we questioned their challenges and you can see that all in the report when it's released tomorrow. Check out hostaway.com but 80% of them said that the biggest solution for the struggles in their business was software, which is great and you know that Mark as well. Sometimes when you have a problem there's software that can solve it. But the real interesting part was that one of the biggest pain points that businesses had was also software. And that's of course the reason I'm smiling is that we're fairly new in the industry. We're not a 20 year old company running on 20 year old technology and we're, we're killing it. There's a lot of property managers switching to Hostaway right now to get the latest technology but it is a challenge because you need to make sure that it works for your business. And I can say at Hostaway we use over 60 different technology platforms and sometimes I just wish that there could be a little bit of consolidation. Why do we need all these tools to do these different things? But I think that's where we're moving towards in the, in the case rental software space is going to be one, you don't need to use 50 tools, you need to use maybe two or three and that's, that's it. Or for some of them only one. And that is really exciting.

I think with the survey reports that I've seen over the last seven years. I think software and tech is a constant theme where it's a, it's a pain point. And you're right, I Feel like instead of consolidation, what's happened is we've got a lot of new things that have popped up even this year. The amount of a guest response companies, there's about four or five I can name now that I've seen from them or another events over the course of the year. So is this basically, obviously now Hostaway has got a ton of funding behind it. You're looking forward to 2024, 2025? Are you looking to acquire companies? Are you looking to go ahead and use that money to just bring everything in house and build it yourself? Like, how's your sort of mindset at the moment from like a CEO of Host away sort of looking at this?

Yeah, great, great question. I think it's all, all a question of time. Our customers are very impatient. They, those who have been with us for a longer time, they know that when there's something new available when, when this big change or release on, let's say Airbnb or Verbo, we're always the first ones to pick it up and support it and implement it into our platform. And so we have very high standards to adhere to. But I think we will see massive improvements overall in the software space over the coming years. And so from our point of view, it's less about money and more about time. What is the most efficient and easiest way to bring new technology to our clients? And if that means we go out and build it or acquire or do a partnership with companies, then yeah, we'll just have to evaluate what, what gives the most value to the customers in the shortest amount of time. And that's one of the luxuries you get with money, is you start valuing other things than money, like time. Well, customers are quite busy, so they value time.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the things that I really like about Hostaware, and I've seen you mention this on a, on a podcast recently, is we're talking about software, we're talking about tech. But one of your big goals for 2024 is actually staff and customer support. Can you just sort of explain what you're planning doing for 2024 with the, the support team, but behind the scenes and what your big goal is for 2024 with that, there's a couple of.

Companies that, that have differentiated themselves in history purely by support, and that is exactly what we're planning to do. We're on a really good track so far. When you look at the, the ratios of support and customer success members compared to other companies in the industry, we have more it's that simple. And just yesterday we were running one of our webinars, which are, we run monthly webinars and they're extremely popular and we always have a QA section so people can type in questions. Someone just put in their question. By the way, hostaway support is great. And we had a small celebration here just this week when our Capterra rating went from 4.7 to 4.8. We aim for 5.0. That I think is the only thing that's acceptable in today's day and age. But yeah, investing in improving support and also customer success, that is something that we're planning to do. So what my vision always was is that we're going to be a software partner that provides the software and most importantly, we are going to empower our customers, our partners, to build better businesses. Because building a business is incredibly hard. And if you're a property manager, you're struggling with so many different things. There's legal, there's financial, there's hr, there's marketing, there's sales. Then there's practicalities. How do you fix the leaking roof? There's all these components that go into it. And with all the aggregated data that we have and expertise and the knowledge, we should be able to help our customers become more successful in their own business. And that was a vision that I held for many years. But we never really had the resources to build a customer success team, which is something that we now have built and we are rolling it out. And the feedback has been overall very positive. Because when you are running a business, you're basically at war with the world. They're everyone out there is out to get you. And it's your job to make sure that you can survive and that you can thrive. Because if you don't, there's someone else who's ready to take your spot in an instant. Now, as you are running that war, it's very easy to lose sight of the simple things. And for our team, it's very easy by looking into, into our customers accounts, we can see, hey, did you know that you know this beachfront property? You're not really using the word beachfront in the title and there's a tag here that says beachfront. You didn't click it, so you're not gonna get any bookings for this property. That's very easy to miss. But this is exactly what our team is doing. Just looking at the basics, or did you notice that this property number 26 out of 73 for the last six months, it has received Bad reviews and maybe we should look at those reviews together and figure out oh yeah, the coffee maker is broken. That's why.

Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two boostly books that we brought out, the book Direct Playbook and the book Direct Blueprint are two of the top rated and the best selling in the hospitality category on Amazon for just two pounds you can grab both of those books right now the foundations and the structures that you need to put in place is in the blueprint and then for 101 marketing tactics that is in the Playbook. So go and grab a copy on Amazon now just type in Book Direct Playbook or the book Direct Blueprint and we'll see you on the other side now. They're very fair, very good and I and again we, we partner with, with Houseware on the website side and it's amazing to see and the growth has been phenomenal. Somebody just put in the chat here and I'm going to bring up on screen they said hire me, Marcus. I have a goal for 2024 to work remote from my short term rentals when they're vacant. So hey, it could be a potential, a potential hire in the chat right now. And another thing, one of the thing that, that really struck a point to me. You're, you're a CEO and you've got I imagine quite a fair amount of employees now maybe over 100. But still to this day when you have to off board an employee, you jump on the, on the call with them to have a chat with them. Can you just explain the thinking behind this? Because I feel like there's so many people in here who have employees and the talk to me behind the thinking behind it, why do you do it? And just the impact really.

I'm a, I'm a really picky consumer. I, I love interacting with people but sometimes I'm, I'm forced to interact with businesses as well. Forced to interact with airlines, with insurance companies, with banks, are forced to interact with, with restaurants. The one thing that I really don't like is when you interact with a business and the other person clearly doesn't enjoy working there. And you see this all the time because then you know you're going to have a hard time getting things done now. When we started building Hostaway, we had experience in a lot of tech startups from before that and we had a very simple vision. It wasn't to take over the world, it wasn't to build the best software. It was simply to create a good place to work because we had seen businesses that were great places to work, but the business was terrible and they were, they. They went bankrupt, people were laid off. Suddenly it wasn't a great place to work. And we had seen businesses that are very profitable but terrible places to work where everyone hates going into the office. So we set it as our mission that when our customers interact with us, they should interact with people who enjoy what they're doing. And I think our Glassdoor ratings of 5.0, I think 5.0 is the only acceptable rating you can have speak for themselves. We're a fully remote organization and I have done every job in the company except for writing code, because I don't know how to write code. And I think it's my duty. I don't know what other CEOs are doing. We got about 160, 170 staff right now. It's my duty to talk to every one of those staff members and remind them just how important they are because they are the ones that solves the customer's problem. They are the ones who help customer find a new good solution. They are the ones who come up with a great marketing campaign. They are the most important people in the company. I don't know what other CEOs are doing if they're not doing that powerful.

And again, we've got a lot of people here who hire and they may hire contractors, outsources or in house. And I feel like it's, it's an important message somebody put in the, in the chat. Can you explain a little bit more about the interaction relation between Boostly and Hostaway? I'm confused as it seems your services are competitors, each other and complementary. What am I missing? Well, first and foremost, Boostly is not a pms. We have got no ambition to be a PMS in any way, shape or form. We work with host for host away. Sorry, in. In the fact that we connect our API. So when we've got one of our customers who has got a direct booking website and we are a massive fan of a very smooth checkout process and a very smooth interaction process, we connect to Hostaway and we basically then will pass all the data through to. To. To. To Hostaway, which is. Is. Is how. How we work and we are very aligned on the messaging of Darren Bookings. But it's also nice to see that we're also very much aligned on customer support. We're very much aligned on how we treat staff as well. So it's amazing to see. I would call it that the peanut Butter to our jelly. I don't know if you, if you shared the same shame, same sentiments there, Marcus, but now it's been an absolute pleasure getting to know yourself and last a year or just over a year. We've, we've had this partnership together and I know we've got a lot of our Boostly members who maybe join with another PMS but eventually moved to Hostaway or have been with Hostaway from the start. And it's always a pleasure working with a company like you say, who is new, is fresh and can pivot and very flexible and it's, and you know, very responsive. You know, it's, it's awesome for us because we always having tweaks. We've got a lot of members at Boostly who are always asking for new, new things. As you know, Google is the, is the latest thing that I'm going to talk about later, but it's amazing to be able to work together and push forward for that book. Direct message.

Yeah, that's right. So we have one of the largest or if not the largest marketplaces. So a PMS is basically where you manage all the bookings. That's the centralized calendar, pricing your payments, your accounting, your communication with the guests. And we have 160 partners now. Just in the last couple of months, I've seen 15 AI chatbots come and partner with us. They're not all on the marketplace yet, but Boostly is one of our, our biggest, biggest partners. They build great websites and you know, I, I think about it as a home. You probably in your home you have everything you need. But there's a couple of things you can do. For example, you can't fly across, across the world. Go to Tokyo. No, you need an airplane for that. And you know what you don't have? You don't have a beach in your backyard. And if you have a beach, you don't have a golf course in your backyard. Now that's when you need, even though your home is probably perfect, you need other tools to get other things done. And that's why Hostaway on one hand is an all in one solution. But not every part of our software is good for every situation or for every property manager. And we got over 160 partners like Boostly so that we can offer their services to our clients as well, which is part of what the customer success team does. If there's a challenge that we, we can't overcome together, we know our partners by heart and we can recommend the right services. Amazing.

Thank you. And so when it comes to Hostaway and the people that you're helping the most. Do you have any, any limits of you to speak to our team, you've got to have a minimum amount of properties or how does the sort of the pricing scale up? How do you keep it fair for all? Because we've got people in here who are starting out maybe with one property. We've got people that are growing with 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 properties. How do you tackle this obstacle at Hostaway specifically?

Yeah, I think it's an industry wide issue because the needs and demands and the budget of 1, 2, 5, 10, 100 and 1000, we even have customers with tens of thousands of properties. Those are very different. And, and up until now we've had on our website that if you, if you sign up, first of all we talk to everyone because we don't want you to end up with a software that you don't like using. Just like I don't want any person on this planet to work at a job that they hate and I don't want anyone to use our software unless they really like using our platform. This is why we talk to each one one of you. So if you're interested you can sign up for demo on hostaway.com but if you put in there that you have only one property then we're going to say we're sorry, we just don't have the time right now because demand is quite massive and we have received feedback that it's hard to get in touch with the sales team. That's just because they're busy. But we are constantly hiring. But if you are planning to grow and you maybe want to just bounce some ideas of us, we don't see our sales team as a sales team. They're more consultants because they're, they're the industry experts. They have whatever original idea you have, they've talk, talked to a hundred other people that had the same idea and they can share the best practices. So if you're planning to grow beyond one property, let's say in a year you're planning to have maybe two or three go on our website and type in that you have three properties and talk to our sales team and see if you can learn something from that. And if you, if you don't end up choosing host away, that's completely fine.

Yeah, you know, you're not going anywhere and you'll be there when they're ready to grow. So it's, it's a great message to have and this is why I've Loved having you being part of the summit. Host away were one of the, the few people who stepped up when I said, hey, I, I, you know, I need some help with the ad cost that we're going to do for this and, and you said, yeah, 100%. Well, we'll love to help. So massive thank you from me. And if everybody please, on the app, if you're watching on the live right now, tap that love heart emoji button as many times as possible. Give Marcus a thank you for coming with us today and thank you to Hostaway. So tomorrow is when the STR Report 2023 is going to go live. Upon the site. All being well, where can people connect with you? Is LinkedIn the best place? Facebook, Instagram? Where can people find out more about yourself? And again, just give that domain one more shout out for where they can go tomorrow to grab this report, please.

Absolutely. It's hostaway.com and if you want to find me, just Google Marcus Hostaway LinkedIn and that's probably the best way to reach out.

Oh, well, thank you. If you've made it this far. Hello, welcome. Not many of you do having about 60, 61% of you cut out before the very end. So this is a little tweet for all you there at the end. Go ahead and go to boostly.co.ukical and you will never miss another live event again. B O-O-S-T-L y.co.uk forward/I C A L. And I'll be back very soon with the next edition of the Bruce Lee podcast.