This is a short interview transcript of a YouTube video (host Mark Simpson with guest Kevin Poneskis) about targeting corporate bookings within the service accommodation (SA) market. Key points: get training/mentorship before starting; common mistakes include apathy and listing only on Airbnb (not targeting corporate guests or booking.com); corporate guests provide longer bookings and higher value; Kevin describes operational scale (joint ventures across the UK, in excess of 60 SAs) and local ‘gold-mine’ areas (Swansea and Plymouth); operational tactic: pay meet-and-greet staff £15 (often ex-cleaners) to welcome guests, gather stay-purpose details and upsell direct-booking discounts; follow-up depends on the skill of the meet-and-greet person and may involve team outreach.
Questions this video answers
November 19, 2019.
In excess of 60 SAs (service accommodations).
Swansea and Plymouth.
£15.
Chapters
If you want to find out more, if you go to the boostlead.co.uk podcast, check out season six, because that whole series was dedicated to service accommodation. You can find out a bit more about that terminology, but this is a really good chance to chat about corporate bookings and business bookings. Prime focus on that is getting those corporate bookings. And that's what we're going to talk about today. What was the one bit of advice that you wish that you had received from your peers when you were getting started into this essay world with anything?
Go and get training. It's not simply a case of getting a property and just whacking it onto Airbnb. There's an awful lot more to it than that. Getting the right training and potentially having a mentor as well has always been fundamental to my success and I notice it in the success of others as well.
What would be interesting to know would be what are the common mistakes that you see a lot of your delegates or mentees make when they first get into essay? And particularly, let's try and focus this question around reaching out and getting new bookings.
People do not make as much money as they could make with their service accommodation properties, certainly, and that comes largely out of apathy. It comes out of laziness, taking it for granted. Take the bookings for granted and just putting them on Airbnb. Some people only do that. They don't even put it on booking.com so you actually want to target the corporate guests because they're the people that are more likely to book for longer periods of time.
I love that sort of the way that we go down. And have you got any success stories from your properties? We haven't really unraveled about how many properties that you have in the SA world and whatnot. But have you got any success stories from doing this method that you can think of on the top of your head that you'd like to share with us about how you did that and.
What were the benefits on the back of it? Well, in terms of getting direct bookings, yeah.
We've had.
We've got properties scattered all over the country now, SA properties. So our main personal gold mine areas are Swansea and Plymouth in terms of sa, but with SA management, we're JV with people all over the country now. So it's in excess of 60 SAs in total. That doesn't include our other properties in the portfolio. But the point I'm going to make here is that somebody. There's lots of work to be done with service accommodation it's just you shouldn't be doing it. And so meet and greet, we pay £15 for somebody to go and do a meet and greet. The main people that do it are ex cleaners of ours. 15 quid is a lot of money for somebody that's used to scrubbing toilets for an hour and they're quite happy to go and sit in a lovely service accommodation unit with wi fi and the heating on and watching telly, waiting for someone to knock on the door or to send a text or to ring or whatever, because they need to be let in. Now what the meet and greet person then does is have the conversation with the guest. Why are you here? How long you here for? What's the contract? Oh, wow. Would you like to book with us direct from now on? Here is the website and here is the discount code that you can use to get the discount, etc.
Do you have a system and a structure set up in place where they report back to you after the meet and greet just to say, hey, so we've got a business guy who is staying in the area, but they're looking to get more, or do you simply trust that person then to do the upsell, so to speak, and to get them to come back more?
So, depending on the meet and greet person, some of them are more experienced and more skilled than others. So our main sort of meet and greet person, yes, you can do an awful lot. Otherwise, if it's just one of the guys, they can just obviously let us know that what they've gleaned from the guest and then one of our team can just reach out.
So do you have the systems and structure in place then, Kevin, to recognize business bookings before they even arrive, or are you gathering all of this information on the fly with the check in.
Process, by the way, just in case any of your listeners or viewers are wondering what happens if the guest is arriving at a really unsociable time. Well, that's fine in those circumstances you can issue the key code access because you literally don't want someone doing it at 1, 2, 3 in the morning. Clearly, with Airbnb it's a lot easier because you're able to open dialogue with your guests with Airbnb a lot easier. And quite often they will inquire to you and ask you questions. But yes, with Airbnb you can open dialogue with people and establish why they're coming, et cetera. That's cool. And so you know before they come that their business, it could be quite often the PA to the MD or whoever in HR is tasked with booking accommodation for the team, for the contractors, etc. And often they're just using Airbnb as that platform in order to source essay. With booking.com, it's a lot more of a sort of faceless transaction, because people don't need to open up a dialogue, they can just book you direct. So with Airbnb you can be inquiries only, that sort of thing. Thing. Whereas a booking. Com, basically you just get told you've been booked and someone's come in.
