Let’s talk about texting with Alix Hecht of Wishbox

Foreign. Episode 23 of Season 8 and today what we're talking about is using text messaging to communicate with your guests in the short, medium and the long term. How it can not only help prevent cancellations, but increase your upsell for your properties before the guests arrive, when the guests are at your property, but even getting them to stay later on down the line, we talk to Alex who is the sales director at Wishbox Wishbox. If you didn't know, they help you really when it comes to not only communicating with your guests once they've booked, but also as well getting that upsell. And I couldn't think of anybody better to speak to than Wishbox when it came to this. If you want to go find out more about Wishbox, go to Wishbox Co W I S H B O X CO Just one little thing before you go, go and check out our podcast sponsors hostfully hostfully.com you get free digital guidebooks that you can send to your guests before they arrive that will help you with WI fi codes, directions and places to visit in and around where your area is. You get a digital guidebook for free absolutely free by going to hostfully.com if you want to upgrade and go for their premium features, just put Boostly2M in the promo code and you get two months free. Just because you're a Boostly podcast listener, please do go and support them. Please do go and sign up for a free listing. It helps keep these Boostly podcasts going every single week. Finally, before you go, if you want to get all of your social media content sorted, we do talk about it a lot in this episode. If you don't want the stress and the worries of having to create social media content for your Facebook, your LinkedIn, your Instagram, then go to booster.co.uk bdm for just £9 and 99 pence. Every month you get 30 fresh pieces of content that you can use. It's part of the book. Direct membership. Your copy and your design is all done. It's all part of my in house design team. Go and check it out. Boost co.uk bdm you need to do now is sit back, relax, listen, but then most importantly implement the advice that we give you in this Boostly podcast.

So my name is Alex and I'm based here in Tel Aviv in Israel and originally from Glasgow and I've got around 14 years experience in SaaS sales and I specifically I'm incredibly passionate obviously about Wishbox and about the vacation rental market. And what Wishbox does is we actually help to automate the guest communication, help you to also generate more revenue from upsells, enhance the guest experience with increased brand awareness. Additionally help to kind of streamline your process by collecting information, collecting passports, e signatures, authority forms before the arrival of guests.

Do you find that you get a lot of your clients, a lot of your members are in the UK Europe or are you spread out all over the world like evenly? Where does the UK sit on your member levels?

Europe is such a hub for the vacation rental market, so London is an incredibly strong base for us and we also have a lot of the domestic products here actually in Israel and our second biggest market after that would probably be in France. But I would guess that Europe really is our premier focus right now.

I'd be really interested to know from the people that are watching live and even if you're watching back on the replay, to leave a comment, put your hands up, just put a text yes or a text no. Are you at the present moment in time communicating with guests, whether it was guests, pre coronavirus or even guests that you may have currently staying with you now, if you can take guests or even ones that are going to be there in the future, we'd love to find out. So if you could just put text yes or text no in the comments, how important do you feel that texting is and how it falls in lines with the guest experience?

Alex, sending personalized messages to guests really through, whether it's through email or chat or text is just one of the best ways to actually increase the engagement. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how many times a day do you have your phone open with WhatsApp? Probably all the time. So text is one of the best ways to increase that engagement, to increase also your brand awareness and additionally, especially with the upsells, also a great way to increase that revenue.

And this is the one of the cool things that I really love about companies like yours and you're welcome, et cetera. But the upsell is a key part of using the service. Could you just explain to me a little bit more about what upsells that we could potentially be talking about here.

Specifically, we know that our most popular upsells are the early check in and the late checkout. Probably a second on that would be transportation. Okay. It's incredibly important, especially currently with the crisis that we're seeing. I read a statistic last week that 80% of the people that got home from the airport, they took a taxi. So the ability to actually offer those people those upsells immediately is basically just like picking money up off the floor. Right. It's so popular. In addition to that, I'd say after that the room upgrade is incredibly important. So the ability to say to somebody who's already a guest to be able to say to them, okay, you've got a nice suite here, perhaps get the next phase up or the VIP package. Okay, so room upgrades also incredibly important. Then I would say luggage storage, spas. And then really for the Corona time, I would really say that food supplies are incredibly important too. So food deliveries, personal chefs, everything that's connected to fundamental living, it's like the.

New normal now is crazy. We've been talking about this lost a lot over the last month. The US unique selling point that you normally would associate with your marketing is just totally gone out the window now. You're talking about so many different things. And with the upsell. So looking from Wishbox in kind of host sort of plug in home delivery straight into Wishbox and then a guest can check out through there. Or does it, or is it, does it all evolve around a third party? Like how do Wishbox help people when it comes to doing things like the upsell?

Well, every destination has a different experience. Okay. So an urban destination might have things like walking tours, cultural experiences. So it's really. Or actually different activities like wine tasting, water sports. So it's really important to make sure that, you know, we're offering the experiences that are actually going to excite the guests the most. But yeah, so essentially it's like you can plug into our marketplace and you can also add your own, add your own upsells as well.

Okay. So when it comes to the beauty of WhatsApp, let's just focus a little bit on WhatsApp right now. What are the features that you can do with WhatsApp that maybe some hosts are not aware of? Like any personal favorites that you have, and I've got some as well that we can share afterwards.

You can actually send messages automatically to guests using smart filters. Okay. And you can also send targeted messages actually to help the person through the next phase of the guest's journey. So I see actually that my favorite feature is actually smart scheduled messages that allow you to send the first messages to guests by booking, source or reservation status and also to the ability to send messages to all of the in house guests at a timing of your choice. So if you wanted to send a message to everybody about a breakfast, make sure that you send it at 6am and not kind of the day before.

But One of the features that I personally love as a host and a guest is that you can share your location with somebody. Couple of years that we have used this feature. For example, last September we moved all of our family moved from the UK down to Spain and we decided to drive. We put all of our belongings in a car, got the ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam. We just drove through Belgium, drove through France and to get into Spain. And when we were having to find places to stay, my geographical knowledge of France, rural France is not the best. The amount of times where we had to use WhatsApp to share the location with where we were and where the host was because we were arriving at different times and whatnot, it was invaluable. And the beauty of WhatsApp is that it's free. You can call anybody in the world for absolutely free. You either use it on wifi or it goes part of your, your phone data. We have found WhatsApp to be super useful from a guest point of view, but also from, from the host because like, like you're saying you can send out pre populated messages, you can do the upsell. Even when a guest is on your property. Doesn't matter whether it's a B and B, a hotel, a rental, you can still communicate and you can offer these upsells upsells there again. This time last year we were in Bali, we were staying at, we were living, I had a one on one contract at a resort out in Bali and we were, we were sort of going through their systems and structures and their marketing and one of the things that I found really insightful, they were using WhatsApp and they had 10 phones on their front desk and they had 10 phones that were connected up to WhatsApp, which is, which is crazy. The operation they had was super cool because they had 10 villas and what they would do, they would have a direct communication with each guest into each villa at all times. And they were using it to offer breakfast or lunch and dinner to get delivered to their rooms. They're offering it to upsell tours. It was a communication. So if there was a problem.

Wrong.

They had housekeeping that could access this. And these 10 phones were at reception and it was done all through WhatsApp. And it was again, the beauty of it is that when you send a message, you know, when somebody's seen it, read it, you know, and it's, and it's super, super powerful.

Also there's really something to be said about communicating with guests through platforms that they're already used to and already familiar with, because there's that feeling of, you know, if something is being done through something like WhatsApp, where people are so familiar with it, it creates that kind of instant connection and kind of instant engagement. And it also feels incredibly personal and responsive. I mean, the feedback from our clients is just so overwhelmingly positive. We actually have a smart integration with WhatsApp. So currently you're able to send scheduled template messages to guests, kind of just encouraging them to complete the pre check in, obviously, gather in those super important documents, gather in the passport scans, provide them with important vital information. Okay, so super important right now because we've seen that a lot of our hosts are really, really struggling from perhaps they've let go a lot of their staff. A lot of people are functioning on half of their regular staff load. So being able to automate this process right now, it's incredibly important. Also you can also provide them with, with the ability to review, which is unbelievably important. So the ability to send somebody a WhatsApp message, you know, before they check out, to tell them this is how you review. Please review. And so sending the customized messages, depending on their room, their rental type, and also according to their booking source. So if you know that somebody's come in through, you know, booking.com you really want to increase that brand awareness there because essentially the personalized feel has really been stripped from the entire conversation. So they might not even be aware about where they're staying. You know, how many times have you gone somewhere, booked it through booking.com and you've no clue about where you stayed. So this ability to kind of, to send them a WhatsApp and kind of say to them, this is who we are. You know, know where you've stayed. It's unbelievably important. And you can also kind of really whistle that down to, you know, if you're going to send it to a family, make sure you send them this type of message. If you want, you know, or if people booked for a Harry Potter tour, right, you might want to also offer them the wine tour, any kind of different reservation status or condition. You want to really customize those messages to make sure that you're just bringing the most amount of value from your guests and also the most amount of overall guest satisfaction.

I 100% agree. And if you're going to have to, if you're going to have to watch Harry Potter, you're going to have to be drunk while doing it. So I like how Harry Potter and wine gets brought into that. Wishbox are obviously got members all over the world have got hosts, property managers. How are you as a company helping its members during these times?

We are here for all of our hosts. Okay? All of our hosts, which are struggling right now, know that we're in this, we're in this with you, we're in this together to help you. Whether that be instantly informing people of a change in your cancellation policy or better informing people also about their local conditions. Some people who are arriving from abroad right now have to go into instant 14 day quarantine. You might need to actually inform them about that. Okay, first of all, we really recommend that all of our hosts use Wishbox guest app posts to instantly update the guests before and during their stay. So you really need to highlight that you're going to go above and beyond to ensure the guest safety, including the deep cleaning of the rooms, taking all the necessary measures and following the local government guidelines. Using scheduled messages is also really important right now. So scheduled and instant messages allow you to get in touch with all of the guests, you know, with important and instant messaging. So through Wishbox, all of these announcements can be forwarded to the guest through the guest app or email or sms. With regards to the upsells, we really recommend that right now is the time to appeal to your domestic market and collaborate with local suppliers. So we know now that it's incredibly important. While people are less inclined to go out of the country, you really need to focus on your domestic market. We think that this is going to be the initial one to sort of burst. This is a great time to partner with different attractions or experiences and be more compatible with kind of the local market demand. So right now is a good time to partner up with those local suppliers and create the kind of the perfect experience, the perfect holiday package to the guests. If somebody is not utilizing, for example, like the social media aspect of marketing to their guests, now is really the time to do it. Make your, you know, with making your like engaging with the guests more on like a level of, you know, the text messages and also like social media and also that's also very important.

Again, it's a message that we've been saying every day. Since you cannot go quiet now, this is not the time to go quiet. It's not time to sit and sulk and wait for government bailouts. This is where you've got to be proactive and you've got to be posting every day. What would be then the one bit of tip and advice that you could pass on apart from the staycation One which is an amazing tool, you know, post on social media. Is there any tips and advice that you've been passing on to host that maybe being on the phone to Wishbox or going, we don't know what to do in these sort of times. Is there any other sort of bits of advice that you've been passing to them to give them confidence that they will get through this, that will be a business on the end of all.

Of this, we also really recommend, you know, a lot of our owners have been raising concerns about their margins. Okay. Really really expressing their concern about that. So right now we really recommend making an additional revenue stream. Okay. So at this time certain services are just more relevant than ever. So cross selling taxis for a safer transport and when people are less inclined to use public transportation, unbelievably important, unbelievably relevant food supplies for stocking the properties. Very important outdoor activities like local restaurants and food experiences, really, really important right now. And we also really have seen a lot of good engagement with automating the check in process. So allowing your guests a little bit more flexibility right now a lot of staff have been affected as I mentioned before, so you can offer your guests a self check in without sacrificing your service standard. So that's why we actually have fully support smart and digital locks like Viki ascut locks we have in Australia and also Keynest as well as being able to automate that process with their document scan, digital signatures, things like that.

The way you clean your property now is going to be part of your unique selling points. You need to be getting that across and you can do that really crystal clear with text email. But the most important thing is to keep the communications open. Thank you very much for that, Alex. We like to finish these podcasts a little bit different from most. We like to do quick fire questions. Now we're going to find out a little bit more about yourself. And as we always say with everybody, as you're tuning in live or even when you're watching back on the replay, I love to see your comments. I go back on every single one of them. If you've got any answers to these questions, leave them in the comments so I can go back and look at them afterwards. So number one, obviously we've been in lockdown for quite a while now. If you could be isolated, if you could be on lockdown with one celebrity or famous famous figure, alive or dead, who would that be?

After I saw that, the Gal Gadot singing Imagine, I don't think I ever want to meet another celebrity again for the rest of my life. But I think, did you see that? It was something else I did. I'd probably pick a politician, you know, probably pick a famous politician. Perhaps Boris. You know, if he didn't have coronavirus, maybe I'd. I'd pick his brains about a couple of things.

There you go. You pick Boris's brains. Good one. Okay. Obviously, busy person, sales director of a company running around all the time. And, you know, always there's that one movie or that TV series that you've just put on your to watch list, and now, you know, we've got a bit more time to sort of be indoors and get a chance to catch up. What is that one thing that you've always had on your to watch list, whether it's a TV series, whether it's a movie or a documentary, is the one that stands out, one that you're looking forward to potentially checking out the next couple of weeks?

I just watched the first three parts of Tiger King. I don't know if anybody's got Netflix. Anybody? Anybody seen it, but it is a heck of a show. And I'm unbelievably excited about the fourth one.

You've got four. Three more episodes. Four, five, six. You've got four more episodes. And because I've got the little bonus one, I binged it.

I. I'm addicted. I'm addicted.

I heard about it and then I just thought, right, I Normally finish about 10, 11, work wise, but I'm just gonna watch one before bed. Before I knew it was like 2:00 in the morning, I just binged so many of them.

Bad idea.

It's insane. It is insane. And, yeah, anybody who watched last night's episode, you'll notice that when I started the podcast yesterday will be a little. A little tip of the hat to Tiger King in there. Yeah, Tiger King is a one. What is the. What would you say would be the one thing that you have missed being able to do since being on lockdown, going into work?

I really missed it. I really miss my colleagues. I have a great time with them. Great banter, even. Just great things like going in and having a coffee together? It's so minute, but it's so unbelievably important. I'd say it's probably worked.

What has been your best purchase, your favorite purchase, under 100 pounds in the last, say, six months to a year. So there's one thing that you can think of, Alcogel.

That's been the one I don't know, I'd probably say that I recently got into a little bit of a LinkedIn Premium for sending instant messages to people. So those, those 15 messages that you get with LinkedIn Premium have really, really helped me from a professional perspective. And from a personal perspective, I'm gonna have to go with the Alcogel.

Nice. Nice choice. Nice choice. Like that. Okay, so do you have a favorite podcast, like a YouTube? So on the way to work or driving in the car, anything do you put on a podcast? Is there a YouTube channel, any sort of favorite one that you can recommend?

I'm a big MMA fan, so I listen to a lot of Joe Rogan. I listen to a lot of his pre fight and post fights and then I end up watching him for hours. He's, he's phenomenal. The guests he has on are just amazing.

Which is, which is funny because the first one someone asked me who I would isolate with and mine was Joe Rogan. I'm a big Joe Rogan fan. I just think that he covers all the boxes. It'd be a good one to be down with. And finally, again, I can't let you go without asking, what is your number one piece of advice to anybody listening that you would pass on to them to help them increase their direct bookings?

I'd increase the direct booking. I'd probably recommend establishing a really strong presence on social media. I'd say that that's probably one of.

The best ways social media, fantastic way to go. Build your brand, build. And you can do it for free with social media. Fantastic. I really, really appreciate you doing this. I know it's a little bit later than what it is here in the UK over in Israel, so appreciate you taking the time to doing this. There's a lot of people asking in the comments, but if you could just tell us the best place to go if anybody wants to find out more.

About Wishbox, Wishbox Co and you can sign up for a 14 day free trial. In addition to that, we also have lots of interesting advice about how to, you know, how to upsell. And we have a whole list of all of our different integrations there. So if your PMS isn't supported, let us know and we can check it out.

I just want to say thank you so much to everybody that has tuned in tonight on the live and for those of you who are catching back on the replay like we've been doing every night, this, this, this past 30 days we've been going live, sharing tactics, advice. I've been bringing in people from the world of hospitality we've been bringing people, opening up my black book for sales and finance and everything. All I ask in return for all of this free content that you're getting is you do me one thing. Go and share this post. Doesn't matter what platform you're watching it on, whether it's Facebook, whether it's YouTube, LinkedIn, wherever. In the bottom left hand corner is a share button right about there. If you tap on that, you can share it on your personal wall, share it on your business page, you can share it in Facebook groups. We've got to spread the message because there are so many people from the world of hospitality who are starting to think now of giving up. Go to booster.co.uk podcast. Every single episode of this whole series is being put in there. We've got the blog write up, we've got all the links, we've got everything that you need to know about so you can find out more about Wishbox. You can find out more about everybody that we've interviewed during this series. If you are listening to the audio and you're on itunes right now, do me one final big favor, go and leave a review. Reviews help so much and it's going up the charts. We've just come in close to 15,000 downloads, which is insane. Same, but we want to get more. We want to get more, want to get more eyes, more ears on this podcast. Tomorrow we'll be back with another live video. Tomorrow we're going to be talking to Super Control about Master Cancel and how you can be worry free when it comes to cancellations moving forward. Until then, have a great evening and we shall see you all very soon.