Maximising Direct Bookings: The Synergy between Boostly and Hostfully Explained

Well, as we mentioned, we only have 30 minutes today, so I'm going to introduce you to the, to the president and founder of Boostly. Mark, take it away.

Thank you very much and thank you to everybody that's joining us. I know there's loads of choice to pick out from, from Palooza, so to have you to jump on with little old Bruce Lee's is an absolute privilege and a pleasure and we're going to crack on. So we've, I know we haven't got long, we've got 23 minutes and I want to make sure we get through everything. But before we do, I can see that there's a lot of people with us live. And so what I would like for you all to do, if you could just jump on into the chat and just let me know where you are around the world so the message will come straight through to me. Just so it helps. I know we've got, we're trying to see where everybody is. I know you know, Roger's over in Asia, we've got Aaron's over in South America, I'm obviously over in Europe. So let's just see where everybody is. If you do that chat, we'll be able to see it. And it's just nice for me to see where you are around the world. So for those who don't know who I am, my name is Mark Simpson, founder of a company called Boostly. We have been going now for eight years. We have grown from just me behind my computer desk back in the United Kingdom to being a worldwide brand. And the mission at Boostly is to help every single host who comes into our world to get to 65% directly bookings. And the reason why that is important is because when you are at 65% direct bookings, your business is in your world, it's in your hands. The problem is from what we can see out there in the world of the Internet, and I asked that, Paul, today is that too many people are relying on third parties for their bookings coming in. And the majority of you. I asked a question in the poll, the majority of the answers was I said the question was what percentage of your total bookings in the last 12 months have come from the major channel, which is Airbnb, and the majority of you have put 81 to 100%. So 81. So basically 8 out of every 10 of your bookings is coming from one channel. And that is not sustainable. That is not good for you, it's not good for your business and it's not Good for what your future plans of your business are. So what my goal is is to flip that, reverse that, and see how we can get you to 65% direct bookings, 35%, say Airbnb, VRBO, all those good channels. Because we're not saying to you, go ahead and go cold turkey on those channels. We're not saying to delete those channels. You need them because they spend so much money in marketing, advertising, branding. But the whole part of what we're doing here is to make the OTAs work for you and not the other way around. So, number one, as you can see on the screen right now, under who is Boostly for? So this is a, a real good way to sort of really separate who is Boostly for and who is Boostly not for. So, so let me start on the other side. Let me flip it. Who is Boothly not for? So, hobbyist host. What is a hobbyist host? A hobbyist host is if you've got one property and you've got no plans to scale, you've got no plans to grow, you've just got the one property. Let's just say it's a side project. It's a bit of fun. Maybe it's a property that you've got that's down by the beach and you and your family like to go there throughout the holidays. But you're watching this webinar, you're watching this part of the Paloozas, just because you're part of host flee and you're just checking it out, that's fine, right? Please make sure you take full advantage of all the amazing free advice you're going to get. Obviously, you can go to all of the cool Boostly things that we've got. We've got two books that cost less than $10 to buy. You've got free YouTubes and podcast. Not few. Also, as well, Boostly is not for hosts who wish to basically connect on the OTAs and hope it generates bookings. So basically, you know the type of host that just wants to put all of your listings on Airbnb, say, and just leave it there. You don't care about them dictating the rules. They don't care that they could someday just shut down your list, and they don't care that one day you won't get. You might not be visible on page one. You're absolutely fine with that. Again, that's cool. Please take advantage of all the free help and guidance. But Boostly isn't for you. And the other one, Boostly, is Not for hosts who view everything as an expense and not an investment into their business. Now I would like to think if you are watching this webinar, if you've taking part of Palooza, if you are here and you are looking at all the different integrations and this doesn't really apply to 99.9% of the people who are tuning into this because you already know that this is an investment. You already know this isn't an expense. But Boostly isn't for you. Now who is Boostly for? Boostly is for hosts who understand consistency and time are key to growth. Boostly is not a get rich quick scheme. We do not sell this magical bean over here. We are all about getting you to 65% direct bookings and we get making sure that everybody knows that it is literally not a case of where you sign up to boostly on day one and on day two you click your fingers and you got 65% direct bookings. It is going to take time, it's going to take consistency, but we are here to help. Who else is Boostly for? Boostly is for hosts who want to play the long game to achieve long term success. Again, a big thing that I talk about, if you've ever heard me talk, and I like to talk a lot, is I get you to do just little bits, try and get 1% better every day. You can get 1% better every day. Consistently doing it consistently over time, that'll be the key to your growth. And I've done this now with our family business, which is a hospitality business in the UK from 2011 to 2017 when we exited in 2021. And boostly again is just another example of this started. It's eight years time. Longevity, consistency always wins. And Boostly is for action takers who want to grow their business to be built on their terms. Again, a big part of Team Boostly. We've got over 2,500 customers now. We're powering 10,000 listings plus around the world. Last year we generated over $62 million in direct bookings. And the majority of the people that we help and the ones that really get on board with Boostly and the ones that really do with the direct bookings, they're action takers. They're not people who go, oh, I'll do this in the spring or I'll do this in the summer or I'll wait till after the wherever they literally come on board and go, yeah, I'm ready to do this now. So that is Boost Lee, his fault now, again, if you are on the right side, if you are somebody that boostly isn't for, again, thank you so much for tuning in. Please do watch. You can dig this crazy accent for a little bit. But again, what I'm going to show you today maybe isn't for you. If you're on the left hand side, the boostly is for, then definitely do listen. And again, I asked a question and you all jumped into the, into the answers, which was a fantastic. So we've got people from San Diego, Canada, all over, which is amazing. Now, what I want for you to do now, please jump off those, jump off your hands, get typing. Are you somebody that boostly is for or are you somebody that boostly isn't for? So just put hashtag is if you are and put hashtag isn't if you're any other category. And again, it really doesn't matter if you're in right or left, but again, if you're in the category left, then please do let us know. So jump on in in the question and you can just put is. I'll just put hashtag isn't. Thank you for those who are dropping the emojis as well. All right, so this is our goal, this is our mission. My goal for 2024 and seeing that we got to $62 million in direct bookings last year, which was basically £52 million, my goal for this year is to almost double that and get to £100 million in track direct bookings for our customers this year. The reason why is I'm a big fan of big milestones and if we can get to that big goal by the end of this year, you better believe I'll be singing from all the social media channels, all the press releases that will be going out talking about this number. Now. The. My ultimate goal and my ultimate mission with all of this is to not only get the attention of the Airbnb group, of the Expedia group and a booking.com group, but it's to get not a seat at the table, but basically have an access, have a bat phone access. So when they're looking to make all these changes that are going to affect us hosts, they can speak to us directly and we can give them a bit of advice. At the moment, I don't think that's truly there with any of the OTAs. Discussions are starting to happen with a couple of them, which is fantastic. And I just want to be able to have to be able to have basically a scholar seat at a table. Now, again, it's not going to happen just by me talking on my soapbox. The boost leave. It's 2019, 2020 no one would pay attention to. But the boostly in 2024, because we've got such a big collective behind us. I mean, the amount of customers, the amount of listings we're powering at the moment is more than some PMS's that are out there, right? So there's a big movement creating behind this and we want to keep on going and that's why we're setting these big, lofty goals. And this is why, if you're in the category of Boostly is for. Then again, we'd love for you to pay attention to what I'm going to show you. So this is how we do it. This is how we're going to get every single one of you to 65% direct bookings or even more. So, Mark and Ian and Julie and Gerardo and April, who is an is, and Tony, thanks for seeing you as always. You already is a Boostly member and I know you are already somebody that we love working with, but this is how we're going to do it for everybody else. So I like to say that Boostly gives you the tools, the tactics, the training, but most importantly, the confidence to go and get direct bookings. And this is how we package it all together. So, number one, and I think this is the. The biggest thing that we're known for is our direct booking websites. Now, we started doing direct booking websites in 2018 because before that I started off as just being a coach. I was just doing coaching on direct bookings. But the people that we were working with, they always were coming back to me and saying, mark, this sounds good, this looks good, but there's one problem. And I said, what's that problem? And they'll go, my website. My website's crap goes. I don't know how to do it, I can't do it, or my website designer won't let me do it. And what I found is that website designers are big divas. They are very precious about what they have. And last week I was on a different webinar, a different zoom, and there was a host who was in Scotland who didn't know about Boostly and she was talking about the website that this company had put together for her. And this website company didn't have a clue about hospitality. They didn't know about the way that a hospitality website should look and how it should work. They tried to do something weird and basically they didn't have a PMS, right? They were trying to do everything with WordPress and WooCommerce and Wix and it was just really messy. And the worst part is that host turned around to me and said, this website cost me £25,000, so about $30,000. And I almost fell off my stool. I couldn't believe it. So this is why we ended up doing websites. Number one, we understand the industry. Number two, we know how a website should look. And the beauty of it is because we have a framework that is built on WordPress. It really is flexible. Now, I love Hostfully, I said to David and Margo and everybody at the team, I love Hostfully, but the free PMS website that you offer and everybody else offers, it's very restrictive. Especially if in your own. If you're in this left category where you want to grow your business and if you really want to grow your direct bookings, the free website that every property management partner provides is not very good, I think. But you all recognize that and you all acknowledge that it is just there as a free thing just to get you going. Boostly is that step up. And this is why we work really well with Hostfully, because when you come to the Hostfully team and they go, right, I want to get a better website, then we've just got that really good partnership that you can just pass, pass them over. But the big misconception about Boostly is that we only just do websites. We do not just do websites. It's just one part of the little jigsaw that we put together to get you to the 65% direct bookings. The second part of what we do is we've got coaching. So just like what Roger was talking about, one of the cool things that Hostly are doing now is office hours, live demos, all that good things. That is what Boostly does all the time over in our, what we call the Boostly Academy or the Boostly Mastermind. Basically, it's our training site. Because I could give every single one of you right now a website. I could give you the Ferrari of websites. But if you don't know how to drive a Ferrari, what's the point in you having one? And this is the problem that so many website designers do is that they give you a website and they just go, see you later. All right, Mark, thank you very much. Here's your website. All the best. All right. And there's some that go, here's a website. Thank you for paying me X amount. Oh, by the way, if you want me to do all of these other things, I'm going to bolt it on and I'm going to charge you a really high premium every single month. And I've seen some ridiculous quotes come in. I've seen ones that start at least that. The lowest I've seen starts at least $750 a month. The highest it's got to about 3,000amonth. And I look at what they're doing and I go, that's ridiculous. That's nonsense. So instead of me giving you a fish, I will show you how to fish. And that is literally what we do at Boostly is we give you the tools and we give you the training to show you, okay, your website's here. This is how you get website traffic to it. This is how you do social media, this is how you do blogging, is how you do SEO. This is how you do all the things and not only do me and Liam. And the cool thing about Liam is he's also a hostfully customer over in the uk but he's also part of Boostly, but he's also a coach. He's amazing human being and he helps me run the coaching behind the scenes. At Boost Lee, we have live sessions all of the time. We bring experts in all of the time. So you are in the best, best place. Now if you ever miss a session, we record everything and we add it into what's called our Boostly Academy. So our Boostly Academy has got 80 hours worth of footage from over the years and if you're somebody who like to tune into live sessions or if you much prefer to catch the replay as we call it, it's there for you as well. Most importantly, what we do now, and this is what Liam has crafted, is a Boostly roadmap. So basically we give you a roadmap that will help you achieve all your goals over 12 months and we work with you on them. The final thing in which is probably my favorite thing is the community. So we've got 10,000 years plus worth of experience in our group, over 2,500 hosts and like I said last year we did $50 million in direct bookings, which is pretty cool. Now I could talk about Boostly all day long, but I think one of the cool things about where we are now is, is the product works. And just like Hostly, there is Raven fans of hopefully and there's Raven fans of Boostly and we do really well. Like the top left is is Captera, the top right is Trustpilot and this is just some like People talking about the results. I asked people to share some results and we've got Rose and we've got Marie, who are just sharing their results, being part of Boostly, which is, which is epic. And obviously we've got a couple in the crowd, which is cool. So having Tony part of it is amazing. All right, so this is the promise to you. So Boostly's promise to you. We vowed to give you the tools, the tactics and the training to get you at least 65% direct bookings. We guarantee you that we, you will at least recoup what you pay to join Boostly. And this is probably our secret sauce, this is probably our usp. We offer a full money back guarantee. So if you do not get what you pay to join Boostly in direct bookings over 365 days, I will give you your money back. And on top of that, I will give you an extra $200 to apologize for wasting for your time. Now, the money back guarantee, what I find isn't normally to the people that I'm talking to, because you will have booked a call with the sales team, you'll have maybe seen me talk about this loads. This isn't really for you, it's for your partner, that business partner who hasn't got a clue who this bald British guy is, or it's for your relationship partner who's like, listen, I don't know what's going on is this guy with a weird accent. But you go, listen, if you're fine, we can join, we get full money back guarantee and if it really doesn't work, it'll give you £200 on top. So you look at an investment. So it's a win, win, win. Just to give you a bit of context, we've only ever had to give over eight years, one person their money back and that was one person right at the very start of Boost Lee. So we've approved, we've evolved and the product now is as good as it's ever been and probably is one of the best in the industry, which is really cool. So just a recap, this is what you get. A roadmap to 65% direct bookings, monthly coaching calls, direct booking website that is synced into Hostfully. This is the big thing about it as well, is that hostfully, don't just pair up and work and partner with any old people's. We have got a real good relationship, we've got a real good sync. And all of your information is synced from hostfully into Boostly and It just makes it look epic. So the booking process is smooth and I'm going to show you what it looks like very, very soon. And I know we're pushed for time. Six minutes left. You also get social media and email marketing templates that you can swipe and use. And not only that, we've also created the Boostly AI clone. All of our training, all of our things that we've ever done and talked about, we've created an AI bot. So now you can take our email templates, you can take our social media templates, you can plug them in to our AI clone and you can personalize them to you and your business. This has never been done before. Nobody in the industry is talking about this and I'm literally about to do a session in a couple of weeks time if anybody does join on exactly how to use this and you can plug it in with your very own CRM. So we've also got our own CRM, our own email marketing tool, our own social media scheduling tool. So I literally, when I say we give you all the tools, this is what we're doing again. Access to all the training videos, private Facebook group, literally everything you could possibly need. Now if this sounds good, I just need for you to do one thing and one thing only and tap those emoji buttons as fast as you can. The plus the love heart, maybe not the shock face, but every emoji button. If that sounds good, just please do me a favor and tap so I know. But if it sounds good. Okay, cool. Lovely to see. So let's take a little look. So hopefully this works. I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to tap on this button and I'm going to tap on this. Okay, so Roger, can you just confirm that you can see the screen? Just, just shout yes.

Looks great.

There we go. Cool. So I'm going to show you three different types of hostfully clients that we have at Boostly. And I've come straight to the booking page and I'm going to show you the homepage. So this is Scottsdale, this is. Oh wow. Properties. And obviously the vibe that this property is going for is bachelorettes. Okay, now I'm going to show you three different types of booking that we have with the Hostfully team. So obviously with this one, because it's a big property, bachelorette parties can be an absolute dream or they can be an absolute nightmare. Depends on who you're speaking to. Right, so what you want to have, you've got three options. You can have Number one, which is instant book. Number two, you can have inquiry or number three, you can have a mixture of both. Now, obviously this customer wants to have inquiry only. So basically what we did is we set up the website and again, the websites all have the same framework because at the end of the day the framework works, right? We're not trying to reinvent the wheel, we're not trying to create the Mona Lisa of websites. We know what works. We know where to put the right buttons in the right places at the right time. And we've done this over, I say, eight years. We've done thousands of websites. We know what works. The true gold in what we do is, is the connection and the sync that we have into Hostfully again. So all of this information is being pulled straight from hostfully so you don't have to waste time having to re copy and paste it all in. If you lose a property, you gain a property. It's all there and it's all synced. And again, when the guest wants to make the booking, all of the dates are synced in directly with within hostfully. All of the details in here, 1, 2, 3, boom, pop a quote in, you're done. I'm going to share this next tab now, which is Moonrise Homes. Again, little bit less on the Bachelorette, a little bit more in, you know, family and all that good stuff. This one has got instant book so you can come in here, you can go find the dates that are available. Again, we've got a really cool, smooth booking process. Go through this hit book now and you'll go straight into the hostfully checkout page. So one of the big problems I see with the majority of website designers is you'll go through this, you'll click book now and then they go right back to the beginning of the booking process on hostfully. And it really does break down that booking flow with this. And with us, we're always working with the team to make sure that it can be improved at all times. And it just literally takes you straight into the booking page where you can go ahead and book. And finally, this is Liam. It's the Liam Carolan part of Boostly is a Hostfully client as well, which is fantastic. He offers things a little bit differently. So he does mid MDMTR strategy, medium term rentals. He has property management. Again, we build these websites and they just look cool and they work and they sync straight into your your hostfully back end. So that's how they work, that's how they look. You can go and Find full examples on the boosted.co.uk website. Let me go ahead and flip over to here if I do this. So this is the price. We're ready for the price. We've got two minutes left. So the price to join Boostly is US$62 a month. We have a setup fee of 6,000 USD, no binding contracts, freedom to cancel at any time, complete money back guarantee and a commitment to match any competitor's price. So if you can go away and if you can find out somebody that is cheaper than Boost Lee, then we will match that price. But they have to do everything that we do. As in they have to do the training, they have to have the CRM, they have to have the websites that sync into host fleet. I believe that we've created a category of one on one. There is no booster competitors because no one else is crazy enough to do what we do and nobody else is on the mission that we're on the mission for.

Well, thanks everybody.

Check out Boostly.

Thank Mark. Thank you guys for being a great partner with hostfully. We look forward to many more exciting things in the future. And just a reminder to everybody, we've got four more Days of Palooza events so please take the time to take a quick peek at some of our other partners. They've got some, some great presentations and demonstrations. It's only 30 minutes. You're likely to get some some great discounts as well at the end of these. So thanks everybody. Have a great rest of your day and we'll talk to you soon.

Amazing. Thank you. Bye Jim. Thank you.