My Chat with Andy Garnett 🚀

Mark, thanks very much for inviting me on tonight. It's a real good opportunity to help other people as well. So, yeah, my name is Andy. I run a service accommodation management company called Art of Rest. We've got properties in distributed number of locations actually in Surrey, in North Wales, Hampton Court. We do a mix of own properties, we do some rent to SA deals and we also manage for other people as well. So it's been a rather interesting time for us during the coronavirus period. I'm also a coach as well, so I love teaching other people about how to do service accommodation.

When and how did you get started in hospitality service accommodation? What were you doing before? What sort of made like the transition into this.

So I'm a bit of a geek, so I come from an IT background, so I spent about 15 years in the city in an IT career. I've always been interested in property investing and I kind of came at service accommodation for a property investing angle. Little did I know at that point that actually I was dropping myself into a hospitality business. But I absolutely love it. I know this is what I do full time now. I love learning about new things. You know, I recently joined Boosity as well and I just. Yeah, it's. It's been a massively fantastic experience and I never go back to my corporate job, ever.

What happened to you on that sort of week? The 12th, so let's say the 12th to the 19th of March, when it really sort of hit home what we were going through here specifically with hospitality. What was happened to you? What happened to your bookings? Was it as bad as others or were you okay? Did you have a lot of bookings already? Were, you know, were you able to navigate? Just sort of just bring us back to where you were. Right then.

That particular week wasn't so bad for us because we still had quite a lot of bookings in the system and it hadn't really started to hit us. Our market here in Surrey is a whole mix of things, actually. There's lots of corporate business, construction, bookings, but also quite a little bit of family tourist things as well. So we've got a good mix of stuff. And actually during that week it wasn't too bad, but towards the end of that week, you know, we started to get some cancellations in and then it was really after that point it all kind of started to happen and where we thought, right, well, we've really got to do something here. So we then started to get a slew of cancellations come through and we just saw the market Just completely pivot. Right. You know, so it just went from your normal tourists, your corporates, to get your rest of it. And then there was just this. I mean, before the government really clamped down, there were two markets we went after. One was self isolators and the other was key workers. And, you know, we changed our titles and our listings and there were about three things that really worked for us. Do you want me to go through those?

Yeah, I was gonna say sort of what actually worked, you know, because obviously after the 21st. So please, yeah, please share those three.

First thing was local Facebook groups. So we wrote some lovely little posts. I joined about 10 local Facebook groups around us, community groups. We wrote some lovely little posts in there saying, we want to help people. We were quite genuine about it. We said that we didn't want to make money out of this. We were trying to do it as low price as possible possible. And these are the types of people wanted to help. We have to be very careful when we go into these groups because they can be quite sensitive and if they see you as profiteering, then it can turn against you quite quickly. But we have had lots and lots of inquiries and also a number of bookings through that group. The second thing that was really good before the whole Airbnb thing happened is Airbnb. So we're still getting Airbnb queries to this day. What we found was people weren't actually booking on the site, they were just messaging us. And then we were either to able to book them on Airbnb or actually to take them off Airbnb and put them directly. That continues to be a popular platform for us. The biggest thing that's been a success for us is actually contacting existing guests that we already had in the apartments that were starting to book for reasons of isolation or wanting to be apart from their families or key worker bookings. I mean, one week we got 121 nights worth of extensions in one day, and then a few days later, we got a further 51 nights of extensions just from existing people who were in the apartments. And it was so important to keep in contact with existing people in the apartments. That's the biggest thing that we did.

There's three different routes then that you've gone down, which are really interesting and I'm really excited to sort of hear what everybody else says. Local Facebook, Airbnb, or from an OTA that you're able to then convert to a direct and any existing people that were currently in your properties who couldn't go anywhere Else, for whatever reason. So as it stands, and if we're sort of talking like occupancy rates, sorry, occupancy levels, have you noticed an increase compared to this time last year? Are you noticing even ground? Are you noticing a little bit of loss? Where are you at compared to prior?

We're probably just as full as we were last year, but obviously the rates that we're getting off are quite significant, significantly lower. So we part business into kind of survive mode for the next two, three months and actually we dropped our prices, we got people in and we're helping people who really need to be apart from their families as well, which is, which is great in itself. But we're just taking each week at a time. Some of our apartments are actually booked out for the next two months and then some are just getting booked week by week. We've got two or three apartments that have been booked by construction workers that are working at a local hospital, but they just keep booking week on week. So really it's just a case of taking each week at a time. You know, that's what we're doing.

You notice now that the average night of your bookings has sort of gone up.

Yeah, massively. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's gone from an average of probably like four or five nights to like weeks now because people are just booking weeks and they want to stay to get away from everyone.

Thank you for sharing that. And if you've got one tip that you could pass on to anybody right now who can take bookings, and I just want to prevance this to say we obviously get viewers from all over the world. We've got people from Australia, America, uk, Europe, and we've got people that cannot physically take bookings right now. But if, if you, if you can take bookings right now, what is that one little tip that you can just pass on to somebody that is watching this?

I think the information is out there for you to get bookings. Right. And what I mean by that is been such a phenomenal response from, from like minded operators on particularly Facebook. So the service, Accommodation Network UK Group, Hospitality group, you know, these groups and people are coming together to share tips. I did an interview with Mary Cullen the other week. She shared 25 tips on how to fill your places. You know, people are pushing information out there to other people and you will find, you know what works. But the biggest tip is just connect with the Royal operators, they will help you. We're all in this together.

If anybody wants to reach out to you, wants to go find out more about you. Come and check out your videos, because you're doing a ton of videos, which is fantastic. Where's the best place to find you?

Just come and find me on my Facebook page and then just message me from there.

And then G A R N E T T. Best place.

Yeah, that's right. And, yeah, I think I've spoken to more operators in the last, like, month than I have in the entire time I've done service accommodations.