Na'im argues that advice from 3-4 years ago no longer works in short-term rentals because the market is too crowded. He pushes direct bookings and converting OTA reservations into repeat customers, a shift he calls the direct booking revolution.
What is some of the bad advice that you see being given in the industry?
Well, I'd say that perhaps some of the worst advice is outdated advice, namely something that worked three, four years ago but doesn't work anymore. So even when I started, you know, my apartments myself, it was enough to put it on Airbnb and you were making lots of money. Then things started weakening a bit and you had to sort of start going on booking.com and you have to tinker around with home away and holiday lettings. And it sort of worked for another year or two, and then the market really started getting crowded. So if you want to make it work, you basically need to be able to keep that extra slice of income that you're paying to the OTAs or the listing site. So I'd say the biggest advice is the missing advice. You know, the things that are not being said about how important direct bookings are and how you go about getting those direct bookings. I think that's a real lack in most of the training programs.
Yeah, I like that. And I like your tagline with Zevu. Was it the book direct revolutionary? Is that right?
The direct booking revolution. I don't think direct booking revolution.
I do see that on the T shirt. Nice little product placement. I like that. So you're 100% right. You're 100% right. Book direct or direct bookings is not talked about enough. And that is my one goal with this podcast series is to spread the word about direct bookings. It's one of the big reasons why I wanted to get you on this podcast and on this series is because it is so important for everybody to do. You're 100% right. Three or four years ago, you could just throw up a listing on Airbnb, get really nice photos so your listing stands out and that's it. That's all you needed to do the same on booking.com but now the amount of people that are doing rent to rent or rent to save, they're all being getting told the same things at these courses. And you can spot somebody a mile off who's doing service accommodation and the courses that they're doing by the state of the photos and it has become oversaturated, you can just see in the major cities. So you have to have to be doing something even different now to stay ahead of the trend to be getting that booking first, that direct booking, or even if you have got an OTA booking come in, you've got to know how to convert that into a direct. And Amanda And David, they spoke about it in episode three and obviously we're going to go on and talk about it now. But what is xivu's goal then? You've created this business out of a need, scratching your own itch, which is normally why some of the best businesses are created. What is your sort of 5, 10 year goal with this and with direct booking, would you say, Naomi?
Sure. So what I'd say is that the business itself, or the software itself was born out of the need, the PMS side, the Channel Manager side and all of that. It was probably a conversation on the Facebook group. I think it was a post by Jason Living. And that really triggered what has turned XIVU into becoming a cause rather than just a business. You know, the cause for getting the direct bookings. And the conversation was regarding rate parity, narrow and wide rate parity. And I'm not going to go into much detail, but basically OTAs will penalize you if you have a cheaper price on your own website than on their website. It used to be that you were not allowed to have a cheaper price on any ota, so you basically have to preserve the same price across all the OTAs. From my understanding right now, you can have OTAs, but you can't undercut them through your own website. So the idea came to me, why don't we just have a communal website where people can advertise their properties, where they don't have to pay any commission and given that it's not their own website, they can give discounts, they can give direct booking advantages.
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