Partnering for Success - Connecting Your Property with Travel Experts

Okay. Welcome to the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that gives you the tools, the tactics, the training and most of all the confidence to go out there and get direct bookings. We do a mini series on this podcast where we just talk about services and people who are in the hospitality arena who can help you just increase your bookings. In general, we're not all just about direct bookings. It's about getting more bookings and finding out about what's going on there in the hospitality world. So we've got a special guest with us today. She is a returning guest. She's, she's been on the show a couple of times and it's always exciting and there's always new things going on. So we're welcoming back Mariah Rockman. She's this co founder of the Smiling House Group. And welcome along, Mariah.

Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here again. Liam. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's, it's been, it's been a while, but we've been cooking something very nice and new for the whole industry to increase bookings wherever property managers are. And I'm happy to share with you a little bit more about Villager. Tonight.

I'm excited to dive into Villa Tracker. But before we dive in, not everybody listening is going to necessarily have heard who you are and what the Smiling House group is. So just very briefly, can you give yourself like the elevator pitch? I know that you're a best selling author and I know that you speak on panels, but for those who don't know you and many people I hope do, can you give yourself an introduction?

Yes, of course. So my name is Mariah Rockman. I'm based here in Switzerland in the Swiss Alps in the beautiful ski resort of Gstad. I'm a part of the str world and this great industry. For the last 12 years I did it all the way. I've been homeowner, fell in love with hospitality, then a property manager and then started to develop what became an ota, which is a Smiling House, which is luxury platform for luxury properties worldwide. With 10,000 properties up to today in 50, 54 different countries, 400 destinations wherever there's luxury actually in the world. And with the time we develop a section that focus only on luxury properties for sale vacation rentals called Triangle. And today we are here to tell you about our last baby in the family. This baby is born big and I'm Talking about the first B2B2C platform for professionals in the vacation rentals like property Managers from one hand and travel professionals, legacy travel professionals on the other hand. And this is actually Villa Trekker.

Mariah, what is Villa Tracker? Give us the pitch for Villa Tracker.

The Villa Tracker is the first B2, B2C platform in our industry. So for many, many years, we as vacation rental professionals, through the biggest OTAs, bukit.com, airbnb, et cetera, learned that the only people we can talk to and should talk to is our guests. It's a host guest relationship. Everybody that was potentially considered to be a mediator or somebody in the middle was kicked or been kicked out of the game. So all these travel professionals that are the people who selling hotels, they know how to sell flights, they know how to sell cruises, they know how to sell everything else, you know, cars, rentals, whatever. They've been kicked out of the game of str and they do not know and was not offered until now to be part of the booking system. The ecosystem of our bookings, the message of host to guest was so, so strong that nobody in the industry dared actually to break it or to try to create a channel that will connect to these travel professionals. So Villa Tracker is actually a platform, a closed platform. We call it a GDS global data service for these travel professionals. You can call it the Airbnb for travel professionals. A place where they can book the properties, our properties, of the property managers, on behalf of their clientele. It means that this platform is settling all their difficulties that was preventing them from working with us so far. Who would pay my commission? I'm company, I'm not a private person. I cannot pretend to be a guest. This is what the OTAS enforce these professionals to do so far, to pretend to be the guest, but they are not the guest and they didn't want to take the risk. So they could communicate with us on one hand and communicate with their guests on the other hand in a comfortable way, in their own language, in the way that they need to feel comfortable with their clientele. And the most important, they could find, finally, a source that they can trust. It can't be that some event planner will keep on booking the same villa in Ibiza just because he happened to know one person in Ibiza. And what if somebody wants to have a wedding in Tuscany? So we needed to find a way for these professionals to trust us, to create a hub where they trust can be paid forward to their guests. And the last thing that I can say about Villa Trekker is forget about the common average booking rate when it comes to us and our guests. When a professional is involved, you can expect the budgets to be between few times more to tens of times more than an average booking already. From the fact that somebody is reaching out to a travel professional to manage their traveling, we can expect a different kind of clients, a different kind of guests, a lot of upsells, of course, and a different kind of budget. So this is what Villa Tracker is.

The clientele who are likely to use Villa tracker will be usually booking on behalf of somebody else. And when did you first discover this. This niche, this problem, you know, how did you come across?

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I came across it in a very profound way in the time. In Covid time. If we can remember these terrible times. I. You know, we've been here in Switzerland. That was one of the countries where Covid was kind of. Kind of easygoing. But already then, like two years back, we had a lot of activities in different parts of the world, and we became like a specialist of COVID where to travel, who to travel, you know, regulations in different countries and so on. And then we start to notice about one weird thing. In the OTAs where we were active, and in our own OTA, we start to get messages like, I'm a travel agency from Mexico, and I'm contacting you on behalf of my client of 22 people that want to go to here and there. I'm an event planner, and because of COVID restrictions, we need to make a very small wedding. And I'm reaching out to you on behalf of my clients, too. And I start to realize that it's not happening once in a month. It's happening, like every third request was coming from a travel professional. So, you know, hotels were closed. These travel professionals finally realized, and their clients were knocking on their door and said, I don't want to go to a hotel. I want to go to a villa. I want to go to a chalet. I want to go to a castle. I want to have my own amenities. I want to have my own pool. I don't want to share it. I don't want to share the living room with nobody, and I don't want to share the dining room with nobody. And that's the moment when they, this professional, first of all, realized that they need us. Because it's not only that we didn't think about how to make them come to us. Let's admit it. They didn't see us for many, many years as professionals. These are the people who went to universities and learn tourism, and they say they looked at us like eight or Nine years ago. And they said, who are these people? They're calling themselves property managers. They are different people that just two, three years ago they did something else. They know nothing about hospitality. So some things needed to be evolved to get to this moment. And it's not by coincidence. It's not only because the OTA has been blocking those professionals, but we were not ready as property managers to welcome or to stand the standards for these professionals as well. And they were not ready to talk to us. In Covid, it all changed and I start to have more and more bookings with these professionals. The average booking was much more than $30,000 per booking. I said, hey, it's a different ball game. But what if they're only booking this because they have this kind of inventory? What if we will have the $5,000 inventory but it will be accessible for them? But then I started to ask them what is it that they need. They needed a white label PDF or even better with their own logo. So I designed it in Villa Tracker. They needed their own commission in the price and they needed the price not to be over the top because they don't want their client to find it in the OTAs. So in other words, I understood if I want to work with this crowd and we want to open it, we have to share. We don't have to upsell, we have to share. We have to share to reach new eyes, to reach new kind of people and to look at this professional that want to join us as our ambassadors. So the whole way of how Villa Trekker been built was 100% listening to their needs, how they need to communicate with their clients, how, for example, in Villa Trekker, travel professionals have alternative offers. They can send up to five properties at once, different than the OTAs that you focusing on one property and then you reach out and see or book it. Their client is expecting to get a variety, a little bit above their budget, a little bit under the budget, few in the budget. But show me more, show me that you're working for me. This is why I'm not looking myself. That's why I'm doing it for you. Show me how I can combine few properties together in one trip. Show me how can I combine a beginning of a trip in a hotel and then with the property and then ending up in a hotel next to the airport. So we're talking about a completely different. Deep understanding and learning of these professionals with their end customer. They can communicate to us so much more. And once we know and once we understand, we can offer so much more.

What advice would you have for them in general or their business? How should people be looking to either grow their businesses or create brands which really solve real life problems like, like you have with your brands.

So I would say first of all, stay connected means listen to, to Mark, listen to you Liam, to everything that you bring in so many trends into, into the show and into the community. As I men, I'm one of the community members so you have to stay tuned to trends. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. So you know, stay in the OTAs stand your direct booking, work on your branding, on the way you look, your special offer, your uniqueness, your authenticity, but open yourself to more channels. In the end of the day you want to get as many bookings as possible and to get to know new crowd where you can also maybe give more of your beautiful hospitality services. List your services, it's very, very important. List your services. Even if the OTAs that you're working with are not open to display it, do it in your own website, communicate it in the social media media and welcome, very welcome to highlight any, any of these services within Villa Trekker. The more the merrier in the end mainly coming from, from the very, very niche originally of luxury hospitality. And I know that out there in the city centers where most of the travelers are going to, there's much more similarity between one apartment to another, between one service to another, between one price to another. Within all this you can shine, bring your own. It can be shown in the way you picture your properties. It can be with a unique design, it can be with unique description. Try to shine and do it with something that is you and not somebody else. Your personal touch as a host is still very, very important.

Is there anything else before we bring it to a close that we need to know about Villa Tracker or about anything else you want to talk about?

Yes. So no, I just want to say that it's a great community. I can say that I'll be happy to maybe to reach out and like we did before, to give something special for the community of Bustley to join Villa Trekker in as more like as a community members that will give maybe some kind of benefits of you know, of getting to bring the properties live faster and get the special attention. As a community member myself, if you happen to be in portal in the 2nd of October, please let us know. We have a limited amount of of attendees but we're going to throw a very beautiful launch event where we're going to show also behind the scenes of Villa Trekker if anyone who here listening and joining, please welcome. Just contact me via LinkedIn, WhatsApp or anything else and we'll be happy to invite you to the event. And this is another note with no connection to our properties. As always, I'm happy to give any tips, any inspiration, especially also to you ladies out there. Spread your wings. This is a great industry for all of us to join and a great one for you as well. So I'm here always happy to to answer, to give anything for my knowledge to anybody who listened to this and I want to thank you once again Liam, and for the whole Boostly community for having me again here.

Thank you for listening to this on the Boostly podcast. If there's services who could use Villa Tracker, who you think, oh I know this person who may be interested to be one of the business users of Villa Tracker or potentially hosts who would match the description that we've discussed. Please do pass this episode on to them and and hopefully you'll be able to have some magic happen there for everybody else who wants to come and carry on the conversation, come and do so in the hospitality community on Facebook. It's one of the groups and you're welcome to come there. It's a free open group where we can discuss what we've talked about on this podcast or anything else you'd like at all and especially direct bookings. So that's it from me. Thank you very much Mariah again and we'll see you on the next podcast.

Thank you.

Having a blast Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee Cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes don't write it, just do it loosely.