Partnering for Success: Connecting Your Property with Travel Experts

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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. Long Mariah. Thank you.

Thank you. It's great to be here again. Liam, thank you for having me. 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 Villa Tracker.

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 Gstaad. 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 a homeowner, fell in love with hospitality, then a property manager and then started to develop what became an ota, which is Smiling House, which is a luxury platform for luxury properties worldwide. With 10,000 properties up to today in 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 the 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 on one hand and travel professionals, legacy travel professionals on the other hand. And this is actually a villa Trekker. Awesome. Yeah. So this is just in, in in a short brief about me. I'm part of the hospitable host together with Mark. I'm, I'm part of Boostly community, know many of the people out there. And we also of course still based on a lot, a lot of direct bookings. And actually it's because of these direct bookings that we got from travel professionals that kind of twist my mind how come these professionals reaching out to me and I'm calling it direct bookings. I'm talking about concierge companies, travel designers, event planners. And I understood it's because I am busy with luxury properties. There's a place for sharing. And these professionals wanted to speak with somebody that would be with them on the same, let's say the same boat and handle such bookings together. And then I realized that I'm lucky to meet these great partners. But 95% of the industry not only don't have the chance to work with them, they do not even know how to reach out to them. And it's the same problem on the other side of these travel professionals. They do not know how to, how to reach out to vacation rental professionals. They do not know who to trust. And that was a crazy time where I started to put it all together and try to build, and this is now almost two years, the first platform that will actually create the bridge and will make it possible for every property manager around the globe, or any travel designer around the globe to, to talk with each other and to book properties from each other.

That sounds very, very cool indeed. And first of all, I just want to take a moment just to say what an introduction. I mean, you're an inspiration in terms of all of the, you know, businesses that you do. But, you know, it's recognizing the need in the industry. And I certainly think that if it helps people find awesome hosts and encourages more, I mean, especially longer bookings, more business bookings and that side of things. And this is super exciting. Just before we move on to Villa Tracker, I just want to acknowledge for anybody watching on YouTube, we have got a little bit of a video delay, but I know if you're listening on the audio, it's coming through nice and clear. So, Mariah, what is Villa Tracker? Give us the, the pitch for Villa Tracker.

The Villa Tracker is the first B2B2C 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 kicking, kicked out of the game of structure 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 a 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 guests, but they are not the guests. 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 the 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 budget to be between few times more to tens of times more, 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 guest, a lot of upsells, of course, and a different kind of budgets. So this is what Villa Trekker is. It's a bridge between two industries that intercompan with another and actually a blue ocean of new direct bookings from a Different source.

It's very cool because I had never considered that there's a problem out there, especially for like, people who curate the stays or arrange the stays on behalf. Because you're absolutely right. Until you've just said that there. All of the big platforms say, no, you've got to be the end user, the end booker, you know, and, and this is where that makes it virtually impossible for those businesses to operate legitimately. You know, they, they must, like you say, have to find people the old school way of, of, you know, searching areas, going from word of mouth, going from maybe social media and that side of things. Whereas now you've created something where those professional services can actually go and use. And it now absolutely makes sense. So when you said originally B2B to C, I was like, what, what do you mean by that? But I get exactly what you mean. So you're. 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, 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 things 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. 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, what are these people? They're calling themselves property managers. They are different people that just two, three years ago they did something else then. They know nothing about hospitality. So some things needed to be involved, evolve 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 ballgame. But what if they only booking this because I 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 Trekker. 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 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 Tracker being built was 100% listening to their needs, how they need to communicate with their clients, how, for example, in Villa Tracker, Traveler 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 to and see or book it. Their client is expecting to get a variety, a little bit above the 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. So everything is with a lot, a lot of communication. And Villa Tracker, the concierge of Villa Tracker that works in Villa Tracker will communicate it back into the property managers in the sense that the property managers can sell more, they can do upsell more, they can get ready for unique questions or all kind of requirements that the guest is looking for and they can just become a better host in that process as well.

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And I Imagine for like these figures you've mentioned. If that really is more than the, the normal rate, then I'm certainly up for unique questions and for learning to host better, especially if, if the rates are higher and it's a industry which I've personally as a host never considered. So this is, this is very interesting. So playing devil's advocate a little bit, is it just, is it just certain luxury kind of properties or what type of properties are required?

So yeah, so we're starting off, started of course from the, from, from the base of, of what we had in of Smiling house with the 10,000 properties that we have. But actually Villa Trekker is welcoming much wider and diverse range of properties to join. And the reason is professionals are coming. Sorry, the guests are going to this kind of professionals to book them a London getaway. They reaching also to stay in a hotel or maybe in a private or in apartment next to a convention. There's many more reasons. It's not only the leisure stays out of the city. So for the first time we are welcoming city centers, we're welcoming property managers we never been working with. We are welcoming alternative to hotels even for couples. Just for you to know, in Smiling House we normally working on five bedrooms outside of the city in a very luxurious destinations and so on. Now Villa Trucker is open to the world. We still looking at design properties, we still looking at average booking of minimum of $500 a night. And that's because we believe that less than this amount people will be able to book alternative themselves. If they're already going to the travel professional, if they're already paying and including in the itineraries, the flights and the cars and et cetera, they probably looking for a product that is also a little bit higher than the average booking in the OTAs. But it can be an apartment, it can be for a couple, three people. It can be or should be designed with authenticity. And of course if there's other added values like sustainable homes or homes that are embracing events, Villa Trekker is the place where in spite of the other, all the other OTAs, we are welcoming properties that are welcoming events. And we create a different collection for these professionals to find these places. We are welcoming pet friendly properties as well as family properties and of course sustainable properties. We are welcoming all the different certificates out there in the vacation rental industry or any other authority that will declare that this property is sustainable. And so we have these four different collections where these professionals can look into and choose from.

That's very cool. And as a host, I mean it means that potentially people who are listening to this, who have got design LED or some of these niche kind of properties, whether they're smaller than or larger kind of properties, but particularly where there's going to be demand and it sounds like there's demand, it really depends on where the these services operate. And is demand fairly worldwide. Is that where Villa Tracker operates? Is it all across the world?

Yes, Villa Tracker is. I said it's a baby that born already very big born as an OTA display as one of the leading OTAs via guesty as first channel manager who's offering it. So guest users can join Villa Tracker within a click and doesn't matter where they are from. We are looking at your collection and we will approve it or not approve it according to the criteria. But the criteria are much, much wider. If you are not a guest user and you do want to push your properties for village record, we are offering a manual upload. Of course, then we will be looking at the properties even more to see that they suitable, that they're unique or they represent a unique destination that is not on offer. But the location can be anywhere, anywhere in the world. You know, these travel professionals been there much, much, much before us, right? And they're definitely here to stay. So their clientele is coming from all over the world and traveling to all over the world. So the location is meaningless. And so wherever you have properties in this kind of and you want to reach out to new eyes, to new demand and to get inspired also by a different crowd. If you have a property that can host an event or wedding or have anything else that is unique and you didn't find a way till today to shout it out, this is the place to do so. And if you have other uniqueness that you believe that somebody will appreciate, we are kind of an OTA with the Villa Tracker that is going and developing and adding more tech parts according to the highlights and the feedback that we're getting from both sides. So for example, I tell you about a cool feature that we are about to add and it's still under development. Some of these travel professionals told me or gave a feedback that sometimes they're designing a trip for their clientele over a few weeks, like four, five, six weeks. Sometimes, you know, when people from, for example from Australia is flying to Europe, they're not flying for one week. Then they say if we would have an interactive map where we could see between countries, even you know, which are the same properties that standing our criteria, we would be able to to plan France and Switzerland and Italy and Spain in one itinerary. Then we will combine it with hotels and with vacation homes. So we now kind of been challenged and we developed this for them. Other thing is like hot destination. This travel professional want to know what other travel professionals are looking for and this is giving us a feedback of what is the hot destination. If some, if tens of them started to look for Marrakesh and we don't have enough inventory in Marrakesh, I will be the ambassador to reach out back into my beloved industry and say, hey, they're all property managers in Morocco. Marrakesh, your destination is on demand. Come and connect to Villa Trek. So this is how we doing it. I'm proud to say that just before we launch this year Villa Trekker, we already have proof of concept of a few millions of dollars of turnover. Our biggest wish is to lower it from the high ticket towards a much more accessible up to 5,000, $10,000 or even less for stay. So it means that everyone that listen to this podcast, almost everyone can join.

That's really cool. That sounds like such a big opportunity and certainly a market which I've never considered, but certainly for hosts who have got those, those properties that you've mentioned in the right locations, it's certainly worth checking out. Where can we find out more if there are either these concierge services? Because there may be some people listening to this guy. Do you know what? That exactly suits my market and I need to go and use Villa Tracker or if it's a host who goes, you know what, my property kind of, kind of fits what Mariah's talking about there and I'm interested. I've got places which host events. Where do we go to find out more?

Okay, so as I said, if you are users of Guesty, you can connect to Villa Tracker as a one of the leading OTAs within a click with all your properties or part of them. If you're not a guest user, you can reach out to Villa tracker dot com. Most of the website is talking to the travel professionals because they are the real users of the platform. The platform, by the way, it's a closed platform, so don't expect to see any of the features that I talked about. They are really dedicated for these travel professionals. If you want to connect your properties and you're not against the users, there's one link in Villa Tracker for property managers and you can fill up the form and the dedicated team from the Smiling House and Villa Tracker group will reach out to you and will you know Introduce themselves, see and get to know your properties and will upload manually the ones that are, you know, a perfect fit for this platform. That's for now. I believe in the within the next year we will be able to offer the same service as we do today with guesty to other channel managers as well.

That's exciting to see what the future holds. And my last question for you Mariah, is you've got experience of several brands and several businesses. For our listeners who are likely hosts themselves, 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 Mark, listen to you Liam, to everything that you bring in so many trends into, into the show and into the community. As I mentioned that 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 and welcome, very welcome to highlight any of these services within Villa Trekker. The more the merrier. And in the end, you know, I'm mainly coming 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.

I love that, I love that because everybody can, you know, sometimes people can chase the, the money and go, oh, I'll go after that and I'll go after this. But ultimately if you're putting yourself into the business and you're branding it well and it's showing up, you're going to get repeat customers and at the end of the day that's a surefire way to grow. And Mariah, the chats we have are always inspiring. I feel inspired. I hope the listeners are feeling inspired. 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 Boostly to join Villa Trekker as more like as a community members that will give maybe some kind of benefit of, you know, of getting to bring the properties live faster and get the special attention. As a community member myself and I don't know when this interview will be posted, but if you are happen to be in Porto in the 2nd of October, please let us know. We have a limited amount 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 answer, to give anything for my knowledge to anybody who listen to this and I want to thank you once again Liam and for the whole bustling community for having me again here.

Thank you so much for joining us today and for inspiring us and letting us know about Villa Tracker and I know there's members within Boostly who I certainly are going to nudge this interview towards them because I think they'd be perfect and you know, we'll see what happens. But thank you for listening to this on the Boosty 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 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.