Profit on Every Platform: Mastering Distribution & Markup

I know we get a lot of people tuning live, which is fantastic, but we get a heck of a lot of people watch on the, on the replay, especially shout out to our Australian viewers because for them right now I feel like it's 2 o' clock in the morning. And as much as I love people who are action takers and spend the time in their day to learn, 2 o' clock in the morning is a bit too early. But this is what I would love to know from everybody that is in the Zoom. Let me know where you're tuning in from in the world. So just say, hey, I, I'm Antonella and I'm tuning in from XX and my business is Y. Give your business a pitch and a promote. If you want to drop the web link, drop the web link so you can all just share your business, talk about your business, promote your business. All right, without more being said, we've got an action jam packed. We have got 45 slides, which means you are going to be learning a lot. So I want for you all please, as I flip this screen here, we're going to go into this, which is the screen. Fantastic. I want you all to get your pens and papers ready. I want for you all to go get a cup of coffee, get an energy drink down you because you are about to learn a lot. Fede, thank you so much for, for doing this. As of yesterday, I am going to be in charge behind the scenes. I'm going to be in charge in the slides. You are the expert. You are going to teach everybody. And just like yesterday, if I'm not caught up, please just say, next slide, Mark, next slide. And I'll start that form you. But for everybody else in the chat, we've got JoJo in Texas, we've got Zoe in the Forest of Dean in England, and everybody else that is jumping in on the Zoom Room. If there's somebody here who you realize isn't here, you need to be tagging them and saying, hey, come and get in the Zoom Room. But without further ado, Fede, thank you so much for doing this. I'm going to leave. The Zoom Room is yours. I'm excited for this one.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Mark. I'm super excited. I think you are spot on. You need some coffee? I have mine here. I'll try to make revenue management, you know, kind of like bringing down that barrier of, you know, this is scary. I have price ups and I plugged it once and I turn it on and I never open it because I'm Afraid of what to do. My goal with this presentation is not to actually tell you, okay, this is how to tweak everything in your pricing. It's actually giving you the mindset and the tools you need to understand how to take action and give you some action points for revenue management. Because revenue management is really a philosophy, an art, more than just a hard science. And that's what I want to get into so pretty quickly. About Me Federico Zimmerman, People call me Fede. I'm originally from Argentina and that's where I started Hosting actually in 2018 in my spare bathroom back in Buenos Aires. And then I started as a BA Actually for US Operators from Argentina. And then I started a management company managing 5,000 miles away from Argentina for operators in the US with a partner that was here. Then I moved here. I split that management company I had in the past and started a new one in 2023, which grew to right now we have around 75 properties that are managing across the US and the reason why I'm talking about revenue management and is a topic I'm super passionate about is because I spent 10 years working in the airline industry and I was working pretty closely with the revenue department in the application of revenue management for airline tickets. And I want to show you a couple of examples of properties I took for management and how strong revenue management strategy made a difference. So, for example, the next slide, Mark, is. Oh, sorry, the objective first, the goal again for this presentation is to make sure that you know the basics of revenue management, which is not just pricing. So we're going to talk about that, but help you to boost direct bookings through better pricing and availability and give you also strategies to maximize profit and minimize platform fees, which is probably what a lot of you are looking to do, right? So yeah, examples of properties that I took for management, how a strong revenue management strategy made a difference. This property in Blairsville, Georgia, we were able to do better pricing and availability and give you also strategies to. I'm here myself, Mark. I minimize platform fees, which is probably.

It's okay, it's okay. Keep going. Sorry. Keep going. There's a bit of echo on that one. We're all good.

Okay, perfect. So this property in Blairsville, Georgia, we were able to increase revenue for 75% in the last quarter of 2023. I took this property for management in August 23rd. So you kind of see the difference here from price lapse. $6,000 in revenue in one quarter as soon as we took over for management. The next property is a property in Cadillac, Michigan, same thing. First quarter 24 compared to first quarter 23, we doubled revenue over 116% increase just by changing the pricing and putting a strategy in place. And the next property, which is also Michigan, just in the month of February 24 compared to 23, we did a 211% increase in revenue with a lower occupancy. So this is all about the strategy. Right. So with that said, we're going to talk about mindset. And again, in my point of view, revenue management is all about the mindset and understanding the business we're dealing with and why it's different to other businesses. So the logic if we move to the next one, Mark, is we are dealing with a highly perishable product with fixed inventory and different customers will need to pay different amounts at different times. And this is the most important thing because I remember when I started working at the airline industry, they told me every time a plane takes off and there's a seat empty, we can never sell that seat again. And this is the same thing with our calendars. Every night that we have an empty calendar night and the night is gone, we can never sell that again. So it's highly perishable. So we're leaving money on the table. And again, we want to sell to the right customer at the right time at the right price to maximize our potential revenue. So we cannot afford to leave money on the table. Right. And we also need to find a way to reduce dependency on OTAs. I remember I learned from Mark long time ago. He said, and Mark, let me know if I'm right quoting you on this, but if you are relying on one booking channel, you're building your house in someone else yard.

That's the one. That's the one.

Yeah. And that's. I probably heard that two, three years ago. And that stuck with me. It's like, yeah, that's super important. Right. So, but again, if we're relying on only one platform to do the pricing for us, we're going to be a little bit, you know, relying all the control into one, one business that is not ours. So what are the basics of revenue management? Again, I was saying we're going to talk about revenue management, which is not equal to just pricing. There are a lot of things that come with revenue management. And the number one thing, the first point in revenue management is going to be your tracking, which is looking at your data. If you have a new property, you may not have your own data to start tracking or to see in the past, but you can have your market data. But as soon as you start operating, as soon as you have a property that is live, you definitely need to start tracking different metrics. The most basic ones that everybody tracks is like your revenue and your occupancy. Okay, how much money did I make last month or last quarter and what was my occupancy? And maybe comparing that to the market. I want you to start tracking more things. For example, how many non shows you have, how many cancellations do you have, what is the number of pets are you hosting? If you host pets, number of guests over occupancy, how many people are requesting you to book for 10 people where you can host eight. How many seven day bookings you have or where's your booking window? Where's your average booking window? And booking window means how much in advance people are booking are booking seven days in advance, 30 days in advance, two days in advance. Ancillaries how much are you setting off on ancillary e.g. early check in weather events because you may start to realize that depending on how the season is going for if you're in a winter market that's going to have a huge impact unexpected the part of how many people are leaving before finishing the stay. Huge one booking source. Where are your bookings coming from and even reason for travel? And the reason why you want to track all of this because this is going to help you make business decisions around revenue management. Right Even it's going to help you to understand what type of changes you need to make in your property in terms of amenities, in terms of like design. Because again if you realize that you set up a property for a specific guest avatar but the reason for travel is different, you may need to change a couple of things inside the house. If you're getting a lot of requests for more guests than you can host, you may want to add an extra bed. Right? Those type of things.

I just want to say very quickly Fedi and I've got a question for the whole audience that are with us and we've got quite a lot of people in there. You've got two different types of basic and advanced tracking. Can you just leave in the chat please everybody, one of two words. Are you currently doing basic or advanced tracking with with your business and with your numbers? It doesn't matter what if you're a basic or advanced. I just want to get a little level here. So if you could just leave Basic or advanced. One word basic or advanced. So Fede, here's a question. Because you you can't See the chat that's coming in. What do you think the majority of the answers are right now? Either basic or advanced.

I'll say basic.

Yes. I think we're going to go 98% basic here. We've got two of our advanced, which is cool. So really interesting. It gives you a little bit of a handle of the room that we have right now. But fantastic insight. Thank you. Sorry, Fady, please continue.

No, this is great. And I'm going to give you one example of why I want you to start tracking this so we can go to the next one. And I want to show you one example. With last year, I track the amount of pets that we hosted, right? And in my business, we charge $75 per pet. And I had a total of 308 pets across 141 stays. Last year. There is a total of $23,100 in pet fees, which is a lot of money. Now, the reason why I want to show you this is because you know how pet fees are. You know, if you're charging per pet, you need to request for each one of the pets. And it's a little more sticky that if you're doing like a flat fee per stay for all the pets. And I know a lot of operators are doing that. They say, I charge 100 bucks for up to three pets. So I wanted to do the test. I said, okay, if I make it easier for my team when it comes to charging the pet fee, and I say flat $100 per stay, how much would I have made? And I would have made $14,100. So it's a difference of $9,000. And at an average of 20% on management fee, that's $1,800 that I would have charged less on management. Right? So this is why I track all of these metrics because then I can make these decisions. And you can reverse this and say, hey, if I'm charging, like any of you here watching this, if you're charging a flat fee per pet or you're not charging a pet fee, you can start doing some numbers, pretty simple numbers. You can drop them in ChatGPT3 for you and say, you know, what is the potential revenue that you can make if you do different charges? So again, you can do this with so many different metrics that you can track. But this one for me was pretty insightful because I definitely wanted to make it easier, just charge one fee, but it wasn't going to be like a good business decision. Right? So another huge one that we mentioned is Tracking your booking channel, source and repeat guests to build your funnel for direct bookings. Right? And this is something simple. You can even find repeat guests in your OTAs. They have the metric. Or go through your guest names and try to point out if you see any repeat guests. But the only way that you can start taking action on building a plan and saying, okay, I know that 89% of my bookings right now are from the one big ota. How do I change that? Is by having those numbers and then building a plan, which we're going to talk about, right? And of course, you want to also collect guest data. And this is important because even though we're talking about revenue management, you may think, okay, revenue management is all about pricing. But no, again, revenue management in a hotel is a department that works with marketing, it works with purchases, it works with a lot of different departments because it's just the entire revenue is not only what is the final price in your calendar, right? So very important. Collect your guest data, always in compliance with the OTA's terms of services. Right? To retarget, because we know there's been a lot of changes lately. I don't want anyone to get in trouble. Just make sure that you're updated with the terms of services. Now, okay, we talk about tracking. This is the first part of revenue management. Start with tracking, looking at your data, and then you move into forecasting. Forecasting is basically having the crystal ball to look into the future, right? Is one of the most challenging parts for anyone doing revenue management. If you read any book for revenue management, they're going to say that forecasting is extremely challenging. It's basically taking your historical data that you analyze and then kind of like building this projection of what you feel the future is going to look like. Now, this is kind of like the scientific method. You come up with a hypothesis based on all the information that you have and you put it into practice and you try to see if you're actually doing things right and keeping comparing your new bookings and new data compared to your past data and your goals. So this is basically forecasting. I want to give you one specific example so you can see how this works. I manage a bunch of properties in Michigan. Michigan is a fantastic market in the summer, as you know. You know, lakefront properties with hot tubs and kayaks and all the fun stuff. They do amazingly well in the summer. A lot of operators, a lot of owners, they say, I just put a minimum stay of seven nights and they get booked and I do great, right? And I say, okay, that is fantastic by your entire market. By analyzing the market, everybody puts a seven nights minimum stay and there's just one more from the bunch. What if we offer something that the rest are not offering, which is a minimum stay of three nights and we charge a premium for that. Why? Because when people are going to search for a short term rental property in Michigan for three nights, they're gonna just be a handful of properties because most of the operators are asking for seven days. The outcome of this, if we move to the next one mark is. Let me see if I have the example here. It is this property and you're seeing the screenshot. I took this price ups, right? June 1, August 31, by changing the minimum state to three nights, we did an additional 18,000, almost $19,000 because we were able to charge a premium just by changing the minimum stay. Which is funny because if you look at my average length of stay, it dropped a little bit because at the end of the day when they were doing the seven, nine minimums, then they were ended up with gaps and they had to lower it last minute. And then, you know, dropping the prices to kind of like fill in last minute those gaps. By having this far in advance, three minimum stay, I was able to again, higher price increase almost $20,000 in one summer. So huge difference, right? And that was from my looking at my historical data, looking at my market, and then creating my hypothesis projection for what the summer can look like if I do this strategy. Something important I want to talk about when you are analyzing data. I love to talk about this. It's called survivorship bias. And survivorship bias comes from World War II when the Allies were bombing the Axis and the planes were coming back and they were looking at the planes and they were looking at all the bullet holes and they were saying, okay, we need to reinforce the wings where they had the bullet holes, right? And then one engineers said, actually I think we're looking at this wrong. We need to look into the where these planes are coming back, are not getting hit because that's probably where the ones are not coming back and getting hit, like the engines. The reason why I mentioned this, because this is about what is the data that we are not seeing where we're analyzing something, right? And I try to keep this in mind every time I'm looking at any revenue data. Quick example, you go to any OTA to search for, okay, what is my competition doing the next week? And let's see how much they're charging and what I need to bid with where you're going to look at their search results for the properties that are not booked but the ones are better competition that are already booked, you're not going to see them. So you always need to keep in mind when you're looking at data, what is the data missing that didn't survive a filter? Right. You're analyzing a market. Okay. What happened with the properties that were sold in last couple of months our short term rentals and didn't make so pretty important to keep in mind. Do we have any questions Mark or anything you want me to address before we just.

It wasn't really questions more or less, it was statements. So somebody asked the question of do you like Touch day to collect guest data? Yes. You know anything that is third party that is approved by Airbnb all for it. Which is, which is good. I do love this. This little diagram of the survivorship bias I feel like is fantastic. I feel like that's where so business is not just pricing. You can take take absolute lessons. Lessons from what I will say though to everybody because I guarantee you're all making notes. Any questions that come to mind, don't be afraid just to pop them in the chat. There is no silly question, there's no wrong question. I'd much rather you get insight to experts like Fedi while we're here because as soon as this live ends, if a question comes to mind it's gonna be a lot harder getting a, getting a response. So if you've got those questions, doesn't matter what, what it may be, when it comes to pricing, drop them in the, drop them in the chat. So moving on to this part of pricing and price by itself.

Yeah, perfect. Thank you, Mark. So pricing. And again I wanted to make this point strong. Revenue management doesn't equal pricing. Pricing is a part of revenue management and I'm going to disappoint you a little bit if you're expecting here to come and say, hey, this is the exact price you need to put in your calendar this date. What I want you to understand about pricing is pricing is executing this strategy that you build based on your historical data tracking and your forecasting. I do want to tell you a couple of things about pricing that you are going to find helpful. Number one, there are different pricing strategies. For example, most of you, if you're using price labs, wheelhouse, any of those tools, you're doing dynamic pricing. And that is a type of pricing that you can combine with other strategies. One example is market penetration pricing strategy. And that's something That I love doing and it works out pretty well. I'm going to give you one quick story. My own property in one of site. As I told you, I used to rent my spare bedroom. When I moved to America, I turned the entire apartment into a short term rental. It's a pretty nice apartment. We're very well located, pretty unique. And when I launched it, I shared it with my friends and I say, hey guys, this is the listing. If you know anyone they can book. And all my friends were like, hey dude, this is too cheap for your property. Property. But no worries. I started charging $70 a night the first one two months. Now I'm charging average of 140 and I'm number one in the market because what I had to do was positioning that property pretty high in the algorithm. So what you do with market penetration is kind of like create this fuss, create you know, these, these lot of bookings quickly, a lot of reviews quickly and then you can start to raise your prices, right? So it's not something you need to set forever. You can make these adjustments. You can do what is called last month standing, which is this is a nerve breaking strategy. But when you have compression time and compression times means occupancy can't meet the demand, for example World cup coming next year or any of these big events like Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift doing a concert, you may want to price pretty high or super bowl of course to be the last man standing, last person to get booked. But of course you go too hard on that, you may end up not selling. So you got to be careful. So yeah, pricing, there are different type of strategies. Make sure that that goes along with the hypothesis you put for your tracking and forecasting. And then the next point, pretty important. This is basically the fourth part of revenue management is inventory management. Your inventory management is going to be how do you manage your calendar? How do you determine the availability of your calendar? And I'm going to give you different examples. When I was saying that I launch at a lower rate for this market penetration pricing, I don't open my calendar for a year. I only open the first one two months. Especially when you do those type of like 20% first three guest promotions in the OTAs. What you can do is say okay, I'm going to open my calendar for the first 12 months with this 20% discount. Because I don't want people to use that discount in the middle of the summer. If I'm launching in the middle of February, I want the people to use the discount as soon as possible. Or again, your minimum stay. You may say, hey, farther out. I don't want to compromise, you know, people booking for one night and then compromising the possibility of selling for a week. You may want to have a longer minimum stay, farther out. And then as you get closer, that minimum stay drops, which you can set up in your dynamic pricing platforms. You can even restrict your check in and checkout dates depending on what PMS and what pricing tool you use. But that's something we use pretty often, especially for holidays. I don't want people checking in or checking out January 1st, December 25th, Thanksgiving, Thursday. So we always look into the holidays and control that check in, check out to make sure that people are not breaking a holiday in the middle. And that's also pretty nice for your cleaners who don't. You don't want your clients to go and have to clean in the middle of a holiday. Right. So different ways that you can manage your inventory and control which days are for sale. And then you have your distribution, which is your cost of distribution and channel strategy. So another metric that I haven't talked about, but it's extremely important that you track is your acquisition cost. Right. So you definitely want to have a strategy around your pricing and inventory for which channels you're using, doing markup rates in certain OTAs, doing promotions for your direct booking websites. But you need to understand what is your acquisition cost, what is the cost for each one of the bookings that you acquire based on the platform, your marketing strategy, etc, so that way you can decide, okay, where do you want to focus your efforts? Right.

So I've got a question. There is a question that came in. It is a really good question.

Yeah.

And I think I know what the answer is, but it'd be good to get your take on it. So it came from somebody who said, do you find that by the. By decreasing the minimum stay during the holidays, for example, during the busy season, the example that you gave at the top, yes, you come out with 20k extra in revenue. But do you find that by decreasing minimum stay during the holidays is beneficial in. In the summer, for example, busy season also. So what, what was like. So just unpack that example. Why did you decide to do it? Why did you not stick with the. The safe route of going minimum seven nights and so just unpack that so that somebody else can listen and can sort of take advantage and inspiration from it?

Yeah, no, I love that question here. There's a very common point that is going to be, oh, you have more cleanings and there's more wear and tear on the property. But again, the goal is here that you're charging a premium to cover for that. But the reason is pretty simple. You got to do this exercise. You got to go to any OTA or Google or where you want to go and search for your market and start searching different combination of dates. And then you're gonna start seeing how you're restricting yourself in how many search results you're showing up and how many eyes you're putting into your property. That's the way that I think about this is number of eyes in your listing. I'm going to take that summer example. I'll give you another example just to make this point. I have a few properties in downtown Fort Worth. I love the market. And you know, being downtown, an apartment is kind of like being a hotel. And hotels do one night stays, right? So when I go and search for, in let's say Airbnb, I search for Fort Worth Friday till Sunday. I have 100 properties, for example, available next weekend. When I search only Friday to Saturday or Saturday to Sunday, I have only 20. The other hundred properties are available, but they're not letting people book for only one night. So you have a one night market that is not being met with the offer. The amount of listings are available, right? So what you can do there again is saying, okay, if there's no competition for one night stays, but there's a demand to meet, I can do one night stays and charge a premium. So it's all about that. It's about how many properties are showing up in a search result. This is the same with amenities, right? By having a hot tub in Pet Friendly, you gotta test this with number of nights and understand, okay, if I'm doing this fill the type of filter search of number of nights and amenities, et cetera, et cetera, how many people are showing up and how can I make sure that I'm showing up in as many search results as possible. And that's what we did with those three minimum states. Because I realized, okay, when I'm searching in Michigan for three nights in the summer, there are a handful of properties. When I search for seven nights, there are a ton. So I can definitely charge a premium because I'm offering something that most of the other properties are not offering. And that's kind of like the logic. Does that make sense?

Yeah, 100. And I feel like there's going to be more questions come on the back of it. So let's shift through the mindset and then what we'll do by the end, we'll, we'll crack on with some of these really good questions that are going to come in.

Absolutely. So a little bit on the mindset because this is the number one thing I need to break, you know, from people coming to, to these calls or even my own clients. It's like for example, I don't want my price to go below 350 nights. $350 a night, you know, because we're very pride about, proud about our pricing on our property. But you need to be flexible. I understand this is a pretty elastic type of industry where people, you know, at the end of the day people are willing to pay something and, and you gotta meet that because it's pursued value. It's not a, a good like bread that is, you know, market value. I don't want to do one night stay bookings. Yeah, this can be a little bit challenging depending on your market. If you have a pretty large house, if you have an apartment, if you have a small house, do the one night stays. Just set up your process to make sure they are betting your guests correctly and you're not gonna have an issue and you're gonna have a full calendar. And again, you can charge a premium for those one night stays because you're one of the few doing it. I don't want pets destroying my furniture. Right guys? Pets friendly is one of the top amenities when I take a new property for management. As soon as I turn it pet friendly, we see an upgrade on bookings immediately and pets normally behave even better than humans. Very common question I have. I know you're on it, but can we do anything about next weekend? Pretty common question about going for my clients. Right. And we're constantly changing prices, constantly staying on top. This is the most important thing. I'm on top of the calendar every single day. I have a team doing revenue management with me. And another thing that we normally do is a common question. I guess why is the cleaning fee lower than what we pay to the cleaners? You don't want your cleaning fee to be higher than a nightly rate. Very important. And what you want to do is transfer part of that cleaning fee into your nightly rate. And there are different ways to do it, but it's pretty important you keep that in mind. If your cleaning fee is higher than one night of your calendar, that's going to hit you back in the algorithm and people won't like to book with you. So yeah, some common beliefs and breaking.

Those down, it's really good because everything that you said here with these common, limiting beliefs, I've seen the messages in the zoom already, so I can see what's coming up and we can definitely you built to knock these down one by one. So let's move on to minimum price one.

Okay, another common thing that I want you to think about. Do you care about your ADR or your revpar? And this is some revenue management terminology that if you're not familiar with, I'm going to break down pretty quickly. Your ADR is your average daily rate and your revpar is your revenue per available rental. So your ADR is telling you, okay, what was the average rate that people booked? Your calendar. So let's say that you have a calendar of 30 days and you have people booking two nights sold at $1,000. Perfect. Your ADR is $1,000, but you had only two nights. You made $2,000 entire month. Right. Your revpar divides that by the occupancy and tells you the actual number that you made in the month is your actual revenue. And the red part is the indication if you're being profitable or not. So I always talk about this because I hear people about, yeah, I price at a minimum. I don't want people to book lower than this. At the end of the day, you need to care about the final number you have in your bank account at the end of the month over what price you were displaying to people. Because that's only showing off, in my opinion. The compounding effect, this is huge. And this is a conversation I have pretty often. Sometimes you gotta be willing to take bookings at a lower rate that you're willing to take, especially in the low season, in the worst days of the week, because you're tricking the algorithm. There's a compounding effect into taking those lower bookings in the middle of the dead winter in this property that is not very popular in the winter, because when the different platforms see that you're getting these bookings when no one else is getting booked, then they're going to prioritize you because they consider you a great property and you're going to get showing up higher and higher in the algorithm. So there's a compounding effect again into getting more bookings, even if it's a lower rate, because it's going to have a huge benefit in the future. A pretty common question, what if I get someone to book at a lower rate, but only if they stay for a few days so they will still pay a significant amount, making sure it's not a Cheap guest. And this is the logic here. You can play with length of state discounts. I do a lot of these where we say, okay, you book for one night, two nights, you pay the rate that I have published. But if you book for five nights, I give you a length of stay discount. That way, yeah, you're paying a lower adr, but you're still paying a significant amount. Your booking total price is still something you got to come out of pocket. You're taking my midweeks and I'm getting more money. So think about your length of stay. Be willing to offer these type of discounts. That way you make sure that, hey, okay, again, I'm filling my calendar lower rate, but I'm knowing that these Wednesdays, Tuesdays, I normally get empty vacant. I can sell them in combination with the weekend. And you're gonna have more revenue at the end of the month. And I want you to keep in mind you have fixed costs for operating your property besides your mortgage or utilities, just having the property live. If you do property management, you know this, you have a property that your owner is pretty strict on the bookings and you have the calendar vacant. And you're paying for your PMS dynamic booking, your direct booking website, you're paying for your channel, your marketing. So those costs, you got to cover for that. Same thing with pet friendly. I highly encourage everybody to be pet friendly. Do your research on other host feedback. My feedback is fantastic. I love hosting pets. You can build a list of things to purchase for the property like couch covers, doggy balls and stuff like that. Check the average revenue generated by pet fees and percentage of claims paid by Airbnb. I honestly like, if I have an issue, I send a claim to Airbnb or if you use Wavo or anything like that. A happy guest is what I use. I get paid. It's really, really, really beneficial to be pet friendly. Again, for the number of searches that you're gonna show up when people are filtering and check what your competition is doing. And I want to give you a pretty visual example, Mark. If we move to the next slide we have here, and this is a screenshot I took from Airbnb. Right. But doing a search in a specific market, I don't recall exactly which market was this one, but just a simple search for a specific date. I have 418 properties available. And once I say, okay, I want to filter, I want to narrow it down for in this same search, only properties that allow me to bring my pets. I'm going to cutting the competition to 144 properties, more than 50%. And then when I add a hot tub, it's only six places. This is a screenshot example I use when I'm talking to my clients for property management. I say, hey, I know you don't want to host pets. I know you're still thinking about putting the hot tub. Let me show you why we need to do it.

So just to stop you there. And there's been a really, really good question and I feel like this is the mindset that a lot of people are going, you know, it doesn't matter what the model that you operate in. If you're an owner, you're a manager arbitrage. This is, this is really good question. So Katie put I have just added pet friendly in the last two weeks to increase occupancy and revenue. We did a flat fee to see what others were charging for pets. So we didn't want to be higher than others. We were competing with same bedroom or who were higher revenue occupancy already. So basically same bedroom rate as them as an same amount of numbers of beds, etc. What do you offer for pets that you provide? $75 per pet stay, but not nightly. Other properties charge come into play. Question mark. I was so nervous this last weekend when guest booked two nights before arrival and had dog. So when you've got somebody like Katie who is, you know, chatting to you about this feddy and you know, you want to walk them through why it is beneficial, how would you sort of speak to that?

Yeah, no, that is great. And I'll say, number one, put your boundaries. You don't want to take any pet. What we do is we put pretty clear in our listing description what type of pets we're allowing. So we say we allow only dogs up to 50 or 30 pounds depending on the property. If it's a small property and we do the charge the pet fee, we do it per pet per stay, $75. The reason why we do that is because I want you to remember you're not only competing with Airbnbs or short term rentals, you're competing with hotels and you're competing with boarding the pet in the local boarding hotel or calling pet sitter. Right? Because at the end of the day there are different options. It's not just like choosing another Airbnb with a lower or higher pet fee. So if you think about the average boarding cost is around $75 a night, I think, or $50 a night. This is pretty competitive. Now you want to make sure that your communication with your guest in your messages and everywhere is pretty clear based on your expectations. Like, for example, not putting the pets, not letting the pets on the furniture and stuff like that. Something a lot of operators do. And we do have a few properties. If we leave old blankets that we don't use anymore or sheets in a basket for the pets to cover, to cover the furniture. And then we leave doggy balls. And if you have a yard, this is something we also have in a bunch of properties. It's just the doggy back dispenser and a little bin outside to make sure that they are picking up. And we also communicate, again, depending on, on the location, on the setup, things like, you know, there may be an extra fee. We need to pick up after your dog in the yard or making sure that they're not off leash. So the neighbors can be an issue. Again, for many properties, you know, the people are living, guests are leaving the dogs off leash on the background. They go to your neighbor's house. So that's another thing to consider is answering the question.

Yeah, no, you're 100% are answering the question. And I feel like when it comes to it, and if you look at this example here is if you are again all reverse engineers to your customer avatar, okay, so think about where you are, think about what your area offers and think about the type of guests who come, right? And then you've got to look further afield and look at the, the, the type of traveler. At the moment, more and more people than ever before are deciding to travel with pets because for whatever reason, maybe kennel costs are getting too high, maybe they haven't got anybody that they can leave their pet with and they still want to go on that staycation. Or maybe it's the fact that they just like having their pets with them when they travel. You know, that is becoming more and more common now. And I've always said, and this is a very typical business cliche or investing cliche, is that when everybody is fearful, you be greedy. And if there's a better example or a better screenshot that you can see, it's the one that Fed A has here. So random location on Airbnb doing his research, no filter.418. So there is a ton of competition. You are literally one of hundreds that that future potential guest could book. You drop an extra filter in of pets and it knocks it down by almost a quarter. My maths is shocking, by the way, so it's probably wrong. But 144 is still a lot, but not as much as 418. Then he added in a hot tub and then we all know hot tubs. You know, again, we all love or hate hot tubs. I love being in a hot tub. I hate cleaning a hot tub. But vest is by the buy. This is the example that we're looking at is that it is suddenly dropped it down for where you are one of five other competitors in, in. In. In your local market. And that is before they go and add in things like WI fi, dedicated workspace, kitchen, back garden, all those things that you can also filter down for. And if you think that people aren't using the filters on these OTAs, then you are drastically wrong because it is being used more and more. And the reason why we know this is because Airbnb are added in loads of extra features in their and we always say that Airbnb has got the more data than anybody else that is out there. And when they make these changes, they do it for a reason. They don't do it for a whim. So again, we're using pets as an example because pets is a very. I want to say Marmite. I don't know if you know what Marmite is, Fede. It's in the UK to either love it or you hate it. And it's one of those ones where you go into Facebook groups and you see the words pets and they all go, oh, they all go yay. Right. This is just an example. You could substitute pets for loads of other examples. One night stays being one of them. I'm sure we'll talk about that. Or all the other things that you can do. This is again, we're talking about it and Fede's put a thing in there. It's called limited beliefs. Right. And the problem with common limiting beliefs is that we make so many business decisions based on our personal preference or what we assume the market wants. Right. This is where you go to basic and advanced tracking. With basic tracking with your own limiting beliefs or what you assume. And don't forget when you got assume it makes an asset of you and me, then you make the wrong business decisions for you and your future business where you do advanced tracking, you do advanced research and you utilize somebody like FEDI in this market who's very well known, very well knowledgeable. Sorry. Then you actually can be better off for your. For your business. So really, really good points so far. Do you want to add anything of that before we scroll down to minimum stay Fedi?

No, I think that that's perfect. You Hit the nail on, on all these. And the next example actually is exactly minimum stay on what I was talking about, my downtown forward market. You can see this is a search in February 21st to 23rd for one guest, two nights. I have 115 properties available. And when I search from the 22nd to the 23rd, one guest, 22 places available. Now those 115 have their 21st, 22nd open, right? They're available because I can see it in the top image. But they're having a minimum stay of two nights. And that's how you show up. Because again, I want to go out on a date night with my father or I'm coming for, you know, a play, a show, an event. You only have 22 people to compete with 21 hosts. I can charge a premium here because there's less competition.

So there's a really good question about this and I've just had to scroll up and up and up to get to it because it was right at the very start. But Megan said, okay, one night, minimum, one night, minimum stays. I'm all for it. But how do you charge a premium for a one night stay? And there's four people in a row who asked this question. So I thought it was really good to bring it back at this. So how do you go ahead and, and decide on, on charging a premium? Because you're right, there will be people, whether it's a concert, an event, they're passing through, they will just need the one night. And you can see the difference here from 115 down to 22. It is.