Real-Time Marketing Review from Mark Simpson to a New Hospitality Owner

Welcome to the Boostly Podcasts. We are doing marketing review time. We haven't done these for a while. This is the first of the year, first of 2024. And what I love about our marketing review lives is that when we do it, even though we're going to be speaking specifically with the person who's on the other end of this line today, we can help so many of us because there's going to be some things that I recommend to our property owner that you who are tuning in, whether it's with us, whenever you are tuning in, wherever you are tuning in from, where it's audio, video, you'll be able to take that and put it into, into your business. So I'm looking for one aha. And whenever you get that aha moment, leave it in the comments below. Please do let us know if you're tuning in on the audio, then obviously you know what to do. Send me an email and let me know what your aha is. This is marketing review. This is the Boostie podcast. So let's get started. All right, welcome back. I've got with me, James Kinnersley. James, thank you very much for joining me. If you could just do me a massive favor to everybody that's tuning in. Just let everybody know a little bit more about you, where you are in the world and a little bit about your properties before we dig in, please.

Sure. Thanks for having me today, Mark. Really appreciate it. Love the intro. Yeah. So I'm James Kinsey, I work professionally as a sales director at Air DNA, which no doubt your, you and all of your following team here will be pretty familiar with. I've been there over six years now, so quite a journey from kind of startup world through to kind of being acquired and being a bit more of a serious operator in the space on a personal level. Partly why I'm here with you today is I am a small time host with a couple of properties, two soon to be three, and I might, much like many of your customer base, want to make, make the most of increasing direct bookings and speaking to an expert to ideally get as many constructive comments and feedback about how I might make that step. So someone directly kind of in the industry, it's good to get a chance to speak to someone, a real expert, well regarded like yourself. So thanks for having me.

So this all started, we met, it was at Scale London, I believe it was September and we mentioned about doing something and I said, yeah, absolutely, let's have a, let's have a zoom call. We then went our Separate way to many different conferences. Finally had that zoom call and I said let's do a marketing review. You willing to do a marketing review? We'll do the podcast because they always go down well. These episodes always really hit home with a lot of people that are tuning in because like I said, even I'm going to delve into your portfolio the help and advice that we pass on to you. I know full well that there's going to be somebody who is watching at home, listening at home and going, ah, this can help me. So let's just dive into the properties. Can you please, just for context, let everybody know where they are in the world.

Yeah. So I've got, currently got two properties in the southern part of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. So one is off the north northwest coast of Attica which are Spanish. Pretty famous I think or at least on European level for, for kind of epic holiday guaranteed sort of good climate destination year round I suppose is what they're famous for, I think.

Yeah. And okay, so let's break down the properties themselves. Just give us a little bit of a, a synopsis of both of them. What are they, where are they, who do they service best? What's the avatar?

Yeah, I mean broadly speaking we're still talking a target market of kind of like young families and, or a kind of middle, a mid level type, type kind of end user. One is a three bedroom, two bathroom when bought was just a three bed I think was maybe four beds and one bathroom. So that needed a bit of reform and not doing. And then the, the other property was a one bedroom turned into a two with one bath. The model I try to go for or I'm trying to implement is properties with lifts and swimming pools. So you kind of cater at least to the babies and families department as much as you do to the oldies, perhaps with anything towards kind of disability segment as well. So that's ideally the kind of target market I think anyway in terms of the exposure that people are looking for when they go on their trip to that level of destination is to be able to get, you know, at least pool, sun lounger, that kind of thing on, on site. So that's the, that's the model I'm trying to, trying to stick with.

Nice. And how many years have you had these properties for?

So I've had the three bedroom for two and a half coming up three years and I've had the other two bedroom for a little over a year. A year in May I think it will be. And there's a third one oncoming which I'm in the process of closing now. So that's right next door to the second bedroom then sorry, this the two bedroom properties. So that's kind of the setup.

So the Canaries post Covid how has the islands been? Because everybody knows the Canary Islands is like I said, guaranteed sun pre2020. You know, it's where I used to go for our busman's holidays when I was growing up. You'd always escape there in January because guaranteed sun. What's been the sort of the vibe in the scene and you know obviously with the context is you get a fantastic viewpoint because you can just tap into your data set from you know, the day to day to sort of see how everything's going. But what is the state of play right now with the Canary Islands? Are people there all the time? Are people coming back? Are people taking their time to come back? What's the sort of outlook?

I've actually been really surprised in terms of. Well the first performance increase you saw was people generally from European from the European continent understanding that it's a pretty easy to get to very family friendly, excellent weather destination. And when that kind of umming and arring period of do we go into long international travel again was on the table, many people's answer was no, we don't need to entertain the Dubai or the longer haul trip any longer to get the same sort of end product at a relatively cheaper price. So broadly speaking I thought that was only going to be sort of a period of time post Covid that 2122 explosive period that we had. But actually I've only seen increasing ADRs and booking lead times increase from my two properties. So I mean I want to say I'm probably a relatively small sample size in this business but my forecast for the what the ADRs were likely to be was a lot lower than what they are now. I'd say they're probably 50% further if it's an increase from what my. What my projections initially were.

So the guests that you've had over the past year or two years combined for the two properties, where would you say the predominantly are from? What countries are they traveling to you from and staying with you?

Yeah, it's a mixture. So when I look at some of the analytics for the property so far, you're talking about uk, German, French, Spanish. I think it's probably the sort of top four. The quality is Eastern Europeans. I sorry, I'd say stick between like Romania, Hungary. That's Pretty much the top sort of five or six nations, I'd say.

Cool. And in terms of boots on the ground, what's your team looking like that help run the two properties like cleaners, maintenance people, checking people, checkout people, etc.

Yeah. So I'm actually based in Barcelona. That's where the one of the European head offices for Edna. So obviously not on the ground to help conducting, you know, check in checkouts and, or cleaning and anything a bit more manual. So I've got a team that handle my check in and check out and also administer the laundry and cleaning for each of those checkout, check ins and changeover of clients.

And then your role within the company here are you, what are you sort of doing as you're not day to day but like how are you overseeing, how are you running it? You doing the market in the bookings, et cetera? Communication?

Yeah, yeah. So client communication, managing and kind of the operational side of pricing the calendars, that kind of thing is still all in house. Sounds a bit grand, but it's basically done by me for the time being and then I basically share at the end of each month forecast and check and check out with the team on the ground in Tenerife. So they have a clear idea and if there's any other changes and things then they can, they can be abreast of the situation.

Awesome. So let's talk about the software and the kit that you are using behind the scenes. What is the first and foremost from a marketing point of view? What are you using for your booking channels? What's. What are the OTAs that you are listed on?

Yeah. So principally booking.com Airbnb. I'm historically had exposure on VRBO but I've never actually had a booking from there. Whether that is a mistake to sort of give up on, on a, on, on specific channels would be interesting to get your take, but just principally those two. And booking.com is a real monster for me in terms of what it, what the conversions look like. I'm about 90 bookings slightly changed a bit, a bit more this year. But in terms of what the forecast looks like otherwise, historically I've been 85, 90% bookings from booking.com so if we're.

Doing 90% booking.com just to sum it up, does that mean that Airbnb is 10 or is it anything?

Yes, there's probably about 5% Airbnb and then I'm probably about 5% direct from like, you know, people I work with, friends, some of the Insta. Instagram posts and things I do, but I'd say again, very much a factor why we're kind of here today to try and get some insights as to what, what needs to be changed up really.

So tap into that. You said Instagram posts. Do you have, when you're saying Instagram post, is this your own personal one or do you have one for the properties?

No, it's still personal. So it's like targeting just like even then I just make a specific kind of target group of those I think might be interested or to speak to in terms of the post. When I've got gaps or a week here or there that needs filling, I try to fill that. And actually we at least had quite a lot of success, but it's not something I've like gone to directly as kind of like habit of repeating over and over again. So I haven't even got a profile for it for the entity itself. But maybe that's something I could look at a bit more detail.

Well, who knows what comes up in the market interview.

Here we go.

So let's talk about database. So obviously you've had a lot of bookings come from booking.com 90% of the total bookings that have come in. And obviously booking.com don't share with you the email address, but you get the phone number, for example. Are you collecting database? Are you collecting any of the data behind the scenes and what are you using to store them on?

Yeah, so I made more of an effort in the last six months to do exactly what you say, trying to maximize on a database. So like I get my check in representatives to also get them to fill in their actual email addresses so that I'm not dealing with the booking.com handle. And obviously I've got the messaging side. So usually they've already messaged me or I've messaged them on WhatsApp, so they kind of already fit in. I haven't converted those into like a group for from the telephone number side of things, but I've just stored all these things, all the names, emails, on an online Google sheet, which my team has access to as well. Whoever's checking in to those details.

Brilliant. So when you say the check in person gets that information, how are they.

Doing that when they're handing the check in? They're just asking to take down the details from the guest already, which doesn't seem to be an issue. I think it seems quite standard. I mean, I'm not sure to what extent it's been kind of pushed back at all. But it's more like, hey, can we get your details? And you know, hasn't been an issue there. So we're just storing all those details. Client names, addresses and, sorry, email addresses and, and phone numbers.

Cool. And if you were to hazard a guess without looking at the sheet, how many names do you reckon that you have? The pieces of data that you have now, do you reckon rough guess?

Yeah, rough guess. Two or 300.

Nice. Let's go. 300. Sweet. That sounds good. All right, so we've got marketing booking.com 90%. Just to recap for everybody that's tuning in. 5% Airbnb, 5% direct. We've got a personal Instagram account, we've got a check in form that we're given to our guests by our check in team on arrival and we've got about 300 emails and we're on a Google sheet. Have you ever set up a mailchimp or anything like that? Yeah.

So way back in the day I used to manage rental properties in Sitges in Spain, which I used to rent out on this basis and I used to do these mailchimp kind of mail outs. I haven't actually done that on this business so far, partly because I've been quite unquote happy with the results of how the properties have gone. But realizing this now, this is like a destination that perhaps I should be arriving at sooner rather than later. Mark.

Absolutely. If you're struggling on how to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start, then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boostly and our team right now. We can walk you through exactly what we're offering, how we can help you and give you a portfolio of websites that we have worked with that are matching not only your niche, but could be in your location as well. Boostly has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world increase their direct bookings. And if you are interested, then all you need to do is go to Boostly. B O O s t l y.co.uk call and book in an appointment with one of our sales team. Okay, so let's talk about other sides. Property management software tool. Do you. Have you got one up and coming? Is there anything in the works? Are you using any?

So as you'll know, the company that employs me, Adna, recently acquired Uplisting. So I feel that this is an omen if nothing else, that should force me into the use of vms. Now at the moment I'm kind of switching between as the majority of my bookings coming through booking.com, i'm using their interface, which you know is fine, but like ultimately I'd like to centralize everything and I think art listing will allow me to, to harness that kind of potential in hopefully centralizing everything.

Fantastic. And in terms of team communications with your clean stuff, etc, are you using any of these tools behind the scenes like a breezeway or a turno or anything like this?

No, at the moment I'm just, I just directly speak with my, the main representative who owns that business and then she coordinates with her team, whether that's the cleaners or any other specific people to do the check in checkouts. Otherwise it's directly with. With her or her husband. Or her husband.

Awesome. And in terms of the two properties, are they both. Is it Santiago? What's the town of Tenerife? Is it Pier del Santiago?

Yeah, Puerto Santiago is the, is the, is the town of the three bed. And then like literally sort of five minutes down the road you've got another kind of beach area called Las Arenas, which is where the other complex where the two bedroom sits and where, where the future second two bedroom will sit next to it.

Yeah. And the potential third one, is that going to be in the same town area? Are you looking to go further afield in Tenerife?

No, no, the second one's going to be, the third one's going to be exactly the next door property to the, to the current two bedroom one as well. So benefit to that is that I know I'm going to finally exactly get. I know more or less what the refurb is going to be. I can go with the same design. I kind of know what the price point's likely to be. So I sort of felt like, although that's quite lucky, you think, would you necessarily not want to diversify? I still feel that I've got good occupancy and there's still good amount of supply. There's a good amount of demand for that still property in, in that complex. That's where I'm marketing.

So when you go from property number one to property number two, I always say it's like a time where you start to think of a brand name for this. Have you had an idea of what your brand name could potentially be? Or is that something you haven't even thought about yet as you go to property number three?

Yeah, I mean it's something I want to go into more now. I was in the process of setting up an sl, which is like a limited company here in Spain with Another partner last year we decided in the end not to go hand in hand together. But um, I still registered like the website online for Blue Island Escapes seems to be still relatively kind of memorable name and in fitting with the kind of destination. So that's kind of where I'm at.

Nice. And we're obviously talking about the western side of Tenerife in terms of popularity is the capital or the main place is. It's Santa Cruz. And then you've got Costa adequately. Is that like the.

Yeah, Costa Decay.

Yeah.

So I mean I say there's a segmentation there between like part of the resort area or in that sort of south and southwest part of the island. Partly because you've got this amazing climate there year round. It rarely dropped below 20 degrees Celsius. So that would end up being a target in terms of like beach destinations and families that want to go there. The capital is great. I mean they, they harness the second biggest carnival after Rio in the world. So there's like still some demand for locations like, like that. But ultimately from there, further north of the island, you're not dealing quite in the same level of climate, even though it's only an hour or an hour and 20 minute drive away.

Yeah. And so the area that you're in, this area, area that you've chosen, is that more of an up and coming, like an up and coming area, a new area, is that always been there? It's had like a bit of a refurb. Like what's the sort of the, the reason for going to this part instead of like Cristianos et cetera.

I mean, I mean ultimately like as a, as a child it grew up there. My folks had a place or my grandparents bought a place years ago in the like late 60s. So there was always that bit of that connection. But then ultimately, you know, cards on the table, like value for money, purchase for those level of assets versus what you can still get on a cash on cash return is pretty attractive.

Right.

That same amount of money in Barcelona here, deployed doesn't, doesn't get you much. So in terms of the value for money and the more importantly, I think you're talking about almost a 12 month season, right. You've got May and September, which are the lower of the seasons. Otherwise you're pretty much, you've got a, should we call it a 10 month season to be conservative.

Yeah. Interesting. Very cool. So nice area, lovely weather year round. You've got a nice mixture of demographics that come from, you know, obviously from the Brits that Come down and you've got the Germans, the French, Spanish who like to go to the Canaries for their, for their vacations as well. Which is, which is lovely in terms of occupancy. And if we look at occupancy sort of going forward, how, how was your calendar looking for 2023 and how is your current Linda looking forward in 2024? Like where, where's the gaps that we need to potentially fill?

Yeah, good question. So I find the next like three months of both properties, I'm probably already looking at like 85, 88. So towards 90% occupancy, I've got a few gaps and that's for the next three months. But realistically, outside of those booking windows, like, the lead time doesn't really stray so much further out of that, at least in the data I've seen. So I figured that I'm there thereabouts in terms of what the occupancy should be. I mean, I always could have embraced a bit less occupancy to then try and maybe play with pricing a little bit more. I think probably market is a little high compared to what I've had in terms of bookings. I'm sure we've discussed this when we met face to face in the past. You don't actually want to get anywhere near 100% occupancy. You want to leave those specific dates that you can maybe maximize on ADR potential. And then I've got a few key dates which I know you, you spoke to me in the past about like both Christmas is next year, already booked both those properties and New Year's. And I know in the direct game you always suggest to try and think you can always get rid of those, those key dates yourself and not have the assistance from the ota. So I did certainly curse myself when I saw those bookings come in. Even though it's kind of half good.

Half bad, having the bookings, you know, bittersweet. Yeah, yeah, brilliant. All right then. So, and in the, the property block that you're at, what separates you, would you say, your properties from the others? Have you done anything special unique to try and say, hey, come and book with us instead of like, you know, there's on your street, I can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6 other places that you can potentially book on? Booking.com. so how are you doing it differently, would you say?

Yeah, I mean, the three bedroom property, ultimately you get so much value for money. You're six people and you don't want to pay A villa price, the price point value for money, good quality of already existing reviews and point score has like kept me pretty high up all the rankings when I've searched even on kind of an incognito or different window to make sure I'm not being duped by booking.com but I'm just trying to be able to see like where I sit in terms of value for money. Six people, right? Like rough price points like at the high end, like 145, 150 a night. So you divide that by six people, you're getting quite a lot of bang for your buck. Considering going to pool on the roof and the lift and you know, nice quiet location so it seems like that's quite good value. I think there's more competition in the two bedroom because ultimately there are much more supply of two two bed, one bath locations. But in this case I've reformed them to make sure they're pretty light and airy and the proximity to being 15 meters from one of the main swimming pool on the ground floor is I think a bit of an attraction. But I think the two beds are naturally a little bit more weak because there's so much more supply in the market. Yeah.

Okay, so we've got loads of lovely, lovely stuff to go on, on here and what I would encourage everybody that's tuning in when you're listening to this or watching this, let us know as well what your calendar is looking like for 2024. What was it in 2023? Where are your properties around the world as well? Obviously James's properties are on a, on an island, you know, northwest of Africa, classed as Spanish for very touristy. So it's a fly to destination for the most part. And you know, you've got to then look at the context of your properties, where are they, who's traveling and again the questions that I've asked here. So what's the tech stack? So what are we using to, to run the business online with the pms? We've asked about where the bookings are coming from and there's definitely some things that we can dig in about collecting, collecting data. And then we've asked about the properties themselves, who they attract, who they appeal to and obviously as well what their, the main selling points are, which again you can take that and you can answer those questions for yourselves and please do just don't do it privately. Pop them in the chat, pop them in the comments so that we can, we can go for it together. So let's have a little look at them, shall we? We've teased them long enough. So let me hit this share screen button so everybody now can see the property. So we've got the list in here. These are the two that are on booking.com and then the same two we've duplicated up here. So the obvious element in the room question I know people are going to be thinking is, where's the direct booking website? So where currently are we in your direct booking realm and thinking in terms of when or is there a website, where's the website, etc?

We're not there at all. So, like it hasn't been been a priority, but hasn't been executed in terms of getting this thing together. Hence, like we're having this call a bit now to see like, where we can go to take this online. I mean, maybe you've had this same thing with some of your other clients. I know the lion's share of people who exist have like only a couple of properties or less than like I have. So I always felt maybe I haven't merited having, you know, or being big enough to get a direct website. And I know that's a bit of a myth. So currently we're OTA based and or privately with that 5% recognition for, for the, for the direct books I've currently got for those properties.

Cool. All right, well, here we go. Let's have a little look. So we've got on booking.com there's a. The direct booking website will come at some point in the time. Okay. Obviously, as you grow blueisland escapes.com or.co.uk whatever the domain is, that will have a website attached to it and that'll be a main place that you can send people to. So obviously what we're going to be looking at is how can we grow the database, which we'll definitely cover in here. But before that we, we don't want to, you know, cut our nose off, despite our face. We're getting so much traffic and bookings from booking.com and Airbnb, you've got to be able to have a look at them to sort of see why. So one of the things that I did was I took all of the reviews that I could just quickly see here, the first page of reviews, and this is a nice little tip for everybody. I just basically did a blank copy and I pasted them into chat GPT and I asked it the very simple question, read these reviews and tell me what I'm doing. Well, and this is a really good thing for everybody to do as you start your 2024 marketing because it will help you with a couple of things. Number one, it will be able to identify what you're doing well and also as well, it can also identify ways of what people are asking for in terms of improvements. So basically it's just come back here. Based on the reviews that you received, there are several aspects of your service and properties that are consistently appreciated by the guests. Number one, location. Number two, facilities and amenities. Number two. Number three, cleanliness and comfort. Number four, host communication and responsiveness, Internet quality, family, group, friendlies, views and environments. That is the free bed. Okay, so when it comes to your, your marketing, as in the information that you present, I would be taking these seven things and I would be talking about them. So with booking.com you're obviously limited as such as to what you can present. But one of the things that I think would be really cool is that although you can't amend the text to a certain extent because they like to keep it very generic. What I would do on Canva is I would go on Canva and I would create an image and I would just list off the main seven things here that you are known for to just say guests who have stayed here really love our 1. Location. 2. Facilities, amenities, cleaners, comfort, host, communication. The reason why you can do that as an image is that you can upload whatever images you want to booking.com and as they're scrolling through, so this is normal journey of a booking.com guest. This will load up and then I'll straight away they'll just click on the first image that comes up and I'll just want to look at all of the images that you have here. Now the, the first thing that comes to mind with me is the cleanliness is obvious. You know, the nice colors, the white and the blue, which if I was going to, before I even look at property number two, I'd expect that branding to stay the same. The white and the blue. Because your domain of Blue island escapes the brand in there. That's obvious. White, blue, that's what I would get from that. But one of these images here I would have it where it's a nice white background with blue writing. It's basically saying the reason why our guests love us is because of, because we, we, we love to speed read, we love to get as much information as soon as possible and a nice little image saying that with your branding on it, if you can get away with it of Blue island escapes, then it's, it just means that the person who's reading it can find out more about you as soon as possible. And everybody needs to realize this when they're doing their search and they're on, on one of these OTAs. One of the, the plus points of marking on an OTA is that you can be visible from somebody who has never heard about you before. That's fantastic because they get tons of traffic, they do all the marketing to get people into here. The negative point is that when they're on here, not only do they see you, but they see all of these and what the normal booking process of your, of your future potential guest is is. Yeah, they'll have you open but in the next tab they'll have this one, this one, this one, this one they'll have like five or six. They've got so many tabs open and they're just have a, a filter in their mind's eye of. Okay, so I've started with this. I've got tons of options now. Let's limit it down and limiting it down could be a number of things. It could be price, it could be reviews, it could be just location of all of the above. But let's just say we're on yours and you know, this is nice. Clear pictures, professionally done, all the good stuff. The polls in the right place showing the view. But then if you've got something that nobody else is doing, which is an image with text on it, they're going to read it and then again we're going to be focusing on what people love, location, facilities, cleanliness. You don't want it to be a massive paragraph, bullet point at most. But then if you do it right, it will stand out. And again it's what could potentially get somebody from going the research phase to the next phase, which is, which is booking. So that's one of the first things that I would do with this one. And let's have a quick look at the second one. Yeah. So white and blues. Lovely. So the consistent theme, one thing I did notice by looking at this is a lot of these of are outside shots. So just go into the back end of the extranet and just move them around. So you want to make sure that yes, having an exterior shot, pool shot, but have some interiors as well higher up so they can click into it more like things like, like this, etc, that, that's lovely. But again the same thing come into your, your reviews here on, on bookings just literally drag, drag them all the way down here. And I'm only doing page one just for speed, but Then you can do page two, page bridge, page four, start off a new chat and again say the same thing. Read all of these reviews, what I'm doing. Well, so again, it's doing exactly the same thing, but the reason why we do a different tab here is because it's a total different property. If I pasted that into the other one, it would get confused with the two of them together. So we're starting a brand new chat here. So again, apartment quality and cleanliness, location, facilities, host interaction, family friendly environment, safe and secure, value for money. So again, consistent fees, consistent vibes, fantastic. And again, I would just take that, take those bullet points, go into Canva, nice white background, blue wording and just say this is why our guests love us. So it just gives you that bit to stand out. Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two boostly books that we brought out, the Book Direct Playbook and the Book Directly Direct Blueprint, are two of the top rated and the best selling in the hospitality category on Amazon for just two pounds you can grab both of those books. Right now the foundations and the structures that you need to put in place is in the Blueprint and then for 101 marketing tactics, that is in the Playbook. So go and grab a copy on Amazon. Now just type in Book Direct Playbook or the Book Direct Blueprint and we'll see you on the other side. Now we take that over to Airbnb. And the cool thing about Airbnb is that you actually can put in so much more than what you do on booking.com so you've got the ability to take full advantage of this description here. You can add so much more and it can be bespoke to each one. So I would definitely go in and go onto Airbnb and just fill it out properly. Make sure every little aspect is ticked. All the things that you do well is ticked. I would look to amend the images around just to see what sticks. And the cool thing about Airbnb is it tells you like these are the people that land on your page. This is who sticks around. Etc, all of that information is, is crucial. But yeah, I'd be getting rid of anything that's got a cloudy sky and then just, yeah, just like amending the pictures around. Unlike booking.com I always say with images like less is more like booking.com they want you to put tons in as possible. But with Airbnb, what I'd be looking to do is to instead of having lots of the same pictures, like two patio Shots have one patio shot, but then use the caption. You get the ability to add a caption to really explain what they're. They're looking at. The more you can do that for each one. So let's say you're gonna have 20 pictures max on. On Airbnb for here. Say it's. Say it's this shot here. You're telling the person what they're looking at. So instead of just saying kitchen, just put. This is our fully stocked kitchen. It comes with a coffee bar, it comes with Spanish toaster, it comes with hob and extractor, fan, kettle. So they're literally. It's telling them what they're looking at. You can use AI to write this out. So you can basically drag this image, put it into AI and say, describe what you see here for an Airbnb caption. Airbnb now are also having AI caption generator built in, which is really cool. So it saves you an extra job to do. But I would definitely be taking this kind of information and using it as the base of your description for. For Airbnb. Because with booking.com you can't just list off these seven things. It would be. This is what you get when you stay with us. Because this. The way that they go on Airbnb and the way they look is that they come in. Yes. They'll click at the pictures because I want to see more, which is great. But then they'll actually go and read the description and then they'll go, you know, the reviews, and then they'll go the price. Does that make sense?

Yeah, you're right to already use, use and showcase the stuff you've already got right up on, rather than, you know, making stuff up. You can actually. You can use already what that. What there is.

Yeah, 100%. So the first things first is obviously we want to go down the route of getting to 65% diary bookings. That's the goal for everybody. But before that, we've got to make sure that what we have in place is always optimized. Anything that's working, we've got to optimize it. If there's another thing that I'd like for you to do. So the first thing, go in and update your Airbnb, Fill it out, reduce the pictures, make it quality over quantity. Check if that's the right title again, run these variations through Chat GPT. And if you wanted to with. With Chat GPT, you could come and look at the. The area as a whole. So this is another little tip that Everybody can do. So if I come into here and I'm going to search location and I'm just going to put these sort of dates in. Right, so we're down here and let's just try and limit it. So it's very similar to what you have. So it's two bed, sorry, two bedrooms. Maximum price. Your average price is between 100 and 300 a night, is that right?

Yeah, yeah. It's never as high as 300. Between let's say like £95 and £150, something like that.

Cool. Let's just do somewhere along the sides here. Right. So the reason why I was doing that, let's just pick this one here. Let's just say this is like what you've identified as being one of the best in the area. It's obviously not, but let's just say what is. What you can do to find out what these are doing so well. Again, you can drag all of their review. So you do see all of these. If you do copy an A hit, hit copy on it. So control and a highlights all the reviews, copy them all. And then this is the, this is the same one here and go. These are reviews left from a competitor in the area. Can you highlight what these are doing so well? And again, what you can do is you can go, well, this is exactly what our competition is doing. Like work friendly amenities, that's a big one. So I personally would assume the Canary Islands right now with digital nomads, people that can go at any point of the year, they can go for a week but can still work, what would they be looking for? And work friendly amenities is coming up is, is something that I'm thinking, okay, that might match what's behind the data and the numbers. Well equipped, comfortable accommodation, cleanliness, secure host communication. So you're already doing the communications. Value for money, special touches. So the welcoming gourmet basket and the host willingness to share information about tips, that's a cool one. So like a, a welcome basket could be a good thing to add in. Not a massive expense, but again, if you put the price up a little bit, you can offset the cost. There you are already doing the cleanliness. The work friendly amenities could be an interesting one. And again, with work friendly amenities, it doesn't have to be a massive upheaval. You've technically already got that here with a desk and a screen, you know what I mean? But you can go onto your Airbnb listing and you can say, we've got a work friendly space and you just Take a picture of it and say this is a work friendly space. And again with that, you would come up more in the filters of said Airbnb. And obviously then you can just double check that with with Adna and say, okay, well how many of these searches are coming up? X, Y and Z. But it's a really handy tool to sort of note of because it'll help you amend your listing to suit what the type of person that is traveling to the area would be. Okay. And you know, if other people aren't usually providing a welcome pack or a welcome gift bag. One of the big things that I talk about is that when everybody zigs, you zag. So if nobody else is doing a welcome basket, if no one else is doing something cool at check in again, unreasonable hospitality about Book by Will Godaro's fantastic book. Everybody's read it, but it's like, how do we put it into practice? So when, if nobody else is offering a welcome basket, how can you stand out from the rest? Offer a welcome basket and have some cool things in there. Whether it's teas and coffees or chocolates or whatever it would be, is a cool thing to provide because it instantly then makes separates you from everybody else and you can talk about it as well, which is cool. So the first things first in terms of bookings, in terms of more awareness, in terms of turning a guest into an influencer and an influencer into a super fan, what we want to be doing is, is, you know, really tapping into what's working. Booking.com Airbnb We've established it's working. How can we improve it? We can't amend the text on booking.com but we can definitely add in an image with text we can pimp out our Airbnb listen a bit more so it's more visible because there's definitely a lot of people using that channel every single day, every single month. And then the next aspect, the final aspect aspect as we finish up is how can we then start to make changes in the back end that will make sure that we can increase our direct bookings. So the first things first, I'm gonna encourage you to watch this free video. So it's boostly co.uk forward/listingsites it will take you to a YouTube video. Most this is a great one to watch because on here it will show you a tactic that takes about 40 minutes, but it will help uncover any potential site that you are not listed on. So one of the things that I know to be true, especially about German and Dutch and French guests is that they don't always use the, the free typical OTAs that we know of. Booking.com Verbo Airbnb. There are big listing sites in Holland, for example, that are catered for Dutch people who are traveling to the Canaries on Spain there are, they'll be the same in Germany and France. But the way to identify that is by running this search here. So the first thing, try and incorporate any sites that you aren't tapped into and listed on to get them on there. Obviously the main, the major thing for you is to get your PMS up and running. So get uplifting up and running. That's going to be key because then it means that you can then be on more sites and with the. Without the threat of double bookings, which is, which is a big one. Yeah. And the next thing, the final thing is to start to grow this, this database and actually do somewhat with it. So you've got 300, which is amazing. One of the things that I would look to do would be to create a Google form and the form would look like this and to not put as much pressure on your staff to get this information. You can send this out at the point of booking. So when the booking comes in you can have an automated message and it's the same one that goes out on booking.com that goes out on Airbnb or wherever the sites you're going to be listed. Just to say, hey, to speed up your check in process, please fill in this form and again check in. Especially if someone's flown in, the last thing they want to be doing is faffing around filling in forms when they can have it all done at the point of booking. So the form will be email, first name, last name, phone number, number of people in the party, check in, date, and then you can ask in these bonus questions as well. The most part of his form, the most thing that's really important for is these first five questions. Email, phone number being one. But these two here are really cool as well. So what was the deciding factor in why you picked us as your place to stay? So at the point of booking you're asking them why is and they'll tell you value, location, word of mouth, saw you on Instagram, whatever it may be. Right. And then the second one is, I mean you could have, are you celebrating a special occasion with us? Or you could have whatever you want in. It could be something totally different. It's like, you know, where, you know, special occasions one. Or it could be are you Is this a work trip or is this a leisure trip or a combination of both? Is it like a pleasure? You know, is it like. And you can start to then get really key bits of information that will help you with your, with your property or properties or future properties that you take on board. So this Google form will take five minutes, you can easily send it out and it'll go at the point of, at the point of booking and then obviously, elephant in a room, get your mailchimp up and running and just start to communicate with previous guests that have signed up to receive emails from you. So maybe once a month or once every two months or, you know, no more than once every three months, send out emails just talking about the island, talking about the area, the town. If the big carnival's coming up or whatever's coming up, just keep people up to date because people are always looking for an escape to the Canaries and it's an easily accessible island. And even if they're working again, this workation thing is massive at the moment, but you just got to keep top of mind because when you're top of mind and they're going, right, I'm going to come back to this part of Tenerife, they'll know to stay with Blue Island Escapes instead of going with somebody else. But it's just proactive things. So there's some nice little things to be starting with there. Obviously the website is a great point of call, getting the branding name. I love Blue Island Escapes. I think you've got the white and the blue, which is your colors, your logo. Yeah, the cool thing about chat, GPT and Canva. Now the logo can be literally created via, via that. And get your PMS up, listen up and running. Start to collect that Google form at the point of booking because then you've got it down and it's listed and it's there. Start to use it and go in and, and really take full advantage of all of the amenities and the, in the extranet of booking.com and fill out your Airbnb list. So some nice little homework there. So what I'll do is I'll. I'll send a little recap of this. I'll send it to you, to your emails. There's little things you can get cracking on with. But yeah, as well, what I would love for everybody to do who is tuning in at home is to think how can you take this and how can you put it into, into action? With the Google form, it's five minutes to set up and you copy and paste the link from there into your Airbnb Messages or your booking.com automatic messages or when up listen is up and running. A cool part of uplifting is that you can do a automated message that goes from uplifting to your PMS to your booking engines for you. So you can do it there once and you can do it at the point of booking. Super simple to do. There's, there's more videos on the YouTube channel showing you how to exactly implement that, but that's really effective because then you can get tons of information about your guest at the point of booking, which is really cool. So I hope that helped. James, thank you very much.

Yeah, super useful. Thanks, Mark.

Well, we can check in in three to four months time and see how everything's going and we can, we can, we can go from there and see what, what improvements have been made and if it's had any, had any impact. But it's, it's slow, small things. The main, main important thing, I think everybody falls foul of this. You've got emails, you've got 300 there. Use them. Start to send an emails out to your past guests and you'll be, you'll be amazed that even if by three or four emails that get sent out, what that does to those direct booking.

Numbers or referrals, Please get on with. Thanks for your help, Mark.

Brilliant. All right, fantastic. Thank you very much, James, and everybody that's tuned in, please make sure you subscribe, make sure you tell everybody share this video because this is a marketing review video that will help. Doesn't matter where your properties are around the world, what your niche is. There's definitely some things that everybody can crack on with. But with that being said, thank you very much everybody and we'll, we'll see you all very soon.