This is a podcast episode (Season 8 recap) led by Mark Simpson with guests including Janet and Mariah (Smiling House) discussing the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on short-term/hospitality rentals and practical responses. Mark cites a Fuel Travel survey of ~15,000 respondents reporting only 3% said they would not travel in 2020 and ~75% were "on the fence" waiting for lockdowns to ease or for accommodation policies. Mark urges hosts to stop promoting OTA awards/plaques (e.g., Booking.com badges) and recommends local-targeted Facebook ads (radius targeting). Guests describe large booking losses (one partner reportedly lost £/€70k) and critique Airbnb/OTAs for unilateral cancellation policy decisions. A proposed platform, Hubster, is described as a community for vacation-rental professionals to share knowledge, events, and opportunities.
Chapters
All the events are getting canceled, bookings are canceled.
And here's what I want for you to do. Podcast. We're in season eight. The stats that I want to share. So there was a couple of recent surveys done, but the one that stood out for me was Fuel Travel did one and they surveyed roundabout. I think the average at the end was about 15,000 travelers and guests. What was really interesting to me was a lot of the numbers that were coming back, the stats that really were surprising for me and I've got them written down on a piece of paper here. The first one is that out of nearly 15,000 people that were surveyed, only 3% of them, 3% said that they would not be traveling in 2020. Obviously we as hospitality owners, you watching this live or on the replay, you have been affected by COVID 19 for your hospitality business. 97% said that they would be okay. And I think the other important thing about this survey as well is that 75% of those same said that they right now were wanting to book, but they were just sat on the fence. They were waiting for either lockdown to be reduced so that they are allowed to travel and go and stay again or that they were waiting to see what the accommodation themselves were going to be offering. This again is playing a big part. 75% of people that are sat on the fence, they are waiting to see see what happens. What I noticed today, I was walking around our property, walking around the farm here, and I spotted one of these. Now hands up if you have got one of these in your property, in your B and B, in your hotel, have you got one of these that's laying around now the reason why they do this is marketing on their front. They send it to you because they want you to put this up on your wall. They want you to show it off. They want you to have this in their eyeline because it says AttheTopBooking.com, it makes you feel good because you get that decent award, that decent number, that decent thing so you can show it off. And again, I'm going to take an example that I saw a friend of mine, good friend of mine, Steve Kapandi from the Book Direct symposium, he did this at the event when I was there in Greece and Athens with him. And it was really powerful. And I think today more than ever, if you've got one of these on your wall, if you've got one of these that is in your property, if you've got this on your website, if you show off about this, then and here's what I want for you to do, rip it up and throw it away. Cause if they're gonna treat us like that, why should we actively promote them in our properties?
Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so my name's Janet. And these days when people ask me what I do, I generally say I help people to build online audiences. So that means more followers, means more fans, more subscribers. Because if we have all of that, then we can make more money, we can make more sales in our business.
What would be the one piece of ADV that you wish that you had received before you made that pivot, that initial pivot, that sort of jump from going from one to the other, from one sort of career to the other role?
I don't think I did anything wrong, as it were. I don't look back and think, oh, I did that wrong. But there was a piece of advice that was given to me actually when I left teaching and went into journalism because I was freelance. I've always been self employed the whole time. I've always had to buy my own business, my own customers, whatever. And it was look for work while you're busy. So when I was a journalist, I always had my eye on all the time.
Wherever you are in the world and however you've been doing your marketing, whether you've been, again, heavily reliant on third parties or you've been actively looking to get your own bookings right now, then there's definitely a lot of things that you can be doing to be proactive on this. So number one, what you can do is if you are active on Facebook and particularly Facebook ads. One of the cool features of Facebook advertising is that you can set a ad radius. Now, what does that mean in simple terms is that you can go onto Facebook and they give you a map and you can draw a big circle of 200 mile radius or 100 mile radius or a 50 mile radius around your property. Let me just bring in today's guest, Mariah from Smiling House. Mariah, how would you. Thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you.
What is your opinions on how Airbnb booking.com and the likes have acted during COVID basically this pandemic. Do you think they've done enough to look after hosts and. Or could they have done more people?
They've just been, you know, facing, you know, cancellation one way from, from Airbnb coming at once, one of our partners in Italy telling us a story how he lost 70k worth of bookings in one day and people find themselves completely lost In a partnership that's supposed to be between the OTAs and the property managers. And they felt that this kind of partnership is not a real partnership. Instead of being a real partner that you discuss with that you're asking, at least in a survey, you know, they could have done to take some property managers and homeowners from around the world and from different segments and ask them how would they like to deal with the situation.
If you could just start off by giving us a little bit of an insight where you are right now with America and the Corona crisis.
Us, we're behind what everybody else is going through. Like in the uk, we saw everything that was happening and there wasn't, you know, we kind of saw it almost like at a distance, like, oh, that's, you know, it kind of sucks to be them, but it's not happening to us yet. And then in the span of like a couple days, honestly, quite honestly, it was like in one week, it really hit hard where all reservations were completely wiped off of our calendars and there wasn't much to prepare. And then with, you know, the drama that's been happening with Airbnb, basically not giving hosts the option to be able to cancel their reservations, not giving the choice. So for managing for other people, we didn't have the luxury, you know, the ability to be able to say, hey, you know, this guest wants to cancel. Should we refund them or give a partial refund? Airbnb just kind of stripped that away from us. So each state is handling it differently, but across the board, all the events are getting canceled, bookings are canceled. You know, Airbnb is even deeming some locations as unsafe and not allowing post guests to be able to book in certain locations.
Could you please just, in simplistic terms, just explain what Hubster is and how it could benefit the vacation rental work.
The problem here is that, you know, people from Sydney wouldn't come to Italy or to Spain or to London to meet, you know, people that matter in vacation rental income because they are far away from everything. A good idea would be to bring events or meetings to these people. So we thought, what about designing a product, a platform, something that can bring together people from all over the world, people that matter in vacation rentals industry, and put them together in a sort of community where they can, you know, share information, share content, even share, you know, courses, webinars, events on a unique platform. And we call it Hubster. Basically, that's it is like, you know, a way to put together a lot of knowledge info from the industry best practices and anything related to vacation rental, even opportunities, job opportunities and things like this in one in one community.
As always, my only ask for me doing all of this every single night is just to do one thing and you just share it into one Facebook group. Just try and get people to realize that they don't have to rely on Airbnb for booking. They don't have to rely on booking dot com.
