Short Stay Summit Mega-Cast | Live Countdown + Ticket Giveaway

I'm going off the dome. Ready for my close-up? Good looking, let me tell you, get more bookings. Oh, that'd be nice, giving me tips, tools, and advice. Yeah, you're gonna get them, hon. You're gonna sit back, listen to Mark Simpson. Whoa, having a blast, gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee because it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf. Making up those rhymes, don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect, you're better put direct.

Here are the words in the podcast, that's what comes next.

All right, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. We are live on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on YouTube, I think even Instagram, Twitter. I don't know, we're just live everywhere. So thank you so much for joining us. My name is Mark Simpson, founder of Boostly, over 800 podcast episodes, over 100,000 YouTube videos, and somebody who is going to talk today with you all about the short stay Summit. I am part of the STA board, I think. I just hang around with meetings. They keep me around for something. But what I said to the team is, listen, let me do a big mega cast. I did it last year, had a ton of fun. Let me invite a lot of amazing speakers to come into a live stream. We can talk about it, have a lot of fun doing it, give away some prizes. What do you reckon? And they said yes, amazingly. So wherever you are tuning in from around the world, I assume the majority of you are in the UK, but I know we've got a lot of Americans tuning in as well. Please say hi in the comments. Let us know where you're tuning in from. If you've never heard of the Short Stay Summit, stick around because over the next hour, 2 hours, I'm going to bring in some amazing speakers who have got sessions happening at the Short Stay Summit. I put the bat signal out and people are going to be jumping in. I've given them the link to come and join me. So we've got a host of amazing people coming on. Fingers crossed tech prevails because as you know, with it being live, anything could happen, and it probably will. So first things first, uh, we're gonna be giving away one ticket. I've bought an extra ticket for this event and I'm gonna give it away. Uh, all you have to do is put the word ticket or hashtag ticket below in the chat, wherever you are tuning in from— YouTube, Facebook, I don't care. I'm gonna gather everything together, pick one name, put every name into a hat, get one of the kids to pick it out, and I will let you know who the winner is, uh, Tuesday, tomorrow night. So with that being said, drop a ticket in, drop a live in, let me know where you are around the world and keep doing so over the course of the next couple of hours because we've got some cool people tuning in. So let me just, before we get them in, and I've got the, the green room is lighting up, the first guest is in, but before we bring them in, let me go and share my screen and let me show you what is going on. The Short Stay Summer is happening on the 22nd of April in Old Billingsgate in London. It's been there now for a few years. It's a phenomenal venue. It just works. I've had the immense pleasure of being helping putting together the sessions this year. Um, I've probably recommended 100 people. They've picked 2 out of those 100. Um, but that just goes to show— sorry— the standard of the people that put their name down. I've gone through the sessions, and this is probably the best it has ever been. And I feel like this year, for whatever reason, we've got people coming in from all over the world, especially over in America. Like, we've got a lot of Americans coming over, which is insane because this is a one-day event. Now, there's loads of fringe events going on that mean that it's not just a one-day event truly, it's more of a week. But you can go to the website shortstaysummit.org, find out about the icebreaker party which we're hosting with some amazing people, the Shorties, Uh, the House of Lords dinner. You've got, uh, James Varley's Host Planet, which is kicking on on the Thursday. And you've got Host Chela as well, which is going to be happening on Thursday and Friday in London. So there's loads going on. I'm not going to talk about them just now. I've got people coming in to talk about that. But, um, let me just walk you through very quickly what is going to be happening. Uh, so we've got loads of stuff on the homepage, as you can see, what the STAA is, the work that they do. It's going to be talking about all of the things. Do go and check them out. We've got, again, Again, some unbelievably good speakers that are going to be coming down and talking and showcasing their expertise. And the one thing that I will say, the reason why the Short Stay Summit is a standout is because of the people that can get in the room. Not just vendors, not just good people, not just hosts, property managers, but we've also got elected officials as well. This is an opportunity if you want to know what is going on and be able to grab them and speak to them. Hopefully this is your chance to do so. And again, just look at the names that are going to be on here. Unbelievable. Let's go and have a look very quickly at the, at the main stage. So this is the main stage here. It's going to be kicking off bright and early, 9:45 AM, with Andy Fenner. Hopefully Andy's going to be joining me. I've sent the invite out. Whether he, he joins or not is another one, but he's going to be here, uh, as well as Chris Webb, who is one of the MPs of Blackpool South, um, which is a massive one. So it's going to be a welcome and a keynote kicking off then with with, uh, with more. We've obviously got Andy, we've got Josh Croft looking beyond the headlines. Again, the, the big theme about the, the start of the morning is regulation, is legislation, is all of the things. And, um, please do, if you come in, go and check them out. The main stage can see a couple hundred people and it is going to be packed. Then we're going to get into the data, so talking about the state of play from a global point of view, but also then the UK point of view and what the numbers me. So again, the morning is absolutely packed. Then obviously we're going to be going into the lunchtime in the afternoon. You know, we've got fireside chats, easy for me to say, with Alex and Annie from the Real Women of Vacation Rentals coming over from the States with Mr. Tim Rosolio, easy for me to say, VP over at Expedia Group. That is going to be a big session. Then it's going to kick into AI. Shock. We're going to have lots of AI chatter, but the people that are going to be on stage are truly pioneering this with Steve Schrubb. Graham Donoghue, Kate Cox. I've put the word out, hopefully one of those is going to be joining me in the next hour and a half to talk about that. Then obviously later on in the day, a big thing at the moment is do I sell or do I stick? I, I know that it's a big topic at the moment, so Simon Lehman, who else is going to spearhead that? Again, I've put the word out to somebody on this panel to join me, uh, over the course of the next hour and a half to 2 hours. And obviously then Andy is going to come back and do some closing remarks. The STAA, again, if you want to go and find out more, click on that link at the top there. Come and become a member. We need members if this is going to become a thing. And with this, we want this to be here in a couple of years' time, this massive flagship event. We need more members. Simple. I know the website has been poor. I know the sign-up process has been complicated in the past. We're trying to fix it at the STAA. I've given my advice. Whether they listen or not, that's another thing. But Bye-bye. Go and check out, come and join. And I know a lot of you have tried to join and are joining. It's not just one stage though. There are three stages. The workshop stage is back again. It's an ever popular one. It is on the first floor. Not easy to get to, not easy to know where it is, but it's on the first floor. You've got the ground floor and that's where the main stage is and another stage and that's where all the vendors are. The workshop's on the first floor. Again, packed with so many good speakers. We've got a lot of workshop speakers coming to join me. But again, every session is packed with upsells to guest experience to regulation to, you name it, it's all there, right? There's loads, right? And I think the recording, I actually don't know. I think every stage is being recorded and hopefully there's going to be replays made available. If you want replays, if you want video replays, comment, spam the comments right now, say we need replays, and I will show this to the organizers to say, hey, get your act together. And then this is the, this is the one, uh, that I'm looking forward to. This is one that I'm going to be on. Um, they, they won't let me on the main stage for obvious reasons, but this is the one that I'm looking forward, uh, to being on. So in the morning, um, the, the Power Up Women in the STR Roundtable. Absolutely love these events. I love to see what's happening here. Um, there is not enough women representation in this industry, and yes, elephant in the room. I'm a white male having to say this, but there is not enough women on stages, people who are sharing their expertise. I come from a family business where my mum run the business, uh, and to see so many people now, like the, uh, the women at Expedia, um, like Lisa Rhodes who's doing Women in Short-Term Rentals, like the women in Travel Thrive and Why Hungry, there's fantastic things happening. So please, again, If you are there early, come on, be part of the roundtable and stand up and get heard. Because again, we need more females on stage speaking. Vanessa, who is Vanessa de Souza, started a movement I think in 2019 called Tie On Stage, and it's phenomenal. Still having to talk about it nearly 10 years later is a bit shit. So come and be part of it, stand up and have a great time. Meet some fantastic women who are making amazing strides in the industry and be part of that session. It's on the Learning Lab. So the Learning Lab, again, it's going to be very hard for me to explain with my hands, but as you walk into Billingsgate, you're going to get registered here. The main stage is to your left as you walk in. You're going to see a lot of vendors, a shit ton of vendors in front of you. At the far end is the Learning Lab. That is the place to be. It kicks in with more, obviously, Robin Clifford, Uh, we've got amazing people going to be talking about all of the things. And then we've got, uh, 10:45. Oh yeah, Justin Ford. I've put the word out to Justin. It's going to be early wherever he is in the world. He's over in America. I've said, hey, come and speak to me about this. That's going to be a good one. Um, we've got the Wanda Group. The Wanda have come out of nowhere. Wanda do really good websites. I'm jealous of their websites. They are flying over with a huge team this year. I'm sure they're like gold sponsors. And they're going to be doing something on the Learning Lab stage, which is massive. Then we've got Scott Sage talking, sharing his skills. Scott Sage is a good one. I'm a big fan of what he does, big fan of their DNA. And he's a Boostly customer as well, which is cool. And then in the afternoon, listen, they've asked me to MC this stage. Louise is coming in, dropping something. I love this session, how cancellations can turn into Driving Growth. Um, again, I've asked Louise to come and join me. Hopefully she's on later on. And then these are the two out of the 100 people that I asked for, uh, 100 sessions suggestions. These are the two that they've signed off, and, uh, I want to give them their flowers. Um, they're so busy they can't join me today. I've asked, but there's just so much going on in their worlds. Hayley Marie Anderson, and I'm so excited for you to see these sessions because I'm going to be emceeing it. I'm going to be introducing Hayley founder of CMH BMZ. When you hear of Hayley's story, you're going to be like, wow, very, very impressive. When you find out how old she is, you're going to be like, oh wow, that is really impressive. What have I been doing with my life? Hayley and Patrick are both of the generation of Gen Z, and what they've done and what they've achieved at such a young age is insane. To have them flying over to speak at their first time in the UK, the first time at the Short Stay Summer, and for Patrick, it's the first time he's been speaking in Europe. Phenomenal. Now, the Learning Lab stage only has room to fit 80 people because it's going to be 8 tables, I think 10 seats at each table. It's going to be a chance for you to get your laptops out, get your tablets out, get your phones out, get your pen and paper out, actually learn, but then do. Hayley's one is unreal. I've seen her do this talk before virtually, never met Hayley in person, worked loads with her She's a Boostly customer as well, and I'm really excited to, A, meet her in person, but B, see this session live in person. I've seen it virtually. It is insane. You're going to get so much value from it. Number 2, Patrick's session is Scaling Your STR Business to 150 Units by Becoming the Go-To in His Market. He's from an area of the United States called Joshua Tree. If you've ever been to America and you've been to Joshua Tree, you will know what I mean. When he comes in and shares his skills on how he has done this. I met Patrick years ago in a rooftop bar in Nashville, USA, and, you know, even younger than he is now. And he said, listen, I want to get on stage. How can I get on stage? And I just said, just be so good that no one can ignore you. And he took that to heart and he's gone and absolutely smashed it. Uh, he created his own conference. He's, he's gone and acquired so many companies, and he's just become that go-to expert in Joshua Tree. His session I'm very much looking forward to, and to be able to bring these two over to London, bring them over to the United Kingdom, and give them a proper British night out with the icebreaker party, which you will find out more about. So again, my advice here is if you aren't fussed about missing other sessions on the main stage or the workshop stage, uh, come and get yourself in, get your table, get your seat, you know, have one of those things where you just get your, get your spot and don't lose it for the rest of the day because this is going to be insane. I'm going to finish it at 4 o'clock on the Learning Lab. And I've got, I've got a talk that I've never done before. That's probably going to get me in a lot of trouble. But it's one that I'm really excited to do. Because I'm going to show you actually how to use this thing, AI, and how you can actually make money with it. The thing that's here, whatever's here, I had to give, I had to give a suggestion. It's not going to be what I'm going to do. I'm going to go a step further. And I haven't told the organizers this is what I'm doing, but I'm going to go for it. And listen, it may go over an hour. I've got some surprises lined up. I've got some sweets lined up, obviously. I've got so many cool things lined up for this hour. And I'm still fine-tuning and tweaking and working on the talk. I'm like a comedian who is getting ready for his Netflix special. I'm doing doing the rounds, doing the warm-ups. But what I've got planned for this, I hopefully will go down as my best talk ever. My best talk, in my opinion, was 4 years ago over in Nashville, and it's, uh, it, you know, it pains me that I've never done anything as good. So I'm coming prepared for this. So make sure you're there for that. Please come and support us as we, as we finish it out. But with that being said, listen, I've got some amazing guests. Listen, the green room is absolutely firing now. They're all waiting for me to come and get them on. So let's go and get the first on. What's going to happen is this, um, between each session I just need 10-20 seconds to get my breath, get the next speaker on. So I'm going to have a, like, um, like a little landing page, uh, it's like a little video. Do not— if you tune in or drop out and you come back and there's this little video hitting and you go, where is Mark? Don't worry, I'll be back in like literally 10 seconds. I just need a drink, clear my throat, welcome the next guest in, sort the next guest out, I'm getting in. We're going to be here for a good hour, maybe two, depends on how long we go. Some speakers will speak longer than others because I can't shut some of them up, which is rich me saying this, I know. So get yourself comfy. Um, everything is going to be recorded. If you have to drop out for whatever reason and come back, it's literally going to sit here live. If for whatever reason you're tuning in on Facebook and it cuts out, come to YouTube. The links are all below. If you're watching on LinkedIn and it drops out, come to YouTube. YouTube always seems to be the most consistent, and that'll be where the replay is. All the links will be in the comments, all the links. Come and join us, uh, and if you want to win a ticket, I've bought an extra one. Just comment below 'ticket.' I'll take all the words that say the word 'ticket.' My AI will grab them all. I'll print all the names off. I'll whack it all in a hat. I'll get my, uh, 3-year-old, my 7-year-old, my 10-year-old, or my 13-year-old to pick a ticket out tomorrow night, which is Tuesday. and that person will win a ticket to this amazing event. Saves you a good couple hundred quid. But if you don't want to wait, go ahead and buy it. It's amazing value. Uh, come on in, hit delegate tickets. There's loads of options you can do. I'm not going to walk you through it, um, because again, in my opinion, the website's a bit shit. But I didn't say that, right? Let's go ahead, let's go bring in our first speaker. Uh, I can see them all in there. I'm gonna go pick out somebody and we'll be back in about a minute. All right, everybody, let's do this. Livestream, mega cast, Short Stay Summer 2026. And if you want me to do this for your event in the future, you listen, just slide in my DMs. Here we go. Be back in a minute. Okay everybody, kicking off the live stream. Uh, I couldn't think of anybody better than Mr. Andy Fenner, CEO of the Short Stay Association. Massively, uh, thank you for having— for joining us. Um, Andy, just very, very quickly, just talk about, uh, your role CEO of the STAA, what you've been doing over the last 4 years, and just sort of talk about what things you've actually got done. Let's like sort of talk about what the STAA does for our, for our association.

Yeah, so it's been a great— thanks for having me, first of all, Mark. Brilliant to join the podcast. And what have I been doing for the last 4 years? Gosh, lots. The STAA has been at the forefront as the only national association in the UK. We've been pushing with all of the governments across the UK trying to, to get the sector— our priorities have been get the sector recognized for what it is. And what it is is the lifeblood of UK tourism. It's our sector, the, the owners, the hosts, the property managers, the companies around us are the beating heart of UK tourism. Without us, there is no industry. And we've been working really hard to get this sector recognized as that, get the understanding that we are vital for UK tourism. The reason why we've been doing that is because, as everybody in the sector knows, we are blamed for whatever reason for causing apparently the entire housing crisis in the UK. You know, the reason why no governments have built houses, the reason why rent's high, the reason why this, that, and the other's high. 'Oh, it's always holiday lets.' I mean, anybody who applies a bit of logic to that knows how ridiculous that is. But what we've tried to do is accept that people are entitled to their opinion. If that's their opinion, that's their opinion. What we've done is made sure that we've got out what is the truth and the real narrative about us, which is that tourism provides jobs in rural areas, coastal communities, up and down the country, and crucially provides jobs in rural and coastal communities where no one else is going to. No one else. Google is not, to the best of my knowledge, about to set up a factory in the middle of Wales, the Cotswolds, the Yorkshire Dales, etc. So what provides those jobs for local people to live and work in their communities is tourism. And what we've got to do is make sure that those jobs are valued for what they are— proper long-term careers in local SMEs, and we need to get those to be respected and valued, and that's what we've been trying to do.

Amazing. So coming out to April, coming up to April, obviously the short stay summer is, uh, coming very, very fast. This will be, uh, your final short stay summer with us. You're going to be, uh, leaving in May. So first and foremost, amazing work done over, over the time. Can you just list off what the things that come to mind, the things that you've managed to get passed through, the things you've managed to achieve. What's like the things that sort of like ring true, like the top of your mind of what the last 4 years have looked like? What are the things that you can tell the people?

Yeah, the main thing is that the STAA, the Short Stay Summit, is just our annual conference. Every association has an annual conference. This is ours. Now, obviously, it shows the value of the STAA. It shows the strength of what we're doing. That we've got the people behind it that we have because our annual conference has become the go-to event for our industry across the sector in Europe. I mean, I don't think that there are many people who would deny that the Short Stay Summit is probably one of the best in the world, and we're super proud of that. But it's only a part of what we're doing. But the summit itself, yeah, I can't say how proud I am of what we've achieved, of what the team has achieved. You, the rest of the board have done. I think one of the crucial things about the summit that we need people to understand is it's a not-for-profit event. We don't make money at the summit. I do not get a chunky bonus at the end of the summit.

You know, the board would be nice— it'd be nice if you did.

It'd be nice because I mean, it'd be fantastic.

I wish we did.

I mean, if we did do that and we all shared the profit, we'd all be rolling, but we don't. What we do with the money that we make at the summit is reinvest it into the association, and we use that money to fund the work we're doing to protect our businesses. So we don't make any money at it, and we're the only event in the country of this type which is a not-for-profit event. We've done things at the summit that I'm really proud of. Like, if anybody who's gone in, you've all seen the light boxes. We don't have pull-up banners. We have proper professional light boxes. The event looks amazing because of them, but there is some logic behind that other than it just looks nice. What we wanted to do was ensure that whether you are a business which has got a turnover of millions or you're somebody just starting out, that everyone gets the same chance. We will build you your stand, it will look professional, so when your people are walking around, you've got potential customers in that room, you as a small business, you look good, you look professional, and you get a great start from doing it. We didn't want have the thing where the small businesses were like parked in the corner at like a lot of conferences, in the, you know, in the back room with a couple of scruffy pull-ups and a trestle table. That's not what we wanted. Everyone gets the same opportunity. I'm also really proud at the Summit that for years now the Summit and the STAA has supported the communities that we operate in. Last year we supported, and we've always had a nominated charity, last year we supported The Forces Employment Charity. We got them on the main stage. We had MPs and speakers coming in from Scotland, the UK, etc., talking about Forces Employment Charity. Year before that, we had the Family Holiday Charity, and this year we're supporting Time Away. Time Away is a charity that gives holidays to people whose children have long-term health diagnosis, and you can meet them and talk to them. We will be building them a stand at the event to showcase what they're doing. I would encourage anybody who comes to the event to make sure they engage with them.

And talking about the summit itself, you're obviously going to be kicking off the main stage early doors, just before 10:00 AM, with like an opening address. And you're going to be— again, a lot of the people I've been speaking to in the preparation for this, and I say, why the summit? Why do you come to the summit? And a lot of people have said it's because, uh, you managed to get MPs in, in the room. So talk to us about what is going to be happening on the day, what makes the summit different in that sort of perspective, and, and who have you got coming down to the summit from the House of Parliament? Yeah, the, the summit is—

I mean, it's now— I don't think it's because of the work I do, it's probably because of the work Diane Lloyd, our event director, does and the amazing professional way that she runs the summit, that what we've got is an event that people now want to be at. It's sort of gathered its own momentum, and MPs, speakers are asking, can I be there? Now, we've got an MP who we have turned down numerous MP requests to be the person to give the opening speech because we've got the same guy who came last year, Chris Webb, who's the APPG chair for tourism and hospitality. That's the parliamentary group that looks after Tourism and Hospitality. Chris has been a real, really good defender of our sector, understands tourism, and we need to support the MPs and the people who are supporting us. So Chris is coming down to give our opening speech. We've also got Nigel Huddleston, who is the Shadow DCMS Secretary. We've got Andrew Griffith, who's the Shadow DBT— he's the Business and Trade Secretary. MPs like Bayou Alaba coming, we've got Jane Kirkham coming, so we've got a cross-section of MPs who are going to be in that room talking to people, meeting sponsors, meeting hosts. And the key thing for us from having those MPs there is great to have them, but when they get in that room, it's not seeing the, the being on the stage or going and talking to, to the big boys like Booking and Airbnb. Yes, it's great that they talk to them. What's really important is that when they're walking around they are meeting individual hosts, they're meeting small property managers, they're meeting people who run cleaning companies in the Lake District, they're meeting people who run businesses in the Yorkshire Dales. They are seeing the real people in our industry and meeting people, people like Justine Ireland from down in the Isle of Wight who I was with a couple of weeks ago. Meeting them, seeing the passion, the belief, the professionalism in our sector that's what changes the narrative in politics. When people look into their eyes and see, realize, yeah, these are local people running local businesses, providing jobs in the local communities. This is what tourism is about.

And talking about the narrative, your session at 10 past 10 on the main stage with the likes of Chris, etc., is going to be looking beyond the headlines.

Yeah.

So can you just give a little sneak peek what we can expect on the day? What's going to be the talking points? Why should somebody be sitting down on the main stage 10 past 10 to have a listen to what you've all got to say?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great session. We've got me, I mean, I don't think anybody's going to come and listen to me, but they'll come and listen to Chris Webb, they'll come and listen to Joss from UK Inbound, and we've got Kate Nicholls, the chair of UK Hospitality. What we're going to be talking about is our place, if you like, in the tourism ecosystem, how we operate as an industry. If you, you know, we all have our reasons for choosing to stay in a holiday let, but if you're going to go and stay somewhere in the Cotswolds, chances are you will look for somewhere that maybe there's a pub down the road, maybe there's a this, that, the other down the road. And that's what Kate and I are going to be talking about, how tourism isn't an island. We're not a standalone, and neither is hospitality. That local pub relies on the holiday lads. We've got to get that message across to government, and we've got to get people to understand that if you want the pub in the local village, it's not going to survive just on locals. People don't drink as much as they used to. It's too expensive. There's a cost of living crisis. What keeps those local businesses going are our customers, and that's what we're going to be talking about We're going to be talking about how our sector is so vital to tourism, and it still amazes me that we're having this conversation, that you think, actually, how have people not realized that we are this important?

It's—

I mean, it drives me mad that you hear people saying, oh, you know, there's another holiday let opened, and you think, well, there's another holiday let opened. Nobody in this world buys a property and thinks, I'm just going to open a holiday let. They open a holiday let because people want to stay in it. You know, we are entirely demand driven. If no one wants to stay in your holiday let, you'll close it. People stay in it because they're there because people want them and people want to see them. And you know what's happening at the moment? There was an article in the Times on Saturday, Sunday, this weekend just gone anyway, about staycations. You know, the problems that we've got in the Middle East, at the moment and the cost of airline flights, etc., it's making people again realise that, yeah, you can go on a fantastic holiday without getting on an aeroplane. You can stay in the UK. And we've got to get people to realise that, yeah, if you want to go, you know, you want to go somewhere for Easter, you want to go somewhere for the summer holidays, well, get booking now. Get on wherever it is you book your holiday let and stay in this country because there are amazing places that you can go and see and you can go and stay. And all of that thanks to holiday letting.

Yes. Yeah. Get the troops riled up. I love that. Uh, so go everybody, go and enjoy your Easter, get out the way, come back afterwards, then make sure you get your trip down to London booked for the 22nd for the short stay summit. There is a load going on. Like I say, Andy's going to be kicking it off and I've got some amazing speakers coming up next who are going to talk about their sessions. It's amazing how much we can cram into one day. And you're right, the work that Diane you and Andrea have been doing behind the scenes with your good work to make it happen is insane. So all I want to say, everybody, go and first and foremost drop a thank you Andy in the chat, and then go and check out the website as we're doing this livestream now, because for the next 2 hours we're going to be talking about those sessions. And when you do walk in the building and you go and look at the sponsors and the vendors, go look at their light boxes and say, oh yeah, that is nice, because that's what— that's the work that we've done. Behind the scenes. So Andy, appreciate it. Any— I think the final question I want to ask you is, obviously now the STAA is going to go about finding a new CEO. When your successor steps in, what's the one fight that you hope that they never back down from, whoever they are? Like, what's that one thing? What's that one bit of advice? What's that one thing you would love to see them take on next?

I think the one thing that I want to ensure that the person coming in does is be positive about the sector. It's so easy as a trade body to start getting involved in the, oh, you know, we're doomed because of this, and tourism's at the end because of that, and holiday letting is doomed because of the other. We're not. We've got to remember that whatever we're facing as a trade body, that's your job. You're dealing with that. You are the one who's tackling the problems, because out there across the country, there are tens of thousands of people who are relying on holiday lets for their jobs, to pay their mortgages, to keep their kids in school. And they are relying on you as the leader of this trade body, as the leader of the STAA, to set the example and, and be that positive person about our sector that is championing it and telling people invest in our sector, go on holiday in our sector, telling MPs to be positive about our sector. And back our sector because the holiday— the small businesses across holiday letting, they need support, they need encouragement, and they need backing. And that's what I want to tell someone: be positive.

Amazing, love it. On that note, let's call it. I've got my next speaker who's just joined the green room. Mr. Simon Lehman is waiting, ready and raring to go. Andy, thank you so much, really appreciate it, and look forward to seeing you in a few weeks in London town. Cheers. All right, everybody, welcome back. Uh, we have a fantastic speaker to my right, on my left, however you are looking at this, Mr. Simon Lehman. Thank you for jumping on with me on this, uh, mega cast. To talk about the Short Stay Summit. How are you doing today and where are you tuning in from? That's more importantly.

Absolutely. It's a great pleasure. Thank you for tuning in, Mark, and happy to give support as well. I actually would like to say thank you to you as well for all the work you're doing to promote the SDAA, which is absolutely amazing. You'll find me in sunny, beautiful Switzerland at about 16 degrees outside, so not really March weather.

Nice. Yes. Well, it is lovely this time of the year and we're looking forward to next month and we're looking forward to Obviously being in London for the Short Stay Summit. So basically, what I wanted to do today with the megacast is get everybody in, we're going to talk about their sessions, and you've got a really cool session. It's going to be one of the final ones on the main stage. Can you just give a little bit of a breakdown of why you decided to be part of this talk, why this interests you, and give a little sneak peek to who's going to be on the panel with you on the main stage?

Yeah, absolutely. Normally at the conferences I get the pleasure to do the graveyard shifts and try to keep the hottest to the latest, uh, to the end. And I've been involved with STAA for several years now, and I found my spot in basically moderating the investor panel. Uh, sell or not to sell is my topic right now, um, and it's all about basically mergers and acquisitions, transactions, growth models within the industry. And something I really enjoy, I have a super powerful panel with very diverse people from different stages of their company. So one is Alexander Limpert, founder and CEO of GuestReady. Jennifer Day, she's the chief growth officer of, at Always. And Constantine Schroeder, co-founder and CEO of RBO out out of Germany. And it's interesting that these companies run different models in terms of growth. And eventually you will hit a situation where you're thinking about selling or buying additional businesses for your growth. And I think these are the things we're looking at. So they're differently geographically, geographically, they're different in size, they're different in the type of tech stack that they have built and use. And we're trying to sort of look at this entire industry, open to the different models, and then see how that influences your selling and potentially buying strategy as a property manager within the space.

You're right, it is one of the final sessions. It's on at 4:15 PM to 4:50, basically pretty much closing it, closing it out. You're going to be competing against a little stage called the Learning Lab where I'll be talking about AI. So it'll be a fun A fun little session. I haven't even checked to see what's on the third stage, but it's going to be a good way to end the day. There's going to be lots going on. And you're right, I feel like your sort of niche at the STA event, Short Sale Summit events, has been talking about to sell or not to sell. I've just got a super quick question. So I've been listening to you for many years. I love what you talk about, love what you do. And you often say everyone exits at some point. Now, when you moderate a panel, you don't really get a chance to shine and flex your skills. But I want to just ask a quick question. So if you're a typical, let's say, 50+ to like 300-unit management company or any type of company, what does a sale-ready business actually look like for you on the inside? You mentioned tech, like tech stack, owner relations, OTA versus direct, which is what we talk about a lot. Dependency on the founders. What do you see and what are you seeing at the moment? Because you have got the inside track on a lot of these companies and I feel like people come to you before they even make it known that they're looking to potentially exit. So how does that look from your remit, from what you guys do at AGL?

Yeah, absolutely. I think they haven't changed over years, over time, what they really are at the end of the day. The first thing is depending, like, understanding what you want to do afterwards. Do you want to get out of the business? You want to stay in the business? I think there's a lot of pre-questions to basically answer yours. So understanding what the implications are, what do I build this business for? How does an exit going to look like? Do I want to only sell a majority? Do I want to keep a certain piece, stay on board? We know that local property managers are performing better than super large ones, especially for that reason, because the show is happening in the destination, the relationships are there. And then I think one thing that is very important is obviously absolute financial hygiene. That hasn't changed in 3 years. And by the way, I'm also moderating a CEO roundtable from 3 3 to 4 at the SDAA, which is by invite only, that we're talking about mergers and acquisitions. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about. So financial hygiene is absolutely the most important thing. The single biggest reasons why it takes certain property managers to sell their businesses a lot longer than what they anticipated is because their numbers are not in order. So they have not been audited. They just, they don't stack up. The accounting system doesn't stack up with the PMS. The revenue doesn't stack up with the accountant. So the taxes, the VAT. So financial hygiene is the absolute utmost important thing. If that is not in order, you cannot sell a business because once you enter due diligence, every stone will be turned in your organization. And if they find anything that doesn't stack up, that will go against your valuation. It's very simple.

Yeah, I'm getting PTSD of when I went for a potential exit a couple of years ago now. Of all the things that you just said, my literally my spine was just like tingling as you were talking. Brings about bad memories, but hey ho. So you mentioned there the roundtable. So am I right in thinking they've literally got you working from 3 till 4, quick little turnaround, and then 4:15 till 4:50? Is that right? How is that shaping up?

So that's correct. So I have enough time to quickly go to the bathroom, have a glass of water, and be back on stage, which I'm really looking forward to. And I'll be pumped because I get a lot of input in my CEO roundtable and the conversations on M&A as well.

Yes, very, very much so. Okay, so for those of you that, um, so this is the cool thing now of being back year 3 at Old Billingsgate is the layout is exactly the same as it has been for the last few years now. Um, it's 2 floors, and as you walk into the venue, uh, you will know what I mean when I say 2 floors, because on the first year nobody realized that the, the first floor was up there. And I remember me and you were doing roundtables and everyone was looking for them because it wasn't clear. This year it is a lot more clear where these are going on. So there is a lift at the back and some stairs you can get up. So go and see Simon at 3 o'clock, go to the bathroom, get a quick drink, run downstairs to the main stage. You literally can't miss the main stage, 4:15 to 5 o'clock, if exiting is floating your boat. So Simon, thank you very much. Uh, before we let you go, um, we spoke to you when we did the Book Direct Live Stage Summit, uh, a couple of months ago now. Well, literally last month. What's been happening since we last spoke to you 6, 7 weeks ago? What's been happening in your world?

Yeah, a lot of things have happened. By the way, I'm also there with my own podcast, STR Global Unlocked. I will be at the summit as well, and I'll get the opportunity to have some interviews with MPs and some other important people in our travel industry as a whole. So I'm really looking forward to do that as well and do a live recording. Out of Billingsgate as well.

Nice.

So 6 weeks, what has happened? We're seeing new models. So I won't touch on the geopolitical situation right now. It's pretty rough out there. I think, you know, once again, we've seen a lot of crisis in the past. We've seen 9/11. We've seen SARS. We've seen subprime crisis 2008. We've seen COVID. And interesting enough was always the vacation rental industry benefiting from crisis tremendously because it pushes people to make domestic holidays. You don't want to be stuck on a cruise ship in Dubai while missiles flying across your head. So, you know, there's different things happening right now and that will have an impact on travel. And that's the beauty of short-term rental because we're a local business and you can, you can get to that locally, either for the UK domestic business, for the Germans, whatever. And I think, you know, we are pretty crisis resilient because people still feel like they want to travel, maybe not air, but they take a car, go to a vacation rental. So in the last 6 weeks, from a geopolitical point of view, obviously been rough, but I'm positive that this will, you know, not hammer us entirely, um, as it will other travel verticals, uh, I guess so very, very strongly. And the second thing is, is that we're seeing some super interesting business models on the horizon right now. I mean, CasaGo has made progress in the United States, but we're seeing interesting European business models arising with, you know, using AI-native technology, which are definitely setting themselves apart from the traditional property management companies. So I think one of the biggest things that I will also address in the conversation is how do more legacy-type property managers who've been around for a long time make that switch when we see AI-native property managers who are growing hundreds and hundreds of units just by using AI agents to basically build their supply, I think we're gonna, we're gonna see some tremendous challenging ahead, and that's what's happening out there.

Yeah, yeah, I'm, uh, I'm looking forward to seeing all of the new vendors that are going to be on that showcase on that floor. We've got a lot of them. I've seen the, I've seen the map, uh, and names that I've never seen before and hopefully will be around in a few years' time. And it is crazy how quick now you can spin up a company and get in front of people. So this is why these events are always interesting in this, you know, obviously we've got the Short Stay Summit that happens in April, and then to, you know, to close the year out, you've got things like Vurmer over in America in October. So it's like, which events, which companies are going to be there in April and who's still going to be there in October? It's like a, it's like a game of whack-a-mole. But, um, shout out whack-a-mole. All right, Simon, uh, so recording podcast live from the event, uh, gonna be on at 3 o'clock, gonna be on 4:15. Sounds like you've got a, you've got a busy day. Are you going to be coming to the icebreaker party the night before?

I don't think that was a serious question.

It's a very serious question. Are you going to come and see? Of course. Good, good, good, good, good, good, good. Don't go to that other party that's happening. So the Icebreaker is the one. Come on to see that. Thank you very much, Mr. Lehman. I'm looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks in London. Thanks for coming on to the podcast, and we'll see you very soon.

As always, thanks, Mark.

Good luck.

Welcome back everybody. I've got another amazing speaker with me to my right and my left, however you are tuning in. Mr. Justin Ford, thank you for joining the Short Stays Summit Megacast. Thank you for, thank you for being here.

I'm excited to be here and I'm really excited for the Short Stay Summit. This will be my third year.

Yeah, third year for all years at Old Billingsgate as well. We love the venue. It's a great venue. You're going to be with us on the morning. You're going to be on the new Learning Lab stage, which I'm really excited about. Tell us what you're going to be bringing to London on the day of the Short Stay Summit.

You know, every year I bring something new. So don't think like, oh, we're going to go see Justin again. I always am changing it up. Last year I brought, you know, design and incorporated design. This year we're going to talk about the experience. Would you stay here? It's something I've been focused on a lot lately. I feel like we need to, as a society, do better when it comes to safety. The home is the most dangerous place, and that's our product. And so I'm really going to push operators to go a little bit deeper into looking at a rental property and going, wait a minute, I'm not sure I'd stay here and I'm supposed to let guests in. I don't know about that.

I was literally thinking about you a couple of weeks ago. Me and the family went to Morocco and, you know, it's not like Morocco is the height of safety, but we were in a really high up apartment, penthouse apartment it was. And I've got 4 kids. The youngest is 3. And the balcony on the picture of the listing looked amazing. You could see the sea. It looked stunning. But in reality, when you get out on the balcony, there's like the barrier here that stops the kids from falling over. It was like up to my shins. And the first thing that my wife said was, well, we are not having our 3-year-old anywhere near that. And you're right. I was literally thinking about that as you were talking. Not all Not all rentals are equal. And obviously this is what you talk about a lot. So what have you been noticing over the last couple of months in the world of short-term rentals with safety? Obviously you've been banging that drum really well over the last sort of, well, all these years. But what have you noticed over the last couple of months when it comes to safety in short-term rentals?

I've been really focused lately on assumptions and you just shared a great example. You see that an operator has a beautiful website, they're managing hundreds of properties, you might go on to an OTA listing site and you think, wow, I'm dealing with, you know, somebody who's been able to get to this level. And so then they just assume that the way the property's been set up is legit, you know, that there's no reason not to. And I think what we as an industry are behind on is what other forms of travel— and I talk about like cruise ships, airlines, hotels, they've built in that human beings, especially on vacation, are not paying attention to what's going on. So they've put safety protocols, they've thought about, you know, if the plane's coming in too hot, we've got emergency slides, we've got different things that the flight attendants are going to do. We haven't done that in vacation rentals. So I'm really trying to get operators to recognize that we need to operate like the rest of the travel industry and prepare our guests for when the worst happens.

Yeah, you've been banging this drum a lot and you've said that most incidents in this industry, and this is something that always I come back to you, is that they're preventable, not accidental. And you've been talking about this for a while and you've always said that the hotels are ahead. And do you still think that we're years away from, or months away from, maybe a standardized government safety code or something like that that could hit our industry? Like, how far away are you feeling that that could be a thing the more that you see and talk about it?

You know, I predicted 2 years ago it would be before the end of this decade we'd see a lot more. The UK has been a leader. Believe it or not, the United Kingdom is really the only country in the world that's actually put forth these holiday home safety checklist. No other country has done that yet. I thought that that would be a sign we'd see more of it. It's still not there yet. Unfortunately, that's probably going to take some more really bad incidents to happen before people start to go, wait a minute, this isn't, this isn't the way that this should be going right now.

Yeah. I mean, my background, I don't think a lot of people know this, but I came from the background of a small hotel. That's where I first got into the world of hospitality. I was born into it. And I would always remember that we had to jump jump through so many hoops just to open, um, you know, from, from fire regulations and, and all of the things, you know, safety and whatnot. Um, and I know that obviously with regulation, the thing that everybody talks about when they talk about short-term rentals is that you haven't got all of these hoops to, to jump through. And so I feel like everybody is calling for it. I feel like the worry is, just like with everything, it's done the wrong way. Yeah, because they'll bring in these codes, which great, but they'll attach on other agendas. That they want. They'll just beat the, beat the brush of short-term rentals. But no, you're fighting the good fight and you're talking all the right things, and I'm excited for your talk. So the Learning Lab, for people who don't know, it's a new stage that the team at the Short Stay Summit and the organization put together on the back of little knowledge booths that they had last year. So that was cool, but it was like these knowledge booths were scattered around, people didn't really know what they were, so it's time to give it a stage and And I'm really looking forward to having people like yourself down and the other amazing speakers that we've got, because it's going to be different to the main stage, going to be different to the workshop stage where it's just going to be 8 tables, 6 seats each. So limited seating space. You come on down, bring your pens, bring your papers, bring your laptops and put a plan down. So I'm really looking forward to your session on Wednesday, 10:45 AM. So you're going to be in the morning slot there.

Yeah, you know, they said, hey, Justin, wake the crowd up. Let's get them going. Let's get that going. And, you know, one of the things that I'm honored by is the last couple of years that I've presented, it's been a similar format. I haven't been on the main stage and I filled the room. That's been fantastic. Thank you to everyone who comes out and supports what we're talking about when it comes to safety. But I've always been excited. I'm not picking on everybody else here, but people have told me they've taken more from those smaller sessions sometimes than the bigger main stage stuff. So I'm not starting a rivalry here, but let's start it.

Let's start.

Well, how many nuggets are you going to walk away from my session and start counting on your fingers and toes?

Yeah, there you go. There you go. Well, this is the thing about the main stage and like now the workshop stage. It's a lot of panels, right? And panels are great because you get a multiple of viewpoints. But if you're speaking on a panel, you realistically have only got 3 or 4 minutes of speaking time. So there's only a certain amount of wisdom that you can drop in 3 to 4 minutes. It's going to be more soundbites. But when you've got a good solid 45 minutes, you've got more chance, and it's just you to be able to get up and share your knowledge. And you're right, like these smaller sessions are great because you can really make an impact. So the main stage is great, fantastic, big, it's all that. But I feel like me personally, I take much more from things like the Learning Lab, which is why I'm excited to to see it in action this year. Just in between now and the Short Stay Summit, what's going on in your world? You're always at events, you're always speaking, you're traveling around doing all the things, but what's your sort of agenda looking like for the next few weeks?

Yeah, I've been speaking at a lot of smaller conferences lately, mainly host-focused, actually co-hosts. And I've been learning a lot about co-hosts recently. I'm really excited about what energy they're bringing to the industry. We've been looking for new voices and new ideas and thoughts, and co-hosts certainly bring a lot of that to the industry. I just did an event in North Carolina that was sold out, standing room only, and it was all co-hosts. I didn't recognize anybody in the room, and I've been in this industry for 28 years, and they brought new ideas. And I'm doing a lot of stuff with different state organizations. I think the next event I'm heading to is the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance meeting up in the state of Vermont. It's a statewide organization, and here in the U.S., we see a lot of that regionalization going on with organizations focused on how best to address short-term rentals in their market.

Amazing, amazing. There's loads going on. You're right, the co-host is obviously picking up, and obviously with the FIFA World Cup coming to America in the, in the summer, there's going to be a lot more hosts. And I know Tyann is doing loads of work, and there's loads of people doing lots of around the States to help hosts do it the right way, because there's a lot of people who will see a quick buck out of all this money coming in from around the world and they'll just cut corners. Having people like yourself and Ty and showing people how to do it right, even if it is just for a summer, fantastic.

Yeah, you know, we haven't been able to like officially label it because it's all complicated with FIFA, but I've been really excited by the number of people who are using our safety checklist that are new operators coming in for FIFA. I'd love to call it the official safety checklist of FIFA, but I don't know they're going to let me do it, but just do it. It's, it's something that you need to do.

Yeah, it's going to be exciting. And I feel like the summer is going to kick off what is going to be hopefully a huge year. Even with all the things that are going on around the world, I do think we're going to look back on it as being a strong, solid year, whether it's UK, US, or around the world, which is going to be good to see. So, Justin, thank you for joining us. Please go and check out Justin on all the socials, LinkedIn and everything, to find out what he's talking about and doing. And we'll see you in a couple of weeks in London Town. See you soon. Everybody, welcome back. Got another amazing speaker to my right, on my left, however you're looking at this. Uh, we've got Margot from the fantastic, uh, Hostfully, um, one of our favorite property management software solutions that is out there in the industry. Bruce Lee has been working with them for many, many years, and I'm very very excited to see the team again at the Short Stay Summit. Um, thank you so much for joining us, and everybody say hi if you're a Hostfully customer. Drop a hi in the live, in the comments below. Uh, Margot, thank you for so much for jumping on, uh, with us all today. We've had some amazing speakers so far, and I'm looking forward to digging into your session, which is on the workshop stage, and you've got a cool little panel. Can you tell us a little bit about— because you're obviously moderating, so So tell us a little bit about the, the talk. Tell us about who's going to be joining you on stage and what can everybody expect.

Thank you so much. So for this moderated session, it's going to be about how to build a connected tech stack for your short-term rental or vacation rental business. And we have some other companies going to be on stage with me, some other PMS companies, which we always think is really helpful, actually, to provide different perspectives, because we all have a little bit different philosophies about this. But I think that the, the question around whether your tech stack should be connected or not is really an easy question to answer, which is that you need it to be connected. I mean, when we started this company 10 years ago, it wasn't totally necessary to have such a connected tech stack. Like, you didn't need to have so many integrations to be operating the most competitive business that you can. But right now we can see that the market is just becoming more and more competitive, and property managers need to put their best foot forward. And in order to do that, they have to use technology to be able to alleviate some of the operational challenges, time spent, potentially headaches that, you know, come about from doing everything manually. So where we used to see a lot of property managers running their business on spreadsheets, now we're seeing that every property manager is using some sort of PMS solution, and it's always connected with others to be able to run their business most effectively.

Yeah, you're right. These conversations are good to have, and you know, you are very right. The, the answer to the question is yes, you do. And this is why it's cool to have different perspectives, because obviously everybody on stage will be, will be talking from their own personal experiences. But obviously as well, they— everybody as you all know, in the world of short-term rentals, they, they move from one PMS to the other, etc., because of different, different needs and wants. And, and, you know, coming to shows and whatnot. A question that I wanted to ask you was, when somebody, uh, is growing their business, right, maybe they've started with a, with a smaller PMS and now they're looking at Hostfully and they're starting to come to you, what do you feel like is one of the reasons why people are joining Hostfully? So maybe they've gone 1, 2, 3 properties and now they're going, right, I really want to get on board with Hostfully because I've seen all the amazing products and tech that they have. What are the reasons why people are switching and coming over to you?

Yeah, well, it really has to do with the amount of flexibility and versatility that we give our customers. And the heritage of Hostfully is to build a platform PMS. We were one of the first companies to get preferred status with all the OTAs or be able to actually like go live with the OTAs. In fact, we were the first one with Marriott to actually go live when they rolled out homes and villas, their vacation rental offering. But it really goes to this idea that we want to give our customers as much flexibility as possible because we've seen that other SaaS companies like Salesforce and many others have built these really robust and strong and thriving ecosystems of other companies around them. Where customers can choose what they need. So like, for example, with Salesforce, you can choose like a kind of a cheaper accounting solution. You can choose like a really robust accounting solution. And with Hostfully, you can choose like a newcomer dynamic pricing tool, or you can choose like a really robust dynamic pricing tool. Right. And we want to give our customers the very best options out there, which means that we need to have a lot of integration partners. And so this is a big differentiator for us. And we also want to have the best, the best partnerships with those integration partners. We actually just announced a preferred partner program ourselves, I believe a month ago or so. So that's a big priority for us. I think the other thing that customers come to us for, because they, number one, is they feel like they can grow and they can expand their toolset and use what solutions they want. And number two is really the amount of care and attention that we give to each customer. Our customer care teams, whether it's onboarding, customer success, customer support, are world-class. We have actually several interviews going on this week with other companies trying to learn from us how we've been able to do this. We have so many people on the team who are property managers themselves. So we have a lot of people who really empathize with the experience of being a property manager. And so it's really about those integration partnerships and the customer care that people are going to feel like like, you know, Hostfully is, is just a top-notch solution. I will say that we, we are investing a lot in product innovation this year. You may have heard that we got a new investor on board, which we're really excited about. And that has helped to fuel and fund a lot of the product innovation that we've been wanting to do for a while. And so I think without saying too much, customers will see a lot of changes this year that are really positive. On the product side, but we've really leaned into customer care and integration so far, and that's what we're known for.

Yeah, I was going to say the one thing that I do associate with you guys is the customer support. The customer care is world class. Obviously, we get to peek behind the curtains a little bit because obviously you have how we work together. And yeah, the one thing that you guys have always shone through is how you look after your customers, which is a testament, you know, which when you're growing and you're growing fast, it's, you know, it's often one of the things that gets left behind from other companies. And I know even at Boostly, we've struggled with that over the years. But it's one thing that's always, always shown through with Hostfully. So well, well done. And I do have my little Hostfully little mascot. It's always there with me in the background.

Nice.

I have the big one here.

Wait, I want to show you.

Oh, yeah. Look at that. That is on the bucket list for sure. Will the big guy be coming to London or are we going to be too much for the suitcase?

Unfortunately.

So we're really looking forward to the summit. Obviously, it's a really good one. I love it. There's a lot of people in the room and I wanted to talk very quickly about the night before. So for the first time ever, the Short Stay Summit team have had an idea of hosting a meetup because there's nothing more worse than going to a big old conference when you don't know anybody. You know, it's very easy to be sort of like on your phone looking like you're doing something, but you're not because you don't know anybody. And the idea of the icebreaker is basically what it says on the tin. To have an icebreaker, it's a chance to meet up the night before, get to know people, get to know someone. So when you walk in the conference the next day, there's at least one person you can go, oh, hey, how you doing. And that was the idea. And it obviously, um, Diane and the team got to looking for a venue, but found an amazing venue. Um, and obviously it's London prices, so, and they have a minimum spend. So obviously we needed to go out and find biz besties in the industry to help put it together. And obviously Hostfully are one of them. So we're really looking forward to it and, uh, to the party. So thank you for, for helping putting it on. Um, are you ready for a, a British night out and a British party, uh, Margot, on the, on the night before?

Well, I think actually technically the last time I went out in London was when I was like 19 years old. That was a long time ago. So it's been a while. But I wanted to just say that for anyone who's going to be there, we're going to bring like lots of people from our team. There will be engineers, there will be salespeople, there will be partnerships people, there will be a sale, you know, like our marketing and partnership salespeople. But my joke was that we're also bringing engineers. So if you're a little bit socially awkward, don't worry, because we got you covered, um, with our engineering team.

We're going to be there.

Oh, that's amazing. I'm looking forward to meeting them all. And obviously, like, you, uh, you live in a part of the world in San Francisco where tech is, is everywhere. Um, how have you found it this year with the rise of all the talk of, um, AI agents and OpenClaw? Are you able to avoid it, or have you dug all in? Like, how, like, how has it been, uh, this year in, in, uh, in sort of trying to either avoid it or getting stuck in? And where are you with it all?

Oh, well, I think when you live here, there's no choice actually, but to embrace it. So, I mean, I've been vibe coding projects actually, and my team is trying to find the best ways to use AI in our company as well. You do have to tread a little bit carefully because you have to be careful about quality and security. Especially in a company build-out. But yeah, actually I've been using ChatGPT, but I prefer Anthropic these days for a lot of reasons. I won't go into that here, but I would prefer to support them. So I've been using Claude Code and I've actually vibe-coded a couple of travel itinerary builders for my kids and some other stuff for work as well. I think that It's quite important actually for people to understand what the limitations are for these kind of projects, because whether you like it or not, this is the direction that the world is going. And it's really nice to be informed and with not too much extra time, actually, you can get yourself up to speed with how things work. I joined an International Women's Day gathering of VibeCo women who were doing it, not just from the Bay Area, but also from all around the world too. So I think it's important for people to learn.

Yeah, amazing. And we're obviously— we're both parents, and my 13-year-old is starting to show a bit of an interest. So for his 14th birthday, we're gonna, we're gonna get him hooked up with a pro plan and let him go loose because it's, you know, it's, it's what's coming. So very fascinating. And you're right, yeah, it's a lot of fun. Um, I actually put together an app and a schedule for the Short Stay Summit in literally a couple of hours using Lovable, which is, which is cool. So I showed Diana and the team which is nice because I haven't got one before, so it's nice to see. So, got the summit, got the icebreaker. What is happening in the world of Hostelie between now and the end of April when the summit is going to be on? What cool things have you got lined up?

Oh, well, I can't share any secrets about what's going to happen between now and then because that would be jumping the gun. My marketing team would be upset. But I will just emphasize, and this is something you and I were chatting about before, that we've made some really big investments on the product and engineering side this year. And so our velocity in product is changing a lot this year, and we're bringing a lot of those people to the conference. And so we're really excited to have lots of conversations with customers and really understand what it feels like to be a property manager today. So I think our ability to listen and really pay attention to the details has improved a lot over the last couple of quarters. and I'm really excited about that. Me personally, you know, we're just off to a fast start this year. I mean, it's been, it's been pretty quick. I don't know if people out there know how it is to work with a new investor, but there's always a time when, you know, you're building that relationship and earning trust with each other. And so we've been working on that. One of the things though that we love about our new investors that they really understand this industry very deeply. And so they've are bringing a lot of valuable insights to how we're thinking about the business. And at the end of the day, it's just going to be a better product, a better experience for customers. And we're excited to show all of our cards. You know, sometimes you feel like as an entrepreneur, you have all these ideas that you just want to get out there and you can't get it out there. But I feel like we're starting to see them come to fruition. So lots of stuff happening for Hostfully. It's going to be a really exciting couple of years for sure.

That's exciting to see. Yeah, you're one of my favorites, so, um, well done. And I look forward to seeing you all in, uh, in a couple of weeks' time in, in London town. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks, good to see you.

All right, I'm going to go and get my next speaker. I'm going to just pop a little holding screen on here, and we're back in, in a couple of seconds with our next amazing speaker. All right, everybody. Welcome back. Another amazing guest with me now. Sarah, thank you so much for joining. So every speaker that we've had so far is going to be a moderator or a speaker at the summit. But you've got a very cool role at the Short Stay Summit. Can you just please let us know what you're going to be doing on the day, and what can we expect from your good self at the event?

Yeah, I do. I think I have the best job of all, which is emceeing the summit alongside Leo Walton, who is my partner in crime. On the Check-In podcast. The summit is one of my favorite events of the year. We emceed the main stage last year. It's absolutely incredible energy. I think because it's a one-day event, that's what makes me so excited. I think I didn't even eat last year, so I don't expect to eat. Just the energies, the nerves are too high. But yeah, Leo and I will be emceeing the main stage, so we'll be introducing all of the speakers there, the panel participants, As well as just kind of keeping the crowd excited and riled up. We don't want people sleeping and we want people also sharing kind of what they've learned. And so, that's an important segment of it as well. We're setting up between speakers to keep the audience engaged and make sure that there's also takeaways from every single one of the speakers. So, it's not just speaker fatigue, as I like to say, but really it's more interactive.

Have you got any little tips, anything you've learned along, along the way to like sort of keep everybody engaged? I know you obviously do improv, right? So can you put those skills into, into this? You've got Leo on stage with you. Like, what, what can you share with everybody what you're going to be doing with us?

I just, I usually just channel my mom from South Carolina. Like, I just, I just shout at people. Last year, I think I literally grabbed the microphone and said, hey, you in the blue shirt, sit back down.

You're going to—

pressure to sit down.

I know, I just— aggressive American, as my colleagues say. I just went full aggressive American and people listen. Shocking.

Just aggressive MC. I love it. Well, that's how you get people to listen, just with the aggression and getting them to listen. So I don't know if you had a chance to look at the agenda for the main stage. Is there anything that sort of stands out? Is there anything that you're looking forward to this year? Obviously doing it last year and this year, is there anything that you're really excited to get to stay around and watch?

Yeah, I think this year there's two things in particular that have really got me kind of riled up. So, I think one is it's less about the agenda and more about the participation. So, last year and previous years, it was much more of like a UK, some sprinkle of European focus. This year, like the Americans are coming in droves, which is exciting. For me, it's like the Summit has made onto kind of the international conference circuit, which I think brings a really unique perspective. So I always say that I think the Europeans have a lot to learn from the Americans and vice versa. And especially when it comes to things like regulation and banding together and being able to get politicians into the room. Like that's the other component about this conference that is so rare and so unique is that we actually have policymakers. It's few and far between, especially in Europe where there's a lot of tensions about regulation and things like that, to actually have the people who are able to make those decisions in the room and having conversations with operators. So I think those are kind of the two biggest things. It's less about a specific segment and more about the energy of this conference in general.

You're right. I have noticed a lot of Americans have been in my DMs saying we're coming over and asking for tips on where to go and where to stay before the summit. And it is because there's always like a thing because it's just a one-day event. I know from being part of the, the summit and the board is how can you get Americans to fly all the way over, vendors and speakers or just attendees, just for a one-day event. And obviously now that we've got these fringe events that are going on, you know, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, it's— it makes it into more like of a short stay week. But that is a big thing. And, and I've noticed it as well. I watched your podcast that you did with Alex and Annie Obviously both of them are coming over. And the thing that stood out to me is in America at the big conferences, you don't really get the policy decision makers in the room. And this is really cool. And I feel like a lot of people don't realise this with the summit that we have got MPs that are going to be down there. We have got decision makers that are going to be down there, you know, and Andy Fenner has done an amazing job of getting them in the room. And it's a case of now making sure that you take advantage of it and listen and watch the sessions. So you're right, it's going to be a really good one. I've got a really good, really good feeling about what's going to be happening at the end of April, which is good. But obviously, you know, you're not just podcast host and MC, you obviously do other bits. Talk about AirDNA, talk about what you're looking forward to this year showcasing, you know, obviously, you're going to be there with the team. What can we expect from AirDNA this year?

Yeah, we have a lot of exciting stuff. I don't— I think I might get like strung up and lynched if I say too much. But there is a lot of really cool stuff in particular coming out in Q2, Q3 this year at AirDNA. So stay tuned is what I can say. But I do want to mention that this conference for us is extremely important. That's evidenced by the fact that our CEO is flying over from the US. We have two other team members flying over from the US. We are really putting boots on the ground from our C-suite in this conference because they see not only the return on investment from, from a financial perspective, but it's much more about being able to have those conversations with operators in the room. So being able to showcase new features that maybe we're working on. Jamie Lane is one of the guys coming over who's going to be doing, of course, a great job talking about everything in the data. But he also has a big hand in the product. Our SVP of marketing, Scott Sage, is also coming over. And he, for anybody who doesn't know, before joining AirDNA, he actually founded and grew his own short-term rental management company in the Midwest to over 200 properties. And so he is not only part of AirDNA, but he is an operator. And so he's absolutely amazing at these conferences because he has a very different perspective to those of us. Like, I mean, I have one property, but yeah, I'm nowhere near Scott's level of understanding when it comes to having the those conversations with property managers. So for us, it's really a place to meet our existing clients, understand what's working for them, what's not working, where can we improve, and then also what are they excited about and be able to kind of showcase some of the new things that we're working on and get some of that initial feedback from clients as well. And then of course, just the energy of the show. I think, you know, so many people have talked about this and initially maybe getting the Americans over is harder because it is a one-day conference. But a lot of these fringe events, including like the icebreakers that you're hosting the night before the event, it's going to make a huge difference. And the fact that it is a one-day event, everybody gives it their all. It's not one of those things where you're like, oh my gosh, we're 3 days in and I'm absolutely exhausted.

It's—

you can do anything for one day, especially when you know that there's drinks afterwards.

So it's true.

It's a really good conference in that sense. Clients as well. And, and that's sort of generalized feedback. So super excited to have the AirDNA team there. My colleague Martha and Laura are also going to be there. So Laura heads up our account management, so she's going to be there talking to existing clients. And then Martha heads up our new business division, so she's going to be there hunting.

There's a lot going on, there's a lot happening. We're very excited. I know Scott very well, he's a Boostly customer for, uh, for websites and whatnot, which is good. And yeah, the whole team are fantastic. And good to see Rohit's going to be coming over and Jamie's coming over. Good to have everybody flying in. So exciting times. When do you actually land in London? Because obviously you're based out of Spain. When do you land in the big city?

I am, yeah. So I actually land the day before. I think my flight arrives at like 2 PM. So I'm just in time. Our team is dividing and conquering. So two of us, it's myself and Scott that are going to the Shorties and then the rest of the team, so Rohit, And Jamie will be, and Martha will be headed to the Icebreaker event. So I know I drew the short end of the stick, I guess, this year.

Well, you both have a great time. It's going to be good food and good company. And that's the main thing. And yeah, Jamie, I'm excited to show Jamie bingo. British bingo is going to, he's going to have all of the things happening. So it's going to be fantastic. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, busy. You're going to be very busy, so if anybody wants to come up and say hi, make sure you try and get it during sessions when she's not shouting at people from the stage.

Exactly, unless you want to be shouted at. No, I'm just kidding.

I wanted to get shouted at. So yeah, really looking forward to it. And you know, when you get to MC, you really do get to listen and watch the sessions. You know, it's normally when you're there and you're like bouncing around, you don't really get a chance to to properly listen to what's on stage. So, I'm really excited to get your takeaways when you do an episode of the check-in after the event, which will be cool.

Yeah, I think last year, we actually recorded sort of at the lunchtime break, and it was one of our favorite episodes. I think this year, we're going to do at least one, maybe two even, episodes of the check-in specifically from the summit with learnings and things that piqued our interest, as well as being able to chat chat with people that we have met at the summit or who have something interesting to say. So being able to bring that offline as well for all of those who maybe can't make it this year.

Well, we've got Simon Layman is going to be recording, and we've got Alex and Annie are going to be recording, and you're going to— sales are going to be— everybody's going to be like podcast heavy at this summer, which me as a content creator, I absolutely love to see. So thank you so much for joining us. I've got the next speaker in the green room ready to go. Everybody please say thank you to Sarah in the comments. All right, let me go and grab them. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mark.

All right, welcome back everybody. Another amazing speaker is to my right, my left, depending on how you're watching this. Amber Hurdle, thank you so much for joining me today, uh, and joining everybody for this, uh, live stream. We're here talking about obviously the Short Stay Summit, and you've got a really cool session, uh, on the workshop stage, 10 AM in the morning, which is, which is crazy, talking about branding. So talk to me a little bit about the topic, talk to me about where you are in the world. Tell me everything about yourself, and then we'll dig into the session.

Okay. Well, I think I love just how you colored in this experience with a lot of different vantage points and different levels of expertise. I'm in the United States, so there'll be that perspective that I bring, as well as, I mean, we know we've got somebody in Cape Town, somebody in Brighton. We've got Scottland, we've got lots of different perspective, which I think is really important when we're talking about travel and hospitality at this particular season in society, societal history. And then we also have people who might be better at like the digital marketing side of things or the marketing analytics. What I do is brand. I'm all about identity and the way that I do brand is through emotional resonance. So like that's why the private equity guys like me because they're like, how do we emotionally connect with our stakeholders? Like we're worried about EBITDA, so they plug me in and then we go. And so when we're talking about hospitality, truly it's like, what kind of relationship do you have with your guests and your potential guests? What kind of relationship do you have with your homeowners? What kind of relationship do you have with your local governments, politicians, and communities? When we're talking about really having to think about regulations and, and fighting for the, the ability to to even operate. So that's the perspective I'm going to come in. I think brand touches everything, but obviously it is the foundation before you can market, which is the amplification of the brand.

It's a really cool topic. And yeah, we've got Anna coming down from Scotland, Steve, who's obviously hosting it, coming up from Brighton, Nick, who's flying all the way from Cape Town, South Africa. That's a long old flight. I didn't think there was going to be many people flying further than you to get over here, but Nikki's one. And it makes a really cool panel. It's on the workshop stage, 10 past 10 AM. The actual title, if you're going to look for it in the program notes or even on the app that they build, it's How to Build a Brand and Identity That Unites Our Team and Wins Guest Loyalty. So very cool. Now you've been talking about, like I say, brand for years. Just give a little breakdown on, uh, where you see this industry at the moment when, when it comes to, to branding. Obviously you've been very fortunate to speak on stages all over the world doing this and, um, and now obviously coming over to, to, to London, which is going to be awesome. So how do you see like the lay of the land at the moment with, with branding in, in our industry, what we call short-term rentals?

Yeah, well, first, Mark, thank you for getting me on this stage because I think London is the one like big hub, maybe Dubai, but London's another big hub that like I, I haven't been to yet. So Barcelona and all that kind of stuff. So I'm excited and, and I do feel privileged to get to hang out with with all of you. In terms of the industry, let's go back a year. So I stood on the stage at the VRMA Executive Summit, and I talked about, I talked about where we were in society. And I talked about how we're really in the early stages of the greatest societal shift since the Gutenberg press, and not the internet, because the internet just amplified the ability that we had to push out information or to access information. But the Gutenberg press is the actual shift that provided that information to the masses. So now here we are with, I mean, all kinds of craziness going on. But we have access not just to information, we have access to thinking. So like, that's changing the game, right? So when I stood on that stage a year ago, I said, please hear me. I work in multiple industries. We all know that I call the vacation rental short-term rental my industry, our industry, like my home is here, but I am in a lot of different industries and the things that they're talking about, we're not talking about in this industry. And I need you to hear me when I say we're going to wake up and we're not going to see society anything like what we, what it once was. And it's coming fast. Fast forward a year later, look at the world right now. Like, I'm like, I tried to tell you this. And so we've got— and I don't want to be doomsday, but let me just set up the stage, right? So we obviously have a huge kerfuffle when it comes to oil. And so when you think about like the, the buffer between like the last time we got to access oil and, and we have supply chain issues now. When you have supply chain issues, that's not like, oh, gas is up, you know, that's not, that's not the problem like for our cars. We have supply chain issues literally for everything that touches business. And so if you think about it from a short-term rental perspective, and I'm going to get to my point, I promise, bear with me, we have less travel, less international travel, at least in the United States, We have less economic uncertainty. We have higher cost of doing business. And in the United States, that drive time, first of all, we have higher credit card bills than we ever had. So people have maxed out their credit cards. So this like rite of passage or this, this assumed right that, that we have in America that we get to vacation is not a reality if our max, if we've maxed out our credit cards. We can't afford the gas even to get to the drive time destination. Like, we have problems right now. And so, what I suggested for people to do is get really clear on your brand. Not just your brand in terms of your business brand, but your personal brand, your executive reputation as the founder, as the leader, as the person who's going to have to move your team through these kerfuffles, who's going to have to step up and advocate at the government level, who needs to go make friends with your local representatives and make sure that as we move through this wave, guess what? Real estate, they know what they're doing. Hotels, they know what they're doing. But the one that puts the, like, the lodging and hospitality and the real estate together, I'm not 100% confident that as a, as a whole industry that we have a path forward that we're all moving towards. I think brand is the answer.

I love that. And I'm really excited to see the session because there'll be lots of different viewpoints, uh, and I know Steve is very outspoken on this, and I'm excited to take Nick's view. He's actually in the green room now. He's going to be coming in next to talk about this, which is pretty cool. Uh, so yeah, very, very exciting session. And you know, you're right, you've been spot on. I've been watching you for years and you are spot on with this, and I'm excited to to see the talk. But you are coming over, uh, obviously there's a lot of reasons to come over. There's a lot of Americans coming over this time. Uh, let me just— tell me and fill me in, who is your gaggle of friends that are coming over from the, from the States? And what have you got planned outside of the Short Stay Summer when you're going to be over here, right?

Well, I'll say my, my two travel companions of course are, um, Alex and Annie from the Alex and Annie Show. They're two of my favorite humans, two of my best friends. I talk to them every day. They know all my guts. Um, and so I will definitely be with them. And then of course, uh, Dana from Rent Responsibly and I are— we're, we're making sure we're syncing our, our travel plans up to go to, um, Middleton Castle for Humphrey's, um, retreat. So that's baked in. We're super excited about that. There's lots of people there that, um, I know and I love, or I know of, and they're people I've wanted to get to know better. So I genuinely believe that anytime there's like a cohort type situation, that who you're supposed to be with is who you end up being with, and your year is your year, um, or your years if you go back like you did. Um, and, and so yeah, we're— I'm definitely going to the Shorties Awards. I'm, I'm a judge for the Shorties. So I have been really impressed with the submissions. Like, I've already read them all. I'm, I'm going back and, and I mean, I've looked at everything that you've sent. Like, if you attach something, I read through all of it. If you did not, you're competing with people who put— gave like a lot of discovery. So I'll be there. I definitely want to come hang out with you. You've got some stuff going on. And I think I've promised a cigar with Marcus, but then we're going to get with Neely Kahn, spend some time with her, see some sites. And Annie Holcomb has like 38 things that we're going to try to cram into like a day and a half. So I've just been like, whatever you want to do, I'm along for the ride.

You are going to be the sheep. To be a sheep.

Yeah, I'm always a strategist.

I want to be the sheep this time. Yeah, you're going to have a lot of time, and I know Annie has got a lot of things planned, and you've named some good people there, so you're going to have a fantastic time. Listen, thank you so much for joining. Before we let you go and before we bring in Nick, just let us know what's going on in your world, in the business world. What have you got planned for this year? What can you share with the peeps?

Yeah, absolutely. So I have two new things I worked on all last year. And towards the end of last year, we launched one and I just launched the other one, kind of like a founder's launch, if you will. So, at the end of last year, I started the Vanguard Council, and that is a small peer advisory group that I lead. And so, it's a little bit of kind of like a combination of me acting as a fractional publicist and then the council all supporting each other in growing their businesses. It's mostly suppliers in the vacation rental, short-term rental space. We do have someone who is in the bed and breakfast world, but considering his bed and breakfast was the number 1 on TripAdvisor in the United States, number 2 in the world, and was— and like Conde Nast, we kind of figured he probably knows some things that we all should learn about, right? So, so that's great. And that just feeds my soul to be in so many amazing businesses and see what they're doing and how they're trying to serve vacation rental managers. And then I have something called Brand Edge Accelerator. So this is more of a one-to-many. So it's a membership. It's only $97 a month. And this is my way of sharing everything that I've, that I've done to help founders and executives and even internal leaders learn how to take their executive reputation and mobilize that to actually get business results. So it's taking your personal brand and it's making it operate like a business brand so that you're the top of funnel. Like you're getting the attention and then that feeds your marketing and your sales funnel, just like all of the other efforts that you have. So we're in the middle of that right now. I'm loving it. It's lots of chatter in the Slack channel, lots of big ahas. I'm a total weirdo and I do personal branding very differently, very deep. And so there's like this huge identity aha. And some people, like I got voice notes of people crying, you know what I mean? Because like It's a whole thing to wrestle with your identity and then say like, "Okay, now how am I going to put this out into the world?" So it's super exciting. I'm loving it. And I'm loving that I'm able to put things out into the world where more people can work with me and my systems. And it's not always just one-on-one block and tackle.

Amazing. So if there's anybody who wants to come and tackle you at the event and find out more, are they able to do so? Come and find you. I'm sure you'll be sticking around for the day, right? So you're going to be there in the morning. Fantastic. I love it. Amber, thank you so much for joining us. I'm excited to see you and see the talk and all of your cool adventures. And, uh, thank you for coming on. Right, let me go get Nick. All right, everybody, welcome back. Got another amazing speaker, uh, after Amber. We've got, we've got Nick who is going to be joining Amber on stage. Stage, on the workshop stage, 10 AM on Wednesday morning. So, uh, not a lot of sleep going to be getting from the night before when we've got the icebreaker party. But Nick, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, so a little bit about Nick. He's obviously tuning in from Cape Town, and all the way down there in South Africa, he is going to be getting on a plane and flying for over 12 hours to come and join us for, uh, the Short Stay Summer. And Nick is also going to be joining Amber in going to the castle, which we talked about the retreat with Amber just a little bit before. So loads going on. Uh, Nick, thanks for joining us today, uh, and for the stream. Uh, give us a little bit of background about yourself, and again, just let us know why you were getting on a plane and flying for 12 hours to come and be with us for the Short Stay Summit.

Uh, thanks, Mark, and hello to everybody out out there that's watching and listening, uh, please be on the, on the show today, Mark. I think to answer your question, uh, about why I would get on a plane for 12 hours and come to the UK in April, um, it's pretty straightforward answer. I think, um, uh, about 5 or 6 years ago, uh, we suddenly realized that Cape Town and South Africa was a little bit of a cork bobbing on the ocean, kind of in the industry, kind of in the, uh, in the game of short long-term rentals, we didn't really know where we stood and what, what kind of value we had to offer. Um, I got on a plane, uh, probably off the back of being cooped up at home during COVID and went to the first Scale conference in Barcelona. Uh, and that kind of started the journey of, um, more recently getting, getting into the global industry and trying to make sure that we were aligned with the best practices and standards and doing everything that we should be doing in terms of what, what, what the rest of the world was doing. My business partner Richard and I have attended some shows in the past. We even went to Verma in Orlando, which was in 2011. Richard's obviously attended some other events along the way, but certainly since COVID we've made a concerted effort to try attend as many shows as we possibly could do and have been able to build some really good relationships. Obviously use a lot of the technology and the providers that, that are at the Short Stay Summit and at the retreat. And just always good to build proper personal relationships because it's always better in person than over a video call from 6,000 miles away. So that's one of the main reasons.

Yeah, I mean, you're 100% right. I feel like this event, the Short Stay Summer, is getting such a good reputation around it, which is why people literally jump on cars, trains, and planes to be there, which is fascinating, really, to me, because it is such a— it's just a one-day event, but it is a lot of good stuff going on. And now there's loads of fringe events that are popping up around it. Talk to us quickly about the day before. We're going to be in a room together in the House of Lords. Uh, this is something that obviously we've spoken about with, uh, with Andy about, but, um, tell us about that. What, what piqued your interest there?

Well, I mean, conveniently it was the day before the STAA and, uh, kind of was sandwiched in between the, the Castle also, the Castle, uh, uh, event with the retreat. So, um, I've been a founding member of the of the board of the South African Short-Term Rentals Association. We're new, we are less than 2 years old and are very much in that sort of startup entrepreneurial phase of trying to understand what we can do as an association to the South African industry. I share the board with 5 other industry members and we're just trying to get to grips with where and how we can add value to our members try to make sure that we're understanding what is topical in terms of regulation and any other sort of initiatives that might be being sort of implemented in a global context. And I just thought it was a really, really good opportunity to sit around a table with fellow association members and to hopefully be able to, you know, lend an ear and pick a brain and kind of just bring, bring back some information back to Cape Town and make our industry a little bit stronger and a little bit more sturdy and see what we can do in terms of building the South African short-term rental industry as an association.

This is a good question and one I wanted to ask because it is kind of topical right now is how for those who are watching this and listening to this and are not fully aware of the latest going on in South Africa with with regulations and just where the lay of the land is. Just let us know, what is the current state of play? How is it? What's going on? And what can you share with us?

So I think we're actually in a bit of a beneficial position because certainly through SAstra, the South African Short-Term Rental Association, we've actually been able to use precedent that that might have been set in other locations and what it's done to the industry in other major cities as almost use cases and real-world scenarios of how things can go horribly wrong if there isn't proper engagement with the industry. So through Sastre, we've actually been quite fortunate to be able to have really good conversations, obviously not as many as we would have liked, but I think we've had enough with, with the various governments and policyholders. Um, and, uh, it seems that there will be a national framework of a code of best practice for short-term rentals, which is a sort of almost a document, a requirement for everybody that works in the space to understand their responsibilities of being a short-term rental, um, host or manager. For that reason, that will come from a national perspective. And then Effectively, what is being done is that local government is going to be deciding on how best to manage short-term rentals, and a lot of the powers within a city environment or within a metropolitan environment will be left up to the local government. Our business is based in Cape Town. We manage around about 200 luxury villas and apartments in, in some of Cape Town's finest areas. And, you know, the reality is that a lot of properties are actually owned by foreigners, owned by Europeans, by Brits, by Americans. And these are holiday homes, and they, they want to come here for a few weeks of the year. So realistically, the, the aim of trying to bring a whole lot of short-term rental inventory into a long-term rental environment, uh, it is— it can only really be achieved by one thing, and that is either by implementing night caps or bans or implementing a higher tariff or a sort of municipal tax. And that is what the local government has decided to do. They've decided to implement a commercial tariff on residential properties that are deemed to be a professional short-term rental let effectively. And there's, there's various thresholds that they're still working on. It hasn't quite been finalized yet. We're in a process of public comments and sort of public participation and engagement, but but it seems as though it will be quite cooperative. And those owners that do choose to, to set their properties up as a short-term rental for the majority of the year will just need to get a registration number, which will be issued by the City of Cape Town, and that will need to be put into the various listing platforms. So there isn't going to be any night caps. I think, you know, certainly in South Africa, we're a developing nation, we We need inbound tourism. We're not over— there might be some times of the year that feels like we're bursting at the seams, but it's really only a problem that we have for a few weeks of the year. So we want to promote tourism, and it certainly seems as though there won't be any onerous night caps being implemented, not only in Cape Town but across South Africa. So we're quite comfortable with the arrangement.

Good. It all seems kind of in order, which is nice because there's other places around the world where it definitely isn't. So, uh, good. And I remember coming down last July, uh, with the family, and we spoke at a scale event in, in South Africa. And I know this was a hot topic, and it's good to see that, what, 9 months later, that is on track, which is, which is very nice. And I got to stay at one of your amazing apartments. So, uh, yeah, very, very good. Love it. And the one thing I remember about the apartment, on the wall, which I've never ever seen in any other apartment, was a Guinness Book of World Records. It was a Guinness Book World Record older. So love seeing that. That's right.

And Mark, you were a wonderful guest. There was no damages after your stay. We didn't have to get Truvie involved. Like, there was none of this kind of thing going on. It was all very clean. You left it beautifully. So you're welcome back anytime.

Fantastic. Now, we, we absolutely loved it. We loved interacting with the, the housekeeper who came every day, and, and the whole, the whole company was, uh, was amazing. It was a great place, and we've told a lot of people about it, uh, and we will definitely— when we come back, when we can get the, get the kids and, uh, get my parents down, uh, we, we will 100% be back to visit. Nick, appreciate it, my man. Thank you so much for coming in. Looking forward to seeing you, uh, next month. It's coming up really, really quick, so appreciate it. Uh, all right, we're gonna let you go. My next, uh, guest has just jumped into the green screen. Everybody please say thank you to Nick in the comments. And yeah, buddy, we'll see you in a couple Bakes. Okay, right, welcome back everybody. I've got another amazing speaker to my right or to my left, however you are watching this. Louise, thank you so much for, for joining us. Um, with like all the other speakers that have been before, we're talking about the Short Stay Summer and our sessions, and you've got an amazing little session on the learning lab stage after lunch. So just give us a little breakdown of, um, what it's going to be about, your company, your journey to getting here, and why you like coming to the Short Stay Summit so much.

Okay, lots of questions there. Um, so I'll start off a little bit about Pickle and what we do, and then that I think will lead on to some of those other points about what we're going to be talking about in the learning Lab. So Pickle is an insurtech company, and we've been around since 2019. And what we do is we specialize in, in various products for the vacation rental market. Now, we started our journey helping homeowners to get the right insurance when they were letting their properties out for short stays, but a couple of years back, we we moved into a slightly different proposition, and it was really born out of COVID when there was a lot of the challenges happening in that market with lockdowns. And we realized that there was an opportunity for cancellations in that market, and, and that's really where the majority of our business is today. So what we do is we look at how property managers can help make more money from having flexible cancellation policies. And we understand how some of the, the dynamic works around that in terms of the different types of customers, different types of properties. And what we do is work to create a new financial model for the property manager to help enable them to sell a 1-week holiday potentially multiple times over Yeah, that's amazing.

Everybody, everybody loves making more money, especially on the back of cancellations. I think there's a lot of owners now all over the world who are watching this live with us and nodding their head going, okay, tell me more. So you've sold them on the, on the principle. So what's your session going to be particularly about? You've got the learning lab stage all to yourself. So what, what are we going to be learning when we come down and watch?

Well, so it's really about that. It's, it's about how cancellations can help drive revenue growth, and we really focus on that revenue growth as well as the downside risk protection as an insurer.

Lovely. So how many years will this be now that you've been coming down to the Short Stay Summit?

I've been there right from the beginning. I'm trying to remember what year it was, but, uh, yeah, Short Stay Show. I mean, so I'm on the, um, the board of the UK Short-Term Accommodation Association, so I I was there from the first year that we started the association and I was there when we decided that we were going to create a show. So that must be getting on for 7 years ago or something like that now. So I've been to each and every one. And so of course I'm a big advocate for it and we're now obviously the biggest show in Europe.

Yeah, yeah, it's phenomenal. So talk to us a little bit about the association. Obviously you've been with it since the, since the start. We've obviously had Mr. Andy Fenner come on earlier talking about it, but from your point of view, why is it important to you? Why did you get involved? Why do you give up your valuable time to be part of this association?

Yeah, so I think that it's, you know, really, we've got a really important sector, and we've got a really important sector that drives a lot of benefit to the tourism market it actually provides a lot of benefit to particularly rural areas where they might be dependent on tourism, and it often gets an unfairly bad press, I think. And so I think that I was, you know, really wanted to be able to help with that. I think in the early days when the Association got started, there were lots of groups that were emerging, you know, the sort of emergence of the individual individual host, for example, who we didn't really feel were very well represented. And we wanted to make sure that all parts of the ecosystem, whether they're platforms, whether they're individual hosts, whether they're rural property managers, could be represented, and that we could start to move the narrative with this, you know, the politicians towards more of an evidence-based approach to looking at what happens in this market, looking at proportionate regulation in this market to make sure that we can still have a market that flourishes and works for everybody. And that's really what I wanted to sort of step in and try and help with in those very early days. And then of course, you know, we've got, you know, just a fantastic group of people on that association that are driving for change there. So it's just been fantastic being part of that journey the whole way through.

Yeah, and we've got a pretty big couple of months coming ahead with a new CEO coming on board and, and all of the things. So it's going to be a busy time. So I'm excited to see what the board put together and what shoot future summits, uh, look like. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's dial it back to a new thing that's coming this year, which is the Icebreaker party. Obviously you are going to be part of it with Pickle, which is, which is amazing. What else is going to be happening? What can we expect from Pickle over the Tuesday and the Wednesday? Have you got anything special that you can line up for us? Anything that you're working on? Any, any sort of new nuggets you can drop, or are you going to keep it all under your, under your hat for when the actual summit is here?

Well, of course, I think I probably need to promote that we've got a drinks a party with Guesty that we're sponsoring. So please drop by and see us there.

When is that? Where is that?

Do you know?

I don't know.

I know when it is. It's the Wednesday night, right? I was preempted.

Wednesday night.

Yeah, I know how busy you are. You just literally get told where to be and who by your many assistants that you have. They give me a list.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's probably dropping quite a big hint there. But, you know, hopefully at some point this year, we're going to be launching some partnerships with PMS platforms for our products, particularly in the cancellation space. And so, you know, we'd obviously— you can hear a little bit more about that in the Learning Lab as well.

Amazing. Well, we're looking forward to it. The Learning Lab is going to be such a busy stage. And obviously we've talked about it already on the live stream. It's only going to be like 8 to 10 tables, like 8 to 10 seats at each table. It's a smaller stage than the bigger one on the main stage, but it's going to be so impactful because it is a case of just getting your, your phone out, your laptop out, your tablet out, your pen and paper out, and just learning and, and all of the things. So, Luis, thank you for joining us. I know you're so busy. Appreciate you taking the time out. I've got my next speaker in the green room ready to go, so I'll let you go. If anybody wants to find out more about Pickle and your good yourself, where should they go? Websites, socials, where can we send people to?

Yeah, so our website is pickle.com, that's pickle.com, and we're on social media as well. We usually either have the handle Pickle, P-I-K-L, or Pickle Insurance. Um, so yeah, please come find us, or obviously come see us at the Learning Lab.

Amazing, thank you so much.

Thanks, Mark.

Hi everybody, welcome back. Another amazing speaker to my right, on my left, however you are viewing— Kate Cox from Guesty. Thank you so much for joining me today for this live stream. We've had loads of people come on, and I'm really excited for this one because this— I was saying to you just very, very quickly in the break room, the green room before we came in— I think this is going to be one of the best sessions of the day. So very, very quickly, just give us a quick breakdown of what is your session going to be about on the main stage, and then just give us a little bit of background about what you've been working on over at Guesty HQ. Very good.

Uh, yes, so my— I'm excited for this panel too, right? So my panel is The Next Frontier. So I'm hosting it, The Next Frontier, a deep dive on AI strategy for short-stay accommodation innovation. And I'm so excited about it because we've got two of the leading experts globally on stage with me. We've got Graham Donoghue from Forge Holiday Group, who, if any of you follow him on LinkedIn or any of the socials, is doing groundbreaking stuff with AI. And I've also got Steve Schwab from Casago, CEO of Casago in the US, who's also doing some really amazing, like groundbreaking marketing using AI. And I'm hoping that we're going to get some really interesting insights that everyone in the audience can take away, like really practical takeaways for, you know, because these guys are obviously be running the biggest property management companies on the planet, but what I'm hoping is they've done the hard work and figured out the stuff that's really working for them, and you can benefit from their learnings and really like get some practical takeaways, uh, on how to do this, um, bring it to your companies and figure out how to make your operations more productive, your team happier, um, and drive more money.

Yeah, it's not often that you're able to get the people like of your level and Graham and Steve on a stage talking about a topic that is so topical at the moment. And this is why it makes really exciting viewing on the main stage, 2 o'clock. So it's going to be a little bit after lunch, so make sure you get into it because obviously you can see a lot of people in that main stage, but this is the one that I feel like people will be backing out to try and see because it is such a topical point. And like you say, Graham and Steve collectively are running two of the biggest companies in our industry and how they are adapting a massive business or businesses to this is going to be very interesting. So that's all well and good. That's the main stage. But I'm interested to know more about what guest is doing at this Short Stay Summit week. You are obviously part of the icebreaker, the icebreaker party, going to be throwing your own party on the night of Wednesday night. We've just had Louise from Pickle who said that she's excited about that as well. Talk to us about Guesty and what you want to get out of, um, get out of these few days over in, uh, over in London for the Short Stay Summit.

Well, listen, I, I'm a Londoner, so I run Guesty's marketing, um, from London. So I'm— I cannot be more excited that the short-term rental industry is coming to my home turf, um, and I get to hang out with, um, all the interesting people in the industry pushing this industry forward, making the future a better place for all of us who are connected to it. So yeah, we're at the Icebreaker. We are holding a drinks party. Follow us on LinkedIn if you want an invite, or come and meet us on the stand. We've also got a coffee cart at our stand this year, and we're giving away free donuts. So if that's not an inducement to come and chat to us, us at the Short Stay Summit, I don't know what is. But we're putting a lot of effort, investment, excitement into the Short Stay Summit because, you know, it's where, it's where we all meet and come up with new ideas. And I know because I was there last year what an excellent event it is going to be. Yeah, yeah, so that's what we're up to.

So make sure you come to the stand. You can get your passes for the party while you're having a donut and chatting to the amazing team there about all things Guesty. Obviously on a marketing front from Guesty, I've noticed this year that there's been a major uplift in the content that you're putting out. I'm loving the case studies that you're doing. I don't know if you've had a hand in that or not. I feel like it's raw, it's perfect, and it looks really well done. What, what other things in the market in front are you trying to achieve in 2026? What's your, like, KPIs and goals that you've got for the brand?

Well, we've got a massive product launch calendar, as usual. Um, we launched 333 features last year, so actually keeping up with our product team and making sure that we're, um, communicating the benefits of all our product innovation. So that's like a big pillar for 2026 marketing. I'm glad you've seen all of the increased activity because we're actually working with a lot of quite interesting AI practices to make that quicker, easier, more productive and real. So really checking all our facts facts and making sure that we don't publish anything that's not true. I think that's one of the big things that I want to dive into with Graham and Steve on the panel. Like, how, how do you use these amazing new technologies and make sure it's accurate and telling the right stuff? So we want to tell people about the benefits of all of our product innovation. We've got a huge track on AI innovation coming throughout, well, 2025 and 2026. We're going to launch a product at the summit which helps customers think about pricing decisions and how to get the maximum revenue. So we'd love to talk to you about that on the booth if you want to come and chat to us. But we've had 8 releases AI releases over the last 18 months. So again, if AI is your thing, come and chat to Guesty about what we're doing and how we might be able to help.

Wow. So soon it's not going to be guesty.com, it's going to be guesty.ai.

Let's say not giving out the dot com.

Can't give up the dot com. But yeah, the trouble with marketing and I speak from this as somebody who loves marketing in 2026 is keeping up with all these product launches. It must be so hard because now with the tools and the skills that we have available to us, the product team are just able to ship so much more quicker. So it's like, how do you keep, keep up? Which obviously this is, this is a Kate problem, being the CMO of a huge, a huge company. Yeah.

And how do we communicate that in a way that, um, people understand, makes the benefit really clear? Um, and remember, we've got amazing customer support team out there who are there to help all our customers, hold them through this journey. Because I agree with you, Mark, that AI is very hard to keep up with. And in fact, if you talk to all of the big AI, you know, players, the people who you think are like really pushing things forward, they will agree that AI is really hard to keep up with. So I think it's about stripping away some of that hype, really focusing and zeroing down on what, what stuff really moves the needle for businesses and actually what, what things you can afford to just let simmer a bit longer until you jump in and get, get involved in those ones. So yeah, I agree with you. I think that that's a major, major play.

Amazing. So seeing that you are a Londoner, we can tell by the accent, we've got a lot of Americans coming over for this, uh, for this week, for this show, uh, for the Short Stay Summit. Um, Mr. Steve Schreiber, you've mentioned him, but there's a, there's a host of Americans that we've tried to— I've had Amanda on earlier, Amanda Hurdle coming over. So seeing that you are a Londoner, I can't think of a better person to ask this question to. You've got 2 days after the Short Stay Summit for a bit of sightseeing around London. Where's the first place that you getting them to go? They're like top secret. This is like Kate's go-to place. Where, where are you sending somebody? Where are you sending them to?

Oh man, that's a tough question.

I only ask tough questions on this show.

You do. I always say get the Uber Boat because we're in the East, right? Um, for the event. So the Uber Boat is a really good way of getting up and down.

Used to be called the Thames Clipper for old school Londoners. I used to live in London a long time ago, uh, 2000 and 2009 to 2010, I used to live out of Canada Water, so I used to get on the Thames Clipper all the time.

It's an excellent, excellent way to see what actually I think is the most underused bit of London, which is the Thames, and do a quick sightseeing tour for the price of an Uber trip. So I always tell overseas visitors, go, go do that. But if anyone overseas wants more specific recommendations, I'm on the booth and come and chat to me because it is one of my favourite things, is sending people to the right restaurants, the right shopping areas in London.

Yeah, that's a really good tip. Jump on. It is so cheap. People don't even realise how cheap it is, but you can literally get from Greenwich, which is way out there, all the way over to jump off at the Houses of Parliament, and it is cost-effective and you get to see all the sights. So love that one.

Even further, it goes even further down, right? It goes to Kew. Um, like, you can even get to Kew Gardens on it. It's a good, good tip.

Yeah, I like that. Okay, we'll end it with that. Kate, thank you so much for jumping in. The next speaker has just jumped in the green room, so I'll let you go. But please do come and see all the things that Guesty are doing. Thank you so much for being part of the icebreaker party. It's going to be a lot of fun. And obviously you've got your drinks as well, and the donuts, and the stand, and the sessions, and the talk. So really looking forward to hearing more at the summit in a couple of weeks' time.

Amazing.

Thanks so much.

Bye-bye.

All right, everybody, welcome back. Another amazing speaker with me to the left or the right, however you are viewing. Simon, thank you so much for joining us over in sunny New York. You're part of the co-founder of Sweetop, and you are going to be part of an amazing panel on the workshop stage on Wednesday morning Can you please break down what the session is about, who you're going to be joined with, and then just give us a little bit of an update of what's happening with Light at Sweetop, please?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a ton for having me on. Really excited to be doing this. It's a great warm-up ahead of the conference for both ourselves, I think, and people will be attending. So first, I guess, a couple of words about, you know, the conference itself and why we're attending. I mean, obviously it feels like April is going to be really the short stay month and the short stay, specifically that short stay week with so much happening. And we're going to be attending a few of the events happening throughout the month. And the talk we're going to be having with some great folks, with Yannick from Smooboo, Bart from Otorank, and Allan from Boom is going to be around how to utilize AI in your workflow, specifically your operations, your guest experience, your guest operations in general, while ensuring that you don't just see it as a pure replacement for what is otherwise filled with human touch and human interaction. And so I think we're going to— it's going to be a fascinating podcast because while the topic is is very much AI, I think the topic will actually have to be centered a lot on, on what is human touch left that, that you can apply in this space at that stage.

Yeah, it's a big, uh, it is a big talking point at the moment because if, you know, you only have to open up your favorite social media of choice and everybody's talking about AI, AI, AI. But again, this is why I'm really excited to see what the four of you have to say, because if you look at what industry are in short-term rental is hospitality, right? And at the end of the day, we're selling a good night's sleep. I've always said this, and a great experience for your, for your host, right? So how do you keep that hospitality aspect in an industry that is, you know, got a shiny object called AI, automations, workflows? This is the product that you are selling as well. So how do you— yeah, how do you get around all of that is going to be Yeah, fascinating. Like, you come at this as well from somebody that started off as a property manager in the management game. So how, like, how are you going to bridge this topic? What sort of nuggets are you looking to bring to the, to the panel alongside Bart and Alon?

So I think what's, what's obviously really exciting about, uh, to your point, you're open effectively any web page now, and, uh, all that you read about is, uh, AI. And there's this, I think, constant feeling, oh my God, am I feeling— am I like being left behind here? If I'm not doing the new thing that was released today on LinkedIn. And so I think it's interesting because things have moved fast and so the questions have also changed. Like a year ago, people were really saying the industry is going to split into two things. It's going to split into operators that use AI and operators that don't. And I think we're past this question completely. I think now, you know, everybody is experimenting with it. Some may be using it better than others. I think the playing field is going to level out over time. I think really the segments that we're looking, that we're seeing now is actually a bit of a three-way split. The way I look at it, there's going to be hosts that use AI to try and automate truly everything with little to no human in the loop.

Loop.

You know, the guest gets a code, clean bed, simple digital experience. No one really ever talks, like heads into beds, right? Like the sort of initial prescriptive hospital of hotels. And while that's great for margins, and some guests I think do want that, I think that this is going to be like what we currently see as economy travel. That's what it's going to be. It's not necessarily going to be a cheaper property. It's just going to be a property where where a human doesn't really touch the experience. There's going to be like the hosts that are going to be a bit in the middle where they duct tape AI on their workflows and try and like say, oh, you know, I'm going to put like 3 things together. I'm going to like push it to a spreadsheet and I'm going to like have a bunch of Slack reminders all day. And the problem with that is that they're like, they're automating part of their experience, but they're drowning because of the lack of automations between these different experiences. And I think that that's sort of where a lot of the industry is finding itself now. And I think I think that's a segment that's actually going to disappear fast. I think the future of hospitality in many ways is going to be that hosts are going to become guest experience curators, where AI really needs to handle everything that the guest either never sees or never really understands is necessarily handled by AI. Schedules, monitoring, pricing, screening, a lot of the logistics. But humans are going to be freed up to curate experiences is leveraging data collected by, uh, you know, automated tools. Um, and that's going to be the new segment of like luxury, uh, or higher-end experiences.

I think I really like that because that's such a nice, nice way of looking at it. Because the other angle that I heard, and we were both at the Manchester Scale event in November, somebody got on stage and says, how do we prevent from being glorified cleaners? Which is the other angle, right? I like guest creator more than glorified cleaners. This is nothing against cleaners, but, uh, you know, you don't get into this game— I mean, I've, I've changed so many bunk beds over the years and cleaned so many toilets, I don't need to do that anymore. Like, how do we prevent from doing that and becoming— I love that, guest creators. I like that angle. Please bring that to the stage because that is a, a real nice way to say you can alleviate your time to give your guests the best experience, and you will be that, that creator. Fantastic. So like you said, there's a lot going on in the week, not just the Short Stay Summit. Give us a little breakdown of where else you're going to be popping up in, in London town outside of the Short Stay Summit.

Yeah, well, I mean, we're going to be heading to the Short Stay Summit at the beginning of April of that week. I think it's the 22nd. I will be heading to an event with Host Planet and James. Very excited for that. I believe it's the next day, actually. So hopefully we'll meet many of you there. And then Hostella is going to be effectively that same week. So it's going to be packed. I feel like I was in Hostella just now in Austin a few months ago, and it's happening again. So yeah, it's going to be a packed week. It's funny what you just mentioned. In November, people were talking about November feels like 7 years ago in this new world where time is diluted, is diluted. But I think like to some extent, what I frown upon when people say, and we're going to become glorified cleaning companies, is actually we're going to empower our cleaners, our people on the ground to be able to deliver an experience Whereas today a cleaner spends 20% of their time sending messages to HQ about what room they should do next, or there's still a guest in the room, or how do I find those supplies, or where's the inventory? Like that 20% unlock, that's going to define what's next. How do you use it? Do you use it to, you know, make your balance sheet look nicer? Or do you use it to elevate the stay? So I think it's, in fact, we're going to become definitely more operationally focused, but that operations can be leveraged in two ways. You can either become indeed a cleaning company and just do the strict minimum, or you can actually become a curator.

I like that. And a little mention to James Varley. He's going to be on the stage before you on the workshop stage. He's going to be talking about to survive in the realities of hosting, which is what I love about having sessions in, uh, in the UK. You've got really nice big, uh, fluffy sessions talking about all of the cool things, and then you've got like the grit where you've got like, you know, Jamie Miles from Anglesey, you've got Margaret from Liverpool, you've got Jermaine from Pastakies as we're talking about all of the things. So I love that. And plus as well, what I love about London and the Short Stay Summer is you don't normally get this, but we've got actual members of parliament coming in. And, you know, you're going to get a chance to see on the main stage, there's going to be big, big talks talking about regulations and all of that stuff. And then, you know, you've got, uh, the learning lab stage where you've got all the things going on as well. So, uh, Simon, thank you so much for jumping on. It is going to be a very, very busy week, busy month, like you've, uh, like you said. So thanks for joining us. Between now and then, what are you, what are you working on? What are you working over there in New What do you got planned up your sleeve for Sweetop? What can you share?

I mean, we're, yeah, no, I'm happy to. I mean, I think we are constantly rethinking our entire architecture. That's what any company should do today. If you're bolting on features onto your existing products to make it sound like you have an AI narrative, I think you are going to be partially left behind. So I think on a monthly basis, we understand what new things have come out that enable us to work 2, 3, 4, 5 times faster. And when I mean architecture, I mean both the product where how can we involve a lot more autonomous agents across the product in order to develop, unlock new things for operators, but also about how we work. Work architecturally at the company, like the tools we use every day, how, you know, 6 months ago, somebody in onboarding was focused on purely onboarding customers, and now they're coding tools to make their onboarding experience for customers better. So I think it's rethinking that constantly and not waiting to act on it just because you're potentially concerned that things may change again in 2 weeks.

That's mad that the whole team now is coding. I love it. Listen, so to everybody that's tuning in live, please drop a thank you, Simon, for jumping on. But we're also giving away a ticket. I've gone and bought a ticket for the Short Stay Summit. I'm going to give it away. All you have to do is comment the word ticket, whether you're watching on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, just comment the word. And while you're doing it, drop a share on here so we can spread the word. So we're trying to get as many people as possible to the Short Stay Summit. Summer. This is why we're doing this mega livestream. It's why we're doing all of the things and all of the promo. Um, I feel like 1,500 has been the max that we've ever had. So if we can top that, that'd be phenomenal. So, and obviously the SuiteUp booth would thank you for it as well, because that means more people coming around and, uh, and saying hi to Simon and the crew. How many team members are you bringing down to you to London?

We're, we're going to bring, uh, at least 4 of us. So I'll be there myself, myself, I'm, I think, very excited to also meet a lot of customers on the booth. We have so many partners in the UK. It's been an incredible market for us. And so we'll be sure to use that not just to meet new people, but to make sure our existing partners are fully leveraging the product.

Good. And this is the problem when you talk on podcasts like this and, you know, live streams and you go to events and stuff and they start to hear, oh, you're from like America. Oh, you can only, surely that means that you can only look after American customers. I get it all the time with this accent and my domain, which is a.co.uk. When I speak to somebody in America, like, oh, you can't help me because you're over in the UK. But no, it is worldwide. So, and obviously that is so awesome to see that you've got a lot, a lot of customers over in the UK. Simon, thanks for joining. We look forward to seeing you in, in a couple of weeks' time. It's going to absolutely fly by. Uh, please everybody say thank you to Simon. I've got the next guest speaker that's just joined my green room, so I'm going to go and grab them and I'll be back in 20 seconds. Thank you very much, Simon.

Thank you so much. See you all at the Short Stay Summit and in London.

And okay, welcome back everybody. I've got an amazing speaker to my right, my left, however you you are viewing. Sally, thank you so much for joining us on this very special mega cast livestream about the Short Stay Summit. How are you?

How are you today?

I'm very well, thanks, Mark. Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here, excited for all this activity going on.

Yeah, we've had amazing sessions so far, and we're still going. We've got a few more to go before we let everybody go for the day. But can you please just break down a little bit about your, your session? Very quickly before we jumped on, I said you've got a very unique session because it's like 3 sessions in 1 that's going on. But talk about the main stage, talk about the data, talk about the data hour for us, please.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what a way to start the show with some data. So I think the current market means that data is really prevalent right now. So we're starting off, Eddie and I will do a global overview of what's happening. I'm going to dive in with the UK-specific insights and highlights. We're going to be diving under the hood a little to see what is actually happening in the UK. How we can help property managers. And then those headlines from both these, the global macro view and the very specific UK view, we're going to feed into an expert data panel so that we can bring the experts on and say, okay, how are we actually going to respond to this? How do we help hosts and property managers react and navigate through this market to all these changes we're seeing in the data right now?

Yeah, you're going to be joined by some heavy hitters in the industry. Walk us through who's going to be joining you on, on stage at 11:15.

Yeah, so we've got Maria from Beyond and beyond. Um, we've got Vered from Guesty, we've got Martha from AirDNA, and we've got Thibault from PriceLab. So such a wealth of knowledge and expertise, and it's a not-to-miss slot for, uh, for how to best navigate through and use some of these data trends we're going to share and say, how can we help you with your business?

So give us a little sneak peek. I've seen you've been posting on LinkedIn about the data, especially in the UK. What's, uh, obviously like lot could happen in these next few weeks. But what's like the early data for 2026 showing from, from your, from, from your viewpoint?

Yeah, we're seeing demand's fairly flat. Um, it's not disappeared, it's just, it's just flatter and it's coming later. So effectively, um, having a spontaneous or the ability to attract a spontaneous booker is now, should be just part of the DNA of how you can go out and get those those guests. So how do you stand out? How do you react to some of these macro factors that we're seeing? People, we're seeing prices hold really strongly right now, and that's what's keeping revenue up. So how do we help navigate through what we're seeing is quite a late market where normally we see pressure on prices, but the market is just later? So how do we make sure we keep those ADRs, those sort of average daily rates, up? And how do we not get that pressure? And we're also seeing a shift away from direct bookings to the OTA. So how do we help help navigate that. We're seeing cancellations increase. I'll share some data there. What gets rebooked? These are just extra factors that I think the current environment, it doesn't feel like it's going to change immediately. So how do we help operators respond to this so that they have some confidence in how they approach as we come up to peak?

Yeah, I think like you say, there's a trend that's been emerging, and I feel like the trend is not a trend anymore, it's just the thing.

Yeah, it's pretty normalised. It's what we saw through 2025. Shorter durations, tighter booking windows, but it does mean there's opportunities that as we head into some of these peak holiday periods, people are still yet undecided. So you can go and grab that. People are still booking, it's just that demand is flatter, people are staying for shorter durations, so you've got to sell more to stand still in terms of your occupancy. And people are being a little bit more discerning, which is only natural in the current environment. So how do you go and grab that? That late booker.

Yeah, because you've got all the people that have booked to go to the Middle East, they're getting cancelled left, right, and centre. So they're now getting a plan B for all of the things that's obviously playing a factor. People, staycations, you know, obviously we talk about staycations a lot, that's going to be a thing. But you obviously don't just think about the people in the UK, you're going to have a lot of people from Europe who are maybe planning to go to the Middle East who are also looking at the UK. And, you know, say what you want about about, uh, the United Kingdom, uh, it's gonna be decent weather-ish. You're gonna get a bit of rain, but, uh, you're not going to get any crazy weathers or anything like that. And, you know, it's just a solidly good place to come. And we're obviously very biased because we live here and we love it here, uh, but I feel like there's no better time to be vacationing in the UK than it is from maybe like April, May, June, July. So it's all good. So excited to see that. And yeah, I've been that in many of your sessions over the years, and especially at the summer. And it is good because it's, you know, for anybody that is attending and listening, it's a chance to get like a head start on everybody else, all of your competition. So if you are down and you're up early in the summer at Old Billingsgate, then make sure you do head over to the main stage. It's going to kick off at 10:45 AM for a solid hour. So it's going to be a good one. Loads of good people on there, but that's not the only thing that you guys are doing that week. Talk to us about the plan for the week of the Shorts Day week, as we're now calling it.

Yeah, so the day before the summit, we'll be at the Association lunch at the House of Lords, and we work with a lot of associations, giving them access to our data. So it'd be great to connect with associations from around the world. Then we'll be at the Shorties the night before, so we'll be celebrating all those achievements in the industry. Obviously the summit, and then the day after we'll be at Hostella, so we'll be meeting with the whole European best of Hostaway. So a really jam-packed week full of short-term rental activities. So it's really exciting, and we'll be having lots of fabulous conversations, meeting with clients, meeting with prospects, and just sharing some of these data views that we can help people with.

Yeah, we've been speaking to a few people earlier on the live who are coming over from America, and like I've said, for the first time I've really noticed that a large majority of Americans are jumping over the pond to come to this, uh, this summit because it's not just a one-off event anymore. It is a full week with all the fringe events that are going as well, which is great. So we're looking forward to it. Looking forward to seeing you. Looking forward to seeing the team. Uh, what is Keydata working on? I've asked everybody this. Ask them to like see if they can spill any secrets. What's the plan for 2024? What can, what can you reveal?

We have product updates coming out every single week, Mark. We are, we are working tirelessly. Probably the most interesting one at the moment, it wraps around the theme of AI, but our latest release of AI allows you to use AI to either build your dashboards for you or to analyze the dashboards that are there. So that next step of saying, here's the data, what does it actually mean and what actions do we recommend? And that's just been released. So we're getting a lot of great feedback about that.

Yeah. For somebody speaking totally personal, I look at numbers and it just flies over my head. I like it where you can go, right, here's some numbers, here's what to do. And does it come with nice little pretty pictures? I visualize this 100%.

100%. It's amazing. It's very graphically pleasing. Yeah.

Nice. There you go. I love all of that. All right. Amazing. Sally, I'm going to let you go. I know you're super, super busy. We've got our next speaker has just joined the green room. Thank you very much, and we see you in a few weeks in London town.

Amazing, look forward to it. Thanks so much, Mark.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

All right everybody, welcome back. Another amazing speaker to my right, on my left, however you are tuning in from this. Uh, James, thank you so much for joining us, part of the Fodge Holidays Group. You have got a pretty cool session. We've just been very, very quickly chatting while it was just that little break there on who you're going to be with. Do you want to just break down what's happening on the workshop stage, a little bit about your, your session and, and like who you're going to be with?

Yeah, so we're, uh, we, we are speaking about how to thrive in a suppressed market, right? So something that's definitely relevant to lots of property owners out there. They've been seeing some challenging trading. And we're going to talk about strategies for pricing, making sure you're still growing despite difficult markets, how it can be sustainable, and moving beyond occupancy into sort of real profitable business. So it should be an exciting, exciting one, I think.

Yeah, we've got people coming in from all over the world, which is cool for your, for your panel. Obviously Scott is coming over from the USA, you've got Oliver Stern who is American but obviously lives over here, and obviously obviously, uh, you've got Jessica Gilliman who's UK-based, and obviously you're UK-based out of the Northwest. So I'm excited for this one, uh, because there's going to be lots of different viewpoints from, from this. Like, what angle have you sort of thinking of to come for when you're going to be on the panel here? Well, how are you sort of trying to bridge this, do you reckon?

Yeah, well, my experience comes, I guess, as both an owner, uh, because the Forge Holiday Group owns a number of own units through its Forest Holidays business, and then as obviously somebody who represents other owners and tries to drive the right bookings and income for them. So got a bit of a mixed perspective, which I think I can bring to the panel. And there's obviously some dynamics that we can talk about, talk about there. And at the minute we're talking a lot about how do we make sure that we're, you know, protecting rate but using other tools to drive in the booking volumes and incomes that we need. So I think that'll be Yeah, good addition.

How many Short Stay Summits now have you been attending over the years? Like, what number is this?

This will actually only be my third. So I had a change of industry a few years ago, so I'm a relative newcomer to it, which is quite exciting. I came along last year, saw some excellent panels last year, yours included, and I'm really impressed with the quality of it. So I thought, why not put my name forward to get involved this Yeah, good, good.

And like, uh, how, how much, or what are you looking forward to, to seeing this year? Obviously there's going to be a, a lot of speakers coming from all over the world, there's a lot of panels, there's even more being added with the Learning Lab. Is there any, anything on the agenda that you're looking forward to, uh, to checking out personally?

Well, personally I'm always interested in the, um, the technol— technology related stuff, so I'm interested to hear some of the little snippets we'll get get around AI and things like that. The bit I liked the most actually was just drifting around and seeing the exhibitors and speaking to some of the people that were there actually, because that was a real good opportunity for me to network, which is something that is a changer in industry that was useful to do and made some good contacts, some great suppliers and like different companies that I would have not spoken to actually. So that was the best bit for me.

Yeah, but there is a lot of AI. I know obviously Graham, who is, who is your boss, is going to be there speaking with Stephen Schwab on AI. We had a little sneak peek of that session earlier on, and it is shaping up to be probably one of the standout ones of the— on the main stage over there. And yeah, there's all little bits that are going on, but you're right, I feel like the main draw for me, because it is just one day, it's fast, it's furious, it's everything that you can imagine from a one-day conference. And it is one that, again, you get to see a lot of people that you're normally just chatting to to on LinkedIn, etc. And, and there is, there's a lot of fun to be had. Obviously, there's, uh, there's all the things that are going on outside of the actual summit itself, and we've heard from all of those, uh, earlier on throughout the, throughout, throughout the live stream. And, and for yourself, um, with the Forge Group, what have you been working on? I know obviously Graham is big on his AI. Uh, I was saying to you just a little bit earlier, I get updates quite a lot, but what is on the horizon for the Forge Group this year? Is there anything you can share? I'm trying to get this out of everybody who's tuning in me today, seeing if there's any little sneak peeks or anything that's coming down the line.

Yeah, well, as you're aware, we do do a lot with AI, right? And trying to embed that throughout our business is a good piece. It's purely around driving efficiency and capability, right? And both of those things are to try and benefit both our forest business and also our wider owner pool, right? The leaner we are and the better we are, the better that is for everyone. So that's a big piece. And for me, for me personally, I'm relatively new in my role. So we've been looking at how do we make sure that our revenue management basically best reflects the needs of our owners. There's always niggles with every, every system that everyone has in process. And for me, it's about starting to speak to those owners, understand what it is that we are doing well, the areas we can drive and improve, and hopefully to be able to bring the sophistication of our revenue management to that next level. So we've already got quite a bit of development and sophistication around those revenue management systems, but there's more we can do, particularly using some of the machine learning techniques and hopefully starting to get to embed some of the generative AI on the front end of it to be able to communicate why we're making some of those price recommendations that we're making to our owners. Because it can be complicated when you're sitting there across, you know, one or multiple sites and you can see the price change in a certain week and why has that happened. So there's all sorts of really cool stuff we're looking at there.

Nice. And does, does the Forge Group, does it have a booth at the summit or do you just freely roam around?

It's a good question, actually. We normally do have a booth. It's normally Sykes branded, which is obviously one of our, one of our brands. I assume that's the case, but I haven't actually checked before this. So if you come looking for us and you can't find me, maybe just look for my face instead. But we do, we do normally have a booth there.

So yeah, yeah. So if you want to come and find James, you're just gonna have to be at the workshop stage in the afternoon. So it's going to be— absolutely, it's going to be 3:35. Just had a quick look there, 3:35 to 4 o'clock. So coming towards the end of the day, uh, after you. There's only like one session afterwards. And so, and then after that, we all be heading to the, to the bar and to the pub for a wee drink, which will be, uh, which will be good. So listen, thank you very much for for joining us. You've got an amazing panel that you are going to be part of, and the whole day will hopefully be good. Appreciate you coming on and looking forward again to seeing your talk and all of the things that are going to be on with Forge Group throughout 2026. Cheers, James.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. All right everybody, welcome back. We're back again with another amazing speaker. Is this your first time speaking? Speaking at the ShopStay Summit, Steph?

It is, yes, it is. I'm really excited about that.

Good. Well, congratulations, first-time speaker, which is awesome. So give a little background— who you are, where you're from in the world, what do you do for a living— and then we'll dig into your session a little bit.

Okay, okay. So I'm Steph, I'm the owner and founder of Rural Cleans and Rural Stays based in North Yorkshire, and we've operational for the last 11 years servicing holiday rentals and managing them.

Yeah, nice. Very, very, very good. I've seen you on the circuit for a long time now, which is great. So to finally have you on stage, on the workshop stage, sharing your expertise is going to be good. And you've got a real good session. We're just very, very quickly talking about it before we hit live and came on. We've got a panel of Turno, Breezeway, we've got Matthew Durant from i4me and your good self. And you'll be talking about how to sleep Better at Night by Optimising Property Operations and Management. So tell me a little bit about this, about what you're looking to bring to the panel. Have you had any ideas to think about what you're going to be saying? And just give us, like, share a bit of expertise on that, if you don't mind.

So from a housekeeping perspective, I think obviously it works really well with being on with Bruce Way and Turno because they all gel together. We can have the best cleaners in the world, but if you don't have systems and processes, then everything can fall, it'll fall apart very, very quickly. So, over the years, after making lots of mistakes, trials and tests, we have built a system in-house where we, everything is systemised right from the moment we take on a new cleaner. It takes a long time to train them, and hopefully that if we can build them up up with a good skill set that they will hopefully stay for quite some time. And if not and they move on, that they are going to carry on them good practices to whether they set their own business up or they can transfer them skills to somewhere else.

Class. How many times have you been down to the Short Stay Summer over the years? Have you been like quite a few times now or how many times you've been down, come down from the north?

This is literally my first rodeo. So it's been a case of always wanting to come and always being either too busy, I suppose, or not being able to purchase a ticket last minute. So to have this opportunity is— yeah, I'm really excited.

So what made you put your name forward? How did that come about? Because obviously, like being a first-time speaker, there's an opportunity to put your name down. What made you reach out? What made you get in touch?

It was a good friend, Alistair, that had actually tagged me first of all to turn around and be like, look at this, this is something that you need to do. And I just thought, you know what, this year is the year that I want to try and get out there, you know, get noticed. And yeah, so I just thought, you know what, I'm just going to jump in.

Let's give Alistair a shout out. What's his— what's his name?

Alastair Mullins. Alastair Mullins, founder of Luxury Cottages. I've known Alastair for a good maybe 9, 10 years now, so we've chatted of many things over the years. Yeah, so it's quite nice to have somebody in the industry that you've kind of like grown, evolved with, and watched him evolve as well.

Amazing. So Alistair Mullins, if you are watching, there you go. Thank you very much for the assist. Now Stephanie's going to be on stage speaking with some industry legends. We've got Chris Rull, customer experience at Turner. We've got the amazing Aga of Breeders' Voice, and I think obviously we've said as well Matthew Durant as well. So that's going to be 11:45 on the workshop stage. But this is a first year, so obviously you're going to be coming down to London, uh, you're going to be arriving at Old Billingsgate. It's it's a big old venue, uh, you've got lots of people to see and things to do. Like, what's, what's your plan for the day? What are you looking to get out for coming down to the summit outside of your talk? What's your big goal?

Um, okay, so I'm really looking to be able to connect with, um, owners, potential owners who are interested in coming but they're not quite sure yet, those that are already in the industry, you know, within, within my not even just my area, you know, nationwide. But I'm looking to connect with, with lots of owners and see if we can help them with their properties, move forward and help them with their operations. There may be a case that, you know, they've got a really, really good loyal cleaning team, but there's just things that are getting missed and they need a little bit of help, maybe some consultancy, to make it it better. I'm very much a people person and I love building teams. So it's not even just like building my own teams. I've helped quite a few people over the years now where they've got, they have cleaning teams and they just, they weren't optimized for the way that they needed to be. Worked with them for a good couple of months and then them cleaning teams now are absolutely flying and the holiday properties are doing really, really well. They've got out of the rut of maybe like negative reviews, but things that can be easily fixed with just a bit of tweaking and like processing things. So yeah, so any, any owners really that I'm really keen to connect with, any OTAs that actually maybe want to pass some work our way, um, you know, you might as well shoot your shot, Stephanie.

You might as well shoot your shot. Well Uh, listen, we've got Chris coming in very, very soon. I've just seen him join the green room, who's going to be on stage with you. So it's a perfect little segue. Steph, thank you so much. If anybody wants to find out more about you, how is the best way to get in contact? Is it LinkedIn? Is it email? Like, what's the, what's the best way?

Yeah, LinkedIn and Instagram is probably where I'm most, uh, most active.

So give the Instagram A plug, what's the handle?

Uh, Rural Cleans.

Just Rural Cleans, love it. Listen, Steph, massively appreciate you taking time out your busy calendar to jump on with us to promote the summit. Everybody please say thank you to Steph in the comments. I'm gonna go have a quick break, uh, I'm gonna go get Chris set up and we'll be back here in about 30 seconds with the next session. All right, Steph, thank you very much.

Thank you for having me.

Cheers, Mark.

All right, welcome back everybody. We're a couple hours in now to this live stream and I've got another amazing speaker to my right or my left, however you are seeing this. We've got Chris from Turno. Chris, thank you so much, uh, for joining us, uh, today. Um, first time that we've been on a, on a podcast together, which, which is nice. So I really appreciate it. Give us a little breakdown of where you are in the world, what you do at Turno, and then we'll dive into your session on the workshop stage.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so yeah, so my name is Chris. Um, I'm the vice president of customer experience here at Turno. Essentially what that means is my teams are, uh, responsible for sort of all of our customer-facing actions. So our customer support team, our award-winning customer support team, our customer success teams, we have an operations team, our sales team. So everyone sort of kind of reports up into this major customer experience organization that I lead here. I personally am in Denver. Our teams are global. We have folks in South America, we have folks all spread out throughout the United States, we have folks in Europe. So we have teams all over the world that report up, not just within my organization, but with Interno overall.

So amazing. What I love about today's live session is that we've had a lot of folks trying to tune in from over the pond in, in America. And I've said to quite a few now of our American hosts and moderators is that it is amazing to me this year the amount of people that are on stage or not on stage that are flying in for this event, because it's not normal for a one-day event to get so much attention worldwide. We've got Nick Taylor coming all the way up from South Africa, which is insane. We've got yourself coming in from Denver. We've got Margot coming in from San Francisco and everybody further afield. So it's great for Terno.

Speaking obviously from the brand, what makes the Short Stay Summit like one of the ones that you just have to be Yeah, yeah, you know, I think, I think for Terno, one of the, you know, we've had a lot of incredible success, you know, on the host side in our marketplace with cleaners and contractors in the United States and Canada and sort of North America. But we're seeing a lot of pull and velocity and momentum in our European and UK market. Markets. And so, you know, UK has almost very quickly become sort of our second largest market, you know, behind the United States, and so, and is continuing to grow. And so, you know, this is an opportunity to, number one, like, make sure that, you know, that one of the things we hear a lot is like, I didn't even know who Terno was, right? And a lot of that is just because we're sort of still new into these areas. But, you know, as a marketplace, it's, you know, this flywheel starts to happen where more, more hosts get on the marketplace, more contractors get on the marketplace, and, you know, we continue to grow very quickly when that happens. And so we want to lean into that and we want to invest in that and be here. We're sending, like I said, I think we're sending 4 or 5 people from Terno here, most of US, European, you know, folks that we have on the team. And it's a big opportunity to meet our existing customers as well as potentially new ones who are looking to, you know, solve those operational challenges of both from a software and a boots on the ground, you know, perspective, right? I think that's the, that's the thing that we specialize in.

So yeah, no, absolutely. The team is always well represented at the summits. I've been going for many years now and there's always been a fantastic team. So looking forward to seeing you all again. Let's very quickly talk about the workshop, say and the session that you are going to be a part of. We've just had one of your fellow panelists, Stephanie, with us. Can you just shed any light into the session, uh, what you're hoping to get out of it, and what expertise can you bring to it? Obviously there's yourself, uh, there's Aga from Breezeway, Matthew is going to be moderating it, and Stephanie from, from Rural Clean. So it's a nice little, little mix there. How— what are you looking to bring to the, to the panel personally?

Yeah, you know, I think You know, operations and sort of the executional side of both cleanings, maintenance, right, inventory replenishment, all this stuff that sort of you don't realize, I think, when you get into short-term rentals and you start to even scale as a property manager, or even if you're managing your own. You know, I've heard the quote multiple times, right? Like, I thought I was getting into a short-term rental investment. I didn't realize I was getting into the cleaning business, right? Or the maintenance business, right? And I think that it's a true thing. It's what drives sort of 5-star reviews. It's sort of this, you know, table stakes thing that is still a very, you know, a very heavy lift on many folks inside of the industry, right? And so, you know, I'm really excited to talk a lot about some of the software operational things that are happening within the short-term, you know, with a lot of new technology, AI, things along those lines, like you can sort of build your own custom operational stacks much easier than ever. But I think the bigger challenge is still, you know, who's going to do the work in the property, right? And how do you ensure quality? And how do you ensure, you know, you can, you can, when, when you need people, they're there, and you have the backup systems, and you have the ability to flex. And so, I think that it's, you know, it's a lot more than just a software problem. It is very much a human problem. And I think that that's what people sort of miss, right? It's like, oh, I'm going to go grab some software and that will just fix all of my operational challenges, right? It tends to be much more complex than that.

Yeah. You are right. And it's such an interesting Interesting thing you mentioned software. We've had a lot of people on today talking about a mixture of things including AI, and obviously Terno is providing a, a solution, a software solution to help humans, right? That's, that's basically what you guys are doing. With everything that's going on, like, how is Terno, um, sort of pivoting? How is Terno sort of 2026? What does Terno look like in 2027? What have you— what are the conversations that are happening behind, behind the scenes? So that you're right, anybody can spin up an AI whatever, but how are you, uh, making sure that your customers, your people that are being part of your software, your solution, and prospects as well are going to be looked after in 2026, 2024? What can you share? What's the little nuggets that Turno are cooking up?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, a lot of this stuff is probably going to launch a little bit more in, in, uh, in the US in 2026 and will continue to grow internationally. But, you know, we, you know, we believe that the challenge again is a lot more sort of people-based with what we're trying to solve operationally. And so that means within this year, we will be launching multiple product lines that increase our service offerings. So things like maintenance, dispatching, and inventory replenishment. And, you know, curb-to-curb or trash pickup, you know, on top of the cleaning, right? These are all these sort of like boots on the ground, you know, things need to be done physically at a property type of work that we're going to be launching, right? We're going to be extending the service offering not just to be the cleaning but to be the entire full stack for both property managers and individual hosts who want to use us, right? And, you know, that means leaning into, yes, we're going to continue to improve our software offering if that's what you want to use. But we also lean into things like APIs and opening up our ability to say, hey, if you want to just write to us and use our, you know, find folks on the marketplace and dispatch them as you need through a different connecting software operationally, by all means, like do that, right? Our strength is something that's very difficult to build, which is as a marketplace of trusted humans, right?

I love that. So you know what's crazy? And I just literally thought of that, like calling APIs, it's things that we do in Boostly all the time. Like, how crazy would it be that in the very near future, it could be that you could have an agent, an AI agent calling a human to do like a kind of like rent a human, which would be madness to sort of think about.

Yeah. I mean, it's— you would— you think it's mad. It's happening. We have people who are writing to our APIs today who are, you know, they go out, they find their teams, they put them onto, you know, they're inside of the software, inside of Turno. And then they don't necessarily use Turno as the main operating platform that they're that they're leveraging. They sort of use something else, but they're using us to read and write, you know, the conversations and the engagement and the checklists and the project types and everything along those lines. So yeah, it's absolutely happening today. And we want to lean into it because we think that like, you know, yes, we've created great software, there's great software that exists all throughout the industry. But, you know, one of the things I hear from operators specifically is they all are very unique. They all have their own unique ways of doing things, all their properties are unique, right? And so essentially, What they're saying is, I would rather build software or find a solution that fits me versus me trying to fit into what software solution you're offering. That's not every— that's not everyone, but yeah, it exists, right? And we want to be there for it.

I feel it's very good. I mean, it's very good to have that mindset and mentality going into this year because I don't know, I just feel like in a year everyone's going to be talking about this even more than what we are today. So it's good to see. Listen, I don't know if it came up on the live, but my wife is calling me, so I have to end this livestream at some point today. And I feel like that is probably her cue to saying get downstairs and stop being live. Chris, I really appreciate you coming on. Look forward to seeing you in person as well as the whole Turno team in a couple of weeks. Listen, thank you very much for joining us.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Mark. Appreciate the time.

Take care. All right. With that being said, because my wife is calling, that's it. This is the end of the live stream. I've got to get downstairs. She keeps calling me. So thank you so much to all of our speakers that joined me today. Thank you very much to tuned in live with us wherever you are in the world. Going for a few hours now. I can literally hear the kids downstairs screaming. So with that being said, we're going to end the live stream. If you want to win a ticket ticket, comment the word ticket. If you've missed it, hit the replay. If you're watching on the replay, put hashtag replay. Love to see you on the replays. And just get down to London, 22nd of April. It is going to be an unbelievable day, but an unbelievable week. There is so much going on. So wherever you are, whether you're in the United Kingdom, whether you're over in Ireland, whether you're over in Europe or America, you know the place to be. It's not called the Short Stay Summer anymore. It's called the Short Do not stay weak. My name is me, Mark Simpson, founder of Boostly. All the podcasts, all the videos, giving hosts the tools, the tactics, the training, and the confidence to get more bookings, all that good stuff. And I'll see you all and all your faces in London in a few weeks' time. If you haven't yet got a ticket for the icebreaker, do so because I've got a lot, a lot of things planned. It is going to be unbelievable. I will say more and more Get your ticket, see you in a few weeks. Having a blast, gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee, cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf. Making up those rhymes, don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect, you better put direct. Mmm, here are the words in the podcast, that's what comes next.