Streamlining Stays: How ChargeAutomation Delivers a Slick Guest Experience

Hi, welcome back to the Boostly Podcast. The podcast that gives you the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly the confidence so you can go out there and get more direct bookings. Today we're shining the spotlight on a service which you need to know about. If you're in the short term rental industry or in the boutique hotels industry, there's this service basically is going to help you and we do this every few episodes on the Boostly podcast where we talk about services which in hospitality there's a lot of different tech out there. So we want you to know what the tech is, what it does and why you should use it. So today we've got a special guest, we've got Flo, he's the Chief Revenue Officer from Charge Automation and we're going to be diving into what Charge Automation is and how it can help you. So welcome along Flo. Thank you for joining me.

Thanks Liam. Thanks for the opportunity to present what we're doing.

Thank you. So, first question, always start with the end in mind. What do you want people to take away from this about Charge Automation? How do you want them to remember you in this episode of the Boostly podcast?

Mostly I want them to remember that we exist. We keep joking that we are the best kept secret in the industry. So I've been in this industry for about 10 years, joined the company about two months ago and we've got several tens of thousands of properties in our portfolio. And several times now when we demoed, when I joined, demoed demos with clients or potential clients. Some reactions were, hey, this is really slick, this is amazing. How come I've never heard of you guys? And I think this honestly in a nutshell, I just want to spread the word that we exist. We'll talk about what we do. But yeah, ideally that, hey, there's a company out there called Charge Automation that's could be quite helpful.

I like that you've dangled the carrot as to. I want to find out more. Before we do ask that question, I just want to pose a slightly different one. Why is the problem that Charge Automation solves important to you?

So I think it links in really well actually what Boostly focuses on and I think we've got a really interesting love hate relationship in our industry with solution providers. Everyone loves and hates their PMS, the Airbnbs and booking.com that we can't live without. But yeah, you do obviously a great job in helping people get non ota revenue. And we focus one of our key focuses is helping property managers to generate Additional revenue from upsells, which I try to refer to as the cool little brother from direct bookings because it helps you to be a little bit more independent from the big OTAs and bolster your revenue. And I think that's kind of dear to my heart as kind of a, with a small business mindset, I want to help people that are similar situation to be successful.

That's cool. That's cool. And 100% hosts want more revenue. At the end of the day, with all the things happening in the industry, it's really important that we find ways to generate more revenue from our existing guests and especially if they're booking direct. So let's dive in then. So what is charge automation and what does it do?

Yeah, okay, I'll give you, I'll actually read you the marketing spiel and then we'll do this in how actual people talk. So on our website it says vacation rental managers use Charge Automation's guest experience solution for contactless check in, payment automation, security deposit collection, upselling, chargeback, fraud protection and digital guidebooks. Now that's a lot. But what it means in a nutshell, and this is kind of how it helped me really understand what we do when I joined, is the PMS was initially built and does a really great job to help you with your internal operations. You put your descriptions, your pictures, your pricing. It's facing you as the operator. But the PMSs haven't traditionally done a great job to offer anything guest facing to help with the guest communication and guest flow from the moment they book to the moment they check out. And we help property managers to provide a really slick guest experience and then bake in a payment automation and credit cards fraud protection and upselling in this process in a really, really neat way.

Nice, nice. I mean there's a lot of threads I could pull on there, but the first one I want to pull on is the fact that guest experience is now more important than ever. Right. There's, there's a lot of people listening to this who think, hey, my area is getting a bit saturated, I'm seeing a lot of new units. Well, one of the ways that you can definitely stand out is if your guest is coming along, you're getting the five star reviews. And yes, you may be getting the five star star reviews at the moment, but ultimately anything you can do to always be a step ahead of your competition and having a really good automated guest flow where it looks good, where there's, you know, sort of easy upsells and your guests can personalize Their stay easy, it's just so important. Right, so what does that kind of look like from the guest point of view? What is their kind of experience? If I'm a host and I've got charge automation and Flo, you're my guest, how is your experience? How do you know? What is the difference?

I guess the difference, that's exactly what I think I want to point at. So at the moment it's fairly established that a guest makes a booking and then in the PMS there's kind of a series of messages scheduled where the first you have the welcome, the thanks for booking confirmation, then hey, here's a link to how to get to the property. Maybe you send out some recommendations in regards to what can be done close by to the property, recommend some restaurants, some activities, then close to the check in, you'll provide the guests with the message, with the door code and so on and so forth. But now if you put yourself in the guest shoes, that means that from the moment you book to the point you check in, you have somewhere between five to 10 or even more messages with pieces of information. And if you've just been on a 12 hour flight or I had this in Mexico, flew around halfway of the world, I arrive, pull up my phone, try to find the messages on to talk to the taxi driver, where to go show him on my phone with it's just kind of not an ideal way to communicate. So taking this situation, what we've done is so first of all we integrate with the pms. And then in this very first message where the property manager says thanks Mr. Mrs. Guest for booking with us, we bake in a link that brings the guest to a digital journey where they can verify themselves so they can upload. So hold on, first of all they see booking information, that's me, that's my name, the dates we pull this from the pms. Then they can upload an ID to verify themselves, which is good for the property manager to protect them from fraud. Then they see the payment details, when what will be charged, that they will be put a hold on the security deposit, everything very transparent, very visual, really slick and easy for them to understand. On a web app, no download required, captures the screen size, understands the language setting on the device so they don't have to change anything there. And in that process we bacon as mentioned, a protection from credit card fraud, which means that guests will have to verify payments, which then brings also the burden of proof away from property manager in case there's a chargeback claim. And once they Kind of went through this kind of verification process which is just a couple of clicks and can be very much tailored to the booking source or the property itself. They justified basically getting access then to what we call the guest portal where you then have access to the door code. The WI fi details further information on how to make the best out of your stay in the property. And what's really slick, and this is I think one of my favorite features here is because we take tap into the payment process of our clients so we don't take the money, we just automate processes. Here we have the card on file and very much like an Amazon experience, the guest can be presented with a catalog of products. Early check in, Midstate cleaning, late checkout, airport pickup, welcome basket, whatever you can reasonably provide to your guests. And the guest just has this similar to an impulse buy where they can just select this from a catalog and continue and it will be charged on the fly. There's no messaging going back and forth. Very, very convenient from the guests. And they can do this in this pre authentification phase all throughout their stay sit on their sofa. Say you know what, this looks a bit messy around here. How about we order Midstate clean while we go to the beach and then we'll come back and the place is nice and tidy and you just click on your web app and purchase this super easy.

Hey, we'll be right back with the show. But in the last couple of months I've heard that property managers and holiday let owners were seeing a decline in revenue which is not good. Operators have started cutting spending in anticipation of what could be a downturn. And this is where I want to bring your attention to Hostfully. Hostfully is one of the leading property management software programs out there with all the bells and whistles you need to manage and automate both but at a crazy affordable price. For the average manager switching to host flee there be a saving of nearly a thousand dollars a month which is insane. Hostfully stands out as one of our go to recommended partners here at Boostly because they can list on not only Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com, google, Marriott and plus the 16 other major channels which means your property is seen more. But it is also an app automation tools, the best Inbox and that award winning 24. 7 customer support. So why pay more for expensive software? Join the Hostfully family. Elevate your property management game without those hefty price tags. Visit www.hostfully.comboostly to get an exclusive deal just for you. So Hostfully Is H O S T F U L L Y. And when you book a call, tell them that Boostly sent you. All right, let's get back on with the show.

Nice. So it's super, super slick from the guest point of view. How does that work then for the owner, for the host? Would they just get an email, a notification saying this person's purchased late checkout?

Exactly. So you could have for example, a product that, when you always know that you can provide this, like maybe a welcome basket, it's just instant pay. If it's an early check in and you might want to check with the operations team or you're not entirely sure if you can provide this, it would be by request, meaning exactly like you said, you'll get notified. As a property manager, Lisa inquired about an early check in. You look at your calendar. Do you have an orphan day? You talk with the cleaning team? Maybe. Can I, can I not offer this? And then you accept it or decline it. If you accept, it gets immediately charged to their credit card. And if you decline it, the guest will be notified that unfortunately we can't provide that or they can't provide the service.

Yeah, that's, that's really cool. I mean this, it seems pretty, pretty good that it communicates in the way it needs to. Needs to communicate. One question I'd like to dive into is actually from one of our members within Boostly. Kimberly has actually spoken to me today about a situation where she's with Stripe. Her PMS links directly into, into Stripe, but she's had the unfortunate case of some, some credit card fraud. So I explained to her that it would need to be two factor authorized in most situations. Is that the kind of thing that Charge Automation could help to protect against? Is it, is that that kind of ballpark?

Exactly. So we have a special agreement with Stripe which allows you. Allows us to do several things. One of them is yes, this fraud protection where the credit card holder will be triggered to use a pin, meaning there's no chance for stolen credit cards to be used. Same situation. For example. We have this on an ongoing basis. And for me, ever since I joined Charge Automation, it's been a real eye opener to how much of a, of a, of an issue this is in our industry where guests come tell the property manager like, hey, by the way, this property doesn't look at all as advertised. We don't like it, we want to leave, we want our money back. Property manager hands them a check and then a week later they see that the credit card was charged back through the credit card company. So basically they didn't just lose the booking, they also lost the money they gave them via check damage on the property where the guest says I never stayed here. No idea who these people are. And with, with this two factor factor authentication, what now happens based on the financial institutions rules is as mentioned earlier, the burden of proof lies with the guests. They have to show that there was some fraudulent activity. And then you as a property manager, you have the credit card, you have the id, you have a signed rental agreement, you have the name and so on and so forth. So fraudulent charges will be reduced to zero. And then it gets narrowed down to. And there's really, really. Then, then it's going to be tricky if they smoked in your property and there's a no smoking policy to send a picture of smell is fairly tricky. So there's still cases where you will go through a claims process and you might lose this process. But for like I said, when it's clear fraud or when it's someone breaking your rental agreement, like the cancellation policy, which is also anecdotals which we hear from clients that a guest books and then two or three days before the check in their plan changes, they decide they don't need the property anymore, send a message saying like hey, I'm canceling. Property manager says okay, get it. But due to our cancellation policy, unfortunately we won't return the money on your booking. And then guests are trying to claim the money back through their credit card company saying there was some something fishy going on and they never made the booking. And these are kind of situations that we can remove entirely. And when we talk to clients, large organizations and they tell you we had 30, 40, $50,000 worth of chargebacks last year and if you can reduce this to half or third by paying a small monthly fee, then that's, it's absolute no brainer.

Yeah, it sounds really good. And ultimately sometimes I get asked by hosts, is there any way to reduce this from happening ever? And I'm like, well unfortunately short term rental is, is a business. With any business comes a certain level of risk. And you as the business owner must accept that level of risk in order to get the rewards of, you know, the potential profits and everything out there. But by having the right systems and the right tech stack in place, then you can reduce that chance much further down to, you know, the, the low, the low single digits of things happening. And me as a host, you know, outside of Boostly, I've had only one chargeback ever. And that was Actually from, at the time we took our own payments from one of the OTAs, from the major OTAs and we, we got a chargeback. They'd come, they had caused damage. Exactly what you're talking about there. Many of the times that we're talking to people about direct bookings, people are worried about chargebacks and I can quite, I can say that it's very rare in general, but when it does happen, if you've got the right systems like Charge Automation, then you're going to be in the best possible, strongest position available so you can reduce the chances of issues happening. So so far down that ultimately it makes the reward of all the extra income from the direct bookings much more worthwhile and advantageous. So that makes sense.

Yeah, the idea is really like you said, it's kind of chipping away at the risk with an ironclad rental agreement where we had this the other day with a gentleman who, yeah, with this, with this guest coming in and then after two days saying like, yeah, they don't like the property, it's not as advertised. The good rental agreement would say that on the day of arrival, at the end of the day they need to kind of message the property manager of any, any issues with the property and if they don't do this again, you're secured providing IDs. So for example, with charge automation here in Spain it's required anyways in Italy as well, but in other countries it's not and we provide kind of the flexibility for property managers to say I just want an ID for the main guest or for all adults for example, or for everyone on the, on the booking party. And then when we talk to property managers who have either high end properties or maybe they are in, yeah, Barcelona, there's some places, Myrtle beach in the US there's some places that attract a bit of a party party crowd in theory. Nothing wrong with that as long as everyone plays by the rules. But then if you ask guests to upload an id, maybe even hold, upload a selfie along with it so you as a property manager can hold the selfie next to the idea and say yeah, okay, cool, this is the person. And then also combined with the security deposit, guests know they have skin in the game and then there's a way better motivation or way higher motivation for them to just be good guests and enjoy the property. And know then also that if anything happens then yeah, security deposit is there kind of to, to settle, settle that?

Oh definitely by taking ID and a security deposit, it's reduced the Number of issues I get so far down just by, by making sure those things are in, in place because if guests have got skin in the game then, you know, and yes, it does put off some bookers, but the ones it puts off are probably the ones you don't want anyway. So, you know, it's not a bad thing to have.

Yeah, I did actually there was a study from the Brussels Institute of Data. They looked into this because they wanted to see to what extent a security deposit might stop people from booking. And what they found is that this type of traffic typically then moves over two or three maybe four star hotels. So it's typically low value bookers where yeah, the risk might be a little bit higher to have damage anyways. And then if you're filtering this out already before fraud can happen or before damages can happen, then you're already avoiding issues.

Definitely, definitely. So how does this work with a PMS? So many PMSs, including mine, have some of the features that you've mentioned to some degree. Where does charge automation kind of fit in that kind of flow?

That's a really good question because this is also the typical conversation when people come to us, which I then also find interesting because they come to us stating my PMS has something similar. And then I'm thinking, well yes, but there must be a reason that you reached out to us still. And so I'm really fascinated by this. So Thomas, our CEO has been working on this for eight years and initially typical startup story from our industry property manager, he's a software engineer, he built this for himself. So it's really, really neat. And as I mentioned earlier when we demo, people are really impressed and say this is so neat how this all bakes in because it's one, one easy flow, very well presented visually. And typically what people have in place at the moment is elements of it where they say, so yes, I do have upsells, but then every upsell I need, the guest needs to basically upload their credit card, purchase something, then go to the next thing, purchase that, where we can basically just select this in a catalog. Then the id they might have some elements of this. So in a nutshell it's just really tightly integrated with the, with the pms that also feeds then the information back into the, the pms. And we've just been there earlier. So we have the advantage of kind of the early starter or first mover and have a very neat process from A to Z that includes, from what it seems, everything that property managers are looking for while the alternatives are Missing certain elements or just not very, very appealing or easy to interact with or might be an app that's downloadable and I don't know if you stay for a weekend in a city for a business trip, if you fancy downloading an app, just to be able to interact with that property, that's not the most appealing way.

Yeah, that makes sense. And ultimately, like you say, there's lots of different tech out there in the industry. It's having the right tech that works for you and your business is the key thing. And it doesn't hurt to go and have a, you know, if you're interested about protecting against chargebacks or making the guest experience better, it doesn't hurt to go and have a demo, go and find out more. And that's exactly what we, we do here at Boostly, is to shine the spotlight on awesome services like Charge Automation where you can then go and find out more information about this and we'll be sharing the details on how you can do so shortly. But before we do, Flo, what are you kind of excited about in the hospitality industry or what does the future for Charge Automation hold? What sort of things can you see coming along?

Yeah, I mean, in general, what I'm fascinated by. So I've been around for a while in this industry, as mentioned, I worked for several startups and I keep saying to people that in five years, I've been saying this forever, in five years we'll look back and say like, hey, remember how it was? And I mean I was around when a channel manager was a thing, like, so why, what do you guys do? And she was like, do I need this? I remember a call with a property manager in New York who had basically a human channel manager. He had a team of nine people that every time a booking came in, they would block the calendar. Unthinkable today. And this also leads me a little bit to kind of to you asked earlier what I want people to remember. Another thing I want apart from transformation, what I want people to remember is we are in such a fast moving industry, in such an innovative industry where we have now some key players established, some big brands, checked in on a lot of investment or big investments. But on the other side of the spectrum we have companies like us who lived in the shadows a little bit, who have a very, very solid following and very innovative solutions. And I think for property managers, what you have to really keep in mind is there will be no point where it's like, okay, I've sorted this, this is done. Now I've Got my tech stack and I'm happy. We had a demo yesterday, was it? Yes, Yeah, I think it was yesterday. So we just announced a new integration with Track and we had a call with a lady and at the beginning I always ask like, so what brings you to us? What are you interested in? And she was like, I don't know. My boss told me that he read that there's a new integration and he just asked me, like, find out what these guys do. Because he wanted to be educated and see if there's anything new that he can take advantage of. And I thought that's the spirit that I admire in this industry. There's a couple of people who don't behave like that to my great disappointment. But I thought that's really fascinating and I completely get. You cannot demo every solution, obviously, but at least when you've used your tech for a while to say, hey, we got good value out of this, let's go out and see what else is out there and maybe tip our toe in something new, see what kind of innovation is being brought. Because there's just a lot happening. And in regards to Charge Automation. Yeah. What excites me is just this opportunity because I keep referring to Charge Automation as a product first company. There's been others in the industry who were sales and marketing first. So a lot of noise and the product will follow somehow. And Charge Automation is really the stereotypical from property managers or property managers, a very solid product that then was identified as like, hey, we should make this a commercial success and share this with others. So that's kind of the journey that excites me at the moment.

No, that is amazing. And I couldn't agree more that ultimately having a product led service, you know, like something which solves the problem. As you said, the founder saw a problem and went out to try and sort it. And now it has become something which has helped many people within the industry. But also what you said about Curiosity, now I was talking to somebody else about this, said, what attributes and what skills do you kind of need to bring to being a host? And Curiosity is one of the top ones. You've got to be curious to go and find out about what is out there and bring it into your business and actually implement. That was one of the other things we said to implement what you find out and actually put it into your business. And I know if you're listening to this podcast, that they're one of the people who are action takers, because if not, you wouldn't be listening to this Podcast and you're also curious. So the chances are if you listen to this podcast, you're going to be more successful because of conversations like this and finding out about services like Charge Automation. So this has been amazing flow. And although there's so much more we could dive into, I want to allow people to come and find out more from yourself, leave people wanting a little bit more. Before we do, I'd love to just know whereabouts are you in the world and if you could have any superhero power, what would it be and why?

Where I am in the world. So the company is centered in Toronto and Ontario. I'm personally in Barcelona. I've been there for 15, 16 years. Barcelona has become a real, real solid hub for vacation rentals, lots of interesting companies and my superpower, I think my superpower is my humor and my charm. Even though I struggle saying this because it's hard to talk about yourself as a superpower. But yeah, typically people appreciate talking with me, at least for a while, until they get to know me.

That's brilliant and what a great answer and thank you so much for that flow. So there's only two questions left to be said. The first one is how do we find out more? Where should we go? What should we click? I'm going to open up the mic for you.

Yeah, that's really easy. You go to chargeautomation.com is another one of my running gags. I keep telling to Thomas, our CEO, that Charge Automation sounds like a working title, like let's just call it that until we find something else. But then now we're too far down the rabbit hole to rebrand. So ChargeAutomation.com and the other thing I wanted to mention is we're super flexible company, so the product is highly modular. So we have some really large players who just use one tiny element because that's just kind of the puzzle piece that was missing. Others who use the whole suite and you can tailor this pricing is super flexible. You will always find a rate plan that suits your business, especially because one of them is free. Who doesn't like that? And also when it comes to servicing our clients, it's also something that I really admire and that has been hailed from customers is you can self service, you can get free onboarding with our team or you can get a more tailored experience as a paid service. So again, whatever your pocket looks like, your budget looks like, or your your needs and requirements, we've got typically a solution for you. But yeah, ChargeAutomation.com is where you find us on LinkedIn.

Sounds like there's something for everyone there. So thank you so much, Flo. And thank you too for, for listening to this on the Boostly podcast. We know there's a lot of places you can put your attention. Really thank you for putting it with us here at Boostly. If you do want to know what Mark Simpson, our founder and CEO, talks about in terms of tech, you can always go and find out in the book Direct Blueprint, which is one of the Amazon best selling books and that's@boostly.co.uk book that you can go and pick that up on there. And that leaves us with the last question then, Flo, which is is there a saying or a motto which has kind of resonated with you either recently or in the past? Feel free to share to take us out on that question.

Yeah, so it's a good one. So I think there's this, let's put it this way, there's really a motto, but there's two books that I really like. It's the Code of the, ah, the Hagakure. Sorry, Hagakure. It's the Code of the Samurai. It's a really weird book. Half of it didn't make any sense. I really struggled with the names because the Japanese names that are impossible to remember for me. But the book treats about kind of the code of the Samurai and there's some really, really nice wisdoms in there, hidden about focus, about how to behave. I like that. And the other one is the Godfather, a book that I've read. I don't know how many times in a movie I've seen, I don't know how many times. If you forget about the romantization of the Mafia, which is a little bit wrong, quite a bit. I like the family element of that, that the family is everything. And I think also with the short term rental family, what I do enjoy so greatly in this industry is the networking opportunities. Everything's connected, everyone has to partner or can partner with each other and it's just the best thing to go to trade shows and see people that you've known for years or meet new people. And I think this is really one of the best things of our industry in general.

100% agree. Love the film, by the way. One of my, one of my firm favorites as well. So hello, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for spending your time with us. And yeah, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people reaching out as if you do want to reach out and you've enjoyed this podcast. The Show Notes will have the links in, so you'll be able to go and check out charge Automation and the cool things there. And if you've got value from this podcast, just share it like, and share it and send it to somebody else who will get some value from it as well. Thank you very much. That's it for me. And thank you very much, Flo.

Liam, thanks so much. It's great.