Takeaways from the exclusive Airbnb webinar

Joining me on the replay and what I wanted to do today is just as always on a Friday, just give you a quick breakdown of the week that was in the world of Boostly, share some good news, share some wins from our hospitality owners and just let you know what is going to be coming up next. So thank you very much for watching back. As you should hope to know by night, know by now. My name is Mark Simpson. I'm the founder of Boostly. I help posts by giving them the tools, the tactics, the training, but most importantly the confidence to go and get more direct bookings. And a big part of what we do is websites. I'm going to talk to you about websites and another part of what we do is content creation. Again, I'll talk to you about that in a second. And another part of what we do is training. And this week, my week has been full of of all of them. So as you are watching this back on the replay or live with me now, and I can see we've got people tuning with me live, please say hi, please let me know where you're watching from in the world and also as well give your business a little pitch and a promote this Easter weekend. Name where you are in the world website, who you cater for. If you've got bookings, let us all know because you never know who's gonna be watching this back on the replay. So we're currently live right now on Facebook, currently live on, on YouTube as well, just basically all over the interwebs. So thank you very much if you are tuning in with us live. So first and foremost, what happened this week? Well, on Monday we had a very special milestone for Boostly. We had the 200th episode of the Boostly podcast and I took that moment to celebrate 200 by celebrating the women in hospitality. And I really wanted to get a message out there that somebody that I've known for a while, Vanessa at Rentals United, she is encouraging as many women as possible from the world of hospitality to step up and share your voice, share your opinions, events or clubhouse rooms or anything like that. And the, the interview was fantastic. I have never had as much response to a live video podcast and I have done to that one. People reaching out to me in the messages and just saying really nice things about Julie, Vanessa, Heather and Mariah. So that was a really good one. If you missed it, it was the 200 episode. You can go and find it. It was on Monday and you can go and find it on YouTube and Facebook. I'm currently turning it into a audio version as well. So please do keep an eye out for that. On Tuesday, we had Mr. Andrew Kitchell of Wheelhouse. He came into the 90 day quick start to more direct bookings. So that's my 90 day sort of training program for more direct bookings. And we've been doing pricing the last two weeks. So I got Andrew to come in to talk about base price, how you can do pricing analysis even if you can't do it online. So how to do it offline, which was really effective. And he just went above and beyond with the advice came on. There was live Q and A. We had about 60 people taking part and I absolutely loved it. So again, thank you very much for Andrew for doing that. And on Wednesday, two really big things happened. So number one, we had an exclusive Airbnb webinar. So Airbnb reached out to me a couple of weeks ago and they said that they wanted to do a webinar for, for hospitality owners. The hospitality community has become on their radar and they wanted to do a A basically a little Q A, which was really good of them, to be honest. And I, and I didn't think it was going to go ahead. I told them that I didn't think it was going to go ahead because I've had many conversations like this in the past. But to be fair to them, they went ahead, they did it, and they again were really good. I don't know what their play is. I don't know what they're. I don't know what they're trying to do. If it's genuine, then I'm massively for it because none of the other OTAs do it. But their answers were honest. They gave some fantastic insights as into what the trends are right now. And the takeaways that I can share with you were that there's been a new guest customer Avatar created through 2020. I've spoken about it already, but it is the digital nomad. It is the work cation. So the reason why you'll notice on your Airbnb amenities right now that you can put in so many new things. One of them is that they are getting so much more attention ever since the ipo. More people are using it and they're getting more demands and more questions. So they are encouraging as many people as possible. If you aren't already, how can you cater for somebody that may be traveling while working? So is that little desk, is it a, like a designated work area? You know, is it a ring light? Maybe? Because everybody's doing Zooms and things like that. Is it, you know, whatever it may be, a printer, a scanner, whatever. So how can you adapt that into your listing? And if you do adapt it into your unit and your business, make sure you talk about it, because it's something that they're getting a lot of attention for right now. They also gave some general idea on the 15 Commission, why it's gone up from 3 to 15%, why they've scrapped the service charges. And basically, right now, if you connect Airbnb to a channel manager, you get bumped to the 15%. Now, there's pros and cons to it, as always, but what it means is that the guest no longer pays the service charge. So, again, a big thing that I teach is how to convert a OTA booking into a direct one. And, and, and that method never used to work on Airbnb because there was always that service charge in the way. Guests were never willing to accept and pay it to Airbnb because when, when they cancel a book and they have to pay it. But now the good news is, is that by the service charge scrapping, if, if a guest, you know, through the, the magical things that I show you what to do and you can go find that video on YouTube, just go and search for how to convert an OTA to a direct booking. If a guest reaches out and asks to cancel their booking and flip to a direct one, it's a lot easier for them to do it. So, again, go and check it out. You've got some business tools as well. And for the first ever time, they've announced that they've got an FAQ section on their website as well, which is in the owner section part. I never seen it before. They mentioned it was quite new, as in new for 2021. So if you ever got any direct questions, go and check out the faq, because it may have been answered in there. To be fair, they did answer a lot of questions. They were totally honest and I was really appreciative for it and so were the hundred people that tuned in alongside with me. It was recorded on their zoom. They have got no plans to share it, but they are going to be doing more webinars coming up soon. I'm not going to be part of it. We're going to be doing their own webinars. So if you want to find out more, just contact your local Airbnb rep. You can find that in your extranet. And the other thing that I've done this week was a clubhouse room. So a three hour Clubhouse Room. We did it on Wednesday night. A guy that I've got to know quite well through Clubhouse called TJ Tiani Tajani. So he's based over in Houston, Texas. Real nice guy. He wanted to do a direct booking masterclass. So we did that for a good, good like three hours. We really got into it. So many good questions coming in from the audience and I was able to enlighten so many more people that it's not just Airbnb that's the way and how they can go and get diary booking. So, so that was really good. Um, I'm gonna take in a little break from Clubhouse in, in April, but I will be back on Clubhouse with a bang in in May. I just announced that on the 3rd of May to the 4th of May, we're gonna be doing another 24 hour clubhouse room. These things are big events. I'm gonna be rolling out the the Little Black Book and we're gonna in there. Hopefully by then Androids will be able. Android users will be able to use Clubhouse as well. So we'll make it a really big show and just do 24 hours of just really helping hospitality owners just get more information and from some, the many experts that are out there, which is good. So as I do every week, I wanted to show you a couple of the websites that have gone live this week, but I wanted to do a very special one for those that are tuning in with us. So you may have remembered that a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that what we are creating behind the scenes here is really exciting and what we're going to do is we are going to create a boostly booking engine. The big problem right now is that when a guest comes onto a WordPress website. Now WordPress is obviously the way, it's the key to all of this working, especially if you want to get more people on your page, if you want to get ranking better, if you want to turn more lookers into bookers, so to speak. But the problem is, is that for those of you that get a WordPress website and you have obviously your PMS, when you make changes to your listings, changes to your prices, say if you add a new listing. For those of you that do that, add properties. For those of you who lose properties, you then have to go and duplicate everything that you do on the PMS to the to the boostly website also as well, the booking part was, was getting very broken. Depending on who the PMS was, it just wasn't running smoothly and I could just see how it was broken. And I was saying to Tom, who we do the websites with, we need to fix it, we need to sort it, we need to make it. We need to make it better, we need to make this better. And we went away, we looked at what. What was out there and there's nobody doing what I'm about to show you. So this is really close to being ready, what we're doing now. And we're working with Pastor Keys on this now. Pastor Keys, their channel manager is Rentals United. And you know, Rentals United sync off to so many different channels. So what we're basically doing right now is with the website, all of this information that you see on here, all of the listings, for example, this syncs directly in to the channel manager. So all of the information that we're pulling is from Rentals United. And the cool thing is about this is that if we deleted all 200 listings in, if we just hit the refresh button, they all come back. So all the prices are updated in real time, which is fantastic. All of the information is in. In real time. And Pasta Keys, they get a lot of properties they add in quite a lot of times. So it just means that they don't have to duplicate it up, but they still get the big boostly wireframe that we do with the reviews, obviously, and X, Y and Z benefits of booking direct, it's. It's all. It's all there. But this is there. This is the magic part. And this is where we're so close to cracking. So if you go and run a search, for example, and one of the properties comes. I just did a search in Brighton now, what would normally happen here is that you would go to Book now and it would then take you to the pms. And the real pain point is that the guests would then have to run this search all over again. So as far as. And I talk about this a lot when it comes to. When it comes to the booking process, the booking stage is the most important part. And when you throw up that obstacle, people get lost and confused and as soon as you confuse them, you lose them. So a big part of what we've done is that when, as soon as you hit that Book now button, it takes them straight to the final payment page, which, again, is being so hard to implement. And we have to be bespoke for every PMS that we're working with here and Channel Manager that we're going to work with. But this has been a massive breakthrough this week. We've cracked it with, with Rentals United, we're about to crack it with uplisting. We've got to, we've got Zevu, we've got Guesty, we've got Smubu, we've got Hostify, we've got Hostfully and we're just adding more and more now every single week. So this is going to be massive. And this is a, this is really is a game changer in website design and I'm, I'm so excited and again for just number of reasons on, on why so and again nobody else has, nobody else has done this, has attempted this crazy malarkness. But yeah, we're really excited for it. So this is going to be ready soon. Current boostly done for you website clients. You're going to get first dibs on it and then we're just going to slowly roll, roll back and roll out as, as we go. But we'll be more about this in April. So let me know what your thoughts are. I excited everybody that I've told is excited that I've sent this to industry leaders to ask for their opinion. They're excited. So it's, it's, it's really promising. What we're, we're gonna do next is once it's ready we're gonna go to every PMS and try and strike up partnerships and just say let's roll this out to all of your clients so they don't have to use a free website anymore. They can use a WordPress website and this could go cataclysm, so to speak. It's gonna go to the moon as all the crypto people are saying. But what I wanted to do, I just want to show you a couple of websites that actually went live this week. So what I'm going to show you first is Simone Neary. Now take a look at this video. Now this is Estuary View Caravans. This is such an amazing video. It's up in the northeast of the UK and again straight away this is the first thing that you see when the website loads up. It just looks stunning. Really good work from Simone up there. So yeah, fantastic. And again it's got the, it's got the, it's got the signposts of a boostly website. Little bit about us telling a nice story, reviews, what we offer, property highlights. Why is your book Direct ready to book which is fantastic. So again really love that one. And this next one is a boostly one page. So Tara has just recently joined the 90 Day Quickstart program. Part of joining the 90 Day Quick Start program. If you're part of the early bird offer. You got a free Boostly one page website. Tara didn't have a website and now it's just gone. Yeah, I want to get it, get it live. And this is live now, which is fantastic. So it's a real simple one page website. This links straight into her calendar and they can just go and inquire, which is really simple. It just looks like a listing but again it's doing all the right things in the right places. So now Tara can share her information about her amazing property that she has. I mean that bath is stunning and I guess can, you know, inquire and go from there. So which is, which is lovely, which is really lovely. Which is the benefit of a one page website. And again, for those of you who want to know more about Boostly onepage. So basically these one page websites is something that we are working on all the time. We currently have a copywriter who is creating a Boostly marketplace. So when this is ready, we've currently got leisure bookings, we've got business bookings, portfolio builder, property management builder. This is going to get changed to a specific niche because then what we're going to have is we're going to have solo traveler workation, we're going to have beach apartments, rural apart, like rural properties. And because the cool thing about what we do with this is that we create 95% of the copy. All you have to do is change up the pictures basically. Change up the pictures, change up the wording. So again, most of this has all been done. Julie's just literally taking it and just added in her little, little customization, add in a couple of pictures and it's all ready to go. So we're going to have different niches and different websites. It's going to be literally like a marketplace. And this is like 99 pounds, so less than 100 pounds. And you've got, you've got a website which is, which is, which is lovely. Real simple put together. So that's that. And I just want to say a massive well done to Rachel, Rachel Straughn from Bic Brand Brick roots property, Simone obviously Morris and Tara for getting their website live this week we welcomed to team Bruce Lee, James Padgett, Juliet Williams, Matt Corber, Jeffrey Harvey, Tiandi, Sean Greaves as well. So again, so we've got some real exciting projects to work on there and also as well we've had a lot of new people join the Boostly content creator. So Boostly content creator for those that don't know it's the one where you get all of your social media content done for. For you, 30 to 40 pieces every single month. You've got the email templates and you've got the website headline generator to just £5amonth. So welcome to Gemma Tracy, Tracy Northcroft. We've got Gia, we've got Rajesh, we've got Julian, got Lorraine, we've got Naomi, Selena, Hannah, Sarah, Sherry, Jen, Don, Helen and Kristen Agneska and we've got Michelle and we've got obviously Sean's joined as well, which is fantastic. And finally, welcome to Faye, Hannah, Elizabeth, Mandy and Carl who joined the pre release book squad for the book Direct Playbook that is going to be coming this year. It's going to be released in November. It's currently getting edited by now by the fantastic Neely Khan. Hi, Neely. I know you watch these. So I've done the first draft, 47, 48,000 words. Neely is in the moment and putting it all together. So to join the Pre release squad. 99p, that's all it is. You get behind the scenes access. You get to go read the first draft now. And. And we've got loads of cool little sneak peeks coming up just before November. We've got 200 people which is in, which is great. Come up to 250 people. So that is lovely. So that has been the week, the week that was. I would love for you in, in the comments if you haven't done so already. Let's go see who's with me. So, Gail, Helen. Hi, Helen. Hi, Jill. Sunny Scotland, which is fantastic. Let's see here. So Jill, out in the sunny garden on the sunny west coast of Scotland, tidying up, ready for guests 26th of April. It's exciting for me, so let's get a little promotion. Kinterly House by Oban special deal for family and friends coming to meet up locals. Lovely, love that. And Patricia shared their website, Ashley's Guest House, which is awesome. Hi, Julie. Gaff Mansion over in the USA and Leticia's there with Norfolk Beach Cottages which is fantastic. So thank you for everybody and hi, obviously Gail and Helen, thank you for very much. Thank you very much everybody for tuning in. I hope you have an amazing weekend. Whatever you're doing, please do so in the comments. Drop a link to your website, give your business a little bit of pitch and promote just like Jill did there, which was lovely. Let everybody know where she's in the world with the sunny Scotland with the sunny Scottish weather special offer on and when they're going to be opening, which is great. I wanted to show you one more thing. Somebody created this for me this week. Those of you that are into your NFTs will know that this is a crypto punk, which has just made me laugh. It's obviously myself as a crypto punk, which, you know, I could potentially sell that on the nft, which I'm not, but it's just fun. That'll be a profile picture, definitely, which is. Which is lovely. Somebody's also as well done some new cartoons for me, which is. Which is very funny. We've got some. Some really nice boostly ones there, which is good. So again, have a great weekend, whatever you are doing. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll give you one last little bit of promo from. From another sunny Scottish tree top lodge.co.uk all right, everybody, thank you so much. I'll be back next week for another one of these, the week that was. And whatever you're doing, have a great weekend. Eat lots of chocolate and I shall speak to you all very soon.