The Future of Direct Bookings - Where Is The Book Direct Movement Headed?

The Heads on Beds podcast is one of my most downloaded listened to that is out there in the world of hospitality. I absolutely love it. For those of you been watching and listening and following me on social media now for a long time, you will know that the Fuel podcast back in the day was a massive inspiration for me to get going with Bruce Lee and framed a lot of what I talked about because that was high level discussion. And I then took that and put it into a level that I know hosts with, with, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 properties would understand. And Heads on Beds has been going for a year now. Conrad and Paul have done this podcast for over 100 episodes. And I reached out to Conrad and said, I've got an idea for a show around the book Direct Movement. Would you mind having me on? And he was very gracious to invite me on. And we spoke for about an hour about the book Direct Movement. We talked about a lot of things. I'm going to look at the docket. How is the book diet movement going to grow? How can we stop Airbnb, how can we educate? And everything else in between. We talked about community, we talked about niches, we talked about variables, Amazon, you name it. And it will go down as one of my favorite interviews because it was just me chatting to two people that knew a lot about this industry, a lot about customer data trends. And it was really nice to have that discussion. My brain hurts because it's, it's made me think. So I encourage you all to listen to watch and all this good stuff. And at the end of it, if you want to go find out more, just make sure you go to the Heads on Beds podcast. They've got a website and all that good stuff, and They've got over 100 episodes that you can download and binge. So without further ado, this screen is going to change and you're going to see Conrad, Paul and myself chanting about the book Direct Movement.

All right, Paul, Good morning. How's it going?

Well, you know, it's, it's a little more full room we're talking with today, but I, I, I'm excited about today's discussion. I'm, we're, I'm riding the high from yesterday's football, American football here, but that's, it's, it's a good time for me. So how are you doing, sir?

I, I can't think of a worse topic to start with than who.

Yeah, well, there you go.

Right, exactly.

But I think we're, I think we're contractually obligated to it. Do do it. So, yeah, you're very happy. I'm almost happy. Which is kind of like the definition of a sports fan. And I think that's a universal human experience. If your team is not very good and then they almost win, that's like so frustrating. Like they could have won but they didn't win. And then when your team is supposed to be mediocre, shall I say Paul, but then they end up beating a team that's very good. That's cool. Like that's a fun experience.

There you go.

For the listeners. If you want to go Google, this will come out many weeks later at this point, but you'll see that the Patriots lost the Seahawks. And then you'll see unfortunately in overtime. And then you'll see the Paul's lovely Minnesota Vikings took down the mighty vaunted 49ers, which is unexpected. So I'll.

We'll take it.

Well, we couldn't have predicted that. And we also could have predicted two things that are going to happen today, which is that we have a predictions episode coming your way with a few thoughts and ideas. And this was Mark's idea. He pitched it to us. So we never had a guest on the, on the podcast before Mark. So welcome. I think I've been on your podcast so it's fun to reciprocate as you are first ever guest 107 episodes in. So how's it going? What's going on? What's going on in your world today?

Thank you, thank you very much for having me. I'm a big fan so it's a pleasure to be on here. And I come in from the other angle so I've got, I spot a soccer team that's very good that was playing the underdog and we lost at the weekend. So it was unexpected. But they. There's a flip of this is that I took two of my boys to their first ever game at Anfield and it was the, the most perfect day. The weather was amazing, so it was nice and sunny. Didn't have to walk to the ground in the rain and have the boys complaining. Everything went absolutely perfect that day apart from the result. And I was Talking to my 9 year old the next morning and I said, listen, what would you rather, would you rather have it being the most perfect day but the result, we lost or would you rather have had it where it was raining? Our tickets didn't work to get in. You know, we missed our takeaway pizza later on, but Liverpool won and he was like, yeah, no, you're right. We'll have it the other way. So, yeah, it was a mix of emotions, but now really happy to be on here. Thanks for a lot of having me and yeah, excited to dig into this topic.

Yeah, right on. Yeah, I'm with you, Mark. There's something to that. I think you can have a great time and go to a sporting event even if your team loses, if a lot of other stuff goes right. It's hard for me to have a bad time, for example, at a Red Sox game, which is what I did when I was a kid, because I have such farm, you know, fond nostalgic memories of going to those games with my, with my dad. So even if they lose, like, it's still fun just to be there at the park. Like, there's lots of things that entertain you even if the game isn't very good. But now the games are a lot faster. Total sidebar. So you kind of have to pay attention more than you used to in the past. Again, things we pay attention to on this show is prediction. So that again, kind of Mark's idea here. We'll beat this one up a little bit. Where's the book Direct Movement going? You know, Paul and I really thought about this one. We put together a bit of an outline and some different predictions and ideas. So let's dive into it. Paul, do you want to take the first one and kind of where do you think this is? What's the direction that we're heading in? This is something we talk about a lot, but I don't think we've ever done anything exactly on this, on this topic work.

Yeah, I mean, I think it is, it's, it's something that I, I think we should hope that it benefits us if it is going to grow. And I think, you know, our, our first prediction is it will grow slightly over the next few years among professional hosts, property managers, but it's also not going to be as straightforward and it's not going to be easy for maybe the single property host there. I, I think that that's something where logistically, some of the pieces you have in place there, there's just more that you can have in place when we're talking about the book Direct Movement, namely a direct booking website. And so a lot of those single property hosts that are just managing on an Airbnb or VRBO or just using those distribution channels, not taking everything into their own brand, into their own, you know, single, their, their own, their own booking website, their own booking engine, it's just it, it's an opportunity that maybe they're not ready for it. But I think that is when we're looking at the professional post those professional property managers though, you know, 50 plus, 25 plus, however we're deeming those, I think they are, they're set up for success and as long as we're, you know, we'll talk about a little more in some of these points as well. Educating people, educating those travelers, those potential guests on the benefits of the book Direct Movement. I, I think that it should grow. I mean that's, that's, that's, that's what we're going for here. So you know, kind of a vanilla topic to start here. But you know what are, what are your both of your thought on, on whether we will see growth in that book Direct Movement?

Yeah, I mean Paul and I think are in agreement on this. Mark, obviously I'll go to you in a second. I'm curious what your thoughts on it but I think if you have the ability and the I guess like execution opportunities in front of you to grow your marketing efforts and movements then I think yeah, like book Direct should become easier for you. But I think it's, you know, like Paul said, I think it's really hard if you have one property to continue to make progress. It's not that you can't make any progress. I just think that's going to be more challenging. It depends a lot on what type of inventory comes in over the next few years. You know, depend, may depend on the location, the market, the area. But certainly over the last few years we saw an explosion of those single, two, three, four property hosts. Maybe they came in, the money was good, it was easy. You know, are those people going to kind of fade out? It was more of a side hustle, wasn't their main thing. Maybe the more professional, you know, managers will take over and they might have more execution, that sort of thing. So Mark, I'll go. You're right because I'm assuming you've, I can tell from looking at your sites that you work with a variety of people. One property up to many, many properties. What's your take on this? From that smaller segment to larger segment.

Yeah. And I think the context is that all three of us, we're, we're not coming up this with data behind us. You know, if we were to speak to Jamie Lane at ED or you know, any anybody of our sites are looking at data on a day to day basis, they'll be able to provide a little bit more numbers behind the predictions. But I feel like what we all have, the three of us, is that we see and hear a lot of what's happening within, within the industry. I obviously speak and hear for a lot of hosts who are at the start of their journey or they're, you know, getting into their journey or they're well on their way to being, you know, short term rental host, professional host. I feel like there's, there's three categories. There's one that's the hobbyist host, then you've got the professional host and then you've got the professional company. So the, the, the hobbyist host in my opinion is somebody that is dabbling in the market. Like you say, they've either own their property or they are managing a property for a homeowner or they're doing a like an arbitrage rent to rent model and they'll either have one or they'll have two, three, four, but they won't have more than four. And they're just like I say, they're dabbling. They're seeing if this is something for them. This may be one income stream of many in their life and they may even have a W2, they may have other long term commitments and this is just dabbling. They're hobbyist hosts. So you pack them here and then you've got, in the middle you've got a professional host. So this is somebody that has gone that next step. They've maybe, you know, done all the things, this is their core focus. Maybe it's them by themselves or them and their partner that's doing this or they've got partners and they again they either own or they manage or do the arbitrage or do a bit of everything and they've probably gone past that 7, 8, 9, 10 property market and then they're moving on to the next stage. They're looking to grow and scale their business. They're starting to, you know, new levels, new devils and we've all been there where you've got people to hire virtual assistants in house people. You've got all these other headaches and all these other plates to spin and then you've got the professional companies. I think that's maybe, you know, those are more that probably be watching this on LinkedIn. They'll be the ones that are, you know, down the line built a very firm, solid brand and business and they are on the next stage to scaling and potentially exiting down the line. And with the bug direct movement I feel depends on who is in those three categories. It differs in where it is in, in your day to day world. Right? The hobbyist host doesn't care, doesn't care about Bug Direct. It is just solely focused on probably one platform which, you know, Airbnb it, it. They probably don't even have a, a pms, which I think is a very key indicator when I speak to a host if they're wanting to grow or not, if they have one and you know, they, they are literally just relying on that one platform. If it all goes well, great. If not, no worries, they'll pivot and they'll just go look at somewhere else. So Book Direct for them is nothing. My day to day is trying to educate them, to help them to decide mentally if they want to be a hobbyist host or if they want to graduate into being a professional host. I mean that's literally what I do every day with the podcast with the books and everything. Then you've got the professional host for them. If they haven't got Book Direct in their mindset, they are never going to get to that next stage. This will just be a nice lifestyle business and that's it. I feel like the people that I speak to a lot are in this category because they go, ah, that's what Book Direct is. This is what it is. This is what a website is. This is, I've got that, I've got this thing called insert pms. But I've never done more than had the free listing site that goes on there and then that's, you know, that is like where their growth will be. And than the professional company, they've got a very solid Book Direct basis, they've got a very solid brand, they know exactly who their customer is, their avatar is, you know, and they are growing, whether that's through acquisition, whether that is their management company, whether that's through, however they do it. So the movement is there. And I feel like over the next few years what you will find is that percentage wise and you know, if we had Jamie Lane on this with us from DNA, you'll be able to give some. But the hobbyist host, it'll just decrease, decrease, decrease, decrease, decrease the amount of bookings per direct to OTAs, the professional host will increase, hopefully, fingers crossed, that's what my belief is. And then the management companies, the big professional companies, we'll see. I'd like to think that a lot of them will increase, but the bigger you get and the bigger at scale it gets, it actually turns out to be a lot harder to have a massive chunk of Your revenue direct, because you're battling so many different elements as you get to that massive level.

Well, this was a bit back in the feed, Mark. You may have listened to this one where we talked about Vacasa, and obviously that's the largest property manager here in North America and certainly in the US and they have, you know, whatever the number is at this point, somewhere between 35,000, 38,000, somewhere in that range, unfortunately. Not trying to be rude, but that number is going down. You know, if you look month over month, year over year, they're managing fewer and fewer properties, but they're phenomenally successful market book direct. I mean, like, we may criticize a lot of what they do as far as their acquisitions, their, you know, future training of companies and things like that, but I mean, if you go look at their public reports, public data, I mean, they're getting 4 to $500 million a year of direct bookings. It's actually really phenomenal when you look at it. So people are going to the Vacas website, booking directly. There may be other issues that we don't have the time to or scope to discuss on this call today. But it's not that they're unsuccessful with the direct marketing side of it. It seems like. You're correct. You're exactly correct, Mark. They struggle on execution. You know, some of the. The bottom, you know, that last layer of cleaning maintenance, you know, property care, homeowner relationships, those kind of things is where they're struggling. But they're not bad at marketing, nor are they bad at getting bookings directly. They seem to be, you know, according to the reviews and the feedback that you see online, bad in other areas. So I'm with you on that. I don't know if there's, you know, more of that layer in there, Paul, or anything else to add in. If not, we go to the next one.

No, I think we're good there.

Yeah. So. All right, so here's my second thesis here for the book Direct Movement, which is that the quality of your book, direct marketing, doesn't matter as much as the quality of your book, direct property or properties in that side of it. So. So we just did recent conversations, Mark, we had about this triangle, and it's based on Dan Kennedy's ultimate, ultimate marketing plan, which is message market media. And we kind of adapted it and made it more specific to the vacation industry, and we talked about the property or guest demand. So, like, what is that actually? What is that guest looking for? What are you offering? What is. What do they desire? And what awareness are you generating for that property? So in other words, if you have a property that people want, if you market it correctly amongst different channels and we could talk about those channels and you ultimately know who was looking for that property, you can be successful. That was sort of the thesis that we came up with and I think that matters quite a bit because one thing that I'm sure you see, Mark, on your side of things is that some people put a lot of effort into marketing things, maybe even building a nice custom boosted website. They might even try to do advertising marketing on their own. And they're kind of marketing a property that's not very good. So maybe you could speak to that side of it which is that the property itself matters just as much as the quality of your marketing that you're doing for that property. What's your thoughts on that, Mark?

Yeah, so with this I feel the way that going to move into is very different to how companies been working in the past. And let's just say professional hosts, because the hobbyist hosts, like we say, they're just dabbling, but the professional hosts, let's just focus on this segment because in the past and if you're a management company, we all know the general route, how it goes, you are managing maybe your property or you're managing your parents property and you're doing well and all of a sudden a friend of a friend reaches out saying, oh, I've got a place down the road, can you do this? Yep. You know, it's very much you say yes as you're getting going, you say yes to everything. And as business owners, we're all guilty of this. I've done this. I'm sure all of you have done this. You've just, you pile on the yeses and there comes a certain point in time where you have to kill your darling, so to speak. You got to remove the properties that do not suit your overall brand. And this is very hard to do in the management world because you know, the owners that you get on board, you, you know, you speak to them pretty much every day, whether it's good or bad or everything in between. But it comes a point in time where as you grow your, your brand, there will be properties that fit that brand and there'll be properties in your portfolio that don't.

Right.

And you can probably now everybody watching this, even on the ones you own, you can go for your portfolio, look at what your overall brand is and you'll be able to very quickly go yes or no, does it suit now whether you've got the, the courage to, to kill him is another story. But when it comes to marketing, what is going to happen is this is. You always got to remember that the riches are in the niches, right? The niche that we talk about is very, very key to your, to your growth moving forward. I just stayed literally this weekend talking about Liverpool. I took my boys to go and stay in a short term rental for two nights and I discovered somewhere, found somewhere, booked somewhere. I'm not going to name the company but the branding was pretty cool, easy to remember name. The property was just a shell. The location was unreal. It's in between two massive stadiums, it's in the city center. It had parking, you know, we drove so we needed that parking option. But the actual property itself was a shell. Now that was a management portfolio. So they weren't directly couldn't go and change all the decor, they couldn't change all the interiors, so to speak because obviously they had to get their homeowners say so. But it was a really poor guest experience. As soon as I set foot in the door, right, everything up until that point, great communication, key codes, all of that, great. As soon as I stepped in the door it was like, and you know, this is the problem because I, they've got other properties and this brand that they've got, they, the other properties may be great, I don't know, I stayed in them but that one just let them down. And I feel like this is what's going to happen especially as they grow, especially as every professional company now hosts tries to grow, is that you've got to make sure that yes, you've got your guest avatar. We talk about your ideal guest, the guest that you want to walk through your doors. Yeah. But as you grow, you're going to have a property avatar as well, just like you're going to have a staff avatar and whatever avatar that you have. But that property avatar is key because when you get say five properties and they all fit the same brand, they all fit your same E Force, they've got the same, you know, decor, they've got the same promotional things are going around. When I go home and I speak to a friend of mine who says, yeah, I'm going to Liverpool, I'll go, oh, you should go and stay with boom, insert name. Instead of going, oh, you should go. And I stayed at this Airbnb. And that is the key, in my opinion, to market in our growth. It's what people say about you when you're not in the room. And that is a big part of it for this crowd, for this professional host crowd.

Yeah, I mean, I agree. But Paul, any reaction to kind of what Mark's saying there with like, that's that story. I feel like it's a common one we've heard.

I mean that is, that's having watched so many people try to grow that business from a 10 to 20, 30, 40, 50, you do you get into that point of you're, you're not holding to. Maybe, maybe you don't have the brand to find. Maybe you don't for whatever reason, maybe you haven't put that much thought into it. As Mark said, a lot of people just fall into this. I'm managing this one. I'm helping a buddy out here, family here. And then all of a sudden I have a 10, 10 property management company that I'm running and I didn't have time to put in those, those, those, you know, best practices, the baseline to have a successful brand business. I think it is, it's. It's once you hit those scaling points, wherever that is for you, and when you're adding on people, when you're adding on, you know, two properties a month, three properties a month, something like that, you, it is, it was, it was always interesting to have those discussions of we've got 60 properties, but I don't really like these bottom 10 or so. I don't like these. It is at a certain point you have to, you have to decide, am I growing to grow? Am I growing to get 100, 200, 300? Or am I growing to make sure that I have that brand that's growing a representative brand, something that again, having condos in Smoky Mountains, probably not that helpful. Having cabins in 38, probably not that helpful. Making sure that you have the right property for the right market, I think is, is really important. And Mark, you, I think you hit the nail on the head there with making sure that people are talking about you to drive that desire long term. Because, you know, a lot of people are doing the social selling for you after, after they've come to your place. So yeah, they may post the, post the photos, but the last thing you want to do is see that message a week later that, oh, it's, it just wasn't that bad. And nobody likes that, that tag of oh, this property management company, they're terrible. Now you've got some virality that you might not like coming through. And, and it is, I think that, that, you know, together you guys really nailed the head on what, what can be a really difficult part of that owner acquisition strategy is, is what do I want to bring on? Do I want to bring on a smaller number of properties that really fit my brand or do I want to bring on more and more and just bring in the revenue and see where everything falls after that? So.

Yeah, well, I think Mark, you explained it well too, where it's like that, I guess, like you're starving and the property represents, you know, satisfying your hunger. So you just take anything on and Paul, you know, expensive. These leads are right. When you're doing homeowner marketing, you're trying to scale and you're doing whatever it may be, whether it's direct mail, whether you're doing digital, this is a tricky problem to solve, like getting more inventory. But we all, if you're going into that professional, to Mark's point, or that really large scaled company, you have to get more inventory. So you got to figure out ways to do it effectively and efficiently. But if you're too picky, then it makes it really hard to grow because then you're even being more restrictive on like the leads you have coming in. Oh, that's no good. That's no good. Okay, I'll take that one. And so on and so forth. So it's a, it's a challenge. I don't think anyone here is sitting in our seats envying the position that a lot of those folks are in, trying to balance everything out because it is.

Well, can I just add on to that as well? I've just literally gone through this process with, with Boostly. Like we've literally felt this wrath of it. We had 1962 websites and we cut them by half. We've just cut it down to just over 900 now. And so we've had to sort of kill our darlings because so many people, so many support things were coming in. So many of the, the, the customers that we had didn't fit the niche of clients that we wanted to work with, moving, moving forward. And you know, it's, it's not a nice process. You have to deal with the backlash. You have to have some pretty awkward conversations and all of. But now what about four or five, six months later, we're coming out the other end and it is such a better business on the back of it. So it's, you know, doesn't matter what niche you're in, doesn't matter what you're doing, this has to be done. And you know, when you're starting, you have to say yes. Like you just Say you have to say yes. You got to take it all on. You have got to learn, right? But moving forward, as you grow, the power is saying no. Because when you say no, it actually opens up more opportunities for yes. So hopefully, if you're in this position, just take our advice and go for it. Don't put it off. Don't delay ripping the band aid off, because it just makes it worse down the line.

All right, so here's a theoretical question. Obviously, Mark, you know, you know where you ended up now, but if I approached you 10 months ago, let's say before you started this process, and I said, hey, Mark, we're going to go ahead and chop the number of clients you're working with in half, what would your reaction have been before that? Would you have been receptive that idea, or you would have pushed against it? And, Ben, in other words, would you been. Would you be open to someone telling you that back then, or you would have pushed against it? But, like, no, I don't think you're right about that.

So I have been told this for the last maybe year and a half, and I put it off, put it off, put it off, put it off, put it off, put it off. And I delayed it, right. And ripped the band aid off. And it was 10 times worse than what it could have been if I acted and did this a lot, a lot sooner. So I'm testament to this. I've, you know, I. I can stand here, being on the other end. Should have done it way sooner. 10 months, 18 months. When the person came in to boostly to help with all of this, suggested this, and I was just like, no, because I was set in my ways. My mindset wasn't right. But, yeah, hindsight is amazing. It's the most. It's the super power that I wish I had more than any other superpower. Yeah, amazing.

Better than flying. Yeah.

Better than everything. Right. Hindsight is an amazing tool. And, you know, you trust me on this one. Just don't, don't delay. So if you're watching this, if you're a manager and you've been sort of procrastinating this over the summer, if you've had just those properties or those owners or those ones that are just like, you see the message come through on WhatsApp or email, and you just have a little shudder inside, then I think that's the little telling point to you. But you got to go and do what you got to do.

Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it all Right, So we'll go to our next one here. Next topic point. So here's my take on this. The only way that Book Direct will grow meaningfully is if the guest is more educated. But educating solely on cost hasn't proven to be the most effective methodology of education. Right. So every single piece of Book Direct marketing that I typically see, and Paul, maybe we could talk about this first, seems to say book direct and save. And I'll be honest, I put that in a lot of our client ads. So if it's clients listening, like, yes, I do put that in your ads, because I think that is not, it's not an invalid form of messaging, but obviously it's not perfectly sufficient to cover all of the benefits of why someone would book direct. So that gets us started. That gets the conversation started. Oh, I get a better deal when I book Direct, but it's obviously not enough to complete the process. Maybe, Paul, you can speak to, what are some other thoughts or ideas of Book Direct beyond just the fact that maybe, quote unquote, it's a little bit cheaper?

I think it is. I think we've. It's not. This isn't a new movement by any things. I think we have put in the effort over the past few years, but it is, I think that the niche in this case is probably hurting us a little bit because we have, I think there is such a varying landscape in the short term rental, vacation rental, whatever, whatever you're going to call that or, you know, how you're going to deem it is. It is those hobby hosts. Is it the professional property managers there? So I do, I think that as professional property managers, there's an app, there's more of an effort going along, but there's millions. And again, the Jamie, Jamie link could give us the number there. Millions of single properties that it is. They're. The only way they're accessible is Airbnb or virtual? Both. So it's, it's very difficult to talk about the benefits of booking directly there. I think that is it, it does have to come from, it has to come from a grassroots effort of all those professional property managers. And somehow collectively as an industry here I, and again, I don't, I don't know how you do it because there is enough competition and, and Mark, I mean, I do like the idea of you kind of touched upon that and I can kind of throw it over to you here, but talking about how when these individual property managers kind of come together and kind of collaborate and, or co op in kind of different ways there, there is more power there, kind of fighting a larger Airbnb or a larger directory site or something like that. So maybe you can kind of hop in there and kind of talk about what you see on the. Just the education that needs to happen across the board on Book Direct.

Yeah, no, happy to. Because this is the whole reason why Boost Lee was created. Eight years ago, I was a hospitality tourism meeting in the UK in my little town of Scarborough and there were 100 hosts there and they were all bemoaning the fact that so many of their bookings were coming in through third parties, etc. And I just stood there in a room like group of people. I just, you know, it's like a round robin discussion and I was like, well, what are you doing to actually drive your own bookings in terms of educating the guests? And they just looked at me with a blank expression. So first thing I did is I went to the tourism board, the local tourism board, and I asked what education is there for like educating our hosts? And there was none. So I started up a Facebook group called the Hospitality Community. I've been doing it for many years. And you know, we, we the Granary, our family business that we exited from, we were very good at educating the guest. We had it everywhere booked direct. We, we educated what it actually meant, how you can do it and it doesn't just save you money, you actually get earlier check in times. That one tip alone that I shared is always gets people's attention because I talk about how you put earlier check in times direct booking materials and websites and copy and then you go to your OTA and you put a later checkout check in time. Sorry. And the psychological aspect that has, is unreal. So it doesn't always have to be cost, it's obviously the, the perks as well. And if you go and look at what the big chains do, Hilton, Marriott, etc, go look at their website, go look at their, their pages on. When they talk about booking direct, it isn't always about cost. It's, you know, you get free WI Fi, early check in, late checkout, etc, and so education comes in many forms. I set out on a mission back then to educate a million hosts. If I could educate a million hosts and they then in turn educate their guests, then we've got the movement back up and running and growing, etc. The problem is, is that so many people don't know what to do, don't know how to do these things. That's what drove my, my book, the book direct playbook, because 101 ways on to do that. And my whole philosophy and thinking is if I can educate as many hosts as possible and give them three or four little things to do, where to place it, how to do it, how to get the message across, and they go and educate their guests and let's just say they've got a hundred guests or a thousand guests coming through their business every year, then that is how we do it. We're not just going to do it from one person. It couldn't just be me stood on a soapbox talking about it. We had to do it with a power of numbers, the power of the collaborate. And the numbers that we see at a high level are always skewed because you're right. We've got the hobbyist hosts here who don't care. We've got the professional hosts here who are caring more and more and getting better and better at educating. And then we've got the big, big players like Vacasa, et cetera, who have always been good at it because they've got marketing teams galore that can do all of this, pay all the money in ads and all of those things to do. So, so for me, as long as I see this middle category, the professional host growing, that's for me is the main thing, because I'll never be able to impact the hobbyist hosts and the big professional companies already doing it. It's, this, is this middle ground and it just starts at education and, and you don't have to just rely on cost because a lot of people, yes, it's a factor, but it's not the deciding factor. If you can say to a family of five, I'm a family of six, right? And I, we say we're driving three hours to our destination. If you can get across that, if you book direct, you get an earlier check in. If you book via an OTA, you gotta wait till 6 o' clock to check in. I know in the back of my mind, I've got four kids, I've drove three hours of them. Yep, yep, yep in the back. And if I get to the property, I've then got to wait a few hours before I can check in, or I can just book direct and check in early and also as well get a nice little welcome basket and all the free wifi and stuff. I'll be like, I'll do that every day. So it's just how we get across to it, how we get that cross and that messaging across to the guests. And the one thing I final thing I will say on this, I learned this from a book by Donald Miller called storybrand. The major message in that story brand book is that if you confuse, you lose. And that is so key. I think the problem is, as I see so many people and I've seen thousands of people's websites, I've spoken to thousands of thousands upon thousands of hosts. The main thing that they get wrong when they're doing this is that they confuse their messaging, and that's when they lose.

Yeah. Well, I think it's so funny, Mark, that story you just told about the checking in with a bunch of kids thing. Not only would I not mind paying less and getting better benefits, I would pay more to check in early. You know what I mean? So if the OTA was, I'll just make it up a thousand dollars for this day. And then what you're describing, I can check in early, I get a welcome basket and so on and so forth, was eleven hundred dollars. I would pay $1,100, you know, to get the better experience as opposed to, you know, the other way, the other way around. So I think that's a good reframe because it's a value discussion, then it's not actually a cost discussion because the. The guest may naturally go in their brain, all right, it's cheaper. Why? Why is it cheaper? And then, you know, I've told this to many clients before in the past. A lot of clients like the middleman. They like the fact, whether you like it or don't like it, that they can go to Airbnb and cry, I saw a bug, I saw hair in the shower, and therefore you have to refund me. They like having some power and control in that relationship. So when you say book direct, they say, oh, no, I don't know if I can trust you enough to fulfill on your promise and deliver me the experience that I want. And if you don't deliver it, I feel like I have no recourse or no, you know, minimal recourse. Whereas when I book through Airbnb, again, the host may not like it or enjoy it, but they feel like they have someone that they can talk to that's going to mediate that situation more effectively. Now, all of us on the call here know that Airbnb doesn't always mediate those effective, those situations effectively. Excuse me, but that's the guest perception, right? Is that they feel like, well, if I book an Airbnb, I'm protected, I have this insurance, I have this coverage and so on. And so forth. So we have to kind of break through that. And I think your example is sound. It's actually funny you brought that up. I was going to bring that up. The check in idea or the wi fi from the hotels and things like that, because that's a more apt, I think, value discussion over. Just. Yeah, it's like 50 bucks cheaper on my website versus the other sites. And I've suggested to many clients recently, even Mark, some clients don't charge any sort of guest service fee at all when you book directly on their website. And what it turns out what happens, their business is they have no budget for marketing. Even like a larger, more professional host, I've had to talk to them and convince them you might want to consider putting some kind of fee there. Now. It should be less maybe than what's on the OTA, but why not put eight's the number? In my mind, 8% is like a very reasonable fee. It's far less than what you see typically on the listing sites. But that's your. That can be your marketing budget. You can take that 8% off every reservation and put that into funding your advertising and funding your marketing goals and so on and so forth. And there's ample evidence at this point that the guest is not that bothered by the service fee. Otherwise Airbnb wouldn't grow. If the guest hated the service fee and really disliked it, then Airbnb would be flatlining. And that's obviously not the case. Airbnb is growing and they're taking more reservations in outside of seasonality. So, you know, there's some data there to kind of back up what my thesis is. I think many people just aren't doing it and then they leave themselves making a direct booking actually too cheap. So cheap that they're actually not making as much money as they could to then go invest into buying a website through Mark and taking, you know, advertising dollars and working with us to deploy it and things like that. So, yeah, cost is one thing, but I think we did a decent job there covering some of the other things. Paul, did you want to go down number four there? I think it speaks to what I was just kind of talking about with Airbnb, but what's going on? You want to add into that one?

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest or one of the biggest factors in, in the struggle for the direct movement is Airbnb's growth or staying relatively flat. I mean, I think that still to this day, the most painful but the most like, visually astonishing picture is actually looking at the search trends results and seeing Airbnb vacation rentals and verb, just those terms alone and the growth that you've seen with Airbnb people, people just know it has become synonymous with vacation rentals. Just because just like it was in 1415, everything was a VRBO and everything was a buy owner vacation rental. However, vrbo at that point, not verbo, had, had, you know, had figured out what they could, you know, they figured out their branding to a point where that was, that was the term and now it's Airbnb. And I think as long as that is the case that that equity is built up, people are going to continue to search for Airbnb in here. Now they may and they may not always end up on the Airbnb website that I think for right now it's going to be the case. But that's the key there is that that's what people know. So that Mark, to your point, to the education point, we need to educate people that there are other places where it's not an Airbnb, it is a short term rental, it is a vacation rental. Maybe, maybe it is may a matter of terminology and nomenclature of trying to get people to say more of a short term rental or a vacation rental, something like that. I think that's, it's going to be hard to penetrate that armor until there's a, there is a chink in the armor of some kind. And I don't see that happening right now just based on the volume that's there. And I think similar to the discussion we've had the last few weeks or months here about Google and it hasn't gotten better per se, but there hasn't been, I mean even AI overviews, which I think we can, we can maybe.

Agree were really bad.

That was still just a small, a small little dip that it maybe made people think about something other than Google for half a second. Maybe DuckDuckGo, maybe Bing, maybe they started to think about some other options but nobody switched over. Nobody's, nobody's continuously having a bad experience. If people are continuing to have a bad experience on the site, yeah, maybe they will start to look for some other places or on the, on the mobile app, whatever that is. But I think as long as you know, there's innovation on the Airbnb side of things, it is going to be tough to combat just that, that fortress that they've built out for lack of a better term around there, the vacation rental and short term rental community here. But I can throw it back over to anybody and there's some red meat there. Go at it, boys.

Well, I'll go first then, Mark, and then I'm curious your perspective on this, because I think if there's an argument for Airbnb, that's the argument, which is that more people are going to search Airbnb London, for example, you know, to your recent stay, Mark, or they're going to search Airbnb Paris or something like that. Certainly this is the case in major US cities as well, more than almost any other generic search term. Right. So even if we ranked well on Google for some of these, these terms, like, ah, we're just never going to get the awareness that Airbnb has. So I think that's an argument for them. The, I think the stat that you're referring to there, Paul, was the fact that I forget exactly the number off top of my head. Someone can fact check me or I can put a link in the show notes, but I think it's somewhere in the range of 40% of Airbnb bookings now are made directly on the app. So not only are people not even searching some terms on Google or looking through other methodologies or places or things like that, they're just literally opening up the Airbnb app on their phone and purchasing things. It's actually similar. I don't know if Amazon is quite as large or as like, prominent maybe in the uk, Mark, maybe you could educate me on that. But like, my wife would just go to Amazon and buy things. She's not even going to go to Google and look for things. If she wants to buy something for, you know, her kids, a toy or we had to buy them new backpacks for school recently, she just goes on Amazon. She doesn't even consider any other options. So Amazon has become, in a way like a search engine or way that you find the solutions. Just like Airbnb for some people is like, oh, I'm just going to go to Airbnb and I'm going to find a place to stay for my, you know, the soccer match or the football match that I want to go to. Right. So that's kind of one way to think about it, is that with their dominance that strong, it's hard because you don't even give really the chance, the opportunity to book direct, if they're only going direct to Airbnb. So I think that is the, the, the, the battle we're fighting against. I'm curious your reaction to those thoughts, Mark, because that seems like the biggest pro that Airbnb has from our Perspective.

This is why I love this podcast. It's such like high level discussion. You're making me write stuff down as you're talking because there's things I want to talk about because this is such a good discussion. So number one, the. And I've spoken about this a lot. I've spoken about this on stage in front of a lot of people, a lot of hosts in America is that the. My worry is, is if we don't do something now, specifically in this middle category, the professional host, we're in danger of where Airbnb does what Amazon has done to e commerce and books. Right. So, Conrad, you'll know this. For every book that I sell on Amazon, Amazon takes 66% of every $66 cent of every dollar that comes in.

Right.

It's bananas. And there's nothing that we can do. There's literally nothing we can do. What I'm going to do, start up a book publishing company in my back. My back room. No, it's not going to work. I'm not going to go print it all off. It's. It's very, very, very hard to, to compete with that because there's been nothing that's been done. We are still very fortunate in 2024, the part of recording Just cup spin on to Q4 that when a booking comes in on Airbnb, we still find out who the person who is buying from us. Name, last name, phone number.

Right.

Amazon. I haven't got a clue. 10 people could buy it. I don't know who they are.

Right.

That is my worry now when it comes to search. You're right. This whole Google experience at the moment is a little bit bananas. And you're right, though. Bing, duck, duck, go. They haven't really come up with. People aren't switching to there. I feel the true test of time will be when OpenAI bring out their search GPT. And I think the even truer test of time is when Siri gets better and Alexa gets better. So Siri right now is being trained on OpenAI, Alexa, Amazon. Alexa has been traded on the anthropic model. I think that is going to be the true test to Google's. My Alexis has kicked in. That's funny.

We'll leave that in because that's what these voice assistants are interrupting you when you don't want them to.

Exactly. That'll be the true test to Google. If it doesn't, if it doesn't go well for Google and voice takes off, then you're right. Airbnb will Only get more, more powerful because people do just go straight to the app, right? And you're right when, when I want some in the, in the UK now and from a shopping basis we don't go search on Google. We know what we know to be true. Which is, which is Amazon. Unless, unless I buy these energy drinks from this company called Neutronic and you get them packs of 12 and it's, you know, better to buy direct. They've built a brand awareness around it, right? Pack of 12, they're really good. You can buy on Amazon but they've built their brand up so you can go straight to their website and buy for the most part you go into Amazon. Now the reason why I say all of this is that the place that I stayed with at the weekend in Liverpool, I found their listing on Airbnb, right? So I discovered their list on Airbnb, I started my search on Airbnb, I did all the filters, I looked at the map, I came to their listing. Now the reason why I talk about their brand is that their brand was prevalent throughout their listing. They had billboarded their brand name on their listing. So I knew, I knew to do a Google search for their brand name in said Liverpool so I could find their direct booking site. That's what made me go back to their site to book direct, right? So they had had the education. I don't know if they've done it on purpose or by accident or whatever. They, they weren't a boostly customer. They I just somebody that I found randomly to book with them, right? So they had done the right things to educate me to go from my Airbnb listing to go directly. So we, Airbnb is just going to grow. They're going to pump tons of money into it and there's going to be other OTAs that pump tons of money into it and they're going to be that first point of contact. But if you're a smart professional host and if you set your listing up in all the right ways, then you will drive somebody to your listing and then you will drive them to your Dara booking site. Obviously you can't go onto your listing and go, hey, find me a, you know, www.boom boom boom.com because that is not allowed. It's going to get flagged and all other things. But there's definitely clever ways of doing it. And so from that you will hopefully pick up, let's say three out of every 10 bookings. But that is better than what everybody else is doing. Again, hobbyist hosts don't care. So the overall book direct movement, I feel like in the next few years is going to probably drop because there's going to be a lot of hobbyist hosts come in.

Yes.

Maybe regulations shake them out. Yes, There may be more barriers to entry. I always say the problem with this industry is it's only one step above mlm multi level marketing. There's literally one step above where there's a bit more money to pay. But there's literally nothing else stopping me from going to that house over the road saying, hey, your house is for rent. Give it to me. I'll do all these things, I'll get it. And I can literally get it on Airbnb tomorrow.

Right.

There's regulations coming in to stop that depends on where you are in the world, but for the most part there isn't. But if the more that regulation comes in, which I think is a good thing, it may shake out that bottom hobbyist market host and it'll just mean that there's going to be, you know, like it says in here, if there's less supply, less people coming onto Airbnb, what does that mean to the whole market? Who knows? But I feel like if as long as I personally can impact this middle ground, this professional host, and we can get them to increase their direct bookings, that is a, that is a win for me because there's no slowing down the Airbnb phenomenon. What they are doing next with AI and all of these things, it's only going to stop, strengthen their brand, but they're not going to personally take stuff away from the book direct crowd. What they'll do is they'll just take even more bookings away from booking.com and Verbo, who again are niching down in their own little things and trying to do all of their things that they're doing, that's what they'll take from. So I feel like I've just thrown so many different things in there, but.

I feel like, no, no, it's okay. A few threads I'll pick up and pull on Mark from my perspective then. So I think the odd platform thing, by the way, that could probably be a whole podcast episode that we do just on how to like subtly nudge people off platform. Right. Following all the terms and conditions of the rules of Airbnb, we're not advocating that you do something that you shouldn't do. And you know, to your point of like, you don't want to get banned off Airbnb or, you know, remove that listing from your Platform. Well, it goes back to, even to your example from a few minutes prior, later check in date from for Airbnb guests versus Book direct guests. Nothing in the terms and conditions. I'm assuming you've still looked at that, that would not allow that. And yet it can nudge people your direction. It's, it's probably not one thing, right? It's probably five or six things, right? If you just kind of keep nudging, you can get some benefit there. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of angles to explore there. Here. Here is actually the next point. So it depends perfectly into kind of what you're saying there. I think ultimately, Mark, my, my next point was you can, you can win the direct booking battle, but the direct booking war may be being lost overall right now. And that's okay, right? So I think the one thing about what you said that's very true, that I agree with, is that you're fighting your own individual battle. So even if the Airbnb sort of large cruise ship, if you will, is going on its own track and you can't really, in your little ship, change course or really, you know, do much to modify, you can still win your own little war. So you can get more direct bookings. Even if the overall direct booking marketplace is maybe being a little bit softer or going down a little bit because you are in control of your own website, of your own brand. You can go buy a custom website and get it built out. You can go leverage a pms, you can go do your own search marketing, social marketing, email marketing. These are all things completely within your control that you can actually take action on. So maybe that's just more of a philosophical note or question, but I think, I think of it like layers, Mark, where it's like things way outside is like things I have no control over. I have no control over the US Economy right now. I don't know who's going to get elected to be the next president. Don't know, don't want to make any sort of political statement there. It is what it is, right? That's the things way outside of my control. As I get closer and closer, I start to have more control where I decide to buy the properties or invest in the properties. I can't really control that market, how well it may go, but I kind of can do my research and try to find the right ones, all the way down to like how I photograph and put my listing on Airbnb. Back to your example from a minute ago, that's 100% in my control. In fact, if I don't do it, no one else will do it. Right. So it's like, as you get closer and closer to, like, the core of what the actual problem is, you get more and more, I guess, like, empowered to, like, do things that will actually help you and get. Get your business in better shape and you can win the little battle, even if the overall war is being lost. And maybe that's what some people need to hear is kind of my thoughts with that, you know, point that we had in the outline, which is like, it's okay. Like, some of these things are outside your control and that's okay thing to say. It doesn't matter because you can still do what you need to do to have some success there. So, Paul, I don't know if you have anything else you want to add in that point. Maybe it's just more of like a battle cry. Don't give up. We got a few more things to go over.

I know, but I think it's an awareness thing. It's just, it's, it's knowing more than anything else that, that there. That you are battling other entities out there. The otas, the Metasearch site, you're battling more than that. So taking a more of an active role and trying to drive more of those direct book, direct bookings. Yeah, you're not gonna, you might not win the war right now, but those battles, it is, it's. You can prove those battles out in the short term, put those best practices in place and move on there.

Yeah. Awesome. All right, so last one here. I'm curious your thoughts on this one too, Mark, because you kind of touched on it a second ago. Airbnb may be taking market share away from like, booking.com for example. And you, you may see this. I see this all the time. Oh, we're going to start a new listing site and it's going to be better because we're going to do thing xyz and currently this other listing site only does abc. We're going to do these other things. And people think they have unique marketing angle there. I don't really see it because I think most of these new marketplaces don't actually have a novel idea. In fact, many of these marketplaces seem to want to return to an era that has passed us by. Like, we're going to return to this book direct era. We're going to return to something that's, you know, been a little bit different or the old way of doing it so far. You know, maybe something to that effect. And I just don't think that's a viable path. So, Mark, I'm curious your reaction first. What's your idea between if a new OTA were to grow and be successful, what would the actual value proposition of that OTA have to be for it to grow in the today's marketplace?

I feel for an OTA to come into this marketplace now and to be uber powerful and to be deemed successful is it would have to really focus on a niche. And whether that niche is purely pet travel, whether that is purely for the LBGTQ community, whether it is for solo travelers or whatever, if there was an OTA to come in and, you know, isn't, I don't think we're going to have another Airbnb story anytime soon, personally. But that doesn't mean that you can't be successful if you were to focus on a, on a niche, whatever that niche may be. And there are plenty of examples out there that aren't in the news every, every week, every day. You're the ones that aren't top of, top of mind for most, but for a few there are. And I feel like that's a big takeaway for the big sites, but also these professional hosts, even for people who want to grow and scale is really focus on your, on your niche moving forward. Because I say I love that thing about control. Like last week I had a session with my therapist and I was getting really overwhelmed in my, in my day to day. Tuesday was not a good day. Wednesday I had a call with the therapist and he reminded me of this. It's focus, manage outcome. And he goes, you focus on what you can manage, on what the outcome is. Like you said, there's so many factors that you see in your newsfeed, in your world and your day to day that you have got no control over at all. But there are certain things that you can control the outcome of and those are things that you focus on. You forget about 99 of it and just focus on the 1. Now, if you're listening to this or watching this and you've got one property and let's say you do minimum seven night bookings, right? This is a wild example. 52 weeks in a year, let's say take two weeks off for like maintenance. That's just 50 bookings you have got to get over the next 12 months. Out of the millions of people that are searching around the world for places to stay, or the thousands of people that are searching maybe in your area where your Property is you've just got to get 50 of them to come and stay with you. Right. So you can focus on managing that outcome. So again, it comes back to who is your ideal guest? Who is the ideal person that's going to walk through your door, who is your property ideal for? Right. And then you just combine the two and then you go and find where they're hanging out, wherever they're hanging out and you just go make sure you spend your time there. And if you can focus on that outcome, then you'll be in a much, much, much, much better place. So my, my advice to everybody is just focus on your niche. Don't get attracted by this shiny object because as you're growing, there'll be tons of shiny objects that are flown your way. Just keep powerful on that message. And I feel like if anybody's looking for additional education videos, there's some really good content by Alex Hormozy that is out there right now on YouTube. And he talks a lot about this. Obviously he's not talking about our industry, which is hospitality, he's talking about a general vibe. But there are definitely some real good nuggets that you can take away and you can bring into your, into your day to day.

Yeah, I think one of his things, Mark, I've listened to a lot of his stuff before, is like one customer, one business model, one avatar to get to $1 million of revenue, which I think is such a nice way to think about it of like I can kind of do one thing really well for a certain period of time and get to a million dollars of a year revenue, which is tricky in this industry because do you mean a million in gross bookings or do you mean a million in management? That's kind of two different things depending on the business model and stuff like that. But generally speaking, like, I think there's some truth to that. One thing I see a lot, Mark, I don't know if you see this as well when you're building sites for folks is they want to go to that second market so early. Like they have five or six or seven properties in one market and they go, oh, now I'm going to go over here. And that's something. Paul and I have talked about that link before in this podcast that I don't like because it's like you've scratched the surface. You know, you've only got seven listings now. Maybe I could make an exception for like what you're describing. We only offer the 5 bedroom pet friendly homes in this market. Well, There may only be a certain number. So there's, there's carve outs to that. But generally speaking, people I think quit way too early on a single market. They want to diversify and go somewhere else when they barely again gone very deep into one single market. And I think that's a mistake. A lot of, you know that scaling maybe professional host trying to be like the really large host kind of falls into. So. Yeah, well, we didn't get to everything that we want to talk to today, Mark, but that's probably a good sign because it means that we can come back maybe and do a part two down the road. So thank you for being the first ever guest. We appreciate it. Paul, anything else you want to lean in here for before we let park go for today or we leave this one in good shape?

No, I think we've, we've, we've taken enough of this fine gentleman's time. I think it's time to move on to the next one here.

Yeah, probably late afternoon over there, so we record the mornings. But you know, for you, Mark, I know it's later in the day, so we thank you for hopping on. If you made it all the way to the end, we need something from you which will help kind of the podcast algorithm gods benefit us. We need a review. So go to your podcast app of choice. If you're Spotify or itunes, you are where we get the most downloads. Therefore we appreciate you the most. But we'll take a review anywhere. Leave us five stars, just like the five star listening experience you just got and we'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks so much and have a fantastic day.

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 loosely making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.