The True Benefit of A Direct Booking [Explained]

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome. And I am not really here. I am currently in the uk. Fingers crossed. All things going well at the Book Direct show and the Short Stay Summit. Now I am pre recording a couple of these intros so there is something to go out on the daily podcast. Like I said in the whole of 2021, I want there to be a daily podcast going out to help you, the hosts, get the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to get more buckets. Now I'm gonna slightly flip it kinda because I was interviewed on a podcast recently by the Amazing Lenka. Now what I wanted to do was just to put that podcast on the booster podcast in its entirety, but it was over an hour long and I do like to keep these episodes kind of short. So what we're gonna do is I've got a little segment of that podcast to show with you. Lenka asked some amazing questions. I sort of documented the whole of Boostly. So if you've ever been interested who I am, the how I got started, why I do this, and most importantly, the tools that I use to run Boostly and recommend to others, then this will be a good one to check out. So without further ado, let me flip my camera. You're going to be listening or watching to the Amazing Lenka and we are delving into all about Boostly and who and how I got here. As always, thanks to the sponsors, I'll be back hopefully in a few days time from the UK we will be able to pick this up as per usual. But for now, thanks for watching, thanks for listening and here is the Amazing Lenka.

More and more I can hear it as well. Like when I. It happens to me as well that I have a guest, for example, who came through OTA and then they would come to me and they say, oh, I know you have to pay lots of commission if I want to come back to you. Do you have a direct website? Where can I book? So. So some people do know that as well. So it's quite nice.

You hit the nail on the head. You really hit the nail on the head because it's not just the commission that you pay. And yes, the commission that you can pay can be a lot. I've seen invoices coming through for like 2, 3, 4, 5 grand on a monthly basis. It can get really high and that is a big burden. So there's a massive way to save money, but as well, it's the power. So when you have a guest who booked for an OTA you are literally playing by their rules, you're playing in their sandpit. And it's, and it's, you know, most of the time it's not an issue, but when it is an issue, it's a big issue. And this is where it just cause unnecessary headache, et cetera. And you know, I think one of the big misconceptions with what I do over the last five years is people think that I'm getting you to go cold turkey on the OTAs and I'm not doing that at all. The granary would never have succeeded if we hadn't have had the OTAS exposure. We were a farm in the middle of nowhere. We were not on the map. We had no right to be seen. But the OTAS gave us that visibility with a European and an international market. Hey everyone, taking a quick break to let you know that today's podcast is brought to you by the amazing Hostfully. Hostfully is a suite of two award winning softwares designed by short term rental operators for short term rental operators. The first is digital guidebooks. You should know about them by now. The, the days of the old ring binders being left in your kitchen are forever gone and now they're being replaced by digital guidebooks. Hostfully is one of the market leaders. It's totally free to get started and it is very cost effective when you want to Upgrade. Go to Hostly.com to check them out. The other part is their award winning property management platform and um, they were recently voted one of the best in the world by the Keystone Awards and they become recommended from a lot of Boostly website clients. So do go check them out hostfully.com go and book in their services, make sure you told them that Boostly sent you and say thank you for sponsoring this podcast Hostfully and all the team really appreciate it. Now let's get back on with the show. But what we did is that we didn't over rely on them. It was just one channel. It was a marketing channel. We used it like we use Facebook. We didn't over rely on one channel to bring in our bookings. We spread it around and that's the key to it. So be on the OTAs, be on all the OTAs, but make sure you've got the systems and structures in place. For example to have a property management software guest e free to book, toke, zivuoplistin, whatever it may be, you've got them all connected in so you don't have any double bookings, etc. And then what you can do through a PMS is then you can have a website and then you can get drive people to there and people think oh that's such a lot of work, so overwhelming. But it's not, it really isn't. The tactics that I show are simple, cost effective. A lot of the times don't cost any money at all and they have maximum, maximum return. Sometimes you can just do one little thing and it will result in a 20% shift in OTA bookings to direct bookings and, and a 20% shift over course of a year can be maybe a four or five figure sum investment which is huge.

Absolutely huge, Huge, huge. It's, you know, 15% especially if you are like here we're on the coastline, staycation boom, middle of a summer. You can charge premiums as you said, the fees you're paying to the OTAs, it's painful as you said, you need that as well for, you know, for the visibility, et cetera, et cetera. But you need to have a place systems in places to be able to take a direct booking. Completely agree and I love how you described it as well.