This content was created by Mark Simpson. This content was uploaded by Mark Simpson. This is a YouTube video titled "The TRUE Benefit Of A Direct Booking Explained" created on September 13, 2021. It features a conversation between Mark Simpson and Lenka discussing the benefits of direct bookings over using OTAs (Online Travel Agencies), including cost savings and strategic marketing approaches. Mark Simpson shares insights on how to effectively manage bookings and reduce reliance on OTAs.
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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 going to 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 Boosie 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 going to do is I've got a little segment of that podcast to show with you. Lenka has some amazing questions. I sort of documented the whole of Boostly, so if you been ever been interested who I am, 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 would 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 where we'll be able to pick this up as per usual. But for now, thanks for watching, thanks for listening and here is the amazing.
Linker 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 I can book? So some people do know that as well. So it's quite, it's, it's quite nice. It's, it's, it's.
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. You can get really high and that is a big burden. So there's a massive way to save money. But as well as the power. So when you have a guest who books for an ota, you are literally playing by their rules, you're playing in their sandpit 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 causes unnecessary headache, etc. 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, with a European and an international market. 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, Ziva, uplifting, whatever it may be, you've got them all connected in so you don't have any double bookings, et cetera. 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 a 20% shift over course of a year can be maybe a four or five figure sum investment. Which is huge.
Absolutely, yeah, huge, huge, huge. It's, you know, 15%. Especially if you are like here we're on the coastline, staycation boom, middle of the summer. You can charge premiums, as you said, the price, you know, 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, etc. Etc. But you need to have a place systems in places to be able to take direct bookings. Completely agree. And I love, I love how you described it as, well, having a blast.
Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
