This Tool will grow your direct bookings

Welcome back everyone to the Boostly Podcast. This is the podcast that gives you the listener, the tools, the tactics, the training, and most importantly, the confidence so you can go out there and get yourself more direct bookings. Today we've got the Spotlight series and this is where we focus on people services, products that can help you as a host. My name is Liam Carolan and we're talking all about direct bookings today with our very special guest, we've got Chris Walker. He's the CEO of Direct Booking Tools. You can go and see directbookingtools.com as if you want to see their website. And it's a tool which basically is aimed to really help your guests make the right decision and come and book direct with you. So I'm not going to give more away than that. Let's dive into it. Welcome along, Chris.

Thank you, Liam. Pleasure being here. Thanks for having me.

Whereabouts in the world are you at the moment and where's the business based?

We're located in a rough place called Hilton Head, South Carolina. It's actually a beautiful resort community in the States. Actually just became renamed number one resort island of the US So it's not a bad spot to be.

What is direct booking tools?

It's quite simple actually. It's something that's been done in the, in the hotel industry for about 10, 12 years now. When they came out with the price comparisons for room nights. No one's been able to do this for the vacation rental industry. So we spent about 18, 24 months in development and came up with a way to where we could show the public the, the price differentials between booking direct versus the OTAs. So as you can see behind me, that's a direct pricing that was generated on the product. It shows up on the property manager's website, the traveler, when they look to book any particular property for any given date range, this product goes out, gets that direct total price out the door pricing for the property and shows it to the public. It's just price transparency is what it's all about.

Can you give us a history of the business? Why, why does this matter to you? Why does direct bookings matter to you as a individual?

Well, direct bookings are very valuable in and of themselves. You know, you get, obviously you get direct communication, you get to set proper expectations, you get to actually review the guests before they book or make sure that they're the proper guests that you're looking for. You know, we have our own restrictions in our own company that, you know, we don't like particular events and things happening at our properties and we have some large properties where that's very advantageous to do. However, we have to turn those people away because that's not the type of clientele that we cater to. So that type of control is very important. And you don't have that control with OTA bookings a lot of times and sometimes you have to cancel those. And of course everybody knows we get dinged for that even more so with some of the new rules that are just rolling out with one of the platforms who I failed to mention at this time. But we'll actually get monetary, you know, dinged on that from, from canceling those reservations. So it's important to have control of your business so that you can control the destiny. You're not beholden to one source of income. We're, we're proponents to some degree of the OTAs. We think that they certainly have done a lot of good for the, for the economy or for the market of the vacation rental industry. It has absolutely exploded due to their, their cash investments or into the marketing and things that they've done. But you know, and they're good partners to have. But they also, you know, should, you should control your destiny. And so that's really what it's about is being able to control how you run your business and not be holding to someone else's the way they would like for you to run your business.

What's been the biggest challenge so far in, in regards to growing this product?

You know, actually getting in touch, getting in front of the decisions makers. You know, the companies, as they grow, they get larger, they get gatekeepers in front of you. You can't get past the front desk people and that kind of thing. And I mean, but that's with any business I think you've got to get with the decision maker. And those people are typically higher up the food chain and they're harder to get a hold of. But interesting enough, we've got a little twist to that is for vacation, for reservationist. They can show this product to their, to their clients that are calling in or emailing in and they can send them this product to those people and convince them that they have the best price in the market. It also prevents them from having to offer feature firm discounting because perception is reality. It looks like you're already discounting your rate to the, to the guest. So we're helping them convert more sales and by doing that they get excited. So they move us up the food chain. So it, it works out pretty well.

What'S been the biggest success then? Like you say, it's only been nine months. What's been the biggest success so far and what are you excited about?

You know, the greatest is the impact that it's having on the property managers websites. It's the conversion rate. The industry average, believe it or not, is 0.52% conversion rate. That means you need about 200 people to come to your website to get one booking. And I don't think, I think if you interviewed 100 property managers, 90% of them probably wouldn't have a clue with their conversion Website conversion rate is because, you know, as a, as a property manager and a fast food and beverage guy, we're all hospitality people. We just love to deliver a great experience. A lot of us don't delve into those, those, those nuances and those facts that really are impactful to what's happening with your business. And when we can take the industry average of 0.52% and move it up to 1.2%, we've, we've cut your need for, for number of people to come to your website to 80. And so now do you reduce your marketing and, and take that as a, as you know, as a savings or do you keep your marketing going and actually end up with more bookings because you're converting more clients that are coming to your site? The other beautiful thing is, you know, my, my own company, we went from 23 direct bookings to 65 direct bookings. I mean, just a massive change. And I didn't change anything intentionally on my own website because I wanted to see what this was all about because, you know, we think it's a great product but we need the numbers to be able to tell us that it is a great product. And We've got about 65 companies on the platform, never lost a single client. And everybody who's on it is very, very happy with product, seeing amazing returns from, from having this installed on their, on their platform. So that's just exciting in of itself and then that's why we built this because we knew it would be impactful and you know, that's, that's what, that's what gets us out of bed every morning because we just love what we.

Do with the website side of things. So I'm thinking WordPress. But will it work for things like WIX Squared, space, stuff like that, or is it got to be a WordPress website?

No, sir. Any website that you come up with, any booking engine that derives a, a total price quote on that booking engine. So you know, as long as you're, as long as you have a booking engine that shows you, you know, ABC street for these dates is total price, then we can work with it. For the most part. There's, there's very market we can't work with. But it doesn't have to do with the, the website itself. It has to do with the PMS on the back end. I don't want to throw anybody bus but, but so we can work with 97 of websites out there.

That's cool. That's cool. And just talking about PMS's, if I've got a PMS, it's still something which could, could work with your product. Is that right? Does it depend on the pms?

I guess no. Well, the idea is it's the website. So as long as the website is generating a total price, we can typically be able to work with the product. Okay, so no matter which PMS you're working with, it will develop and work with the product.

What's the plan for this company in the future? Is there other things coming along? You mentioned as part of a parent company and things like that. What does the future look like for direct booking tools?

Right. So every day we're further developing the product. I can show people a demo of the product even just two weeks ago we came out with the checkout page. Slide in. So on the checkout page once a person goes to book a property, there's going to be a slot and it says you saved so many dollars for booking direct. So again we're trying to prevent card abandonment in that, in that scenario we have the data dashboards in the back end that we're constantly updating. We're about to go to. We're not API connected now. We, we intentionally went script connected because we could work with anybody. Instantly we're going to start to go API connected. That way we can further delve into our data dashboards and be able to report even more information back to the property manager about their actual bookings and the conversion rates and things. I mean the website conversion we've got, but, but you know, there's things that we can't get a hold of until we are API connected. And we didn't need that. We still don't really need it. The product still works. We're just trying to develop our back end data analytics to a further extent to give them greater insights into their, into their, their business. We do have some other things that are in the pipe, but I, I can't quite open up the can of worms on those yet? Because they.

They.

They are. They're pretty cool. They're pretty neat and. But I just don't want to. To. To open that. That box just yet, so.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee. Like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard on the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do.