Using AI to take your STR operation to the next level

All right, Luca, if you could do me a massive favor, just tell everybody, tell all the viewers, all the listeners, all the watchers, a little bit about Journey, a little bit about you and how you got this job.

Yeah, thank you for, for having me. Yes. Like I'm co founder and CEO of Giornia. I, I was born and raised in Italy. To just give you a bit background about myself, moved to, to us specifically LA. This is but 2008, a couple of years after I moved there. This was like early Airbnb and there was not much done online in terms of short term rentals. And one of the things I realized is that short term rentals, especially for luxury villas, was done all through brokers. And if you search for luxury villas online, you couldn't find really anything. So I launched the, that's, that's how I got involved in the industry is by seeing this problem, launching a landing page. And literally this is one of the first company doing Google Ads for, for luxury villas in LA. That landing page did over $1.2 million in revenue next to us on, on the first year. And yeah, that, that was the very, very beginning of the industry. Obviously short lived like within, within a thousand of 12 months we had some, something like maybe 15 competitors including like one fine stay luxury treat a bunch of other companies. But that really hooked me into the industry. And from there obviously since since it became a pretty crowded pretty quickly, I spin off some management company with the idea of utilizing technology to make that business as scalable as possible. A company at the time was called Gaswiser, grew that company to 300 units across six different cities in US and in the process of doing that I built a massive amount of frustration and trying to make different technologies working together. I've been a customer of many DMS companies and I've been trying to make him work things like access control system alongside with guest verification system pricing, different type of IoTs and different type of OTAs all work as a single system. And I think that was interestingly enough as when we were doing this and we raised some bench money at the time just as a management company was kind of the time of you know, the time of sunder and other major players like lyrics and stuff like that. So we kind of all started like in the same time where everybody was, was raising money and I figured out even bakaza, they all had a very common problem which was the one of the tech stack. So obviously smaller players had the same problem but on the large scale it was even bigger. And I Started realizing a lot of people were spending a lot of resources to build this system in house. And so that's also what we did. But we did it with the idea of after we built it, we said, hey, we're fixing a big industry problem by putting everything into a single place. So why don't we develop that into a product instead of selling it to other people with a similar problems of ours. And that's how a journey was concerned.

It really is a very common entrepreneurial journey where you scratch your own itch and on the back of it, other people go, oh, like Luca, how did you guys do that? Can you do that for me? And it grows from there. So talk to us a little bit about Journey. What is your usp? What's your elevator pitch? Because you know, as we, as we all know in this game, there's a lot of choice. I mean, there is a lot of choice out there. So how does journey separate itself from everybody else? What's your unique selling point? Your. Your, you know, your taxi pitch? Elevator pitch?

Yeah, I can give that another pitch. But I want to say something to answer your first question, how we separate ourselves from, from, from everybody. And that's by creating an alternative to this very messy, fragmented environment. So we want to create a finite environment. We want to create a full alternative to everything else. So we say, hey, instead of you trying to figure out all on your own, we have done that for you. So we took a completely different concept and idea of what, how, how things have been done, right? Like if you go to a pms, the idea, general pms, the idea is that they connect with as many service providers as possible. We want to have as many verticals as possible, but we want to have maximum one or two providers per vertical. And the reason being is because if you have pricing, if you have channel manager and if you have guest notification system access control system, IoTs, like all these different verticals and you choose multiple providers per vertical, this system are not going to work well with one another because the combinations are almost infinite. This is a very technical problem with a very user and problem. The technicality is that you only understand that when you've tried to build different systems on top of typical PMSs and you understand that that's not going to work and it will work for a percentage of the industry. I think it's the minority, but it's very much like full customizations. But then you have to have very high technical knowledge or have a finite product. Perfect example is an Apple product, right? Apple. That's exactly what they do. And that's the reason why a lot of people have iPhones is because it's the finite amount of solutions that you can have by doing that. Those solutions are built specifically for that platform. Number one, those solutions work well together. You don't get viruses, you don't get bugs or limited amount of bugs. And so all of those things comes as a big advantage. That's exactly what we did. We chose one vendor per category, usually sometimes two. And we go as deep as possible with those vendors. So for instance, for Prytim, we chose Wheelhouse. And you have 100% of wheelhouse functionality embedded inside of our system. Right. And then we did the same thing with Auto Host. Auto Host is fully embedded inside of our system. Now back in January, already did with ChatGPT, we created our own AI, which we will probably get more details on the AI side, but that's fully embedded into the system. And so as a user you really need to learn one system, not multiple. And you can upgrade, downgrade, whatever service you want. The frustrating part of what's happening in our industry is if you're a user today, you want to come in the industry or even if you're a large user. But let's take the example of somebody that just started, they have to do weeks longs of months long of research, research on who they want to use. Once they choose who to use. It's weeks longs of onboarding for your pms, weeks long of onboarding for any service that you want to use and making sure that it's integrated with pms. We just removed entirely all of that for our system is a one click process. What we are launching on the 16th of May, it's actually of potential when this goes live, have launched on the 16th, what we call Journey 2.0. We are making it a one click process. So as long as you have an Airbnb account, you log in on your BNB account within our platform, all your information, all your settings, everything, it gets imported inside of our system. And upgrading to Wheelhouse out of host or access control system is as easy as one click on button. That's it. And that's how the industry should be working. Right? And so that's how we think we're changing the game. I give you a long answer.

No, it's a great, great answer. So the question that I have them is Auto Hosts, Wheelhouse, fantastic companies. How are you making this decision to go with them? Because obviously in the dynamic pricing world, you've got many partners, obviously Our host as many different partners, what's the reason for going with with them? And why not? I guess if you're looking at the elephant in the room, why not open your services up to multiple. Because technically you could be missing out on potential customers there.

Yes, I mean it's, it's true, but we say hey, the people that want to have that level of customization, let them all be in a bucket. But it's a small bucket. That's the mis, I guess like misunderstanding that there's like in the industry they think that everybody wants this high level of customization when in reality people want simplifications. And if you look in every industry, whoever comes in and simplify things without a compromise on the end product, and that's really the challenge comes out as a winner. So, so that's, that's what our mission is. And, and we say, hey listen, the end of the day, is there really this big of a difference between pricing, pricing softwares and. A little bit there is. And number one, we chose Wheelhouses. Sounds like a paid advertising for Wheelhouse, but we, we have split tested basically every pricing tool that there is on the market and Wheelhouse keep mount on top. That's just as simple as that. And so we chose them with the addition of, hey, you know, you have to build custom API to work with us because we don't want to work with your typical API connection where it doesn't give you any functionalities. You have to give us an insane amount of functionalities. We want basically everything that can be done in your platform be done on our platform. So that's how we chose the partners. And that goes for every partner we work with. And we are not stuck to be like, hey, if there is someone that comes out that is 10 times better than who we are working with, we're not going to work with them. There is that, that is that option. And there might be an option in the future where there's going to be a couple options you can choose from potentially. We don't, we haven't, we haven't decided that yet, but no more than a couple because each single one of them needs to be fully built for, for our system.

If you're struggling on how to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start, then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boostly and our team right now. We can walk you through exactly what we're offering, how we can help you and give you a portfolio of websites that we have worked with that are matching not only your niche, but could be in your location as well. Boostly has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world increase their direct bookings. And if you are interested, then all you need to do is go to Boostly. B O O s t l y.co.uk call and booking an appointment with one of our sales team. So for me then, the question is, who would you say watching this right now would be your, you know, your crush client for Journey? Are we sort of talking to people that have got one property to maybe 20 properties or this question? Yeah. So who, who would you say you work with best? Because I've got my opinion and my assumption, but I would love to know your answer first.

Yeah, I would love to hear your opinion as well. But I, I can tell you one thing. I built this product because when I started my management company, I went from a single unit to 300 units. My needs have changed constantly throughout that journey to end it and I couldn't find a system that would adapt for my needs quickly enough. And I have actually built a product that it would be perfect for me at a time. And my goal is to have a product that doesn't match you up, a single unit that is you can start as simple, as easy as possible, which is part of the big announcements that we're making on the 16. But at the same time it can scale as complex as you want to. But the reality is that the different system matter relatively, but you, once you start being trained to a single system, you don't want to switch if the system can adapt for you. And so our goal is to be your solution from the very beginning to the very end of your journey.

So my assumption with this product is, is that. And again at Boost Lee, we work with hosts in the past and when they come into our world from one property and we've taken on the more that we've grown and become more known in the industry. We've had people come and want to work with us that have got hundreds of properties in their, in their listings. And what we've developed and what we've devised is our Crush and our cringe list. And over time we've realized that anybody over a hundred listings isn't suited to work with Boostly because they've got all of the things in place. So they've put you, you, you know, majority of the time they've got a pms, majority of the time they've got pricing, majority of the time they'll have an SEO guy, majority of the time they'll Have Facebook ads, Google Ads, going to a certain pages, they'll have met attacks and all that thing. So they've got a spider's web of a business and they look at Boostly because we've got that API integration into their pms, which is, you know, majority of the time would be a guesty or a hosted, ones that charge a premium. And then they want us to try and connect a bridge that was broken in the back end. And for what we do and how we work, it doesn't, it doesn't match. So all of our headaches and all of our, you know, stress and customer service calls has been on those situations. So we very quickly pivoted and gone right. Our crush client from here on in, from May 1 to moving forward is one to 20 properties. Those are the ones that we work with the best, we have the best impact because majority of them don't have a pms. Majority of them don't have pricing software. So they've got Airbnb.

Great.

And a lot of them don't even have Verbo or booking.com set up. They definitely don't have email marketing set up. So when we take them on board, and again without the pun intended, we take them on a journey, we join their journey from Property one and let's say we can grow with them to property 2021. We can jump in at the time where we can mostly make an impact. If they grow to a hundred, great. We're already in the system, we're already behind the scenes doing all the connecting, which is cool. Well, that's for us. And the way that you talk about simplicity, and I love that because any question that I ever ask in my own business and when I'm doing coaching calls, I ask them is how would this look if it was simple? And simplicity always wins. We make it simple. A habit in entrepreneurial life of trying to do things the hard way. My granddad always said to me when I was growing up, he said, there's two ways of doing things, Mark. There's the easy way and there's the way that you take. As I've grown, I love it and I've improved and I try and like simplicity always wins. And so the way that I would assume, you know, if I was speaking to a potential boostly customer and they're saying, listen, I don't know what PMS to go with. And I say, well, where are you at? I'm a Property one. Be more inclined to point them to your way than if I was speaking to somebody that was, you know, a couple of hundred properties in that's got all these things in place. Because like I say at the moment you're very limited to say. Right. Your dynamic pricing solution will be wheelhouse. Your, you know, auto host will be in, you know, so that's, that's my assumption. But that's, that's a very cool answer. Okay, let's very quickly pivot then I go on.

Yeah, but I want to address what you said because you said too many good things.

Okay, okay. Go, go, go, go, go.

Yeah, no, I think you're 100% right. I mean who we target is product is built for. If you're building it from scratch with our product, it can scale into the thousands of units. Who I'm going to be targeting is not going to be someone who has a thousand units today because you, like you said, it's much harder sell. I just want to say one last thing about the, the big release that we just made is that we are planning to really try to change things on how been done and to make it very much accessible and having people familiarize themselves with technologies. And so one things that we have launched is that anyone that is with Minute Auto Host or a wheelhouse or only wants to use the PMS solutions only they are going to have full access to our PMS and direct connection with Airbnb and direct connection with GPT4 fully for free. Because our business model is making, making money on everything else that we can give you in in terms of solution on top of. And this is very much a big game changing that is coming in. The industry should have come earlier, to be honest, from other players, but we want to be the first one to bring them to market.

So let's talk about this because it is the big new shiny object. People are saying that AI is coming, AI is here. And we as an industry, as vendors, as partners, as leaders in the industry, you have to adopt and move fast and bring it to our customers and eventually it'll be to the Joe public. So this is interesting. So a couple of weeks ago you were in London, you were talking about AI in hospitality. Can you just give us please like the cliff notes of your talk and like how you see AI and how it will impact hospitality moving forward for not only Q2 in 2023, but Q3, Q4 and obviously Q4 and 2024 as well, please.

Yes, I'm extremely passionate about this topic because. And one of the things that came up actually at that conference was I think a lot of people are underestimating what's happening. And it's very normal. Why people are underestimating this is because we are used to linear growth on any type of technologies, like even computing power, because computing power was strictly correlated to cheap power development. And those computers double in power every two years. AI is not strictly related to its development to hardware. It's purely software. I mean, obviously there's some hardware that runs it, but hardware can take it at much bigger power than what it is right now. And AI doubles in power about every three months. So you now have a compounding effect. So that means that in the last three months there's been more development in AI and more advancement in AI than in its entire lifetime. So that's, I think what humans have a hard time wrapping their head around. Right. And so with that comes the fact that it's going to impact almost every single industry that we know of. Number one, it's already impacting them and there's already solutions that are happening. They're already doing things. But too is if you're not on top of it, you're going to be left behind. People are. And this here comes the second, I think probably misjudgment that people are having on AI that they're saying is going to take over millions of jobs. And it is true that it is going to do that, but it's going to be the millions of people that are not going to adapt quickly enough because just as much as they're going to take those jobs away, it's going to create millions other jobs because it's just elevating and enhancing what humans can do. So we are going to be able to do a lot more things a lot quicker, a lot better and a lot greater. So I just want to say that as the first step of I guess of the opening and to answer more specifically what's going to impact and how it's going to impact hospitality. I think the quickest one that is happening, we are journey, we are launching it. But I'm sure we're not the only one working on this. Actually stuck in the conference. I think there's been a lot of people that have been talking about similar topics. We happen to think we're, we're more ahead of other people because we're going to start working on it for a long time, but we're definitely not going to be the last is automating guest communications, tech support and review management. I think those, those three are going to be the first ones they're going to, they're going to come and play what I love that one of the question was like okay but obviously there's everybody is used to like the typical chatbots that they've been existing until now and they're horrible and I agree with them. This is very, very completely different because if you look at GPT ChatGPT for instance, answering generic question is a lot harder than answering a finite a set amount of problems that you can give it with a with a trained database. So that already happens. That is already at a higher level than what a normal customer service can do. And I think within a month or two we're going to see hundreds of solutions. We're bringing I think one of the first ones free to market to the market. The only thing we're not going to enable fully for free is the auto response and some customizations on the settings but the people but one of the biggest pushback we got was so this is sounds like it's going to be impersonal answers to guests and it's not going to be going alongside the same style of your company. What about your branding and all of that. And this is again not a misconception that existed in the in the AI is actually going to be able to create a higher level of customization. It's going to be able to remember way more information about that specific guest than any other human. You're going to be able to customize based on your style and based on the type of preferences you're renting and based on maybe if you're a management company and a specific owner has specific requests, you can customize each answer to that. That's something that me as an expert having experience whenever we work with hundreds of different management companies with 24. 7 customer support, something that is extremely hard to do with humans, but it's going to be extremely easy with AI.

Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two boostly books that we brought out, the book Direct Playbook and the book Direct Blueprint are two of the top rated and the best selling in the hospitality category on Amazon for just two pounds. You can grab both of those books right now. The foundations and the structures that you need to put in place is in the Blueprint and then for 101 marketing tactics that is in the Playbook. So go and grab a copy on Amazon now just type in Book Direct Playbook or the book Direct Blueprint and we'll see you on the other side. So let me just jump in quickly. You are, you are right. We are moving into a world of personalized approach, personalized marketing. And humans are fantastic. We are all humans. You and I are human. But we have to sleep, we get ill, we get cranky, we forget, you know, we like alcohol, we speak as an Italian and a British guy, we like, we like our booze, right? And so because of that, we forget and stuff. These AI robots, they never sleep, they never complain, they, they don't get sick and they work 24 7. And you're right, AI is going to remove a lot of jobs. It's going to remove a lot of, a lot of fiverr. 90% of fiverr is going to disappear. But I say this to everybody. It's going to remove the crap and it's going to remove the average. The cream always rises to the top. So if you are somebody who is worried, it's because you're not very good at your job, number one. Number two, what this is going to do, it's going to help free up time for business owners, entrepreneurs and your staff. Every single business should be looking at how can they improve their productivity by 30% without adding on any more headcount, which is again, what we're doing every single day. At Boostie, we are building out a 247 bot using Kodi, which is a fantastic AI tool that will plug in and we basically upload all of our documents, all of our PDFs, all of our documents, any YouTube video, anything like that, we upload it to this tool and it, it learns it, it programs it and it replies with our voice, which is going to be key. So anybody who says it's not personal or whatever, they're using the assumption of what is currently here, which is those chatbots, which, yes, is an awful user experience, but it will get a heck of a lot better. So for everybody in hospitality moving forward, you can know full well that a question will come in, whether it's a platform or direct, whether it's an inquiry or a question, and it will be answered professionally, with your tone, with your personality and quickly, which, you know, in the world of TikTok, where we want everything within seconds, we want to watch a video within seconds. You'll be able to achieve that, you know, because at the end of the day, who wants to be awake at 2am answering a message about WI fi or a microwave not working, or that somebody's been locked out because they're too drunk, right? And that's, that is what this will bring and, you know, depends on when you're watching this. If you watch us on The Davis podcast goes out, you are literally at the most up to date as we ever are. Two, three months like you say in three months time. But maybe hundreds of us solutions and Journey may have even got even better with all the things that it can offer. So you've got to stay on top of this. And like I said at the very start, AI isn't coming. AI is here and right now it's the business owners that are being impacted. And then the next will be the guest, it'll be your bookers. Amazon already announced that it is looking to bring in chat GPT into Alexa because Alexa's is currently struggling and it needs an upgrade. And that's the next thing. Just imagine now talking to your device one to the, to the left of me here and it will be able to book a holiday, it'll be able to make an, you know, to, to, to to book a stay, book a hotel, book a short term rental. Right now if you ask that question, you won't be able to do it. So it's going to impact business owners now, which it currently is in 2023. Everybody's being impacted, doesn't matter what industry you're in. And then next it's going to be your customers, Joe Public. And if you're at the forefront of it and your vendor, whoever you use isn't currently implementing it in Q2 or Q3, then you rive the wrong vendor. You need to be upgrading and going to people that are at the forefront of this and so Journeys being one of them, fantastic to see. Okay, as we look to wrap this up, where number one, can people come and find out more about Journey? Number two, if anybody wants to reach out to you, pick your brains about AI, is there any place that you like to post socially about it? And number three, what's your final takeaway from this podcast? What's this like the thing that you want everybody listening to take away from this?

Yeah, well Journey junior Com definitely if you're interested in the business. I'm pretty rich. I try to be pretty reachable so don't at the same time I'm easy but I'm pretty active on my LinkedIn and it's my name and last name Lucas Lamberto. So feel free to add me or follow me there. I'm happy to answer any question on my team, answer any questions specifically about AI even to just share information and then take away, I mean I think you said it, just make sure you're on top of this because it's evolving much quicker than People are thinking and it's actually a lot easier to use than a lot of other technologies. We're used to Internet early age, but this is much more and it's a lot easier for a lot more people to, to develop tools and build things. So make sure you're on top of it.

Fantastic. Thank you very much. So Zambelo is Z A M B E L L O on LinkedIn. If you put that in on LinkedIn with Luca L U C A at the front, Journey is J u r n y.com please do go check it out. Fast, fast growing property management software solution. It looks to keep it simple for all. And yeah, it doesn't matter whether you're property 1, property 10, property 20, property 30 and you're looking to have a simple solution which everybody is, then definitely go and check them out. Can they book a demo? Can they get a free trial? How does it work if someone's like on the page right now, how does that sort of work?

Yeah, our PMS with a connection with Airbnb is fully free, so anybody can do that. And then you can also book a demo if you want to see the product in more details. But you can literally run as many Airbnbs as you want on top of our platforms and use our and our basic AI system. The more advanced obviously for premium and the other upgrades are for premium, but that's fully for free.

So if I wanted to get started for free, I would come on, create an account and if I just connect just my Airbnb listing, that's free for all.

That's correct.

It doesn't matter how many properties I've got.

Doesn't matter.

And then from there there's a gentle upgrade as you go. Brilliant. I love that, I love that. Okay, well, go check that out. Really is worthwhile. J-U R N Y.com start for free and as you grow, as you go on your journey, journey will be there with you, which is lovely, Luca, appreciate it. I really look forward to tapping into more of AI with you. I'll send you a message out of this because I've got a WhatsApp group just for AI chat and so love it. I'd love to have you part of it. But for everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in. As always, this is the podcast that brings you the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to increase your direct bookings and cut down on your over reliance on Airbnb and the OTAs. We are here three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. It doesn't matter whether you listen on Spotify, on Apple Android, or you like to watch the videos on YouTube or LinkedIn or any of the social medias, we are here for you. All you need to do is Google boostly go from there and choose your podcast listening of your choice. With that being said, we're going to stop today's recording. Luca, thank you. Thank you everybody for tuning in.