Using DACK Inc To Perfect The Guest Experience

So welcome along to another live broadcast of the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that gives you the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly, the confidence on how you can go out there and get more direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan and today we are shining the spotlight on another awesome product. This in particular features in the book Direct Blueprint. So if you're watching on the Facebook live or on YouTube, you'll be able to see the book. If you don't know what the book Direct Blueprint is, you can go and check it out by going to thebookdirectblueprint.com and it's basically Mark Simpson's latest book where he's brought together some of the titans of the industry that you as a hospitality host need to know about. Today we are really lucky and excited to feature one of the heads of products, or the head of product, I should say, Thomas Schaber from DAC in. So DAC is a marvelous kind of guest experience app. So welcome along, Thomas.

Hey there. Thanks for having me, Liam. And thanks for having us in the book and having us on the podcast for sure. It's great to be here.

I'm excited to have you on Thomas. So first of all, can you introduce yourself, your role and any interesting fact that you want to share?

Sure, yeah. So I'm Thomas, I'm head of product at DAAK and one of the co founders. Um, and yeah, it's, it's a guest experience platform. Um, we've been around for few years now and I think probably one of the more interesting things for us is Damon and I, the, the other co founder or main founder, both of us did not come from the short term rental industry. So we were outsiders. We saw a need for change and we came in from the outside and, and came up with a new product that we think the industry needed.

Can you introduce the. What, what really DAC is, what problem does it solve and what regions as well does it cover? Because that's the other thing. We've got an international audience. People will be listening in from of course the uk, from the us but also all over the world.

Yeah, absolutely. So DAC today is a guest experience platform that is available in North America, United States, Mexico, Canada. We have some operators in the UK and some operators in Australia as well. We're just starting to roll out multi language features which would include the rest of Europe on a web version and we're working on more of the currency. So we're a little limited on currencies. Right. Now, but so primarily the North American market and the UK market, we've got the pounds figured out as well. So that's where we're at today. There was also a huge, obviously regulatory leap that we had to take there to be in the UK and the EU that we finally gotten past on all the legal due diligence and all that.

If for the hosts out there, there'll be people out there who have just never heard of dac, what is it that it solves? How can it help the host?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think kind of, kind of the way to explain DAQ is to take a step back and think about why Damon and I came up with the product. Again, we were outsiders. We were not from the short term rental space or the lodging space in general, but what we saw was a really disjointed lodging experience in tech. Right. So everything in tech, everything in travel was technology driven. In 2017, 2018, even at that point, I could Uber to the airport. I could use clear to get through, you know, security. I could use my Delta Airlines app to use as a boarding pass. I literally didn't have to talk to a person. And then I would go to a hotel or a short term rental and I would be looking for a pin code or a key under a doormat at a hotel. I'd be standing in line in a lobby waiting to get checked in. And it just made no sense to us that everything else had made it to the 21st century and lodging was so far behind. So what we really built was a comprehensive end to end guest experience. From check in to check out. Everything can be done through a single portal in an app and a native app or a web app. And that really became a much larger undertaking, I think, than we even thought then on incorporating digital access and guest verification and upsells local recommendations. All this stuff in one app turned out to be a pretty big feat. But we're happy to say that we have a live product now. It works really well and it encompasses everything you could possibly need in the guest experience space.

That's cool. So really it's a one stop shop for hosts who really want to give guests the best experience. How does that work though? I mean, in terms of, say I'm the host, what do I need to do as a host to take part in the service and to really get it up and running? How much work, I guess, is there involved?

Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. You know, so we primarily work with hosts. I would say I'd be hesitant to use the word, you know, professional. I don't want to like, you know, you know, speak badly about half the crowd or smaller operators. Right. I think they're all very professional. Right. But generally it's professional hosts that list on more than one channel and utilize a pms. Those are the types of hosts that work with dac, Right? Because if you're just using Airbnb, right, you can probably facilitate most of the guest experience there being B. But if you're on multi channels and you're trying to get guests to book direct, right, which is obviously a big thing that you guys with Loosely and Mark do, you're going to need a central spot to manage guest experience, right. So it's very easy to set up. We link with any. We link with 18PMSs, and we'll probably be at 20 by the end of March on the PMS front. So we link with your pms, you ingest all the data from the pms and then you can use a variety of different tools in the platform to quickly and easily add and build out content. So you can clone content, you can bulk import content from Excel sheets. There's a variety of tools in there that make it really easy to get a robust guest experience app up and running very quickly. Um, so you don't. And I think it's really what you make out of the product is how good it is. It's just like a Facebook profile, right? So the more you put into it, or your LinkedIn profile, right? Like the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. And the more you build up the content over time, I think the better it looks. But I wouldn't think about it as one giant daunting task. I would think about it as start to use Dak, get familiar with the product, start to customize it and build it out, you know, over time.

Let's talk more about how it works from a guest's point of view. Say I've just booked into Sally's place. I've literally just paid for it. I've direct booked because I found her on Airbnb. I saw all their hints in a listing. I found her Boostly website and then I booked. How would it then work? What's my. Then what's my journey? I guess how do I get involved with dac?

Yeah, no, it's great. It's a great question. And it's a good point too. I think, you know, 20, 2018, 2017. This is a relatively new concept in travel, right? So you didn't have the biggest guys, they didn't even have an app right now. Marriott, Hilton, you know, all have a digital app and I think it's becoming commonplace. So I guess they're getting more familiar with that. But yeah, if you're booking at Sally's place, you would receive an email from DAC or from their PMS that would say, hey, to check in early to view local recommendations to learn more about the property, potentially to do guest verification, just click on this link and you can download the app or click on the web version as well. And from there you'll control your guest experience. And I think what we see operators generally do is kind of hit that a few times in a few different ways, right? So they'll say maybe the first welcome email says thanks for booking with us, do all this on this app. And then they'll send a follow up email maybe a few weeks ahead of this day, like, hey Liam, we notice you haven't checked in yet or viewed the app yet. Just make sure you get all the property details and act access information and local recommendations. Make sure you download the app and with that communication, that's kind of where that journey kicks off for that guest.

Thank you so much to everybody who's tuned in on the Boostly podcast and thank you for putting it with Boostly. We hope this has helped. Go and check out Dak and we'll see you on the next one. Guys having a blast. Gonna get it on the Boost 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.