Using Technology To Avoid Nightmare Guests

Hey, hey everybody. Have you as a host ever had a problem where somebody's either smoked in your property or they've caused lots of noise, had parties? These are the type of things that as hosts we're always worried about. You never want that nightmare guest. And today we've got a very special guest who's going to talk about a technology which is going to help to prevent that and give you more control whether or not it's a direct book and all through an ota. This is just a very cool piece of tech that you need to know about. So if this is your first time here, you're listening to the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the trainings and most importantly, the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan and today we've got Richard Coleman, who is the VP of marketing from Minute. And it's amazing piece of technology that if you've not heard of, then you're really going to Enjoy the next 20, 30 minutes. So welcome along, Richard. Thank you for joining me today on the podcast.

Yeah, big time.

So Richard, can you give yourself an introduction and also introduce what minit is, the elevator pitch.

Absolutely. So, as you said, my name is Rich, I've been at Minit for about five years now and I've seen the company grow quite substantially in that time and not just in the size of the company, but also in the types of customers we have and the customers we have around the world. With now over 100 countries we have host using minute. And essentially what Minit is is Minute gives you insights into your property. So it lets you know the noise levels in decibels in the property, it lets you know the temperature, the humidity and if someone is smoking in the property. So all the things you worry about guests doing. So if that's them throwing a party and disturbing the neighbors, you set a threshold and that can be different for the day and the night. And we notify you if that goes above that level and we can also contact the guests on your behalf. If they smoke in the property, our sensors can detect tobacco smoke and once again let you know and also message the guests to make sure they quiet down. We do occupancy as well, so we can see how many people are in the property. So if it's supposed to be booked for two people and 15 turn up, then we also know that. So yeah, so basically we have in room data that allows hosts know that the guests are adhering to the house rules and not disrupting neighbors or the wider community.

I mean it's every host's worst nightmare is to get somebody who comes and stays. When people do book through OTA sometimes some of them, obviously you can see previous reviews, but even then sometimes people without reviews book. And certainly for us here at Boostly, we obviously want to get more of our hosts who are listening to this, more direct bookings. And one of the things they'll then worry is that it's one of the most common questions I get is how do I protect my property? And you can always have things like obviously insurance, you can always have security deposits, but ultimately the devices and the tech that you have as part of your business is really going to help to stop some of the problems before they even get going. And this is the great thing about minit and minit in general. Just having that device is just a cool piece of tech. So let's dive more into that because there was a lot of ground obviously covered there. And first of all, I just wanted to bring the attention towards the name of it. I've been calling it Minute for years. So I'm glad to have yourself rich turn around and say actually it's minute if you're based in the UK and us. So for everyone listening to this, that settles that debate. So let's just go back into one of those first questions. As a host, what do I need to do and how many of these devices do I need to have, you know, to protect my home?

It really depends on the type of home you have and what you're concerned with. Most of the hosts that we talk to are concerned with noise because if there's a lot of noise, it often is the precursor to a party and it's the thing that can disrupt the neighbors the most and likely end up in a neighbor complaint and and then you potentially losing the listing. So if noise is the real concern, typically we say you only need one of these devices. So you pay per home per year, you pay the subscription fee for the year, you get the device and then you put it in a common area such as a living room. If you have a five bedroom villa in Spain and you're worried about smoking and noise. And our new sensor is also fully weatherproof, so you can install it inside the property or outside. So it really depends on your concerns and the size of the property. But the majority of our users have one and it goes in the common space and some users might have two or three if they have a larger property or are concerned about both Indoor and outdoor noise.

And how would the host know there's noise going on? What is the. What does that look like to them?

So we have both a mobile app and a desktop app. So if you want someone looking at that, they can see a noise graph over time and it will show you the decibel level. So we don't record anything. You can't listen on any conversations. But purely all you see is a graph that shows the decibel level historically. And you can set a threshold that you're happy with. And that can be different during the day and during the night. So during the day you might say, look, it's okay if people are up to 90 decibels. And then at night I want them to be below the threshold of 70. And then you have a noise timeline. So what you can say is, if it's above that threshold, for five minutes, I want to get a receiver notification in the form of a push notification to the app and an email to either myself or someone in my team. If it continues being noisy for another five minutes, I want to automate a text message or an email to the guest to tell them that, hey, guys, look, you've been noisy for 10 minutes. We want you to quiet down. You also have the option to get the device to flash and sound, so the device itself will start flashing to alert the guests that something isn't quite right. Or we have an auto call feature where you can type a message and that message will be auto read to them via a phone call. So it's very customized for what you want to happen. So you customize the entire. The entire kind of journey. But essentially we monitor the decibel level over time, and you can see that on a graph or decide who in your team you want to be alerted.

You know, the cool thing about this is that one of the worries that I'd have as a host is some of the times where there's most likely to be parties going on is these days for me, I'm not up still. Still around near my phone and that sort of stage, certainly after having a child, you know, I'm in bed by decent times these days. So one of my worries has always been that if there's noise going on and the neighbors complain in that I may not be aware of it as soon as I need to be. But this is great about your device is that it alerts the guest directly. So there's every chance that they get that alert and cease and desist, basically, which is cool.

So just to start that so I was jumping there. The data shows that in 94% of cases when it is now for five minutes, the first text message just saying like, hey guys, just reminded the house rules are after 10pm you need to be below X level. And 95% of the case that's enough to get them to quiet down. And it's often a case that they reply and say, sorry, kind of forgot or we were watching a film, didn't realize and it's fine. And it's only that 5% of the time where it might be an issue. And one of the things we try to do to counteract that is, is in the UK we have a guard service. So it's a service called Guard Assist. And if it's three in the morning and people are being noisy and they get the text message and the phone call and they don't quiet down, we can actually send a train guard to the property who will knock on the door and then report back to you. That's a service where we're offering in the UK at the minute and we'll eventually, obviously plan to hope to spread wider. But I think that's, that's, as you point out, it's a really key thing is when you have people in your property, you go to bed thinking, am I going to be woken up at three in the morning by my neighbor saying that there's a party or a raid going on next door? And what we're trying to do is kind of give hosts peace of mind that like you can worry about the bigger picture stuff and we'll worry about, about the daily logistics and dealing with the guests.

And it's just so important, isn't it? I love that guard feature. I mean, that is something where I've always thought if I do have some party or something going on, then I'm lucky enough. I used to work in department stores. We used to have security and stuff like that. So I'm aware of the places you can call. But so many hosts would panic. You know, you'd think that who can you get to go there? So that's, that's fantastic. And you know, something which we look forward to seeing, you know, go to other countries and some of our listeners may be interested from, from other places as well. So one of the things you mentioned there was house rules and obviously house rules are just so important. What does a host need to tell their guest about your device and where would you recommend them? When do you recommend they tell their guest about the device?

So we have some, some material on Our website, we have a few blurbs that you can put in your listings. So we actually recommend everyone make it obvious they have this device. And we have some channel that you can use to kind of inform guests about not just what the device does, but how it does it. And so we use a technology called edge processing. So when you have a Google or an Alexa, what it does is it records what you say, sends it back to Google or Amazon, it's analyzed there, and then the answer is sent back to the device. All of our processing is done on the device itself. Nothing is sent back to us. So we aren't able to listen into the conversations. We're not able to like no one could hack the device and listen into the room. So I think it's really important to be as upfront as possible. We don't want this to be hidden or kept secret. We think it's important you tell the guest and you tell the guest that one of the things we focus on most is privacy. Like the last thing we want is there to be any scandals or things about our products or the industry. And so privacy focus has always been kind of top of mind for us. We never wanted to include a camera. We never will. We only record decibel levels, not actually sound bites. So yes, there's material we have on our website and we even have a page for guests that you can point them to on our website that kind of informs them about the product and why it's a good thing. And one of the things we always focus on is we want our product to be beneficial for the guests, the hosts and the community. And it's not just about the hosts. We want the guests to have a nice experience because the host is able to monitor the humidity and temperature levels within the property to make sure it's a comfortable environment. We want the host to feel safe and confident in hosting so they do it more often. And we want the community to see that this host is using our products to ensure the guests aren't having a negative impact on the community itself. So yeah, we provide a lot of collateral and it's very important to us that we kind of, we make short term rentals work for everyone involved in the process.

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Yeah, that's very cool. And I like the fact, the confidence it gives people. And of course by having it noted on your listing, wherever that is in the house rules or within the description itself, that in itself is going to help to put off the wrong kind of people because the minute they see a host has got devices like this, I mean, myself as a host, I use things like ring doorbell as well. And when it comes down to the wrong kind of people, it reduces the wrong kind of people drastically. You know, it's very rare that we'd end up with problems. Now you mentioned some really cool extra features, which was the smoke detection, the humidity detection and that side of things. I want to dive more into that. So let's go for the smoke detection. First of all, this is something which I host a lot of contractors and workers and I know a lot of people listening often have people come and stay Monday to Friday and they tend to be contractors. Contractors tend to probably, you know, sort of generalizing here, but they tend to have more takeaways and often having a drink or having, you know, a smoke. And the trouble is that you're always worried that they're smoking inside. So with the devices, you mentioned having one in the living room, so I assume does that work like a general smoke detector? Talk us through how does it work for the smoke detection.

So yeah, I think it's important to differentiate between fire smoke and cigarette smoke. So our device is built to detect tobacco smoke. So if someone is smoking a cigarette within the property, it will analyze the particles in the air, it will decipher if any of those are from a tobacco cigarette, and it will alert you based on that. And so if you are worried about smoking in your property and it's happened before, you may want to put kind of one in a common area like living room, one in the kitchen, maybe one in the hallway or where you think people might be smoking. So yeah, it kind of depends and it's. And it's a difficult one because properties are so different, not just building to building, but country to country. You have some properties that have 15 foot high ceilings. You have some rooms that are 200 square feet, some that 50. So yeah, it kind of depends on the individual use cases to how many sensors you might need or how much of an issue it's been. But I think most of our hosts, if someone smokes in a room, you can, you can pretty easily tell and so they know where kind of the main, the main reason is, is where people are smoking. It's typically the living room where someone may or not, may or may not be like leaning out of the window to try and mask it.

And with that do they get sent a text alert or is this just something which the owner will get told about?

It's up to you. So with most of our features it's fully customizable, so you might want to have a message forward to the guest to say, hey look, tobacco smoke's been detecting the property. Just a reminder how sures are you that you're not supposed to smoke. Or you can have it where it just goes to your team and then you decide how you want to deal with that. Maybe it's a phone call, maybe it's a knock on the door. So it's customizable and it's up to kind of what works best for you.

Amazing. Amazing. So generally that's two of the main concerns of hosts covered. And the other thing you mentioned was the humidity and the temperature and that side of things. So to my mind as a host, I'm thinking especially at the moment, where we're seeing at the moment as we record this, is recording it in July, but it's still very much on our minds, the cost of bills, the cost of energy and all that sort of stuff. So how does it track the temperature and is there anything we can do if we see that the humidity and the temperature is high? I'm looking at it from a cost saving point of view as a host, but you mentioned as well, it can then be comfortable for your guests. So I guess this is for places outside of rainy England, is that correct?

It is. I think when I, when I joined Minute five years ago, the temperature feature was always kind of a bit of an edge case. People liked it and they said like, it's nice to know that like the guests are comfortable and the, the, the team doing kind of the changeover of setting it to a nice ambient temperature so when guests turn up it's not freezing cold or boiling hot. And over the last couple of years, as you mentioned, that that's changed quite drastically. And I think not just in the U.K. but across Europe, kind of lesser in the U.S. at the minute, the cost of energy has gone so high that people are now wondering how can I use this data to to, to reduce my energy bills. And one of the things we've, we've been really pushing in the last year is we've done an integration with Tado who make smart thermostats and smart AC controllers. And so at the minute, you can use minute connected to your pms. And what we can do is turn off the air conditioning or the heating in between guest days. So if you have one guest book Monday to Wednesday and then another one booked Friday to Monday, we can turn the heating of air conditioning off in between those two guests so that if the first guest leaves the air conditioning running, it's not running for two days whilst the property is empty. And that's becoming something people ask us more and more about. And we're getting more requests now for integrating with other types of smart heating controls than kind of anything else because it's kind of top of mind. And I think people also nowadays are looking for more like return on investment. And so the noise monitoring is kind of an obvious one where if you can rent parties, you save money. And the cigarette smoke is another obvious one, where you might have to have a professional cleaner going and get the smell out. But the energy bill ones is one that's really resonating with people at the minute. And that's something that we're putting a lot of focus on in the years to come.

One of the things that it's just occurred to me that happens quite often is we, when there's problems in properties in inevitably as hosts, we do get property problems. You know, it's not a passive business, is it? You know, there's times in winter where boilers go wrong and things like that and you see the thermostat still switching on. If, even if you've got a smart device, but obviously having a device like yours in the property, we'd know if the thermostat's working, wouldn't we? We'd know if the heat's actually on, which is.

Yeah. So in the same way you can set thresholds for noise, you can set a threshold for temperature and you can set one both low and high. So you can say if it ever drops below 8 degrees in the property, I want to know. And if it ever goes above 30, I want to know. And we've had cases where we have a host who has a property in the wilderness in Canada and he got a notification saying the temperature dropped below 8 degrees. And he went out there and he actually, his heating had broken and his pipes started to freeze. And he said without minute alerting him that the temperature dropped, he wouldn't have gone out to the cabin for two weeks, would have had frozen pipes, burst pipes and it would have been like a catastrophic problem. And so you can. Yeah, in the same way I kind of think that the main use case is, is on the energy saving side and trying to turn heating off either in between stays and the next thing we kind of want to go into is because we have motion detection in the device. If the property is empty for an hour then turn the air conditioning off. Because we work with a property manager in Spain called Bob Dubey who do short term rentals in Madrid and Barcelona and one thing they've seen is that people turn up in the morning, turn the aircon up full blast and then go out for the day because they want to come back 10 hours later to a nice cold apartment. But running an AC4 blast to an empty room is kind of worst case scenario for host and environment. So it's kind of one of our sustainability pushes as well as to how much money can we save posts and how much can we benefit the environment by not running heating and heating and cooling devices constantly when they don't need to be.

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 forward/call and booking an appointment with one of our sales team.

You know this is really cool because a lot of people, myself included, I'm guilty of this, of just assuming, hey, it's just noise, it's just noise. And you know, I can monitor noise. You know, I might be able to hear on my ring doorbell and stuff like this but hopefully people listening to this are learning alongside me with this. That's why I love interviewing people and chat and so is there anything that you're excited about or any changes within your industry which you're starting to notice and know sort of new, new opportunities that minute is. Minute. Minute is, is jumping on.

Yeah, I think quite widely. The, the short term rental industry is, is becoming more professionalized. I Think when I think back to staying in an Airbnb eight years ago, you'd turn up and, and some guy would come running down the road and like hand you the keys and he'd like text you, like hearing some house rules, but like, they'd be a bit confusing and you check in and then like it was all a bit of a, kind of a weird experience or a strange experience. And now you. The last Airbnb I went to, I booked it. I had like a PDF guide arrived by email before I turned up. Here's the access for the smart control, here's the access for the Chromecast. And it's a much more professionalized experience and I think that's exciting for us that the industry is getting more professional, it's growing and people are now starting to think of products like ours as to how can I make the experience even better and how can I make the guest stay more comfortable and what are the things I can really do to kind of up the level of what I'm doing and to up the, up the barrier and what's the, what are we aiming for up, closer up the bar? And I think that's really exciting for us because that's what we want to see. We want to see the short term rental industry thrive. And I think having hosts take more responsibility and really kind of push the bar to see where they can go is. It's a really crucial step in that.

Yeah, an exciting one, definitely. Especially all that smart home tech. You know, how does one device talk to another? How does your property management system or channel manager talk to minute? And it's just, it's really cool to see. So obviously being said, it could save me as a host from people smoking, having a party, you know, temperature and save me money on bills. What sort of cost are we talking? Are you happy to talk us through how it works for a host? If there's somebody listening thinking, you know what, I'm interested in this, what do they need and how much does it cost?

Absolutely. So we have two different plans. We have a standard plan, which is kind of the do it yourself plan. So you buy the device, which costs £50, you pay £120 per year per property, and for that you can set up your thresholds and we will notify you if there's an issue. We then have the pro plan where you get the device for free, but you pay £180 a year. And the difference there is you can integrate your PMS and that's when you can start to do all the clever things like you can just go to bed and if there's an issue, we'll message them or we'll call them. So the kind of the standard plan is that you get the information and the pro plan is you start integrating other tools such as your smart thermostat or such as your pms. And there's a lot more that we can take control of and allow you to kind of focus on growing your business.

And when you think like you say, the chap in Canada, he'd have literally cost himself thousands upon thousands of dollars. You know, this is a small price to pay for a piece of amazing tech. So that's really awesome and thank you for that. So as we start to get towards the end of these, we love to do a couple of quick, fun questions. But before we do, is there anything else you want to share from the world of minit?

Yeah, I think sometimes people kind of see us as a small startup or they haven't heard of us before. I think it's important to realize that minute is now live in over 100 countries. We have staff all over the world, we have an offering where we can ship the majority of the world and we're really, really driven to help support this industry everywhere we can. And so we love hearing from people, we love hearing edge cases, we love hearing the issues they're having and we really want to try and help in any way we can. And as we say, our goal is to support not just hosts, but also guests and the community. So we want to make sure that we help improve the reputation of short term rentals. And we've done quite a few pieces of work with either cities or associations where local people or local government has said we want to ban all short term rentals because they're such a nuisance. And we've gone into the city and We've put up 200 devices in short term rentals, recorded it for three months, then gone back to the city and said it's not short term rentals, they're not the problem. I think they're a very easy scapegoat to just blame them. But when you actually look at the data, that's not the case. And so we are very driven to help the industry. And that's not limited to the uk, the US and Sweden. That's a pretty global ambition and that's kind of where we want to, where we want to go and where we want to be seen going.

That's very cool. You've actually reminded me of a story we do have a noise monitoring device in one of the properties and we had, as you sometimes get, we had a neighbor who didn't like living next to a short term rental and so he used to complain and he'd complained that there was noise. And of course by having the information at hand we could actually prove, when we got contacted by the police, we could actually prove there was no noise at the times he was complaining through having that. That device. So it's well worth worth having. And the other benefit was we knew when the cleaners were in because it was one of the few times we'd get an alert because there'd be vacuuming close to the device, which was. Which obviously triggered it, which, which was quite funny. So it helped in several ways and definitely I see the value in it and many people listening will do. So I'm just going to timestamp this. As I said, we're recording this in July, so any prices you've heard on the podcast, you know, may have changed. If you listen to this way off in the future we're going to be sharing how you can get in touch and find out more about Minute in just a second. But before we do, let's just find out a little bit more about Rich. Rich, what is the karaoke song of choice when. When you go out and have some fun?

I think it's probably Mike and the mechanics. Looking back over my shoulder.

That's very specific. I don't know that one, but I will stick it on Spotify after this. Just in trivia.

Yeah, that's the hope is if you don't know it, you don't know how bad I am.

Fair enough, fair enough. Where was the last place you went for a spontaneous stay or where would you like to make the next spontaneous stay?

Probably to Wimbledon, to the tennis. So I don't know if you know this, but if you have an AMEX card, you can pick up last minute tickets. So I occasionally have to phone my boss and say I managed to get AMEX tickets for Wimbledon. There's only chance I can have a half day in 20 minutes. That's a pretty big rush. But luckily I'm based about a mile down the road in Putney, so it's a bit easier for me to get there.

That's very cool. That's very cool. And what do you like to do for fun and who are the people that you like to spend time with?

So my main hobby is running. So I try and run three or four times a week and one of my main Things is I love traveling to go running as well. So end of last year, we went to Valencia, stayed in Airbnb there. Wonderful city to run the Valencia Marathon. And so my fiance and I kind of have a tradition where she picks a city she wants to go to. And I say, can we go around the marathon? So if we're going to go to Rome, it'll be for the Rome Marathon and then we'll see the city. And so, yeah, so it's either with my other half or my best friend and I started a running club here in Punny. And so, yeah, we've got a pretty good group of friends there who all love running and all love traveling, so it's a good combo.

That's cool. That's cool. So people listening to this, I'll even see you running past their house or singing Mike and the Mechanic somewhere soon. Both at the same time. Who knows? Awesome. We love to just find out a little bit more about our guests, so thank you so much for that. So I'm going to throw the mic open. Where's the best place for people to go to find out about Minute?

So just go to minute.com so m I n u t.com and you can learn all about us there. If you are a property manager and you have more than six properties, feel free to book a demo with one of our sales team and they can run you through the best use case for you. We have sales team members all over the world now, from France to Spain to the US and so I'm sure they've. They've dealt with similar size customers with similar issues and can give you some pretty good examples and case studies as to how we've helped other people. That's cool.

And to bring it to a close, what is your favorite mantra or saying something that really resonates with you?

It's a rude one. So I might have to change out one word. I think it's a.

You can swear on the podcast.

I think it's a. It's a Hemingway quote, which is the first draft of Anything will be Shit. And so I kind of have a. This. This drive within my team to say, just because we don't know how to do something isn't. Isn't a reason to not do it. Let. Let's do it. And then if it's not great, let's make it better. And so I always want the team to test things out and to build new things and see what we can do and to not worry about kind of that fear of failure. The only way we're ever going to get good at doing anything is to do it and iterate and get better. And so I kind of love that idea of just because you haven't done it before isn't a reason to not do it now.

I like that. Start now, get perfect later. That's something which Mark encourages. Just get started, like you say, and you get better along the way. So thank you. What a great way to bring it to a close. Rich, thank you so much for your time this evening. As we record this, I hope plenty of people go and check out minute Old habits die hard minute off the back of this. So it's minute.com and the notes will also reflect that. You'll be able to see, you know the website. It's very easy one. Thank you for listening and if you think that anybody else could get some, you know, sort of good information from this or be inspired by this, please do share. Please do like it. And thanks very much for for tuning in. We know there's lots of places you can put your attention. Really thank you for putting it with Boostly. That's it from us. Bye for now.