VRMA 2026 - Direct Bookings Panel with @CraftedStays and John An

Welcome, welcome. Thank you very much for everybody for coming down. On your tables you will see a little gift from us all to you for coming down. These are little fidget spinners, so feel free to get it out and give it a good play as we are talking. One thing that I don't want to see from all of you is on your phones having a little swipe on Instagram. One time I did a talk and I was stood at the back of the room and I saw somebody on Tinder. Please don't do that. Don't lie to your date tonight. This is going to be 45 minutes. It's probably going to be the best 45 minutes of your Vurmer experience. Yes, we do have more prizes to give away. We are going to do a question and answer at the end, and we've got a little challenge as well. Now, as Denise very kindly mentioned, on your Vurmer app, there is a section where you can go on to this talk and you can leave a review. Please go and leave a 5-star review because they'll invite us back next year. All right? Even if you don't enjoy it, just leave a 5-star review. Now, To the left of me are 2 of the best in the industry. When I got asked to put this panel together and they said it's going to be about direct bookings, I went out and went straight to these 2 chaps and I said, let's, let's do it. So they have put together some amazing slides. I am here to moderate this session and to make sure that John doesn't speak too much and just keep this moving along. Without further ado, what I wanted to do to start with, I would like John to introduce himself and then Gil to introduce himself.

Hi everyone, my name is John Ahn. I'm the founder of Tech Tape. I lost my voice because I was out too late last night. Founder of Tech Tape, we provide revenue management services, and as part of that, we collect a lot of data for our clients. And so we're using a lot of our client data as part of understanding what we're seeing in terms of direct bookings.

Yeah, I'm Gil Chan. I'm the founder and CEO of Craft2Stays. We build direct booking websites and we help hosts win more direct bookings. I have a history in e-commerce. I have 15 years in product development before starting my own company and working with the likes of Shopify, Squarespace, a lot of big brands, retailers. So I come from specifically the e-commerce world and really trying to bridge the two because I feel like we're very much behind in hospitality in terms of commerce. I see what you can do on the e-commerce side and what we're doing here. And there's quite a bit that we can do more of.

All right.

So the topic today is direct bookings. So the headline is Direct Bookings Are Up, Why Aren't Yours? So hands up here who would like to get more direct bookings. Okay, that's good to see.

There's not many of them.

So this is the premise. So direct bookings are growing. The problem is rarely effort. It's just that most operators know they should be driving more direct bookings, Many have maybe invested in a website, maybe they've run some ads and talked about it at conferences just like this one, but there's a gap, and that's what we're going to discuss today. So the big difference between operators who are doing 50%+ in direct bookings versus those that are maybe under 15%, that's what we're going to dig into today. Now, the reason why I wanted John and I wanted Gil to be part of this is that they both can bring their expertise, and we're going to break it down into channels. We're going to break it down to AEO, which is AI search, and we're going to do so much in this session. If you've been to any of the talks over the last 2 days, you know there's been a little bit of doomerism around direct bookings. But by the end of this session, not only are we going to give you a little bit of hope, what we're going to do is we're actually going to give you some actionable tips that you all can be doing after this session to help you get more direct bookings. Does that sound good?

Yeah.

I can't hear you.

Yes.

All right, good. Let's get you warmed up. I know it's 3 o'clock on the end of the session, so thankfully we can get started. So Gil, the floor is yours.

Yeah, actually I was talking to Timothy earlier before we were getting on board, and I think what he's doing right now is representative of folks that are doing really well in direct bookings. There's a big contrast between the property managers that we work with that perform at that 50% rate. And there's a big difference for folks that are doing 15% plus on direct bookings. I think it first comes off in hospitality. Property managers that we work with, typically the ones that are getting direct bookings, consistent direct bookings, are— they have a high standard in terms of hospitality. A lot of them get repeat bookings, and you don't get repeat bookings if you do not have an extremely high standard in terms of hospitality. Beyond that, the teams that we work with typically are well-staffed when they're booking 15%. 90% plus direct bookings. You're not someone part-time, you're not the owner-operator that's also doing marketing on the side.

Right.

You have dedicated staff in the business that is running all the marketing channels, thinking obsessively over the guest experience, thinking about all the different touchpoints, where everybody's coming from, what— where are they looking for things. Those are the ones that are typically doing really well. They're really, really obsessive over that entire guest journey. I have an image of the funnel there, and I'll contrast this later on, but property managers really have to think about not just getting someone onto the webpage because that's not nearly enough. We build phenomenal direct booking websites. Having a direct booking website is not the whole game. That is not going to get you there. You have to think about the entire funnel and how you're going to get folks. So it really depends on who your guest personas are. Where are they looking? But you really have to think about where the guest is and how to really get in front of them in the right way. And they're likely not going to book with you that first time. They're probably going to touch and see you on Instagram. They may go onto your website. But the property managers that do really well, they think about the entire funnel and how to drive that person down the funnel all the way through. So there are folks playing with ads, there are folks playing with pixels. They're both playing with cart abandonment and email marketing, because you want to make sure that you're getting in front of that guest when they're first planning that trip, but you also want to get in front of the guest when they're thinking about where to actually stay there. So for me, that's probably the biggest difference is really understanding the entire guest journey and how do you get in front of them when it's most important.

All right, just a super quick question. Put your hands up if when we say the word funnel, do you know what we mean? Good. If the answer is no, don't worry because we're going to explain more about that as we go. But that is the first part. So, John, can you come in please and explain what this next slide is? And just before he starts, we're going to be showing a lot of slides today. I guarantee you want to be getting your cameras out and taking pictures. Do not worry if we go too quick, just message either myself, John, or Gil on social media afterwards and we'd be more than happy to send you the full slides after. So, John, over to you.

Yeah, so what Gil said is exactly right, right? A lot of folks start off by saying, oh, I have a beautiful website, now let's do some Google Ads and hopefully direct bookings come in. So all the graphs that I'm going to show here today is not about market-wide data, it's just the clientele that we are working with and we're looking at their data. And so what we see is if you look at the manual and the direct, The median lead time is 60 to 30 to 60 days. Right now, we've all heard that lead times are are dropping, but for those who are actually taking action on direct bookings, the lead time is a lot longer. Now let's think about this, right? A direct booking is a channel. What do the OTAs do? They do the marketing. They touch the visitors, the guests multiple times. They're doing that, and because they're doing that, by the time they're booking on OTA, they may have seen a lot of properties, yours included, and then as it gets closer and closer, that's when they're booking that stay. And so what you see now is on VRBO, all other is kind of, You know, the Wimstays, the Hoppers. It's a combination of all those. And Airbnb, the median lead time that we're seeing is about 14 days, so much, much shorter, right? If you start thinking about your direct booking as a channel and you're doing all the work that the channels are doing, then it actually starts to make sense what you need to do in order to grow your direct booking business.

Do you mind if I step in?

Of course.

So who here does email marketing? A lot of us. Who here thinks about their booking window as they're doing email marketing? Yeah, these are the folks in the room that thinks about when that guest is going to be planning their next stay. And typically, at least in our markets, like I have properties in Gatlinburg, we typically book about 45 to 60 days in advance. That means that we have to get in front of that guest 2 to 3 months prior. So if they stayed with us last year, this time we're hitting them 9 months later to make sure that we get ahead of them so that when they're thinking about booking, they're not looking at the OTAs, they're looking at us.

Right. And so lead time is not like one point in time, right? But it is kind of a continuum, like a treadmill, right? It's kind of going. And so you want to Touch them multiple times so that when they're ready, they're ready to book. So now the way this slide is organized are these are the top 14 direct booking managers that we have within within our portfolio. And so what you see is the best direct booking clients portfolios. They have a lot more return guests versus on OTAs, right? So you're getting more return guests because you're actually communicating back to them. Stays of longer than 7 nights, again, the folks who are actually working on direct bookings, they're able to work that relationship. Hey, I have a couple more days. And so they have much longer stays. So they're They're interacting with their guests to make sure that they're having a good stay. And then this is kind of an outlier. Typically, you're not making nightly rates higher, but they are staying longer, and that's how you're making more money with direct bookings. Anything you want to add?

No, I think that's good.

So All right. So every operator in this room is spending heavily to fill their calendar and most of it goes on commission. So what changes when you move part of that channel that you own? So we're going to move on to this one. So, John.

Yeah. So what basically the flip side of this is, a lot of folks think when you do direct bookings that it's free, right? But again, you have to do the marketing. You have to pay people to actually send out the emails, have a strategy. So what this graph is showing is across the blue line is the percentage of— it's basically the channel distribution, right? So in our portfolio, about 63% or 60+% bookings are on Airbnb, but that represents almost— does that say 90%?

89%.

I'm getting old, so I can't say that part. But 89% of the commission that our clients are paying goes to Airbnb, right? So that's a phenomenal number. And then VRBO, about 18% of— they have 18% of the share, 5% of the commission. If you go to the direct and manual bookings across our portfolio, 17% are getting the bookings, Again, this is a misleading number because on the PMS it shows you're hardly spending any money. How much are you spending on Google Ads? How much are you spending paying your staff to do the marketing and whatnot? And so that's really the distribution that we're seeing here. And so now again, the final point here is Operators with the strongest direct booking pay less than half in the commission. So the again, the top operator, their percentage of the commission that they're paying the OTAs is the lowest, and the kind of the general trend is the the worse you are at direct bookings, the the more you're you're paying for the commissions. That's obvious. Again, with that said. We have not yet been able to track how much additional folks are spending. However, we need to start factoring that into a graph like this.

All right, let's rest John's voice because as you can tell, he's been having a lot of late nights here in Nashville and it's going. So we're going to move back to Gil. All right, so now what we're going to talk about is what I think everybody is fascinated at the moment, with AI search. It's a hot topic, and like I said, Gil is one of the best in the industry to talk about this. Just a quick show of hands, who is trying to figure out what AI search even means? Okay, so quite a lot of you. So Gil, when you are ready, please, over to you, and let's go through your slides, please.

Yeah, so maybe pause for a second and talk about what we've done. We've been— we build websites and we want to make sure that when we're building our websites or we're consulting with our clients, we want to make sure that their websites perform really well. And traditionally it's been performing really well on organic search, SEO. More recently we've been spending more time on making sure that our property managers, their sites are found when guests look for them via ChatGPT, Lexi, Claude, all of those. I saw the stat, it's been a while back, but 18% of all ChatGPT 2/3 of all conversations are travel-related, someone planning their stay, planning their trips and such. And so we want to make sure that our property managers get found. And so what we did is— sorry, I apologize in advance, I have done— I've scraped some of your websites. But what we did is we took 2,000 of the largest property managers in the United States across 20 different markets. And we put them against all the chat engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Goya Overviews, and Gemini. We pulled all of them and see which one of those 2,000s got cited by AI and which ones didn't. And then, again, I'm sorry, I scraped all of your websites. I looked at your homepages, your property pages, your landing pages, your FAQs, I looked at how many backlinks you had, and it was really to help us understand why some property managers are showing up in search and why some didn't. So it's over 24,000 citations that we got. And so I'm sharing a little bit of it. None of this is gatekept. So if you go onto our website, craftusdays.co, and go to the resources tab, you'll see 6 different articles on it. A lot of them is very fascinating, and we're constantly running this test over and over again. We're probably not scraping your website as much now, but we are running and trying to figure out where is the app heading. For instance, ChatGPT, for instance, removed Reddit as a source that they're getting their citations from. And so we're updating that on a consistent basis to learn how does that reflect which popular methods we're showing up or not. So here are some of the findings. Across 24,000 citations, someone in this room is getting cited. Specifically, 42% of the time an independent operator is getting cited by AI search. 26 times is our friend COTAs. And then everything else are the DMOs, the editorials, social aggregates, and so on.

Now, now just very quickly, who is surprised to see that stat? 42% independent operators. There you go. Now, does it give you a bit of confidence when we talk about direct bookings and what's happening? Good. So Gil's got some more good news.

I'm a data nerd, so I'm going to show you a lot of data and feel free to pull me outside if you want to go deeper. I don't have a slide for this, but 90% of the time someone asks AI, where should I stay? One of us in this room, an independent operator, shows up in that search. So it's not monopolized by the OTAs, and we have more slides on this. It's not even monopolized by the biggest property managers in the nation, and which is this one. 7 of the 20 largest property managers in the nation are found in AI search, which is telling us just because you have a bigger portfolio doesn't mean that you automatically get cited by AI search. It's not the case. There's not a monopoly in this.

And just quickly as well, like, up until a couple of weeks ago, I think the main people that were using AI are business owners and geeks, right? So we call it enterprise AI. I've got 2 geeks next to me and business owners, right? But right now, if you are following social media in this country, Meta, which owns Facebook, has launched Muse. Hands up if you're using Muse. Yeah. Also as well, there's a new startup called Instinct AI. So for the first time ever, personal consumer AI is really getting going. So the stat that he gave, I think a lot of you missed, but 2 in every 10 people, their conversations on ChatGPT is involving travel. That is only going to go up. And we all assume But Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia are going to be at the top of the search. But with what Gil's done with his amazing research should give you all the hope that y'all are going to come up above the big operators. Does that give you a bit of confidence? Does that get you excited?

Yes.

Good.

All right.

So, so the other way to look at this is what AI is doing is it's disrupting everyone, right? No, everyone. They don't know what to do, and even the OTAs are struggling to figure out what to do. But because it's disrupting them and you, you actually have a shot at beating the OTAs at what you're doing, as opposed to where we've been up till now, where either Google or the OTAs had the dominant control. And it— and Gil's the guy who can help you navigate this whole landscape.

I'm so happy to be here. This is an interesting one. We scan all the top markets here. So these are the— a segment of the 20 markets that we scan. And on these, every— so this graph shows how many times one of the top 5 property managers in that region gets cited over and over again. And so, for instance, Hawking Hills, 84% of the time, the same top 5 property managers get cited over and over again. And over and over again. So really, what you're not competing on is hundreds and hundreds of operators. You're competing to get into that top 5 spot there. And it differs by market, but that's something I want you guys to realize, that you do want to get in there, but you want to get there more and more. You want to get into that top 5 spot because once you do, you start to get cited more and more.

Just out of interest, have you ever checked on ChatGPT or Gemini if your business comes up when you do a search? Yeah. Who's doing a search not in private mode? So do you know what private mode is on AI? So incognito mode is something that you do on Google and it doesn't track your cookies so you can get a good idea. Do the same thing on ChatGPT and if you don't know where it is, top right-hand corner, put it into private mode and just Get into the mindset of your guests, your ideal guests that you want in your property or properties, and start asking questions. Don't put in things very vague like accommodation in X. Go a bit deeper because that's how we're all chatting to our AIs, right? And it knows about you. So go and try that and see where you come up. And again, if you are in any of these top 5 locations, you want to be doing it sooner rather than later.

Yeah. And I would Emphasize to folks, if you are interested in getting inside AI search, put yourselves kind of back to what we were talking about earlier. Put yourself in the guest perspective. Plan a trip in your specific market. Think about who's going into that area and assume that you don't know the area at all. And you'll start to feed it information about who's traveling with you, what's important to your family, and then you'll start to ask it questions on what things should I do? And you want to be the one that provides that type of answer, that's the best way to game it right now. This one's fun. This one's fun for me because I'm a data nerd. So that sharp line down the middle there indicates property managers that didn't get cited and did get cited. So if you're on the left of the line, it doesn't matter whether or not you get cited or not. For instance, on that first line, local area guides and things to do pages. How many of us have things to do pages? How many of us has more than 5 things to do pages? How many of us has 13 things to do pages? So the people with that held their hand up last, 13 things to do pages. No, no, not 13 pages, 13 things to do. Yeah, so the ones that the property managers have more things to do pages are the ones that come up in AI search. So you want to make sure that you're providing answers for folks that are traveling in the areas that we service, and you want to make sure that you're creating content that is very unique. Please do not use ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever system of choice and say, hey, find me the top 10 opportunities of blog posts I need to write. You can go ahead and write them and post What that's going to do is Claude or ChatGPT is going to basically go from its training models, find all this information, regurgitate it, and create you a blog post that you may be very proud of. But what it's actually doing, it's creating a derivative of that content that it already knows. There's nothing special about that page. There's nothing special for AI to want to cite that page over what it already knows. So if you're going to create a things to do page, make sure that you're reaching out to your local team, the boots on the ground, you're providing detailed citations, detailed information, those detailed things to do that no one else has content on, and go deep on it.

Cool. Does this mean, you know how AI puts watermarks in You know, in the content it generates? Is that kind of a factor in the block or something like that?

Not really. You just want to make sure that you're creating content that is answering the question. With the watermark stuff, I don't know yet whether or not that's going to mean that they don't cite you. And those watermarks can be used as a final check. Like, you can use Grammarly and it might put a watermark on there. So I don't think you need to worry about that. But most, like, most Kind of going back to it. There you go. All right, I'll speed through this because I've been going deep into this. Guest type pages— these are your pet-friendly stays, your multi-generational stays, your couple stays. 3.6 times the property managers that got cited has 3.6 times those types of pages. They usually have 2 times the amount of pages on the website there.

So, you're saying that the property managers that are getting cited have 3.6 times the amount of guest type pages?

So what I want you to take away is those 3 graphs here is really make sure that if you want to get in front of guests as they're thinking about booking a stay, go top of funnel, really provide value to the guest that is planning that stay, answer those types of questions. The smart ones, you'll pixel them, you'll capture their email, you'll bring them back onto your website. Please do, otherwise you're wasting a lot of content. What you should not be spending time on and energy on, at least for AEO, agentic search, don't spend your energy on backlinks. Don't spend your energy on having other people link to you. We have found no differences between sites that got cited with heavy backlinks versus ones that did not. So don't waste your time on that. You might still want it for traditional SEO, but to this day, right now, I think we last ran this research Refreshed it in August. It didn't make a difference.

All right, Gil. Five minutes, and then we're going to do a game with everybody. So speed talk.

Yeah. Go. This is my last slide. So so when when someone asks, a guest asks, where should I stay in my market? Forty-two percent of the time we come up. Twenty-six percent of the time the OTAs come up. So it's Close to even, twice as much. But when someone's asking, for instance, things to do in our area, the OTAs are not creating content for this. They're not. 2% of the time, an OTA comes up for that kind of question. Same thing, help me plan a 3-day stay for my market. 2% of the time, an OTA comes up. Most of the time, it's linking to one of those things that So there's not a monopoly on the OTAs, at least not right now on this. So please make sure that you're creating the type of content that's answering those questions and get in front of them.

So you may be thinking, right, oh shit, I gotta start creating a lot of content. Thankfully, there are loads of tools. Gil has got an amazing product at Crafted Stays that will help create this content for your sites. There's another tool called Inkstr. We've been running an experiment with Rajan at the back there. His website had zero content on it. This tool basically was creating daily, daily blogs that are crafted for AI, and now he's smashing it in the Sedona Valley area, right? So you don't have to be doing this yourself, right? Like what Gil said, don't just do copy-paste in ChatGPT. Go speak to Gil, go speak to Chase at Inkstr, because there are tools there for you, but we'll Do it for you every single day. I don't know about you, if I was to tell you to write a blog post every single day, you'll go, nah, fuck off. So there are tools to help. Gil, you can pay me commission for that plug later on. Alright, so we're going back to John, Mr. Chatty Cathy over here. If your direct channel isn't paying for itself, how would you even know and what are the warning signs? And I warn you now, John, you've got 2 minutes. If you go over, I will shout.

Alright. So I'll keep this really brief so that you don't shoot me. Again, it's really the same message. You really need to just focus on the orange dots here. Commission share of revenue, Airbnb is taking about 15%, VRBO about 3%. I think a lot are on the legacy. Booking.com comes in at the highest. And it's showing again that the booking direct are cheap, and I won't go into that again. You are spending some more time and money on that. And so that's how the channel commission share is. And with that, let's get to the games.

Whoa, okay, that was even quicker than I thought. Hang on a wee second, Mr. Ant. So Gil, can you set up what we're going to talk about? And we We sort of teased it at the start with a funnel. Thankfully, you all have a kind of idea of what a funnel is. But good, William, just want to explain what this is, please.

Yeah. So I had Ali Haney on our podcast, the BookSolid Podcast, a little while back, and she described to me that funnel is not that hourglass or half hourglass-shaped thing. It's really more like a spider web. And I kind of like talking to Timothy right before this. You may target a guest on social media, you may target them on TikTok, on Instagram, You may have them on agentic search, AEO, you may have them on traditional search, but you're touching that guest kind of throughout there. And that guest may see you multiple times there. And what I wanted you guys to take away is that don't be afraid to experiment with many different touchpoints there. And you're going to have to experiment with many different touchpoints, but what I want you to do is try to make sure that you're guiding that guest through You're putting a pixel on your website that allows you to retarget that guest. You're collecting that guest email and you're moving that guest further and further down that funnel, whether or not that's shaped as a half cone or a spider web. You want to make sure that you understand all the different touchpoints, understand who your guest is, where are they spending their time, where are they consuming information, where are they doing the research, and driving that customer further down the funnel. All right.

So who likes playing games? Raise your hands.

Yes.

All right.

Let's get excited. Let's get going. So what we're going to do is I thought a cool way to end this panel today is that we are going to look at every different funnel action.

Okay.

So I have got 12 pieces of paper printed out with a funnel thing. All right. Now what we're going to do is I'm going to let you try and guess what a funnel is. So for example, I'll let you know one. So one of them is paid ads. Alright? So what you're going to do is you're going to pop your hand up and you're going to try and guess. Now if you guess, you are going to win a copy of my book called The Book Direct Playbook. There is 100 tips in here. Alright? And you're going to win a copy. So who would like to go first? Who can try and guess what one of the potential funnels that we're talking about here with Gilead. Who wants to go first? Who wants to win a book? Come on, who wants to go? Yes, Marcus at the back.

Top of funnel.

Top of funnel is what? Give me a thing. What could that be? What could be top of funnel? What is Rajan very good at?

Social. Social media.

Fucking hell, you got it. Right, round of applause. Alright, we're gonna have to go quickly. Marcus, come and get your prize. Now what I want for you to do though, you don't just stop there. You got to come to the front because we're going to do something with you later. So come to the front. Come on, give him a round of applause. All right, let's— we're going to stand right here. Okay, so who's going to go next? What else is in the funnel? We've got social media that is top. What's the next one? Yes, sir.

Your email.

Email. Give him a round of applause. All right, what's your name, sir?

Stan.

Stan, come to the front. There we go. You get a book and hold this nice and Proud. Stand next to Marcus for me, please. All right, so we've got email, we've got social media. What else is in the funnel? At the back.

Cold outreach.

Cold outreach. Is that one of them? Cold outreach. All right, it is a good one, but it's not there. Family fortunes. It's good, but it's not there.

Right, who's next? Website.

Website is of course there. Give Colby a round of applause. All right, you stand next to Marcus, please. All right, what is something else on this list?

SEO.

SEO. Where is that? Who said that? What's your name? Give Kathy a round of applause. All right, this will become clear what we're going to be doing. Come on to the front, don't be shy. This will become clear what we're doing in a hot minute. There we Here we go, Kathy. Thank you very much. All right. What is next? Give us another sort of a funnel to get more bookings.

Paid social.

Paid social. Yes, we've got that one. Drop your comb, sir. Oh, round of applause. Thank you, Patrick. All right. Give me another one. At the back again.

Pardon?

Yes. Podcast. Well done. I'm glad you got that round of applause for podcasts. All right, we have got a few more. Come to the front. Who else wants to go? Yes?

Video.

Video. Good, but not quite there.

Blogging.

Blogging. Is that on there?

I don't think we have that one. That one's part of website.

That's part of website, but well done. Who wants to go again?

Do we have referrals?

Referrals. We definitely have referrals. Round of applause for Stephanie. John, can you just pass me those books?

There we go.

All right, so we have got a few more left. We're going to be digging deep now. I'm going to give you a little hint here. What has Gil just been talking about?

AI.

Yes, AI! Well done, round of applause. Come and stand up here. What's your name?

Stephanie.

Stephanie, congratulations. We'll get you a book as well. All right, how many left is up there, John? 4.

4 more.

We've got 4 more. Alright, so I'm going to give you a clue. If somebody lands on your direct booking site but they don't make the booking and then you leave the website and you get something in your inbox, what's that called?

Pardon?

Cart abandon retargeting. We'll give him a big round of applause. Yes. All right, and how many we got left? We've got 2. Okay, thank you. All right, so we've got the next one. Gil, pass it here for a sec. So when you get a guest come and stay with you, and then the next year they come back, what's that called?

Weekend.

Who said that? Yeah, you win! So round of applause. All right, we've got one left. Okay, this is a big one. How long is the last book? Oh, are you gone already?

Okay, man.

All right, so this is a cool one. So when you, uh, have got your property and you work with a—

Family.

Fuck you, Kiki. No, when you, uh, have got other businesses in your area and you work with each other, you are working with local Businesses.

Businesses. Advertising.

DMOs.

Advertising.

Local businesses advertising. I'm gonna give you a round of applause. Right, come on to the front. Now, there were some very good shoutouts. DMOs from Lauren there, absolutely. And we've had cold outreach, etc. But this is what a funnel looks like. Now, what we want to do is we want to order this funnel So it looks like the spider web. Okay? So this is how we're going to finish. We're going to start with the top of funnel and we're going to end with the bottom. So for everybody else in the room, we're going to be moving our amazing competitors, our amazing participants around, starting with the top to bottom. So Gil and John, what I would like for you to do now is to organize everybody in the funnel. All right? And if anybody's got any suggestions, you can shout out, but you've got a minute before we end. So Gil, go.

Social go on the side. AI search go on the side. You know, you stay where you are. Booking site go on to the far left. Organic search move to the far right.

Stay there.

Press and podcast move to the right. Booking site go all the way down.

Go all the way down.

Word of mouth, move to the right. Actually, you're right around there. Yeah, so this is generally kind of like what we want to see for— yeah, you're right, you're fine.

Okay.

Yeah, this is generally what you want to see for your booking funnel. These— the far end on this side is your kind of organic, your top of funnel side. This is where people find out about you in the first place. This middle of funnel are people that you're trying to nurture, you're trying to get in front of them more and more often. You're building that trust with them. And my favorite down at the very bottom, the conversion. You're trying to get that person to book with you. So this is generally kind of how you want to model things. You don't have to do everything. I hope you don't try to do everything because if you try to do everything all at once, you're likely going to fail. So please think about your entire guest journey. Put yourself in the guest's point of view. And think about where are they discovering, where— what's going to be most receptive to them. You may be doing paid ads to bring them back to Instagram to get them back to Instagram, or you might want to target them on email. So depending on your guests, it's going to look very, very different. This is just a sampling of it. Yeah. Hopefully this gives you an idea of what a funnel looks like.

And before we let all of our amazing people go back down, obviously on top of that, you've got to have a great PMS. We've got people like hospitable and hostfully in the room that provide a great PMS system. So if you've got all of these things combined, you will be in that top 50% that Gil was talking about at the start. Can we give all of our amazing humans a round of applause? You can go sit back down.

But as everyone's sitting down, all those— all these funnel items cost time, money, energy. That's, that's part of what that was all about.

All right, so we have got 5 minutes left, and I did really want to have 5 minutes for questions because I know that we have bombarded you with a lot, and I know that you would probably have some questions. If you do, please, uh, pop your hand up and I'll come to you and you can ask a question for John or Gil. But before we do that, can we just give these chaps a massive round of applause? to be one of the best sessions. So I hope that you agree. If you do agree, please open that app. Verba want you to click on it and give it a 5-star review. Again, if you've really enjoyed this session, my name has been Mark Simpson. This is Gil Kahn, and this is John. And if you've not enjoyed the session, my name has been Brian Chesky. Thank you so much. Now, questions. Who's got a question? Okay, at the back. You're going to make me walk here. Yeah, I've got one. No, you can—

hey, come on.

We've got to play the bit. All right, so your name, where you're from, and the question. Sure, Adam, Breckenridge, Colorado.

Um, my question is, we just had everybody stand up there, we're talking about top, middle, bottom of the funnel. You said don't do everything all at once because you'll burn out or mess it up, whatever. So if you were going to pick one thing from top, middle, and bottom to prioritize, what would you tell us to prioritize?

One from each.

It really, it really goes back to Hello, hello? Yeah. All right, yeah. So it really kind of goes back to your ideal guest. For some, SEO might work, for others, social media. Like, if I had a glamping site, I would go social. I would not waste my time and energy on SEO. That's not where my guests are. So it really does depend. The one thing that I want to make sure that everybody does in this room, from a middle of funnel, collect that email and make sure you use that email. That is applicable no matter what strategy you go. You collect that email, you can target them on Facebook, you can create a lookalike audience to get more of those folks in there. But if you don't collect that email, you lost that customer. They won't— hopefully they'll come back to you, but I'm not here to hope.

All right, we've got time for one more question, maybe 2 if it's a good one. And again, if you want more email tips, there's a book called The Book Guy Playbook. You can go and buy it on Amazon right now.

So there we go.

Thank you. Hey, I'm Catherine.

I'm from the Oregon coast, and I noticed in your slides you mentioned build a page of your website for a guest type. Are you suggesting like landing pages for dog lovers and families?

Yeah, exactly. So, and you can specify the type of stays. The ones that work really well are pages of planning the entire trip. So I have 2 young kids. I do a lot of research on what do we want to do when we go to a new area. And if I'm looking on ChatGPT for answers of— we went to Japan, we're looking for all the different things that we want to do, and we only have X amount of days to do so. And if I'm asking ChatGPT for this question and it's going out and trying to find answers, if there's a landing page on there that answers specifically that type of question and answers it so well, it's going to start citing that page there.

Thank you.

All right.

We've got one more. Who wants to ask the final question of our session? Anybody? Going once. They're going— oh, Jake. Here we go. We didn't kick him out yet, so he's got a chance to ask the question.

Be nice, Jake. I'm going to see if I can screw up one more thing.

Hey, everybody. Jake from Steamboat, Colorado. I'm curious, what's the difference of a simple website that you get from your PMS versus something like these other options that are out there to do more complete websites?

You're making me pick sides next to my buddies over there. Sorry, I didn't even know.

Here I am to screw everything up.

No, but we do get a lot of folks that do use the PMS websites, and it's great for them to kind of start off with. And for a lot of repeat bookers, they're looking to send them back to the site. It's a free option. It's a great option for folks. We typically work with property managers that are really interested in making massive impact on their direct bookings. So we're thinking about how to add a pixel on there, how to do cart abandonment, how to make sure that they appear in SEO and AEO, having the tools to really audit their website.

Okay.

So it's just a lot more layers of depth into it. It's not— we're not here to make a brochure. We're not interested in making a pretty website. We're really here to drive more and more direct bookings.

All right, we're going on. Oh, sorry, go on, Jeff.

One more thing. We have a litany of things that you could be doing, right? Since you can't do everything all at once, that might be one way of having one of your bottom of funnel I don't get other things going. And, you know, that's how you can mix and match. All right.

We've got one slide left and then we're going to finish. But this is the one that we wanted to save for the very end because Gil did a ton of research and he has found the top 40 sites that the AI tools mention the most. So what we would love to see if one of y'all is on this list. Are you ready for the big reveal, Gil?

Yeah.

Are you ready for the big reveal?

Here we go. So out of our research, 24,000 citations, these are the folks to look into. These are the top 40 property managers that are cited by AI. I love, I love seeing all the cameras out right now. You guys get these slides.

No, but still, Gil, it's a good picture. So everybody can do that. Now listen, we have come to the end. Like we mentioned, if you wanted any of these slides today, That is Gil's, mine, and John's QR code. I haven't got a clue where it goes, but it'll go somewhere. Send us a message, uh, send us a message if you want a copy, if you want to chat. Uh, Gil has got a booth, uh, up on the expo hall. I don't know how long this is open for, but it's open for a bit. John, are you just wandering around?

I am wandering around. Wandering around.

All right, one final round of applause for our esteemed panel today. Can we have a round of applause for all the people who came up? And thank you very much, everybody.

Goodbye.