What Vacation Rentals can Learn From Hotels

At the show, I want to very quickly say thank you to our podcast sponsor, which is Hostfully. So those of you that have been hiding under a rock for a very long time and don't know who Hostfully are, they are one of the market leaders in the digital guidebook world. If you haven't yet got a digital guidebook for your hospitality business, please make sure it's the thing that you do today. The best thing about digital guidebooks is it is free. To get started, go to H o s t f U-L-L-Y.com and you can get a free digital guidebook today from Hostfully. What you can do from there is you can inform your guests about any changes that are currently happening in your local area. You can tell them WI FI codes, you can show them how to use the dishwasher and all of those amazing things. It's not just for rentals, it can be used for bed and breakfasts as well. So go and get your free digital guidebook by going to hostfully.com there is a freemium option. You can upgrade to get more digital guidebooks and more features when you do that. If you'd like two months free, please put Boostly 2M B O O S T L Y 2M in the coupon code section. You'll get two months free. I'll be back later in this episode just to mention Hostfully one more time, but just want to say thank you so much to all of the team at Hostfully for continuing to sponsor the podcast. It means the world, so let's get on with the show. My name is Mark Simpson and I give hosts just like you the tools, the tactics, the training, but most importantly the confidence to go and get more direct bookings, increase your heads on beds and cut down on the over reliance on the OTAs to do so. So my good friends at Hostfully, sponsors of this podcast have asked me what can vocation rentals learn from hotels? And my answer to this is upsell. Upsell. Upsell. Think about the last time that you stayed in a hotel. What was one of the first things that they do? They ask you if you'd like to join them for breakfast or dinner. It's an upsell again. In a lot of places they ask if you want to use the WI fi, you've got to do an upsell. So again, this is something that I believe that vacation rentals can definitely learn. Str, service, accommodation, whatever you want to call it can definitely learn from hotels is the power of the upsell and There are so many tools at your disposal to do this. For example, if you're working with a good PMS hint, hint, hopefully you can have automated email triggers. Go out to the point of arrival and in one of those email templates you can ask the guest if they'd like to have a later checkout. You can ask if they'd like to pre order maybe a welcome hamper. There's so many opportunities here. There's so many things that you could do to take advantage of this. You could build up some really cool local relationships with local businesses and you could work together to have a takeaway delivered. You could have pick up from maybe a train station or an airport. You could have bikes delivered to the property. You know, there's so many potentials that you could do here that you are not. Upsell is a massive form of extra income and it literally could be a case where you don't have to do anything apart from just telling the guest. Now one of my preferred ways of doing this is with the hostfully digital guidebook. Digital guidebooks. I've said this so many times. The future hostfully have got one of the best in my opinion. And you know, I think that everybody should have a digital guidebook and heck, hopefully give you one for free. If you don't go take advantage of a free guide. But when are you not going to do so? So go and grab it because with that what you're able to do is again lay out all of the potential upsells. You can build out a travel itinerary in our digital guidebook. But you need to start, you need to start doing it. I believe that with vacation rentals we've only got a limited supply. It's not like with what I do with digital courses where it's an unlimited stock. With our vacation rentals there's only so many dates, there's only so many beds that we can sell. You know, we haven't gotten a limited supply. So upsell is the key here and it's what hotels do so well. So that's my one tip for everybody. Utilize upsells. And if you want to go find out more, just type in boostly upsell into the search engine of Google and I guarantee you there'll be at least one blog, one video or one podcast where I talk about this. If you want to go find out more, head to boostly.co.uk or just search boostly on Google and my face will come up if you want to chat to me directly. Instagram.com BoostlyUK make sure you hashtag bookdirect. Make sure that you are proactive in 2021 and beyond. And whatever you do, please do not over rely on the OTAs. Thank you so much for watching, for listening. However, you're consuming this and I look forward to speaking to you all very soon.