Why Dick Smith is right about the Online Travel Agents

All right, firstly, thank you so much for watching this back on the replay. For those of you who are tuning in live, if you could do me a massive favor, let me know that you can hear me and that you can see me, okay? So for those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Mark Simpson and I run a company called Boostly and I look after a community called the hospitality community and the Boostie community. Today I want to talk to you about Dick Smith. So first and foremost, I just need to know that you can hear me. So before you start doing anything else, before you go on with your day, for those of you watching this back on the replay, I need your help. Just let me know that you can hear me by putting the thumbs up. Paul, you make sure you stay there because I need you for this. I'm so glad that you're watching this live and I need to know that you can see me, okay? So if you. If you can hear me. Thank you, Cherie. Yeah, you stay on as well. I need all my Australian friends to watch this video because it is really important, not for you, but also as well for the uk, Europe and the rest of the world. Before we begin though, what I want to do is to give a little shout out to any hospitality owners that may be watching this. So if you are tuning in live, all you need to do is in the comments, put the name of your hospitality property, whether it's a hotel, guest house rental, if you want to put your website address, put that in. If you want to put a link to your Facebook page, put that in. Because this is going to be really, really, really important. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to chat about a gentleman in Australia called Dick Smith. Now, I have been inundated over the last week with messages, posts in the hospitality community about a video that this guy did over in Australia where he was talking about the state of the hospitality industry over there. Now, as you're watching this, before I go any further, I need you to do me one more thing. There should be a share button somewhere on your screen. I need you to share this now, whether it's to your business page, whether it is to your personal page, whether it is in some groups that you are a part of. The person that I really need to get hold of and the person that I really want to speak to is Dick Smith himself. So if anybody's watching this that knows him or can share this in some of the same groups that he is a part of that would be amazing because there's a reason for this. But I need to set the story first and foremost. Thank you very much, Emma. Sharon. Yep. Great. So if you're a hospitality owner and you're watching this, put a little link in to your business because all of this is really, really important. Now, a week ago, Dick went live on a think on his Facebook. I wasn't quite sure how he did it, but he was explaining the fact that he had just become aware that in Australia, hospitality owners, they call them motels over there, but motel basically is guest house over in the UK on the western side. And how there was two big companies that were taken away from millions and millions of dollars every single year out of Australia. And he was fuming because of this. Now, to give you a bit of a background on Dick, he is an entrepreneur. He has built up a big franchise in Australia and he's now branching out and doing other little bits and bobs. But he's got a real big following and this was brought to his attention and he was really annoyed at the, the fact that in Australia, millions of dollars is being taken out of the country, going overseas to these two big companies and these two big billionaires that were taking all the profit away. And the companies that he was talking about is Booking Holiday Group and the Expedia Group. Now you'll have all have heard of booking.com, you've all have heard of Expedia. But what a lot of people don't know is that these two massive companies own pretty much all of the online booking space. So for example, you may have heard of Trivago. Trivago is owned by the Expedia Group. You may have heard of Kayak. Kayak is owned by the Bookings Group. You've got Agoda. You've got all of these other sites that around the world that are owned by the bigger groups. The only separate one in all of this is Airbnb. And that's a totally separate thing. But the reason for this video and the reason why it's so important to spread this message is that for every booking that you make and you being somebody who's not a hospitality owner, so when the Joe public make a booking and anywhere in an independent property, when I say independent, I don't mean your Marriotts or your travel lodges or your premier inn. And when you book with these properties, every single time, the property itself has to pay a commission to the other third party sites. So booking.comexpedia, okay? And this commission can range from 15 to 30%. Now, if we're talking about it on a singular level, losing 15 to 30% off one booking may not seem a lot to you, but if you add that up, if you're Talking about a 20 or 30 bed property, if you're talking about a guest house that is like five or six rooms and 80% of their bookings are coming in via these third party sites, that adds up a lot. And you could be in a situation. And I did an article with Look North, I think it was nearly two years ago now where we worked out, on average there was about a million pounds being taken out of the Scarborough coastline, the Yorkshire coast, just simply in commission costs. And that is crazy. And so the reason why you need to go and watch the video and if anybody's watching this and if you have a link to Dick's video, please post in the comments below because he articulates this a lot better than I probably am doing now and I've ever tried to do. But it's really important. The one thing that strikes me, and again, if you're watching this live, thank you so much. Please do me a massive favor, just let me know that you can hear me. If you're a hospitality owner, I know there's a load watching. Just please comment below with a link to your website, with your Facebook page and share this, share this in groups. Share this on your personal wall. We need to spread the message about this, about this video. So the reason why it's really important is that these big groups, these big businesses, bookings, holidays and Expedia, they make you think that by going via their website and by booking via their website, you're going to get the best rate. And that simply isn't the case. It's just very clever marketing by some very clever companies. If you were. Thank you, Sheree. That's awesome. I'm gonna pin that. Oops. If you were to actually call up your local guest house, hotel, cottages, rentals, you know, if you were to call them up directly, you would be getting a better rate. But it's not all about price. You get better incentives, you get treated better because that hospitality owner is having to put their rates up 15, 20% just to cover for costs. So if this video does anything, I just want to try and educate just one or two people out there. But the next time that you're looking to go and book a holiday, a staycation, a two night stay or even business trips, don't always assume that by going to booking.comexpedia that you're going to be getting the best rate. Do a bit of research, go onto Google, find the property's real phone number or email address, give them a call, send them an email and you'd be pleasantly surprised. Now, if you've got any other questions about that, simply comment below. And there are well over 15 hospitality owners who are watching this video as well. And if you put a question about how to book direct, I'm sure there's going to be somebody that can help with this. Now, Dick's video was amazing and it really did open the eyes to a lot of Australians. But the problem with the video and the problem with a lot of it that I see is that there's no solution. He was saying that how when you do a Google search for motels in his local area, that the top 10 searches were all these big listing sites, but he wasn't given a solution to the problem. Now, over the past two years, since I've started doing boostly and started working with the hospitality community and hospitality owners, I've got some solutions and this video is to try and get in front of Dick and to any Australian, or to any Brit, or to any Aussie or to any American or to anybody to say that if you want my help, if you want me to put on some form of training, free training, this wouldn't be a charge. If you want me to do like a webinar or something where I can show you three or four really, really effective tools how you can actually fight back against the big guys to get to the top of Google to get seen by the right people, then you just gotta let me know. Whether it's in this post, whether it's through messages, whether it's through just commenting and putting me on a, tagging me on a Facebook post, let me know. What I really need to do is to try and reach out to Dick and say that I've got a solution that will help. So if someone can help me in any way, shape or form, that'd be amazing. But for you guys, hospitality ownership, if you want some solutions on how you can increase your direct bookings, then let me know. For the people for hospitality owners who are watching this as well, we've got to re educate and it all comes down to us. Now, we can bitch and bemoan the fact that these guys get so many bookings, but we have to be spreading the word individually. It doesn't just take one person in Australia or me or there's a few others that are trying to do takes all of us. And whether that is a case of having on your website the benefits of booking direct with you, whether it is just through emails or through your social media posts, however we do it, we have to re educate. And as well, it's a case for me to help re educate hospitality owners on how to do this. What I would love before I sign off because I've got a lot of things to do today before I get the kids off from school and I've been going on for 11 minutes. And for people who are tuning in, thank you so much. This is where I'm going to pass it on to you hospitality owners. Paul has just posted something really well there where he says perhaps mention these companies, undercut the prices put in by the owners and take a cut in the commission, but charge the owner the full commission and compare prices against their own group of companies. Paul and any other hospitality owner that is watching this now, this is your chance now in the comment section to below to just to let people know why they should book direct, how it affects your business. And like Dick said in his video is that 50% of the average of the businesses that he spoke to, their bookings come from the OTAs. If they just don't go on the OTAs, they're going to lose potentially 50% of their business. Singularly and individually, we're not going to do anything. This video is a plea that as a collective doesn't matter whether you're in a little town, whether you're in a county, whether you're in a country or a big city or a region, we as a group can come together now and really start to spread this message. So that little hashtag, wherever it may be, that hashtag bookdirect, that's a great place to start. If you start putting that little hashtag out in Instagram and your Twitters and your Linkedins and your Facebooks, Twitter, just start to spread the word. The more people see it, then the more people will learn and they'll start to then go direct to the properties. All right, I'm going to sign off there, cherie. Amazing. If you could in any way, shape or form get this in front of Dick Smith and if he ever does watch this, please get back in touch with me because I've got three or four solutions that I can show to him that he can pass on to his audience. And if everybody wants me to do this free bit of training, however I do it, I don't know how I'm going to do it, but just let me know in the comments, just put the word book direct. If you put the word book direct in the comments below, if I get a hundred of them, then I'll figure out how I can do some training and show everybody how you can increase your direct bookings. All right, I'm going to go. Thank you so much. There's loads of comments coming in that I can't keep up with. Final, final thing that I need for you to do. Number one is like this comment below that you say that you've watched it. And number three is share it. Share it like crazy. If you shared it once, shared it twice, you said it twice, shared it thrice in groups, in business pages, on your personal wall, in messages. Let's see if we can make a difference. All right, I am signing off.