Why Wheelhouse will make you more money

Episode. I wanted to say a massive thank you to Wheelhouse. Who are the sponsors of this podcast? You need to go check them out. It's one of the most important tools you will get for your business in 2021. Dynamic pricing, pricing software, tools, whatever you want to call it, it is going to be so essential in 2021 and beyond. The boostly.co.uk forward/wheel. If you enter Boostly 75, if you ever want to upgrade, then you get the first month 75 off everybody right now for a very limited time free account and a free listing on there. You can link it up to your PMS, link it up to Airbnb TripAdvisor, and it will give you all the data that you need. Wheelhouse is faster, it's better, it's easier to understand, and most importantly, it'll make you more money. Please, whatever you do, go and check them out. Say thank you for sponsoring this podcast. So, without further ado, let's get on with the show. All right, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody one and all to another episode of the Boosted Podcast. Thank you very much for tuning in this evening. And what I wanted to do for this very special edition of the Boosted Podcast is talk about something that I'm very, very, very excited about. And whether you are watching live or whether you're watching on the replay, what I would love for you all to do is to get in the comments and promote your business. I am a massive, massive believer that there is going to be one thing happening this year and that's revenge travel. So what I want everybody to do is promote your business. So leave a comment with the name, your name, your business name, where you're located and a link link to your website because you never know who could be watching. But welcome to another edition. As you can see, the home studio is getting set up. My wife has been putting pictures up behind me, getting a bit of lighting, trying to make this look a little bit more professional here. So thank you very much for tuning in. And today on this very special podcast edition is that I am going to be interviewing, chatting and showing you all about a new pricing tool that is going to make you more revenue per booking. So let's get into the interview. This is a freestyle going off the.

Dun.

Ready for my close up. Good looking, let me tell you. Get more bookings. Oh, that'd be nice. Giving me tips, tools and advice. Yeah, you're gonna get them, hon. You're gonna sit back, listen to Mark Simpson. Whoa. Having a blast. Gonna get it on The Bruce 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. If you want my respect, you'll better butt direct.

Mmm.

Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

Mr. Andrew Kitchell, thank you for holding on. Very, very, very kind of you. Of you to do so. So welcome to this very special edition and thank you very much for coming on.

It's.

It's what, 10:30 your time in San Francisco right now, is that right?

It is, but like with an intro like that.

Fired up, amazing. So thank you so much and thank you to everybody that is leaving loads of comments already. So we are live streaming on Facebook and YouTube right now. So if you want to come in and ask any questions, please, please, please do so if you're watching this back on the replay, you can still get involved in the comments and we will look to answer your questions as soon as possible. But today, as you can see from the title, we're going to be talking all about pricing and why people should be paying attention to Wheelhouse this year. So I think the best place to start. Andrew, if you don't mind, just give us a super quick intro to Wheelhouse and a quick intro to you for everybody who doesn't know about you yet.

Sure. Great. Thanks for being on. Your studio looks amazing. I'm already taking tips first of all, so good job. So what is Wheelhouse? So Wheelhouse has historically been a dynamic pricing engine for the short term rental space. In dynamic pricing, we're going to talk a little bit about today, but it's basically how do you interpret market information and information about your unique listing to set the right price and maximize your revenue? So that's dynamic pricing. However, what Wheelhouse launches tomorrow looks like more of a full suite revenue management platform. That means we brought market intelligence reports, we're launching comps that have gone into beta. We have a new booking score analysis tool. So we've broadened the range of tools that can help people understand their unique property and earn a lot more. And Mark, just like you, we've got a goal. My goal in 2021, the way we thought about it is I actually think if people use the same strategies they use in 2020 and 2019 to price their inventory, that more revenue will be left on the table in 2021 than was lost in 2020. So my goal is to help people price. Well, you know, it's a time to look at your Market with fresh eyes, to embrace some technology that can hopefully help and to work together to earn you more revenue.

Fantastic. Here, here. And I think everybody really does can get on board with all of this and all of that, which is really, really key. So this is why we're doing this. So I've been talking about Wheelhouse for that for the past sort of two weeks now to hospitality community, Boostly people. And we're recording this on Monday the 15th. So I know that tomorrow is a. Is a big day for Wheelhouse. There's going to be lots of really cool announcements and we're going to talk about what we can talk about and we're going to look at what we can look and, you know, we're going to be able to share the screen, but we're going to go through a couple of questions we're going to go through. The cool thing is you're going to share your screen. We can go through data, how to read data and how to plan, how to plan for 2021. Because I've said this to you off air and I've said this to anybody who has listened to anything I've said over the last few weeks, there's two really important things that everybody needs to be doing this year. Number one is getting help with the pricing and number two is the digital guidebook. We've already boxed the digital guidebook with hostfully. Now it's the pricing and now it's Wheelhouse. So first things first, everybody who is watching this, you can also go and access your own Wheelhouse account now for free. And you need to go to boostly.co.uk wheel and people are already saying in the comments we look like brothers because of the beard and the hat. I love it already.

We didn't plan it. We didn't plan it.

Yeah, didn't plan it. But it works well. So, yeah, go to booster.co.uk wheel go and sign up to your free account and then the dashboard will open. So let's just really quickly go to the very start. So how easy is it to get started on Wheelhouse? What's the first things that everybody, in your opinion, should be doing right now?

Yep. So we're gonna. We'll step through that. And Mark, we can share a screen in a second here if we want. I think the first, first of all, for everyone, there are two things we're gonna learn today, Right? The first thing we're gonna learn is how to use a free market report from Wheelhouse to earn more money in 2020. 1. So no matter what, even if you don't pay Wheelhouse for revenue management services or dynamic pricing services, you can. We'll create an account today, learn more about your market and earn more revenue. Okay, that's part one. And the second thing we are going to do is teach you how to get started on Wheelhouse. So should you like what you learn on that market report and should you want to do dynamic pricing, we're going to teach you that. We're going to make it really simple as well, because who cares what we, you know, we can teach you some things, but if we can teach you and empower you through the tool, we'll call it a good day. So, Mark, what do you recommend? Do we want to go straight into how do you create and like an account on Wheelhouse and then kind of take it from there?

Yeah, let's do that. Should I share your screen and we'll just go straight in?

Yep, let's share the screen. Let's share the screen and let's keep our eyes on any questions that come in. We're happy to slow down and do a deep dive, but this is just your really basic. This is your homepage. If you are getting started for the first time, you can click, obviously, get started for free. We'll ask you for your name and email and to create a password. That's great. I'm actually going to log into my account and the only reason I'm going to log in is we'll end up at the same place. So should you have just created a new account or should you have signed into your existing account, you will always land on your dashboard. Okay. And from your dashboard, when you first show up, you'll actually just have one single demo account. You can play around with it and see what you can do on Wheelhouse. But the first thing, for most of you, what you are going to do is, is you're going to add listings or accounts. So as soon as we know where your listings are, we can show you a market report and we can obviously start at look. We can start looking at price recommendations for you. So there's a bunch of ways I can do that. I can click here and I can see all the channels that are available to me. We'll talk about that in a second. If you had scrolled to the bottom, you'd see all these different accounts available for you as well. And if you go to your new user settings, you can add a channel from here. So there are a bunch of different ways, but let's just Click add listings. Now, something that Mark has pointed out, what we were talking about the other day was Wheelhouse today is connected to about nine different software services. It's not enough, Right. So in about four to six weeks, we're announcing something which we call Wheelhouse Everywhere. And the sneak peek of that is we're going to go from having nine to about 90 softwares connected to us. If you can't use us today, don't worry, help is coming. But we're going to talk about the power that's just about to be unlocked for people, no matter what channel they're on. If I wanted to connect an account, I could click on Airbnb for an example. I can add my email and my password. I can connect to Airbnb in that fashion. We have a lot of folks on Guesty for Guesty, you'll just have to ask them for an API key. We work very, very closely with their team. Super Easy to Use Hostfully. For example, the guidebook company that Mark, you mentioned, Easy to connect your Hostfully account as well. We work with a lot of great services here. There's a fun, sneaky way that we'll be bringing a whole lot more services to market very, very soon. Once you connect, if you connect your account, all your listings will actually automatically drop you back on your dashboard. And you'll now see all your listings here and we can start our next level of exploration. Mark, questions about that.

So one question that did come in, which is really interesting, is that one of the people watching tuning in live with us, says that he noticed that the dashboard that you showed is very much set up for rental properties. What about the bed and breakfast and the small hotels of the world? Will they still be able to use this, or what would you recommend?

So we showed the general dashboard, and if I. Depending on what the question is, it sounds like for people with a lot of properties, they wanted a slightly different view.

Is that so basically, bed and breakfast, like bed and breakfast, small hotel, motel, you know. So is it. Is it used for. Is it used for both? Can. Can hotel owners, can bed and breakfast owners use it as well?

Definitely. So we, we have people with a thousand plus listings and we have people with a single listing. Right. So the pro tool that we're launching tomorrow is really a build upon Wheelhouse's current dynamic pricing engine. But it's faster, it's more responsive, it's easier to use for people with large portfolios. So I'd actually say if you have a large portfolio in the space or a Single property Wheelhouse is going to be pretty easy to use for you. I'm going to show a couple sneak peeks here. So whereas we're going to actually be able to go in and make adjustments on an individual listing, I recommend we start there first. Everything we do today. So let's actually go toggle over to the settings for a second. If I wanted to go adjust things like min stays, I can do so on any number of properties at the same time. For people looking at last minute discounting, long term discount, seasonality, weekend adjustments, etc. Again, we're going to step to all of that. Mark, my recommendation actually would be that we start by looking at a single listing first. Let's get one single listing set up first. And literally everything we do on a single listing, we're going to be able to do on that multi listing view as well.

Yeah.

Sound good?

Sounds good.

Great. So let's say again, we just connected a bunch of listings and we wanted to go see what one of our listings, one of our rooms look like on Wheelhouse. Well, the first thing we would do, you can click into your calendar from your dashboard, right. And here's what you're going to see on the left side here, we're going to see what is our dynamic pricing over the course of the year. We're going to see a basic calendar view and we're going to see things. We're going to see kind of a calendar with daily prices. And when we click on a day, we're going to be able to see why is Wheelhouse making a particular price recommendation on a particular day. Now we can even scroll down. We'll actually see events. So anytime there's a flag, we're going to see events on our calendar. It's kind of a nice easy way to see what's happening in my market. And we have every single market we're in, we actually have event data for as well. And Wheelhouse now is available in 80 countries. We're on six continents, we're in 800 plus. Oh, I actually probably, yeah, 800 plus markets, 10,000 plus cities. We're available in quite a few places, but you'd be able to see this information everywhere. Now your calendar view is really a place to get kind of first acquainted with Wheelhouse. And let's say that we were clicking around, we were learning about prices on particular days and we wanted to make some adjustments to our pricing strategy on Wheelhouse. Well, there's a lot of ways to do that. Right. So in the first case, let's say you had automated pricing with Wheelhouse. We'll step into that in just one second. But if you wanted to control your calendar, you can always come into Wheelhouse and adjust prices on a particular day. Oops, sorry. So let's say I wanted to come in and I wanted Wheelhouse to automate my pricing, but I wanted Wheelhouse to increase these particular prices by 20%. Well, you can easily do it. It shows a lot of fine grain calendar control. And you can also always on Wheelhouse, and let's stretch this into a weekend. You can always add and lock in particular rates should you not want to take advantage of dynamic pricing, but just lock in particular rates. Right. So that's, that's a quick view of the calendar. We're actually going to come back to the calendar because let's look first at all your settings. Okay. So Mark, can you still. You can still see my screen, right?

Yeah, 100%. It's going well. People are saying really good and looking forward to more areas being added. So, yeah, let's. Let's delve into this.

Yeah. Okay. So this is just the automation tab. This is where you can come to turn on and off automation. It's really simple. But automation is only important once you get your pricing correct. Right. So let's first start with your base price. This is the most important thing to get set up correctly for your calendar. Okay. And when you're setting your base price, your base price is basically what is the price for your listing on a night with normal demand and Wheelhouse, we make it pretty easy. You can take kind of our basic easy set and forget it settings. You can do a more conservative approach, meaning your pricing will be a little bit lower. You're more likely to drive occupancy. You can take a more aggressive approach, which means they're taking a little bit of a chance with driving higher average daily rates to maximize revenue as well. Or our recommended approach, which in most cases will end up maximizing your revenue. Right. When you do go to more aggressive, you're taking a little bit more risk. That means your outcome can actually be better, but it could also be worse. Right. So you have these easy kind of set it, forget it settings, or you can fully customize your base price. So if you came in here and said, whoa, my base price, you know, needs to be a little bit different, a little bit lower, a little bit higher, you'll see that our pricing is adjusting above your base price. Okay. It's kind of step one. We can dive more into how to Set the right base price. We have a lot of writing on this as well, but we'll just for now say that's kind of good enough for now. So we're actually going to click. We're going to leave the setting for a second. Another really important thing for folks to get right is your minimum price. So your minimum price is the price that wheelhouse pricing will never go below. Right. No matter what. Even if it's a low period of demand. A minimum price might be a setting that you want to set on your place just to, you know, maybe you only want to book to people who can pay you a certain amount per night. It's actually a pretty common thing in our space. So mean price is a little bit more of an advanced setting. Right. And we might come in here and you can see that we've actually set up this property. So we set a global min price. Let's just adjust it now to 200 a night. However, we're going to come in and we're going to adjust our weekend pricing. I'm going to delete this setting for a second. So we're going to set up our weekend pricing to be $300 per night. Right. And you can see it's pretty quick and responsive. As soon as you type in a different number here, the graph is instantly going to adjust. If we maybe make, we'll make Saturday, Friday and Saturday nights. 350. Sorry. Here we go. And you can see there's quick adjustments to your calendar minimum price. Now another fun thing you can do. Let's say that you wanted to keep your minimum price high in the far future, but 30 days out you want to drop your min price to 150. And 20 days out you wanted to drop to 125. Of course, these settings could be whatever you want. What I hope you're noticing is that whatever strategy you want to employ here is really quickly translated into a view that you can see. For those folks who ask us about managing a whole slew of properties, a bed and breakfast, a hotel, etc. Again, you can do this on all of your listings or a sub segment, your one bedrooms, your two bedrooms, any room type at the same time, we're going to see that as well. This is just the zoomed in view first so we can make sure to learn all the tools. Similarly, let's say we wanted to add a date specific minimum price. So maybe there's a few nights on your calendar that you want to make sure you protect. Maybe you know, for September you want to make sure that right now you're keeping your minimum price at $500 a night. Let's just click this. Sorry. Here we go. You can see that it's out at $500 a night right now. So pretty easy, responsive controls, hopefully for your minimum price setting. Questions about that, Mark?

No, it's all good there. Main things coming in, saying looks fantastic. I mean the elephant in the room is when will it be available for my channel manager, when will it be available for my pms? And I just want to reiterate, and I've said this to so many people, it is coming. It is coming. Believe me, it is coming. Andrew is so enthusiastic about this that there's a reason why it's. It's a little bit slower because they want to make sure. So it is coming. So anything you just wanted to add quickly to that before we jump back in 100%.

So we actually have the technology to add 35 new PMSs today. However, there's one more thing we're working on that will not unlock one PMS, but it will unlock us 60 additional PMSs. So we are a little bit excited about both on the integration side, announcing that in one big fell swoop in about four to six weeks, that's part one. There's also a data partnership we're working on Wheelhouse right now. Even though I'm happy we're available in 60, 70 countries, et cetera, that's not enough. And there's also a lot of markets that want us, especially remote markets. So we're working on a data partnership that will make us available now as well. When we are not live in your market, it's because we're not willing to make bad recommendations for you. And the amount of data we need to make very good recommendations for you is non trivial. Right? So if today you are a property owner with more than 50 listings and you're in a market, it'll take us four weeks to get your market set up. However, again, we're working on our own data partnerships that will make Wheelhouse essentially available everywhere. We're not very far away. We'll be able to help you out very soon. I can't wait. I apologize. We're not available in your market today.

But that sums it up. You know, it's due to people like you watching who have shown in like interest in Wheelhouse, requesting remote locations. And this is how we do it, and this is why I love chatting to you and just saw how enthusic you are about it, is that we're able to come on and, you know, small, maybe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, unit people are just in remote areas and just be able to request. And if enough people request and enough people join, then this is where the power is and this is how we're able to work with a company like yourself. So it's really exciting. So if you haven't yet done it already. Boostly.co.uk wheel that's the pretty link, that's how you can get to the login, that's how you can go and sign up and then once you're in there, make sure you go and connect something and. And request. Connect, request. That's as simple as it is. And if your PMS isn't there yet, there's going to be at least 70 coming soon. And the bigger it grows, the more it will be on there. And then you get to go. But the next question I have, which I. Which. Which is. Which is really cool, is whilst people. So there's. Someone's coming to the comments. Hi, Registered, linked up, Airbnb linked up, TripAdvisor. Great. Is there anything that you could recommend that I could do whilst I'm waiting? So that would be a cool thing to dig into. Yeah.

Yeah. So you're saying. So if you have linked your TripAdvisor and other accounts, I think the. Maybe the really important thing to learn because there are resources that are available to you to do better revenue management today, even without Wheelhouse. Right. So we have a whole bunch. If you go to our website, to our homepage, you will see a whole bunch of courses. I'll actually just show. I'll show folks right now.

Yeah, that's a great place.

Go to userealist.com and this will probably sign me in. So let me. So if you scroll down the page here, you're actually going to see on our homepage, we have these revenue management courses available now and all of these. So Demand Detective, we're actually going to teach you how to read your local demand signals. Right. And I'll actually share out. Mark. What I'll. What I'll give you and your audience today, I'll give you a link to a bunch of videos that actually, whereas these, if you clicked on them, they're going to load a webinar where you're going to have to give us your email. I'll just share a link with you. You can put in the YouTube comments as well. But it will basically teach you how you. How can you learn your market's three key demand signals which are Seasonality, day of week and local events. Those are the three demand curves in every single market that you need to look at. Yeah, that's part one. Right. There's other more advanced revenue management. So when we're talking about rapid responder pacing pro, there are ways to do a lot of these things even outside of Wheelhouse that we'll make sure people have their hands on this year. Because guess what, it's our job this year to make sure the industry succeeds. Wheelhouse's long term success is partly dependent on a strong bounce back from those whose businesses were impacted this year. So we will make those resources available. We've done a bunch of talks on that. One really fun thing for seasonality. If you don't, if you're, if you have the same price every single night of the year, you're roughly leaving 20 of revenue on the table. And there's a reason.

That was our exact, exact thing what you just said that it spoke to us and when we were chatting on the phone, it spoke to us anyway. It's, that's exactly what we used to do. Same rate. We used to maybe put it up or down depending on, you know, very, very like 1, 1 pound, you know, $1. But yeah, it's crazy to think how much revenue per booking we, we left on the table by not looking at it this, which is why I'm saying to everybody, listen, this is going to be so key this year to recoup any losses that you had last year.

Yep. So let's go look at a few things and let's just go see how dynamic a normal market is in. But this is true. We're going to look at San Francisco, but it's going to be true of every single market. We'll just see how dynamic demand is. And as soon as you see that, you'll be like, okay, so of course I need to be adjusting prices. Okay, so, and mark to that, that question of how can we help others? Again, we'll make that education material available. There's a bunch of things you can do, tips and tricks do. Everything that I'm going to show you on a market report is available in other kind of differentiated fashions as well. So here's why. We need to look at data to inform our pricing. So I'm on a Wheelhouse market report. This is free for any market we're live in now. This is free and available to you. So for those folks who have created an account, linked properties and for live in your market, you can click on your market intel Tab now and go step through this. Okay, the first thing I'm going to urge you to look at, we have two types of charts. We have time series and distribution. I'm going to show you there's kind of a beginner and advanced aspect of these lead time. If I click on lead time, I will see how lead time changes every single day in my market. And what lead time means is how far in the future are people booking in my market, Right? And the reason this chart is so spiky and differentiated almost to a point of not being valuable is it shows us that all these big demand spikes, all these high peaks here, these are times when people are booking very far in the future. Right? But you can see lead time changes every single day for every single market and changes by inventory type. It changes by neighborhood. Already we're starting to see why dynamic pricing data, informed pricing, can help us kind of discern what demand actually is in a market and figure it out. Now, another way to look at lead time for your markets is to go look at. Now we clicked over to the distribution curve. This is lead time again. And now what I'm seeing here is I'm seeing the percentage of bookings that were made in my market a certain number of days from a state, right? So when I am hovering over this thing here and I'm looking at, I'm looking at San Francisco in January and I'm looking at all performers, I could filter by a lot. I'm looking at all bedroom types, I could filter by those, I'm looking at all different people. Ask about BnB, hotel, etc, you can filter by that data as well. But what we can see is when we're looking at all bookings within a market in January, 21 of all bookings occurred in the last five days. Okay, now let's look at what did December or what did last year look like? Well, it actually looked pretty different. Right. So you can see, you can see as we're looking at kind of lead time charts and markets. This is December 2020, this is December 2019. Now, I guarantee you whatever market you're in, whether your market has been devastated and there are no bookings because you've been shut down due to Covid, or whether you're booming because you're a drive to destination or you happen to be performing well, I guarantee you the thing that has changed in your market is lead time and length of stay. If you're in a drive to destination where bookings are actually happening, there's so much demand in a Lot of markets that people are starting to book even farther out into the future. Right, here's a good time. So I highly recommend people go look at their lead time chart and start to figure out when are people booking in my market. The second thing we mentioned, length of stay. Right. So length of stay has changed in almost every market as well. And you need to know how long are people booking in your market? In a lot of markets now we're seeing people book. Let's go look at your market in Scarborough. Right? Let's go look at Scarborough.

Yeah, we can do Scarborough.

Let's go look at Scarborough. Okay. And let's go look at the average length of stay in Scarborough right now. So this is in January and we're starting to see that about 20% of bookings in Scarborough are now 14 days or more. Now, the only way you can get a booking that's 14 days or more is if you have are available for 14 days or more on your calendar. Right. When people come and look for these long term stays, which might be very valuable for you to book, well, you need to protect your calendar, make sure you don't get bad bookings. So lead time and length of stay. This data can be instantly translated into a particular thing. So let's just say for Scarborough, we have now learned that 20% of bookings are 14 days or more. And we know that from a lead time perspective. Let's go see, when are people booking in Scarborough? Well, right now it looks like the average booking in Scarborough is happening about 17 days from a stay date. Right. So about 1550 of all bookings are happening 17 days before a state. That's actually, that's pretty interesting.

Well, it's a bit of context as well. In the UK and in England and in Scarborough, very restricted on who and who can't travel at the moment, who can take bookings. It's got to be key workers, you know, because of the lockdown restrictions. But this data, what we're looking at right now, it will be even more invalid when these restrictions start to lower. Because as soon as restrictions start to lower, that graph is going to go like crazy. Because when people can travel and people are able to book and the OTAs are open and you know, direct booking channels are more open then, you know, as soon as people can book, as it showed last July, people are going to go for it. They're not going to hold back. This is where this whole revenge travel thing comes in. And this is where it's super important that you do not get left behind on this. This is super important that you are so proactive in this because it will mean that you are not wasting so much. Like 20% revenue is a lot. So this is why it's really good to be doing it.

And revenue, you know, with that revenue, that's revenue that goes straight to the bottom line, right? It doesn't. It costs you essentially nothing to get. So I want to look at one more chart, Mark. This is occupancy. Looking forward a year and what you're able to see. And this is. We have this for all markets as well. I've toggled over to the future tab on your market reports. I'm looking at occupancy and not only will you be able to see, we're starting to see booking patterns emerge far in the future. Right. So even though very few bookings have occurred, this is Chicago usa. You were able to come look at expected occupancy in your market even based on very little signal. Now the other thing I always encourage people to look at. I am so sorry, I've got a call coming in here.

That's all right. Modern technology, right?

I think there's a delivery at the door. That's just not going to happen right now. I'm okay. The other thing I encourage people to look at, Mark, this is really wild. In the short term rental space, a very non obvious thing that you can leverage to price your property better is that as estate aid approaches in a lot of markets, available inventory increases. Right? It increases. That means once you're. So if this is tomorrow you can see and we're looking at Chicago right now, but we could look at almost any market here. You can see there's 6,500 rooms available. And if we go a little farther in the future, there are actually fewer rooms available now that's. That's very unique, right. This doesn't happen in the airline space, it doesn't happen in the hotel space. But in the short term rental space. Your competitive set often increases as a state aid approaches. It's because people block their calendars, especially now three, six, nine months out. Which means if you are selling your inventory three months out, three to six months out, six to nine months out, you are selling against a much smaller competitive set. It's really important to get that right. You can price differently against that competitive set, basically. So this is all the information at your fingertips now. Right. We can look into the future. We can see how many rooms are available. We can look at how wheelhouse is translating very small booking signals. Into detailed information about how my market is going to book. And of course, I could filter again by high performers or inventory type, et cetera, to see the same thing. I can look at what my competitors and others are asking for. Right. So if I went over and said, well, what are people asking for in my market, I can now see what people are charging on a nightly basis. So all of this information shows you, especially once Covid is starting to become a little more under control, once travel patterns are starting to emerge, every market's going to look different.

Yeah.

It's going to look differently than you knew in 2020. It's going to look differently than you knew in 2019. And so the best way to empower yourself is to take advantage and look at the real data. Right. And just it's relatively easy to apply to your portfolio. I'm happy to show us now how we would do that if we have time.

Oh, we definitely have time. A quick question that came in is from Sharon saying it'd be really nice to know where do you get your data from? So how are you getting all these amazing graphs and numbers and figures and predictions?

Yep. So we get it from Connect, we get it from Connected Channel Partners. We get it from. We have hotel data as well. So if your market has hotels that are relevant to you, we have multiple hotel data partnerships. And then there's. Part of the reason Wheelhouse is going to be available everywhere is we're working on two additional data partnerships that will enable us to price people accurately far and wide. Wheelhouse analyzes about 3 million listings per night. We've done so for six plus years. And we've also had. We have about 50,000 linked listings, which means we see perfect data for all of those properties every single night.

This is good question. When, when I was saying that I think that this is the best, my personal opinion is because not only does the data go further, it goes deeper. So it gives you more data to show you. But the cool thing is it doesn't overwhelm. It cuts straight to the core. And those graphs that Andrew's just shown is perfect. And it's everything that you need to know and you can, you can read it really well. And the cool thing is, is that you've got free courses, free tutorials, free guides, and there's a chat team as well that you can just go, hey, so I'm looking at this. What does it mean? And you can get real simple answers to, then go and price accordingly. So a question that came in from Alan was, okay, so I've got all this data in front of me. How do I get it to automatically update my pricing? And I guess the answer is let's do it. So let's do it. Yeah. So how would you then? Like, how. So. So, so busy. I'm thinking busy hospitality owner here. I'm thinking peak time, you know, middle of August. I haven't got the time to be, you know, going over all the data and, you know, making decisions. How can I get it where this will just help it and automatically automate.

It for me 100%. Okay. So Wheelhouse's job is really to do two things. Our job is to make data very accessible to you and make sure we're surfacing good, valuable data to you and putting you in control of it and then automating it so you can kind of run your business to the best of your abilities. Right. So let's. Let's. Alan. I believe it was Alan to that question. Let's go click in again to our settings. And here. The one thing, Alan, that I was going to recommend is once you understand what data is available to you, you still might want to set some parameters around. Kind of like you might want to tell Wheelhouse your strategy. So we told Wheelhouse a potential strategy around min pricing. Right. We already updated that. However, you might want to come in and here's some other ways you can kind of get your hands on the machine. So. Well, one caveat. First of all, automation is simple. You can turn on or off wheelhouse pricing with a single click every single day, and Wheelhouse will literally analyze your market, your competitive set everything, every single night and update your pricing. And it's one click away. Right? So however, you might want to come in and say, hey, you know what, I want to take a slightly different strategy, whether it's more conservative or more aggressive than Wheelhouse or a fully customized strategy. Right. So once you see what wheelhouses are kind of how your markets perform on weekends, you can come in and look at any market. You could again set the knobs and dials of your machine to say, I want to do more conservative. Recommended more aggressive. Or let's just say, even though Wheelhouse is already going to be adjusting automatically around your weekend demand, you said, hey, I want to take more risk on weekends, and I want to bump my weekend demand or my weekend prices by an average of 20%. Well, you just did it, right? It was that simple. We came in here, we customize, and I'll just. Just. So it's easy to see for people who are. Oh, my goodness. This is so funny. Always fun to have deliveries in the middle of a webinar. I apologize all. Now, I'm not going to save this, Alan, but I could have made the weekend adjustments. I could have also taken control of my seasonality. Right. So here you can see that wheelhouse is already adjusting automatically on, on a monthly basis around seasonal. Seasonal demand. Well, let's say again that you thought wheelhouse was good 11 months of the year, but for August and September, you wanted to come in and really crank rates for a little while, especially in the far future. Right. You might say, hey, we're going to raise our prices during high seasons because we believe this pandemic pricing is or kind of this kind of revenge travel, as Mark is speaking to that is really going to drive rates to levels that we haven't seen before. And guess what? I believe that, too. I don't think that's crazy. I think it's 100% accurate and I think we're already seeing it in markets in Australia and other places that are starting to get closer to the unlock. Right. So if you wanted to just adjust and take control of your pricing engine in any way, again, it's really easy to come in and do it. Right. You know what? I need to yell at my window real quick at the delivery driver. I'm going to go on mute for one second.

That's all right. I'll take over for a little bit. All right. So while Andrew goes and shouts out the window to see how he can get his delivery, just want to say thank you everybody for supplying some fantastic questions. Now, I recommend that everybody goes and checks out. Booster.co.uk wheel go and get advantage of a free account that gives you all this data. And then what you're going to do is you're going to go connect it up. So when Sharon was asking, where do we get the data from? We have to help them by providing more data. So this is why it's really important that we have to link it up to Airbnb, to our TripAdvisors. We've got to link it up. And what it will do is it will give us more accurate data about the areas that we need to be in. Because you're right, we need to be in more areas. We need to be. There has to be everywhere. And they are going to get everywhere, but it needs us to help them to help you. And this is the simple matter of fact, there are a lot of dynamic pricing tools out there. And, you know, I'm Very fortunate. I have gotten over the last five years to know everybody and I know them all and I've been playing around with all of them, but I've never been as excited as I have been with this. And it's. It's due to the levels of excitement and enthusiasm that Andrew shows. You know, we're already being established as brothers. I think we've established that. But the enthusiasm and how he explained things and how the team explained things is second to none. And at the end of the day, they've pretty much come to us and say, listen, we need you to help us. And we're in areas that they can't touch at the moment or don't know at the moment. So get on there. Boost.co.uk wheel get your account, you know, while you can. You know, get it and take advantage of it. Take advantage of what's there and the tools that are available to you. I've signed up and I get their emails and it's really useful to me, so it's useful to me. I know it's going to be useful to you. And the main thing is, I would say to everybody, get your free account. Link it up. Airbnb, TripAdvisor 1, both. If your PMS is there, great. Link it up now. If not, wait until it is. Because over the course of the coming weeks and months, there's going to be more and more and more added. The final thing that you need to do, jump into the chat and just recommend and request your area if it's not there already. So, again, the tools are there. We are going to get more and more and more. Andrew is back and I hope you got a good delivery. Okay, so let's go into the final stages now.

Well, Mark, I want to add one thing because Sharon's question was so spot on and you're right, there are other pricing tools out there. And when we took a look at what when we were thinking about kind of professionalizing Wheelhouse and really doubling down on the investment, the team has gone from 4 to 15 people in the last 12 months. One of the things that we really thought we needed to do in 2021 was to make data transparent and accessible in a way that it just hasn't been before. Tomorrow's launch of our Pro platform is step one of a whole bunch of things. Mark, with your permission, I'd love to see. I'm happy to show people the behind the scenes of the things that we will make transparent this year and that we've been showing to people Saying, hey, here's all the data that we can use to empower your business. But I actually agree. I think the category hasn't been good historically about sharing data, about making data exportable, about making data like, how do you drive kind of accountability around revenue management? Guess what? Revenue management is really, really hard. There are times when you first link your property that we need to see a few bookings before we'll be perfect. That's just the truth. That's the way it works. So Our goal in 2021 is to make data transparent and accessible. I'm happy to show you a little sneak peek of what that looks like.

Like, please do. Let me let you share your screen and you can do that. And then what I want to do just before we finish is I just want to let, I want you to explain to everybody the difference between the free plan and the pay plan and then we'll break down what the pay plan is because I think it's really important to differ between the two so when people go in, they don't get confused. So let's go to the sneak peek and then we'll go to that.

Sweet. Okay, Mark, I'm going to do two sneak peeks because why the heck not? Okay, first of all, you might have noticed if you have acute eyes, that there's a few green boxes on the page and one of them says beta only. Well, what this actually is, is for all properties. And this is actually. I'm going to leave this page too. We are about. This actually is in beta. That means 50 customers are using this tool today. But we have a comp set tool that is in beta where you're actually able to come in and see. You can build comp sets of up to 100 listings. We have one lock comp set, but then you can create three more comp sets you can see. We say coming soon here. I'm actually going to click into a user here because this is beta. We might run into a little snafu here, but we're going to roll the dice because we like to do things live. In this case, we're going to go. This will just speak to a little bit of the data transparency. If we run into an issue, we're going to give it one go. Okay, so I'll have to share out a video on the comp set coming live. But basically what you can see here is it's an ability to look at a map, look at all the data from properties near you and actually look at how they're priced on a daily basis and even export that data and do it however you want. So these comp sets are about two to three weeks away from going live. To everyone, this is part of the big infrastructure rebuild we've been taking on. And so pretty excited to share that with you. But what I actually wanted to show you is a little bit behind the scenes. The first thing here is notice that we hopefully have what you think is a slightly nice looking website, but we're about to step into what we call the experiment section of Wheelhouse. These are all the data science tools we've built over the last five and a half years to ab test every aspect of our model. And I'm going to click into one of these tools right now. Okay, so what we're stepping into is a little bit of behind the scenes of Wheelhouse. It's not beautiful. It is data rich. Okay. And this is a customer who just moved over to Wheelhouse. They're based in Australia. This is one of their 400 properties. And as we step through some of the data on the back end, again, this is how an automated pricing tool can be put to work for you. The reason I'm showing this now as a sneak peek is because while this is in the back end in our data science section now, this is also another part of our. It's actually part of our next product, Sprint, which means it's at most eight weeks away from being in your fingertips. We're going to make it a little bit more beautiful, but let's see what's here. Okay, so first of all, you'll see that when we're analyzing a base price, there is a huge amount of data we're looking at. So this is actually a. This is a summary of. A summary of the data that we look at to analyze each unique property and to be able to suggest a base price to you. And to do that, we look at, yes, your bedrooms and bathrooms and the number of photos you have and where you're located. We can click on a map to see where you are. We look at your fee structure and we come up with an initial base price. Right? And then we look at every single booking you've ever had and we readjust that base price. Because guess what? Over time, every booking you get tells us more about your property. If you're the first to book in your market, we obviously know you're underpriced. If you consistently book at the very end with the last few places to go, that can be great. It also can be a little bit lucky. So Every single booking. And this is the beauty of pricing for the short term rental space. We yes, our challenge is that every single home is unique. Every single property is unique. However, we can look at the data to understand how each property is unique over time. And this first data chart here shows us how deep the information is. Just around your base price, right. We're seeing every attribute, we're looking at every single booking. And in this case, if the revenue manager, this team as a full time revenue manager had made any adjustments, we would see that here as well. Okay. Now once we have your base price, we actually come in and we, we build multiple local demand models. Right. So for every single property in our system, we have what's called a predictive demand model. And our predictive model looks at what are, what is price signal in your market? How are other hotels, properties near you priced? We need to look at that because pricing is really, it's a assumption on what we think is going to happen in our market. Right. That's the same with the true prices on the stock exchange. That signals what the market thinks is going to be true about a business in the future. Well, price signal at hotels, airlines, short term rentals, the market is telling us what people think is going to happen in the market. And that is one local demand model we look at. Now the second local demand model we look at is the reactive model. Right. The reactive model says, well, who cares what we thought 12 months ago, all that matters is what bookings actually happened in a market in a neighborhood on an inventory type. Right. Guess What? I thought July 2020 was going to be a pretty good month across most American markets and we were wrong. Covid hit right. So if we had only used a predictive model to look at pricing signal and had it hadn't made a very robust reactive model, we would have been sol. Our recommendations would have been no good. However, our, our reactive model is strong enough that we've had Marriott and other hotel groups come to us and say, can you tell us more about what you're doing here? What's going on? This is where hotels can learn from short term rentals because our pricing challenges are harder. Do I have a few more minutes here, Mark?

Yeah, please do. This is awesome. This is really good seeing the science and the thinking behind it and it's getting lots of lovely comments in the chat. So thank you.

Okay. And again all of we're showing you now, we are going to make this all in your hands now. We blend those models on a daily basis and when I spoke to Australia going wild because people are starting to book. The reason it doesn't look like there's a big difference between the predictive and reactive model is if this is the Melbourne market in Australia and you can see that around the holidays at the end of the year, there's such a big spike in prices that people are charging in the market that they're both charging and that people are booking at that. It's messed up the Y axis. Right. So we can't see that the predictive and the reactive model here are actually about 40% apart. But that's 40% higher recommendation around what, what's actually happening in the market on these days than you'd see if you're just pricing off your competitors prices. Right. This is how we can translate booking signal into information for you. Right. So the blended model, Alan, you asked us about automated how we automate. The blended model is what we, is what we post every single night. Right. We have to lean a little bit on the predictive and a little bit on, on the reactive model. And this next chart shows us exactly how we do that. Right. So now we are looking at model blending and I recognize this is a little bit of the science behind revenue management, it's really effing fun. But you can see here that in the far future, it's a little small, but you can see that the reactive model, more than a year out or about a year out, it doesn't have a big impact on our model yet. Right. There's just not enough bookings for us to be saying, okay, well, we can translate one or two or five bookings into exactly how we should price your home, however, as a state aid approaches. So when we're looking at the next few days here, you'll see that the reactive model, which is again tied to actual bookings on your inventory type, competitive set, market, et cetera, the reactive model makes up most of our recommendation and it changes over time. Right. So we go from kind of predicting prices to responding to actual booking patterns over time. And we don't do it in a boring linear fashion or even kind of a slightly quadratic fashion. When bookings pick up in your neighborhood or in your market or your inventory type, we. The reactive model kicks in faster. This is the, basically the machine that 24 hours a day is watching out for your inventory type. So Alan, to automation. When you automate with wheelhouse, this is what you're tapping into. Now here's something kind of fun too. One more thing, Mark, just to before we share screen a Little bit more. Now we can go break out all of these individual models and we can show you just local events. I can show you just local events and weekends near you. I can show you just seasonality. I can show you your temporality curve. I can show that. For the predictive model, the reactive model, the blended model, I can also. And this will be part of our offering with one click, copy and export all of this data. Data empowerment is coming to you, and it's coming to you by the end of Q1. Lastly, model date. Now, if I wanted to go look back at in time and say, well, what did Wheelhouse recommend? I don't care what they recommended today. What do they tell me to do on October 10th or November 11th or at the start of January? Well, that accountability is coming to revenue management as well. So these are some of the series of tools that we agree with. Was it Sharon who said, where's your data? It's like, I can tell you where our data's from, but I'd be much better off just putting you in control of this and taking control of it. And that's what this year is about. Right. So from the education, from the pricing plans that we're bringing to market that empower people to kind of take it like we're literally bringing a pricing plan to market we'll talk about in a second, that enables you to keep more money, you can not only earn more revenue, and in 2020, we increased revenue by 22.6%. And yes, we're going to tell you how we measure that, because that's actually really difficult to do, too. We can spend a little bit of time on that. I know we're a little tight on time, but the only other thing I wanted to highlight is, yeah, all of this, we're going to empower people. We're going to do so in a way that hopefully is affordable and compassionate and happy to answer any questions that maybe come up from looking at some of that data.

Marc, that's amazing. Thank you so much. And it's exciting to see because again, it just backs up everything that I've been telling everybody about it. And so I guess to finish with them, we've got the free plan, we've got the pay plan. So how does the pay plan work? How can people pay for it? Because some people are getting confused that it's on a, on a commission level, some people saying it's, it's a, it's a flat rate. How does the, the pay plan work? Yep.

So let's. Toggle over if you can share my screen again, Mark.

Absolutely.

So this is our pricing plan for 2021. It scales by portfolio. Both of these plans scale by portfolio size. But we decided, and this is live tomorrow, obviously you can sign up today and you'll get the same thing. We basically said there's too much unpredictability in markets and portfolios out there right now to have one. One way of pricing, right, we have customers and markets that might still shut down and they might have no demand, in which case they're not going to make money. So us charging a flat fee would be detrimental to their business. And there are markets that are booming right now where if they were paying a commission model of 1%, they'd be paying wheelhouse, candidly, a lot of money. And I do think we're worth it, right? Like the way to think about revenue management. The reason you pay for revenue management is it makes you more money. So if you have a better pricing engine, you make more money and you actually cost you less. But anyway, we just decided to put people in control, meaning you can link your portfolio and you can either have. If you're making a lot of money, pay us the flat fee. You will literally, you will keep more money, right? So you not only earn more money, but keep more. If your market is kind of unpredictable, I'd recommend the commission model. Right? The commission model will only pay you after your month is you'll only pay us after your month is complete. It'll be totally tied to how much money we make you and how much money you earn. So it's kind of whatever you want, whatever's best for you, whatever enables you to keep more money is fine by us in 2021, and we might continue to indefinitely. Who knows? We're just. We thought it was a slightly more compassionate pricing plan. If you're in multiple markets and one market is strong and one is weak, you can split your portfolio in any way you like. But we're kind of inviting you to game us. However you keep more money, do it nice.

And again, a lot of the features that they see are free. It's. If you choose to upgrade and go and go for the. Go for the paid, which is, you know, it's obviously the way that I look at it, everything that you showed me is something that you would hire for. So you would hire a revenue expert to do this for you, but a revenue expert who is this in depth? They would be charging a lot more than, say, $19 per property or 1% in commission. So again, you're saving yourself, having to do a hire. You're going on the science on the data, looking at 3 million, 4 million pieces of, of listings and prices and whatnot. Plus as well, it will automate it as well, so you don't even have to worry about it. You can literally set it, you can forget about it for a quarter and then you can just review it on a quarterly basis if you choose. So wish if you want to be really in the dirty in there every day, be my guest. You know you get the best of both worlds, right?

Yeah. Earn more, save time, scale faster, more freedom.

Yeah. And what I personally love is that you've given me the option. You know, you're saying, right, this year is all about you making more money. You can choose it and you can flip between the two. I assume. So you can. You literally choose what's best for you. Yeah. Change it anytime. Whatever's best for you, whatever's working, you know. And the main thing I want to stress is that you do get so much with the free, but when you obviously if you choose to go up, then that's, that's fantastic. And as well, I believe I heard from, from the team behind the scenes, if they put boostly 75, they get a, they get a discount on the first month, which is even better. So that's cool, that's really cool. So boost is 75, write that down if you ever choose to upgrade. And you get a pretty cool discount on the first one. So, Andrew, I just want to say thank you. I mean there's so much content that people can get stuck into on the site if they want to learn more. You know, just by signing up to the email list, you get real cool emails, come in easy to understand and drive just to the right places. And you got the courses. So Andrew's going to very kindly send me the link to that. I'll pop it in the comments somewhere and you can go from there. But is there any final things that you want to say? Because this is coming in nicely to a one hour podcast. I like how this is coming into an hour. So, final thoughts, Anything that you want to say? You know, you've explained so much. Why? I guess my question would be why Wheelhouse? That I think, I mean, if that was a question. Why Wheelhouse? There are others out there. Why Wheelhouse? Why now? Why you?

Yep. I will answer the why Wheelhouse, but you also gave me permission to share one more thing, so I'm going to share this.

Okay. Sharing the screen. Sharing the screen.

Nope. Nope, we're just talking now. We're just talking. Okay, so if, if today we, I mean, we tried to cover a lot today, we kind of obviously explored some interesting avenues use. But I would say the early question, like, great, I have all this data. How can I put it to use? What I, what I can really assure you is, especially if you spent an hour or two watching some of our educational courses, if you tried for literally 30 minutes to set up your own account and adjust the knobs and dials data or revenue management, I'm sorry, can very quickly go from overwhelming to extremely empowering. Extremely empowering. And the first time you get a booking for more than you thought will show you that you are, you're pretty good at this, right? You do know your market. Especially with better tools, you can do better. And I always say to people, look, as soon as you list your property online, you are a revenue manager. And it's as easy now to have an advanced revenue management strategy that captures you more money as to just leave it be. So I'd highly recommend to people, especially in this year, use data to inform your revenue management strategy. It's not as hard as it looks and it will very quickly go from, you know, from a lot of noise to a signal. So that's part one. Now, why Wheelhouse versus other pricing tools? I think the three things I always say here, the first is the depth of the data. Wheelhouse has been both a. We've, we've invested a huge amount in our data science and I know it's, it's easy to say, oh, we make people x amount more money. It's pretty intangible for folks. But the depth of data that we have is, is really unprecedented. And then we've turned that data into, we've just ab tested it so much. I don't think anyone in the space can really come close on the depth of data that we have around this product. Right. We've managed our own supply, meaning we've run a B test. We know everything from how does a pet fee to a cancellation fee to photo order impact your expected revenue. So the depth of the data is part one. Part two is for folks who have larger portfolios. Hopefully we got a taste of the interface today that makes it really easy and fast to manage and control your whole portfolio. So the usability of the site is something we're often kind of, we hear as is something or I guess people thank us for whatever, whatever the right term it is there. But it's the design and usability and the third thing is customer support. All right, so we have 24. 7 customer support. We take care of people if they have a single property or a thousand properties. Right. We're going to treat you the same. You have access to the educational content. So if we're not there to help for any reason that you need us immediately. But we do have 24,7 chat. You can go and learn more on your own. Right. So it's a little bit of, it's the depth of the data, it's the ease of use and it's the customer support that kind of holistically add up to a revenue management tool which to most really makes people more revenue. And, you know, that's kind of it.

Amazing. Thank you so, so much for it. If anybody wants to reach out to you and say hi, is LinkedIn the best channel of you? You're a Twitter fan, Instagram. Where's the best place if someone wants to say hi? Or is it good old fashioned email?

I live on LinkedIn. I'm@Andrews wheelhouse.com I'm on Twitter, but probably less more personally than professionally. And I would say reach out to us@helloswheelhouse.com if you wanted to speak to our team, I'm available at Andrews wheelhouse.com I'm on LinkedIn. I love connecting with people there and Mark and I are gonna be spending a lot of time together too. So he knows where to reach me.

Yeah, 100. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on and for sharing. And again, I stress to everybody, this is your chance now go and get the free account booster.co.uk wheel if for whatever reason you feel compelled enough to go and invest money and time with them that I do recommend, make sure you pop boostly 75 in the promo code. If you do it, they may send me some goodies to say thank you. So this is the end of the podcast. It's a big one, it's an hour long. So thank you so much. For those that have tuned in from the beginning to the end, if you listening on the replay, thank you so much. Now here's where I need your help. I want to make sure that every single host this year is going to be covered in the two most important areas, pricing and digital guidebooks. So what I need for you to do, please share this video. Please share this video. If it's on YouTube, grab the link, send it to a friend. If you're on Facebook, share it into a Facebook group, share it into your pms, Facebook group. This is really important if we're going to get more PMS's linked to Wheelhouse. Share it in your PMS group. Every PMS has a Facebook group. Share it in them and say, listen, check out Wheelhouse because this is how we're going to get them aware. Okay, the final thing that I would love for you to do, if you haven't done so already, hit the like button. Subscribe, tell a friend. That's all we're doing. And if you want to find out more about pricing, you want to know more about systems and structures, and you want to learn about more about direct bookings, then go and come and check out my book. My very first book is steadily ticking away. I'm getting lots and lots of words and characters done five chapters in now, over 25,000 words done. If you want to come and join the journey and proofread it and check it out and see the behind the scenes boostlead.co.uk Book for Everybody that joins now, you'll get a special discount on the day that it launches in November. You'll jump on a special Zoom call with me where I walk through all the tips. And as well, we're going to be doing some giveaways and goodies to help the launch and get so many people aware of it. So thank you so much for tuning in. If this is the first time you have checked out a boostly podcast, then go to boostlypodcast.com you'll get all the back catalog plus much bonus features in there as well. So thank you very much. Thank you Andrew and I shall see you all very soon.