Wifi For Guests: Elevating Guest Satisfaction in the Digital Age

There is a secret weapon out there when it comes to boosting direct bookings and it's in the form of a little box. Have you ever visited a Starbucks or a hotel or any coffee shop and you've wanted to use the WI fi? To get access to the WI fi, you have to give up an email address and your contact information. This technology has never been available before in the short term rental or the midterm rental market, but now it is. I've been talking about this company and my clients have used them time and time and time again and the results are phenomenal. The company is of course, Stay Fire State is a global brand and they are making waves in this industry. I am so grateful and happy to say that not only am I a client, not only am I a friend of the company, they are also now sponsoring the podcast. And when Stacy came to me and they said, hey, we want to sponsor the podcast, I said, well, only reason I will do this is if you can give a really cool discount to the Boostly community. You can get started right now on Stay Fi, no contracts and get 50% off your first three months with StayFi. All you need to do is use the code Boostly. When you are getting started again, just put boostly to get 50% off your first three months. If you are serious about boosting your direct bookings, then you need to have StayFi in your tech stack. To lock in your Stayfi discount and start cultivating your engaged guest list, go to stayfi.com boostly stayfi is s t a y dash f I dot com forward slash bruce lee and watch your bookings soar.

Okay, so we're live. So today we are talking about the importance of WI fi in general. So as short term rental hosts we WI fi has never been more important. I mean people would rather be without water than WI fi in many situations. So today on the podcast we're talking all about WI fi. We're talking about how you can advertise it to your guests and also how you can identify problems and things like that which may be happening with your WI fi. So to help me do this, we've got a very special guest here today. We've got Philip Picard. He's the co founder and CEO of Speedy WI Fi and we're going to be diving in with his product and really talking about what it does, how it can help you as a host and ultimately how it can help your guests before we do. So if this is your first time here, welcome to the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that gives host the tools, the tactics, the trainings, and most importantly, the confidence so you as a host can go out there and get more direct bookings. We do a special episode where we look at individual businesses and people who can help you. And that's exactly what we're doing on today's episode. So let's welcome along our guest. Welcome along. Phil, how are you? Cheers.

Liam. Yeah, big thank you for inviting me to be very excited to come share our stories. Thank you.

Well, we appreciate you joining us. So, Phil, before we dive into the what speedy WI fi is, tell me about yourself. How did you come up with this product and why and your background?

Yeah, sure. I'm originally from South Africa. Spent the last 15 years living and working abroad. Spent six years in Hong Kong, five in Los Angeles. Since a young age, I've always had the itch to roll up the sleeves and become an operator. But, you know, as the saying goes, don't build a business for the sake of building a business. So I was really, you know, patient, really looking for something that was, you know, a real deep pain point and something that affected me that I could then, you know, pour my blood, sweat and tears into. So at the start of COVID we were hopping around various rental properties and we kept on running into the same issue, which was slow and unreliable WI fi, which we had no way of knowing before arriving at a rental property. So, you know, a firsthand pain point that I experienced as a, as a remote worker. So, you know, I started looking at the market, realized there was a massive opportunity to provide a WI fi connectivity solution for property managers and their guests. So from that moment, we were off. We raised some initial capital, recruited a great team, started to build out the product, which we launched earlier this year. So excited to, you know, be out in market with our product and, you know, expanding our customer base.

Well, it sounds like it's happened quite, quite fast. And just what were you doing when you're having to travel for. For work? So why was the WI fi so important to you at the time?

Well, yeah, so my time abroad, I've always, you know, been. Been across continents and, you know, visiting family, visiting clients, you know, vice versa. But I think at this, at the onset of COVID we suddenly had this flexibility that we didn't have to be in the office anymore. So, you know, like many others, we, we took advantage of this flexibility and we were hopping around various villas in Southern California. And yeah, as I mentioned, you know, the WI fi was a massive issue for Us. And I think the aha moment was then what we realized that us as guests, WI fi would actually drive our decision making. So we would, you know, select one property over the other if we had, you know, verifiable information of the WI fi at the property.

Yeah, and this, this is something, I mean that we have said for a little while is that you need to display your WI fi speed. And I know we're going to dive more into that and how you can display it and. But this is something which all hosts. If you're listening to this and you think, do you know what? I haven't got anything. Displaying my WI Fi speed is so important for your guest. It's just so important for them to know the speed before the book, particularly if they're a digital nomad or needing to travel for work or pretty much any reason. These days, guests really like good WI fi. There's often a few people on different devices, isn't there? So let's dive into speedy WI fi. So what problem does it solve?

Yeah, I think the starting point is just our dependence on WI fi in today's digital age. Our kind of personal story came through remote work and traveling. But what we've come to realize is we all depend on WI fi, whether that's family wanting to keep in touch with loved ones, you know, kids wanting to stream whatever show on Netflix and then, you know, just general work and, you know, keeping connected. So understanding, you know, the broad demand for connectivity was really, you know, our North Star and making that information available to guests ahead of time. In terms of our solution, we've built one solution for one problem. So we've tried to be, you know, really specific and, you know, intentional about what we built. So our platform is driven by a hardware device which property managers plug in at their rental properties that captures the WI fi performance data, that feeds a web application which gives you 24,7 visibility of the Wi fi across your properties. And then finally, as we touched on, we've got a verified WI FI rating which you can embed on your listing site. So really, you know, advertising high speed WI fi is a unique differentiator of your properties with the real purpose of capturing increased bookings and longer term stays from travelers that require high speed connectivity.

And if I was a host, so there'll be host listeners to this, some with, you know, multiple properties, some with only one. But I think WI fi problems in general is something that we all want to avoid. So what is my experience as a host? What do, what do I need to do and how am I best to kind of show off the WI fi speed?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, right from the get go, we really focused on building a hardware agnostic solution that's plug and play with very little integration. You know, there's, there's so many tools out there and we don't want to be, you know, overwhelming hosts with just another product suit. So first off, you know, depending on how many properties you have, 1, 10, 200, 500 plus, you know, we've got scale pricing depending on the volume. So we'll send you the devices. All you need to do is connect it to power and connect it to wi Fi that will then self register and pick up on our web application. And from there we've got a no code widget or rating that can be embedded on any direct listing site. So we compatible with WordPress and it's really just one line of code that you can drop into your sites to showcase first of all, the speed. And then we've got the ability that guests are able to click in for further information if they want to really understand if a particular property will meet their connection requirements.

That's cool. So as a host, I sort out my WI fi, I go and pick it from my preferred supplier, I plug in your device and that device will then automatically connect to an application which I can then see what the speed is doing. So if a guest then phones me and says, you know, the WI fi isn't working, you know, I think I'm on the right network and that we can, we can see that. Is that right?

Yeah, sure. So on the, on the monitoring side, the first piece is really acting as an early warning system. So you receive a notification from us rather than a complaint from a guest. And we've got the ability to set the sensitivity of those notifications so you're not, you know, constantly getting, you know, bombarded. So that's the first piece and then the second piece. What a few of our customers have found really helpful is if the guest calls and they, you know, complain about faulty WI fi, the first thing that they do is log on to the, to our platform and see if the property is online. So if it's online, you already then know, you know, that you can get the guest to recheck the password. Are they capitalizing that first letter, adding the exclamation mark at the end? And you know, that's really helpful because it avoids you having to send somebody out to the property when there isn't in fact an issue.

Yeah. And often that's not an issue with the hardware. Often that's an issue with guest user issues. And as I'm sure many people can relate to this, if you're struggling on.

How to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start, then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boostly and our team right now. We can walk you through exactly what we're offering, how, how we can help you and give you a portfolio of websites that we have worked with that are matching not only your niche, but could be in your location as well. Boostly has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world increase their direct bookings. And if you are interested, then all you need to do is go to Boostly. B O O s t l y.co.uk call and book in an appointment with one of our sales team.

Who would you say it serves the best? So who is your ideal, I guess your ideal customer who would come and use this product?

Yeah, sure. We started with quite a broad offering because, you know, everybody everywhere has wi fi and everybody cares about it. But after being in market now for a couple of months, we've narrowed down our ideal customer profile to apart hotels and villas, so large villas. So we find with, you know, the villas and the part hotel offering, guests typically stay longer. And when they're staying longer, they're usually, you know, demanding the comforts of home and the connectivity of an office. So, you know, there's less sort of wiggle room and just more demand for absolute connectivity while traveling.

That's cool. That's cool. And I mean, this is one of the things I had a call from a guest earlier on today in my hospitality business and they were very specific that they wanted hardwired, great Internet, certain speed. And it's just more, more prevalent than ever with people needing that sort of stuff. My question for you is for all the hosts who are using on Airbnb, for instance, you can now verify the apps, you can go to the property and you can search and verify the speed. How does that differ from your product?

It's a great question. You know, first off, congrats to Airbnb on launching that solution. I think it's a great start. And they're, you know, one of the more advanced hospitality players out there and, you know, but abundant resources, the our differentiation and how we sort of stack up against that is because we have our own device, we can have a continuous data stream. So we really focused on the reliability of the connection in addition to speed. So we measure latency value, which is Basically ping time, the amount that, the time that it takes to load a quick Google request. And so you're really focused on the reliability of the connection. So you know, often if you're working remote, you would much rather have a slower connection that's 100% reliable than something that's hyper fast that you know, craps out a few times a day while you're on calls and you know, disrupts your, your connectivity which can be critical when you're on sales calls or you know, investors and you know, you really need to have a high quality of service to, you know, keep that conversation flowing naturally.

Let's say you don't have a very good Internet provider or something's wrong somewhere along the line. How could your product help with proving that basically to some of the suppliers?

Yeah. Awesome. Another great question, you're hitting on all the, all the good spots of our products. So the first piece is we really help the host narrow down the source of the issue so we can first off identify if it's related to the actual Internet that's being serviced by the Internet service providers or if it's potentially more the hardware issue on the WI FI local area network. And then finally it's to pile out which you know, is a bit different. So initially you know, pinpointing the cause of that issue and then second of all, if both saw struggling with Internet their properties, they can use our data set to lodge disputes with their service providers. So they could say, you know, I'm paying for 100 meg line, I'm only getting 30 and you know, it bombs out a few times a day. So they can use that data set to, you know, equip themselves to lodge a complaint to the isp. So the ISP would then, you know, either increase the service level or rectify the issue. And if there's really nothing that they can do about it, they can really use our data set to help them get out of, you know, a fixed term contract and enter into a new contract with, with a better provider.

Yeah, there's, there's nothing worse than when these big companies advertise you're going to get speed and you know, you pay for it, you set it all up and you don't actually get anything like that speed. And I know there's lots of different reasons that could be for that, but having a tool like Speedy WI Fi is going to really help to prove that either way, what is there in store in the future. So I think I've got to grips with the product and you know, what it is at the moment, is there any kind of nuggets you can share with what the business is going to look like in the future?

Yeah, we're keeping that under wraps for now. That we're really looking at just the guest connectivity experience and how do we optimize that. So one of the things we're looking at is one click log on to WI FI upon arrival. We're also looking at VPN and security on the network, you know, cleaning up devices, custom WI FI names and passwords. So there's really quite a lot that we can we get into. And yeah, we just at the start of a very exciting journey to you know, just ultimately add value for guests and hosts 100%.

And I know we spoke before we went live about I used to many years ago selling WI FI speakers and things like that and you know, just it was so hard to tell whether or not it's the speaker, the router, the Internet provider. So you know, I know there's going to be especially guest houses, apartment hotels out there listening to this who especially want to make sure they've got the very best connection available. So let's talk about, are you happy to talk about pricing and to cover kind of what it would look like if a host wants to, wants to go ahead?

Yeah, absolutely. So we charge five to ten dollar monthly subscription per property, scaling depending on the number of units signed up. There's no setup fee. Very easy installation takes two minutes. That can be done by anybody with access to the property, be that you know, a cleaner or a manager or whatever that is. So we really, you know, focused on that ease of integration. So yeah, we are looking for customers at the moment. We've got a strong pipeline that we busy delivering against and we really just focused on a low cost solution and ease of integration and provide value rather than being a headache of another tool.

Yeah, that's cool. And we were saying yesterday on one of the podcasts, you don't want too many stacks of tech but you really want the ones which really help you to make sure things are working properly easy for guests and stuff like that, which is cool. So is there anything else you want to share about SPDY or that side of things before we share how people can get in touch? Yeah, sure.

I think just what you were touching on not being another tool. So our system really runs in the background. We've got the easy installation and then our alerts are also set up through Slack and Microsoft Teams. So you really don't really know we there and we Tell you whenever there's an issue. So really focusing on actionable insights and providing value to our customers. On the contact question, feel free to reach out to me on my email philipetspeedy IO and that's Philip with one L. I'm also available on LinkedIn. Alternatively, you can go to getspdy IO and schedule a demo. Got a great team that will, you know, help with that onboarding process and you know, walk you through the product, answer any questions and go from there.

Sounds good. Thank you so much for that. And before we bring things to a close, I'd love to just ask a couple of fun questions just to change the tempo a little bit. So where was the last spontaneous stay you had?

Last spontaneous stay was I had a friend's wedding in Bordeaux, France and it ended up being Bastille. So I did two nights in Paris on route back and yeah, that was really great to just experience the French national pride.

Nice. Very nice indeed. So, and when it comes down to advice, general lifetime advice, obviously you've started this business, you know, after post Covid and that, what advice would you have for any business owners out there listening to this?

Oh, good one. What I really find is, you know, I try to be intentional with everything that I do in today's world. We really overwhelmed with media and you know, targeted marketing, all trying to, you know, grab our attention and you know, sell their products. So, you know, wake up in the morning and really understand what's your North Star, what's important and you know, make sure you're just striving to hit those goals and you know, be intentional about, you know, what are your focuses and objectives.

Nice. Yeah, I think that's really sound advice and thank you for coming on today. Sharon, get Speedy. Obviously all of the contact links that you mentioned are going to be somewhere around this. So if you're watching on YouTube, they'll be underneath. If you're watching on Facebook, they'll be in the comments. And of course, if you listen to this on the Boostly podcast, we'll make sure we put them in the show notes so you can go and check out the speedy wi fi. And yeah, thank you again. Phil. Was there anything we missed along the way or any last years?

No, I think we covered it all. Yeah, I really enjoyed the session and you know, maybe just one closing remark is just, you know, I've really fallen in love with the short term rental industry. I think, you know, from meeting Mark at the various conferences, I really get a feeling of collaboration and sharing best practices which I think is really unique to to the rental space. You know, a lot of people are always just willing to give their time, share their tips. So, yeah, really come to to love the industry and looking forward to being involved in the many years to come.

Nice. Nice. Thank you very much for, for sharing. And like you say, hospitality is just one of the most friendly. You know, everyone's in competition with each other, but everyone shares tips.

Amazing.

That's the whole purpose of this. So thank you. If you're listening on the Boosty podcast, we know there's lots of places you can put your attention. Really thank you for putting it with us. And we'll see you on the next episode. That's bye from me and bye from Phil.

Wonderful. Thanks so much, Liam. Talk to you soon.