Deep Dive Into ResortPass As A Leading Marketplace With Michael Wolf | EM Group Chat #211

Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk about founders and leaders on the home of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 211, which is a really great group chat. Just had Michael Wolf, who's the CEO of ResortPass. ResortPass is a marketplace for booking day access to hotel amenities. It's used by over 2,000 hotel partners and operates in over 400 cities. Prior to joining ResortPass, Mike was also the head of operations at ClassPass. This is a great chat with Michael, bringing back to his experience at ClassPass and some of his key learnings led him to joining ResortPass. We did a deep dive into as a leading marketplace for booking day access to hotels and amenities today. We got to learn about their growth, how they're leveraging AI. Michael shared lots of tips for founders, and we also had a great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation. You're going to find it a great watch to the end. So, Michael, ResortPass has been mentioned in the community a few times now, you know, so it's great to have you join us here today. I want to start off by saying huge thanks for taking the time to do so in advance. We have a lot that we're going to dive into with your marketplace experience and ResortPass, but I thought it'd be great if you could start off by briefly sharing your background for those here that might not know you.

Yeah, for sure, Mike. Thanks for having me. Super fun to do. Of all the podcasts I've done, I think just talk about marketplaces for a half hour or so. Like genuinely what I would love to talk about all day long if I could. So thanks for having me. I'm sitting here in our New York headquarters at 17th and 5th. So the heart of New York startup world for those who know it. I've been a lifelong New Yorker, been doing the startup thing pretty much. I did a couple years doing the consulting thing at Bain, which I only mentioned, I think they do such a good job on people and culture. But ever since then, I knew I wanted to do startups and I wanted to do it in New York. So Been kind of doing that for 20-plus years, and my focus has been on marketplaces. I just find them the most intellectually stimulating. Making something work for 2 sides of the marketplace is just more fun than, in my experience, straight D2C or straight SaaS software. You get to do a little bit of everything in one. Ran the day-to-day of ClassPass for many years, was involved with a lot of others, things like MoviePass, KidPass, Seated, a bunch of other marketplaces. And the way I got to ResortPass was the first investor in ClassPass, Sagar, He's one of the top consumer investors in the world. If you haven't had him on this podcast, you should. First check in DoorDash, a lot of other great marketplaces. But he, he was an advisor to— he was someone that I worked with at ClassPass, the first check there. And then I started advising ResortPass and joined ResortPass 4 years ago.

It's really great background. So much to get into with all your marketplace experience. You know, I did want to go back to ClassPass because that was, of course, you know, an early marketplace that many of us here will know of. So can you kind of take us back to your experience, you know, at ClassPass, you know, some of the biggest challenges of the business while you were there?

Yeah. You know, like a lot of marketplaces and a lot of industries, You're disintermediating. And that ultimately can lead to incredible businesses that we all know, and that many on this call probably are founders of or have joined. But in the process, you kind of really have to maintain the relationship side. So I think there's one big takeaway I'd have taken from ClassPass, but that I've brought to all my marketplaces, is the investment on things like account management, on the CX pieces. And there's some of it may be perceived as basics, but as a reminder, no one at any marketplace really knows the name of the CEO or the COO or the president. They typically, like there at ClassPass, whether it was a fitness studio, they really knew the name of our account managers. And when we were creating this new business model of aggregating different fitness supply in one place, there were sometimes some challenges with that. I think one of the reasons we did so well is that our account management team was so well beloved by the fitness industry. They knew their markets, they knew every fitness owner. And I think that really allowed for ClassPass to thrive in moments, you know, what we're getting through there. And it's a lesson I've taken with me, you know, every marketplace I've been ever since.

That's going to be a really helpful learning. And, you know, I did want to transition over to ResortPass and you kind of mentioned how you initially kind of connected with the team. I mean, what stage was the business at when you joined?

Yeah.

So, you know, I got there, I professionally was advising CEOs for many years and I got there As an advisor. And I started looking first at the customer reviews, and probably a lot of people do. And I saw people going to the Ritz-Carlton, people going to the Hilton, people in New York, people in Oklahoma, families, young adults. I saw like all this different service area. Okay, that's really interesting for a company I wasn't super familiar with. But I think what was really compelling when I first got there was looking at the partner side, the supply side of the marketplace. And I think if there's one takeaway about ResortPass and what feels very different and how I would think about for everyone how they can make their marketplaces think about this is we're creating a truly new user behavior for users and then therefore a new revenue stream for hotels. To give you a sense, 95% of the hotels we work with at ResortPass have never offered day access. So by definition, the revenue that we're sending hotels, there's no sense of disintermediation, there's no sense of cannibalization. It's all incremental. And my favorite just anecdote about this is I was out in Las Vegas, which is one of our fast-growing markets. I was with one of our partners and they were talking about our technology we have facing the hotels, meaning the software they use. And they're like, yeah, every day open up the portal, the partner portal, and it's like a slot machine. It's like, what free money am I getting today? And I love that anecdote. It's also like such a Vegas kind of connotation, but it's also because that's how they look at us, right? You think about marketplaces and sometimes there's a sense of disintermediation. Like, how do you actually create new value for both sides of the marketplace? And I Explain how we create on the user side as well. But on the hotel side, it's this ancillary revenue that has never existed in hospitality. And it's at the exact moment in the hospitality industry that they're really focused on ancillary. I sometimes speak about how I think the hotel industry is a little jealous of the aviation industry and how well aviation has monetized, you know, every seat, every square inch of the airplane, your baggage, your internet. You know, like these things got all disaggregated. Hotels historically have not done that. They've focused on the room. They've done an incredible job of revenue management, yield management in the room. They charge more for those rooms than ever before, but they haven't really thought about all the other services of the hotel and the ancillary revenue. And what I think is beautiful is unlike a lot of the ancillary revenue that's generated in aviation where people are not necessarily that excited to pay for the seat they never used to pay for or the luggage they never used to pay for, on our side, on our marketplace, the guests are thrilled to pay for this experience because this is an experience they always wanted to access hospitality in a different way. It just never was before available. So it's truly kind of win-win on both sides of the market. which I think is what— why I really am compelled by ResortPass, because it feels good when you really create value on both sides of the market every day.

Yeah, certainly. And I know right before we started recording, we were mentioning, you know, the importance of aligning incentives. And so, you know, in this case with hotels, like bringing them kind of new revenue, not competing with their existing customers. So I guess, could we expand on that a little bit more and just share more about like kind of how that kind of factors in ResortPass?

Let's take it on each side. So on the partner side first, on the hotel side, hotels, the atomic unit of a hotel is the overnight room. It's room 312. How do you fill that room? How do you maximize the inventory? That's what Wall Street cares about. That's what the general managers of hotels are comped on. Everyone thinks about that. And it's just a newer phenomenon to think about all of the other ways you can generate revenue in hotels. Historically, all the other services of the hotels, things like pools, spas, restaurants have kind of been in service of the room. Now there's an idea of, well, how do we make those standalone great revenue streams? And hotels historically have allowed, encouraged outside guests to maybe be at the bar or the hotel restaurant. And this is just thinking about this in this new way across other surfaces of the hotel. But what I think I, what I love equally about the business is on the user side. So the way I think about this, I'm sitting here again in our office at 17th and 5th. So right off Union Square for those who are in New York, I live 10, 15 blocks north. Every day on my walk to work, I pass 10 hotels. I've counted. And I assume historically as a local is that there's no interaction for me in all those hotels, right? I think of those, those are things that are for travelers, except the kind of secret is a traveler comes to a hotel most times once in a lifetime, actually literally once in a lifetime. So how can I have that more ongoing relationship with a hotel that's kind of in my neighborhood? Now, the other part of our business though is travelers. So it's people who are traveling, they're staying at a home rental. What do they want to think about? What do they want to complement that with? Hotel amenities for a day, or they're checking out of a, you know, VRBO, Airbnb. And instead of being one of the 3 billion people who check out every day and sitting at an airport, hotel amenities, all these different use cases. And so we're the rare hospitality company relevant locally, which is kind of unheard of to be relevant for, you know, hotels when you're in your home market. And we're relevant while you're traveling. And if you really though take one step back and what is the essence of the customer value prop that we're providing? We have 4 words to describe it: rest, recharge, escape, and play. And those are the way people kind of use the product. And we really are the sole marketplace that's out there that I think captures that for that day experience. So, you know, in summary, it's we're providing real value to the hotels, providing real value to the users, creating a new category at the same time.

Yeah. And then on the note, as far as like creating a new category that typically comes with, you know, creating a lot of kind of awareness and, you know, kind of education around that. So, you know, how did you kind of do that earlier on with ResortPass and how are you continuing to do so today? You know, one of our challenges is creating a category.

So it sounds like a fun thing to do, and it is a fun thing to do. But at the end of the day, if I go outside on the street in New York and tell people, oh, what do you do? I run a company called ResortPass. Half the people will be like, oh my God, I love ResortPass. The other half, when you explain what you do, they're like, that's such a cool thing. I didn't know you could do that. Now, I tell that to my team all the time, that for the people that don't know about us, it's really compelling. But I also don't want to make it seem like it's always easy to kind of get the word out there. We're lucky that the vast majority of our Acquisition, consumer acquisition has historically entered it and still is organic. When people do search for this or see about if this idea exists, we have really good SEO, we have really good word of mouth, a physical, real offline word of mouth, because the majority of people who do ResortPass do it with another person or 2. So that kind of winds up being that true offline viral loop. But then we also invest in a lot of the normal paid channels. We do events because again, what our product is has a very offline nature to it. We invest heavily in the influencer world, in the social world. So I think kind of the more traditional channels. But what I would say is, you know, is we've built the business organically and through what I would call like traditional word of mouth. I mean, real offline word of mouth.

And, you know, related to that, while we're kind of talking about the demand side, are there some kind of challenges as far as like a seasonality kind of nature of the business?

This is the most complicated I've ever dealt with. We have seasonality for sure. We have weather, right? I've never thought about weather as much as I do now in cities I'm not in. I care a lot about the weather in Phoenix, Miami, LA, Hawaii right now, even though I'm in none of those cities. I think a lot about inventory because we're creating something new. We actually are creating inventory. As a reminder, I think a lot about different brands of hotels and the different echelons, 5-star hotels, the more modest hotels. I think a lot about hotels, not just brands, but ownership groups and management companies, because hotels have 3 different constituencies involved. So there's genuinely, of all the markets and places I've been in, this is by far the most complex. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that's what makes it the most fun, but it absolutely makes it the most complicated is the reality of it as well.

Yeah, certainly lots of considerations and complexities, as you mentioned. So I did want to kind of double-click on one that you mentioned as far as like on the supply side and that different kind of like segments of supply with the hotels. So, you know, it seems like you take like a more kind of curated supply strategy on that. So could you share a little bit more around that and, you know, how that supply strategy might have evolved?

We work with some of the most luxury hotel brands in the world, 5-star hotels that are, you know, beloved and charge really high price points. But we also do believe— I want to be clear— that people can have this incredible experience, that essence of rest, recharge, escape, and play at more modest hotels. And I think one of the most surprising things is if you go read our reviews, again, people's expectations that the 5-star hotels are higher, they charge a higher price point, but you'll see just as positive customer sentiment at a more modest 3-star hotel in Troy, Michigan. There's one hotel that I monitor up there and I see all the inbound reviews and it's just amazing to me how incredible people have it at the indoor pool. So we absolutely have a curation layer and we kind of really are intentional about which hotels we add to the platform. But I think a misnomer is that those hotels only have to be at the most luxury side of the world, and they just don't, because I want to create that consumer experience and kind of meet the guests where they are, whether that's the person who's spending $300 per person on a 5-star hotel or maybe spending $40 at a more modest hotel.

And then also too, you mentioned being in so many different markets, right? And managing liquidity as a hyperlocal marketplace in each one. So how have you thought about that? And I would also say too, when it comes to expansion into new markets.

Look, we have some of our most efficient markets from acquisition and what have you are the markets where we have hundreds of hotels, places like Miami and LA and places like that. But we could also add a great property, a single property in a more remote geography or where there just isn't as much hotels and that do great. So we have single hotels in places that might be surprising, that are surprising to me probably, that do incredibly well, high into the 6 figures. And it's not necessarily that they have a density there. It just is a great property. And we invest in our marketing, creating the word of mouth there. So the density is a little less required. That said, we see the most effective demand generation around those higher density markets.

Got it.

And I guess for a little bit of context, how many markets do you operate in today?

We work in north of 250 markets across 30 countries.

As far as when it comes to launching new markets, what is that kind of new market launch and expansion playbook like?

We really triangulate in the hotel industry. There's again, the hotel flags, which are the brands, things like Hilton and Marriott and Hyatt. Then there's ownership groups. And again, these are often private equity firms and other financial vehicles that actually own the hotels. And there's a third constituency often that manages the hotels, and we've invested in all 3. So that's another reason why it's a little bit more of a challenging place to operate in, but we've built the relationships across all 3. In terms of playbooks, I've been involved with some of the marketplace where I think you need to have people on the ground in every market. I have ones where you centralize more. I have ones where you might want to adjust the language, ones where you don't. Like, everything, every playbook's a little bit different across the 7 that I've done. I think here we've invested very, very heavily across all 3 of those constituents. So knowing every part of the ecosystem has been incredibly helpful for us and building those relationships very, very, very deeply.

And then I wanted to transition to talking about the topic of AI, because that's something we're always talking about today. You know, so how have you approached leveraging AI at ResortPass? And are there any specific examples you can share of how you're doing so today?

We definitely use it in some of the ways that I think are probably more ubiquitous than we use ways that are unique. So ubiquitous, you know, using Decagon for CX and using Granola and using, you know, Claude and some of the ways that those tools are used by their respective teams are really holistically across the company. I think one that's a little specific to us that's kind of fun is on our marketing specifically when it comes to weather. So, as I alluded to earlier, I pay attention to weather, we pay attention to weather more than a lot of other companies. And historically, there's a lot of the data was out there, but how we synthesize that, how we ascertain that process, that was much more manual. Now, this is more automated through AI. So what we do is essentially we have a single report dashboard that comes in that's intrinsically gathering all of the data sources around weather to understand the weather imminently today and tomorrow, as well as kind of for a little bit further out. We then use that to impact our marketing cycles. That could be how much paid marketing we're doing in markets if we know what the weather looks like. That can be what our CRM looks like. If we know that it's going to be a little bit of a heat wave, we might kind of Double down on a promo even for getting people outside the pool. We know if it's going to be rainy in a market that we might kind of focus more on our day room product or on our spa product. So by having the kind of the weather as just like a variable that used to be something that was really important for our business, but we couldn't kind of handle it at scale and then actually react to it. So it's not just, I think, on the AI, the information gathering piece, that's super helpful, but it's like how action-oriented we can be. So it's kind of a fun little example. I think probably A little bit unique for us given the weather considerations.

Definitely a really cool example there. And then related to that with all the different operational complexities, what is the team like today?

If you ask me building now versus a couple years ago, I actually think building marketplaces now is pretty similar. And I don't know how some other guests maybe on this pod have described it. I think that you can build quicker. I think you can build more efficiently on a team perspective, but at the end of the day, it needs to create value on both sides of the marketplace. You need great people on the team. In fact, I think the people you need in a way need to be more multi-skilled than probably ever before. You need probably some capital, right? So like the kind of core pieces haven't changed, but I do think that we're way more efficient. So on the team side, I just think the size team we have today is smaller and we're still hiring and we're adding to the team every day. We've had someone start, I think every week for the last like 6 weeks. But still, the net nature of the team is smaller today than it would've been for a similar company 6 years ago. And that is a reflection of, I think, being able to do more with less in an AI world and some other pieces like that.

Definitely.

It's a topic that we're always discussing, and it's always interesting to hear how the org structures are changing right now as well. So cool. So I'm getting questions right here, so I want to make sure that we can save time for the group Q&A. But right before we jump into it, what would be your top tips for founders starting marketplaces today?

One is the investment on the people side of your team, of course, and that's maybe, but I think specifically as it faces external, meaning, again, I can't explain this enough. We've sent 6 million people to hotels, literally all 6 million, none of them have heard of Michael Wolf, right? But a decent percentage of those have messaged our CX team. We have 2,600 hotels. Every one of those hotels knows someone on my account manager team. So if I look at both sides of the marketplace, No one really knows Michael, but they know my account management team, they know our CX team. And I think sometimes people fail to actually think about that quite as much as you'd expect. And maybe that's just some of my own lessons. But so I just think investing on the people, the external-facing pieces of it, number one. Two is really, I talk a lot about being equilateral triangle and that there's a triangle that you need to give value to the supply side, the demand side, and ultimately yourself as a business, right? So over time, I always say it has to become unilateral. Like over time, you need to eventually give great value to all 3 sides, but at any given time, you might be giving more value to one side, right? So you might be giving great user pricing and just to get more people onto the marketplace, and therefore you're giving more value to the user, you're extracting some from the partner. Maybe you want to sell an important partner, so you're willing to have different economics with them, whatever it might be. But like knowing where you are on that part of the journey, And it can change. To be clear, it's changed over my 4 years at ResortPass. If it's not changing, you're probably not doing something right, truthfully. But just kind of keep thinking about where you are in the journey on the triangle side. So those are kind of my top 2. Maybe I'll throw you one last bonus one on the team side. People talk a lot about the team and it's all about team. It is. And I'm like, I talk a lot about world's best talent. The way I describe that is incredible at their craft and people you want to sit next to. That's how I describe what that means. And I think that it is so easy when you're building a team to violate it on one of those. Hey, that person's so great. They just seem like they would be the best salesperson, the best engineer. If they're not going to fit well culturally, it's not going to work out in the end. So if you kind of start thinking like, oh, I want to hire them, but it feels like they're not a fit, it ultimately is not going to work. It's kind of the secret. So I really am adamant about, for us, it's staying kind of true to both sides, incredible at their craft, incredible You know, human being that fits into whatever the culture that you're building.

This is going to be really helpful tips.

Cool.

We're going to go ahead and get into the group Q&A and actually wanted to ask a question that founders sent in advance and it was around, they were looking to ask, you know, what are the biggest mistakes that you see founders that are trying to build like a ClassPass for X style marketplace?

I think that knowing the partner relationships, it is easy with the right pricing and the right type of product to generate demand. And again, I've been involved with some other marketplaces that did this very successfully, not Cloudflare, but other marketplaces. The problem was when you're so potentially detested from your partner side, that's a really hard foundation to build off. And some people think, well, if you get enough scale quickly enough, then the partner side, the supply side will be forced to negotiate with you. And it's a really risky bet. And so I think the biggest lesson is, you know, as a marketplace, you are nothing but your partners. And I don't say that like in a negative way, but it's like in a respectful way. There's a ton of value you can add as a marketplace. It's why I do what I do. But remind, you know, as a reminder, you know, the 7 marketplaces I've been involved in, I never owned any of the supply. I never owned, you know what I mean? I never was operating fitness studios or restaurants or movie theaters or hotels. And so kind of keep reminding yourself of that is kind of the thing I would say when you're thinking about the X for Y kind of next discipline or next subject that you want to tackle.

Awesome. That's going to be really helpful. Hey, Stephanie, saw you raise your hand. Do you want to jump on?

Thank you, Mike. Hey, Michael, my name is Stephanie. I'm the founder of a B2C marketplace that provides infrastructures for consciousness-based wellness practitioners. So I hold one-on-one sessions all inside the platform. But my question is, how do you go about incentivizing each resort internally in the platform? Meaning when I as a user go in, how do you guarantee that each resort, which resort shows up for me first and why? How do you go about that?

This is actually something that you can really incentivize good behavior on your partner side or your suppliers, because who do you want to show up first? You want people that they're going to have a great customer experience. You want people that are going to be available. Let's say it's a practitioner model where you need to make sure they have good availability. You can incentivize the right— you can have the right incentives for the supply side that it's kind of aligned with who you want to show up first and who is going to be best for your business. And so we think a lot about that. One thing that's great about the hotel industry is the managers in the hotel, the general managers, the whole industry is very focused on user reviews. They care a lot about our user reviews. And we care a lot about our user reviews because we want Great people have great experiences. So we reward people who have better user reviews. And that makes sense logically, right? Who doesn't win in that? The hotels get rewarded for having a great experience. The users have a great experience. And it often helps our economics because we're selling more things. So I just say that because I think actually incentives can be really aligned on how you kind of display things first. If you don't have the user reviews and things like that, that's obviously something you got to kind of figure out, like the little bit of a cold start there. But it's something that— but we, you know, now we have a data science team and there's like a lot of— there's a lot of things that feed into that algorithm. But I do think it can be really aligned is what I'm saying. And I think kind of ultimately the best for the user, the partners, and for you guys as a business.

Awesome.

Hey, Jared, I saw you raise your hand. Do you want to jump on here also?

Hey, Michael. Jared from Napper. We have a similar business, but we focus more on the room than the amenities. Which role at the hotel is most, most aligned with ResortPass? Are you mostly talking to GMs? Vice presidents? Are you trying to usually get like a cluster of hotels at once from a specific brand? Or like, you know, is your strategy a little different? Curious.

It really does vary by hotel. And I think that's again, because we're, you know, we're, what we're creating is something new. There's all the positives on that. But the flip side is it's not like every hotel, the same person's in charge of it. So if I gave you the titles, who our account management team works with at different hotels, I'm not exaggerating. It would be like 12 different titles. Head of ancillary revenue, head of revenue management, head of wellness, head of F&B. And that's kind of a little bit, I don't know if it's our secret sauce, but having built the business now for nearly a decade and built those relationships is we just know all parts of EEE at the hotel. But who that lead is in any particular hotel genuinely varies. It's not the same. I actually don't know if I was to go ask my account management team who our lead is at each hotel. I'd be curious to run a survey. But what I do know without question is that it'd be very evenly split. It's not like always having the revenue manager or having head of F&B. It's pretty varied.

Hey, Michael, actually I had a related question to that, and this is just something that comes up in the community quite a bit, but it's around initially selling in to businesses on the supply side. So do you maybe have tips for founders on that?

This, I feel like, has become the conventional wisdom, but I agree with it, is that it should be you first of all, if it's a zero-to-one phase. Nothing can replace it, partly because just the passion, I love this business. I've been doing startups 20 years. I mean, I say this, I don't know if it's a good thing. I get more excited for the weekdays than the weekends. I just love, we're on office side of the day here. And so I just get excited. And I say that because that excitement people share with me often, hotel partners, candidates, how excited I am. And it's not like I'm excited. I'm not doing that. It's not an act. It's just genuinely how excited I am. And I think when you're talking to partners, they feel that as well. So I think the number one thing is making sure that it's you. In terms of those initial conversations. 2, I feel like almost in any industry, there's some way you can network your way in. Maybe not across the whole industry, but maybe it's the Stephanie, to the wellness practitioners, you have a friend or 2, or a friend of a friend is the first few conversations, then you build on it, right? Because now that we're 2,600 hotels, selling number 2,601 is a lot easier than it was selling number 2. But again, nothing can replace the passion. If you're a founder on this call— By the way, one other thing, If you're not that passionate about what you're doing, don't found the company. One thing that's so interesting to me is people who go to business school and say, I want to found a company. And I kind of have done this a few times. That's the worst idea in my mind, to sit in a room and be like, I'm going to found a company, and then try to ideate on the company they found. I'm not saying it never works. I'm sure there's some examples of big companies I don't even know about, but the amount of passion you have to have for something, we literally make people happy on a Tuesday, and I can't imagine anything I'll ever work on that'll be more fulfilling than that.

I'm glad you mentioned that. It's definitely needed, you know, when building a marketplace as well, all the additional challenges. So cool. Hey, Anne, sorry, raise your hand. Do you want to jump on?

Yeah, I had a related question. So as you've scaled the, the supply acquisition team now, what does the team look like? Is it— is acquiring supply a marketing-heavy process? Do you have a few enterprise sellers to sell in and then they move to your account managers or account managers managing full cycle?

Yeah, great question. So we have a sales team that's selling in, that team is mostly selling hotel by hotel. We do have agreements and relationships at the corporate level across every major hotel brand ownership group and management company. But as you also know, it sounds like you're familiar with the hotel industry, is there's a franchise nature of the industry, number one. Number two is even if we could magically sign up every hotel in the world with one The reality is some of the biggest value we bring is that we have the relationship at every hotel. And by the way, not just the GM, revenue management, all that, but every individual server. If you go around and ask our hotel, the people who love us the most, I was just out in Santa Monica near where Mike lives, and I was at one of our properties. And the people who get the most excited when I tell them what I do, when I'm like, thank you for the partnership, whatever, not the GMs, not the revenue managers, not a lot of people in the back, it's the servers. Because the server's the one who all of a sudden on a quiet day, I'll give you a great example of this, by the pool, all of a sudden people are now there buying food and beverage. I didn't mention that, but it's a huge part of what we do for the hotels, and they're getting more tips. So I was at a conference last week in Santa Monica. The conference, it was a growth equity firm. They basically bought out the entire hotels. Well, every single person in every one of those rooms is not at the pool, It's not the spa. Why? Because they're at sessions all day in the conference space. So all of a sudden those spaces are empty. So who's actually filling, who has the ability to fill up those spaces? It's actually us. And then who's actually happy about that? It's the servers who literally wouldn't get any tips on those days because even though the hotel sold out, there's kind of no other users there. So sorry to go on that little bit of a tangent, but it's just giving you a sense of how important it is across the entire hotel space. But again, we work at the corporate level and we also have the individual salespeople who are kind of knocking door by door.

Then I actually wanted to ask another question, and it was around repeat bookings. And they were asking, are there any specific levers that have worked well for increasing repeat bookings?

Yeah, it's funny. One that I'll tell you, it's like we just tested it. It's gone great. So I'll share it with you, which is kind of what we call a rapid rebook. So we know people use us locally and people use us when they're traveling. Traveling, often they have a good experience. They kind of book us rapidly again because it might be on the same trip, right? So maybe you're still staying in the same home rental and you want to use it again. Things like that. So we really show people really quickly the ability, hey, like you just booked something. You haven't even necessarily experienced it yet, but do you want to like, you know, book again right now? Because maybe inventory is going to be lower if you wait. Maybe we can, you know, do a little bit of a coupon on the second one. Maybe it's just more convenient to kind of do it all at once. So we just ran that test 2 weeks ago and it went great. So we're rolling it out. So you guys know this before our users do.

Hey, Greg, I know you raised your hand earlier. Do you want to jump on here?

Michael, very nice to meet you. I'm kind of building a competitor to OpenTable, but powered by video. So kind of like a TikTok meets OpenTable type of search. In my space, there are a lot of incumbents and almost all of the inventory is owned currently. My guess is you probably didn't have that problem to begin with, but how do you think about owned inventory versus brand new inventory? And like, how do you compete on each side?

I will just say one thing, you know, Greg, thinking about tackling in that space, There, as you're seeing, there's a ton of movement in that space right now, right? Like, and I actually think that's a great thing for you between obviously OpenTable getting a lot more aggressive and Resy and the reservation, the third-party marketplace. I just pitched on one actually recently, a new one that is coming out there. I just think, and you're seeing though, that people are willing to make the move for the right economics on the partner side, for the right technology, for whatever it might be. And so that's a great example though. I think this industry where you would've think, oh, well, you know, maybe the restaurants are locked up, they're either on OpenTable or Resy or what, You're just seeing a ton of movement in that space and it's kind of like the golden era for that. So I actually think there's a— and especially think about using video and other things. So kind of just fun marketplace environment can be helpful daily. I've done some stuff in restaurant tech as well. So I do think you're pointing out something as well around where there was existing inventory or supply versus creating it new. We have a little bit of both sides of that actually at ResortPass, and we do really make an intentional decision of thinking about it. So when I'm thinking about all the decisions I'm making in my business, I'm very much thinking like, is that new inventory? And kind of what are like the motions that go along with that? How's the pricing that goes along with that? How I think about marketing it versus where there might be, that inventory might exist prior to us. And so therefore there might be a direct channel to book it or there might be some other way of accessing it. And we do kind of have slightly different playbooks between the two of them. But I think one thing that's important, and you're already getting at it with maybe the video element, There's still value you can add, a lot of value you can add as a marketplace, even if the inventory was there. Most marketplaces are not creating brand new inventory, right? OpenTable, even on day one, they didn't create new inventory in the sense that there was those tables at the restaurant. They just put it online. So I think there's a lot of other value. And again, I think video's a great example of that. I mean, the UI of the restaurant tech industry basically hasn't changed since OpenTable came out, right? I mean, it's just like a list of restaurants. And if you're in like a new market, I don't even know where to start. So I like the approach for what it's worth. But yeah, I think that's right. It's like delineate between the existing versus, you know, new.

Hey, Molly, sorry you raised your hand. Do you want to jump on? We'll try to get in on one last question.

Yeah. I'm curious how you think about competing with the provider themselves sort of against their own book of business. So I see a lot of hotels sort of starting to offer this as a resource kind of post your entrance into the market. How much are you sort of playing ball with them versus trying to win their business, bidding on their own, you know, your provider's own terms, that sort of thing?

I think that we have gotten hotels excited about it. We often power a lot of some of that business as well in terms of our software. We are the software often for that direct business as well. But I think a larger point there is that hotels' core business is filling room 312 with someone who's traveling. Our core business is other services of the hotel, often with locals. It's a different user. It's a different propensity to spend. It's a different way to market. Like everything about it, it's different systems. Like everything about it is different. And that core way a hotel's going to make money, I want to be clear about this, is still the rooms. We are going to be a secondary revenue stream. Now, the industry is $1.5 trillion, so I don't mind being a secondary revenue stream. That could still be a very big number. But I think it's an important point that everything about what we do is different. Even the guest itself, when someone comes to a hotel to check in, they have a different flow, right? Because they're obviously not getting a room. They might get a key card, but they have different access privileges. So we're really creating this whole different thing. And I say that because I think hotels, maybe you see it a little bit more on hotels' websites, to your point, but at its core, it's still so secondary in their importance. And that's kind of why they really are comfortable with us, not only comfortable with us, but are so supportive of us being often quote unquote their direct channel because it's not their core piece of their business, but they love it because by the way, our revenue is so high gross margin for them, right? Putting the 50th person by the pool, the 20th person in the fitness center, person at the spa, even a room just for the day. That gross margin on that is, I mean, there's basically no variable cost plus the F&B. So it's so accretive to revenue. Again, I'll go back to that example in Las Vegas, what free money, slot machine example, what free money am I going to get today? So not every marketplace is going to feel exactly like that, but think about how are you really creating fully incremental value? Again, that could be the core to Greg's question earlier. It could be still the core inventory, But you're still appealing to a different guest, right? I think just to draw one last analogy on the restaurant side, I think a lot of that 95% of restaurants that have plenty of excess capacity, there's amazing, great restaurants there. They just maybe don't have the buzz or they don't have some celebrity chef or they didn't spend as much on their build-out or the Instagram crowd doesn't hang out.

I don't know.

The actual food quality, like, can you have a great experience? Yeah. And so I would be thinking a lot about how do you light up that and how do you create demand for that? I think the video idea, again, Greg, is a great idea. So I don't know, I just think a lot about that rather than just intermediating existing user behavior and just becoming something in between, right? The guest is going to come here and they're going to go here and you're just putting yourself in there. That's not as good of a marketplace as it's creating a whole new value or a whole new guest, et cetera.

Awesome. Well, that's a great last question and way to wrap things up. So I know we're almost out of time, but huge thanks for taking the time to join us today for the group chat and sharing all of your awesome marketplace experience about ResortPass and helping answer some of the questions that we had during the group Q&A. And I wanted to ask my usual kind of closing question, which is that if you could go right back to before you joined ClassPass and enter the world of marketplaces, what would you tell yourself about marketplaces specifically?

I don't think I ever would've known in advance how fun they are. And I want to be clear when I say that, because it sounds maybe annoying to say to some founders. When I say fun, like, that's— they're the most amount of challenges, right? But that is like ultimately what makes it fun. You know, if I think about a straight SaaS company, straight D2C brand, you know, stuff I've dabbled in, I just think the challenge is what makes it fun. We dealt with something just a couple weeks ago. It was out of nowhere a thing. And I remember I messaged my exec team after, in the moment it was like, ah, right? But after I'm like, but isn't this what makes it fun? You just have to react and figure the things out. So yeah, anyway, just enjoy the journey though, because no one's going to force you to do that, especially if you're a founder or CEO. You just have to take that moment to be like, this is awesome. And so I try to do that way on my walk to work. And like I said, it feels good. Not every day is going to feel amazing. That's what I also say. I don't want to make it sound like every day is amazing, but it can feel amazing. And if you're doing something that feels that way some days, you're doing the right thing.

That's going to be super encouraging and a great kind of parting advice for us all here. And then last but not least, time for a quick plug. Where can we keep up with you and follow along?

I'm just michael@resortpass.com. Everything that I can be helpful with, happy to be helpful. Again, love marketplaces, as you can tell. I'll never do anything but. I'm done. My career is done. So if anyone tries to recruit me for anything else, I also want to do this one the rest of my life. So I've really been, it's just an incredible thing to work on something where you're adding value on both sides, build the beloved team. And so again, I'm not saying every day feels like that. I don't want to make it seem to be annoying, but it can feel like that. And get to something that feels that way. I don't know. That's my unsolicited advice. Or I guess it was solicited because you asked me the question.

I love it. So that's once again, really appreciate taking time to join us here today and paying it forward and sharing all of your experience here and helping supporting founders. And yeah, thanks everyone for joining. Great questions today.