The Rise of Easy Travel: How it Impacts Short-Term Rentals

Welcome back to the Short Term Riddle Riches podcast. I hope you're doing really well out there, wherever you are. I've been bouncing around for the last four weeks. I just got back from a nice little trip in Europe and I want to give you a couple of my insights. The main one being that it's just easier to travel than it's ever been, ever, ever. And easier travel means more travel for more people, which is good for your short term rentals. So stay tuned. I want to talk about the major reasons why it's easier than ever and how it's going to affect you and your short term rentals. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back. I'm glad you're here again. So I was sitting in a restaurant in Lisbon about four weeks ago, just flew across the pond, as they say. So went from South America over to Portugal and we got a recommendation from the hotel we were staying at. Yes, I was staying in a hotel. I don't always stay in short term rentals. I tend to stay in hotels usually when I'm either at a work conference or when I'm just staying somewhere for a couple days. And we were just stopping over in Lisbon before heading over to Poland, actually, where we spent a week. And it was an amazing, amazing time. But anywho, the person at the hotel, when we were checking in gave us a restaurant recommendation. So we showered up, we took an Uber and we headed over there. And when we got to the restaurant, the waiter was talking to us and he asked us, oh yeah, which hotel recommended you? And I just, I drew a blank. I had no idea really what hotel we're staying at. It got me thinking, gosh, it, it is just so much easier to travel now. You can literally go somewhere where you have no idea really where it is. But luckily for Uber or Google Maps, you get there just fine. And then you can totally forget where you need to go back to and be just fine. As long as you have your cell phone, right? So make sure you don't lose your cell phone. So I want to talk about really five ways why travel is just so much easier than it's ever been. And this is, this means that more people are going to travel, right? The less friction we have that keeps us from. The more chances are that we're actually going to do that thing, the more friction there is to pay for something. For example, if you've ever tried to pay for something online and maybe the website wasn't set up very well and you had to go through a whole bunch of steps and ask a whole bunch of things, the chances of you actually making it through that checkout cart are a lot less likely. Assuming it's not something that you needed then if all you had to do is click one button. So planning is way easier than it's ever been. Right? We do most of it these days on our cell phones. Yes. Most of the people booking our Airbnbs are doing that on their cell phones. And there are some differences. If you haven't looked at the mobile version of Airbnb, for example, lately, make sure you do. Our title, for example, the title that we have for our property shows less characters on the mobile version than it does on a desktop version. So something that we need to be aware of, we need to know how people are booking our short term rentals because that's going to help us tailor our listings a little better. But we'll save that another episode. With AI and everything coming down the line, this is just going to get even easier for us. In fact, a lot of this can just get lumped into one AI assistant travel concierge type process. And I know this is being worked on in a lot of places already so that you can go from booking your flight to booking your hotel to booking experiences all in one swoop. So that's coming, that's coming down the line. So we're doing most of this on our cell phones. It's easier than it's ever been. It literally only takes a couple minutes to book a trip now. And if you've been in the short term rental space for a while, I'm sure you've had your fair share of guests that only spent a couple minutes booking your property. And they didn't read all the instructions, they didn't look at all the photos, they didn't look at your.

Your notes or your guidebook. And I'm guilty of this too. When I'm in a rush or I don't have a whole lot of time or I really just want to get something done, I just book places. And sometimes they don't meet my expectations. But a lot of the times that's my fault, right? So a good trip always comes down to expectations. We talk about that a lot. And that is another episode in itself as well. So the number two reason why it's, it's easier to travel than it ever has been is it's easier to pay for things, right? Especially if we're talking internationally. So I was just abroad or I'm always abroad, I guess you could say. So I have cards that work internationally, they don't charge fees. I have a debit card from Charles Schwab for example, where I can withdraw money anywhere in the world and they refund my ATM fees. And now they have bank accounts like Wise, if you've heard of that, where you can actually store multiple currencies right on one debit card or one online account. And so paying for things is much, much easier. Most places are moving away from cash. I was out somewhere recently and I forgot my wallet and then I remembered, oh wow, I can pay with my watch. So there's more ways to pay than ever before. Now we have the contact contactless payments. And so that part has gotten way easier. We don't need to exchange currency all the time. Although I do recommend if you're traveling internationally, you do a little research, see if it's country where they still accept more cash. I know down in Colombia here where I am right now, it's good to have some cash on. So what I recommend is when you fly into a new country, maybe just take out a little bit of cash at the atm. One quick tip, if it asks you to convert fees, let your bank do it and not the ATM because they charge you like crazy exchange rates like 13% or something like that. Paying for things is much easier. Most of it's done just with credit card from our mobile phones. Arriving to our travel destinations is easier than it's ever been before. We don't need to print out MapQuest instructions. I remember those days, actually. I remember in Germany a long, long time ago when I was backpacking around. I. I've traveled a lot too. For those of you that haven't listened to the podcast, I've probably been around 80 countries, hundreds of cities, a lot of them I've gone back to multiple times. I love traveling, that's why I got into real estate. But it keeps me sharp. It helps manage my properties better because I'll what every single time I stay in a short term rental? Almost every time. I should say I'm always learning something or I'm at least thinking of something new in a new way that I didn't think about before. So it keeps me sharp. I like to think it keeps me ahead of the curve. If you haven't stayed in your own property, I know if you've got a whole bunch of properties, that's not super easy to do, or maybe it's not something you want to do, but I highly, highly suggest it, or I highly suggest you have someone stay in your property for you because there's always things that you're going to pick up. There's always a couple little things that our guests aren't telling us that would actually improve our property. So I went on a little bit of a tangent there. But arriving to the property or the hotel or destination, wherever, going now is so much easier because we just use Uber or we use Lyft or a lot of foreign countries have other services like Uber or Lyft. You can just Google real quick and you know, or ask ChatGPT, what's the Uber of Albania, for example, we were just in Albania recently. So arriving to a destination is much, much easier than it's ever been before. When it comes to our short term rentals, of course, we always want to make sure we have a picture of our entry door or picture of our building or actual property so that when our guests are arriving, they don't know our property. Right. They're seeing it for the first time. You want them to be able to recognize it so they don't feel lost. Staying connected is easier than it's ever been before. So this is my fourth point here. I didn't even need to change my SIM card. So I actually have multiple numbers. I have a US number, Colombian number, Brazilian number, and you know what? I could use any of them anywhere pretty much in the whole world without even changing my SIM card. In the US I use a service called Google Fi. It's actually what I use most of the time. My cell phone does allow me to have two SIM cards. Now my Google Fi happens to be a digital SIM card though. You can arrive to a country you've never been to before and when you're getting off the plane, a lot of times you'll see that there's some sort of digital cell phone service where you can maybe just get it for a couple weeks. So what is the moral of the story here is we don't want to lose our cell phones. Right? That is, that, that, that could be challenging. That can be really challenging. For a while I was carrying around a second cell phone. I just leave it in my luggage in case something happened. I remember the days when I didn't have cell service showing up to these places. This wasn't that long ago, right? Or I had used Skype or get Internet to make a phone call long, long distance, overseas or whatever it happened to Be this part is just so much easier now. We can pretty much go anywhere without having to change our phone numbers, do anything. And it's also very affordable. So check out Google Fi. If you haven't used it before, it works in the whole country. Works in the whole world. Pret. When you arrive to a new country, it sends you a little message and says, we've got you covered. Internet's also becoming way more available than it ever used to be. I have a friend that has some land outside of Rio de Janeiro down in Brazil. There is no building structure or anything like that there. But he has Internet. Yep, he has Internet from Starlink, that's Elon Musk's company that's come up and about and I hear really good things. I also have another friend here in Colombia that's doing a development outside of Medellin where I am currently. And it's not hooked into fiber optic or anything like that. And his Starlink just arrived. So we have Internet access pretty much wherever we need to be these days as well. Okay, so to kind of wrap things up here, it's easier to plan our trips than it's ever been before. It's easier to pay for them or it's easier to pay for our experiences and our travels in general. Especially if we're traveling international. It's easier to arrive than it's ever been before because we have all these services like Uber, Uber and Lyft. It's easier to stay connected because we can get a SIM card for our cell phone that works in the whole world or we have Internet access pretty much wherever we go these days. And the fifth thing I want to mention here is that it's easier to travel with different use cases. So what do I mean by that? We can travel as a group now and we don't have to find five hotel rooms. We can of course, dun dun dun, stay in a short term rental or stay in an Airbnb. So fortunately my brother and sister in law were able to meet up with us out in Europe and we booked a few Airbnbs. The accommodations worked perfectly. They have kitchens, they were bigger, lots of space, and also in very good areas. I've got a couple more podcasts. I'm gonna come out with some more insights that I learned over these last four weeks. But we have more options now, so traveling is just easier than it's ever been before. We also have people that just don't want to live as permanently as they did before. Gone are the days when we have a 30 year career. Right. And I would say that, you know, if we have kids, that is different. But a lot of us are waiting to have kids. Millennials, for example, Gen Z, they're valuing experiences. They don't want to be tied down to long term leases. And so for those of them that can and work remotely these days, they're traveling more. And this is not going to stop. Right. We know that people are living in short term rentals now. It's easier to travel and work abroad than it's ever been before. And so that makes me bullish on short term rentals. Of course, it comes down to us knowing who's going to be staying in our property. Are we going to have international guests? We need to know that. We need to know exactly who our guest avatar is so we can set up our property perfectly for that guest, create an incredible experience for them, get incredible reviews, and just keep the cycle running. Right. So I want to thank you for tuning in again. I hope you've had some great travels recently or maybe you have some coming up. But until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

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