Unlock Direct Bookings for Your Airbnb with StayFi CEO Arthur Colker

Well, welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I'm really excited to have a special guest on today. He's the CEO and founder of what I believe is probably the best way to get direct bookings and the best way to build an email list for our short term rentals. And that is Arthur Kolker. Welcome to the show, Arthur.

Thanks, Tim, for having me.

So you founded or you're the CEO of StayFi, and we've talked about this on the show. So I think most of our audience is at least familiar. They've heard the name Stay Fi before. But I'm really excited to dig into the specifics with you today because it's powerful. You guys jam packed it, I guess. Before we do that though, can you give us just a real quick background and maybe where you started? Stay.

Yeah. So I actually found the short term rental industry kind of accidentally. Prior to StayFi, I managed and ran a marketing agency primarily focused on digital marketing. And we had a variety of types of clients from B2B art sales to D2C fashion brands. And one of our customers happened to be a short term rental company called Heirloom, which actually owns and operates vacation rentals with investors. So kind of a different model for somebody that has 200 plus properties in their portfolio. And when they hired me, they were completely depended on Airbnb and vrbo and they wanted us to develop a independent brand and develop a marketing strategy to start driving direct bookings. And as a marketer working with a brand, the first thing we always want to look at is what customer data do you have? Because in this industry in particular, those are the folks who it's going to be easiest to convince to book directly with you. Just because most consumers are used to booking through an OTA like Airbnb or vrbo and maybe they don't yet have the trust to book with a short term rental brand because there aren't that many that are well known. And they said, well, in fact, we have almost no guest data because Airbnb and VRBO don't share that data with us and we don't have the rights to use it even if they did. So we really approached them with let's first find a way to seamlessly collect data from every guest that stays with you. Also, one unique aspect in this industry is unlike hotels, you can have many, many guests staying in a property. And so there's a lot of value in the non booking guests as well. And we looked at a ton of different ways to do this. We kind of Settled on, hey, wouldn't it be nice to put in a system like you see at a Starbucks or a hotel or an airport where when the guest logs into the WI Fi, they have to provide their information because we know that's part of the journey every guest will go on is joining the WI fi, as opposed to some other techniques that require the guest to go do something that isn't the natural part of the stay, like filling out a form or you know, requesting them to do this extra activity, use some guest guidebook or tablet. That's just not the natural part of what every guest is going to go do during the stay. And initially we looked at just purchasing one of these systems from the companies that do it at coffee shops. Right. Because there's a lot of great companies out there that work in other verticals. But it turned out their solutions didn't really work in the short term rental industry, whether from a pricing perspective, capabilities, hardware. So I thought, hey, this is interesting niche to explore more. We could probably build a very basic product for Heirloom that does what we need. And from there it really just snowballed. Snowballed as we discovered that Heirloom's problem was a problem that almost all short term rental operators face in building a direct booking brand. And so we developed a product that we could start selling to other short term rental companies and then it just grew from there and we kept adding more and more features that our customers were asking for.

Yeah, no, fantastic idea. You know, you definitely filled that need for a lot of us. And like you said, it's, it's pretty seamless. I mean someone checks in your property, really the first thing that they do most of the time is connect to the wifi. And if that property happens to be a seven bedroom home and there's 24 guests there, then you're probably going to get 24 emails most of the time.

Right.

And so the list creation can happen really quickly.

Yes, it's, it's crazy because we have customers that manage 3, 4, 500 homes and over the course of using Statefi, they have lists of hundreds of thousands of guests, which is insane. And their, you know, a single email message can drive hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue from one email newsletter. So the way that it can scale, especially for large companies is just insane. But it really, we find it works for companies at all stages. So we were just working with somebody with one listing who only had Airbnb and had 70% occupancy approximately. And for her to use Stayfi even To get just one incremental booking a year will pay for StayFi, our subscription service, with a great return on investment. And she now sees a few bookings come in every few months from repeat guests. So just the ability to first capture that information. And then, of course, now we have all the tools you need to then follow up with guests to actually market your company. You'll see. Obviously, it starts out slower because you're starting to build that list, but the effects really magnify once, you know, have hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of guests in your database that you can go after and market your properties or other services that you offer, which is a whole other area we could dive into as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's super valuable, you know, and it also decreases our reliance on these OTAs. Right. I did a episode, I don't know, it's probably been a few years ago now, when I had a lot of my personal portfolio under one Airbnb account. And we had some housekeepers messaging us, like, hey, how come the properties aren't showing up? And I'd log in, I'm like, they're showing up. To me, everything looks fine. And then we had more housekeepers messaging us. I'm like, okay, there's something weird going on here. And the calendar was also drying up a little bit. And then we found out that we had missed a support email somewhere in the hundreds of emails that Airbnb sends us. And they took our listings down, but they didn't notify us on the calendar. And so, you know, we lost thousands of dollars that week, probably. And so ever since that day, we're like, okay, we're now on multiple Airbnb accounts, we're on multiple channels, but the real goal is to get these bookings coming directly. And so you guys at StayFi, I mean, you're just making that easier for us, for sure.

Yeah. And I'd say the. The great news is, is a lot of the other players in the industry are also on the direct booking bandwagon, let's say, and are also making it easier for folks to have a direct booking website to accept direct bookings, because a lot of the hesitancy we see around folks who are used to maybe just using one or two channels is, you know, how can my bookings be protected? You know, how am I going to have damage waivers or insurance that covers a direct booking? How can I have a rental agreement? How do I process payments? And just about every property management software out there, which is definitely the first software any operator is going to use if they're professionalizing. They all offer a direct booking website and many now offer bundled in services that you can opt in for. So an example would be Hospitable, which is a pms. They have like a basic direct booking product, but they have an advanced one that bundles in damage, waiver contracts, insurance, everything so that your direct bookings are as protected or even more protected than an OTA booking. Because that's the other side is right. Like we can help do marketing, but you also need a system to accept direct bookings in a safe and compliant manner. And so it's great to see that all the other tools in the industry have really aligned and are putting focus on this area so that, you know, everything can work together harmoniously so that you can safely accept direct bookings and have all the tools you need to go out and also market to your guests, which we can also talk about those strategies. Because I think people also get intimidated there in terms of I've never done marketing, I don't know how to do emails. Right. It's actually, I say there's a lot of ways to do it that don't require any real marketing expertise on the operator side to start driving those direct bookings as well.

Yeah, great points there. I mean, when, when I first got started with short term rentals, creating your own direct booking website was like, you know, you had to be a programmer or something, you know, it was quite difficult. And now like you said, you know, you can sign up with Hospitable or you can hang up with pretty much any of the major property management platforms now and boom, you click a button, you got direct booking website. But as you mentioned, sometimes the marketing becomes a little intimidating. You know, what do I do with these emails, how do I contact people regularly and do I have to go in all the time and do that? And you guys have some great features to help assist with that. You want to touch on that for a sec?

Yeah. So in StayFi we have our own email and text marketing tools, but we also integrate with just about every other third party tool out there. So if you just want to use this for email collection, you can send data to a tool that you maybe already use or love using. Like a mailchimp is definitely the most common, but there's 20 or 30 we can integrate with and integrate with Zapier, which can send data just about anywhere you'd like, you could imagine. But then of course, we have our own tools. One great thing about our email tool is that in addition to the data we source from the WI Fi. We also integrate with most pro property management software, such that if you have any real emails in those tools, we also pull them in. So if you've been getting emails another way and it's in your pms, who also will ingest that data? So you have all the emails in your universe coming into one tool automatically, and you can do the same thing, for instance, with forms on your website. Then once the data is there, we have some guides around what to do. The the first type of email we always recommend people set up is an automated email or emails or sometimes called a drip campaign, where whenever you collect an email, whether through the WI Fi or your website or your pms, you can then trigger one or a series of emails automatically. And why that's great, especially if you're not that proficient on email marketing or you don't have the time to do it, is that you can set up emails one time that you know will get sent over a course of a period of time. So one example would be a WI Fi welcome series. So in Stay Fi, we collect the email from the WI Fi, then it triggers an email that you write in StayFi that can, you know, introduce your brand. Especially if you have a lot of Airbnb bookings, they probably don't know that you exist separately from Airbnb and they think of you as an Airbnb. You can write an email introducing yourself, you explain, you know, give them some recommendations, maybe provide a link to a guidebook about this property if you have that, and then let them know you're available to help them in these ways. And then in seven or ten days you could send another email saying, hey, hope you enjoyed your stay. Just an FYI, if you want to stay here again or at one of our other properties, you can reply to me or go to our website and then you will get a better rate than booking through a third party website like Airbnb at. And then you can send an email in 30 days and then in nine months you could send an email saying, hey, you stay with us nine months if you want to come back next year. Because we have so many operators that operate in these like very like people travel every year to this destination type of that again. Rebooking email for next year is one where we see a ton of conversion. And then when it comes to the style and design of these emails, we have a ton of templates in our tool. But if you're a little hesitant around design, plain text emails are your friend, especially at A smaller scale because you can make those emails appear as if they're coming from your email inbox. And then people will also naturally reply to those. So you can set up a simple plain text email with that information that you just write out or have ChatGPT write for you, for instance, and then guests will just naturally respond to that. And those have high open rates and engagement rates. So you don't even need to design a templated email or what you think of as an email newsletter to have success with emails, because you can also send plain text emails and not even worry about design. And that's where I think some people don't realize, you know, you don't need that design component to have success with email marketing in our industry because a lot of guests actually prefer that one to one relationship with the operator that we kind of facilitate or make it look like you're sending this email spontaneously as opposed to getting an email maybe from what makes sense when you're a larger brand with more marketing resources, where it then looks more like a fancy templated email you would be more accustomed to getting from a hotel or an E commerce brand.

Right? Yeah, some excellent points there. I think one takeaway here is that like people still open their emails, right? I mean, I guess our physical mail is becoming less and less. Like I don't even have, I have a physical mailbox, but it's virtual like in another country, you know, and it gets scanned anyways. But I definitely open my email and so it still is an effective approach. And, and I, I don't see that really changing that much, do you?

No, definitely not in the near to medium term, you know, and we see the, I call them transactional or kind of emails triggered by, let's say a wi fi login. Those can still get. We see open rates of 50, 60, 70% because when it's at that point in time where there's an activity the guest is doing that's associated with the email that drives very high engagement rates. And then a newsletter will kind of be in the 20, 30% open rate range, which is very typical for this industry. And we see that across all of our customers. And it has, hasn't really changed. You know, an email is still by marketing standards considered the highest ROI channel across most industries. Because unlike Google Ads or Facebook ads, where you have to pay every time you serve an impression with an email tool, once you collect the email, you can email them really as much as you'd like within some parameters. And like the marginal cost to send an email is very low because like all other tools, we just charge based on how many contacts you have. So like, the cost to send this email to a guest or to get that impression is much, much lower than with, you know, doing digital marketing where you have to pay for each impression. So the ROI through email is still rated number one for all channels. And it's where we see our customers drive the bulk of their direct bookings. Because emails also has this billboarding effect. Right. So even though they guests may not click through the email to make the booking, because you've emailed them consistently every month, they, your brand is top of mind when they want to book their next day. And that's really the most important thing is because most people are not in market to purchase a trip to your destination most of the time it's actually very rare that they're like in the mood to book a trip to Orlando. Right. That may only happen once a year. But the key thing is that when the guest is ready to go do that, they need to remember your brand so that they also check your website in addition to going to the OTAs, because they're probably going to do comparison searching. And that's where it's. If you've been consistently messaging the guests, letting them then know that booking direct is probably going to be less expensive, they definitely will come to your website and do that search. Now, whether you have inventory and can service them at the dates that they want, that's like a different question. But at least you know, if you've been consistently emailing, they most likely will come to check your availability and rates for the dates they're interested in. And that's what we really want to achieve with email is just make sure that brand awareness is there when they're ready to start researching their next trip.

For sure. For sure. Yeah. It's an easy way to stay in touch. And it's also easy for us as owners or property managers to offer the lowest prices on our direct booking website. Right. We don't have, you know, depending on what commission model you have with Airbnb or booking.com I mean these fees can add up to 15 +% between the guest and, and the owner or the property manager. And so, you know, like with my personal portfolio, we, we always have the lowest prices for the guests on our direct booking website, but we still make more. Right. And the guest pays less. So it's, it's a win win. And there's also a lot of value just in, in the list. You know, being able to send an email off, like you said, and, and have less reliance on, on the OTAs and stuff like that. And then, you know, if someone's building a portfolio, if they ever want to sell their properties in the future, they've got an email list where that's not going to go away. It's something that we actually own. I've, I've heard a lot of content creators, you know, recently kind of saying like, hey, we can, we can work with these algorithms and do everything we can, and then one day they can just change the algorithms. Airbnb can just change the algorithm. Right, but they can't do that if, I mean, they can't just take our email lists away.

Right? Yeah. I think you bring up a really good point, which is, you know, the, the list of guests is a really valuable asset for a few reasons. One, if you ever want to sell your business, right, how your business is going to be valued is what revpar are you achieving, right? So if, if the, if the list goes with the business, right, if you compare yourself to your competitor and you have a massive email list that you're driving bookings from, your occupancy rate will be higher than folks that are just using OTAs. So you will have something real intangible to sell to a potential acquirer because you have this list of loyal guests that stay with you on a regular basis and want to come back with you and book direct and then you're actually purchasing your brand. In addition to just the idea of like I'm push purchasing a bunch of homeowner contracts, right? The other side is helping you acquire more properties for your portfolio. Obviously, if you have a robust direct booking business, you're going to be able to achieve better results for owners if you are a property manager by, you know, getting more bookings for their homes. And if you go to a new owner and say, hey, in addition to listing your properties on all the channels, which of course everyone else is doing, you can also have the advantage of having this proprietary list that no one else has of guests that, you know, visit this particular destination and then you can market their property to those guests. So it's a great thing. Stay fi and the related marketing efforts are things we see a lot of people build into their pitch to owners to help them with property acquisition. And then the other thing is if you also do real estate, which a lot of our short term rental operator customers do, guests are also great potential leads for home purchasers who then will also want their properties managed. So we do see a lot of folks in both email marketing and, and some of our other guest engagement tools. When the guests log on to the WI Fi market, you know, interested in purchasing a home? Have you thought about buying a home in this area? Because people that travel frequently to those destinations are often the people that, if they can, will end up purchasing a second home. And so in that way your list also becomes a lead source for your real estate business.

Mm, yeah, great point, great point. Yeah, there's a lot of, you know, in a nutshell, it's to get more emails, right. Get more direct bookings, but you guys have a, there's like a lot of other value components there. And you guys also have the ability, will you create a easy way for someone to create a splash page? Right. That's the page the guest is going to see when they log in for the first time. But then you have some ways to sort of sell some commissionable things on top of that. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yep. So the WI Fi login process is two steps. The first step is the guest joins. They see the captive portal is what we call it sometimes called a splash page where they enter in their name, email, phone number, they have a, you know, you can customize the checkbox to get opt in and have guests agree to other terms if you'd like. And then after that it takes them to a page we call the homepage. If you ever use linktree, it's a very similar type of product where you can basically just have a bunch of buttons that will advertise different things to the guest. So some typical things that are advertised on that page would be a guidebook, a link to your website, a link to book this property again. But then we also have two partners that are integrated and are free to sign up for. One's called the Host Co and the other is called Viator. The Host Co is essentially a free store for your listing where you can sell both your own goods and services as well as they have a bunch of third party services that they can sell and you get a commission from. Obviously the majority of the money is made through selling your own services. The most popular being early check in and late checkout are the two biggest moneymakers we see. People also offer things like midstay cleans, stay extensions, pool heating, and then physical items can be things like firewood, amenity kits, things like that. What's great about this homepage where you have all these listings is that it's a website or stat like it's a page that you can also Link to outside of the WI Fi experience. Experience. So that's when it comes like early check in. Obviously if they are logging into the WI Fi, it's a little late to buy early check in. But you can also send the home page through your property management software's automated messaging and say like, hey, you know, if you'd like to purchase early check in, you can do that here. And then all of those purchases through the host co are request based. So you'll get a request and we'll say like so and so wants to purchase early check in for this purchase property and then you can approve or deny it. And if you approve it, it will go ahead and charge their credit card and then you typically it could be like 30, 40, $50 to sell that service. The other partner is called Viator. They're the, they're owned by TripAdvisor. They're the largest tour and activity marketplace in the world. And we sign you up for their affiliate program where you will earn an 8% commission from any tours or activities that you recommend or sell through that platform. Platform. And so you can feature those in the homepage and of course obviously again sending them in advance of the stay. The homepage will also give guests some ideas about things that you love and want to recommend. And then if guests click on those links and book within 30 days, you get that 8% commission for anything through Viator. So both of those we see, you know, it definitely varies by how well people market them, but people are making anywhere between, you know, 30 and $200 a month per property just through the upsell pieces, especially if they market their own services aggressively. And that would be things like early check in, late checkout and things like that. Because that's where you can make revenue.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Constantly adding new features and changes. And another thing that came to mind is another sort of side benefit. Let's say, you know, we have a home that sleeps 10 people and you have 20 people's emails come in when the guest checks in. Then you, you know that there's too many people staying at that property, don't you? And so in sort of a roundabout way, you can also use it as a way to ensure that, you know, there's not too many guests at your property.

Yeah, so we have a few different types. We have two main Wi Fi alerting features. So in StateFi we have occupancy alerting, which you just talked about. So we actually, if you connect StayFi with your property management software, the occupancy alerting even becomes dynamic. So we actually look at your current reservation and we'll let you know if there's more guests there than have booked. And we also don't do based on devices. So if you log on to stay fi or to the Internet with your phone and your computer, we still only count you as one unique guest. So we do our best to dedupe devices and then let property managers or owners know when there's more guests than our book there, you can also have it be static. So if you only really care if it's over some threshold, you can also set it up that way. The other, of course, obviously, is we do WI FI outage. Alerting, alerting. And we do both going offline and online because there's a lot of now that we see the status of Internet across tens of thousands of properties, mostly in the U.S. but all we have properties all around the world. It's very common, you know, for Internet to go out for 5 minutes, 7 minutes. So we have some tools where you can say, hey, alert me if it's more than 30 minutes. And then when it goes back online and that way you can know, you know, before guests even arrive what the status of the Internet is so you can address whatever that issue is. You know, most commonly, guests like to unplug things. So they may have unplugged the Internet. You may just need to power cycle the modem router. Or there could be, in the case we see some property managers where they have 10 properties in an area and you literally see the Internet go off and all of them at the same time. So it's pretty easy to tell. It's like, okay, this is an Internet service provider outage, or there's a power outage, because Internet is going offline across properties all at the same time. So you just have a lot more ability to manage the Internet across properties by having all of the status in one dashboard.

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, you guys designed a WI fi system marketing system specifically for one industry, right? And so I'm sure when you first started with the company, you didn't have all the features you have today, right?

No, definitely not. The first version of StayFi was just, you know, there wasn't even a user interface. It was just you told us what you wanted your captive portal to look like, and then we would send the data to mailchimp. Right. So it's definitely evolved a lot. And we have some really cool things coming over the course of this year, which I'm super excited about especially on the marketing front, kind of new tools to make marketing even easier. And some interesting new.

Integrations on WI fi that will let us service more types of properties and make it easier to set up stay fi depending on what type of Internet equipment that you have already.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'm excited to see the changes and you guys were really kind to create a coupon code for all of our listeners. And so for anyone listening out there, if you're catching us on YouTube, you can head to stayfi.com forward/stritches and you can use the coupon code Riches. When you sign up, you get three months at 50 off. So I appreciate you guys doing that. Arthur, again, that's stayfi.com forward/strrict. So yeah, I guess in a nutshell, I mean, we're using this with my properties. It's super easy to use. You basically, you know, they're great routers too. They have a good reach. You basically plug them in, you can create this splash page, you can get your list building. The marketing can kind of be handled for you on the back end. You can add in some of these other sort of cool features. Is there anything else you want to want to add?

Yeah, I mean it kind of goes on and on, the different possibilities. So if somebody wants more information or wants to know what they need for their properties. If you go to stayfi.com to our demo page, you can book a one on one demo with one of our reps who will give you a personalized demo of the platform, walk you through all the different features and answer your questions on the best way to get it set up. So if you have questions or just want to learn more, that's really the best way to do it. And that way you can see everything in the platform firsthand and get a sense for how it all works.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks, Arthur. I got one more question for you before we wrap up here. And that is the name of our podcast is Short Term Rental Riches. A lot of times when people hear the word riches, they sort of associate it with financial riches. But we know that there's a lot more meaning to it than just the finance side of it. Is there something in your life or some sort of habit or something that you've picked up recently that's enriched your life in a non financial way?

Oh, definitely, I would say. I actually hired recently a business coach.

Which I think has just added a lot of value to give me because I'm a solo founder, which I think can be very challenging. You know, most People in least software have a co founder, someone to bounce ideas off of. But as a solo founder, I reached out to a bunch of friends, interviewed some different coaches, and it's nice to have that outside perspective of someone who's worked with a lot of different CEOs or founders, especially as you grow a business, because I, you know, in previous jobs I'd only managed two or three people and now we have a team of almost 20. So just making sure that I'm being a good manager and giving people the right opportunities and structures to excel in this environment and make them happy to be a part of this organization is just really important to me and how we establish that culture. And so hiring that type of help, who's kind of both a therapist and coach, I would say has just added a lot of value to my life and made it a lot clearer about, you know, what we're focused on here at State Fight.

Yeah, that's, that's a great tip. I mean, there's a reason why the best athletes in the world still have coaches, right? And the biggest businesses have, have coaches. And so that's, that's excellent advice. And to all of you out there, you know, we talk about going to conferences a lot. I'm sure you will see Arthur and Stefi at, at, you know, your next short term rental conference. So get out there. It's worth spending a little bit of money to, to meet people and to hire coaches because it can just help out in so many ways. So thanks a bunch, Arthur, for coming on. Really appreciate having you on and great insight. It's a great tool. Again, anyone out there, you guys can head to stayfi.com forward/strrict and Arthur and their team put together a discount for you for the first three months. And so looking forward to seeing additional stuff that you guys add on in the future. I feel like it's kind of just getting started with amazing, amazing product. So thanks, Arthur.

Thanks so much for having me.

Until next time. I've dedicated years figuring out how to manage my personal portfolio remotely. And it wasn't always easy and it took a long time. But now my amazing team can professionally manage my properties without me. And good news, our team can also manage yours. Let us save you the stress and headaches and some money by offering you an industry low fee. To find out more about partnering with us, head to Strom, hit the property management button, answer a couple quick questions, and meet with me personally. That's strict. Rest easy knowing that with my team, your properties will be in excellent hands.