Heads In Beds Show - Is "Channel Management" The Same Thing As Marketing Your Vacation Rental Biz?

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul discuss the Guesty purchase of Rentals United along with the conceptual approach of using channel managers as a way to get more bookings. Then they ask a question - is this marketing or something else? Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Guesty acquires Rentals United, expanding market leadership🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Paul Manzi, good afternoon. How's it going? I am doing fantastic, Conrad. How are you doing today? Yeah, pretty good. Busy day here on my side of things. But you know what? A busy day. There used to be a time in my career when I first started, I'm thinking back to 2016, when I would open my laptop, I would do the things that I said I was going to do that day, and then I had nothing

to do. And it was like 11.42am So, uh, if you ever think about that, sometimes if you hopped in a time machine or something or showed your current self to your past self, what he would think of you. And I feel like past self would be like, why are you complaining, man? You got plenty of work to do. So get back to it. It's a, that is, I, I often think about, I mean, it just, just again, the progression of the career path and all that stuff. And I, yeah, just sitting back and writing a few listings a day. Those were some good times. And when I look back romantically, well, we'll say I'm romanticizing those times a little bit.

But yeah, it's a fun time. I think this is always a fun time to be in the hospitality space because people are getting excited like this is this is you know for those beach markets which is still a large portion of who we work with here um i think across the space it is this is this is the fun time this is the go time this is all that work that we did for the first four months of the year lead up to the next four months and then we get to do it all over again when we get after after that biggie season coming through so it is i i have nothing to complain about when we're when we're busy this time of year yeah for sure it could be a lot worse you're right it's kind of like there's a showtime

element it's like it's showtime now like you can sit here and say whatever you want to say but at this point we've got to get eyeballs and we got to get heads and beds which is actually funny at the title of this podcast people may not understand have we ever explained that by the way really quickly like heads like people use that term i feel like negatively sometimes but there's like a real viable component so like we talk about marketing heads and beds people again if you try to frame that negatively maybe you just don't understand the context of it because you got to put heads and beds like that's what the business is there is no business without some heads and beds like that's ultimately what we're all after here so well and i mean it is and i broke it down one day in a in a post that's saying the heads are

the guests the beds are the homes so it is i mean we're really approaching this we've named it in a way you've named it in a way that you've covered both both of the owner side and the guest side so bravo sir kudos yeah no no it's just i guess i understand why people use it in a negative context at times because yeah there's people who only focus on that, right? They don't focus on the experience that, you know, that negative sort of connotation of like, oh, they're just putting heads in beds. But I see it as like, that's the business. Like, that's ultimately what this is. We'll survive very long if you're not putting heads in beds, in my experience. So yeah, I'll get well, let's see. So let's try to pivot that into some things that help you get heads in beds, or at least have for

a long time is this idea of channel distribution. So maybe I could go back a little bit, hopping in that time machine I'm referencing earlier. And I'm thinking back to like 2014, 15, 16, that timeframe when I was getting started in this space and I kind of started to understand it. And it was very common that you would have a PMS and then you would have a completely separate channel manager. And those two functions were related. Obviously one would read off the other and see what availability was out there. And then the quote unquote channel manager would then put your listings out into other places.

And the PMS didn't do a ton of integration. The PMS was more of a central housing piece for what your calendar availability looked like. And then you would have these other tools built into place. That's changed a lot. So the reason that this kind of triggered today as of this date that we're recording, obviously these typically get released a little bit later,

but it was just publicly announced that Rentals United sold to Guesty. And that feels like one of those kind of original or like longstanding or large channel managers that probably I would assume in a, you know, over some period of time will eventually get kind of shuttered and folded into Guesty. That would be my assumption. I've not talked with anybody over there. I don't have any inside info, but that's my assumption. So it feels like, is this kind of the end of the era of channel management and is now channel management just basically a function within the PMS? So what's kind of your reaction to that? And then we can talk about some of the specifics. It's a valid question right now is really who controls those levers? Is it the property

manager? Is it the property management system? Who's actually calling those shots? And I think when you kind of do that deeper dive, and admittedly, I haven't done a deeper dive on Rentals United or any of the other channel managers that we're going to talk about today in a while, it's kind of interesting to see what they've become, what has been included, what kind of partnerships they've put together. And I think some make a lot of sense. I think some, you can tell that in some cases, it is a lot of the channel management that happened initially. We kind of inherited, as we did with a lot of stuff, from the hotel space, from the resort

space. So I wouldn't say we're fitting a square peg into a round hole by any means, but there's a lot of the distribution channels that you see still from some of these larger are going to be more focused on the hotel side or the booking.com, the hotels.com, stuff like that. While they are the largest marketplace and certainly you want to be there in front of those people, I think that there's something to be said for just that end user experience on those places versus other places that we look to drive people and within our marketing funnels there. So this is one of those things that I think one of the main components that we're looking at is the SEO side of things, which is your overall exposure. This is the paid

version of that overall exposure, just looking at the booking side. I mean, that's always kind of how I've seen it is you want that distribution as broadly as you want to. You want to pick the right channels that are going to bring the right return for you. But kind of how do you leverage where they have the SEO expertise or the traffic coming through at a low cost area where you can then drive those bookings? That's kind of always how I've looked at those channel managers is the reverse of the SEO, but not quite paid search, you know, kind of somewhere in there of, is it meta search? Is it the channel management? What does that actually look like there? So I think it's a great move for Guesty, like bottom line. I think that that's a bringing that type of ecosystem under a property management system. Yeah, now what does it do?

Where do they take it from here? And how do they leverage that to give a better experience to those end users of the PMS? That makes a lot of sense. I agree generally with what you're saying. And I think some of these lines do get a little blurry because there's also been some tools that started as like communication type tools

and then they backed into being more like PMS tools. So it's, you know, it gets a little more complicated, especially for like the, I'm mostly managing my properties on Airbnb. Airbnb is almost the PMS for a lot of people in our industry, right? The single property host, the two property host. It's like, well, if it's on Airbnb, that's my calendar. Like that shows you what's available and what's not. They might not really understand fully. And I think there actually is iCal sync, if memory serves correctly, between Verbo and Airbnb,

where you could just basically say, I don't need a PMS platform. Just look at this one. If it's booked here, block it. If it's booked here, block it, right? And there's some delay in that process, but that may do the job, so to speak, with respect to availability.

And so I don't know what's going to happen, to be honest with you, from here with Rentals United. Just the only example that I can refer to personally, I had some experience with this company. MyVR was purchased by Guesty. I was working with MyVR at the time on some of their advertising

and things like that. And I think a very good outcome for that team. And much of that team, I think moved over to Guesty at the time. But to my knowledge and understanding, it was always the plan from the beginning

that eventually MyVR would basically get sunsetted and all the customers would move over to Guesty. That was my understanding of how that worked. And I believe that process is complete now

because it's been some time. So I could be wrong, but just again, from my assumption from looking from afar, I suspect that Rentals United will probably cease to exist at some point. I expect that process could be years. Maybe that's a two, three, four year process, who knows? But it's many years of winding it down, putting everybody to Guesty. And now you're using that for, if you want to keep using it as your channel distribution, then you probably have to go that direction. Or maybe you shake hands and part ways and you have to find some other solution. You mentioned a few other vendors that you are aware of in the space that might kind of take the void of someone who maybe didn't want to be part of Guesty just because they have whatever

PMS that they're using already set up. So yeah, that's an interesting point there of what's going to happen. At this point, we're just speculating. We don't have any, again, inside information here. Even if we got some relationships, some of those companies haven't said anything publicly about it, so we don't know. But from from a marketing standpoint that's what we're more commenting on i think um you know the thing i was talking about the thing we were picking up before we hit record is like what is the value of some of these relationships is it worth spending time effort energy money like you said whether it's if you're giving them just the percentage of bookings that's one thing but if you're paying some kind of listing fee or something like that

are you are you really getting the juice that's that's worth a squeeze when you go and list on like these fourth tier, fifth tier, sixth tier vacation rental websites? I would argue it depends. Like it depends on what you're optimizing for. My gut reaction kind of feels like no, but it also depends on like what your investment is, to be clear, and then what your time is worth, right? That may be part of it too. Like if you have a hundred of the same condo, right. And it's all pretty, you know, homogenized standardized inventory. I think it's in your best interest to distribute as far and wide as possible, right? Because you're, you're like, I just need to fill, you know, going back to our joke earlier, you just got to put heads in beds, right? If you have that kind of problem, if you're like a volume property manager, that's a different game in some respect.

But if you have like really unique inventory, you know, is the extra distribution worth it compared to doing other marketing activity? So like building your search presence through content marketing, building an email list through a giveaway, like being aggressive on Instagram and creating video content, like those may be better ways to spend your time potentially. But if it's like, hey, I click a button, it's out there, it's now on more websites than it was before they have listings, then I can't disagree with that philosophy. I just think build it and they're going to come find you on these third tier websites is not a really viable strategy. And I think there's people in our industry who will talk about the benefits of it. And it's undoubtedly true, there is benefits of it and use large like aggregate numbers to make it

seem like it's bigger or more valuable than it is. So for example, this is a David Angotti thing, I believe, where he'll say like, look at the listing site, look at the number of listings, try to go find out the traffic and like AhFs or similar web or something like that, and then divide the number of listings by the amount of traffic. And then think, if I got this many page views on my listing that year, would I actually get some meaningful amount of traffic? So if you look at a platform like Airbnb, I mean, they're getting tens, if not hundreds of millions of views between their app and website. And sure, they have 6 million listings, but they have the traffic to support 6 million listings.

Go look at some of these third tier websites in a platform like Ahrefs or similar app. And you might see, I'll just give an example. You might see 20,000 visitors a month in Ahrefs on a website. Well, there's a 2000 listings. Then each, you know, each listing is only going to get maybe a few hundred thousand views, something like that. It's not really probably going to move the needle. Again, if you're lucky, you might get one or two bookings a year from it. So is it worth it?

Is that really what you should be spending your time, effort, and energy on going forward? I'm torn, to be honest with you. And that's kind of the premise of the outline here and what we went through was like, it kind of depends. So I don't know if you have other factors that kind of go into that decision. And I think the other thing is that for the typical property manager, every owner has a different use case that they want to use. So being able, I mean, not everybody's driven by making more money. And I do think that that adds a lot of complexity when you're using a channel manager, because then you're having to flip on this unit and flip off this unit and flip off, like there's a lot more complexity. Now,

most of these allow you to do that, which is, which is to the benefit. But I do, I think that that it just adds another wrench another monkey wrench into the whole equation there of what if I have an owner that wants to use the home 12 weeks out of the year and they let me know short notice nine times out of 10 there. There's just some complicating factors that I think make it more difficult to want to use another system to manage. Again, if you can, if you can streamline it, if you can put some automations in, put the right triggers in place to ensure that again, I'm sure based on what they're working with, like it is, it's not just vacation rental sites. You know, I'm looking at the Rentals United website right now. It's OTAs,

it's Metasearch, it's vacation rental sites. So you really are breaking it down into some different locations there. And are there going to be different levels and different engagements at which you have to, again, how much do you have to pay to play? Do we want to pay to play everywhere? Do I want to pay on booking.com? Maybe not. Do I want to pay on smokymountain.com? If I'm in the Smokies, I probably would want to consider something like that. So in any time you're evaluating any of these positions where you can get additional distribution, get additional visibility, yeah, is Home2Go the right option for you? Is Expedia the right option for you? Is Google the right option? I think that's always a good option. Is Google the right option?

I think that's always a good option. But are you doing it the right way? Is this distribution channel, is this channel manager the right way to use Google? Or is it more effective, efficient to leverage it in a different way? I think that's where, and being on the vendor side and not on the manager side, we probably don't have exactly. This is one where it would be good to bring in a, you know, some of our, our other property managers and probably be able to give some better insights into where they've found it. And hopefully maybe we can turn this into a more of a round table type of conversation the next time we approach this too. Yeah. Because I think there's a lot of property

managers who will speak to the benefits of just additional visibility, additional eyeballs, and they may say something to the effect of, Hey, I don't get bookings off this, but I know it's helping me because people will call me or, you know, I'll get a website visit and they might reference them when they booked. Okay. I booked because I saw you over here, but then I searched for your website directly. So that's so-called billboard effect. I'm a hundred percent, you know, clear that that absolutely works. And I know it works because we have clients where brand new properties with a brand new name of a property that never existed before we put it out on the the website and then we start to see it gets distributed, of course, to Airbnb, Vrbo, like you said, all these meta search sites. And then all of a sudden we start to see searches

happening at Google for that property name. Well, it can't be past guess because there is no past guess. It's a new word or a new phrase that didn't exist before, or they're appending the location. So it might be the name of a property, but then they might also put in Myrtle Beach or they might put in Florida or something like that, Key West, that sort of thing. So we can see obviously that it's new demand and that these channels are absolutely, which one is it?

I mean, at some point you just, you drive yourself crazy trying to attribute everything. That was a joke. Michelle Marquis had a post on LinkedIn recently where she wanted us to talk about a multifunnel attribution and everyone was like, yeah, let's do it. And I was like, sure. Like I like getting migraines,

just drive myself crazy. Because as much as we want to figure out like, Hey, this is exactly how the guests came into the door. Yeah. It just doesn't quite work that way in my experience where you can actually track it down consistently every single time. So in that vein, it's like, yeah, why not get all the visibility you can, especially if it doesn't come at the expense to your point of significant cost or significant time. I think there's no downside to that piece of it.

But I also think that again, waiting, you know, for them to come in there is not necessarily the right path. So to illustrate this point, I brought up, before we hit record, I brought up Flipkart. And it was interesting, if you go to the Flipkart homepage, I was joking, I was like, who's managing Flipkart? I haven't seen Flipkart at a conference in years and years and years. It's funny, they're actually running ads though. So someone is running Google ads for Flipkey, I don't know who that person would be. But they're a brand that exists, one would assume. I don't really know what the context is of who's working on this brand. But if you go on the homepage right now, FlipKey, their top featured rental destination on the top left corner of little tiles, at least for me, is Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Large, massive market, one that I know a little bit about because we have a client that we work with in that market. So when you hover over the little tile on the website, on flipkey.com, it says there's 400 listings. And I was just like, there's no way. But then you click it and it does show 1500 listings. So maybe that website is not working properly. But needless to say, 1500 listings on Flipkey currently in the Gatlinburg area. So again, before we record, I looked this up and I went, what do you think the number of listings is in Airbnbbnb for that same you know city metro or you know area in this case in gatlinburg and the answer is 15 000 in fact a little over 15 000 at least according to our lovely friends over at air dna um and i believe that they are pretty accurate in that regard

having talked to them many times um they got the uh the data king over there mr mr jamie lane so anyways 1500 to 15 000 goes to show you that you are quite literally going to get 10x, obviously, the 10x the number of listings on Airbnb that you see on FlipKey. Now, it doesn't mean that being the 1,500 and first cabin on FlipKey is a bad deal if FlipKey is getting traffic, right? That's not necessarily a bad deal to be sort of a fish in a smaller pond. But I think it's very clear if we put these websites in the similar web, a brand like Flipkart is getting

way less than 10x the traffic. So you have 10x the, you know, ultimately you have 10x the number of listings on Airbnb, but I would bet my bottom dollar that you're going to get significantly more bookings on Airbnb than if you only put your listing on Flipkart

because you're going to get way more than 10x the traffic on a platform like Airbnb, which is kind of the battle here, right? It's like when you're thinking about channel distribution, it's kind of a traffic battle who here on this list is good at driving traffic and converting that traffic. I would argue the booking.com team is great at driving traffic, visibility, eyeballs, they're the kings of that. But for whatever reason, I feel like they haven't taken

a strong foothold in the vacation rental market for most of our clients. Because they don't seem to figure out how to get people to convert, they can get eyeballs, but they can't get bookings in the same way. It is so interesting to think about that 2016 arms race now for FlipKey and HomeAway. And TripAdvisor took on FlipKey and Expedia took on HomeAway. And neither of those brands were able to do it. And I don't know. HomeAway just stumbled. HomeAway just stumbled and fell flat on its face, basically.

But just think about that. I mean, and I think it comes back to the conversation. I mean, that was an opportunity to channel manage, to get additional distribution for these vacation entrepreneurs. And Airbnb, in creating their own ecosystem and already having it built and then, I mean, taking the share from there, essentially from that 2016, 2017 period on, you do those search trends. It's that hockey stick growth on the Airbnb side of things. Vacation rentals just kind of steadies out and short-term rental steadies or all those other terms. VRBO decreases pretty dramatically. BRBO, still think that was a huge mistake but i digress um

you you had it you had brbo people knew it it was just the same way not everything was a by owner but you you had it one day one day we'll meet the agency that was responsible for doing that it'd be fun to talk about the rebrand that would be i will say this verbo has no qualms about investing into the brand though i mean they've got like commercials running nonstop. Like I see their stuff everywhere. But is the, like, are we sure that the people executing on the Vrbo site are good? Like are good at what they're doing?

Like, is there a bunch of evidence to indicate that the team at Vrbo was like massively introducing new product features? I mean, like, again, as of we're recording this, this will be old news by the time I'm listening here, is that Airbnb dropped the icons feature. And Brian Chesky almost has like a celebrity status. Like there's people,

if you stopped a hundred people on the street, just went to New York City, stopped a hundred people on the street, how many of them would And Brian Chesky almost has like a celebrity status. Like there's people, if you stopped 100 people on the street, just went to New York City, stopped 100 people on the street, how many of them would know Brian Chesky? I feel like 30, maybe 25, 30 is like not a crazy assumption. Maybe it's saying, I can't name one person that works at Vrbo. And I work in the damn industry. I couldn't name one person who works at Vrbo. I don't know anybody over there.

And it's very interesting. The icons, I don't know if you saw, we're going a little extemporaneously today, but Will Slicker's had a good breakdown of just what they're trying to create. And I agree. I mean, he brings it up nicely. He's trying to create a social media platform. And again, it's that ecosystem.

They've created the largest ecosystem. Now you have to find which other ecosystems are actually going to help you compliment this one. But my goodness, like this is, I think it all ties back to these channels. Where do you need to be? And why have some grown? Why have some gone the other direction? I mean, now the problem I have with Verbo right now is that it, everything that they do marketing wise is we're not Airbnb and I'm sorry, we're past that point. Like you, you like, it's, I think that that ship has sailed like, okay, yeah, I don't want anybody else with me that that selling point was good, you know, two, two, three years ago when it started.

2012 maybe. It would be like, it'd be like this, this would be the analogy I'd have. Imagine ifendy's just ran ads non-stop and they were just like hey guys we are not mcdonald's and it's like right that's okay what are you though but we're not mcdonald's okay i hear you sure wendy's advertisers but what are you what what does wendy stand for right what does wendy stand for that okay you're not mcdonald's that's great but what are you like what are you standing for and i think you bring up a good point there now i think if no verbo maybe if they leaned into um this idea and this this

does talk about channel management in my mind because they are the second biggest channel for most of our clients outside correct you know clients that are getting bookings it's like usually airbnb is number one not always but usually and then usually verbose number two so the traveler is there it's not that the traveler is not there certainly we could say like even though the flipkey branding is more logical and makes sense that it's backed by tripadvisor as all this traffic and knowledge you would you would assume that like flipkey would have the potential to go very far and going back to the topic of the conversation right channel distribution you would assume like yeah why would my i want properties on flipkey trip advisor

which collectively have tens of millions of visitors coming into them on a monthly basis looking for travel information like on paper it all makes sense but in reality it doesn't seem to be executed in a logical way to where they're getting the right outcome for the business. But with Vrbo, at one point, like I said, they were leaning into this idea of like, we are the family home. You know, so like when you go on vacation, like you were saying, the tinge of the messaging was we're not Airbnb or you're not renting a space. Okay, we're the full family home.

Why not lean into that further and say like the best homes are available on our platform or, you know, bring them up in some way where like that would be the ideal thing or i don't know exactly what the model would be even go back to their business model when they were deciding what they needed to adjust and change what they ended up doing was just copying airbnb with respect to like the the fee it was like airbnb had their fee from the beginning guest fee you know help support the platform then verbo was just like tried listing subscriptions tried other things tried different models at the end they're just like yeah you just pay a fee basically at the end of the day so it wasn't even like they're not even innovating on like the core product idea or like what they're doing they're just kind of relying

on like well we're expedia we're big you know we have we know travel we know traffic verbo is our brain in that space like they it's almost like they're checking a box like they're not actually thinking about what does the customer want meaning the guest or the customer in some cases let's be honest is the property manager like those are both customers and that they serve both customers logically. And sorry, bring it all the way back to channel management. I would encourage the person on the other side of that coin, the customer, meaning the vacation rental manager that we typically work with, to think like, how is this person serving me? What are they giving me in exchange for my properties? You're giving them something of value. You can book on my calendar or you have the right to access my

calendar. What are they giving me in exchange? What type of advertising and branding and marketing are they doing? Back to my earlier point, what kind of traffic are they getting? What are they, what are they, why is my properties well suited for this website? Like that would be logical questions to ask. And then you can see like, am I just getting eyeballs that don't mean anything? Or am I getting actual meaningful travelers that want to stay in my properties? And they go to site ABC to find what we're actually after.

Because I think that's the thing that channel distribution should be about. Hopefully is that you go to a site, you see something specific about what you're actually looking for. And then you go, Oh wow, this site actually does have all the best family friendly vacation rentals in whatever area. Um, and they're sorted in some logical way. So that's kind of my, my rant there on that. I think that, and that's, as you were saying, as you were kind of coming into it, like I had my next talking point ready to go. And I think it is, it comes down to intent. And you hit it on the head right there at the end there, is that the intent of people going to TripAdvisor is not necessarily to book, it is more of that informational output. Yeah, you can book at some of these places. But more frequently than not, it's been a matter of you need to actually, like it is,

it's more of that exploration. It's the inspiration. So if they're higher up in the actual traveler booking process in that funnel, yeah, you're probably not going to see as many people actually coming down to the funnel and getting those bookings coming through. So I think when you're evaluating those channels, like are people using this resource to actually book their stay? Or is there more of a planning component here where maybe I don't, or maybe that isn't where the ultimate bookings are going to come from. It's good to be distributed there, but do I actually, am I actually going to take the bookings there? Because on some of these channels, that's just not, that's not the

ultimate outcome for most of the traffic that's going to come to these sites. Yeah. Booking.com. Absolutely. Vrbo, Airbnb, the ones that were initially built as those directories that are booking focused. Yes. They're going to still drive those conversions. But I do think for those that are more inspiration based or more middle funnel in the trip planning process, they just might not be, they might not convert at that same level. So just keeping that in mind of how do people use the site? How would I use this site if I'm going to do it? That's as simple a way as how you evaluate some of these channels. Cool. Go do a quick test on the site and see what someone would

do. How many clicks would it take? If you really want to go through the process, oh, it takes 15 clicks for someone to actually find me and book me on booking.com. Okay. That's not bad or home to go or Expedia, whatever that looks like there. I think that that's, that's a decent way to evaluate like how effective that channel may be. Now, you're going to present you with a whole bunch of data and a whole bunch of reporting. That's going to say, tell you exactly what's happening there. But let's some of these channels are just not booking channels. They're travel planning channels, but not necessarily booking channels. Yeah, which which kind of goes into like one of our main theories, which is the idea that like you can do this yourself, right?

Like, are you ever going to be as big as TripAdvisor? Well, of course not. Right. You're never going to be a large TripAdvisor. And the joke I always make is someone that has like one listing and they're like, I want to rank on the top of Google for, you know, Orlando vacation rentals being an obvious example. And I joke, my joke there is like, if you're good at that, and that's what you can excel at, building that type of content and building that type of, you know, visibility for your website, sell your vacation rental and open a, you know, listing site basically for Orlando. Like you're going to make so much more money with honestly, in some cases,

probably a lot less headache doing that as opposed to trying to rank your single property website for that keyword. So if you're good at driving traffic to your brand though on a more serious note and you excel at that, that's going to help you basically not rely on these channels because I guess what I'm getting at here

and picking at the, like I'm picking at Verbo and saying like they're not doing a great job. They're second, if you want to put it that way, context behind Airbnb. It's like, imagine that they're not very good and they're in second place that means that third place fourth place fifth place sixth place and so on and so on from a relevancy standpoint probably isn't very good the only carve out i will say and we talked about this before we record is these regional sites where they have a strong focus in one area obviously

like you know i have a bias towards working on one of these sites you know but like if you were a website that only serves a single market like like Smoky mountains, for example, that's all you serve. You could have a million visits a year, 2 million visits a year for that one market and be phenomenally impactful for property managers in that market. It's just obviously someone in San Diego doesn't care about Smoky mountains.com for logical reasons. So that's my only carve out.

I'll say there is like a regional focus or a site that's for a very specific type of traveler that you may service. We did an interview on the other podcast I do with Lorraine from Becoming Rentable. People have accessibility concerned. Thousand listings on there that fit that criteria, right? 1.8 million listings in the US. So it's by stretching the magic, like there's not enough traffic there logically to think that makes sense unless you are someone who has a wheelchair and you want to book a vacation

rental. And that's the only vacation rental kind of friendly setup for you to use and you don't have a wheelchair. Then it's like, wow, you just became one of one and that's a different type of conversation. But, you know, again, I think that goes back to all your earlier points when you were talking about it. What does this channel bring? What type of guest is on this website? And why am I the right person to be there?

You know, why am I the lucky one that gets to put my inventory on your website? I think that's a valid question to ask. And then I think you can get to a better conclusion in that respect. So channel managers, you know, maybe a bit of a dying breed in some respect, just because the function of channel management is being integrated in the PMS. No better example of that than what's happening today, obviously, as we record this with Guesty being kind of the vacuum swallowing up these companies. I mean, they've done a little bit of buying.

There's obviously, I think, a momentum towards Guesty being a public company. I'm sure the more customers and the more revenue they get, the better that is for them. That would be an interesting IPO, more of a tech IPO in our space, as opposed to Picasa being the last one that was more of a property management IPO that I don't think we'll see another one of those for quite some time. Maybe ever. It would be maybe my prediction at this moment. Things can change as we go along.

But yeah, anything else to say here on marketing and channel management and how distribution impacts overall marketing efforts? Or should we tie this one up? I think we tied this one up. We probably went a little off script here, but I think we covered all the key points and probably a few points that didn't need to be covered that we just wanted to dive into. Yeah. I mean, we're never going to stay on script. If the listener wants that, they're listening to the wrong one. We didn't even do sports today.

So you're welcome. I'm saying, right, exactly. You jumped right into work. So here you go. Yeah, wrong one. We didn't even do sports today. So you're welcome. I'm saying, right, exactly. You jumped right into work. So here you go. Yeah, we did. We did all good stuff. Well, awesome. You know, one thing that we actually, so funny enough, this is the story I'm going to tell.

We do channel distribution. So all that to say, you know, and we, I take the podcast and I submit it out to all these different platforms, right? But the one that we get the most listens on our Airbnb, if you will, is iTunes. So if you're an iTunes listener, you're on Apple device, you go over there, you click five stars, that's a review that'll help us get more visibility. So that's step one. If you're a Spotify listener, let's do the Verbo comparison. So if you're Spotify, it's Verbo, that's our number two most downloaded platform. So if you're on Spotify, head there, leave us five stars. If you're on any other platform, hey, I'll take it. Just like a

vacation manager would take a booking coming from the fifth or 10th or 15th most popular. If it's a booking, it's a legit guest. You want them in the property. Um, why not? You'll take it. So if you're on any other platform, you can leave a review, but iTunes or Spotify, where we get the most downloads. We appreciate any extra visibility on that channel with a review. Um, thank you so much for listening. We appreciate you. And we'll catch everybody on the next episode of the heads in bed show. Have a great day.