Heads In Beds Show - What 'Marketing Gaps' Still Exist In The Vacation Rental Industry?

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul come up with some ideas based on real everyday pain points that they deal with based on homeowner and guest marketing to help vacation rental managers. Someone, build these! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 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 Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Paul, how's it going today? level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Paul, how's it going today?

You know, we just completed our morning discussion of our golf games and our football teams and a little basketball. We've really covered a lot of sports this morning. I think it's probably time to get on to the vacation rental side of things. But how are you doing, sir? How are things going for you? Yeah, pretty good. Apologize for the background, but we'll try to clean that up in post. Here's a story, because maybe we'll leave it in just for fun. The story is that my daughter, it was her third birthday party yesterday on Sunday, and she got basically what amounts to a karaoke machine. You can Bluetooth connect it to your phone or to whatever, your iPad or

something like that. You can play a song, and then I don know if you don't think you have an iPhone, which is one of your few character flaws. And you can tap the little microphone button and it gives you the lyrics and it acts like a karaoke machine in your pocket basically if you have Apple Music. So that's what's going on out there. Awesome though, I'm doing fine. All good. The weather was cooperative this weekend and kids were having a good time and it was a good time all around, so I can't complain on my side. That's fantastic. Well, no problems to speak of in my world, but some problems that I think we've discovered to your point in the vacation rental world. So kind of a unique episode idea. I don't know exactly

where this came from, to be honest with you. But it was kind of like, how there's these things that we deal with on a somewhat regular basis that just kind of annoy us. And it's like, why haven't they solved this type of, you know, sort of framing came to mind. So the title of this episode, if it doesn't make sense to you, you know, what gaps still exist in the vacation industry? Basically it's like, what things do we wish existed that don't exist? And maybe these things exist, but they're not very accessible or like they're only in some PMS, but not all PMS or they're things that are like, they don't work well between certain systems and things like that.

But it's just like, these are things that kind of bother me a little bit. And the things that bother Paul a little bit that we're going to kind of go through here. And maybe it's just a cry for help almost of like, if someone's out there listening who can fix some of these problems, I'm eager to hear kind of your solutions out there. Or we just wish that these things that maybe are in some systems about others will become more prominent. Or if you're listening and you're like,

I don't have that, but I wish I had that. Maybe it's things that'll kind of trigger your memory if you're a vacation manager or host. So yeah, Paul, maybe I'll take the first one because I think this was my idea and then we can kind of trade off from here. So here's my first one, software or syncing between email marketing tools, like MailChimp, for example, and PMS is still woefully inadequate, or it's not very common that that is a solution that's out there in the marketplace. So there's a few PMS platforms that I think have gone down the path of offering some

level of syncing between like a PMS like guesty, for example, is my understanding has an integration between guesty and MailChimp that emails can sync over and things like that. But it's not as detailed or as I would say, structured as it needs to be in my experience using some of these tools. And I wish that was something that we could have better like it's, it's kind of annoying for my team and for people that we work with some of our clients to have

a lot of data that sort of siloed into their PMS. And it doesn't really make its way over to the email marketing tool very easily. Now we can export CSVs and we can import those CSVs and things like that. But I kind of wish there was a more direct connection or just better syncing of tags, status, if a guest cancels, if a guest is actually booked, check-in dates, check-out dates, all this kind of stuff. I wish we could have that a little bit readily accessible to us in our email marketing tool choice, which is most commonly MailChimp. And it doesn't really seem to be there.

So that's kind of my first one here. It's just like, I want better data in my marketing tools. It's not there. And it causes my team, you know, me at times some stress and anxiety, and I wish we could fix that. So that's my first one. That is, I I've caught myself saying or thinking the same things, kind of not just on the email side of things, but also on the SEO side of things.

And I, sometimes I have to kind of take that step back and remind myself. It is a matter of the property management system is how they're operationally running, running the system. I think every property management system is a huge marketing tool that whether we use it or not, that is something that it's certainly storing all that data that's going to help us market more effectively there. So that is the same thing of when

you had some of those PMS specific websites being pushed out. That SEO is not that great. Why would you not build in this small benefit to helping the website perform better? Same thing on the email side of things. Why would you not have some type of simple connect to make sure that that data is able to seamlessly,

connecting the dots, those air quotes there, I know that it is way more difficult, way more complex than just saying, hey, just connect the dots, make two systems talk, API integration, all that. But there's some true functionality here, especially on the email side. Website, we can work on that stuff. That's a nice to have. I truly think that the email, a better connection with that email service provider really is a need to have because

so much of the communication, pre-state, in-state, post-state is going through email. And to not have a more direct connect, to have to manually export all this information. It's something that as an end user, as a property manager, I would certainly like that. Now, again, if it's something we have to weigh functionality of check-ins or maintenance or housekeeper or something like that, sure, I understand. But ultimately, I think marketing should be in the middle of that list, maybe not the top-weighted item that you're using your PMS for, but it's got to be in the mix. And this is one of those gaps that I think closing that gap would do a lot, specifically for the email side, but I think just overall for the marketing side of things, if we could

call out a little more help from some of those PMS companies here, this is our SOS gives give us a little help on the email side gives a little help on the SEO side of things, maybe a few are going less towards the websites because of that reason. And now let's focus on the email side of things. So yeah, for sure. We didn't have that CEO piece in the outline, but I'm with you on that. And I think I mean, it's simple

things to like the tracking. We've talked about e commerce tracking before again, not in the outline, but I'm with you on that. And I think, I mean, it's simple things too, like the tracking. We've talked about e-commerce tracking before, again, not in our outline, but often not there on the template sites. And it's always one of those things that we've been a little frustrated by because ultimately it's like, these are things too, that should not require significant engineering resources. I mean, we're talking about firing a tracking script, right? On thank you page.

It shouldn't be anything that's massively complicated or, you know, if anything, this Mailchimp requests, like syncing the data, I get that's a little bit more complicated because as each status changes, like something updates in the PMS layer, you've got to then push it out to other systems or other platforms. I get it, right? So I understand why these things aren't just like

they're out of the box. It's going to take some resources and some effort to put them together. But I think it's something where ultimately, you know, if a PMS and all these, a lot of PMS is not every PMS claims to be, oh, we're, we're syncing, we're opening API. I think what they mean though, is just for a listing site. So like, Hey, we'll sync and we'll use your data from,

you know, between our PMS and Airbnb. It's like, that's almost like given at this point, right? Like that should be the case. There shouldn't be a scenario where it's like, Oh yeah, I have to click manually update a description on Airbnb from my PMS. So we all agree that that's like a standard that, you know, these PMS you should be able to tie into. But when it comes to this other stuff, the marketing stuff, it seems like there's a little bit more hesitancy or they just like,

they don't seem to want to go in that direction might as quickly quite as often. And I feel like that's something that can be cleared up on. So yeah, I'll take I'll let you take the take the turn here on creative and these kind of layers here. Yeah. So on the creative side of things, now we talk a lot about video, how powerful video can be, especially on the travel side of things. Making a good video is certainly something that you should be considering, but I think it is. It's really about finding the right person to create that video or making sure it's the right video.

You know, I think our example from the outline here is you can hire a pro videographer. I remember we did this quite a bit especially on the track side of things we would send out a guy with multiple cameras a drone and all the b-roll clip I was always super impressed with and the testimonials that he gave you know for the product itself were great but was it really always the best video I mean it would have been a great travel video but we were so in sass so we got good good pictures of the beach and we got some great imagery. But I think it is. It's really making sure that you're going to hire a pro videographer. They're capturing the right video and then that you're using that video

on the right channels. You know, not every video is going in and not every professionally produced video. It's going to be a good option for Instagram. It's going to be a good option for Facebook. And I think because those are so heavily driven on the multimedia side, whether that is images, whether that is videos, you really have to make sure that you're matching that messaging with that channel. And I think video is one of those areas where you can get it really right, or you can get

it really wrong. But the asset doesn't necessarily change. I mean, you can have the asset that's just wrong for the medium that you're trying to share it in. So it can be really difficult to find the right person resource, whatever that is, or just production company, if it comes down to that, that's going to be able to create the right endgame of creative that you can put out there on, you know, on your social channels on your website on, you know, wherever you're going to use that creative information. So what are your thoughts on creative? And we've talked about the non produced videos on the Facebook and Instagram side. But what are your thoughts on just being able to find the right asset person, everything like that? right asset person, anything like that. Yeah, it's I think it's something we really struggle with, particularly when it comes to that local market, you know what I mean? When it's going down to that

individual person. And I mean, obviously, the more remote or the more kind of like off the beaten path of market is the harder it becomes to kind of like communicate, you know, effectively to that person of like, okay, you're there, I get it, we're not there, we're far away. But like, here's what we need in order to be successful, you know, with this asset with this video that you're shooting. And it's kind of like they have their style. And some of these videographers or photographers don't love to take direction from someone who's, you know, with this asset with this video that you're shooting. And it's kind of like they have their style. And some of these videographers or photographers don't love to take direction from someone who's, you know, again, sitting in a chair, you know, eight or miles away trying to tell them how we're

going to use those marketing assets. Some are awesome. And we've worked with some people before at that local level who are fantastic, who sit there, they listen to our feedback. They want to make it awesome. They will, you know, go through it again, do a vertical video or all these things kind of come into play and think they do a great job. But yes, it's still a bit of a challenge there. Even some of our clients struggle with it. I know what you're generally asking me, but this is how I feel. I think we talked about this before

about when you don't know how to do that thing very well, how do you evaluate the quality of that person's work? I've said this before about development work. We didn't do development work for a long time, build up bookings. Today,, I'll be honest, right? Like it's something where I can't really tell you if the code they write is good or not. I can tell you if the outcome is good, like, if the website is quick, if it's responsive, it has the features I want, if it has the functionality I want, and so on and so forth. But I can't look at the code and be like, ah, they didn't escape this properly, or they didn't do this properly, right? Because I'm not a programmer. And I imagine, you know, like, I could be apathetic to this problem, because I imagine the clients might

feel the same way. It's a video, the property, what's the problem, right? But the truth is, the problem is that it's not going to work well, you know, for the formats that we're running on Facebook or Instagram, if it doesn't have like that quick hook, I think I shared this in a previous episode, but a client sent us a video recently. And the first 15 seconds are a drone shot of San Diego, which is beautiful, by the way, awesome place. If we were shooting a movie, I think that would look in, you know, look in place if it was in a movie makes no sense at all for Facebook, right? It takes us 30 seconds to get to the front door of this property. It's all about the area and all that first. So that's before creative and our experience doesn't work well. So getting that

person locally to follow the formats that you actually need, I think that's a bit of a gap. And if you could create some kind of solution where it's people who understand content on social media and getting them to click a button, hire them, come out here, stay in my property, give me five reels, and just make it kind of more of a transactional type thing. I think someone could make some good money or be quite valuable in this space by doing that, particularly if they could deliver it for a reasonable cost. And if they could actually get those assets out there at a reasonable cost, because certainly what you're describing there, or what I'm describing there, excuse me, is valuable. But the trouble right now

is that some of those people want to charge $10, $20, $30,000 for what is essentially amounts to a handful of Facebook ads, that's their whole Facebook ads budget, right? So they can't do that in exchange for that, or it just doesn't make sense economically. So it's tricky. It's hard. You know, I realize that's kind of today's today's theme, right? As we're talking about things that are tricky or hard. So I think that's a bit of a problem. Yeah, most definitely. Anything else to add into that one?

Or I do not. I'm gonna let you hop into the employment side of things. Because this is just, you know, this is the fun stuff, really. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, so I've done this now, you know, many times and we've hired, you know, quite a bit. So my kind of third one here, they're on the list is, I think like marketing for employment or just sourcing great people for your team, whether they're part-time, full-time, you know, full-time equivalents, contractors, whatever the case may be. I think that's still something I struggle with a lot myself personally. And I know there are services out there that do the recruiting. I'm aware of that.

I've talked to some of those people, you know, in our, in our industry before, but they're very expensive, extremely expensive. I mean, on the order of five, 10, 15, $20,000 expensive. And I'm not disputing that they don't add value. I'm not disputing that at all, but it feels like that's still a bit of a gap. Um, or it's like, people are out there. They want jobs. I have a job to offer, not, not at the moment that we're recording this, but

like frequently I have a job to offer on my team. And that is just like finding like the right fit, you know, for people and finding the right fit for those individuals feels like a bit of a struggle. It feels like it's still it's a very manual process right now. The one thing that we have kind of hired or retained kind of a, I guess, a consulting firm of sorts to help us with like retaining and, you know, kind of finding people is that they do a lot of screening for us. And that I do find immense value in is people doing screening for you. If the value they're charging is appropriate for the time that they've invested and the time they're saving me in that process, right? The one thing that I've kind of had troubles

with with other people in our industry that have done this service is that they charge you 15, 20, $30,000 to hire quote unquote hire someone. They put out a job listing for you, you know, they promote it for you, they get you a bunch of applicants, they give you a few, you know, suggested options, but that's not really finishing the job, I guess, so to speak, or it's not really going all the way. And yet they're charging very premium service for what is ultimately not something that's really not that necessary. So I think if you were a large company in this space, I think it'd be silly almost if

you're going to pay those fees, I feel like you're better off just having a full-time person on your team that's just constantly dealing with, I guess like that HR function or kind of like, but even HR, like sometimes it works with recruiters or works with people who are helping you on the hiring. So I don't even think that's a fair description of kind of what you need there. There's other pieces to it. So yeah, as you can see, like I struggle with this a little bit as something that I don't have great handle on myself personally, that hiring of like,

how do we find the right people? And sometimes we want part time, right? Sometimes we don't need or we we're not looking for a full-time person, but like making that communication clear upfront, certainly doesn't make sense to pay a 5,000 or 10,000 or recruiting fee for someone that's, you need for like a short-term project or someone that you need, you know, for a little bit. That's not a full-time member of your team.

So like we've used tools in the past, or we've used platforms in the past, like Upwork or, you know, FreeNASer.com or these kinds of things. And it's okay, but like you get a lot of, you know, kind of junk mixed in with some good stuff there that takes a lot of effort and energy to, to go through. So people is kind of my, my third one here, right? It's one of the hardest things I think that we have to go through as a, you know, if you're in a leadership position at a vacational

company, or you're leading the company, you own the company, whatever the case may be, finding people, sourcing them economically, you know what I mean? I think is quite a challenge. And then of course, you know, that process of actually hiring them and getting them on board it, I think is a little bit of stuff that I need to work on. So maybe I'm just kind of again, like we're talking about today, Paul, a cry for help a little bit too, of like things I need to keep working on. Yeah, that's mine. I know you haven't been as involved in the process before, but maybe any reaction you have to that on that side of things. it, we broached the subject as we were talking about, you know, what's just better between an agency, a fractional or an in-house resource. And I think to the benefit of a lot of our markets in the space and to the detriment is that they're not always the major metropolitan areas. You don't have a lot of, you know, vacation rental companies in Chicago and New York, and we do have in San Diego, I'll give you that. But a lot of these people where there is an abundance of talent, we'll say for lack of a way, that is just people. That's when you're trying to find those people in more remote areas. Yeah, it's going to be

more difficult. So I understand the reason for the better talents of the world and Steve Trofer's doing some good stuff out there. But at the same time, there is that, sometimes, especially when you're just growing the business a little smaller on, you don't wanna go for a nationwide search or something like that. You are trying to stay more local. And how do you do that?

I think that's where being able to try to, we do have it a little more nationwide right now. Maybe being able to break these down into more have it a little more nationwide right now. Maybe being able to break these down into more, you know, binding hospitality groups that are more, or hospitality head hunters that are more at a state level or a region level, stuff like that. I think that would just make it a little easier. But again, breaking it down to that level, you know, there are other people who are hiring in other areas and other verticals and stuff like that. So hopefully there's a solution out there. But I think, unfortunately, on the hiring and sourcing

of people side of things, you're going to make some mistakes. The key there is the timing of those mistakes and trying to fail fast as much as you can, trying to identify the right talent. But again, you got to have your own kind of rubric for how you're scoring people, scoring applicants. And if you've got a headhunter that's helping with that or some type of talent acquisition specialist of some kind, that should give you the assist, hopefully to at least point you in the right direction. Because yeah, hiring is not a perfect thing.

That's why firing is a part of that as well. Yeah, and I don't think that's the thing too. Firing is so painful on both sides of the equation. You know what I mean? Or just like layoffs, whatever, right? Like it's, I't think that's the thing to firing is so painful on both sides of the equation. You know what I mean? Or just like layoffs, whatever, right? Like it's, I know, because I've been, you know, in conversations with clients or people that we worked with when they have to go do those layoffs and those, you know, when they have to let

people go, you know, pains them, it bothers them. Obviously, the person on the other side of that is dealing with something horrible, too, right? Like we can't ignore that. If you've been like, Oh, or if you know, you've been fired or something like that. Yeah, that's sock them. That's horrible. You know, like, and some of those things are outside your control, obviously, it's, you know, it's one of those situations, it's challenging. But at the same token, it's like, it's so much better for everybody. If we get the right people, you know, on the team who

are looking for what we actually need or what we have to offer. It feels like there's more work to be done there. Like it feels like the current solution of like, try it out and see if it works. This doesn't feel optimal, particularly for full time people, right? That's where it's really damaging. I think if someone's on a short term contract and doesn't work out, hey, you finish out your work, we shake hands, we move on. That's one thing. We've been in that boat, I know, on our side of things before with people. And that's understandable. But yeah, when it's that full time, like we both want to work out, how do we increase the chances of it being a success? Feels like a service or a platform or something where we're not quite there yet, I think broadly in our industry. And you do see a lot of movement and you see a lot of these kind of problems

popping up, I think, for that reason. So yeah, do you want to maybe you could take a swing at this one? Maybe I know it's not as much as what you worked on over the past year or two, but I know it's dear to your heart. And you've done this kind of, you know, how to do this kind of tracking revenue pieces before. Yeah, I mean, I think really getting to that true cost of revenue and then what does it cost to get a booking? I think the taking kind of the hiring and sourcing and people into it, that's part of it. I think sometimes we forget that there are people attached to the marketing costs and understanding that that is something you really do have to factor in to get your real or

actual ROAS, ROI, whatever you're looking at there. But I think the other side of this is that just the gaps in trying to blend this information together to the primary channels that we deal with, Facebook and Google, they just don't really talk that well together. So really being able to, I think you can do better, you can get better insights and better reporting there as far as what you're spending and how many direct bookings are coming through or how that direct attribution is coming through. But there is, there's so much gray area wiggle room, you know, the concept of data driven attribution funnel. Well, okay, now Google is gonna start to say, well, 20%

of the booking came from here, 30% came from here. I think we talked about the attribution a little bit as we were writing out the outline on the Facebook side of things. Well, they saw it here. Is Facebook going to take credit for that booking 25 days out, 30 days out? I think there's a lot of nuance to understanding what is that true return on all of your ad spend there. With Google last click, that sometimes is okay, but again, you can open up those attribution windows in a pretty major way to make the numbers look better or to, or you can cut it down to maybe try to give a more actual realistic number. I don't know what that is, but you can interpret a lot of the ROI information as you please, which again, I don't think is, on the agency side is not a good way to do it for customers,

clients, partners, anything like that. But it's just difficult more generally speaking, more broadly speaking. So anything you can do, whether that's some type of reporting software to bring it all in together, the data aggregation, how can you pull as much of that in to really understand and then take that human resource side in of, okay, with the people, with our ad spend, with all these systems and tools that we have in place, how much am I really returning on all the marketing efforts that I'm doing here? But I kind of jumped around a little bit there. This is definitely more your honey hole here.

What do you think? What did I miss there? No, I think you covered it well. So I think the main problematic piece that I always have with it is that, all right, we'll just make it some blumber. Google Analytics reports $1,000 booking occurred, right? Well, how is that broken down? And what are the margins within that so that I understand how much of that was kind of revenue? How much of it was not revenue? Like, it's so

funny, the people in the commerce world think they have a tough like, yeah, we're selling widgets, and the widgets cost, you know, $10, then we sell them for $100. And then, you know, we got to figure out all these complex things. I'm like, okay, cool, like, 80% of the revenue our clients get don't even go to them, right? Like they just send it out the door. Basically, or actually, get away. That's so much more complex. And then of the fees, they charge summer taxes, which are no margin. In fact, you can argue, collecting a tax is kind of almost a negative margin, because you have to hire like an accountant or bookkeeper, send those taxes off to the right

agency, right. So we can make the argument that like taxes actually are kind of a negative margin activity near line items, collections, right? Which is, that's probably a fair, I feel like the first statement, they look up things like res fees, which are kind of kind of in a way 100% margin, right? And then you've got everything in between. Well, some fees have a little bit more margin, some don't. I listened to a webinar recently, and a layered was on there from Red Sky. And

that seems like a pretty high margin product, right? We're selling travel insurance, and people opt in great, but not everybody opts in, right? Some people do opt in, some people don't opt in. So that's like a whole nother discussion, right? If they're opting or not opting in, that's going to change your margins. Some bookings that people opt into the travel insurance, you'll get more money off that you'll earn more revenue off that. Others, when they don't opt in, you're not going to get that. So yeah, the good news is, I think we've been working

with some of our, you know, PMS providers to give us and like some actually do the amazing out of the box. I'll give owner as a shout out, as I have done before on the show, that owner has actually has that dialed when when you see a book and computer and owner is back in analytics, you see all the line items, everything broken out taxes fees, cleaning, you know, res V and then if there's a discount, they show the discount and there's a negative so it's awesome. But very few people kind of go to that level. And then you really got to like sit down and understand like art X is coming in, y is going out, what can I understand a little

bit better on like a per booking level or maybe like a monthly or like a, you know, bi weekly level. So I understand exactly how profitable everything is. As I know for a fact, we have clients that are far under investing on their advertising, but I can describe it to them. But it's like, if I could show them like it was really, really hard data and facts of like, here's exactly what's coming in and here's exactly what's going out. And this is really profitable. And if you say you're not up on bookings this year, we could probably fix that by doing more advertising. That's the whole layer to it. I'm with you on attribution. I don't know how to solve that problem. To be honest, I think everybody wants us to solve the attribution problem.

And I don't know how possible it really is. I've advocated recently for some clients to add in a how'd you hear about us, old school, you know, attribution, drop down menu, because I think so many bookings that are quote unquote direct. And when I say direct, I don't mean a direct booking in the sense of like they booked with you, not through an OTA. I mean, so many bookings happen when they come, quote unquote, in analytics directly to the website. So many of those bookings are influenced by other marketing activities you're doing, and they'll never get credit for it, right? Because of like, what you're describing view, click attribution, all these kind of complicated things. So yeah, maybe it's a twofold request here. I'd love to see true cost of revenue or revenue booking,

really broken down with like explicit levels of detail to the penny, how much are you making, how much are you not making, how much can we spend to acquire it, where is profitable, where is unprofitable, all those questions. And then yeah, attribution I think will be another amazing problem to solve.

If you could get, again, are you gonna get perfect? Of course not, because you get closer, I think so. And I don't know if a lot of people, PMS layer is trying to make any effort towards making attribution a little bit stronger. I think for the most part, it's just like, yeah, we'll throw in a little something there and hope for the best. And that's leading to like a pretty suboptimal solution.

So I think that's a fair one. I'll let you take the next one because it's homeowner related. So I guess the homeowner communication tools and system, I think just generally speaking, this is something that the reason that Venturi created the CRM that they did because there really wasn't anything devoted to the owner side of things. That it's something that's still, it's a tap on.

Anything you're using, I mean, Venturi is not the only CRM out there. There are other CRMs that are certainly capable of doing this, but I think it is. It's that there's still a tie on. There's not a true direct connect between your property management system and your homeowner list. And just this is the same way we're talking about making sure that that data is syncing up between your email marketing system on the first point. You have to have these...

The owner communication doesn't stop at that. We sold them now It's really communicating and keeping them within your portfolio long term keeping them happy I'm keeping them up to date with whatever's happening on site. There's there's so much more communication that has to happen, but I do think again because you're running your your Business your property through the property management system, the fact that you have to disconnect, there is a disconnect somewhere along the lines there, and you have either two separate CRMs or you're trying to massage or hybrid or do something like that, there's just a drastic disconnect on the owner's side versus what you're able to do within your property

management system. So whether that's a CRM that rolls up under your property management system or something like that, there's some solutions out there. But that was always one of the biggest things is, well, how a lot of the partners were getting a lot out of the CRM or how can I continue to communicate with these people more within my property management system? And we really didn't have a good answer to people. And that was painful. It was just not something that you wanted to have to do.

So I think that right now, a lot of that communication that you're doing with guests versus owners is fractured, whether you have two different systems or whether you're trying to, again, mutate your PMS into trying to run both, there aren't any real, I mean, unless you know one out there in the wild right now, I don't know of a property management system that really can handle the owner's side as effectively

as it does on the guest side of things. So whether you're looking for another solution, whether you are trying to, again, mutate or find a mutant solution or do something like that, that is still such an important function of running a successful, professional property management company is homeowner communication,

obviously homeowner acquisition if you're trying to grow the company, but you need to effectively communicate, hey, things are going well this year. Hey, things are not going so well this year. I think we've seen the ebbs and flows over the last two, three years now. We know that consistency is very difficult in getting these revenue goals. So there needs to be some type of improvement. I don't know if it's on the property management side of things, if it's on just the owner CRM side of things,

but someone's got to come together to make this communication a little better there. What are your thoughts there? Now, like I said, I think you've lived this a little bit closer than I have over the past few years with the projects that you've been working on. It feels like some of our clients will have us. We actually just had a conversation last week about this exact conversation, about, hey, I need to send something to my homeowners.

I'm not really doing it that well right now. I should be, what should I be using? How should I be doing that? And like you said, of course, Ventura is a great solution. Of course, a lot of these tools can help you with lead generation, get more people in the door, that kind of thing. But I don't know if anyone's cracked that quite yet.

I think if someone's gonna crack it, it'd probably be the team over there to kind of get that piece settled. But maybe it's PMS layer, a newsletter type solution, a, hey, here's what's going on. Certainly a proactive update type piece of the puzzle there, hey, here's what's going on and why it's happening. We're seeing softness, here's the data, here's what I'm seeing. I think a lot of homeowners wait for the, or sorry, a lot of property managers, excuse me, wait for the homeowners to reach out to them. And then it's like they've lost the control of that conversation a little bit at times. Like,

I think if you're more proactive about what's going on, it's going to help you, it's going to benefit you because then you can, you know, give them better information or like be more, hey, here's what I'm seeing, here's what's going on. And then you have to have the same conversation over and over again. So I think that's kind of another piece of the puzzle that you want to avoid if you can. And I think it's a major cause of kind of stress and worry for a lot of our clients that we work with is that, you know, when the homeowners are down, like they most are right now, like, what do I do about it? You know, how do I keep them on the up and up? How do I keep them engaged? How to keep them happy? Somebody shrugs their shoulders and go, Hey, we just came through the best few years of

vacational demand in the history of vacation rentals, right? Like it's going to happen. Correction was inevitable. I think those are the people that maybe got a gray hair too on their head and they've seen it before. But all these new people at D face like did this for the first time, they put a lot of money into it, they assumed it was going to be, you know, up and up forever. Maybe those people aren't as happy. And how do we keep them happy? It's through communication is through letting them know what's going on. And I think the tools that we have today for that are kind of falling short. And I think there's some there's improvement there for sure. We'll get a few more moments left here. I got a quick one at the end. And there's some people that are working on this. So I really respect and have

a lot of admiration for what they've done. But I do worry about it. You know, direct booking tools. I think a lot of these people going through this system, are we showing OTA pricing the website a good thing or a bad thing for conversions? I'm not sure. I don't know if that's the gap right now. I think it helps solve the problem to some degree, right?

Like we now know that we're offering a better deal. That is part of the equation. But there's a lot of people in our space who I think seem to think that price is the only consideration. And I've said this many times before, I don't think price is the most common consideration that people have when they're booking direct. And I think marketing solely off price is an almost another gap in our industry, right? Like direct booking has to be more than just price, it has to be other things. See the episode we just did actually with Mark, and he kind of shared some ideas that he had done in his book about like, checking early stuff like that. So I think that we've got a better

understanding what the guest is motivated by by booking direct and we don't have that quite yet. And I think price can be part of the answer to that solution and direct booking tools can get us part of the way there. But I don't think that's completing the circle by any stretch of the imagination. I think if a guest is aware of us and doesn't book direct, a lot of people will say, Oh, your marketing failed. I think that's, that's an overly simplistic view of it. Maybe your marketing worked just fine, but there was something else that they were worried about that we didn't ask them about, you know, so instead of blaming your marketing team, maybe they do or don't deserve blame if

they weren't doing what they needed to be doing. But it's like they booked with Airbnb or Verbo for reason. Let's try to get to the bottom of that and figure that out. And then let's come out with a better solution or better offer or better copy or better messaging to better, you know, address what their concerns were, that I think we have better paths to success in that respect. So showing up to pricing, I'm in the middle. I could see how there could be some upside there. People know you're getting a deal, a deal by booking direct, but there's more to it than that. That is only one part of the puzzle.

That is one ingredient in the direct booking cake, if you will, that we need to have right in order for it to be successful. And I'm kind of, you know, feeling out where that needs to go. So that's my last one. Maybe we can kind of figure out some other ones down the road, but anything else Paul to tie in? Or should we put a bow on this one for today? That's I mean, as I I'm going to put one more on that thing and just say I, I always hate the idea of introducing another option when someone's already on your direct website. So that's, that is my downside. That's my poo poo on that one. Um, it is I think you hit

the nail on the head there, though, and understanding what is that motivation to actually hit to actually book through the OTA. I think right now, we don't do a lot of research on that. We just we see them come through the OTA. And then we just kind of assume that that's the only way they're going to get there. So maybe just, you know, taking that to that opportunity to ask the survey question to do the follow up of, okay oh, okay, so why did you choose us, but why did you choose to book on that OTA as opposed to, did you know about the draft or the side of things?

So yeah, I think that's good. I agree more. Yeah, awesome. Well, if people made it all the way to the end, Paul, one thing that would help us, one little gap that we have in our lives is we're lacking your review. So if you made it all this way, all the way to the end,

you made 32, 33 episodes, 33 minutes into this episode, excuse me. I mean, you leave us a review yet. We appreciate that. Leave us a review. Follow us. Mark actually told us about that after we stopped recording on the last one that we did. You got to say people follow not just, you know, of course we want the review, but also follow us. Go to your podcast app of choice, Spotify, iTunes, click that blue follow button. I think it's purple, if you will, on the iTunes layer. We appreciate that. And we thank you for listening. Have an awesome day and we'll catch you on the next episode.