Book Direct Strategies + Mastering ChatGPT with Bart Sobies

Alex Husner  0:01  
Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex. 

Annie Holcombe  2:14  
And I'm Annie. 

Alex Husner  2:20  
And we are joined today with Bart Sobeys, who is the founder of I booked online and joining us from across the pond. Welcome Bart.

Bart Sobies  2:30  
Thank you very, very much and good morning.

Annie Holcombe  2:33  
Is it across the pond or like down and below? Like you're in Australia?

Bart Sobies  2:38  
We're upside down. So yeah, so yeah. Doesn't doesn't doesn't reflect?

Alex Husner  2:44  
Well, you're in Australia.

Annie Holcombe  2:45  
Yeah.

Alex Husner  2:47  
You didn't know that. You're in the UK? Oh, my gosh. Okay. Well, that makes sense. Why? Time is so opposite.

Annie Holcombe  2:57  
So we asked Julie George, when I think is Julie George, this is does the toilet bowl flush the other way? That was a question I asked her.

Speaker 2  3:06  
Yeah. And I think it actually does. I'm pretty sure that when you change hemispheres, it does. And that that was something that came from The Simpsons back in the day back then. Yeah, that's probably where I started, where he goes or flushes the toilet and it goes the other way around. Yes, I think that is a thing. Now I'm gonna need to Google that. Because Because now I'm like, I feel like really embarrassed that the first thing I open up with is being wrong about toilet.

Annie Holcombe  3:31  
Okay, we didn't realize you're in Australia.

Alex Husner  3:34  
Yeah. blatantly wrong place. So not too bad. But for our audience. Bart, can you give us a little bit of history on who you are and what you do?

Speaker 2  3:45  
Yeah, absolutely. So Bart Sobeys is my name. I'm the founder of I booked online, we started running roughly about three and a half years ago, helping people with their book, direct websites and book direct strategy. So kind of that real practical sense of not just building a website, and you telling us what you want us telling you what you need for your website to get more direct bookings. I started back in roughly around about 10 years ago, helping restaurants do online ordering. And these are the days where people just taking orders over the phone. And we would call them up as salespeople and be like, hey, you need a website, because people are going to order order their food online. And the owners would kind of respond and they're like, no one's going to order what online, they're never going to order online. And they'll slam down the phone. Right now we're not interested in this. And then you know, the rest is history, right? So same sort of concept and philosophy where right now everyone's using the OTAs to get to get their bookings. And what we're saying is, you know what, a lot of people will book direct if it is done correctly. So that's kind of one part. I'm also the host of the accommodation show, which is a podcast for accommodation owners and managers. And the last thing is I'm also a board member of Astra which is Straight in short term rental Association, where we're helping short term rental owners and representing them.

Alex Husner  5:06  
That's great, I guess sounds like you do a lot of the same things that we do between a regular job a podcast board of directors, associations. So very multifaceted. I'm sure it keeps you very busy.

Speaker 2  5:19  
Absolutely. I think the good thing about it is it just keeps us informed, right? We know what's going on, we can, we can see what other people are doing. And we're all about collaborating. And that's why I'm here. And I want to be on this show. And to get to know you, both of you and your community, because I'm going to learn a lot more from you, then you will for me in different stages of our of our lives and businesses.

Alex Husner  5:40  
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're excited to have you here. And we, there's some direct booking questions that we can dive into. And I know we want to talk about chat GPT. And I think Annie and I probably have the most questions on that. And probably our audience does, also. But before we get started on that, you know, besides doing the website for your clients, what other direct booking strategies do you encourage them to participate in?

Speaker 2  6:08  
Oh, yeah, look, for me, it all depends on what size of business you actually are and where your lowest fruit lie. And what happens is genuinely, if you start to talk about direct bookings, then then you get told that you need to do all of these things, the list is extraordinary in terms of all of the systems or the processes, you've got to post on social media every day, three times a day, you need to get onto Facebook, create an account, you need to get onto LinkedIn, you need to do this, and you did that. And with that, with no appreciation of the fact that you might be on your own running your business, you don't have a team of people sitting there doing photos and videos and, and helping you with all of that. So it's all about for us, it's about low hanging fruit. And understanding that if you're not going to do blog posts on a regular basis that add value to your potential customers don't do blog posts do not start to do things that you're not going to achieve effectively. So when you think about direct bookings, you think about the things that you can pull off effectively, and things that you can do is you can register your Google business profile. And you can optimize that you can do the images, you can do small, little bit, which will make a significant differences in terms of your discovery discoverability as a business, and then you hire a co I've done my Google business profile that's working. Now I'm gonna get some reviews on Google, because all my reviews so far, they're just on the OTAs. So I'm gonna go back to my previous customers, and I'm going to send them some sort of email saying, Hey, can you leave me a review, I really appreciate it. And that's gonna start to get you ranking higher. So the first sort of foundation of everything you do is around about ranking higher on Google, and going back to previous customers, be it on email, on phone and getting them to come back. And then on top of all of that, Alex's you'll know is the all the branding stuff and all that that's something that we kind of help with. But the foundation is all about just picking off the easy wins, and making sure that you do them effectively. And that's going to start to get our ball rolling with the direct bookings.

Annie Holcombe  8:12  
So essentially, don't bite off more than you can chew is what you're saying.

Speaker 2  8:16  
100%? Because, I mean, there's a lot you guys will know, like, just the overwhelm, right? Like, what, what do you do next, even running a podcast? What is the next thing that we need to do to promote the podcast? Or to make it better? Yeah, it's it's constant in our lives. So just do the bits that are gonna be the easiest and most in the you know, you can stick to so don't start to play around with Instagram for days and days and days, when you know that you're probably not going to post. Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  8:49  
well, I think also to the social media is like very, like Alex and I talked about like social media, each part of it is very, has a very different audience. And so like, if you're not versatile, you need to focus on the audience that you know, you can speak to, and speak to regularly and in the right tone of voice. Because I think that that's, that's important, too. Some people don't realize the tone of voice that they need to use for the different channels.

Speaker 2  9:11  
Yeah, and you want to know, we call a customer avatar, or your ideal customer profile, so you wouldn't know who your ideal guest is, and really speak to those, that group or that that those groups with some bad English there. But if you're targeting families that speak to a family, because when they when you're communicating with them, they need to feel that it's appealing to them, because if you're messaging is all about romantic couples traveling and doing this stuff, but your audience because all of your properties, these multifamily homes that they should be staying in, then you're you've got a massive disconnect there, right. And don't try to target too many different verticals, because you'll find that the messaging doesn't make sense because if I'm a business traveler, and I I'm seeing stuff about about families and traveling with pets, and in horses or whatever else, I'm gonna be like, well, this isn't for me, and I'm not going to engage with the content, I'm not going to come back because I'm just not interested in it. I need a place which is going to suit my particular needs at the time.

Alex Husner  10:17  
Yeah, that makes sense. I think a lot of companies and individuals as they're growing, they also have to make the decision. Do you focus more on direct bookings or homeowner marketing? And because those are definitely two very different strategies there. And with, you know, definitely different personas and outcomes, do you do anything on the homeowner marketing site, or just on the guest facing side?

Speaker 2  10:39  
It's, it's brilliant. So the number one thing that I see when I talk to property managers, especially people that are building their business, is that their website is trying to do both. So they're trying to get direct bookings. And they're trying to speak to an owner. And this goes exactly to the last point, I was trying to say, target who you're speaking to, in your communication, if you want homeowners, and you want them to join your platform, or to join your company, and you want to sign them up, then you need landing pages that speak directly to them. And the language will be Hey, do you want something which is hassle free, do you want something which will take care of everything for you that it's safe, secure, trusted, will make you lots of money, all those kinds of messages to to get them to fill out the inquiry form. And then to potentially get them as a client that has to be separate from what you're showing a guest isn't guest does not care about the profitability of a property, a guest doesn't care about the fact that you guys do great cleaning teams and all that the guest just doesn't care about that, they just want to know, they're gonna have a great experience. So you have to separate them, they have to be two separate websites, or websites that are separated by different landing pages, but they have to be different. So that then those those they split, and they go down the funnel that they're meant to go down. And we help with that. Absolutely. Top tip for everyone. If you're getting overwhelmed by this, you can build a Google website, you can build a free website template, and then get it going go to lead pages, that's what we recommend for a lot of our clients. Because all the functionality functionality is built around built around getting a lead, rather than a booking, right? So all of those platforms, there's loads of them out there. LeadPages is what we use, we recommend to clients. And then you can just put together a template and then drive people towards there.

Alex Husner  12:33  
Interesting. Yeah, it's like the cart before the horse, you know, which which one do you do first, because you need the homeowners to get the direct bookings. I mean, you want to have, you have to have properties to be able to even drive direct bookings. But, you know, it's definitely a conundrum, I would say, as you're starting to grow the business. And we tell a Costco, our franchisees, the ones that are newer, within within this space, once you get the ball rolling, it's it starts going on a different path. And it doesn't those early days that the first you know, 12 to 24 units, is that more of a challenge. But then once it's once it's going along, if you pick up a clip.

Speaker 2  13:10  
Yeah, that's, that's that's, that's absolutely right. The especially when you're building the most profitable way to get more money into their business is to add more properties, right. So once you get to that 1020 3040 property range, but then what happens once you get past the 30 property range, then your return on investment in terms of investing in direct book straight and book direct strategies, it's exponential, because you've got this bit of this depth of property to work with, you're gonna get more clients and more bookings. So every dollar that you spend on the marketing, you're getting a much bigger multiple, in terms of earning from it. So most of the time, you always want to focus on making sure you've got lots of properties coming in, you will be building as the most the fastest way to get profitable. But then in terms of long term, you want to make sure that you've got the branding and book direct strategy sorted.

Annie Holcombe  14:02  
Yeah, my question was actually going backwards, because you talked about in the beginning that you started out with the restaurants. How did you get into the vacation rental short term rental space? Did you were you managing properties and then or how did that evolve?

Speaker 2  14:17  
Yeah, look, that's a really interesting one. So Airbnb and sort of the sharing economy space is something that I've been interested in involved in for many, many, many, many years. Before even doing that the restaurant in the websites side of things. For me, it was more that I am a hospitality type person. I am a traveling type person. I speak four languages I've got you know, I've I've lived in London. I've lived in France. I've lived in Poland. I've lived all over the world. And travel hospitality hotels has always been something that's it's been part of my life. And then from the restaurant side is still hospitality. And you've got hotels got restaurants as well. And then I just saw this need, I saw this demand for having booked direct websites. And there was nothing really, there was no one doing it the way that I would do it. And by that, I mean like us as a company, we know what it takes to go direct booking. We know what the workflow is for someone. And if you're a property manager, when you're running a business, it is not your responsibility to sit there and figure out what should be on a website. That's what we should be doing, because we're experts at it. And I had that skill set, knowing what people are looking for when they're going to book direct. And then how do you translate that into something which is going to appeal to your brand and your business and your website? So that's kind of where I kind of started myself. And it was more of a demand thing. I understood that there was a gap in the market. No one was really tackling direct bookings as I that I thought they should.

Annie Holcombe  15:50  
Very cool. Okay, I just had to know I was trying to draw that try to draw the line for you to get there. But you're right. And I say that quite often to people is that if you have the hospitality gene, it doesn't really matter. Like which sector you're actually in, whether it be restaurants or be hotels, or be vacation rentals, you just got to have it in order to be successful at it and really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2  16:10  
Yeah, yeah, I think I think culturally is around as well, like, our background is Polish. And I remember, one time I was traveling with my dad and my sister we had gone over to, to the border with Russia, as I was maybe 12 years old. And take what was happening as people were traveling over the border to go get vodka and cigarettes and get it in Russia and then bring it back in their car and then fill up the car full of these cigarettes and Vikings are so much cheaper, you can only bring back two bottles, but then find ways to kind of hide and stash all these anyway, because there's so many people trying to do this trip. The queues were huge, right? So we're sitting there in the car for like, 12 hours just sitting there and we start talking to people around us, we've got nothing to do. And then it ends up being that we get over the border, like one or two o'clock in the morning. So we've got no hotel, but nowhere to stay nowhere to go. And there's a couple of people that were doing this trip, and they were maybe in their 20s and they come and stay with us. Okay, so it's my dad and with his two kids, right, like a little bit weird. But anyway, they put us up, made the beds for us. The next morning, full spread of breakfast, like,

Unknown Speaker  17:26  
Oh, wow.

Speaker 2  17:29  
Like, yeah, tomatoes, cut up the hams and the cheeses. And just it was until tomatoes.

Alex Husner  17:33  
I love that.

Speaker 2  17:37  
So so from a hospitality point of view, Polish people were so hospitable, they're like, Well, you're in need. And not only you need, we're not just going to do the basics, we're going to treat you as though you're one of our guests. And that's something that's been very important to me throughout my entire life. And that's how I treat my clients. That's how I treat my communities and the people that I work with is that I will put my best foot forward. And that's why I like the space so much is that you have this opportunity to meet to really change people's lives through your own experience. Yeah, absolutely.

Alex Husner  18:09  
And, and it translates to the technology, right? I mean, the experience that you're able to build throughout your websites and the communications that you coach your clients on how they do the email marketing, and I'm sure pre arrival emails and everything else that's part of that journey. You know, hospitality goes through whether it's physically in person, or whether it's digitally. So that's, that's, that's great. But I want to switch gears here because I know we've got a lot to talk to talk about and unpack. And you are the expert in this. And we've been just, you know, itching to have you on the show. So we can pick your brain. But we want to talk about chat GBT and just want to get your thoughts on, you know, there's a lot of excitement, slash confusion, I think out there and how people within travel are going to be able to utilize it and what it means for SEO, what it means for reservation teams, you know, how you get trained on it. So I'll start from there. And I'll let you kind of dictate where you want to begin with it. But I mean, where where, where do you where do you see this taking the industry, I guess to get started?

Speaker 2  19:14  
Yeah, look. So Chad GPG is what we're talking about right now. And I just for anybody that's watching. I just want you to be aware that, that even if you're watching this in six months time or a year's time, we're seeing chat GBT right now, but it could be a different platform. So we're talking about using AI within our businesses in general. So this is a bit of a catch all because AI is the thing which is or the natural natural language modeling, which is happening right now is what is going to change things for ever. These tools. We're going to be using them every single day in our business in absolutely everything that we do. And the faster you learn about it, the faster you'll be using them and then you'll be using them more effectively. In everything that you do, and the one thing that I think that the most people aren't talking about, they say, Oh, well, we'll do all this work for you, I'll do this for you, we'll do that for you. These tools are all about being a more effective communicator. And what it's doing is it's finding ways for you to write a better email for you to write a better social media post at scale, it's going to do a better response to a review. And it's going to just do a better than what you probably would be able to do it. And the key here is, is that because it's drawing so much data, you as a human being, you cannot scour the entire internet to find all the answers. But this tool can. And then when it's writing its response. It's got all of this information that as a human being and not possible to get, and it's giving you what it thinks is the best solution or the best answer to the question. So what we'll do is, for example, if you were to say, Hey, can you I've got a good one, I've been talking to a bank recently. And then we've been going back and forth. And they've given me a proposal in terms of a resolution. And then I've got a chat TPTs said, Hey, I'm not happy with the resolution, can you please write what you think is good resolution would be, and it just came up with all these ideas that I just didn't have in my mind. And it's communicating back to the bank more effectively. So as a catch all, better communication, more effective communication? And then the question today is, how do we use that initial experimental business?

Annie Holcombe  21:39  
So you, but you still, because we've talked to some other people about this recently. And I'm, I'm very weirded out by the whole thing. It feels like one of those movies we watched in the 80s and 90s, where the robots were going to take over. So it feels like it's happening. But you're not saying use it solely and don't interview like be it's kind of like the dynamic pricing discussion. Like you don't want to set it and forget it, let it do its thing you have to like, be an active participant in what it's giving you and maybe edit it or decide like what's best for your, for your voice, I guess?

Speaker 2  22:09  
Yeah, absolutely. It's just kind of that first step. And I find it like, it's a great, you know, when you're right, you're writing something and you put a blank page, and you don't know where to get started. So you might be starting a blog post, I know, I need to do a blog post about whatever, I just don't know where to get started. And so you use it, and you're cool, great. And you Okay, give me some more ideas about that. So using it for ideas for inspiration. And then you need to go and edit it, put it in your voice, you want to change it. So what you would normally say, and the way that you speak and make sure that it appeals to your audience, because that those intricacies it's not going to pick up it's not going to get because it doesn't understand you that well, in even the most recent versions of these tools coming out are getting better with that. And look, it's only a matter of time before we'll be able to get almost get that word perfect. But we're not quite there yet. So you do need to intervene, you always have to read what's come out and make sure that it's going to be accurate, because it can also take things and haven't completely inaccurate. And then you've posted something up which which which you wouldn't you wouldn't want to do and you're responsible for the things that you post?

Alex Husner  23:20  
Absolutely. Yeah. When do you think is this going to replace original thought leadership writing? I mean, I feel like yes, it can help with ideas, but at the same time, and yes, you can tweak it so that it sounds more like you. But for people that you know, are thought leaders and are writing their own content often. I feel like it's it's, you know, it's kind of you're hijacking the system to be able to use this instead of writing what's coming from, from your own mind, if you were to want to do that, right.

Speaker 2  23:51  
Yeah, and it's a real tricky one. Because I mean, the robots are learning from the other thought leaders by grabbing their ideas and their content and then smashing all back together and then pushing it back out. So it's kind of this circular thing which is happening. So those original ideas it's never gonna be able to do because it just doesn't have them write its sourcing on what's been there in the past. So it is going to impact writing is going to impact everything that we do 100% I think that it's more of a timesaver more than anything else. But I think that in terms of the like, I can tell nowadays when I've read posts, and that one's been written by chat GPT and that one hasn't. And you can tell the difference just because I'm using it that much. But I think that in the long run, unfortunately, I think it's going to really nail a lot of a lot of this kind of stuff. It's a lot of people are gonna find it very, very hard to compete. Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  24:53  
do you do when you get when you get the stuff from chat, GBT like you give them a scenario that you need to write something for it And you just thought you take it and then you edit it, do you give it back to the system to know, so they know what the final result was. So they learn your voice?

Speaker 2  25:08  
Yeah, absolutely. So it's gonna bring up my notes as well, because a few things I want to make sure they don't miss, because I've got some real good value value nuggets for you guys. You, you can do different things. So you can have tone, tone is incredibly important. So happy, you can do sad, you can do enticing, you can use all these different tones that you would want within within your copy. But also you can give it a voice. And by giving a voice, you can say, Write this from the perspective of an expert, write this in their tone of President write it in the tone of a traveler from the 1800s, right or in the tone of someone whose time traveled 100 years back or from 1000 years ago to now you can go to you can get super creative with that, that the the actual the point of view of the person that's actually writing it, which for us gets really exciting. Because when we're writing things, and when we're writing our descriptions for our properties, when we're writing our blog post, if we've got a digital guide that we've left for people, we can now get super creative and not just say, hey, well, these are the top 10 things to do in a local area. These are the top 10 things to do from the perspective of someone that would have been here 100 years ago. And then the voice, the tone, and everything like that will change dramatically. Or you can target your own audience your own avatar and say, Hey, right, from the perspective of why this would be awesome for a couple traveling with a pet. And then and then all of a sudden, it's going to do that part of it for you. So you're going back, you're putting in the tones that you want, and having a conversation with it. And we were doing some mathematical equations, because you can use it to your Excel equations as well. So you know, like when you need to move some data.

Alex Husner  27:14  
Yeah.

Speaker 2  27:16  
Could you could you please write me an equation to summarize this and this? And then if the answer is yes, to copy the field across to another sheet, right? Because you might might have a yes, no. Is this a client of ours? Yes, call, please move to another sheet. So I've got a clean sheet there. And then, as you're going through, and it gives you the equation go I didn't it didn't quite work. And then little respondents say oh, sorry about that. Sorry, that didn't quite work. What is the error message that you got? You know, this is the error message. It goes, Okay, cool. Now try this one. And then you try again, that still didn't work. And it goes, Okay, so where did where did we go wrong? And then you keep on going. And then after five problems, and that's when this is I think this is the equation you were looking for. And like yeah, that's the one. Thank you. It's insane. I've got Yeah, I'm getting goosebumps talking about

Annie Holcombe  28:06  
I don't know that anybody's ever had goose bumps on our show, Alex,

Alex Husner  28:09  
that we know of. I'm sure. Nobody. Everybody so far, I mean, how do you if you're somebody that is new and apprehensive about this? What is what are your best tips for how you jump in and learn to do just go right to chat GBT chatty GPT? Or are there you know, do you watch videos first? What do you do?

Speaker 2  28:36  
Yeah, so a few things. One is, I think at the top, I said, Don't do this chat GPT. Google's just released their own. And there's a lot of people working on multiple formats of this stuff. And there's lots of things going on in the background. So it's going to change incredibly rapidly. So literally, what we're talking about now is going to age a little bit by the tight like, within six months ago, what we're talking about that the biggest thing with this is to try it with different ideas and see what it comes up with and be patient. As about recording date, they just released chat, GBT four, I'm already seeing developers turn around and say, Oh, it doesn't work the way that doesn't do this. It doesn't do that. Yeah. Okay. Wait, ask the right questions, ask and the right way, there's a good chance you'll figure it out, buddy. And then you'll think is the best thing that's ever happened to you. It's the same thing. So you might use this tool to respond to a positive review. So we will get lots of reviews all the time. And we don't have the time to go through and to figure it out what we want to write as a response and we can't be original time because we just don't know what we will. Our brains are limited. So we'll respond to a positive review. Great gives you the right answer. You just get the review posted and say hey, write a really nice, nice response. Conversely, if you get a negative review, those are a lot harder to respond to. Because you've got a motion now, that's your human being, oh god, why don't we wait, they're wrong, they're wrong. They shouldn't, you know, they should have known how to check in, they should have done this, we've got this bias, we've got this emotion that we're going to add to everything, the response that we give them, we can use chat GPT to generate that response. And the first answer you might get might not be the one that you want, because you might find that it's too harsh. He might go, can you please make this a bit more empathetic? And then he goes, Ah, okay, cool. And then it might get it completely wrong and not understand the context of what it's what you've asked it to do. And it will come out with an answer. It's not right. And you might go back and say, Oh, hold on a second, I'm running an Airbnb business. And this is a review that was written by a guest six months ago, you need to give it a bit more context, so constantly improving it. But to answer your question more succinctly, you want to make sure that you start to use the tool on everyday tasks that would normally do so that you get you wrap your head around how it works, what kind of inputs you need to give it, and then you figure out what response it's going to do. And then once you've done it, you see a really working, that's when you can start to bring into more facets of your business.

Alex Husner  31:17  
Interesting. Are you able to do different tones together? So like I'm on Jasper right now. And we've purchased that to use it for the podcast on some things, but haven't really gotten into it too far. But when you can put in your tone of voice? Can you do more than one tone of voice? Or does it just take the first one that you list?

Speaker 2  31:35  
No, it's It's, it's super smart. So it will actually understand if you are using two different ones that if they're contrary to each other, then you might run into issues. But you know, happy and powerful and presidential or whatever, and you put that or put it all together, and then I'll know how to use that. And the one the one tip here is that if you find that the answer is not exactly where you want it to be, then you would you would just say, Hey, you got a bit too far with a happy? We're not We're not that happy. We needed to be a little bit more formal, please. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing for your podcasts, and this is something that I haven't seen Jasper do is emojis. So you can go to chat GPT get your texts ago. Hey, can you put emojis in it? Bang? I'll do the whole thing and a few seconds.

Speaker 4  32:28  
Oh, that's cool. Andrew McConnell will love that. Yeah.

Speaker 2  32:36  
So So yeah, back to that thought leader thing. And the emojis. So So yeah, emojis are a really great one. So you can get it to add those in the other. I'm gonna run through a few tips for people if that's okay with you. Absolutely. But getting data and putting it into tables. So you might say I want to do 30 social media posts on X topic. So 30 social media posts on the best thing to do in my area, okay. And then, and then I'll give you those 30 things. Okay, so now put that into a table and write me. So you've got the ideas first, and then write me 30 social media posts and the second column. In the third column, I want hashtags. In the fourth column, I want the emojis which are associated with that idea. And then I'll just do a table for you with 30 posts. If you're clever, you can then figure out how to get all of that and put it into Canva. And you can import it because a camera will import a CSV, and then you create 30 social media posts. Wow. looks

Alex Husner  33:41  
incredible. Yeah. A bunch of stuff here. There's one more thing.

Annie Holcombe  33:47  
one more tool we have to figure out how to use. Yeah,

Speaker 2  33:49  
the operative thing that I want for you guys to know is an audience is this is the limitations. And what I'm telling you about is based on what my experience is with the tool. When you go out there and you start using it your business unit, oh, why don't we try to do try to get our spreadsheet that we've been struggling with without owner invoices, and wouldn't be great if we just get those invoices and write really nice summary at the end of it. So they don't have to read all the all the numbers and stuff. It just says everything that they need to know, at the bottom of it. And it just had a really nice positive way. And then it does a summary Wow. And you just grab that the role that you gave it, and then you just do it for all your own summaries. Then if you want even more advice to get you build some software around it, and it's done within minutes days, but it's limit. The limit I have right now is my own creativity, my own thoughts and what I'm reading from other people to use this kind of tool. So the table thing is absolutely huge. To put things into tables. I'm doing it all the time. Yeah, but other ones as well. But I'll let you guys jump in.

Alex Husner  34:58  
Yeah, no, I love that. Because so how does this apply to and I've had this debate with several people, but I want to get your take on it, especially since you're big into direct bookings. But how does this apply to the future of SEO? In the marketing world?

Speaker 2  35:13  
Yeah, you can, there's the different people thinking of it in different ways. So I've had countless people turn around and say, Ah, you're gonna get penalized for using tools like GBT or AI to generate your content? I've been told that, you know, if you use these tools for Airbnb, that they're going to penalize you and D rank you because you're using AI for it. My take on it? And I, first of all, I don't have the answer. I don't know what Google is going to do with this stuff. I don't know what, what, what Airbnb is going to do. But from my point of view, these platforms are desperate for really great quality content that people are looking for. They're looking for if my question, and this is answering the question, so I'm looking for accommodation, I need to provide you with the best accommodation with the best description, the best titles and everything like that. It happens to be AI, which is providing the best quality content, in my view, so be it right like that's, that's just the way that it is to answer the SEO thing, 100%, it's going to change things dramatically, because it would just get better. I don't think it's going to make that much of a dent into the way everything works. Because it just it just means that people that didn't have great site titles will now have good site titles. If you already knew how to write a good site title, you would have it anyway. And now it's just a volume play. So if you've got all those images, and you need to get descriptions of what's on the images, now they've got a new tool, which will do that for you. So then you just yeah, that's huge, right? Yeah. That's right, because we just don't do it, because it's just boring work right now. Here's a table.

Alex Husner  36:58  
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2  37:00  
Yeah, read table. So that kind of stuff, it will change. But the next part of this, which is for another podcast episode is that we search for things is going to change, because we're not googling as much as we used to, we were using our home devices, were getting our information from Instagram, from Facebook, from LinkedIn. So we're not actually physically on Google as much as it used to be. So that whole dynamic will start to change in the future.

Annie Holcombe  37:30  
I don't even know what like said, I'm just so overwhelmed by the fact that this can do spreadsheets now. Like my head is just spinning. I had no idea. So you know, so your average, we've talked a mark from Bruce Lee, and he talks about like his his customers and and where he starts out? Do you work with just the like someone starting out, like with one unit? Or do you have large, you know, large organizations, you're just everything in between in terms of people that are in in vacation? Rentals?

Speaker 2  37:58  
Yeah, fantastic question. So when you start your short term rental business, then you're kind of in a bit of a tricky place, because you've got no revenue coming in, and you're trying to get more property, you're trying to do all these different things at once, as I talked about before, you know, book Direct Website, should I be focusing on now, when we're talking to a client that's got between one and 10 properties, then the conversation is always where are you going to next? And what do you plan for the business? And then generally, people I don't know, I'm just got started, but how can I know where I'm gonna get to? But that's where we help to facilitate that conversation, actually, and that's a little bit of consulting is going, Hey, all right, you're going to need to focus on this, focus on that, and then get yourself to the right scale. And then they'll come back to us and say, All right, we've got to there. At the at the outset, you need a very strong brand. And you want to create the infrastructure with your book Direct website to get yourself going. Then with the clients that we work with, generally when you get to certain scale, where we're actually looking at kind of sub brands, because if you put it smashed all together, you try to create an OTA kind of experience, you need massive scale, like pasado to make it work. Or you just you need to be an expert in just Florida. So everybody knows, those are the Florida short term rentals. So there's a massive amount of strategy in terms of how we build the websites. And we can go I mean, our biggest clients, right about three 400 properties. So we can go kind of to that scale, if we're looking at enterprise. So 1000 FOSS is not something that we haven't played around with too much yet. We can add lots of value, but we don't actually build the end solution because it has to be so well integrated with the PMS.

Annie Holcombe  39:36  
Yeah. So how do you the person that starting out so they've got 10 units? The one that things that Alex and I talked about and we really stress is that you have to protect it you to build your brand you have to be present to have that brand recognize, but so many people have given themselves over to Airbnb, and they call themselves Airbnb. And so we had this you know, hashtag that kind of went viral last year not you know, We're not Airbnb, but that people get so dependent on a channel, whether it be Airbnb or whatever, that they don't know how to pull away from it and start to build their brand like that it becomes a dangerous, like, PAMPs it's almost like an addiction. And really, yeah, really they don't, and they don't know what to do. So how do you how do you work with people, because I think it's those people in that 10 range that seem to be the ones that get the most addicted, but then it's like, once you're addicted, you get to 20, you go to 30, you go to 40, you get to 50. And all of a sudden, you're so you're so deep into it, walking away from it seems like, like, you know, just giving away the keys, you know, it's just it seems impossible, it seems

Speaker 2  40:38  
impossible is the is the operating thing, because I know a property managers who have done exactly what you've said, they bought 200 properties, 300 parties and 500 properties, these three individual clients and different areas. And they've had exactly this problem. And it gets very, very difficult, especially if you're in a very competitive market, where you're competing with all the OTAs, you might be in a city, right, and then a city, there's 1000, different options of hotels and, and short term rentals and places that you can actually stay to building out that brand. There's there's two sides, but one is that you want to make sure that it's strong, and it works, you can get SEO, but the SEO doesn't really work because everyone's competing with you. And there's a hotel chain, which is just got a budget, which is just gonna blow you out of the water. And that's the hotel chains. But then you're also talking about the OTAs as well, right? So that how the hotels did it, they started to build loyalty programs, right? I'm gonna go straight back to them. So that's, that's like a super advanced thing. And then and then anywhere from food. So to answer your question, if you're smaller, how do you start to do it, your communication with your guests is the number one thing and then number one, absolutely

Speaker 2  41:52  
great experiences, great experiences, great experience to stop thinking about money, something about everything else did they have a great time, if they had a great time, they're gonna come back to you because they know you. And they can use individual because Alex was awesome. Yeah. Or they're going to know you because your brand is awesome, because you've got things that make you stand out, because you have got some, some sort of treats that you give them with your brand, although they are cool, and they start to associate that brand with a good experience and a good time. And there are lots of businesses that have built out this brand. And for you, you need to think about at the very start and start to get that brand in there. And your emails and your SMS messages and your digital guide are all things are tied together to create that brand, which is going to stick in people's minds. And that's how you get yourself more protected from the OTAs. Because what happens is that as the OTAs grow their interest is to, to their shareholders, right? That's what they respond to, not necessarily to where your business is your struggles, your pains, your growth. And if you become not profitable for them, then the business case for them should be to not work with you or to not help you out because they have to follow the profit. That's just more of a bigger thing. But customers, customers customers, get them get them to love you get them to love what you're doing.

Alex Husner  43:20  
Yeah, I think the communication is so key to that. And is really, it's you know, some people probably look at it as, it's not really that big of a thing. I mean, what your email, Caden says when when you confirm a reservation, and what the pre arrival emails are, and the post day, and I mean, really, you can transform how somebody's experience is with you by how you how you speak to them. And I think there's so much that can be done in that that is actually somewhat normally the more of the lower hanging fruit really, that is, you know, people just jump straight to Well, I need to leave a bottle of wine in the property, or I need to do this and do that. That's, that's, that's, you know, that's an excess. I think that's great to do that. But at the same time, you can build an experience by just doing some of the basic things too. And, you know, we I've definitely seen that in my career that really just making sure that your brand is wrapped around that messaging strategy, and really mapping it out. I mean, truly mapping it out from very beginning to the end of a guest journey. And looking at those phases as you move through them. There's a lot of potential there. So I'm glad that you brought that up.

Speaker 2  44:27  
So in our business, we've got lots of different email chains that we use for potential clients. We've got one so we've got a Facebook group, and then when they joined the group, you said you want a free review of your of your website and your business that Yeah, great. And then what happens is they go into an email chain and we send them emails on the first day, second day, third day, fifth day, one week, one month, six months, 12 months, just saying Hey, you okay, that sort of thing. And those emails, they were written by me because I did them years ago when we first started, and I got all those emails recently. You know, it's one of those things I now I need to get back to them and work on them and have a look at them and improve them because things have changed, grab them or pop them into chat. GPT said, hey, just make these better. That was the. And then and then all of a sudden was way better. I was like, How come? It's, it's because I filled in holes that I didn't see. I just didn't see them because I'm a human being. And I wrote it myself. So I thought it was perfect. But it's not perfect. Here's what I think. So then we rewrote over email. So Alex, you're 100%? Right, that communication and all those different points is important. And I think the other thing that gets missed out on is the communication in the property. The guide that, you know, how, what are they reading? What are they seeing? And beyond just the layout, and they're sleeping or whatever? Are we actually communicating our brand in an effective way? A good example is when you check into a hotel, generally, the first thing is you see the screen and now your name on it. Oh, hi. Yeah. Similar type of stuff that you need to do, which creates that loyalty between you and the customer?

Alex Husner  46:03  
Yeah, yeah. Creating the loyalty and making it feel personalized and making it easy for them. One of the things that I love that we do at Costco, we have these QR codes that are branded as Costco within our properties. So anything that has, or can cause a guest confusion, how to turn the hot tub on, or how to use the Wi Fi, or even how to use a TV remote, we put these little QR codes with it, that goes to a video of us explaining how to use it. And you know that that cuts down on service calls, which is one less communication, they're not having to call us. But it's, I've been a game changer. I mean, that's so much easier for somebody to be able to easily figure out how to do something on their own, but also know that you're there, you're there with them, you know, so whether you do something like that, or you have, you know, in property devices, or if it's within the app that you use, just being able to provide that information so that it's easy for guests to find, because the last thing they want to do when they gotta make get on vacation is have to sit and think and wonder, how do I do this? If I call, I'm gonna have to wait forever in line, you know, it's a busy day, nobody's going to answer my call. So just making information available within the unit is also a great, great tip.

Speaker 2  47:18  
Yeah, I love that. And I feel that. So that was something that kind of would have been done like this over probably the last year, a little over a year and a half or whatever. Or maybe they're way ahead of the curve. But that's that opportunity where once you start to do it, then you start to unpack it more and say, how do we make these videos even better, rather than just being about the remote, but it's like now how do we make them funny had opened our brand into it? How do we create that, that extra the magic sprinkle onto the experience to really make you stand stand out and shine? So yeah, 100 like each of those times, Alex, you've got that opportunity to talk to your to your guests. So how do we do that in a really good way?

Alex Husner  47:59  
Yeah, yeah,

Annie Holcombe  48:00  
we've been talking to and I'm sure you've seen her on LinkedIn, Lauren maidwell. From antebellum. She's in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and she did some stuff like that. But she she didn't, because she knew she knew her avatar, she knew it was families and not 10 times they had kids. So she's made all these videos, very fun. She's dressed in a bear suit, like the comedy of it there. And so like she was talking about, like she communicates to the guests before they even arrive. So they don't have any questions because she's told them what the check in procedure is. She even tells them before they leave with the checkout procedures, but in a really fun way. So like the kids want to watch it, the kids want to know, like, well, how can I help with a bear said, I need to take the garbage out. So I'm going to take the garbage out. So you know, like being creative is great. And I think you know, to your point about like using you going back and redoing your emails, it's like you have to iterate over time, because the way you speak to customers, it changes. I mean, it used to be 10 years ago, you would never have put a QR code in the room and not send a person to the room. That just wouldn't have been acceptable. But now, you know, I think COVID advanced that movement of like, it's okay, I don't have to see somebody the whole time, which I think from the hotel perspective, they probably didn't like that very much because they thought their game, you know, the way they win the game was like we have people we can send all these people to solve these problems. But the technology is faster and advances faster and,

Alex Husner  49:14  
and workforce to Yeah, I

Annie Holcombe  49:17  
mean, it's problem.

Alex Husner  49:19  
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of great things that technology has done for sure. Yeah,

Speaker 2  49:25  
whenever you're thinking about these things, always think about the experience and we can we can bring in these tools we can bring these different things, but is it making it better for people? Or is it creating a little little bit more friction? So always put yourself in their shoes, it is essentially nice. Is this a good experience? Or is this you know, we're being a bit cheap here by not having someone there or or that sort of thing? How do we make it special and how do we make it feel amazing because people are so excited for their trips are so excited to check in so you can leverage leverage that. Yeah, I just wanted to tie that up.

Annie Holcombe  49:59  
Yeah, great. entry point. We appreciate you coming in. And I guess getting up really early in Australia to talk with us. And hopefully it will. Will we see you at any conferences in the US this year? We talked about probably for sure international write your permit? Yeah,

Speaker 2  50:14  
so definitely be if there's a few little ideas that I have right now just depends on my schedule, I might make it over for the Northwest vacation rental managers.

Alex Husner  50:27  
That'd be so great. Because we're gonna be there. Yeah. We're really excited.

Annie Holcombe  50:32  
Yeah, so yeah, I think there's a lot and one of the things that I think we've talked about, as Alex and I kind of the underlying mission of why we're doing this is we wanted to tell stories, but we wanted to educate. And what we found is, so many of our listeners are actually people who have just started in the business or want to get into the business, I've been inundated as of late, because I'm hiring at work. And so there's a lot of people that are trying to reach out to me, but a lot of them are realtors and people who don't know much about the industry, but they want to learn. And so they've said in, you know, they came across our podcast, and they really appreciate the education. So I think what you just provided was a really great, you know, great insight on a tool that, you know, again, I'm a little freaked out by it, I'm open to trying it for sure. But we need to continue to present these options for operators so that they can build their brand and drive their bookings directly instead of using channels and being beholden to one channel.

Speaker 2  51:23  
So we did. On that we did an event that I was thinking about in November, December, we launched it in January, where we did a five day challenge to get people up to speed with AI. And we found that people during that challenge by day two, they were going through and changing their descriptions and titles. And we had people coming back saying, oh my god, I got three Book Three bookings overnight on that. Wow, wow. So, so if anyone is interested in that I booked online, I booked dot online for slash AI. And then you can follow that and maybe ask for the link in the show notes. And then you'll be able to get access to that five day challenge to get yourself up to speed. And the last thing I really want to encourage everyone, if you're listening to this, and you think oh, this is great, this is great. If you're running a business with any kind of team, they need to be using this. It'll save you so much time, so much effort. All of our team has been trained on this. They write customer emails with the help of these tools. So make sure that you get yourself just get yourself trained up spend a little bit of time on it, the payoff is huge.

Alex Husner  52:30  
Yeah. Great. Well, we love that. And Bart, if anybody wants to get in touch with you that they want to hear more about how to learn chat, GBT or about other book direct strategies, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?

Speaker 2  52:43  
Yeah, so look, follow the accommodation show. Great podcast with lots of great guests. I booked dot online for such AI for all the ai ai stuff. Or if you want a website, just drop the AI and it's iBooks dot online, you can always reach out to me, I'm everywhere. Instagram, Facebook, email me, it doesn't really matter. I'm very contactable or, or if it's more appropriate, I'll put you into on onto one of my team who are experts as well.

Alex Husner  53:11  
So thank you so much again, for coming on today. If anybody wants to contact me now you can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com. And if you're enjoying the show, we'd love to hear from you. If you can leave us a review. Wherever you listen to your podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. But until next time, thanks for tuning in everybody. Thanks. You guys are

Bart Sobies  53:30  
awesome. Thank you