How Beyond is Redefining Revenue Management for Property Managers — with CEO, Julie Brinkman

Alex Husner  1:14  
Welcome to Alex and Annie: The Real Women of Vacation Rentals. I'm Alex 

Annie Holcombe 1:17

and I'm Annie, 

Alex Husner 1:19

and we are joined today with Julie Brinkman, who is the CEO of beyond, Julie, so good to have you here with us today.

Julie Brinkman  1:45  
Oh, thank you, ladies, so much for having me on I'm so excited to be here. 

Annie Holcombe  1:48  
We're excited. We've been wanting to have you for a very long time, so it's finally. We're just grateful that you had the time to do this, because we know you are a busy woman being a CEO in today's world, but we'd love to hear a little bit about your backstory and how you got to beyond?

Julie Brinkman  2:02  
Yeah, no. And I again, appreciate you all having me on. I've been huge fans from afar, watching all the incredible conversations you've been having, both about vacation rentals, about women in business. So thank you so much again. You know, I think there's like the path you're on, and then when you look back, you're like, Oh, here's my story, you know, speaking of before, when we were just catching up, my 13 year old daughter, who keeps me really honest, I actually grew up in a house where my mom and dad split up when I was about 13, and she had an associates degree, aka, didn't have a bachelor degree, and actually worked for him pretty quickly. We learned she had to go back to school, get her bachelor's and then became a lawyer. And this was all during my formative teenage years. And so when I was growing up, watching her kind of go back all the way back to the beginning and start again and earn her own living, I think that was really impactful for me. And so when I was, you know, growing up like I wanted to make sure that I was always had my independence and always was able to this long story, I think, control my own journey. So that led me to work really, really hard in school, which gave me the opportunity to go to business school, and then I also wanted to be out on my own and living in a city. And so, you know, all these little micro decisions led me to the place where I am now. I loved to work with small businesses, and so I thought this cool new tech company called Groupon would be appealing. So I started working there, you know, learned a lot about local businesses, and then got the startup bug, worked for an HR tech here in Chicago, and then got the opportunity to be the COO at beyond through a friend of a friend. Actually, I really this was a completely new venture for me. From my experience as a guest, I had only ever been a guest of an Airbnb, so I didn't really have a good understanding that there's whole sophisticated, professional industry behind vacation rentals, and so once I started to learn more about the industry and about what beyond brought to the table. It just really hit the bug between my love for travel, my love for small business, and then also my love of technology and data. So that's a long story short, into how I got to be here with this title. That's great, and

Alex Husner  4:18  
I mean, not even really a long story, because I think that's in between all those little micro stories, there's probably a lot of things that added up throughout the years that you know got you to where you are now, besides just the main things, right? So, but that's that's interesting, though, and yeah, I mean, for somebody coming into a role like what you have, what you had, and what you have now, without really knowing the industry like it had to have been a little overwhelming. I would think, I mean, you know, tell us maybe a little bit about, how did you navigate that and start learning about beyond what you knew from the position of what you do in that position, how do you apply it to this industry?

Julie Brinkman  4:58  
Yeah, I mean, I think it would. Good about what you don't know. What you don't know is you don't know it, if that you have no idea how, like blissfully ignorant you are. And I started my first day was March, 2, 2020,

Alex Husner  5:15  
Oh, wow. Oh,

Annie Holcombe  5:18  
perfect timing.

Julie Brinkman  5:21  
Yeah. So I'm in our San Francisco office. It's our customer advisory board. People are like, Have you heard of this COVID? You know, people are talking about COVID. It was sort of in the news. But fast forward, nine days later, the entire world is shut down. You know, we do a lot of the way that we book revenue is we, we book revenue when a vacation is booked. You know, who books a lot of vacations in, like, the beginning of the year, everyone. And so what happened is, as soon as all of the cancelations happen, our company completely went from one story to the other. I couldn't even, I think, let it sink in that I was in a new industry, and I just had to deal with sort of the crisis at hand, which now, looking back, what I liken it to is being at the edge of a cliff and there being clouds. And you don't know if there's a trampoline or an abyss under the clouds, it was just like we're jumping. I, you know, I don't know what's going to happen, but, you know, I'm sure everyone has their stories from back in those days and how uncertain everything was. And I think through just getting through that period, you know that that first six weeks moves literally crickets, and then we just started to see things coming back to life, you know, around Memorial Day, going through that with the team and with our customers, created a shared experience. And so we knew, you know what it was like. They didn't have revenue coming in the door. We didn't have revenue coming in the door. Everybody was nervous, and we were just trying to help each other out. Hey, what do you see in the market? What are you hearing? Who's going where? I think that also gave me an appreciation for how very you know, this industry is unique in so far as people care about each other and try to look out for each other, and hey, we're all this is working toward a greater good, if, if this is all the market we participate in, versus, you know, the HR tech I started, or I was at before, we focused on auto dealers. It's a much different world in auto dealerships than it is in, like, vacation rentals. Yeah.

Annie Holcombe  7:23  
So go back to I'm very curious, because we've talked to a lot of people about their experience. You know, I was actually on vacation in Colorado when the lockdown happened. So we were like, there had been there a couple of days enjoying it, and then all of a sudden we're hearing that it's happening, and then they're like, oh yeah. At midnight, sun, everything shuts down. We woke up the next day and it was like, literally, crickets all over steam, where the area we were in Keystone, and trying to get flights back and all that stuff and but I so I was, I was removed from work for those, like, first few days, because I was on on vacation. But we, we've talked to everybody about, like, how we all felt, like, for the industry, it was, it was just a rocket fuel for where we ended up going. I mean, the next two years were just, like, anybody could just, you know, name your price, do it. So it was great. But what was that? What was that initial few weeks or few days like for you guys to say, like, okay, like, because you're you're really, truly out of control at this point, because you can't control cancelations, you can't control how a property manager is going to react. All you kind of have to do is, like, sit there and almost wait. But that's, you know, and that's not a way to run a business. Like, what was your initial thought, and how did you guys approach supporting your partners?

Julie Brinkman  8:28  
Yeah, it was. It was wild. I think what was true also, if I put myself back and I cannot believe you were all the way in Colorado and you had to get home, I actually drove

Annie Holcombe  8:41  
or what. No, we got a flight. We were the last, like, two days of flights getting out of there, but, yeah, we got out. Wow, I think because

Julie Brinkman  8:48  
it was, we were all experiencing it together. I mean, as a company, you know, it was pretty rough. It's almost like when you're driving a car and then you just throw it in reverse, you can just feel, you know, like, okay, everything just broke. You know, all of the of the cash that we had pulled in, we refund it. All went out the door. Cancelations were like this. Bookings were like this. We created internal dashboards. We had a meeting every morning to check in customer our you know, account managers were getting when they could get a hold of customers, it was people were so afraid, and all we ended up really doing was trying to just take care of each other emotionally. Hey, like, I know you're scared. I'm scared too. I mean, not to mention the fact that kids were home from school. So it was just everyone was trying to also deal with the humanity and, like, the personhood of it, in addition to kind of balancing the business needs. And I think that that, like, sort of shared experience is what made it, I think, increased empathy level and increased people's ability to sort of weather the storm, for lack of a better term, yeah. Well,

Alex Husner  9:50  
definitely a very interesting time for you to break into the industry. And it is actually kind of funny though. I think we've had probably at least a dozen people that. Come on the show that either they had just started a business right during COVID, or they had just sold a business, or, like, I mean, they were had, like, really big things that happened right in the month of March. And it's interesting to see, you know, where they've all gone and what they've done since then. But, you know, I definitely, I remember in that time period when, you know, things started opening back up again. And it's like, you know, nobody was used to raising rates that drastically at the at the the 11th Hour, but it's like there was just, you know, prices were just absolutely insane. And if you didn't have a rate tool or a way to see what the market was doing, like you were either leaving tons of money on the table or, I mean, just just not getting, not getting the bookings at all because you're priced in the other direction. But I'm sure you guys grew a lot during that time period. Did you end up increasing customers a lot during that same year?

Julie Brinkman  10:50  
Yeah. I mean, it was, it was wild. I you know, what we saw was people so as soon as, you know, as soon as people could travel again, calendars filled up almost overnight. And so you couldn't, I mean, you couldn't move rates fast enough for the computer effectively to understand. I remember also at this point we were, we had just started to open up into Europe, and this was also when we started getting requests for like, maximum prices, because our algorithm would basically push it. And they were like, this is just too much. So how we want, actually, a ceiling on prices. We don't hear that request, actually very much. I

Annie Holcombe  11:28  
know 3838 never turned down the capital. Yeah,

Julie Brinkman  11:34  
yeah. Not a lot of 13 bedrooms in in like, you know, the Cotswolds. But it was, you know, it was a massive not only rocket fuel for our revenue growth, but our customer acquisition and our customers grew, right? There was a ton of supply that came on the market. Money was still pretty cheap, relatively speaking. So you could get a mortgage and you could people were investing in second homes, left and right. And so there was this incredible just like growth all around us, which was, you know, really fun to be a part of and and frankly, was what I wanted to join when I came on to beyond. Was I love growth. I love finding new ways to grow. I love building and helping people find those paths. And so it was, while tough, you know, and gray hair inducing it. It's been really, really fun. So

Annie Holcombe  12:23  
fast forward out of COVID. You've seen great growth. So in that time since then, I mean, I think the world's kind of, we've gotten over COVID, although it's still that thing that happened that, like, was, you know, the shut off and restart of the business. Because, you know, you talk about, like, from data, you really can't go back to data pre COVID. You can't go to data during COVID Like, so it's all like we're restarting and looking forward like. So what do you look at as the things that you've accomplished post COVID that you're most proud of? I think

Julie Brinkman  12:51  
what I feel most proud about is this team. So we went from, you know, two offices where people were mostly in the office in San Francisco and in Lisbon. And I think we're like, 40 or 50 people. We're now close to 200 we have, while we have four office spaces, we've, you know, we operate in like, I think we have people in 30 countries. And what we've been able to really do is take our culture and expand it and bring people on who operate and treat our customers the way that we started treating. You know, we that sort of is in alignment with our spirit. We have our core values, and so that I think I feel most proud about is that we haven't lost who we are as a company, and is the way that we the standards that we hold and what we say will be true, becomes true. I think that has been the most satisfying. In addition to, you know, growing Europe, launching new products, building the team, all of those, I think things you maybe find on a resume, I think, like the spirit is what really keeps me going.

Annie Holcombe  13:57  
I love that. I love that. And whenever I think leaders concentrate on the people rather than the product. The product will come with the people. You know, it kind of works itself out, but it's really, it's refreshing to hear, because I think there's sometimes, there's just too many businesses that it is really a singular focus of we have to grow to this level before we can deem ourselves successful. But it's like, if you have a happy team, they're going to have happy customers, and then you're going to have happy customers who want product that you can build, and it all kind of feeds into itself. So that's really good. Yeah,

Julie Brinkman  14:27  
you should tell investors that,

Annie Holcombe  14:30  
bring me to an investor pitch. I don't know that. I don't know that they'll listen to me. I don't have any money, so not doing well.

Julie Brinkman  14:40  
Tell us whoever has an opinion. Yeah, right,

Alex Husner  14:42  
yeah. Hopefully listen to people that know the industry at least. But yeah, I mean, talking about the people though. I mean, obviously, you know, as CEO of the business, you're interacting, I'm sure, with a huge, wide range of customers, from different size companies and managers to locations and everything else. But. What do you think is the main concern or pain points that beyond solves for for your clients, our

Julie Brinkman  15:07  
core promise is to beat the market. That's what we want you to do. And no matter what the market is doing, I think, as we just talked about, the market could be growing like gangbusters. It could be in a challenge period. You should beat the market and our, you know, our the data that we are able to provide, the automation we're able to provide, and ultimately the time savings we're able to give you all lead to helping you beat the market such that your owners stay with you, add units, keep growing, you know, tell their owner friends, and you're able to grow your business. As I mentioned when I when we just started talking, this is a huge multinational corporations. These people, you know, property managers, built their business one by one by one. And I think that's like, that's something that I always want to stay close to, is people who have built and grown their own businesses. And, you know, that's our passion, is to help people continue to do that and spend time doing what they love, which is like, you know, talking to owners and being in hospitality, not fiddling with dials on the internet. Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  16:08  
yeah, if you had to say, you know, the one thing that I love about the post COVID era is, again, lot of the pricing tools kind of developed around that time. And I had come from Hotel Management before I was in vacation rentals, back in the late 90s. And so we, when I was in property management, when I moved over, we were using a lot of like hotel practices to manage revenue and how we would overbook properties, and, you know, just all the things that hoteliers do. And so it is neat to see, like, some of those practices be made applicable to vacation rentals, but also kind of nuanced for the type of properties that we have. But if looking at the different pricing tools that are out there, what do you think makes beyond stand out against kind of your, you know, your cohort of pricing tools? Yeah,

Julie Brinkman  16:54  
I mean, it's all about the bottom line or the top line, as it were. I think when you compare what beyond is able to do versus manual pricing, or some of the PMs provided offerings out there, or even some of the smaller players. At the end of the day, it's about the revenue that you're able to generate via ADRs, revenue per available night and driving more occupancy. So to me, because of who we are, because of the pioneering nature of our product and our data science, we have to keep that bar really high, and we're constantly investing to make sure that we keep that bar high. So you bring up hotels, for example, I think is a really interesting corollary, because hotels, they have, obviously, dozens or hundreds of rooms where they can test their pricing methodologies. They can test their pricing theories. Not so much with vacation rentals. Usually you have one owner, one listing. And so if you test a pricing theory that fails, you have a either at best, a very angry owner, at worst, a gone owner. And so you know that was the things. Those were the types of things that we were listening to with our customers, where they couldn't test a theory or they would potentially miss an event and they weren't picking up on demand. How could we help with our technology get ahead of that? So, you know, get ahead of sacrificial bookings. And that's where, that's where the technology that we call search powered pricing was born, was we sit there, and we can see both searches and quotes, so we can anticipate demand. Everybody knows Christmas is Christmas and when it's going to be but people don't know if we'll use like the pretty well trodden example, Taylor Swift announces a concert you don't want to miss that booking. Or, you know, all of a sudden we're in COVID, and now they allow travel calendars get booked, right? You want to be able, you want your prices, to be able to react to the market in real time. And so that was, we've been able to pull from the best practices and airlines and hotels and other hospitality to apply it for vacation rentals. Because it is, you know, it is unique. I mean, after all, like, there's a reason why beyond is here,

Alex Husner  19:05  
yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, thinking back to when beyond first came out, I mean, you guys have grown so much since then. And it seems like, you know, these markets where you do have, you know, a good amount of inventory that you're working with there, that you've just, you've really developed that algorithm to, like, truly know each of the markets. I mean, I think that's kind of the big opportunity, really is, like what you said, it's not ever missing an opportunity knowing what you know about the market as the property manager specialist in that area, but these other things that can happen that you might not be watching. You know, the Taylor Swift concert tour series announcements every day. But you know, you know, Christmas is a big holiday, but these are these other things that you need to be pulling in and being being mindful of, but maybe talk a little bit about the expansion that that you have had. And I mean, what does that look like geographically now for beyond and in the markets? In the United States, yeah,

Julie Brinkman  20:01  
I mean, in the US, you know. So that's a really, you know, interesting point. And I, I will, I'm sure my revenue management and data team will love to hear that they they know the markets as well as our customers, because our customers truly are experts, and most of the ideas that we get to pull into our algorithm came from the local markets. Came From Revenue managers. Hey, this is what I'm doing, but I can't do it at scale. I can't do this for dozens or hundreds of properties. One thing we just actually released is called Off Peak event pricing. And so this is maybe too in the weeds, but you know where the day after an event, it's harder to sell that day if it's still open. So let's say Thanksgiving is a classic example. You sell Thanksgiving that Friday becomes really hard to book if it if it hasn't booked already, but it looks like it's attached to Thanksgiving. And so the price might stay high, but you, as a revenue manager, know you got to keep that you got to drop that price if you're going to sell it. So those are the things that we've been able to pull out of our customers across, I mean, the hundreds of markets that we're in, in the US, we've hand launched each one of them. So we are in all 50 states. You know, I think I'd have to get from our data team, you know, how many hundreds of cities, you know, hundreds of 1000s of listings in the US alone. And then, like I mentioned, have been able to expand to Europe with an on the ground presence, and then also globally into Latin America and Asia. We're seeing we're seeing some interesting things happen there as well that have been exciting. We'll be

Annie Holcombe  23:21  
like to ask you just my day job, I work at a channel manager, and so I've had the the really great fortune to be able to work and look at international business, international numbers, and really try to my company is based in Netherlands. So like, their footprint is very European. They're a Dutch company, so they have a lot of they have a lot of understanding of all the markets within Europe. And so I always try to think about it as, like, what if Alabama was another country and, like, it had a totally different tax bracket, or taxing which they do. But, I mean, it's just like, the borders and that there's some differentiators there. But I'm always interested to bring challenges that we have in the US to them, and they're like, why do you guys do that? Like, that's so complex, and I think it just as Americans, we like to make things as complex as possible, to be unique or whatever. But what do you see in terms of so going from managing inventory in the US versus managing inventory in Europe, like, is there, is there a lot of differences that you see with how property managers either engage or use the tool than you do within the US, yes.

Julie Brinkman  24:23  
And I think in the US, Alabama is going to be completely different, yeah, yeah. It'll is going to be, you know. And so we mostly speak the same language in this country, which makes things easier. The Multi Language facets in Europe make it very hard. So there's we Funny story, maybe not funny, but like our we let a effectively, AI translate our website into Portuguese before any human saw it, and it was like our career site. And so it translated be. Beyond into the Portuguese word for basically heaven. So come join us to work at beyond. Come to beyond, to work

Annie Holcombe  25:07  
in heaven. Like a high bar to set.

Julie Brinkman  25:15  
These are all like the little challenges that little you

Annie Holcombe  25:18  
don't think about, right? Yeah, about no. And

Julie Brinkman  25:22  
so it's up, you know, Portuguese team members, like, hey, it's basically saying, like, come join this call. Or like, you know, and we're like, Oh my gosh. But, you know, I think, like, that's part of growth too, is like, you get to fail a little bit. You get to test things and be wrong, and then talk about it with you all and have a laugh, you know. And there have been some things where we've, you know, we've learned by doing, and we have very, you know, we have customers that are into risk, and so we can try out new features, things that we want to try with them, because they love to give feedback and get early access. And then you have other customers that are like, No, I just want everything that's super, super tested and super proven. So that's been just kind of also fun to see the differences, not only just within the US, but also also in the different countries in Europe.

Alex Husner  26:11  
Yeah, for sure, no, in the last few years, I guess since during the podcast, but then also for me, the last year, working with a couple of technology providers in the space just, you know, learning international business. I never had really thought I would be working with so many people overseas, but it's a good amount of people I deal with on a daily basis now. But and certainly in in the podcast, we've had people from all over the world come on the show and meet with us, and we've had some of our own faux pas in saying the wrong the wrong thing, we learned with Italian people not to talk about the mafia, but

Annie Holcombe  26:47  
they don't have the same sense of humor about it that we do.

Julie Brinkman  26:53  
Play love and you learn, you know, yeah,

Alex Husner  26:54  
especially in our industry too. Because I feel like you know, our industry is such an open and inviting forgiving work, yeah, forgiving. Thank God. It just makes it very colorful. What we do because it, you know, everyone does it a little bit differently, and you have to kind of learn how to market differently and how to service customers differently. I mean, definitely, definitely a challenge

Julie Brinkman  27:17  
it is, yeah, you know, but it's global, and it's wild that vacation rentals, and even the term vacation rentals, right? Like, are you a short lead agency? Are you a church or metal? Like, we

Annie Holcombe  27:28  
call it all different. So many different. Yeah, so many names for,

Julie Brinkman  27:31  
I mean, there's the STAA and STAA and, you know, there's all these. But at the end of the day, it is ubiquitous. People wanting a different choice than hotels, and wanting that the experience of the local culture, and you know what it what it's like to be embedded and so I think that's, you know, it's kind of cool to have that global language shared amongst us. Yeah, I also

Annie Holcombe  27:53  
find it interesting, and I think we're seeing it now. We saw it, obviously, with COVID, but I think we're seeing a little bit of it now. Is that how the politics and various things that happen don't just affect where you are, like they're not just affecting the US, or not just affecting like, you know, I work with people from Ukraine, so, like, talk with them about their situation all the time. But I I think that it's like we are this big world, but it's even in vacation rentals or just in hospitality in general. But I think you can drill it down to our specific world of vacation rentals is such a small community. It's very small knit like we are affected by each other's actions, country to country. And I think, like from, you know, from a pricing tool, from beyond perspective, you probably are seeing that impact on a larger scale. And what you know, we're talking to partners and hearing it in various things. But really looking at it overall, like the grants, you know, that 30,000 foot of what the globe looks like currently in various hot spots or low spots, or whatever you want to call them, like things that are happening. I mean, it must be, sometimes you just look at it and go, Okay, we just need to breathe, like, it's going to be okay, you know? So I would say, like, you know, I'm talking to partners right now, and there's definitely a lot of people that are concerned about relationships with Canada and how that's impacting, and Canadians aren't coming to the US, and maybe they're going to go to Mexico instead of coming here. And there's a lot of different thoughts on that. How do you coach, or how is your team coaching partners to, you know, not be not panic, because I think the first thing is, like some people like, oh God, got a race to the bottom. Make sure I sell out. You don't want to do that, but to kind of hold the line and be steady and have that confidence that it's like we've been this too shall pass, you know, it's almost like you are like a counselor, you know,

Julie Brinkman  29:28  
right? And I mean, I think that's, you know, I think the the experience that our property management clients and hosts have, and especially, especially the more experienced ones who have that history and know that there's ups and downs, and I think, you know, they're able to have that perspective. Hey, this has been a market that there was some heyday in the 2021 2022 time, things got a little corrected. In 23 and 24 things are looking a lot better. So we should, you know, we should. Make it for what it is, and we should also make sure that we aren't driving prices to the bottom right. I think a lot of the trends that you saw in maybe the past couple years was capitalization on like last minute discounts. For example, you that you keep rates high, and then you you write it, write it down to a very cheap price with a short lead time that doesn't help anyone. That doesn't help us as an industry grow. You know, it sort of cheapens the product. I think, when you have a more rational approach to keeping your prices and the expectation in line with the value that's being delivered, and we all sort of like have that shared understanding the industry, and we, we get to, sort of like, grow all together, you know, and then I think there's, there's also just, we're all this together. We're a short term rental industry globally. And, you know, I have the fortunate ability to sort of see the global perspective with with beyond regulations happen in all these different municipalities and all these different locations. And there it's, it is a global challenge. And we as a, you know, we as an industry, could do more to have a more unified response to the fact that short term rentals create economies. They help people grow. They are small businesses. You know, this isn't, this isn't a black or white. It's only taking affordable housing or helping people get richer, you know, it's or helping investors. I think like that for us, we could, we could probably do more, I think, to be more unified in how we are responding, or what we point to as showing that short term rentals help local economies and help people grow, period.

Alex Husner  31:43  
Yeah, I get that completely. We

Annie Holcombe  31:46  
talk about that a lot with people, about the, you know, the need to bring our voices together. But it's also a education piece. It's like, you know, we have to educate not only the people that are coming into the business, but we also have to educate the municipalities and the people and the politicians and the people that are that are doing this to help them understand, but I think it's, what's, what I love about this industry is, I don't think I've seen it on the hotel side, is that we're about collaboration. And Alex and I always talk about, it's like this co opetition. It's like, you know, your competitors are, yes, they're your competition. But like, together you can, you know, cooperate and collaborate and really create a unified message. And the better we get at that, the better we're going to be able to fight off these regulations. I was talking to a really good friend of ours, Ty and cammon, and she's in Missouri, and she has some properties in the Ozarks and, kind of, in the Branson area, and she's been fighting some regulations, but she actually got a bill in front of the State Senate, and they've passed it partially, and so, like, they're adding some new stuff on it. But she got really, really active. She only had, you know, 1015, units when she started out having this conversation. But she was like, if I don't have a voice in it, and I don't rally the voices in my name, you know, my area, like we're not going to be able to fight this on a bigger scale. So it's kind of almost like a blueprint of how other people could do it. And I, I love the, you know, to your point about like, these are, these are family businesses. This is something that they they have built up from, you know, nothing, to something. And they're, they are vested in making it successful. And I think that's what makes it unique, is that it's not these big investment groups that are leading the charge. It's these family owned businesses and these entrepreneurs that want to get together and say, like, hey, like, we're so much stronger, you know, linked as a chain, than we are trying to fight these individual fires out there. And that's what makes our industry so strong. I think, right, it does.

Julie Brinkman  33:33  
And that's incredible story, that she was able to have as much influence and fortitude just to push through and get you know that Bill sign, and think about all the effort that she had to go through for just that, you know, just her jurisdiction. Sometimes I can observe us potentially trying to point fingers internally as an industry. So, you know, the OTAs, while they charge way too much money, they are what people know as vacation rentals globally. And so how can we make sure they're the ones putting championing the our industry. So, you know, while we are in the boots on the ground, helping with local politics, for people to understand the impact that short term rentals are able to have on their neighborhoods, on their cities,

Annie Holcombe  34:13  
absolutely, absolutely, it takes a village, right?

Alex Husner  34:15  
Yeah, even on the other side, not just the the managers and the people behind, you know, the businesses, the people that are renting vacation rentals too, and the purpose and the reason for why people enjoy this type of accommodations, I think back to vrma, back probably in the, maybe, like mid 2000s I'd say, or like, a bit like, towards the end of the like, 2007 2010 they had done a TV series about, you know, showing guests going to these different destinations and booking vacation rentals, and how this was, you know, girl girlfriends that went to college 30 years ago, and family reunions. And, you know, how beautiful of a thing it really is. And I think back to that time, I just, I wish that that message had been more ample. At that point, I mean, to get the greater vacationing public to understand what vacation rentals are in general, and ahead of any of the bad stuff that came out about our industry during COVID of okay, these actually are a very important part of the travel and accommodation sector of our world, but unfortunately, we didn't get to that point. But now, now's the time, you know, hopefully we can turn that around. And I think if you know, Verma, or any of the other associations, can do something to really put more of a spotlight on the storytelling of both the professional people behind it and the people that are, you know, enjoying the product. It should be a really good thing.

Julie Brinkman  35:37  
Yeah, 100% and I think that, you know, I see the efforts, which of the associations, which is fantastic, and I think, I mean, the, maybe the double edge to that sword is, you know, you're annoying. You know, the hotels, when they start throwing money to try to is working, yeah, you're like, Okay, well, I mean, it's validation in one respect, I suppose. Yeah, yeah.

Annie Holcombe  36:04  
I remember when Hilton came out with their first one, and everybody was like, Oh my gosh, shots fired. Shots fired. And I think it was like, most ever, you know, most of us were like, yeah. I mean, that was pretty bold of them to say, but like, gosh, how much have you know, they didn't even acknowledge we existed five years ago. Now, all of a sudden, it's like they are fighting against us. They want in our space. I mean, every single one of them is stepped, you know, stepped into this into this lane. So it is good. And like you said, I think it is validation of, you know, what we're doing is resonating with travelers, and they like the product, and so why not get all of us together and just, you know, let the customer pick. They're going to choose what they want. You know, at the end of the day, I was curious. Just kind of, one of the things that we talk about with people is, like just asking your thoughts on, you know, what are things that maybe we're not talking about enough in the industry right now? Do you think there's something that maybe we should be focusing more on that from your perspective, especially from the data side of it, do you see something down the road that maybe we're not looking at as much as we should? Oh,

Julie Brinkman  37:09  
that's a really good question. You know, how do we predict the future? I mean, I do think that there is something to the shared experience of us as an industry making sure that we're not fighting against each other, and we're not vilifying each other, and this is we want to make sure that when we're pointing fingers at OTAs, it doesn't help us all grow. I think that that's important. You know, I think maybe I shouldn't say this, but I think to the point on hotels and the regulations, until, I think hotels can figure out how to make money, or Hilton coming out with a product, until they figure out how to make money from short term rentals, they're probably going to continue to try to lobby against it. And so, you know, to the extent we can help them share and what we know to be a really great opportunity. Maybe, maybe there's something there. I think, you know, people wonder if, from my specific focus within the industry with revenue management, if AI is just going to basically eat the world, and rates are going to all change by themselves, and no one will have to do anything. I don't quite see that happening anytime soon. I mean, I don't know if you've asked chatgpt Any questions lately, but it's still got a long way to go, in my opinion. And I think you know there's, there's a lot of nuances to knowing your local market, and a lot of nuances to events and things like that that won't be able to be interpreted and analyzed appropriately. But I think the more that our hosts and property managers can continue to rely on data to help back their decisions so that they are able to focus on what they love, which is hospitality and dealing with owners. I see the folks that are embracing those practices as growing faster, winning more, versus the you know, the folks that are like, Oh, I've always done it this way. I'm sort of stuck in what I know to be true about my market. I think if I were to predict any sort of trend, it would be that the people that are embracing some of the leading edge are have a bit of an, I guess, an advantage.

Alex Husner  39:15  
Yeah, we definitely see that in the markets that we both work with and the clients that we work with. So it's a definitely a very valid point. Yeah,

Julie Brinkman  39:26  
you're taking, like, checks and phone reservations, right?

Alex Husner  39:29  
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Have

Annie Holcombe  39:32  
you been to Mexico lately and see how they operate? Ledger, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. It is amazing that there's still areas of the world where that is, that is the thing, but it gives, it shows you, like the the opportunity that exists outside of our borders. You know,

Julie Brinkman  39:50  
you see ledgers, and then you also, when I was just in Europe, I didn't pull up my wallet one time I was paying with my phone. How many of our vacation rentals can we book with Apple or. Will pay, yeah, you know, like, we still have a lot of fruit to pick from the tree.

Alex Husner  40:04  
Really good points. Well, Julie, where, where are we going to see you this year? As far as conferences? Yeah,

Julie Brinkman  40:11  
I think definitely at international. I actually don't know if I'm going to make it to exec Summit, because my husband and I decided to plan a little getaway that weekend, and I didn't realize it, but you know, when you arrange like

Annie Holcombe  40:25  
that, doing your getaway,

Julie Brinkman  40:28  
we need it, so I'll definitely be there, and I think our team will be at all of the major ones. I know one of our team members is emceeing the VR nation. Yeah, we just, actually,

Annie Holcombe  40:39  
we just talked to Jason

Julie Brinkman  40:44  
short stay, I think is coming up in London, so we'll be there where I can't even keep up. I think we did 56 events

Annie Holcombe  40:51  
last year. There's so many now, yeah, there's

Alex Husner  40:55  
so many. Yeah, overseas, it's like 10 times worse. I thought there was a lot, you know, within the continental US, but my God, there's way more overseas than you could ever possibly go to all of them. Yeah, awesome. Well, look forward to seeing you and the team at some other shows this year, and just it's been a pleasure to get to know you, and of course, also your customers in this in this journey is, you know, we're very grateful for beyond of being a sponsor of the show right now and just getting to meet with your clients and hearing what an impact that you're making, literally on their lives, has been really, really cool.

Julie Brinkman  41:27  
So yeah, thank you. Love to hear that. I appreciate you. Thanks for saying that. Yeah,

Alex Husner  41:31  
absolutely. Well, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, Julie, what's the best way for them to reach out?

Julie Brinkman  41:36  
Oh, Julie, at beyond pricing.com or LinkedIn, easy,

Alex Husner  41:42  
perfect. If anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I you can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com and until next time. Thanks, everybody. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai