It’s About DARM Time: Amy Hinote Previews the Industry’s Biggest Event

Alex Husner  
Welcome to Alex & Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex and I'm Annie, and we are joined today with Amy Hinte, who is the founder of DARM, the data and Revenue Management Conference and the Women's Conference. Amy, so good to see you.

Amy Hinote  
Thank you for having me again. It's good to see you. Both.

Annie Holcombe  
Feel like we haven't seen you in a month of Sundays, but you just told us that you were in Sedona getting your spirituality on in the in the

Amy Hinote  
beautiful universe. My intentions for the conference, like I'm ready,

Alex Husner  
I'll prepare for a conference.

Annie Holcombe  
So we so we brought you on to talk about this year's DARM conference. And it is, I would say, with hands down, the best conference in the industry. It's something that everybody looks forward to. I know that when I was planning the budget out, when I got to next packs this year, DARM wasn't on the radar yet. Hadn't been planned and and it's you keep us all like waiting every year whether or not it's going to happen, but we all know that we have to hold money aside to be able to do it, because it's such a The conference has so much good substance. And just, I love the format that you put together. And so maybe let's start where you know planning it and where you're at, because you were planning it from Sedona. So again, not even right in the in the area where the conference is in sand Dustin this year. But let's recap the planning and where we're at and talk about where we're going to

Amy Hinote  
be. Well, I appreciate you holding out some budget for it. I know what you mean, and I hear that quite a bit. I think after every conference, I'm just like, we're never doing this again before later I was like, Yeah, we are this year. We're doing it in at the sandaston Hilton in Miramar Beach, Florida. So between destin and that 30 a area, and I'm excited about it because it's much more of a vacation rental destination than we've had in the past. I mean, most of we've done Charleston and New Orleans and Nashville and so to kind of get back into kind of what we do and where we do it is going to be super fun. We've added some activities to the first day. So if you're coming in early, we've got some deep sea fishing and golf and pickleball boat tours and some spa activity to choose from. So just some more meaningful network options. And, you know, just a way to to kind of just get to know each other as we go into the show. We've done a lot of planning, like you said, I it kind of grew from an educational standpoint. So I would say hands down, this is by far the most education we've ever offered at a conference, definitely the most meaningful education for enterprise level managers I've ever seen anywhere. We have 90 sessions right now on the agenda. We've got will Cora, who's the author of unreasonable hospitality, closing out the show we have John Suzuki is coming back to help us open it up, and Tim Cafferty is emceeing. Simon Lehman's flying over from Europe and talking about AI. And in their markets, we have revenue management tracks, oh my gosh. And the thing I'm most excited about is the marketing track. This year we went in on marketing, and for those of you who like it, like YouTube, we have four speakers coming from outside the industry in the track, nice. So we have Barry Schwartz, who's the editor of Search Engine Land, and yeah, Dr Marie Haynes, who is the Google expert that everybody's known forever, but so a lot of people do know who she is, but she's really been focused a lot on Gemini and the large language of mine, also what Google's doing there. And, and, you know, Google just had a new update this last week, so we're going to be talking a lot about that. And then Jeff Sauer is coming, and Chris Mercer, they're actually partners, but they were old SMX speakers. So again, from our from our days that we used to actually really live and breathe search, you know, yeah, because some of these people who are still in control, I mean, who really understand what's going on, and they're going to be talking about AdWords, PPC and um, GA four, and analytics. So it is marketing's back,

Unknown Speaker  
yeah, yeah,

Annie Holcombe  
yeah. Well, Verma left it off this year, and that was that stood out like a sore thumb. So good job bringing that in. There was a marketing

Amy Hinote  
track. We're not going to ignore us. Exactly. No,

Annie Holcombe  
there wasn't marketing and not a marketing track. It wasn't a marketing it was very it stood out like a sore thumb in my estimation. But yeah, yeah. Anyway, I

Amy Hinote  
mean, other than that, we're also talking about, we've got VRBO, Airbnb and booking coming to talk about listing optimization and answer some questions about ranking there, which I'm kind of excited about, and then really focused a lot on repeat guest and the value there, and also how revenue management and marketing. Teamworks together, and what kind of marketing leadership is going to look like over the

Alex Husner  
next few years. I love that. I love that. That's one thing that I talk to clients a lot about, but two things actually, I mean, how revenue and marketing should be working together, and then also the marketing leadership. Because you've got companies of all different, you know, sizes, sophistications, and sometimes they have, sometimes they might not have revenue or marketing as part of their team, right? So it's like, sometimes you have outsourced people, sometimes you have in source people. And even in companies that are larger that have that, as in source, in the company personnel, there's normally they don't necessarily coordinate the best, and they don't communicate the best I've been part of that before. So I think more information about how you actually do that in a meaningful way is is really helpful for these managers. Because, you know, there, this is definitely an area that there really is no, no manual on, on how you're supposed to coordinate these teams. And it's, it's, it's an art and a science, for sure, so I'm excited to go to those sessions and see what you've got planned.

Amy Hinote  
I agree. Honestly, I'm, you know, marketing has changed a lot in our industry, but I think it kind of took a backseat, you know, especially as doing during COVID. I mean, marketing was essentially about keeping up, yeah, you know, it was just, you know, demand was high, and, um, the the channels have changed quite a bit. And everyone's channel mix has changed over the last 12 to 18 months, quite a bit. And I believe that, um, there's so much more on a direct level that can be done. Airbnb is having their own issues right now. The CO hosting thing is still worth discussing at some point soon. Verbo has is not delivering in the way they have before. Booking still pretty new for a lot of people. So I Yeah, in fact, is you've gotta have a direct strategy as part of your comprehensive effort. Yeah, but marketing is a profession. It is a, you know, it is a

Alex Husner  
professional. It's not a side job of the office manager. Yeah, that's

Amy Hinote  
exactly right. Or some kid who knows Facebook and right, you know, like, if they and revenue and marketing is huge. I mean, you can change your rates all day long, but if no one ever sees them, right? Yeah, right,

Alex Husner  
yeah, yeah, it's not going to drive the demand. And, you know, one conversation that I get into a lot with companies is, you know, they can come to me and say, you know, we want to get into direct bookings. We really want to put more of an emphasis on it. And at the end of the day, what ends up being the realization for many of them is that it's not, you're not saving money by doing direct bookings. I mean, you're really not. I mean, if you're doing it right, you've got to have the people to operate it. You've you're going to be spending more money on ads. And, I mean, yes, you're spending money spent to the commissions to the OTAs, but it that doesn't necessarily mean that you're saving anything by doing direct bookings. But a lot of companies, I think, where they can optimize more is just as you mentioned about, you know, the repeat guests is just get the lowest hanging fruit first. I mean, like, really own that relationship with your guests and like, and because those become your direct bookings. And then when you've got that mastered, then you can start adding in some of the more you know, things that are going to get a wider net of people that don't already know you. But you've got to, you've got to kind of stagger that approach. You don't go from zero to 100 real quick indirect bookings. I mean, it's a long game play for a lot of these companies, completely agree.

Amy Hinote  
Um, one of the things that we heard a lot is, you know, well, the direct or channels, right? Yeah. And so if you look at the whole pie, yeah, let's just say, hypothetically, you've got 100 bookings coming from Airbnb, you've got 100 bookings coming from VRBO. You've got 50 coming from booking, yeah, well, that's your pie. Yeah. Like, direct is more. How do you want to cut? It's not like, that doesn't just mean you're still only going to get 250 bookings, but some are direct, yeah, it's like, what you're trying to do is open up that other channel. And yes, it costs money. I can argue. I mean, I would argue, I think that it doesn't cost as much, or it doesn't cost any more or less, you know, than channel management, if you're doing it right. But I do think it is, it is a channel. You know, direct bookings is a channel. Google is a channel, and Google is not the same in 2024 as it was in 2023 or 2020 or 2015 the last time you looked at it, yeah.

Annie Holcombe  
And it will be the sign of next year, right? Well, they change constantly, yeah, yeah. And

Amy Hinote  
it's not in a good way. I mean, the whole the whole company, has shifted into a much more yellow pages style mentality. Everything is sold. The all of our search results are going through the bigger channels. It's like the spirit of net neutrality. You know, when all the rewarding the larger sites and taking the the smaller content creators down there, if you're, if you got a blog on your site, and it's not about what you do with core you know, with your core business, that you're getting penalized. There's a lot of there's just new stuff that I think we needed to have a discussion about. Out if people want to go there. The other thing that in revenue management side with the right bookings is pricing your repeat guest out of the market. And I think that we've done that in a company wide, and I think we've done it destination wide in some destinations, and it benefits an area like Panama City or Myrtle because you know, then people start discovering those destinations again as they start looking for other alternatives. For example, if in our market, Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, we end up getting a lot of money from Panama City. I mean, a lot of bookings from Panama City at one time. Yeah, and due to rates and reputation, and then now we're seeing a lot of our bookings go to Panama City because Gulf Shores in Orange Beach went too high on pricing. So I think it's worth you don't want to lose your core. Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  
I think the one that did best so that when

Alex Husner  
they do want to go back to Gulf Shores or Panama City, whichever side you sit on, you're able to get them back. You know, that's

Annie Holcombe  
right, the one that did, I think the most damage to themselves in that scenario is 30 a. 38 priced themselves out so far out of the market, and then so many people came into the market that were new. They thought they were going to be able to keep them in. So many people bought new inventory at these high prices that they had to keep the prices elevated. And just to think that some of the, I think, in July, we went to the Florida favor event in August, and they were reporting the July numbers, and they were saying, you know, they didn't, they didn't get outside of 60, you know, barely 60% occupancy in July. That has never happened. Yeah, ever seen numbers for that market? And that's just something that they're going to have to really take a look at themselves and say, like, you know, did we, did we as a market go crazy? Were there a couple of managers that went crazy? I mean, I think the whole market just went went crazy. And the last couple of years, people just took it for granted that it was always going to be this way. So I think it's good to have a reset, like DARM, to be able to get back and get back to the basics. And Alex and I were just over in Italy at a scale event over there. And her and I did two days of I did a presentation one day about distribution, like diversification, but how that included your direct strategy, how it included working with your competitive set in the market, how it included working with your chambers of commerce and and your distribution channels. Then Alex, like the second day talked about what, how the marketing actually worked to do all these things and make it effective. And it was interesting that over there, the adoption of channels is far greater than it is in the US. I mean, they feel like you have to have your eyeballs from every direction, from all over the place, but they are dealing with channels that are very localized within a country, kind of like if we had one for every state, you know. So I think it's a different scenario there. But there's, there's just that, that desire of some companies to take revenue management and marketing and make them two completely separate pieces of the business. It it just, I don't think it ends well for any distribution.

Alex Husner  
I mean, it's the convergence of those three areas. It's revenue, marketing and distribution, that it's like, it's not one or the other. In any case, it's, yeah,

Annie Holcombe  
all of them working together, completely

Amy Hinote  
agree. And like, again, again, everything you know, every source of revenue, it is a channel. And in marketing, what we used to be really good at, which we're not as good at right now, which I'm hoping that we can there again soon, is mastering each channel. So let's say Google is you know, part of your funnel then master. You have to know, you know how to rank well in Google. You have to know, you know how to communicate with the person who's coming through there that, I mean, how to write your ads, how to write your and there's just a lot there you have to master which way you know. We all know that. But that's also true for Airbnb. Airbnb is one of your channels, so then you have to master Airbnb, right? And to to have that channel perform as well as it can and and also with with verbo and some of these things are very like you said, it's science. Some of these things are API connections and making sure those who are working well all the time, which also means putting pressure on a PMS so that it's not breaking down before it gets the nets backs, before it gets you know, yeah, we saw a lot. That was last year. We saw a lot of APIs that whole on top that Airbnb is not doing a lot of, I mean, API support right now with the software companies so and we don't, I mean, we don't have a channel manager, you're not really getting alert when your API is not pulling availability. And so if you, for instance, if I'm streamlined, I'm using the streamlined API and the streamlined channel manager, you know they're not going to tell me that the streamline API is not pulling right, right? Yeah, yeah. But Airbnb and VRBO will will will drop me down if people aren't getting if that's not falling correctly. Well,

Annie Holcombe  
thank you for, like, justifying the value of next, right? I mean, when I think, I think, when people, when you have a when you have a discipline that you're focused on, you're, you're, you're more inclined to raise a flag when something's wrong, whereas a PMS. Has so many things that they're trying to take care of. Their first and foremost is not about that, until somebody brings it to them to say, like, oh, there's a problem here.

Alex Husner  
Oftentimes it's too late. I mean, you can't go three or four days without any Airbnb bookings, but if you're not, as a property manager, watching every reservation that comes in, you might just

Amy Hinote  
Yeah. In fact, most people didn't know when it wasn't working. Yeah, why are my listings not showing up? You know, very high on verbo. Well, yeah, for a while there your software wasn't connecting. Yeah, it's almost impossible to do, but that's where marketing should be coming in, and that's where I think that we'll get some more systems in play to be able to really monitor, like we used to be able to do, to really, you know, know what's happened on every channel that you're responsible for working on and mastering it. Outside of that, I think that the revenue management piece I want to go back to that really quickly. Is, and I don't know how this happened, because we never taught this at Durham, is you don't start the year with your highest rate and then go down until the day of arrival. You know, that's not really never, I promise you, I've gone back and watched videos that was never in one session. So I don't understand, like, going super high on your repeat guys, because that's who books a year out, right? Yeah? So get them in the door. Once you get 30% of reservations on the books from your repeat and your core business,

Alex Husner  
then raise the ring. Yeah? I mean, it's, it's more of the hotel or airline strategy that, in my market, a lot of the condo resorts, that's how they operate. The starting Black Friday, they've got the best pricing to get their repeats booked. That extends till about, like, mid February. And then, you know, based on how things are going, it's like, hopefully they can start raising the rates. But we don't. We don't talk a lot about raising rates. You know, it's always about, it's just like, it's dropping them. I feel like it's a fundamental change in our industry of, like, how do we need

Amy Hinote  
a revenue manager for that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, set your high rate and then start moving it down whenever you need to. Like, that doesn't that doesn't help anybody. That doesn't help the market either, and it certainly, certainly doesn't help the expectations for a guest and in the destination going back to 38 really quickly. I don't think 38 managed expectations. Well, true, yeah, people coming in, I don't think people you know if you're selling a beach vacation, but you can't get to the beach.

Annie Holcombe  
Yeah, yeah, that's good point. Well, that's a whole nother. That whole beach accident issue is a completely different, like animal that they've got a tame So, yeah,

Alex Husner  
yeah, yeah, interesting stuff. Well, the agenda looks amazing. When you said there's 90 sessions, I'm looking at the grid right now. It's and I saw your before we hit play. You showed me the board that you've got with the post it notes,

Amy Hinote  
yeah, oh, wow. You're

Annie Holcombe  
miles, miles from Compass loves this.

Amy Hinote  
I need advice dog and post it first, right? So what? I don't know how people do all this just looking at a spreadsheet, like, yeah, I have an entire table, like,

Annie Holcombe  
Amy, how do you like? And we were talking about it off camera, like, the balance between attendees and vendors. And so, you know, you need vendors to make an event, the big event, like to do all the things, because you need sponsors, and you kind of need some of that, but you have to have a balance in it. And so how do you find the ability for yourself to balance out? One, the attendance numbers, but two, what the education is that it doesn't become because it's the the thing that has has come up Verma specifically, is that a lot of the sessions, people feel like it's an advertorial for a sponsor, and it's not necessarily deep in substance and education. So how do you find that you are able? Because I feel like you do a good job at it, but you're able to balance all of those things out.

Amy Hinote  
I mean, in some cases, the real truth is, a vendor knows more about a subject than a property manager does. So I think that the ultimate goal, just for the agenda goes, it's really going, what do we want to teach? You know, what are the subjects we want to teach? And who are the and then it's who are the best people to present on these subjects. You do hear the pay to play thing, and we do have some pay to play. Say, there are sponsored sessions here too. They're obvious. They're sponsored sessions. So, but at the same time again, in some of those cases, for instance, Jeremy Goff and breezeway is talking about property data and guest interactions, and they have a whole, like, a lot of data on on that piece of it, which is incredibly as far as quality of a product versus in the in the revenue management algorithm, that that's a huge piece of it. And. And so knowing, um, you know, guest review scores and property scores, and also maintenance reports and housekeeping inspector reports, those things are really valuable in terms of rate setting too. So Jeremy Gaul is probably the smartest person on that, on that piece of it right now. And so, yeah, he's the one speaking on that, um, I think, though that this time we did outside of the agenda so women and tried to gather the smartest people about a certain topic to come address it, and then we sold a limited number of sponsorships. We used revenue management too to try to control those levers of the attend, the property manager attendees, versus the vendors and so and we've gotten a lot of story about a lot of pushback from that, from the vendor community, because they're, you know, they're the ones who probably heard this time more than, any way, you know, more than the property managers. But we do have a really high mix of property managers, and I felt like that was, in this case, a better the mix that we have, which is about 25 to 30% of vendors to 75 sorry, 70 to 75% property managers was a better number for us in this particular show, because we are trying to get through so much education in a short amount of time, and we're kind of somewhat limited on space. So, um, one of the things we did hear from the vendors a lot is that this wasn't really as much of a shopping show. You know that this was a relationship show with the larger property management companies. I think the average size company, when we were looking at her, this was a few weeks ago, that's coming right now, manages over 200 properties. So it's a huge it's a pretty large difference compared to what you see at other conferences. And so there are a lot of vendors that we actually discourage from coming just because they don't service this sector, you know? So it's like, if, I mean, DARM is for companies that have departments. So like, if you have a reservations department, because, you know, a housekeeping department, a marketing department, that's, yeah, that kind of org structure is what dorm really appeals to, because it's the education is built around. Well, the

Alex Husner  
things that you're talking about, a, you know, solopreneur or very small team is not going to be able to execute on, you know? I mean, it's just not possible. I mean, this is, that's such a good way to put it's like, a lot of what you're talking about in the marketing operations, the sale, the sales and revenue and marketing working together. It's like, that's, these are department, these are large companies. So I think understanding you're not that it's it's niche, but it's not niche because it's a big segment of the inventory and industry. But understanding that with the content is what makes the big difference here.

Amy Hinote  
I think so. And I really think that, you know, for the people who we're recording everything, so even though there are a lot of sessions, and you can only attend, you know, so many of them, but we are going to record everything so that people can, you know, get all that the if you come, if you buy a ticket, you get the video package with it. We are, we did decide to go ahead and sell the video package separately, so if you can't come, then you can still get the videos all this. But I mean, this is hands down, the deepest education I've ever done, period, and I haven't really seen it anywhere else either. I mean, we're down. We're pretty granular on this, where we're discussing regulations at a we're also doing a regional deep dive of data. So you can not just see national data, but you can actually go into, we have separate, separate data rooms that you can go in and see Gulf Coast data or held in that data, you know, or nice, the tech piece of it got really is a lot. There's a lot going on with that right now. I mean, the rising cost of technology is something we're really focused on. The impact of private equity in our technology and for innovation right now is a big deal and a big point. And the other thing that we ended up really spending some time on was risk was risk mitigation in terms of weather patterns, insurance, the exit plans and budgeting and things like that, just really focused on what can go wrong and and how to mitigate those programs in today's world, not just where it was 10

Alex Husner  
years ago. Yeah, yeah. What about like, overall company profitability? Is there content related to that as well. We

Amy Hinote  
do actually, Jim Ford, I don't know if you all remember, oh yeah, numbers whisper session. That's going to be amazing. That is much again, scaled companies, so for the larger companies, and the ones that the franchise companies, stuff like that, who are looking at multiple destinations, it's going to be so. Were interesting. Ben is doing a deep dive on benchmarking. So really about what you should be paying, like, what percentage should you be paying in technology? What? Yeah, yeah, exactly. We've got Maria and Molina who are coming in and really talking about using customized reporting to to be able to focus on that, but also where that you know how those two things work together, how your budget and your reporting work together to serve you the best and and then we've got, one of the things I'm kind of excited about is we have Wells Fargo. Richard and Willard are bringing in Meredith, who is in charge of their E stop division at Wells Fargo. So really looking at employee ownership and what that looks like going forward, and how that could be a really profitable exit in today's world and an honorable one, you know, something that that leaves you able to still live in the destination where you sold your company without having

Annie Holcombe  
right? Yeah. Oh, Sarah talks about that. Sarah Bradford talks about that all the time, about the destination she sold and was just too it's too pricey to live in. So that's, that's good, that stuff you don't think about, but that's stuff that people need to know about. Yeah.

Amy Hinote  
I mean, especially as you get larger, I think I was having this conversation recently with someone about the maturity of a company. You know that the newer companies, you know, it's easy to be disruptive and stuff like that, when you're young, and you're able to pivot really quickly and um, and you can but Well, as you build into these departments, and you have a, you know, pretty set organizational structure, you know that a consistent one that employees can trust and rely on, you know that people want to know what their job is and who they report to, and you know where they fit into the company or and that requires some maturity in a company. And I think that's where a lot of this education comes in, is that where how do you improve? We've looked at every single piece of the company, and so how do you improve this piece of it, and then created a session around that.

Alex Husner  
Yeah, oh, good. Well, I'm glad I asked that. That's a good one. I'll make sure to go to it. Let's talk a little bit about the battleground that's always the fan favorite at these events. So tell us a little bit about how it's going to work. Who's involved in it. We're super excited. Well, right

Amy Hinote  
now we're focused on not allowing people to cheat this year they're

Annie Holcombe  
gonna wear that stink forever. Now forever.

Amy Hinote  
They're lucky. They're getting to do it again.

Annie Holcombe  
Oh goodness.

Amy Hinote  
But this is fun, honestly. So it is a full on pitch. She does her Shark Tank kind of style thing. So we have judges and and who are they? Um, I can't announce that yet. Okay,

Alex Husner  
okay, yeah,

Amy Hinote  
surprise judges this year, exactly, okay, yeah,

Alex Husner  
the last year's judges on, oh yeah, earlier this year, Travis and Travis and Julie and CJ. But,

Amy Hinote  
yeah, I thought they did a really good job last year, yeah, and CJ and Travis have done it every year. Yeah, so. But there is the science to have the consistency. So people call people out and say, last year, you said that, you know, this was a new product, and you said it was out, and turns out you just launched it three months, two months ago, with VR May, right? Was it really a product, or is it a roadmap thing? Yeah, that was one of the

Annie Holcombe  
things that came up with the the PMs thing at Verma was like they weren't allowed to be on stage talking about it if it was just on the roadmap, and had to have a release date. Whatever is available right right now. Yeah, it's

Amy Hinote  
a good point at the same time. Yeah, exactly. So we'll see, um, we have 10 contestants this year, so five on Tuesday and five on Wednesday, and they have five minutes to give their spiel, and the judges have five minutes to give them to throw out questions, and they have to do it live. And it's, it's very um. It's unnerving to be one of the people do, oh, for the ones that do it, because they do get asked how questions and yeah, um, and you'd have to know really quickly, on the fly, like there's no, there's no time to think about it, yeah, are

Annie Holcombe  
you allowing people to record their their presentations

Amy Hinote  
this year? I know that was last year where that was an issue, yeah? And what? And I get why, because

Annie Holcombe  
you want, Oh, I totally understand why, but it did make it weird,

Amy Hinote  
yeah, especially to when someone doesn't have to. But yeah, people, right, this is our sixth time to do it. So it's like people are learning how to game the system. Yeah, having to go back,

Annie Holcombe  
you know, to go back to paper ballots, right?

Amy Hinote  
Exactly. And no absentee ballots, no,

Annie Holcombe  
absolutely. Yeah, exactly.

Alex Husner  
Right. Tell our audience a little bit about how the voting actually works, too.

Amy Hinote  
So. Voting happens. This is the thing. It what it happened on the app. And it it happened which was a link, actually. So it wasn't an app you could hit. There was a URL for it, and so people were able to share that URL on LinkedIn, and so a lot of people got votes from people who weren't there. So that's what happened last year. Um, but there is, there are two ways you win. You win the Judge's Choice, and you win the the popular vote. And so the popular vote is, is done through paper ballots and through the app, which now is going to be done as you log in. So you'll have to be logged in order to vote. Um, the other way. The other thing is the judges selection. And they meet after the final day, and they go through all of them and they decide which one is the most valuable going forward. It's very sincere and thought out process. And, um, I, you know, I think one of the biggest things is just being able to see what's new from as an attendee, it's like, okay, this is the technology that's coming. This is technology that is on the leading edge that I don't know about, you know? And is it something that we need, or is it not? And another thing, is it something that you already have in a

Alex Husner  
system, right? Not realize it, does it? Yeah, exactly. So

Amy Hinote  
one of the things we are going to be talking about in the text, tech side is fuel fully utilizing the systems that you currently have before you start buying new stuff, or as you buy stuff at least. No, yeah. So you know, because the tech costs are way too high there, and it's what you'll see in the benchmarking session, the people right now are currently spending way more in tech than we've ever spent. Yeah, and, but it's not even just in the sense that, oh, well, you know, of course, there is more technology, you know, more the company is dictated, but we're spending more on some of the same tech and some of the older tech. I mean, private equity. The truth is, I mean, their goal is to go in and make money. You know, they take a business and they want to take a business that was really innovative and turn it into a profit making machine. And a lot of times, what that means is rate increases and fee increases for the property managers. So, and we've seen a lot of that in the industry. We've also seen kind of a less, lesser competition in tech. Until recently, there's some new things coming up, but yeah, I think that has, like, what has private equity done to our competitive landscape? Yeah, I

Annie Holcombe  
wanted to well on that are is there so about utilizing your tech stack to its fullest capabilities? One of the conversations and actually goes back to when we had Travis and CJ and Julian, we were talking about some of the and private equity has, I think, done. Some of this is forcing people to be within one ecosystem and not being allowed to use the pieces that they like. And so is there a conversation around how you build that tech stack to get again, maybe you don't buy, you don't get the PMs to sell you all the modules. You just buy the modules you want. And then as you learn the pieces that you want, I think that people tend to see all the shiny bells and whistles and think, Oh, I've gotta have all of it. And then they don't really use one component of it, because they already have a relationship with another vendor that they've had for 15 years. And they learn they don't have to redo it. Is that going to be part of this conversation? And I don't know if it's within Ben's or a track, or even where it would actually lie, but

Amy Hinote  
oh, a lot of the conversation that we're having on the tech side is around where we're going with code, and the reason I bring that up in this conversation is because we're looking at the future, so you have, like, all the systems we've got in place right now. But what does that really mean? Like, where are we really going, especially when you see some companies who are not innovating at the same pace that they had previously under private equity funding? And the truth is, code is changing dramatically, and I so one of the conversations that we do have, we're having a debate on standardized APIs. And there are back when everybody closed in systems, and closed in your ability, like your APIs would only connect to certain partners. You know, to keep a kind of a closed loop system is to try to create a moat around the tech product. And so as a result, you both have hotel industry experience. So it's like, you know how Marriott and some of the other larger ones they got kind of like, well, in banks too, got confined to a DOS system, yeah, early Windows system get out of because there was a moat around their tech systems. So they weren't able to just plug and play and move and ease out into a new environment until their core system was ready to move. And then, of course, they were left with a buy versus build decision. And a lot of them spent, I mean, billions of dollars trying to build something that would work for them, which obviously is doesn't have any capability. The link across the board, but the idea that systems talk to each other is just how we're going forward. Yeah, I it's the same concept of HubSpot, you know, coming in and being able to talk to all the social channels like there's just the idea that we're going to be able to go forward without a standardized API is, at some point we're going to have to have it now, whether that is done through a GDS Style channel manager or whatever that there's a normalization point there. I don't know, like an Amadeus style thing that they had to do to get around it in a dentistry but the world going forward, we have spent more money on developers in our industry.

Alex Husner  
Fascinating to figure out what that number is. If you take

Amy Hinote  
all the funding we got, all the funding, all the tech companies got, how much of it went to developers? Yeah, like, it's shocking to me, but in the new world, if this is as big as going to the cloud, you know, from having servers in your office, like, yeah, once you've you're mapping data. So in the same way that WordPress, you know, it's kind of like you can drag and drop into creating your Word page, like we're in building a website before it was all code, you know, now they're putting a front end on code, and I feel like that's where we're going within us, once we a standardized our database isn't overly complex, or it doesn't have to be. And so looking at like data, for example, key data today would have been a much easier lift. Oh, yeah, in this world where we're headed, and not having to spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars on or millions on developers to get a system to market. And so it'll give us a lot more flexibility to build what you need, and, um, and not have to pay a fortune for it in the down the road. We're certainly not there yet. But, um, we'd like to introduce this conversation on the standardized API, and it's already been happening. Simon has been trying to work on Europe too. I think you guys probably had the conversation with him before he ran into some roadblocks there. But these companies, they're going to be there, like guesty and track and streamline and have it this whole crowd like the days of building a mode around your system are just over because all you're doing is waiting for to sunset your system at that point now you're just clicking down the time. And so that's kind of nobody wants to buy a software system that's just waiting for it to die. Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  
I'm intrigued by and Miss goes off of that is the amount of enterprise size PMCS that are deciding to build their own tech stack, because there is the ability. It's a lot easier. It's it's not as cost prohibitive it used to be. And I know, like, from a next spec, next pack standpoint, we have a supply API and a distribution API, and it's like anybody can tap into that supply API. So like, if you're out there building it, it's like, if you have the resources to write to the API like, you can tap into all this distribution that you don't have to go through like, five different pieces of a system to do. And I'm really fascinated about the number of people that are doing that, that are deciding to, like, say, I've been on a PMS, and I've been frustrated by it not doing the things that I need, and I need to customize it for my operation, so they're building out their own. And so I feel like there's going to be more of that, because you know, to your point that it's just there's going to be some basic parameters, maybe some standardization, if you will, that's going to be out there. So it'll be interesting to see where we are, like two years from now, like, how many managers are on their own system, versus how many are actually using a inhabit group, or, you know, a track, or any, any of these larger PMS is that exist now.

Alex Husner  
I mean, they may be frustrated with what they're on, but I think at the end of the day, it goes down to, I mean, the cost to maintain your own system, to have your own developers again, like direct bookings. Mean, you're not, in my mind, you're not, you're not saving anything. I mean, my gosh, I've been there, done that, and work for a company. We had our own system that, you know, still had to pay the resources and the people to maintain it, but how we leveraged it to be able to do business with other companies is where it really made sense. And I think a lot of companies that I've heard that they might say, I want to build my own system. It's like in theory, you do, but you gotta have somebody that really understands the industry to build it, and that's where you can hire a developer to connect APIs all day long, but people that actually understand our industry, I mean, those are few and far between, and those are very, very, you know, heavily salaried people to get on your team to build something. But

Annie Holcombe  
don't you think AI is gonna answer some of that like AI can write code like

Alex Husner  
it's not the code, it's the understanding. Like when we were in Italy, we went to a lawn from Boom's presentation that he said the slide said I k plus AI, and I K was industry knowledge plus AI. I mean, AI, we would be remiss to not talk about it in this conversation. Is changing things extensively and. Expansively within the PMs world. But, I mean, certainly that's going to help with development to some extent, but you have, you still have to know the industry and how you're going to pull those parts together, because otherwise you could build a system, but then you still have to add on all these other systems, because you're not connecting them in the way that is really going to be, you know, fulfilling to the business. And I think that's what we've seen the most of so much money that's come into the industry. I think a lot of it's ended up being wasted on a lot of they don't know, because they don't, they don't know, yeah. I mean, it wasn't built from a foundation of understanding true property management, yeah, yeah. I

Amy Hinote  
think we've seen it a lot in media, you know, with, I was just at a hotel recently, and, you know, of course, you now, you go in and you hit the guide, or, you know, the menu or whatever, you can get hotel information. You can order in room dining right off the a QR code on the screen, yeah, you can access all of your your prime, your Netflix, you know, all of that right there. So everybody's kind of like that is something that, not too very long ago. You know, those systems were stand alone, yeah? So it's not like they, they, you had to use a cable. You know what? I mean, who has cable? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I feel like that's kind of where we are. Is that, just as an analogy, is that these systems right now are kind of like cable and I and I, it's just true. They know it, yeah, so don't think I'm offended anybody. They all have a shelf like which is why all the exits are, where they are, where they need to be. I think a company like guesty, who potentially could go IPO, you know, then they're invested in continuing to keep up. If you build your own software, you just like they cost has just found now that they're doing an RFP. You know, trying to buy software is there's only you can build software, like you said, as long as you've got a team in house. Yeah, that can do that for you. But eventually, you know, those ideas get old. And you know, those way people know how to do things is old. I mean, look at narrowcast from Navis. You know, that was every long time i If it were me right now, if I were property manager right now, I would be very tempted to stay where whatever I'm on right now and try to use it to its max capacity. If I was using streamline, or if I was using track or whatever, I would be very tempted, or barefoot, to stay where I am and and use and really understand, you know, what all it has there, because a lot of these people have built out a lot of functionality that people are paying for in other places. And so I don't and then watching the system really kind of gathering your needs and your output. Yeah, output is going to be key. Because, like you said, it's about what do you really want the software to do? Because it's going to get a lot easier to build whatever. Mm, hmm. But knowing what the output needs to be is so incredibly critical, and knowing why you're doing certain things that you're doing, yeah, I this, AI, is massively going to transform code, I think, even more than search, like all we're looking at it right now, is what we talk about a lot in search and in content creation right now. But the code side, I think, is way, has a way bigger impact on our industry.

Alex Husner  
Yeah, huge, huge. I mean, we, we were at scale Italia. Also, we were asking people about, you know, these older systems that were built, you know, pre or early, 2000s into the you know, late, 2000s and beyond. You know, for them to adopt AI right now holistically is impossible, right? I mean, like even to make major changes within how their system operates is impossible because they've got these Titanic ships that they've got the way that data is structured across so many different variations, you can't just make a change and now get everybody onto this new way of doing things and trying to infuse AI in that to be able to interpret all that data, it's just not possible. But, I mean, we see, you know, there's a lot of companies that are adding in chat modules or, you know, review responses and stuff like that. But, I mean, that's, that's just etching the surface of where AI is really going to take things in this industry. I mean, I think we're going to see, we've already seen so much just in the last year and a half or so, since everybody's been so focused on it. But it's like, my god, to think, to think what the battleground will have next year. Incredible. Yeah,

Amy Hinote  
yeah. I'm pretty pumped about it. I think there's a, there's an equalization, you know, on the text, or democratization on tech, that I think is going to be really fun to finally, to see that pendulum swing back towards i i think it's going to make people better managers. I think it's going to be better for the new employees who know how to use that, you know, who have more fun with their technology experience than they're currently having less

Unknown Speaker  
burnout at

Alex Husner  
the end of the day. I mean, like this could be, you know, people that are using AI in the right way. It's like, this is how you can still have a life and be in property. Management, yeah,

Amy Hinote  
very true. Yeah, they won. The question, are you an early adopter? Are you not? Right? If you're, if your whole culture is tech, then try the new stuff and build it out, you know. But if you're not, and your employees are not, then adding, you know, adding another system for them is really, it's not fun. It's not fun not to log into 20 systems a day. I was one of those. The fact is, I really was an early adopter. People joke about my go to meeting and sales force and sky, like I really was an early adopter at one time. So like, but you know, the people who had GoTo Meeting, of course, nobody has GoTo Meeting anymore. Yeah. And zoom and slack versus Skype, you know, all this kind of stuff. And it's like, the funny thing is, for all of this group, is all those things are going to be old too, so there will be a time that everybody's making fun of all but, you know, like, oh, you still have zoom. You're still using slack,

Annie Holcombe  
right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a 24 year old in my house. I don't I get that all the time. What do you mean? You're still using this, but so, so we're just a few weeks out from Durham. It's not sold out, so there's still tickets available, right? Yeah,

Amy Hinote  
yeah. Actually, we've got a pretty decent spot. Okay, so sand Dustin added a new ballroom, you know, which gave us a lot more meeting space. And we, we have a buyout of their entire meeting space. So we, if we fill up one ballroom, we'll live stream into another. So come on, we definitely want you there. And we have a lot of education. Again, this is about learning. I mean, this is not we. Our parties may not be as good as some of the others, but we do have a lot of meaningful networking and a lot of really, really deep dive education.

Annie Holcombe  
Yeah, I always come away very enriched and, like, mind blown at the stuff that I think I know that I don't know. And so, you know, love it. I think I'm excited. I know, I know, I've talked to other people that are attending, and they're just so we're just so we're just so grateful that you're doing the event. Because, like I said, we started the year out like, is she, isn't she? Yeah, exactly. So can we put you on record?

Unknown Speaker  
Can we put you on

Annie Holcombe  
record as how it we will have Durham in 2025

Amy Hinote  
we will have dorm in 22 and there you go. And we will have the Women's Summit in 2020 There we go. There we have it, folks. There you go. Where would

Annie Holcombe  
well, we don't have to know all the details, yeah, but if anybody figure it out later, if anybody wants to get tickets, still, where's the what's the best place for them to go about

Amy Hinote  
doing that? VR, darm.com, v, r, D, A, R m.com. Is the easiest place to go. It's for vacation rental data and revenue management. And there are tons of links to that page on LinkedIn and Facebook too, if that is, yeah, vacation rental data and revenue management, v, r, D, A, R, m.com, the tickets are there, which is looking at the date light registration goes up a week before the show. So definitely get in there before Thanksgiving. And I'm trying to think, what else definitely come in on Sunday, if you can, because with the activities, Monday are going to be super fun and special. And then you know, what about this show is it's done during the kind of, has it holiday vibe? Oh, and by the way, sandesh opened up their ice skating ring. So Tony Santilli said to tell you to bring Annie. Do you

Alex Husner  
have any extra skates?

Annie Holcombe  
I you know, I live in Florida. I haven't had time, but I do have my running shoes. And I think Amy challenged me in the beginning to put together a walk on the morning. So I will do that and put that out for everybody. I think Alana gall is coming, so I'm going to try to rope her in. I used her boss, Scott, to do the one at Burma. He scoped the run out, and we went on a walk. But, yeah, I mean, activities are great. I think, you know, like you said, you do a lot of education, so it's a substantive conference. People feel like they get a lot of meat on the bone, so to speak, and really walk away with a lot of good stuff. So excited to see everybody in a couple of weeks.

Amy Hinote  
I'm saying too. Is there a lot of condos right around there? So if you're coming and you're like, 234, bedroom condos that are walking distance from the venue, or that come with golf carts that can get you to the venue, yep. So if you're coming with more than what you know, with some other people, it's, I mean, getting the condo is a super cheap way to come in. Yeah, it's not usually in December, off season, yes,

Annie Holcombe  
December, yeah. I was

Alex Husner  
just trying to find in our in our emails back and forth with Michelle, but we do have a discount code also Alex Annie VIP for $200 off. So if anybody's still waiting to book, we'll put that into the show notes and then into the YouTube comments too. This little present, awesome. It's

Amy Hinote  
gonna be fun. I'm excited about it. I I'm excited about seeing everybody in this environment and, um, you know, just having. Some beach time with our friends. We're doing beach fun fires too on the first night. I love that, and so definitely bring some casual clothes too. When you come and we're doing fireworks in the last night before there's us, there's a Christmas series concert right after the fireworks in Baytown. So,

Annie Holcombe  
and if you have to bring clothes. There's this outlet mall right across this, oh my gosh, plenty of shopping right there. Yeah, they're

Amy Hinote  
shopping and dining. It doesn't, doesn't have a lock lack of food and clothes. That is true.

Alex Husner  
Always a wonderful way to end the year. We're super excited, and we will include the links for everybody in our show notes and in the YouTube comments, but until next time. Thank you for tuning in, everybody. Oh, oh, wait. One more

Annie Holcombe  
thing, okay. One Okay.

Amy Hinote  
Will is doing a book signing, which he wasn't able to do last time. So unreasonable hospitality book definitely bring it. He Oh, how cool, wonderful. Awesome.

Alex Husner  
That is awesome. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that, because that's really cool. I know a lot of that's really cool. I know a lot of people have just gone absolutely over Awesome. Well, thank you everybody again for tuning in. If you want to get in touch with Annie and I, you can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com and we hope to see you in Destin in just a couple weeks. Thanks

Amy Hinote  
you guys. So much. Appreciate it. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai