Latest / The Modern Hotelier / #331: How Independent Hotels Should Think About Pricing | with Anurag Verma
Transcript
- The Modern Hotelier #331: How Independent Hotels Should Think About Pricing | with Anurag Verma === David Millili: Welcome to a special Independent Hotel Show Miami episode of The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Please make sure to follow, like, and subscribe, and let us know in the comments what you think about today's episode. Steve, who do we have on the program? Steve Carran: Yeah, David, today we have on Anurag Verma, the co-founder of PriceLabs. Thanks for joining us today. How we doing? Anurag Verma: Yeah, thank you for having me, Steve and David. Absolutely. Yeah, pleasure to be here. David Millili: All right, great. So we're gonna get started, so we're gonna go through a quick lightning round. We're gonna get to know you better, your background, your career, and then we're gonna dive into some industry topics. Sound good? Anurag Verma: Perfect. Sounds good. David Millili: All right. Anurag Verma: So I'm equally scared and excited. David Millili: Yeah. You're gonna do great. So when you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? Anurag Verma: I wanted to be a cricketer. David Millili: Yeah. David Millili: Okay. All right, great. So what's something you wish you were better at? Anurag Verma: Oof. Learning languages. Okay. I am married. My wife's mother tongue is different, and I've not been able to do much progress on that front. David Millili: Okay. Anurag Verma: Yeah. David Millili: All right, what's a luxury you can't live without? Anurag Verma: A luxury that I can't be without. Oof. I want to think of myself as somebody who can survive whatever. So this is a tough question. Food, clean water. Like- David Millili: Okay. Anurag Verma: Yeah. There you are. David Millili: Yeah. That's good. Yeah, absolutely. So name a person dead or alive that you'd like to take to lunch. Anurag Verma: Oh, Ramanujan, the mathematician. Okay. Yeah. David Millili: All right, good. So if you could have a superpower, what superpower would you like to have? Anurag Verma: Ooh. Flying. David Millili: That's a good one. Yeah. Anurag Verma: Yeah. David Millili: All right, last one. Give us something that's on your bucket list. Anurag Verma: Many, many things, but I like to travel, like most human beings. Yeah. And I actually crossed off one from the bucket list this spring, which was the Grand Canyon. Steve Carran: Nice. Anurag Verma: But there are plenty other national parks. I've not been to Yellowstone. David Millili: Okay. Anurag Verma: Want to go to Iceland someday. David Millili: Okay. Anurag Verma: Want to go to Vietnam someday, and want to go to Japan someday. So like, plenty, plenty on that list. David Millili: All right. Good stuff. There you go. Steve Carran: There you go. Yeah, really good. So now we're gonna dive into your personal background. A little bit about you and what makes you tick. Okay. So you grew up in India, is that correct? I did, yeah. Where in India did you grow up? Anurag Verma: So my father was an engineer in the railways, the Indian railways, and as a consequence, he would get transferred every six years to a different factory. Wow. Because the Indian government wanted at least engineers and officials to not stay in one place and spread their knowledge around, or not get too comfortable in the same place for too long kind of a thing. Steve Carran: Yeah. Anurag Verma: So I was born in Bangalore, spent my first six years there. Then moved to a city called Banaras, which is in Northern India, and then stayed for six years there. And then the next five years were in a town called Lucknow. Five more years, and then for my undergrad, back to South India, to Madras, to Chennai. So four different cities in 20 years growing up in India. Steve Carran: Wow. Wow. So how did growing up all over India shape you into who you are today? Anurag Verma: One, I want to say when you're getting moved through schools every once in a while, you learn how to make friends with things that can travel with you. Steve Carran: Sure. Anurag Verma: Books. So I'm a nerd. If I can now proudly say this. Yeah. I don't think I was very proud back then. But also you learn how to understand what other people may need or anticipate their needs a little bit. I will say I'm a terrible people person, though. Like, so I don't know why I'm saying I understand people very well. I think I do, but my wife tells me I don't. So, but generally speaking, allowed me to also appreciate, like South India are very different culturally. Languages are different. And there's a lot of almost sometimes friendly banter, sometimes rhetoric between like who's better. And like, because I spent half my time in South India and half in North India, I'm like a little more balanced in saying, "Okay, there are different kinds of people around the country, around the world. They're all generally decent people." Sure. Steve Carran: Sure. Anurag Verma: Nobody's good, nobody's bad kind of a thing. Yeah. It's cool. Or generally, everybody's good. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. David Millili: Yeah. You're good. So what led you to get your degree in computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and then your ME and PhD in industrial engineering at Texas A&M? Anurag Verma: Yeah. So, growing up I was very good in two things. One was math and the other one was playing cricket. But I think soon enough I figured out that cricket career is not going too far. There are a lot of people in India who are very good at cricket, and there are 11 spots in the national team, so tough luck. Yeah. But math was something that I was really good at, and one of my cousins who was, I want to say, 11 years older, when it was time to choose a major was like, "Hey, if you really like math, go for computer science." I liked computer science because it was, one, very mathematical, very theoretical, and at the same time very applied because, yeah, like you could do things with it. What I didn't like was actually sitting down and coding. David Millili: Right. Anurag Verma: And I, at least at that point, I found it a little boring. It is not boring, but at that time, I found it boring. I happened to do this minor in a field called operations research, which was, like, the stuff of my dreams. Like, it was applied maths, really, like, dense maths, so loved it. And then I got a job as a software engineer. Did that for six months, and I had interned at the same firm for three months before, and I was like, "Okay, this stuff is good, pays well, but not my cup of tea." One of my professor's friends was a professor at Texas A&M. David Millili: Mm. Anurag Verma: And he came over to our college and said, "Hey, if anybody's interested in doing a PhD in industrial engineering," which is the field I was very interested in, "feel free to apply." And six months later, that came through, so I left the job and started off. The field that I chose within industrial engineering is mathematical optimization. I loved it. It was absolutely, like, the thing that I wanted to do, and I went in thinking I will then go into academia, go teach somewhere, but all of that changed slightly. As I spent more time doing my PhD, that fell through, yeah. Steve Carran: And while you were getting your PhD- Anurag Verma: Yeah. Steve Carran: You did research around positioning emergency response facilities around an earthquake. Yes. So I have to ask, how did you decide to do that? Anurag Verma: Yeah. Steve Carran: And if there's an earthquake, where's the safest place to be? Anurag Verma: I can't answer that last question. It is outside a building, as far as I know. Yeah. So be somewhere where a building won't fall into you or on you, right? David Millili: Right. Anurag Verma: But the mathematical optimization field that I studied essentially said, "Okay, you have a bunch of constraints, and you have something that you're trying to maximize or minimize." In this case, we are trying to minimize the chances of widespread damage or minimize the time it takes for emergency supplies to get to an earthquake site, right? The FEMA or whoever else, they actually do run into these problems pretty often. There are probabilistic models that say how possible is an earthquake in this location, in that location, in that location. And based on the population on that region, we also know how many people might it impact. Now, if you had to place just one facility, you would not place it on the West Coast because most of the earthquakes happen on the West Coast. So you probably want to do it there. But where on the West Coast? Or if you had the capability to place three, knowing that you can't predict an earthquake, it's all probabilistic. Steve Carran: Right. Anurag Verma: The question was, for the next 100 years, for example, if you know the distribution of where the earthquakes are going to be, if you could only place two facilities, or if you could only place 15 facilities, how would you find the right location so that on average you minimize the damage? Steve Carran: Well, that's good advice because I've been in one earthquake and I was in a skyscraper when it happened, so I won't do that again. Anurag Verma: Okay. So I don't know how you avoid that. Yeah. If you're in there, you're in there. You just try to run down. Steve Carran: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so now we're gonna move on to your career. Okay. How you got to where you are. Yeah. So you interned at Sabre Solutions Airlines and then at United Airlines, and then you worked—continued to work at United Airlines focusing on research on revenue management. Anurag Verma: Yeah. Steve Carran: What did you learn in those airline days that you take with you as CEO of PriceLabs? Anurag Verma: Yeah. So right after I graduated from Texas A&M, I had... My wife was close to Chicago in Champaign, Illinois, and so I wanted to be close to Chicago or Champaign, and Chicago was where I could find something. My job there was actually almost I want to say my dream job, where we could work on a lot of mathematical models and then hand it over to our IT team to code them up. The stuff that I found boring, I could actually give it to somebody else. Yeah. The stuff I found exciting, I could keep doing. A big difference when I entered the industry was how much of the stuff that you do in your PhD or in school is actually getting applied in here. And there are multiple reasons for that. When you're doing your grad school or academia, you assume that the data that you're being given is perfectly clean. Sure. And then your job is to find the best solution possible. Like, or design algorithms to find the best solution possible. When I joined United, one of the early sort of learnings was that, hey, the data is always messy. Like, no matter what somebody says, the data is going to be messy, and you have to design systems that are not necessarily theoretically optimal, but that are robust against that messiness. Steve Carran: Mm-hmm. Anurag Verma: So the kind of algorithms we were designing at United Airlines were sophisticated, but they were always built with the understanding that, okay, what if this data feed isn't coming in as usual? What if there's a delay of two hours in getting this data? How are you going to design the system? And that is something that is very hard to learn at school. Steve Carran: Sure. Anurag Verma: But it was so important to learn if you're designing a system to make sure that the system is robust. Because outside of that, you are going to run into issues where the system isn't working as expected, even if minor stuff goes down. Yeah. David Millili: So in 2017, you co-founded PriceLabs. Yeah. What led you to start PriceLabs? Anurag Verma: So we actually started in 2014. Okay. I switched to being full-time at PriceLabs in 2017. Okay. So probably in my LinkedIn you see 2017 is when—yes, but we started PriceLabs part-time when I was still working full-time at United. David Millili: Got it. Anurag Verma: At United Airlines, I was doing pricing algorithms and revenue management algorithms, building tools that our revenue management team would work on. One of my classmates from undergrad, Richie, one of my co-founders, he was doing his MBA at Kellogg, which is Northwestern University, just north of Chicago, and his roommate got an internship in Boston. So my friend had this empty room for three months, and he said, "What do I do with this?" And he's like, "Hey, look, Airbnb is coming up. Let me list it on Airbnb." This is, I want to say, Feb of 2014. And he comes to me, and we used to talk often because we had known each other at that point for 11 years, and he came to me and was like, "Hey, Airbnb does not give any guidance as to, like, what should I price. You do airline algorithms. Do you have any ideas?" And I'm like, "One, airlines, large hotels have a vast amount of internal data, and so we can build something very easily. I know how to do that part. For your one home that has never sold anything before, I don't even know where to begin." And we're like, "Okay, how would we get some volume of data?" And we're like, "Okay, on Airbnb, this is unique to short-term rentals because there is only one unit, one home. You can look at Airbnb and see if it is available or not." Steve Carran: Mm-hmm. Anurag Verma: So if a date was available and it got booked, you kind of know possibly somebody booked it. And so we're like, "Okay, what if we collectively look at all the homes in Chicago, and then figure out what dates are booking fast and what dates are booking slow and things like that, and base your pricing on that." We're like, "This seems like a good idea because this is something close to what hotels do." Like, they look at their own inventory and see what's... If it's selling too fast, bump up the price. If it's not selling, lower the price, right? Steve Carran: Mm-hmm. Anurag Verma: So we're like, with one home you can't do it, but if you have 300 homes around you and you can kind of look at their calendar, maybe you can. This is all public information. Anybody can scan their calendar. And we were like, "That sounds great in theory, but, like, how do we get the data? Like, do I manually go into the calendars?" Because I was trained as a software engineer, but not really a software engineer. So we found a third friend, friend of a friend, who was a software engineer in the travel industry, used to work at Orbitz at that point, and we asked him, like, "Hey, is this something we can scrape?" And he's like, "Yeah, let me try." And then two days later he's like, "Is this what you wanted?" And we were like, "Okay, we have found our third co-founder. Let's do this." So we built something out. We hadn't even incorporated a company in 2014. We rolled it out for Chicago, messaged on Reddit a bunch of people that we could find in forums that were Airbnb hosts, found out what their pain points were and all of that. Next year, rolled this out for the entire world, not just Chicago, and at some point we were like, "Hey, enough people are using it, let's actually incorporate a company." Incorporated a company. Enough people started using it. At that point, I want to say about 1,000 homes were using us. Wow. We were like, "Maybe we should charge for it because how long can we keep funding the bills by ourselves?" And did that, and sure enough, some customers were continuing to pay for it, and then they kept giving us feedback. So we did not have experience in the short-term rental industry, but they kept giving us feedback on, like, what to improve, what to work on. Some of our earlier large customers in 2017 ended up being aparthotels. Sure. So, in Europe and in US, there was a company called Stay Alfred. Yeah. In Europe there was a company called Hostmaker, and these guys would take buildings and do this. So very early on they also told us about, like, "Hey, we actually don't have one home. We have multi-unit inventory." And they told us what to do for multi-unit inventory, what kind of features to build, and we already knew from the airline stuff what else can be done when you have your own inventory, getting insights from there. So essentially we kept building what customers were asking for us. And yeah. Steve Carran: So for those that might not be familiar with PriceLabs, can you share a little bit more about what you do? Anurag Verma: Yeah. So PriceLabs is a revenue management system. As I just said, we started in the short-term rental industry, but over time we are getting more and more boutique hotels, independent hotels, inns, B&Bs, RV camps, all kind of different... And so at this point we don't call ourselves necessarily short-term rentals, but anything that goes into alternate accommodation or lodging industry broadly. So we are not necessarily serving the large Marriotts and sort of Sheratons and Hiltons. But anybody who is in the lodging industry does run into the problem of pricing, and may not know how to do it. Two things that make us unique on this front are, one, we have data from both the hotel industry and short-term rental industry, and more and more we are seeing that those two end up competing with each other, depending on the market, of course. And so having some sense of, okay, we see short-term rentals really booking up for a date six months out, even if no hotel has figured out and increased their prices, we know that there is demand building up there. Eventually it will overflow into hotels even if they're not competing directly right now, and so we know we can... we have some surge happening there. And then two, because we came from the short-term rental side of it, everything is built as self-serve. You don't have to take a demo with us or sign a long-term contract to start off. You can, of course, do that, but a lot of our customers just do a free trial and try out and self-sign up, like, because all of it has been built to be self-serve. Of course, there are resources, there are videos, there are articles. Our team can hop on a call, but things have been built simple enough for you to be able to use without guidance. Steve Carran: That's great. So now we're gonna dive into the industry thoughts, more the thought leadership section of the podcast. So, many independent hoteliers still price based on gut feel and last year's spreadsheet. What's the biggest revenue blind spot when you see owners run property this way? And why does it persist even among experienced operators? Anurag Verma: The biggest blind spot is, I think, something I already mentioned where when you are looking at your own spreadsheet, you can't react till something happens in your portfolio. And I'm going to start with a smaller example. Let's say you have 10 units, and this is a small one. If something big is coming to your town, if one room gets booked, you'll be like, "Huh, six months out I usually don't get booked, but sometimes it happens. It's okay." Two get booked, and you might be more interested, because when you only have 10, nothing is statistically significant, right? Like, it's all small numbers. The third one gets booked six months out, and you're like, "Oh, maybe I should be bumping my prices up," right? But by now you've already sold three for a cheap price. And in a lot of hotel industry, we actually see that this is almost considered normal, like especially for larger hotels even. Like, even if you have 100 or 300, far out you tend to price low, and say, "Okay, if I see uptick, I'll react to it, but I don't always anticipate an uptick." Whereas, what truly people should be doing, and some people already do, is one, looking at comps to say, "Okay, how are other people pricing?" Maybe they have already seen an uptick. If a conference is happening here, the hotel right next door might have seen an uptick, and maybe I am five blocks away, and I have not yet seen it. But if I see that another hotel is seeing an uptick, what do I do? It's tough to rely on other people's pricing, of course, because they might have a completely different reason. Maybe they have a wedding that booked there, and because of that, all their rooms are already sold out, and whatever is left, you're not going to get those wedding guests. So, a lot of times looking at data is important, but also then putting that data in context. So the biggest mistake a lot of people do is either just not look at the market or when they're looking at market, look at prices. And prices are, I want to say, not the right signal to look at. There's a lot more that can impact prices than just demand. So you have to find that fine mix of your own data, market's data, other markets data. Like if there is an events catalog you can find what's happening in your city, go find that, all of those things, yeah. David Millili: And many hotel owners are nervous about handing the pricing decisions to software because they feel that they're losing control of the property's operations. How do you think about the balance between automation and human judgment when it comes to revenue management? Anurag Verma: So our philosophy, and I think this is a shared philosophy of most revenue management systems in the world, and you asked earlier about what have I learned from United. David Millili: Right. Anurag Verma: At United Airlines, we had a team of about 20 data scientists, about 30 software engineers building a very complex system. But at the end of the day, there were 150 revenue managers for different markets who would sit on top of that system to bring that human judgment. Now, of course, this was 15 years back, but even now the same things exist. And the same is true for hotels, right? Like if you use PriceLabs or if you use any other revenue management system, you're not necessarily giving up control. You still can steer the system if you know something that the system may not have known. So for example, if you know that, I don't know, some obscure wedding is coming up into town, and it's going to be a really big one, I don't know, maybe this is Lake Tahoe or not Miami. Miami can absorb most weddings, I want to say. Yeah. But maybe Como. David Millili: Yeah. Anurag Verma: Right? But if you know something big is coming, and the market hasn't absorbed it yet, you can still guide the system. Or if you know that your strategy is right now to compete on volume because you're trying to establish a brand, and maybe you're a new hotel, you don't have to go for revenue maximization right now because your hope is to get a reputation in so that future revenue is maximized as well. You can guide the system into doing all of these things. So a lot of controls exist, whether they are for specific dates, whether they are for broad strategy, whether they are for state restrictions, when people can check in and check out, all kinds of things. The tools are there to automate, I want to say, boring workflow, whereas keeping the judgment with you, the judgment and the strategy with you. Steve Carran: So one thing we talk about on the podcast is the guest experience is changing. Especially the booking process. Anurag Verma: Yeah. Steve Carran: So now guests when they're searching, they're not only searching for just hotels or Airbnbs. They're both hotels and vacation rentals are coming up on the same site. So how should independent hotels think about their comp set when their comp set is not just the hotel down the road? Anurag Verma: Again, it depends on what kind of stay it is. So if it's a one-night stay, most people would say, "I'm going to just book a hotel," right? It's convenient, it's known. I don't have to figure out how a new home works. Although even on that front, there are plenty of one-bed apartment units, aparthotels that have come up. If it's a three-night stay, then you're right at the cusp of like, hey, it's long enough that having a kitchen is helpful. Steve Carran: Yeah. Anurag Verma: If it's a week-long stay, a lot more people are going to do a vacation rental than a hotel because they're like, "Hey, for a week, especially if I have kids, I don't want to be eating out every night. Having a kitchen is definitely important. Having a separate bedroom for my kids is helpful." So there is a spectrum, and depending on where you are on the spectrum, the guest is going to make different choices. Steve Carran: Sure. Anurag Verma: But there is nobody in the market who's purely seven nights, and there's nobody on the market who's purely one night. Like, everybody, short-term rentals are taking short bookings, like one or two nights. Hotels take seven-night bookings. So guests are mixing those in. So when you think of comp set, it's important to not just look at hotels around you, but also look at short-term rental metrics. Now, the problem with short-term rental metrics is most short-term rentals are one unit, so you can't—right, and hotels, you take the 10 hotels around you, and you have a good sense of where the general market is. Sure. For short-term rentals, you can't pick 10 short-term rental units and have a general sense. So for that, generally, at least in our software, we give you a, like, closest 300 homes, what are they doing, what trends are they seeing, and those kinds of things. That's great. So the way you look at comp sets for short-term rentals is fundamentally different from the way you look at hotels. The other difference is also that hotels you can only see the prices. You don't get to know how much of it is booked. Whereas short-term rentals give you that additional edge in that you can actually see that, you know, the occupancy is sitting at 80% for the next weekend right now. Whereas usually it's not as booked, so maybe there's higher demand. David Millili: Great segue. So demand has become much harder to predict with sudden events. There's shifting travel patterns. There's last-minute bookings. So in such a volatile world, how should independent hotels think about pricing responsiveness? Anurag Verma: Yes. So there are two parts to pricing responsibly. One is for each date in the future as something pops up, how do you know something has popped up and change the price? And then the second part is, as you get more and more information about it, how do you keep changing its price? And both are pretty intense. If you don't automate it, it can get pretty intense. Steve Carran: Right. Anurag Verma: So for example, we frequently run into folks who, for the solar eclipse, for example, that happened last year. Yeah, at the, in, in almost, yeah, all through, like, I want to say Northeast all the way to Texas. Far out, they were like, "Hey, solar eclipse is coming. Let's really, really bump up the rates." And you do it, and sure enough, the solar eclipse, the demand stays where, like, the demand was huge, and you could keep your prices up, and it was fine. On the other hand, there was FIFA World Cup where the same thing happened, like the dates got declared somewhere in October. I went to a game in Kansas City, and I booked a BnB, not a short-term rental, but like a bed and breakfast. And I got a steal because they had not bumped up their prices even two weeks after the schedule was declared, right? So one, finding out. But once you found out, a lot of people bumped up their prices and they were like, "Okay, these are my FIFA rates." But over time, FIFA demand was not as strong as everybody thought it was going to be. You have to be responsive in changing that. And it's not just FIFA or the solar eclipse. Every weekend, the upcoming weekend, depending on how it's selling or not selling, you might want to adjust it. Not just weekends, even midweek. Things are happening constantly, so like depending on how it's pacing, depending on how your pickup is going, you might want to change your prices. And all of that can be done on spreadsheets, but just that you're then not doing much else if that's the only thing you're doing. Whereas, for a lot of software users, it becomes easier where the broad things are taken care of. You're there to provide the final human judgment and nudges, and oversee it essentially. Steve Carran: So what advice would you have to somebody out there who's interested in, you know, founding or co-founding their company? 'Cause, you know, it's not the easiest thing in the world to do. So what advice would you have for somebody out there who's looking to do something similar to you? Anurag Verma: So there are a few things that we usually try to stick by. One is customer centricity. We did not know too much about the short-term rental industry or the hotel industry when we started. We knew there was one problem, and we tried to solve it, and then we just talked to a bunch of people to say, "Would you use it?" And to your face everybody will say yes, they will use it, but then they don't use it. And then you try to find out, "Hey, tell us, like, be honest, what did you not like?" Right? Once you get a certain amount of customers, if you find some champion customers, the really helpful part is that they will start giving you feedback. Now, there are two ways to go about it. One is to say, "No, no, no, you're thinking of this wrong. This is how you should use it." Or to say, "Hey, I only have 10 customers. They're telling me something about how I can improve. Let's just do it." Like, don't argue back. Just do it. And then you'll find out that, that one customer out of 10 was maybe a representative in some ways. A lot of people don't want to talk. The ones who do want to talk, just listen to them early on. As long as they are being reasonable, you don't have to do everything they're asking. And just keep on doing it. You'll start accumulating more and more vocal customers. You keep doing it, and slowly you'll have something that a lot of people actually want because it's solving a problem. You can build the best thing in the world, but if nobody is using it and paying for it, you can't force somebody to pay for it. Right. You can't use somebody to use it for free, even. So, there is that threshold of like, okay, how do I get the first few? And then sometimes that path is just to whoever is asking, just build something for them and then see where it goes. If somebody's starting right now and has nothing out there, I frequently say it's much easier to build for the smaller customers than for enterprise because it's very hard to sell something to Hilton, for example. Steve Carran: Sure. Anurag Verma: Because if you are a three-person company, which we were for five years, Hilton is not going to look at you... But somebody for whom you're really scratching an itch, if they have a 10-person company or a small hotel, if you're really solving the problem, they'll be like, "Hey, I know many others like me, and it's okay. Like, try your best. Even if you don't work out, I will find somebody else," kind of a thing. They are a lot more trusting of newer companies. So like, I think for us, we got lucky that what we built was for the independent hotels and this segment and short-term rentals where the customer size was not Hilton, where like 50 different people have to make a decision to purchase your software essentially. Sure. Steve Carran: So how many dorms do you have on your platform? Any yet? How many dorms? How you started out back in the day. Anurag Verma: at all? So this wasn't a dorm, this was a shared room. Steve Carran: Oh, okay. Anurag Verma: So this was a two-bedroom apartment, and the second bedroom was what he was putting up. Steve Carran: Oh, okay. Okay. Anurag Verma: Yeah. We do have hostels on our platform. Steve Carran: Okay. Anurag Verma: I think in total we have somewhere around 50 to 60,000 multi-unit inventory. And when I say multi-unit inventory, it could be a hotel, it could be a BnB, it could be a hostel, it could be an RV park, it could be an apart-hotel. But if we strictly go down the independent hotel or hotel kind of a setup, then I think it's close to 35,000 doors. Yeah. Steve Carran: It's impressive. Impressive. All right, so we've been asking you questions this whole time. This is where we're gonna turn the tables and let you ask David and I a question. Anurag Verma: All right. What got you into the industry? David Millili: What brought me into the industry? Anurag Verma: Yeah. David Millili: I needed a job. So I was... I needed to work my way through college. And I got a job as a busboy. Anurag Verma: Okay. David Millili: And then I guess the bug bit me, I guess I liked the big, bright lights. It was in downtown. It was a Hyatt in downtown Pittsburgh, and then just decided that that's what I wanted to do. I knew I didn't wanna be in the food and beverage side, but I just knew that's where I wanted to be. And from there, you know, I worked every job in a hotel, and then moved to the tech side. Anurag Verma: Got it, and then what got you into podcasting? David Millili: The tech side. Anurag Verma: Okay. David Millili: So we were advising a company. Anurag Verma: Yeah. David Millili: And they needed help with marketing, and so we actually stepped in, and we launched the podcast. Anurag Verma: Got it. Okay. David Millili: Then we actually bought the podcast from that company. All right. So it wasn't really planned. I don't think Steve or I would have thought five years ago we were gonna be doing a podcast. Yeah. But here we are. Yeah. Anurag Verma: Yeah. Do you guys ever think, "I'm tired of talking to people?" Steve Carran: I never do, to be honest with you. Okay. I think it's kind of funny. Like, my passion is doing the research. Anurag Verma: Okay. Steve Carran: 'Cause it's so fun to understand people's backgrounds and kind of how they got into hospitality. Yeah. And, 'cause so many people from hospitality either came from the industry. A lot of people did not. Yeah. Like yourself, came from the airlines. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's like one of my favorite things to do. Anurag Verma: All right. Steve Carran: So that was a great question. David Millili: Good question. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. This is where you get to let people know how they can find out about PriceLabs, and how they can get in touch with you. Anurag Verma: Perfect. So you can get to PriceLabs at hello.pricelabs.co. You can always reach out to our support team, support@pricelabs.co. My name is Anurag, you can also reach out to me at anurag@pricelabs.co, or find me on LinkedIn. It might be easier if you don't remember the email exactly. But go to our website, pricelabs.co, and for hotels we have hotels.pricelabs.co. David Millili: Okay, great. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Whether you're watching or listening, we appreciate you, and hope to be with you again soon. Thanks for joining us. Anurag Verma: Yeah. Thank you so much.