Latest / STR Unpacked / “Most Hosts Get Direct Bookings Wrong! Here’s What Actually Works in 2026”
Transcript
- Ben: Hi and welcome to Short Term Rentals Unpacked. Today I am joined by Mark Simpson, founder of Boostly, one of the most vocal advocates in the direct booking world within short term rentals. Now this isn't going to be a tactical how to build a website episode. What I really want to explore is the commercial reality of direct bookings in 2026. Who is actually for, whether it's becoming harder, whether the industry narrative actually matches reality. Mark. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on. Mark: Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. Looking forward to digging into this today. Ben: Perfect. Well, without further ado, let's jump straight into it. So look, everyone talks about repeat bookings. I think when you ask about direct bookings, usually the first thing someone talks about is saying, well, here's how I keep the guest. But that seems like the low hanging fruit for me. How do you actually generate net new direct demand in a world where Airbnb and booking.com are the dominant search? Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So there's a cool stat that came out at the back end of last year where 65 % of all direct bookings come on the back of an OTA search. So let's look at that in like real terms. So basically for every 10 bookings, six of them have come from an OTA search. So they're starting their search on Airbnb. They're starting their search on booking.com on Expedia, et cetera, but the book in direct. So how, how can we, how can we do that? Ben: Okay, interesting. Mark: Right. That's basically the question that I always get when I give someone that stat, they go, well, how do we do that? And it's called the billboard effect. I've been talking about the billboard effect now for years. And basically what you need to do, well, what is the billboard effect? So the billboard effect is, ⁓ you know, when you go into your supermarket, right? over here in the UK, we've got as there, right? So you walk into as there and you've got to go and buy detergent, laundry detergent, right? You go to the laundry detergent aisle and you are surrounded by so much choice. So basically what brands do Ben: Okay. Mm-hmm. Mark: is they billboard their name, their logo, their colouring everywhere. So they do it on billboards. They do it on newspaper ads, TV ads, ⁓ radio ads, social media, ⁓ emails, you know, basically they billboard their name everywhere. So when you're on the aisle, you've got all this choice. There's is the brand that pops out to you and you go, ⁓ I recognise them. I'm going to go book with them. That's the billboard effect, right? So in the terms of short-term rentals and for small operators, it's making sure that on your listing, your brand name is as mentioned as many times as possible so that you then put it subconsciously into the future potential guest, the person who's on your listing to go, ⁓ let's see if I can go find them direct, right? And that's what people are doing. people go, well, what is the likelihood of that happening? And the answer is a lot. Ben: Yeah. Mark: ⁓ There's a big TikTok trend that happened in 2024 where content creators were documenting how they could find a listing on Airbnb and find that exact property by doing a reverse image search on Google to find them direct. That trend picked up millions and millions and millions of views. ⁓ So much so that there's a new tool popped up that's called Direkto. Google Chrome extension started by Pierre who used to be part of Ben: Okay. Mark: transparency, think, transparent anyway. So he's got this tool called direct or Google Chrome extension that is phenomenal. And it has had hundreds of thousands of downloads. So the, the impetus, especially within Gen Z is that they will find people direct and they will book direct, you know? And so there is like a, and the stats back it up. So that's one of probably when I talked to host and I've spoken to over, I don't know. thousands of hosts the last 10 years, you we worked directly with 2000 of them and helped bring in a billion dollars in bookings over the last 10 years. The one thing that I talk about when they go down this rabbit hole of not repeat guests, how, how can they get in in front of like new guests from instead of Airbnb booking.com? That's the one that I talk about because at the end of the day, could burn so much money in Google ads and matter ads, you know, if you do it wrong, Ben: Mm-hmm. Mark: So there's no point trying to compete with Airbnb and booking.com on that retrospect because they're just going to, they're going to gobble up the traffic because they spend millions if not billions on it. But it's like, how can you have your cake and eat it? How can you have your listings on your Airbnb, your booking.com, your verbose, but subconsciously into the mind of the booker, get across that you're not just like a hobbyist host, you're a professional business and this is how you find is direct. Ben: so interesting because like I whenever I look for somewhere I always try and find them direct by doing that but I always assumed it was just because I'm a kind of an industry veteran that of course I do that Mark: So many people are doing it. And like the easiest tip that I can give to everybody is you've got 300 characters in your description on Airbnb. So 300 characters from the top to where it says Seymour, right? So in that 300 characters, you've got to get across A, your ⁓ property name. So brand your properties. If you're not doing already, it's an absolute must. Number two, get across your business name and the location that you're based in. So for example, it could be ⁓ introducing the red house brought to you by Mark B and B based out of York, England, right? So instantly what you've done there is you've given it the property name, the business name and the location. So any savvy person traveler will just Google search or go to their favorite AI of choice and type in property name, business name, location. And from an SEO perspective, because that is such a hyper niche keyword, your business and your website, if you've set your website up correctly, will come top of Google, right? And they will just click straight into there. ⁓ And that's one of the easiest ways that you can do it. The reason why so many people fail is that when they're on their Airbnb listing, nowhere does it show that they are a proper business, right? They just literally blend in and merging with everybody. but there's like three key places. One is the description, one is the pictures, and one is the host profile as well. You've got host profile, you've got an option to do 400 characters in there. So, so many people don't take advantage of it and that's just Airbnb, that's not bookin.com or Verbo as well. So there's loads of opportunities to do it. Ben: And do you think within that as well, like you obviously mentioned AI there and people starting to search more in AI. Like I know that AI or chat GDP as an example, that adverts are coming with that business model, right? Is there a way, do you think of kind of circumventing the OTAs by having a very, in the description that you mentioned, so it's AI searchable more than Airbnb or booking.com? Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well, chat GPT ads, that is gonna be a big advantage when and if and where it lands. We don't know what it looks like yet. I know I've seen a few people from the industry, Boris, for example, from flataway talking about this and getting excited over it, but we don't know what it looks like yet. But if it lands the way that we think it's gonna land, it's gonna be like messing around with Facebook ads in 2013. It was a gold mine if you did it right, you know? ⁓ Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Mark: So I think AI ads and chat GPT ads could be really beneficial because the way that they described it and launched it and spoke about it, they use travel as the, as the example. we could have an amazing opportunity when, when, that lands, the rest of AI is, it's really hard to predict on where it's going to go because it seems to be fast moving so much. I feel like what we know to be true is that these devices here, So iPhone, Samsung's, and I've got an Alexa device to the left of me here. ⁓ at the moment, at present moment in time, the only people that are truly using AI is business owners and geeks, right? You're general, like my mom, yeah, my mom doesn't use chat GPT, right? My Ben: Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. Mark: My best mates that I've known since the age of four that I went to preschool with, none of them use chat GPT. If they do, they're messing around with it doing like a fancy animal pictures with their kids. There's going to be a point, and I don't know when that is, that when everybody's using it, whether they know they're using AI or not, my prediction is that... Ben: Yeah. Mark: when they see robots walking on the street, which I think is probably going to be next year at some point, that will then be like the most, the general public are using it as well. But when the general public are using AI, like chat GPT or whatever, or it's at some point very soon, these devices, these Apple devices, the Siri is going to get updated. There's a rumor is it's going to be before the end of this quarter in 2026. Ben: Yeah. Mark: When Siri gets updated and it's gonna be using the Gemini, the Google Gemini ⁓ model, right? When that happens, because at the moment, I don't know what phone you've got. Have you got an Apple or a Samsung? you got? So Siri is shocking, right? It's the worst experience, right? You try talking to it or communicating with it, you know, it's basic at best, right? Ben: I've got an apple. Yeah. Mark: And the same with Alexa. You're trying to ask an Alexa a question or Google Home a question. It's just awful experience when they get updated. So Alexa is going to get updated with Anthropic, which is Claude, and Apple is going to get updated with Google Gemini, which I never thought that I would say, but that's, that's where we're at. So Siri is going to get updated. Alexa is going to get updated. When that happens and these devices are much cleverer than what they are now. Ben: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Mark: I feel like what's gonna happen is that yes, we will start to see more people using AI agents to book travel. So a long way around in saying chat GPT ads, I think it's gonna be great. Get on it straight away. If you've got the budget, you've got the time and you wanna mess around with it. I know I will be, but also as well, you've got to be really looking at it that. I put an email out last week to my audience saying, I think by the end of the year, 10 % of your revenue should be coming from ChatGPT or AI search, right? So you've got to make sure that A, your website can be visible through AI search, you know, how can an AI agent read your website and understand it? Two, you got to make sure that not only your website, but hundreds, if not thousands of other websites. have your data on it in terms of it's got your brand, your brand name, your brand properties. And every single one of these websites are talking about your brand in a positive way. Because again, not everybody really truthfully knows how chat GPT when you type in ⁓ best property manager in Brighton or best place to stay in Valencia. But there's searches that are coming up. There are tools that are out there that can help. I've been messing around with a lot of them, but From what people have been saying and a real good source on this is Neil Patel and his blog and what his team put out, but they're basically saying, for a eye search to be mentioned more times than not, you have to be mentioned on loads of websites, including things like Reddit, Madly, YouTube, right? In a positive way. So reviews is a positive way. Good reviews. Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Mark: And having your brand, your properties, your name mentioned on hundreds, if not thousands of sites. So that's one of the first things that people can be starting to do is to get visible in many places as possible, but also making sure, you know, your central zone of truth, which is your website is set up in a way that can be read by agents, which is mad because you got to set up your website normally to be read by a human. So you want it to look fancy, look nice and all those things, but you've got to make sure you've got specific things in specific places on your site. but where an AI agent can read it and understand it because it has to then report that back to the human that it's talking to. Ben: Is there a world to mark then? Because I'm just thinking back to when I first started my company, Dromore, like back in 2017, I used to go to these like meetups and there would be people, we'd all compare how much we spent on Google Ads and SEO as a percentage of revenue and how much traffic that would get us in terms of new listings, right? But like, is there just a world where then... essentially with GPT ads that's kind of the same because essentially what you've just described is how much you spend on ad spend and how much you spend in SEO it's just done in a very AI friendly way so sorry a roundabout question is essentially is it just going to be a case of who's got the biggest budget wins or is a genuine opportunity for smaller players to break out of this Mark: So when you were chatting in your friend groups back in 2017, were you talking about getting more listings of the more property owners or getting more bookings? More listings. Ben: More listings, more listings because back then there wasn't really a strategy for direct bookings. It was put it on airbnbandbooking.com, right? Mark: Yeah, because that's going to be the thing I was going to ask because the only way to truthfully track a direct booking is if your PMS gives you the ability to track a booking, right? In 2017, I've been in this industry full time since 2010. I used to use a PMS where you could not track anything. It was one of the first things that I asked when I came back into the family business way back when was how can we actually track a booking, right? And no PMS was truthfully set up for it 15, 16 years later and it's not got much better. Ben: Yeah. Mark: But it's, got a little bit better. So you can't truthfully track, you know, ad spends or, know, UTM, UTR links and things like that. Truthfully, to today to track a new listing, a new management company or whatnot. That's easy. You can do super simple leads for that to hit a page. And if it's a sign up, you can, you can do that. Coming back to bookings though. ⁓ Do we have an opportunity? Yes. Because AI is massively disrupting this industry more than anything that I've ever seen before because right now there are people, well, look at this chap in Germany who created this project ⁓ only in November 2025, an AI project, put it on GitHub, it's called OpenClaw and he's just sold his business to OpenAI for a lot of money, right? It's a solo founder who has gone and exited and done an acquirer hire to, you know, OpenAI for, you know, Ben: Yeah, yeah, I heard about this. Mark: rumored being, you know, 50 million. That's a lot of money. For the first time ever, AI is giving these small players the opportunity to do something pretty powerful because all of these big companies are having to pivot massively. I know a guy who is sole job, he works for Microsoft and his sole job is to go and speak to big departments in the UK, government departments and show them how to use AI. That's literally what he does every day today because there are so many people now are like, well, what? Ben: Hehehehe Mark: What is this? And only 0.04 % of the whole world have got a pro plan on Claude, right? So if you've got a pro plan on Claude, you're ahead of a lot of people here. And so yes, we have an opportunity right now if we do it right, right? If you can just spend that time. I dedicate two hours every single week of just AI learning. I block off my calendar. Ben: I really... Yeah. Mark: I don't do any calls, don't do anything, don't listen to messages. And I just read like what I've saved in my phone notes from the past week on AI. And I try and study up and just try and get up to date as much as possible. I've got 25 members of staff at Boothly and I've upgraded every single one of them to have a pro account, either Claude or ChatGPT or Perplexe. And we're all learning together because I know that if we don't do it now, we're going to be massively behind. So that when... ads in chat GPT hit, we can be one of the first people to have a test of it. Test of it from Boothly from like what we do, but also as well testing it for hosts and small property managers to show how they can get ahead of it as well. Because you're right. Mark has do one thing and they spoil everything. Right. And so when, ⁓ when you know, these big companies figure out what they can do, then yeah, booking.com will just go and Ben: Yeah. Mark: shit dump a lot of money into it and probably, you know, get the traffic. But there's going to be a small opportunity where we can get in as well. Ben: Yeah, I totally agree with that. think that makes a lot of sense. So I mean, I guess it's kind of a clear answer from this, but like at what scale does investing seriously in all of this world kind of make commercial sense? Mark: Yeah. I mean, my belief is that there's all the things that I've talked about for the last 10 years. A lot of it doesn't cost a lot of money, right? Whether it's getting repeat guests or new guests. I even wrote a book called the book direct playbook. was 101 tips and most of them don't cost a penny to do. Obviously it's, it's masters of scale, right? If, if you've got a majority of my audience, the people that I help are anywhere from one property, I would say to like Ben: Yeah. Mark: 50 properties. We've got a couple of people in our client base who have got more than 50 properties, but I say that's the majority. So for those who are under 50 properties, there are ways and means to do this that you can get to 60, 65, 70, 80 % direct bookings and not spend a lot of money doing it. It just takes time, right? Time, effort, and you know, being a very good host with a good product. Masters of scale over the 50, 60, 100, 1000 properties, then yeah, you're gonna obviously have to... sink money into this because as you are a bigger, it's a lot harder to keep those high numbers up, but it doesn't mean you can't do it. You know what I mean? It's again, I feel like if you can apply this logic at the start of your journey, then it's easier as you grow. But if you're a thousand properties in and you're thinking, ⁓ I might just start doing this thing called direct bookings. And obviously it's a lot harder for you to, ⁓ to, to, to implement, but doesn't mean it's impossible. Ben: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. if we say like, say the small window of opportunity, if we kind of catch the OTA sleeping on this and that small window of opportunity turns into a relatively big window of opportunity, do you think there's any kind of strategic risk to any of the OTAs? Because it's not just this, you've also got regulation, which is going to affect supply and then... AI ads and then obviously with the increase of direct bookings as well. Do you think, you know, is there a world that within the next five years, even Airbnb or booking.com could be in real trouble? Mark: I think we're getting into mystic meg territory here, like looking at a crystal ball, but I feel like truthfully, like with regulations and stuff, I feel like if you can just get through this next 18 to 24 months, get through these next few years. And if you're still here in the next few years, good, right? Because we, it's still so hot right now all over the world. It doesn't matter what market you're in or whatnot. It's either gone through your area or it's coming through your area when it comes to regulations. Ben: Yeah. Mark: so if you can just survive that, think that I think there's a very nice future on the end of it, but that's not just hospitality. can look at every industry, every career right now, and you can just say, just get through this next 18, 24 months. If you're here at the other end, fantastic because the, the amount of disruption that is happening, not just with AI or machine learning or whatever, it's, it's, it's insane. would an OTA ever be at risk? I mean, I doubt it. Ben: Yeah. Mark: they've been around for a long time and they probably will be around for a lot longer. Will their business model be absolutely disrupted and they will have to do things differently? Yes. I think everybody is, is looking at that. Even like the behemoth is Google is having to change so much, you know, and the alphabet group. So there's going to be massive change over this next 24 months. think this decade will just go down as just a massive head fuck. You know, if it started back in 2020 with the whole Ben: Yeah. Mark: uh, industry shutting down because travelers wasn't allowed. And I said, like, if you can survive COVID and come out the other end, fantastic. You're going to do well. And then it's now it's to a point, if you can survive this next 18 to 24 months and be there on the other side, then I think you'll, you'll, you'll do, you'll do well. So, but it's going to be a very interesting 18 to 24 months, whatever happens these next couple of years. Ben: Yeah. Yeah. But then by the sun thing, there'll be something else in 18 to 24 months. And if you survive that, maybe just stop putting time limits on it, Mark. Just if you survive. Yeah, exactly. But they do book our accommodation. So, know, swings and roundabouts. Yeah, exactly. So actually we're winner. So I mean, like, as a kind of off the wall question then. Mark: Yeah, probably, probably. It's probably aliens. It's probably aliens, you know, in 24 months, probably like, you know, these are extraterrestrials coming in from other planets and fucking things up. So yeah, probably. Yeah, exactly. Well, then there'll be loads of supply and loads of demand. ⁓ Win-win. Ben: If you decided to start an agency, you got 10 properties, you're in the middle of a competitive city, like would you sign up on the OTAs to get stuff? Would you try and do everything direct? Would you do a combination of both? How would you do it? Mark: I would definitely do both, right? At the end of the day, you want a business that's got multiple revenue streams coming in. I don't care what business you do, whether you're a taxi driver or a website designer, a PT, a florist, or a hotel accommodation or a property management accommodation, you want multiple revenue streams coming into your business, right? The problem in this industry, especially in America, is that everybody just plops themselves in Airbnb and goes, that'll do, that'll do me, right? I'm just going to go on Airbnb. We've got one revenue stream into their business. And you know, ⁓ Ben: Yeah. Mark: they often or very regularly come into a point where they get screwed over, whether it's their listing drops off page one or their listing gets suspended, whatever, then they're screwed. I think that in Europe, we're a bit more savvy and a bit more switched on. We know about multi-platforms. We know about this thing called bookin.com about Expedia and whatnot. And so you need to have multiple revenue streams with the OTAs and you need to have multiple revenue streams within direct bookings. Direct bookings, people just think that's a website. No. In direct bookings, there's multiple revenue streams. There is ads that we spoke about, pay-per-click ads, there is SEO, there's email, there's social media, there's referrals, there's working with influencers. So you've got to be doing as many things as possible to have multiple revenue streams coming into your business because just in case something gets cut off, aka your Airbnb listings get suspended or you get ban hammered on Facebook like I did once, you know, and you've got multiple other revenue streams that you can be tapping into. So you're not fucked. Ben: Yeah, I think that makes sense. mean, it's the same as anything else. It's like an investment portfolio. You don't put everything in one basket, right? Mark: Yeah, exactly. You don't go just spunk everything on like this shiny new meme coin that you heard your mates talking about. And you wouldn't, if you came to me and go, Mark, I've just literally, put all of my money, all of my savings into this little shiny monkey that I bought off the internet. I'd be like, Ben, we need to have a chat. Right. And you wouldn't do the same. You wouldn't do the same thing with your business as well. If you wouldn't, I wouldn't just go and put all of my direct booking revenue strategy time into just Facebook ads because Ben: Yeah. ⁓ Yeah, exactly. Mark: What if it doesn't work? What if it changes? What if rules changes? What if I get banned? How much? So it's the same with every business. So, you know, luckily I think in Europe, ⁓ UK, we're a bit more switched on when it comes to things like this. I've got 51 % of my customers in America because they are all on the Airbnb train. know, luckily for me for business, Airbnb keep fucking up and keep changing policies, putting their fees up. And so they just naturally come to us. And I feel like ⁓ when it comes to direct bookings, Ben: Yeah. Mark: 10 years ago, nobody was talking about it. Nobody. That's where I started to do it because we were at 80 % direct bookings at our family business. And so when we exited that and I was like, well, what am I going to do next with my life? It was just obvious to talk about diet bookings and then everything that has evolved around it has happened. Now, 10 years later, a lot of people are talking about diet bookings, which is good. Um, and it just means that more and more people are just aware of it. Now it's a case of teaching people. doing direct doesn't mean you got to go cold turkey on Airbnb booking document, but you've got to make sure you're using everybody to be able to make sure you've got multiple eyes on your business because the more times that you can be seen, the more times that people can buy from you. Ben: amazing. Amazing total sense. Look Mark, I really appreciate you. coming on today and having this chat. I hope that people listening have learnt a lot. I've learnt a lot. So thank you for leaning into the questions. I've really enjoyed it. And if you're listening and thinking about direct bookings, I think the real question is probably isn't should I do it, but are you ready to do it properly? And are you ready to kind of put the money into what the future holds? But thank you for listening and we'll see you for the next one.