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Product Updates - Hospitable Town Hall, July 22 · Hospitable Hosts

• speaker-0: Okay, hello everyone and welcome to today's town hall. Thank you so much for joining us. We are going to start with a couple of company and product updates today before we move on to some Q<unk>A from the audience. I'm going to briefly bring up our disclaimer that we always need to do. And then I'm going to invite on stage a new team member to start things off, Colin. We are introducing you to the team today. Would you like to go on stage and say hello? speaker-1: Hey everyone, really excited to be here. My name's Colin. I am based in Portugal, outside of Lisbon, by the beach. I grew up in the US and Virginia and spent many years in Seattle. I'm joining Hospitable as of last week as an engineer, as part of the front end team. So I'll be working on all the some UI and UX improvements and features and updates that you all have come to expect. I love to travel, travel around the world. speaker-2: Beach. speaker-1: staying in short-term rentals just about everywhere I've been and was an Airbnb host for a few years and definitely could have benefited from a product like this. So happy to be here and learn more about it and meet more of you. speaker-0: Nice. Great to have you, Colin. And obviously being in Lisbon, you've already managed to meet a few team members that actually base there as well, right? speaker-1: Yeah, we had a fun dinner last night with with four of us. So good to see some in person. speaker-2: So speaker-0: Great hear. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. stick around, listening to our other updates. but yeah, thank you so much for coming on stage and saying hello to everyone, Colin. Thank you. okay, moving ahead now to our product updates, and I'm gonna go ahead and hand over to Abby to start off with upsells. Abby. speaker-3: Thank you, Miles. So in the last town hall, we had a question from Swan Cotexture Properties. I'm not sure if you are here today. but you asked, well, you were thinking about offering early check-in and late checkout to your guests, and you wanted to know how often are guests actually purchasing and paying for early check-in and late checkout? Why not just offer it for free? And at the time. We couldn't share any, we didn't have any data on hand to share with you. but we wanted to follow up and give you some of those numbers because we think those numbers might surprise you. looking at the last 30 days, we had almost 1700 early check-ins and late checkouts sold to guests. And that resulted in $82,515 of additional revenue to the hosts who sold those early check-ins and late checkouts. On average, hosts who sold an early check-in or late checkout in that period made an additional $124.54. Although there's of course varying degrees of success. The top performing hosts in the period actually made about $1,600 in additional revenue. From early check-ins and late checkouts alone. And the average price of an early check-in or late checkout is almost $58, is almost $50. $48.91 is the average price. And two hours is the most purchased variant. So most guests are purchasing our early check-in two hours before their regular check-in time or two hours after the regular checkout time. And so If this isn't something that you are currently offering to your guests today, we think you should because that's extra money in your pocket without a whole lot of additional effort. So if you're not using upsells today, specifically early check-in, late checkout, it's pretty easy to get started. all you have to do to enable early check-in and late checkout is just set your desired pricing for each time variant. the The the pricing is totally up to you. But as we shared before, we typically see one hour starting about $25 and four hours going up to $80 to $90. That's on average. Again, you set whatever works for you and what makes the most sense for your property. You also have control, so you can decide when guests are able to purchase early check-in or late checkout, if you want to improve approve that purchase, etc. And Once you've enabled the upsell, you just need to remember to include the guest portal short code in your messages so that your guests know that they can go into the guest portal and purchase early check-in or late checkout if it's available. And speaking of guest messages, we will now, if you have a if you have a custom domain set for your guest portal, when you send messages to your guests that include the guest portal link, we'll actually use your custom domain in that link. this is something that's kind of took us a little bit longer than we would want would have wanted to. we were still including the hospitable default domain before. That was just to make sure that we could get your guests into the guest portal in case there were issues with your custom domain. We have fixed that. and so now if you have a custom domain set, we'll help your guests recognize you and your brand by using it in your messaging rules. And that is it for upsells, I think. On to Tim to give an update on SmartDurstack. speaker-1: Thanks, Abby. Hello, everyone. yeah, let's talk about my favorite topic, thermostats. So to begin, I want to walk you through a scenario that should be very familiar to you all. You have a guest checking out today, your cleaner is visiting tomorrow. Your next guest isn't arriving for another week. But there's one question. Did anyone remember the thermostats? Who remember to turn the heating down or to switch the earcon back on before the next guess? You might remember some of the time, but managing thermostats and temperature between bookings is something that's very easy to forget. But fortunately, we did not forget the thermostats. And that is why we are officially launching our Nest integration to beta today. We have been asked many times over the last 18 months. When are you launching Nest? Well, we finally have the green light from Google, so today. Today is when we are finally launching Nest, and we are in fact the first PMS to actually do so. speaker-3: So now speaker-1: Nest joins the other thermostat brands that we already support, joining our ECOB and our Honeywell integrations. The experience is the same across all the different brands. You connect your thermostat to Hospitable, you configure your presets just once, and then Hospitable will handle everything else for you. And many of our hosts have done just that already. Over 1,400 of you currently have your ECOB and your Honeywell. Thermostats connected between them. Those hosts have connected almost 4,000 thermostats in total, including 63 thermostats on our nest pilot. And so what that means is that so far, Hospitable has actually automated and automatically adjusted your thermostats 186,000 times. So that's 186,000 times that hosts have not had to remember their thermostats. And so what do these adjustments actually mean, all hosts? Well, there's a few things. So first, lower energy bills. Empty properties obviously don't need to be heated or cooled like occupied ones are. Second, leads to a better guest experience. Guests arrive to a comfortable property because of the temperature without anyone having to have thought about it. And then finally, it's just one less thing to have to worry about. And this is something that our hosts agree with. So one piece of feedback that we've gotten is the more smart automations, the better. Love the thermostat feature. I've encouraged all my hosts with an offline thermostat to switch to Honeywell or EcoBee. I have several with nests, so I'm really looking forward to that feature. look forward no further because it's here. Another host said, very quick and simple, it's great not to have to worry about. Love the ability to connect in this way. And so taking that back to the problem we started with and giving a little bit more of an explanation on how the integration actually works for those of you who haven't experienced it before or have been waiting those 18 months for that next integration. So the thermostat integration is built around three different presets. So when you connect a thermostat to hospitable, We're going to ask you to configure those three presets. The first one being occupied mode. So this mode will switch on before check-in, and it will get the property to a comfortable temperature for the guest on arrival. You can configure that how you can configure how far in advance you want that to be and when you want that switch to occur. So you can tailor it for your specific property. And then at checkout time. We are going to automatically adjust the thermostat to what we called unoccupied mode, which will reduce heating and cooling between reservations. If the cleaner comes in and adjusts the temperature of the thermostats, we allow a two-hour override before reverting back to that unoccupied mode. And then finally, long-term unoccupied mode. So we will automatically switch to this mode at checkout. if there is more than two weeks until your next reservation basically enables a deeper energy saving mode during the off season. And so these presets really help to ensure that no energy has been wasted and the guest has a good experience. But we're aware that a lot of you have different workflows. So we've tried to make the integration as flexible as possible. you've told us that some of your properties take longer to heat than others. So that's why we've given you control on when that occupied mode starts. Some of you have told us that you want the guests to have control of the thermostat during their stay. and some of you have told us you definitely don't want the guests to have control of the thermostat during the stay. And so that's why we've given you the choice to decide. So we've added an optional hoggle that either restricts control during the reservation. Or it enables the guests to have control while still respecting any existing lock that actually exists on the device. And then finally, you've told us that not every thermostat, not every temperature should behave the same way. So occupied mode for one device shouldn't necessarily be the same temperature as another. A garage and a living room don't necessarily need to be the same temperature. A room with plants in it might need to be a different temperature to one without. So we've added custom presets that allows you to configure those presets that I've mentioned at the device level and the room level. And speaking of which, many of you have told us that your properties have more than one thermostat. And so what we did is we doubled the number of free device connections available on our pro and our mobile plans. So pro users can connect two devices per property for free, and mobile users can connect four devices per property. So if for some crazy reason you have a supported thermostat but you haven't set it up yet, here is how. So for ECOB and Honeywell users, head to devices, thermostats, then connect and follow the connection flow. For Nest users, like I mentioned, we're still in beta, so you'll need to enable beta features first by heading to settings, preferences, and beta features. you can scan the QR code on the screen also for a link to a help article that will go through all of this in more detail, as well as showing you a list of supported devices. so please stop forgetting about your thermostats, go and connect them. and rather than just talking about it, I'm gonna hand over to Chris, who is going to walk through the process of connecting a Nest thermostat live, show the setup process, and then demonstrate basically how easy it is to actually get started. yes, thank you. speaker-2: Thank you. all right, so we will start from the devices dashboard where we are currently at. So it's a known space where you can see all of your currently connected smart devices. We're going to navigate to the thermostat section where we are going to you're going to see which thermostat brands we currently support. So there are Honeywell and Echo B and there is the new Google Nest integration. So in order to connect Google Nest, I'm gonna click on connect button. And we are going to be redirected into the authentication flow. So from the list of currently support integrations, I'm going to select Google Nest thermostats. And then another redirect is going to occur. And we are going to be redirected into the Googles authentication. So here is the name of my test home. And I need to add Google Nest permissions to Hospitable. So this is very important. Any thermostat that you want to control through Hospitable, you need to select it on this screen. Otherwise, it will not be imported into Hospitable App. I'm gonna click on next. And a couple more confirmations from Google. And hopefully, this should be it. So we're in the success screen. The Google Nest account has been connected successfully. And pressing this button is going to return us back into hospital. So right now we are checking the Google Nest account. speaker-1: And speaker-2: We have found two devices in our account. One is a device that is currently disconnected, so it's the basement device. The other is a living room device, which is currently active. So I'm going to match that one. Living room device is going to be matched to the Key West Willa property. So let me match it right here. There we go. Devices gone. It's currently matched. So what's going to happen right now in the background? We are going to be scanning the Key West Willa property, going through all of the reservations, and then we are going to be creating thermostat schedule schedules based off of the presets that we have defined earlier in Hosperable. This is something that Tim mentioned. If we navigate to the preset screen, you're going to see multiple presets. So here we have custom presets, we have occupied, unoccupied, long-term unoccupied presets. First, three presets are the default presets that Hospitable uses, and those are currently tied to our living room thermostat. Each preset has its own set points. So heating set points, cooling set points, HVAC mode, and fan mode. And also it's possible to control when the preset is actually going to be applied. So yeah, pretty much everything here can be adjusted. We are also pulling this data from the actual thermostat. So we are not going to allow you to set. Set points or turn on the HVAC modes that are not supported. Like Tim said, it's also possible to add various custom presets. So yeah, if we open up a custom preset, our custom preset is currently not scoped to any property. But if we decide to scope it to a living room, we can do so, we can save it, and then preset is going to be scoped to our living room thermostat. so yeah, if we go back, you can see that the thermostat is no longer tied to an occupied preset, but it's tied to our custom preset that has slightly different settings than occupied presets. That way you can customize any preset you want, and you can scope it to any thermostat that you want. So yeah, that's it for me. Okay, cool. Let's switch gears and talk about the tasks app. So in the last town hall, you gave us feedback that messaging in the task app to particularly to the hosts app, the hospitable, needed attention. Some of you had trouble tracking conversations and feared you were going to miss messages from your teammates. There's a lot we want to do with messaging, but rather than waiting for a big project. we wanted to focus on making some quick wins. So in the last two weeks, we kind of yeah, did a big review of what are the problems, what are the things that we can fix. And there were several issues. I think push notifications weren't always opening immediately the thread on both sides, on the task app and on the the hospitable side. there were yeah, some other small bugs. And then we started giving you visibility on any of the task lists. So if you're in like the task management overview, you can now see which jobs have open conversations, have threads, and have unread messages. So we think this is a nice set of quick wins that'll at least improve your confidence that you're not missing messages from your teammates. But yeah, there's more to come later. Switching gears. In the previous two town halls, we've shared updates on how we are making guest reviews actionable for cleaners. We currently share the cleanliness score, the review, and any private feedback you receive on Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO, and Direct. With the cleaner who cleaned the property for that review. We highlight relevant sections so you can easily scan long, so they can easily scan longer reviews and get the salient points that are relevant to them. We love those updates, but we realized there's a little bit of a gap. Your cleaner probably cleans a bunch of different properties and can't be expected to keep them all straight. this is the property with the mildew on the shower curtain and the upstairs bathroom property. So we needed a Property-specific orientation to guest feedback. And it needs to be visible at the right time to the right person, to whichever cleaner is about to clean that property as a way of setting the tone for that job. By seeing the recent cleanliness score, seeing the impact of their job on the reservations, and highlighting the recent specific things that guests mentioned in recent reviews, we believe this will help lift your property scores. We intentionally keep this section concise. And we keep the focus on the voice of the guest rather than turning this into an AI generated checklist. We are trying to deline we are not trying, sorry, to delineate strictly what is a task for the cleaner or for maintenance or for the host. We think that communicating the authentic recent feedback best equips the cleaner to take ownership over the issue. Okay. Moving on. We started a conversation in the previous town hall. About what we're doing to make the tasks app work better for teams. We added a tiny little share button to the jobs page that actually had a lot of work behind it on the back end of our system. Now, the experience we've been working on unlocking is for many of you who told us you assign all of your cleans to a cleaning company, specifically your cleaning manager at the cleaning company. And this person, in a sense, reassigns those cleans to their team. Now the share button was a bit of a hack to get us there. Today we're going to show you the progress we've made to improving that workflow. The goal is to make less work for you, the host. You shouldn't be the bottleneck, sorry, you shouldn't be the bottleneck adding all of your manager's teammates. You should be able to put more of that work on your cleaning manager. And we want to make your cleaning manager's job easier and not have them have to learn how to use your property management software. The tasks app should be increasingly where that work gets done in a workflow that feels tailored to their needs. And with that, I'm going to pass it to our lead engineer on the operations team to show you what a few of the updates are that we're releasing today to make the tasks app work better for cleaning teams and managers. speaker-4: Hi everybody. Okay, so hopefully you can see my screen right now. And yeah, to give you a bit of background on the left-hand side, you've got your teammates, which in this case, as Andrew mentioned, is our cleaning company, which is Acme Cleaning Company. On the right-hand side, you've got a cleaner that works for that company. They're not added as a teammate to your account. Yeah, for this demo today, we're inside the Tasks app, and we're gonna show you what these teammates will see. So we have assigned a task to... our cleaning company, they can see that in their job requests, which appear up by here. So this is a task for today. So they can take a little look into this task and see the information around it. And they can decide as they've been able to up until now, whether to accept or decline this job. So they're going to accept it. And now something that we're showing, which we weren't showing before is we're now showing this, this task hasn't been assigned yet section. Rather than, as Andrew mentioned, the little share button at the top. Yeah. very much leaning more into the assignment workflows for them now. So they can take a look at this, and they can assign. They can add one of their existing teammates that they've already assigned tasks to. From here, they can also add more teammates if they would like. For this today, I'm just going to assign it to Alex that's been working on this task. When they come back, they get to see, yep, they've assigned Alex this particular task and yep, they know that their job is done there. So they're gonna head back to the dashboard and we're gonna move over to what Alex can see on their side. So if we load up the dashboard, we now see the new job, which is this Key West Villa cleaning that's been added for Alex. They get to see all the information around it. They get to see that it's been assigned to them by their cleaning company and they can go ahead and start to work on this job. So I'm just gonna click through. and show you what they can see. Okay, great. So once they've arrived at the site, they will then be able to inform you as teammates have been able to do in terms of what they've done right now. So once they've arrived at the property, they can report a particular issue. And yeah, once they're inside, they can let you know they're inside and they can start doing the work. At this point, this teammate can see most of the things that your teammate will be able to see. The things to note are if you've got a price against the task, they're not gonna see that. They're not gonna be able to assign this to other potential members of their team. But they can continue and they can rate the guest, which was the feature that we launched fairly recently. They can add arrival photos. yeah, for today, I'm just gonna show you some things that they can do within the checklist. So they can jump in here at this point, again, do everything they've been able to do for now. They can load and upload particular images belonging to that checklist. But at this point, your... your cleaner manager is gonna want some insight potentially in terms of like, where is the job at currently? So if we jump into the clean over here, they can come down and currently see that, okay, Alex Morgan is currently viewing this checklist. They can jump in and see maybe the particular room or how have you got your checklist set up, the particular tasks they're working on at the moment. So if I jump in, we are showing you who is viewing the particular checklist at any time. If Alex is going ahead and completing tasks, you're going to have a slight delay, then it will show as completed on that side. And this is the same with images too. So we're giving that real time visibility to your cleaning managers in terms of the jobs that are being done as we are with you, as you will get to see them within the task detail view. speaker-2: And this is an this is an unlock too, Matt, for anyone that has multiple cleaners on a job, right? So if you assign a a larger property to more than one cleaner and they need to be sharing the checklist, like this is really, we hope going to help them coordinate and not and not overlap, right? speaker-4: Yes, exactly that. As I'm sure many of you have done document sharing online where you're both working on the same thing at the same time, we're trying to encourage more of that as we open this up to multiple cleaners on the same task too. yeah, lots of really cool stuff there. I'm going to pass to Andrew back at this point. speaker-2: Yeah, cool. Thanks very much. Yeah. And there's everything we do on the TAS app, it opens up all new feature requests like we see in the chat right now, which is which is great. We love it. and we see yeah, like assigning jobs to more than one teammate. Like that's something that's also on our radar. So so we we can get you guys set up as well. but yeah, it's fun to see all the progress there. Speaking of progress, the next thing up on the list is inventory management, a highly requested feature. and our mission to build absolutely the best operations software on the market for your teammates, we are starting to work on this for the TAS app and for hospitable. And in typical fashion, we're trying to do things a little bit differently. So we want to hear from you what is critical for us to get right? How can we make sure that this product matches your workflows, your team's workflows? We want this to be field first. So we're thinking a lot about how to reduce the burden on your cleaners, on your inventory managers. We want your voice to be heard. And for your feedback to make its way into the product. So we are doing customer interviews. There are two sessions every day through the end of this month. please book a session. These are fascinating for us. We always learn so much. So if you have something to say about inventory management and you're willing to give us your time, we would love to speak to you. So go ahead and book a session. And with that, I will pass to Emily, who's gonna give us some verbo sorry, verbo partner connection updates. speaker-5: It's a tongue twister. Thanks, Andrew. Hey everybody. All right. First, I will start with an update on our send money feature. So you can now use Hospitables Send Money feature for Virgo Partner Reservations. This is going to be available for two weeks after the guest checks out. You can let us know how much you'd like to refund the guest, and we will credit them the exact amount up to the full amount that they paid initially to their payment method on file. That's available today. Next, and available not quite yet, but soon. If on the other hand you need to request additional payments from your guest, you'll soon be able to do that too. Also, up to two weeks after checkout, you can request additional payment, and they will complete that from the guest portal. This is coming soon. We'll be sure to make the official announcement when it is actually available to you. The other big point of feedback that we've heard recently on the Verbo partner connection. That's actually made it difficult for some of you to actually make the decision to finally upgrade the connection is that when you do, Virbo no longer offers you their integrated damage protection product. That's been a really big gap. So to make sure that you have some protection after you upgrade, soon you'll be able to use Hospitable to collect security deposits from your Virgo guest. If you're not familiar with how this works today, you decide the deposit amount that you'd like to collect from your guest. Then hospitable will collect the guest credit card information at booking, and two days before they check in, we will collect the deposit from the guest. As long as the reservation is short enough, that deposit is collected as an authorization or a hold only. Then at checkout, you have the opportunity to claim all or part of that security deposit. And if you don't, the deposit will be automatically released back to the guest. Again, this is coming soon, but we wanted you to know that we are working on it. Finally, last update on Virbo Partner is for those of you who also use owner statements and invoices. So if you do, this might be time for you to tune in. So you might have seen some transactions on your recent owner statements or invoices. And I want to explain why they're there and why it's important that they're there. They are titled Verbo, Commission, Compensation, and the Reservation Code. These show up because of how Verbo Partner Reservations work. Every other channel deducts their fees or their commission straight from the payout, which means that the same person who gets the payout essentially ends up being the one to pay those fees. But on the verbo partner connection, that works differently. Verbo actually charges their commission on a credit card, and that credit card doesn't always belong to the same person who receives the reservation payout. So we needed to come up with a way to compensate the person who paid that commission if it differs from the one who received the payout. We do that so that the commission that you actually charge your owners can be calculated accurately. If you're in one of these two scenarios listed below, you're going to be seeing these verbal commission compensation transactions created automatically. It's important for you to know that you don't have to do anything, they're just created there. We just want you to know why. So if you receive the reservation payout, but your owner pays the commission on their card, you'll see a transaction. Or if your owner receives the reservation payout, but you use your card to pay the verbal commission, you'll see a transaction there. If it's the same person doing both of those things, no transaction is necessary and you won't see any changes. But again, the important thing for you to know is that you don't have to do anything. We're handling this for you automatically. And your commission agreements that you have with your owners are. Honored and the calculations themselves do not change. All right, on to a few more updates on the owner's statements. this one is almost seems silly to make its own slide, but I did want to mention it because in the last town hall, a longtime customer of ours, Jim from the Cabin Ferry, mentioned that the font size was way too small on owner statements. And he was totally right. our engineers were listening into that town hall. And by the time it was over, they had increased the font size and we were on our way. So that's a very, very small improvement. I know it's not a huge deal, but I think the point I'm trying to make is that we really are listening to your feedback and we really, really do appreciate you guys when you take time out of your day to provide such constructive feedback. So please do keep it coming. we're listening. And even if we have our heads down on a big, shiny new feature that's going to take a couple of weeks to build, we do still try to ship these kind of quick wins in the meantime. Speaking of new features, since our last town hall, we have released multiple bank account connections in the owner portal. So owners can now connect however many bank accounts they would like from the owner portal. This is really important to those of you who have owners who have different legal entities set up for each of the properties that you manage on their behalf. So up until now, you weren't able to take advantage of owner payouts or payments because the owner portal previously limited owners to connecting just one bank account. But now they can connect multiple. Today these bank accounts are used for owner payouts and owner payments only. But soon they will be able to be used for more things that you are paid out for or pay for in Hospitable. That's for a future town hall, but we we want you to know that we are working on that. The way bank accounts are managed right now kind of happens at a bunch of different places. And we want to give your owners a really unified experience that's centered around what they can do in the portal. where they don't have to do things multiple times in multiple different places. So more on that in a future town hall. And now we have some dashboard updates. speaker-1: Hello. Me again. So let's talk about my second favourite topic, the home dashboard. So as hospitable has grown, w we've added so many features, dynamic pricing, direct booking, smart devices, upsell, guest portal, so many things. But one thing that hasn't really tapped up is the dashboard. we're aware that previously It hasn't been particularly useful. It doesn't really offer insights. We know that many of you don't actually use it at all and jump straight to the calendar or the inbox. we also know that sort of generally within hospitable, it can be easy to miss important issues. and connected information can be scattered throughout the app. Therefore, the dashboard is changing. we have plans for many plans for what we want the dashboard to be. We we want this to be. Basically, your daily command center, the prioritization engine for your business. It should show you relevant metrics, it should show you exceptions that need your attention, recommendations and opportunities to help you to save time and to grow your business. We have started making some of those changes on the next slide. So the needs attention section is now live for all users at the top. of your home dashboard. This will show you some of those exceptions that I mentioned. It'll show you the critical issues like accounts that have been disconnected or payments that have failed, all prioritized in one place and there as soon as you log into the app. Not every critical issue has been added yet, but we are working to add more in the coming weeks. Next slide then, something else that we're in the process of adding opportunities. So we hear from hosts so often that you're not getting as much value out of Hospitable as you can, that you're leaving value on the table. And we want to put a stop to that. So we have added a section with personalized recommendations to help you get that value from Hospitable. So opportunities to enable this feature that will save you time or automate that specific workflow. Opportunities to grow your business and to grow your revenue. These are personalized to your account and your data. So we are recommending features and changes that are actually relevant to you at the time at which they are relevant. And again, not all those opportunities are live yet, but we're working to not only add more opportunities, but also make them more personalized and more relevant to your business. So previous slides still, sorry. So that is live for some of you. and we will be rolling that out for the rest of you over the next week or so. And then finally, so this is this is very much the start and very much a teaser of what's coming soon. We will be having a town hall on this and these changes and more changes next month. So as I mentioned, we really want the dashboard to be something useful for you. We will be adding more notifications, more opportunities, we will be adding an overview of your daily operations, so your check-ins, your checkouts, your tasks, anything relevant to them that you need to know, as well as configurability. The dashboard should be tailored to you as much as the opportunities are, because you all run your businesses differently. So this is just a teaser, much more coming over the next month. But that's all from me over to Nick for some MCP updates. speaker-0: Thank you, Tim. Yeah, so let's talk about the Hospitable MCP, which actually we haven't done in quite a while. So if this is your first time hearing about this, the Hospitable MCP, and don't worry about what MCP actually stands for, it doesn't matter. But the Hospitable MCP is a direct line between your hospitable account and whatever AI tool you already use, like Claude, ChatGPT, and others. So instead of exporting spreadsheets or copy-pasting into a chatbot, all you do is you just point your AI at your account, and it can pull custom reports, spot gaps in your operation, message guests, even manage your calendar and smartlocks, all with your real life data and with you in control. Hospitable was the first in the industry to offer an official MCP for AI agents back in the beginning of April. since then, we've run a few live workshops to get hosts familiar with how to use it, which you can find on our YouTube channel or by visiting the link on the screen. And I'm sure somebody will paste it in the chat as well, hsptb.com/slash mcp. And here you'll find more resources to help you get started. So just scan that QR code and you'll be up and running in a few minutes. something else that we've done is run an initial build-a-thon in April and a second one more recently in which hosts like you submitted apps and AI workflows that they built using the Hospitable MCP. And after a bit of a longer run the second time around, we've got we're going to announce the winners of the second batch today. And every single project you're about to see in this build-a-thon, as well as the first ones that we ran, they're all built in one form or another on top of Hospitable's MCP. We had 25 submissions this time around with hosts building tools and workflows around operational insights, making a part of their process more efficient, making a positive impact on the guest experience, and just finding new ways to market their state. When looking at these submissions, we considered several factors like how easy it is for another host to set this up themselves, how much of an impact this would make to other hosts outside of that single person's specific use case. how well this demonstrates the abilities of the hospitable MCP and of course some elements of creativity and novelty. And so with that. In third place, Gus Dominguez. actually, so before I go into what this is, so some of you may recall that Gus was actually the winner of our first Build of An with a highly elaborate Game of Thrones style. command center app that had multiple AI agents basically running his entire hosting operation within a very themed web application. So Gus came back with another awesome demonstration of what you could do with hospitable MCP. And in this case, picture this you you're driving between properties, a guest messages you, you're in the car, a date needs changing, and instead of typing it out, what Gus now does is he just calls a phone number, talks it through his AI on the phone, checks reservations, reads messages, blocks dates all over a voice call. but it won't touch anything live without asking Gus first for a thumbs up. once he approves something, it double checks the account and tells him exactly what changed. So he's never left wondering if it actually works. So Gus calls hospitable answers and he built all of this on top of Hospitable C D. Awesome. Next, second place. Tom Beerly and his five-star photo frames. So this ended up being a simple but very elegant and relatable and I think really reusable AI tool that all of you can can tap into. So here's the idea: you've got amazing reviews sitting in your hospitable account. Tom's tool pulls every review for every property, has Claude or ChatGPT, pick the best ones, so the best one and a runner-up, and automatically turns them into a clean. gallery style image that can instantly be used to promote the property to other guests, whether that's on social media, listing photos directly, or additionally on the direct booking website. So the guests' actual words show up exactly as they wrote them. Tom signs off on the exact text before any images get get made. And all it takes is just connecting the hospitable MCP and promote prompting the AI agent of choice with a few sentences to guide it. Shortly after that, the images are ready to use, they they come out and you're good to go. It's simple, it's safe, and it turns reviews you already earned into your kind of best visual sales pitch. And so, in first place, Sean Cunningham, who runs a property management company in Vegas, he's got about 195 leases across short, mid, and long-term rentals. Every month, what came in, what the fee was, what got deducted, needs to be reviewed before being shared. One typo, one minst fee can be pretty bad for all stakeholders. And Sean used to check hundreds of these by hand, you can imagine, with such a large portfolio. So he built an AI that basically checks the math on every statement, checks the management feed against what it should be, flags duplicates, explains any property that came in at zero or negative before it ever reaches a stakeholder's inbox. So that's all powered by live data from Sean's own hospitable account. Using the hospitable MCP to pull that out, give it to an AI agent so it does its thing. So congrats to Sean, to Tom, and to Gus for these. really awesome to see. Thank you for sharing. and I'm sure other hosts will love these. And I do have one honorable mention that goes to Colin at the Riverfront Chalet. Although the direct booking pricing widget on direct sites shows a lot of details related to fees and discounts, the initial date picker. To call and felt incomplete. So what he did was he created his own enhancement to the initial date picker, which shows in real time why particular dates are not available, for example, because of checkout and day restrictions, and what the estimated price together with the applied discount will be on the spot. So for example, length of stay discount applied in that screenshot. That's that's actually from his website. And that's all before even reaching the transactional part of the booking process, right? The actual like. Pricing widget. So he tackled the initial sale. so while Colin technically used the hospitable public API to power this, because you probably don't want an AI agent to be doing this in real time on every single time somebody lands on your page. So there's a public API use case for this. Colin did use hospitable MCP heavily to discover and test the integration itself automatically. So the MCP allowed him to build this out much faster than he otherwise would have been able to. So he was able to build his own kind of vision of what this calendar initial calendar date picker should be as a as a kind of a sales first approach. And he built it with the help of a spirit MCP. So thanks for sharing this, Colin. Very cool. speaker-2: Nick, we're getting some some questions if these are available to if the submission speaker-0: So that's next slide. I'm about to talk about this. Yeah. so all of these and many more AI tools and workflows, they're all available in our MCP library. So again, if you scan that QR code or visit hsptp.com slash mcp, there's a link to the hospital to the mcp library and it has a whole bunch of examples. I'm not sure if if these ones are already there, they will be shortly for sure. But we already have a long list there and with varying kind of levels of complexity and and details for how to set these things up. and so yeah, obviously if if this has piqued your interest and you haven't yet had a chance to try out using an AI agent with hospitable mcp, head to this link or this QR code and you can get started in minutes. You can also join the MCP builders section of our community that's at community.hospitable.com. You can get advice and share with other hosts what's working well for them. including probably reaching out to some of the folks that you saw mentioned during today's build a thunder in the community as well. And with that, I'll pass over to Patrick. speaker-1: Thank you, Nick. Hello. Today we have like nine new partners and we all welcome them. And also I just want to highlight two of them as well. One is Radius and one is Directo. So Radius is a new channel, connects hosts with verified 30-day insurance bookings and helping increase occupancy with longer stays. And the Directo helps hosts turn OT traffic into more direct bookings by guiding guests to their own booking website. So let me say Happy to have you on board in their ecosystem and let me pass it over to Brian. Thank you so much. speaker-0: Hey guys, can we get the next slide, please? Well, that was really fast. I wasn't expecting Patrick to be done that quick, but hey, here I am. So we I'm my name's Brian. I'm on the customer success team. this is something that I think we're gonna start doing every town hall. So there's a quick tip. So that I created this video for you guys today if you want to scan this QR code. It's gonna be kind of a feature that maybe gets overlooked in Hospitable. So what this one is is a review automated review reply. It's kind of it's a really cool feature, but I think it's pretty impactful. to to automate review replies to guess reviews on Airbnb. So scan the code, take a look at the video. It's about three minutes long. and I think this could add a lot of value to to what Hospitable does for you guys already. Next slide, please. And we do a couple success weekly calls. So we started doing one every Tuesday. We've been doing one every Thursday for the last few months. But Tuesday and Thursday, you can scan this QR code and you can register for the next few events. the one that we're running tomorrow is gonna be Brittany. It's basically all about like protecting reservations, protecting your property, so security deposits, guest verification, all the things that then rental agreements and that help us as hosts kind of protect us against maybe bad guests or or negative stays. So, this is going to be a great workshop that you guys can attend. And also check out the next few workshops that we've got. They're all designed to kind of help build value in your business, help earn a little bit more money out of the features you're already paying for. So it might be some things that you didn't know we could do or some things that you're maybe not optimized for. And we can help you take it take advantage of that. And then lastly, we've got you can book a call with our team. So again, we can meet with you guys one-on-one. We can go into the features in your account, make sure you have everything optimized, make sure you have everything set up the way you want. upsells, guest verification. make sure that you've got all your automation set up. And if there's anything new that you want to talk about, we can walk you through that as well. So scan the code and book book time with our team. We've got a bunch of great people who have a lot of time that where that we need to get filled. So so book a call. Thanks so much. And back to Miles, I think, for the events. Perfect. Yeah. Thank you very much, Brian. so Brian's obviously talked about a couple of events there. I think the only other one for me to shout out is as always, we do have another town hall in two weeks' time. We have them every two weeks. So the next one is Wednesday, August 5th, if I've done the maths correctly on that. same time, same place. So you can go ahead, scan the QR code and make sure that you get those added to your calendar so you don't miss another event. and I think that is It for all of the exciting updates that we've had today. So we are now going to move over to some audience QA. So we have about 10 minutes left. And if you do want to ask us a question live on stage, you can do so now. So if you head down to the React button on your screen, you can click in there, click raise hand, and then that tells me that you would like to go on stage and ask a question. At which point, when I invite you on stage, I'm going to ask you to unmute so we can hear you ask your question. And then we will attempt our best to answer it. okay, just gonna wait a moment to get a couple of hand raises. And we have a couple of folks in here. So we're gonna start off with Kathy. Hello, Kathy, inviting you on stage to talk. Hello. speaker-7: Yes, I've been a host for six years, so I'm looking forward to more meetings here. I have a pr pet friendly property and you only give one opportunity to put in one price, but they could have two dogs or three. I wish that hospitable could put an other or some kind that we could put a a price in ourselves. Is that possible? speaker-2: So you're you're talking about the property fees being able to set up a per pet price. That is supported. it's supported on Airbnb. I don't think it's supported on all channels. I know I don't think booking.com even has the concept of of of a pet fee. but it it should be supported in the in the property section of our property. You'll notice a little drop-down menu next to the price. If you click on that, that will give you, I think there's four different options, like per guest, per stay, per stay, per night, per per per pet, per night. speaker-7: Correct. speaker-2: Like there's there's we support all the options that are available, at least on Airbnb, who has those. I'm not sure about all the other platforms, but I assume you're out you're asking about that. speaker-7: Yeah, I you're correct. Airbnb does have options. Verbo does not, and com does not. speaker-2: Okay. Yeah, and we can't go beyond the platforms, but we should be in line with the platforms. speaker-7: Okay. Thank you. speaker-2: Thank you. speaker-5: one more thing about that something that I do if I get a booking on a different platform. You can also add a pet fee as an upsell and you can charge like per quantity if you will. So you could say like allow up to two quantities of pets and then the guest can pay directly through the guest portal for that if the booking platform doesn't have the option for you to charge it. speaker-2: Emily. Emily's not a pet owner. She talking quantities of pets. speaker-0: Awesome. Okay. Thank you very much, team. And thank you for your question, Kathy. Okay, next on stage we have Mindy. Hello, Mindy. speaker-3: Hey there everyone. Thank you so much for taking my question. Emily, I'm really glad to hear that there's going to be able to have multiple bank accounts in the owner portal for owners. Will they also be able to change those on their own? Like sometimes I've had owners want to change where their their account, which account it's pulling from, and they haven't been able to do that. speaker-5: Yes. Yeah. So the idea is that we're working towards like full bank account management in the owner portal for owner for banks that they own. So what they can do today is they can add a bank account. That bank account by default becomes their default where all of their owner payouts or payments go into or come from. And then they can add other bank accounts and scope those to properties. So if they have, you know, a different property for a different bank account, they can they can switch that up per bank account. So they do have full control over like what goes into what bank account. like I said earlier, it's just for owner payouts and payments today. but relatively soon those bank accounts can be used for any type of payout or payment and hospitable moving forward and they manage it themselves. speaker-3: that'd be great. So that includes the direct payouts? speaker-5: from direct booking. Yeah, not today but soon. speaker-3: Very cool. Thank you so much. speaker-0: Awesome. Thank you very much for your question, Mindy. okay, and next up, we have our next caller. I'm not sure how to pronounce your name, unfortunately. Shush Jaj, inviting you on stage. Hello? And maybe an accidental hand raise. so we're gonna go to the next person. Okay, Aaron inviting you on stage. Hello, Aaron. Do you have a question for us? speaker-3: Yeah, hey everybody, how's it going? speaker-0: Good thanks. speaker-3: All right, good. thanks for the town hall and everything that you guys do. Love the the team at Hospitable. quick question that I came across. I would like to create an owner statement for a property that I own. So I have it set up as an individual business, but I do have investors in it that I would like to pay out monthly just like any other owner and kind of have that all in the same workflow. Is that possible or is there a workaround to do that? speaker-5: So I I answered you in the QA. Here's the there's technically a hack you could do where you set yourself up as an owner, but I want to be very careful about recommending that because the way that we do accounting in everything is based around your business type. So if you're not using accounting and you're not connected with QuickBooks and stuff, it's probably fine. However, what I would say is that you might want to hang tight because we have other people in this situation and we plan on eventually Allowing the owner in the owner portal to add additional owners, if you will, so that the property manager deals with one main contact and that main owner contact gets to decide like, okay, from the payout, I want to split 20% to this investor and the rest of those to me or whatever. So you know, I I would advise against the workaround just because I think you'll probably regret it later when we have the feature that handles it properly. speaker-3: I I will always stick with your advice. Appreciate it, Emily. speaker-0: Perfect. Thank you very much for the question. okay, we'll try and squeeze in one or two more. Manuel inviting you on stage. Hello. speaker-8: Yes, so I had a couple of questions related to direct booking. So one is I you know I can't activate Google Vacation Rentals and I think that that's an issue that I saw some someone mention it. And then the other question was I'm using Truvi for you know for the the you know, whatever the insurance or whatever, but it's not connecting, it's not available for hospitable on on direct bookings. So Is there any plans to integrate those two? speaker-3: okay, let me address your second question first. Are you on direct premium or direct basic? speaker-8: No, I'm in Mexico, so I'm direct premium. Bay basic. speaker-3: Basic. Okay. and currently you're not able to submit claims to TruVee for direct basic reservations. Okay. Actually, I think this might ring a bell in discussions with TruVi. I think they might have some limitations because we work with TruVi for damage protection for direct premium. And so they try to prevent people from getting double billed if they're also TruV direct customers. I will I'll check in on that conversation with them because we were working with them to try to make it possible for To make sure that those direct basic reservations could get covered as well if you're a True B customer directly. and then your first question was on getting connected to Google vacation rentals. Yes. yeah, it's I think we'll have to look at your specific case and see why you're you're not getting connected. There could be a bunch of different reasons. It's kind of hard not, it's kind of hard to tell without looking at your specific property. So I will take a look at that for you and follow up. speaker-0: Awesome. speaker-8: Think so. speaker-0: Thank you very much, Abby, and thank you, Manuel. Okay, I think we're gonna squeeze in just one more caller. So Sophia, do you have a question for us? Hello, welcome on stage. speaker-3: Yes, hi. I was actually it's just a comment. It would be really helpful if you guys could post these QR codes somewhere on hospitable so that way we can reference them easier than having to go back to this town hall to get them from the slideshows. So is there a way for cause you like you posted a bunch of QR codes very quickly and I try to photograph them, but it's it's not easy to do to find. Like for example, I want to go back and make an appointment to have a one-on-one. and I'm not able to find that QR code easily. And then if I want to talk to someone about creating my own direct portal, again, that's like a different QR code, a different person that's in charge of that. So is there a way that you guys could just Make it easy for us to get a hold of you guys and to contact the right person. Where is speaker-0: Definitely. Yeah, so we actually just had this conversation internally as we're presenting these slides that there's too many QR codes. so I think the solution is probably gonna be if you head over to the community, we will make sure to post everything there. so for this one we we don't have it prepped and ready to go, but for the next one we'll make sure that we kind of have all those links and references in one place, then we'll share one place for you to go and get all those things. right now if there's anything kind of missing and you need a link to anything, feel free to go to community.hospitable.com and ask your question of any links that you're missing and we'll go ahead and share those with you. But we will make sure in future that we're proactively creating that post that has all the links and we'll make sure to share that at the end of the session to make sure that that's the one place that you can go and you can get everything from there. speaker-2: I think we're pretty good about sharing a recap of the town hall and the community the next day and then we'll just make sure to get the links there. You don't actually need the QR codes, of course. It's probably a lot easier if you're looking at it just to click a link. but we'll make sure the links get get sent to that update. speaker-0: And speaker-3: The links is what you need. It's just that it goes by so quickly it's very hard to speaker-2: Yep, we all had the same thought. I think this was peak QR code for for hospitable. Like never had this many QR codes in a town hall. speaker-0: And so Sophia, I just I just responded to your comment. Just go to meet.hospitable dot com. Like and that's and that's literally that's probably the link in most of the QR codes that were shared that you wanted to go to anyway. So just go to meet.hospitable dot com and you can schedule a meeting with anybody. speaker-3: E E T. Okay. And like for example, you guys also post things about like the Facebook page. And that's great. but if somebody, you know, I've been with you guys for now, I think over a year, but if somebody is new, all of those resources would be very helpful. And especially when we're in a bind trying to figure out a solution. if if there was somewhere just on the actual app, that would be Amazing to just go into the app and says, okay, this is how you click on meet.hospitable.com or like you have you have things here inbox properties calendar. Maybe add something at the bottom that just says resources for host. I don't know. And then at that link, it's it gives you this is who you contact for this reason. just it it's very hard to understand who we need. For certain problems, unless we attend these town hall meetings and then we're rushing to write notes down or having to go back. So I think just making it easier for us to have the resources at our fingertips. And the the thing that I use, everyone uses, is your app. So if you could just put something under operations that says post resources, that would be amazing. speaker-0: Cool. Yeah, we we do also have the support documentation section in hospitable and Petra's just shared that link with you in the chat. we are looking to revamp that as well, make sure that we put more of those resources in there too. because I think there's a few things probably missing that we shared today that will make sure that get added in there as well to improve that section. speaker-3: Wonderful. Thank you guys. You're doing a great job. speaker-0: Awesome. Thank you so much, Sophia. Okay, I think that's all we have time for today. I feel like I should address the elephant in the room, but PC's not here today. he's feeling a little under the weather, so he was unable to join us. but thank you so much, everyone, that did join us today. we appreciate everyone attending here, listening to our product updates and giving us feedback. As a reminder, we will be back in two weeks' time for our next town hall. So please stay tuned for that. we look forward to seeing you again, same time, same place. Thank you, everyone. Have a good one.