Latest / Host Planet: Airbnb, Holiday Let, and Vacation Rental Insights / Stop Losing Bookings to OTAs – Direct Booking Strategy

Transcript

Stop Losing Bookings to OTAs – Direct Booking Strategy · Host Planet: Airbnb, Holiday Let, and Vacation Rental Insights

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to Hostplanet Bite Size, that podcast brought
• 0:03
  to you by Hostplanet and Housefully.
• 0:05
  My name's James Farley, the founder of Hostplanet, and our
• 0:08
  goal is to share everything you need to know about buying and
• 0:11
  managing short term rentals. Today's guest is Gil Chan from
• 0:15
  Crafted Stays, and he'll be sharing five ways to convert
• 0:18
  lookers into bookers on your direct booking website.
• 0:22
  OK, real talk now for all you hosts out there, you know that
• 0:25
  moment when your guest messages you again with, hey, what's the
• 0:29
  Wi-Fi code? Or you're staring at 5 different
• 0:32
  calendars wondering if you've accidentally double booked the
• 0:35
  cottage. Yes, we've all been there.
• 0:38
  That's why here at Houseplanner, we recommend Housefully.
• 0:41
  It's basically your rentals Control Center.
• 0:44
  It handles bookings across all the big platforms, syncs your
• 0:48
  calendars to ensure there are no double bookings, automates guest
• 0:51
  messages, and even creates these really slick digital guidebooks
• 0:55
  that stop all the repeat questions.
• 0:58
  Honestly, it just makes your life easier and keeps your
• 1:01
  guests happier, helping you achieve those all important five
• 1:05
  star reviews. And here is a little bonus.
• 1:08
  If you're a Houseplanet listener, you can get $500 off
• 1:12
  onboarding for House Phillies property management software and
• 1:15
  30% off digital guidebooks for life.
• 1:19
  Just hit the link in the show notes and use the codes Planet
• 1:22
  500 for the PMS and Houseplanet GB for the guidebooks.
• 1:27
  And if you'd like a proper walk through, there's also a link to
• 1:30
  book a demo with Frank Bosey from Postfully.
• 1:33
  He will show you how it all works.
• 1:36
  Less stress, more bookings, sorted with Postfully.
• 1:46
  GAIL, thank you for joining us on House Planet Bite Size
• 1:50
  special episode. This one, you've got 6 tips to
• 1:53
  share. Usually we share 5, but you've
• 1:55
  got a special direct formula, so 6 tips to share on converting
• 2:01
  guests through your direct booking website.
• 2:03
  So take it away with tip #1. Yeah, I think the first one is
• 2:07
  discoverability. You want to make sure that
• 2:08
  guests can find you, and what that means is there's many ways
• 2:11
  they can find you. They can find you on social
• 2:13
  media, they can find you through organic search.
• 2:15
  Whatever that method is. Make sure that you're well
• 2:18
  optimized on that one, on the SCO side, on the organic front
• 2:21
  of it. You want to make sure that they
• 2:23
  are on goals. You're on Google Search Console,
• 2:25
  because if you're not on Google Search Console, folks will not
• 2:28
  find you, that you won't be listed on Google.
• 2:30
  You want to make sure you have proper site maps so that Google
• 2:34
  knows how to scrape your web page and pull all the relevant
• 2:36
  information. You want to make sure that all
• 2:38
  the pages are indexed properly. And if you're on the social
• 2:42
  media front, there's many different ways of doing it.
• 2:45
  You can grow your own following. You can work with influencers.
• 2:48
  If you're starting just out in the first place, you want to
• 2:50
  make sure that you're filming the entire process of your
• 2:54
  entire build out. People love that
• 2:55
  transformational story, so the first tip is really making sure
• 2:59
  that you're discoverable in whatever channel you focus on.
• 3:02
  And if you are focusing on it, make sure you're diving all the
• 3:05
  way deep in there. Your short term rental business
• 3:08
  is evolving fast, but how do you keep up with the latest
• 3:11
  regulation, tax changes and industry trends?
• 3:15
  The answer is to attend the House Planet Roadshow, which is
• 3:18
  coming to a city near you in 2026.
• 3:22
  This is the UK's premier event for holiday let professionals,
• 3:26
  supported by the Short Term Accommodation Association, Price
• 3:30
  Labs and the Women in Short Term Rentals community.
• 3:33
  This is your essential opportunity for learning,
• 3:36
  networking and expert insights. Starting in Cornwall on the 5th
• 3:41
  of February, you'll spend a full day mastering compliance,
• 3:45
  optimizing your revenue strategies and sharing lessons
• 3:48
  learned with your peers. After Cornwall will be in
• 3:52
  Portsmouth on the 4th of March and London on the 23rd of April.
• 3:56
  That's the day day after the short stay summit.
• 3:59
  Later in the year we'll be heading to Nottingham, Bath,
• 4:02
  Chester and Edinburgh. So don't navigate the complex
• 4:06
  2026 market alone. Learn from the leaders driving
• 4:10
  the industry forward and shape the short term rental
• 4:13
  conversation in your market. Tickets are just £40 each and
• 4:18
  available now from our website. Head to Houseplanner dot Club
• 4:23
  for further details. How does AI and the large
• 4:27
  language models start to muddy the water here?
• 4:31
  Yeah, I mean, the the weird thing is that large language
• 4:35
  models, they still use the backbones of search behind the
• 4:39
  scenes. So Open AI is still using Bing,
• 4:43
  Gemini is still using Google behind the scenes.
• 4:45
  So they're still using a lot of the same fundamentals.
• 4:48
  The way that they want the information might be a little
• 4:50
  different, but if you're not on Search Console, if you're on,
• 4:53
  you're not on big webmasters, they're not going to fail to
• 4:55
  find you in the 1st place. LLMS, they tend to like
• 4:58
  listicles. They tend to like shorter
• 5:00
  paragraphs. They like things very
• 5:03
  punctuated. So you want to make sure that
• 5:05
  you kind of kind of tighten things down a little bit if
• 5:08
  you're trying to appear more in LLMS.
• 5:13
  But at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you're
• 5:15
  registered. You want to make sure that
• 5:16
  you're driving content, that you're building content that
• 5:19
  resonates with your audience there.
• 5:22
  If you missed that, you won't come on, search on Google, you
• 5:25
  won't come up and search in LLMS.
• 5:26
  It doesn't really matter there. So you want to make sure that
• 5:28
  you're driving, you're building content that is tailored for
• 5:32
  your specific niche. Yeah, target your content at
• 5:36
  your guests. Quality content is going to
• 5:38
  shine. Discoverability, then, is tip
• 5:41
  #1. What's tip #2?
• 5:43
  Integration. You want to make sure that your
• 5:45
  website is deeply integrated back into your PMS.
• 5:50
  When Kraftus Days first started off, we weren't like that.
• 5:53
  You had to manually create your properties in there, manually
• 5:57
  update them. We used widgets all over the
• 5:59
  place for search and for bookings.
• 6:02
  And we found that over time that that eroded our ability to
• 6:06
  really Max my conversion. So we spent a lot of time at
• 6:09
  Kraftus Days to make sure that we're tightly integrated back
• 6:12
  into your PMS. So you make a change for your
• 6:15
  property descriptions or your pictures or your amenities.
• 6:18
  You've added new things in there.
• 6:19
  You make that change in your PMS.
• 6:20
  Your website should immediately reflect that result.
• 6:24
  Your reviews should automatically pull in.
• 6:26
  You're not using some sort of widgets to pull that in there.
• 6:28
  It should be natively integrated back into your PMS.
• 6:31
  Your rates, your availabilities should always come from the PMS.
• 6:36
  When you're integrating with the PMS, you want to try to avoid
• 6:39
  using their widgets. There's many reasons for that.
• 6:42
  One of the primary reasons is for mobile.
• 6:47
  Those widgets were not adapted for desktops and mobiles.
• 6:49
  So we go through the process of really integrating with their
• 6:52
  API so that we can change the layouts, we can change the
• 6:55
  navigation, we can change the entire booking flow based on
• 6:59
  what screen size they might be going on.
• 7:01
  So you want to make sure that as you're building out your, your,
• 7:05
  your, your direct booking engine, your website, that you
• 7:09
  have a really tight integration back with your PMS.
• 7:11
  Makes a lot of sense. Discoverability integration tip
• 7:15
  #3. Relatability.
• 7:18
  This is where a lot of people get choked up.
• 7:21
  They end up creating website that looks really beautiful.
• 7:24
  They have really nice images, but it when you land on it, it
• 7:28
  has very generic copy there and that really can deter someone
• 7:31
  from booking with you. A lot of times people are
• 7:34
  booking with you because they're following a story they they
• 7:37
  found you through somewhere. You want to make sure that that
• 7:39
  thread is being pulled in you maybe if you are really
• 7:42
  targeting them really well on your Instagram page, you know
• 7:46
  what their their pain points are, you know what they're
• 7:48
  looking for. You want to make sure your
• 7:49
  website does the same. And if you don't know who's your
• 7:53
  ideal guest avatar is an easy thing to do is do a big dump of
• 7:58
  all your reviews. Bring it into whatever AI tool
• 8:01
  you want to do. They can sift through that.
• 8:03
  They can start to pull out certain threads.
• 8:07
  They can be I we enjoy this place with our with the
• 8:09
  grandparents and the grandkids. You can then understand who's
• 8:13
  actually visiting your place and how you need to massage your
• 8:17
  messaging on your homepage. But make sure that even if
• 8:21
  you're using a template or using some agency, whoever is building
• 8:25
  out your website, you don't want them to just create it out of
• 8:28
  the blue. You want to give them a lot of
• 8:29
  guidance on how to create your website and really resonates
• 8:33
  with your ideal guest avatar. How important is it to have a
• 8:37
  high level of consistency between all your channels so
• 8:40
  that you know your social media channels look similar to your
• 8:44
  website, so your potential guests can see that this is the
• 8:47
  same thing and it and it makes sense.
• 8:49
  You know, they like what they see on social media, they like
• 8:51
  what they see on the website. I don't think the branding from
• 8:54
  like a color palette perspective matters all that much,
• 8:57
  especially from Instagram all to your homepage.
• 8:59
  Because for instance, a lot of our higher volume direct booking
• 9:05
  drivers that some of our customers, they may be working
• 9:08
  with influencers and influencers will have their own styles and
• 9:11
  their own representations of things.
• 9:13
  What doesn't change is the audience that you're trying to
• 9:16
  go after and the pain points that you may be talking about.
• 9:19
  So if it's big family stays, you always talk about all the things
• 9:25
  to do for the grandparents, easy accessibility, easy to get
• 9:29
  through, but also fun activities for the kids.
• 9:31
  You want to make sure that that thread is following through with
• 9:34
  even the influencers that you're working with.
• 9:36
  What they talk about in their in their reels, what you talk about
• 9:40
  on your own post, what you have on your web page, on your home
• 9:43
  page, and even any additional landing pages that you decide to
• 9:46
  create in there. You want to have that
• 9:47
  consistency through again, the color palette and some of those
• 9:51
  things they matter less. It's more about what are you
• 9:54
  trying to solve for them? Who are you going after?
• 9:56
  And are you hitting that touch point where they feel like, OK,
• 9:59
  this is a stay, they get me. This is actually specifically
• 10:02
  made for me. That's when you feel.
• 10:04
  That's when they feel like, oh, I'm not going to go on an OTA
• 10:07
  and book because I know that this property manager really has
• 10:12
  tailored this property specifically for my needs.
• 10:14
  The guest feels seen. Absolutely.
• 10:18
  OK then Gil tip #4. Tip #4 is E for ES.
• 10:24
  This one is, it's something that we had to kind of learn along
• 10:28
  the way, me coming from e-commerce.
• 10:30
  In e-commerce, you optimize every step of the funnel.
• 10:34
  You want to make sure that when someone is on the top of the
• 10:36
  funnel, you have a very well oiled funnel all the way
• 10:39
  through. So someone's going on your
• 10:41
  homepage, you want to make it make sure that it's very easy
• 10:45
  for them to book. And this is one of those reasons
• 10:47
  why we don't use widgets. If you're on the home page and
• 10:50
  you're searching for a property, put in two dates in there and
• 10:52
  the number of people that are staying with you, you want to
• 10:54
  make sure that on the next page you're showing the relevant
• 10:57
  properties. But when they click through to
• 10:59
  that to actually book on that to, to read more about the
• 11:02
  property, you're keeping those days consistent.
• 11:04
  And if you're using widgets, you don't really have a lot of those
• 11:07
  controls. So we do some some nifty things
• 11:12
  where we're keeping the dates that people selected throughout
• 11:14
  the entire stay so that they're not having to reap input that
• 11:16
  again, we do things like it when we're showing reviews, we're not
• 11:21
  just showing the reviews in isolation.
• 11:23
  They can actually click into that review and read more about
• 11:25
  the specific property there. We have it where on mobile you
• 11:33
  have a very different booking experience than what you may
• 11:35
  have on desktop. And even things like we find out
• 11:40
  that some of the older folks, myself included, I'll call
• 11:43
  myself old, we tend to book on desktop.
• 11:47
  So on the mobile side of things, we make it very easy for them to
• 11:51
  share that listing page with themselves or with others.
• 11:55
  So there's a share capability as well too.
• 11:57
  So none the less, like you want to think through every step of
• 12:01
  the funnel as if you're the guest and how to make sure that
• 12:05
  you're answering all the questions that they have.
• 12:07
  You make it very easy for them so that they don't have doubts
• 12:11
  as they're going through that funnel.
• 12:13
  Make it seamless, make it easy. I love it.
• 12:16
  We're on to C then, which is tip #5.
• 12:19
  Yeah. So C is for credibility.
• 12:22
  You want to make sure that on your site you feel reputable,
• 12:27
  you feel trusted by by the user. There's been many times where I
• 12:31
  visited direct booking website and the copyright is dated
• 12:34
  20/24/2023. That's telling a user that the
• 12:38
  site hasn't been updated in a year or two or even who knows
• 12:41
  how many years. So you want to make sure that
• 12:43
  that footer has the the latest updated copyright information or
• 12:48
  date. You want to make sure that you
• 12:50
  have your reviews in there, you have your privacy policy in
• 12:54
  there. You should be having a consent
• 12:57
  manager. So especially for folks in the
• 13:00
  EU, you want to make sure that you have a consent manager that
• 13:03
  ask people do they opt into cookies and any tracking that
• 13:08
  you might have on there for Google Analytics, that's
• 13:10
  actually even required as well too.
• 13:12
  So those are some of the signals that you want.
• 13:15
  Some folks will even add their host image and the host bio.
• 13:19
  I highly recommend that if you're an operator that doesn't
• 13:24
  have hundreds of properties, that's OK and it's good for you
• 13:28
  to be able to showcase yourself as part of that.
• 13:30
  People end up liking to like to know that they're renting or
• 13:35
  they're staying specifically with this host there.
• 13:38
  So we actually put that as part of the onboarding process where
• 13:41
  you get to upload a picture of yourself, you talk about
• 13:43
  yourself and we will actually include that as one of the
• 13:45
  template options or the sections inside your website.
• 13:49
  Yeah, 100%. I've seen a lot of people talk
• 13:51
  about this online. You know, make sure in your
• 13:54
  about page you're, yeah, displaying yourself, putting
• 13:58
  your photo of yourself, you know, you and your wife or
• 14:01
  whoever's running the listings with you.
• 14:02
  It's funny actually, I saw a LinkedIn post from a guy as well
• 14:05
  saying on all his about pages for his different properties, he
• 14:09
  always puts a female because he says that people prefer to to
• 14:13
  book with females and what what, what do you make of that?
• 14:15
  It was a very mixed response to that, by the way.
• 14:18
  I. I hate to admit it but I think
• 14:21
  that that is actually pretty true.
• 14:24
  I still have myself as like the main point of contact on our
• 14:28
  listings, but I know many, many hosts that have put a female or
• 14:34
  the wife is the the primary contact on listing and they have
• 14:40
  found that guests actually are warmer when they reach out a
• 14:44
  little bit less direct if it if anything.
• 14:47
  So I have seen that anecdotally. I don't have enough like heart
• 14:51
  date. I'm not running data like I'm
• 14:52
  not, I'm not running experiments on it.
• 14:55
  But I've had a lot of folks that choose to put the the wife in
• 15:00
  the family or the mom in the family as the host and they seem
• 15:05
  to have more positive communications, at least in the
• 15:09
  very beginning. Yeah, I, I, I can see why I get
• 15:12
  it. I get it.
• 15:13
  I think, I think as well if, if you are running like a family
• 15:15
  operation as well a family business, it's nice to show
• 15:17
  that. And I think other people
• 15:19
  appreciate, I mean, even even bigger businesses that I see
• 15:21
  online and I want to find out more about them.
• 15:24
  When I go to the about page, I want to see photos of the people
• 15:27
  who, who are involved in it. So it doesn't just apply to, to
• 15:30
  short term rental. OK, going through.
• 15:34
  Yeah, for for us, like we, we have our entire family as like
• 15:37
  the host image there. So it's the, my wife and I and
• 15:40
  our our two kids and that's the host image.
• 15:42
  But the name of it is myself. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 15:46
  OK then. So we're on to #6, which is T.
• 15:49
  Yeah, T is for tracking. This is something that is missed
• 15:54
  all too often and anyone that has been in marketing for any
• 15:59
  even just a little bit of time. The better that you know about
• 16:04
  the performance of your campaigns and how you're sending
• 16:07
  traffic to your website, the better that you can optimize
• 16:10
  things. If you know that a certain
• 16:12
  influencer is 1 driving the traffic, you can figure out why
• 16:17
  is that influencer doing better than others or maybe to double
• 16:20
  down and and do more with that influencer.
• 16:23
  If you know that your e-mail campaigns are more effective
• 16:26
  than running socials, maybe you double down on your newsletter
• 16:30
  rather than post because we only have a finite amount of time,
• 16:35
  energy, resources, money to spend on on marketing.
• 16:41
  So if you have a better idea of what activities are driving the
• 16:47
  most amount of direct bookings, the better that you're able to
• 16:51
  run, run that business there. For us at Craft of Stays, we go
• 16:55
  a bit deeper. We do e-commerce tracking.
• 16:59
  Since I had come from e-commerce, this is pretty
• 17:01
  standard practice where you're not just understanding analytics
• 17:06
  at the website level, but a per property level.
• 17:11
  So any craft of stage users, if they're adding the Google
• 17:13
  Analytics code, they get to see if an influencer is driving
• 17:17
  traffic for a specific property even and understand the
• 17:21
  conversion flow for that specific property.
• 17:24
  So we go pretty deep in those things, but even if you're
• 17:28
  hosting the website yourself, you're doing it elsewhere no
• 17:31
  matter what. Go ahead and spend maybe a 30
• 17:34
  minutes to set up a Google Analytics account, add your, add
• 17:38
  your tracking code to it. Even if you don't understand the
• 17:40
  dashboard, if you spend the time to input that Google Annex code
• 17:46
  and later on, if you hire someone, Google has already been
• 17:49
  mining that data for for you since the beginning there and
• 17:53
  then you have historicals that you can slice and dice and
• 17:56
  figure out. But if you never put that
• 17:58
  tracking code in there, you can't go back and and ask all
• 18:00
  for information about data that doesn't know yet.
• 18:04
  So just make sure that you're spending the time on on 1st
• 18:07
  installing the tracking code and then to really trying to
• 18:11
  understand how to read the data, what data is important for you
• 18:15
  to look at and really how do you use that data to tune your
• 18:20
  marketing engine? So we've got discoverability,
• 18:25
  integration, relatability, ease, credibility and tracking to
• 18:32
  people out there, the house and property managers who have a
• 18:35
  direct booking site right now, what's the single most effective
• 18:40
  thing they can do to get more conversions?
• 18:45
  The biggest thing that I would advise folks to do is to invest
• 18:50
  into their e-mail marketing. So if you're working on social
• 18:54
  media, if you have a direct booking website, if you are
• 18:58
  maybe just collecting emails from folks that have visited
• 19:01
  your property, make sure that you have your e-mail marketing
• 19:06
  funnel well oiled. Make sure that you have, if you
• 19:12
  have your website that you have your, your pop ups to really
• 19:16
  capture emails if someone visits your page.
• 19:19
  Because we find that 95% of people that visit your direct
• 19:23
  booking website or even any website will not convert on
• 19:27
  their first visit. So if they're if 95% of people
• 19:31
  aren't converting, you need to make sure that you're bringing
• 19:33
  them back. If you don't collect their
• 19:35
  emails, if you don't pixel track them, there's no way for you to
• 19:38
  reach back out to them. So you're hoping that they'll
• 19:41
  remember you to come back to you.
• 19:44
  Whereas if you're collecting their emails, if you're able to
• 19:47
  pixel them, you can then retarget them through ads or
• 19:51
  send them emails. The nice thing about emails is
• 19:53
  if you collect their emails, you can also run target ads against
• 19:55
  that e-mail as well too. There's also unique things like
• 20:00
  creating look alike audiences based on your emails, but we
• 20:02
  won't get into that. But nonetheless, if you have a
• 20:05
  good e-mail list and you're actually e-mail and segmenting
• 20:10
  your list, that can go extremely far.
• 20:14
  Fantastic tip. OK then Gil, give us the lowdown
• 20:18
  on crafted stays and where people can go to find out more
• 20:21
  information. Yeah, Crafted Stays is a direct
• 20:25
  booking platform that allows hosts to build high performing
• 20:29
  websites, all without having to hire a digital agency or someone
• 20:35
  kind of build out your website so you can connect your PMS.
• 20:39
  You can choose for via different templates and have one of the
• 20:43
  highest performing direct booking websites.
• 20:46
  By the middle of the afternoon, we've seen folks that achieve a
• 20:50
  75% lift in conversion from moving one point website
• 20:54
  platform over to us. So it converts extremely high.
• 20:57
  We've kind of walked through some of the reasons why, but we
• 21:01
  spend a lot of time in making sure that we're tuning our
• 21:04
  platform for conversion. We also work with larger host.
• 21:10
  We originally started off by helping folks like myself to
• 21:12
  have smaller portfolios, but because we're so focused on
• 21:16
  conversion, a lot bigger property managers are coming to
• 21:20
  us. So we now also create custom
• 21:22
  sites for folks that have larger portfolios too.
• 21:25
  So if you have a larger portfolio and you're really want
• 21:28
  to make sure that your marketing spend is used most effectively,
• 21:33
  feel free to reach out to us. You can visit us at
• 21:36
  kraftasdays.co. Superb.
• 21:39
  Check it out and we'll put all those details in the show notes.
• 21:42
  Gil, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for sharing those tips
• 21:45
  and for joining us on host Planet Bite Size.
• 21:47
  Yeah, that's good being here. All right, that's it for today's
• 21:50
  episode. My thanks to Gil for joining us
• 21:52
  and sharing those essential direct booking website tips.
• 21:56
  Remember, this podcast is brought to you in collaboration
• 21:58
  with House Philly, which is trusted by short term rental
• 22:01
  professionals across the globe. As a House Planet listener, you
• 22:04
  get 2 exclusive offers, $500 off onboarding house for these
• 22:09
  property management software. Just use the code planet 530% of
• 22:14
  digital guidebooks for life. Use the code Houseplanet GB.
• 22:18
  To grab these deals, click the link in the show notes or head
• 22:21
  to housefully.com. For more free education tips and
• 22:25
  trends from the STR industry, visit Houseplanet dot club where
• 22:29
  you can sign up for our newsletter, listen to our
• 22:31
  podcasts, and download a suite of ebooks for hosts and property
• 22:34
  managers. That's it for today's episode.
• 22:37
  Until next time, be hosting.