Latest / Hospitable Hosts / How Stay Helps Short-Term Rental Hosts Get Direct Bookings
Transcript
- Miles: Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Hospitable Host Podcast. My name is Miles, I'm the head of marketing here at Hospitable, and I'm your host for today. Today I'm going to speak with Paul, the Chief Operating Officer at Stay, a new platform for your direct booking website for you to connect directly with vacation rental guests. So we're going to speak with Paul today and find out his ideas and strategies around direct booking. If you enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to like, share and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Okay, hello Paul. Thank you so much for joining us today. Paul Buonopane: Hey, how's it going, boss? Miles: Good, thank you. How are you doing? Paul Buonopane: I'm great. Miles: Good, good. so Paul, we're obviously here to talk about Stay and the new integration with Hospitable. Maybe first you can start us off with a bit an introduction on what Stay is. you know, what problem are you trying to solve with Stay? Paul Buonopane: Awesome. Yeah, thank you for having me. So stay as a direct booking channel for property managers and owners. We're looking to drive traveler demand for folks that want more direct bookings. It seems like everybody's focused on that. My roots in vacation rentals go way back to Flipkate and in some ways stays similar to that. We've seen the trends towards over alliance and OTAs and folks now have a site and have direct bookings as a strategic priority and we try to help them actually get direct bookings on their website. It's their customer, it always has been. In our view, it should go back to being that way. And that's what we're trying to solve for, getting rid of the high fees, getting rid of the no guest relationship and getting rid of the lack of price controls. Miles: Okay, nice. And obviously there has been some direct booking platforms before. you know, why do you think you know, why do you think stay in particular and why now for stay? And you know, what's what's the opportunity here? Paul Buonopane: That's a great question. In some ways, we're a little lucky in my view. This is my third or fourth time doing this model in various travel sites. And I think the timing's never been better. I mean, the pain point is sharper. think, you know, increasingly the water is getting warmer, so to say, the fees are getting higher, but the OTAs, Miles: Mm. Paul Buonopane: and now you see a lot of action and not just discussion on various places online from owners and managers. Everyone has a site now. Everyone wants travelers and wants bookings, but they want to the relationship. So I think that like what's happening now, timing-wise, having frankly nothing to do with stay is that people are actually doing something about it, which I think is great. And then in terms of demand and demand acquisition, I mean, we've been doing this, our leadership team has been doing this for 15 years. is obviously a lot newer. But I think our demand playbook is kind of rooted in what's always worked and then augmented in what works in 2026 and beyond. So I think that the combination of property managers and owners being squeezed by fees and by loss of control over the guest experience and guest relationship is making Miles: Mm-hmm. Paul Buonopane: people curious. And whenever they hear of, think, Scott McGilvery-backed who's our founder, HGTV, Scott McIlvery, backed by a kind of veteran leadership team. It's usually a pretty easy yes from folks we talk to. Miles: Nice. Okay. So it sounds like as well that kind of the the decision to start stay is kind of being off the back of host and property manager feedback and kind of listening to that being squeezed on fees and wanted to make direct booking more of a success. Is that the case? Paul Buonopane: Yes, I think that's very fair. And I think a lot of times, and there are a lot of challenges as we talk about direct booking acquisition and what everybody is talking about and focused on. I think the thing that I'd want the committee to know is we're less of a middleman than I think the other OTAs. And by that, mean, we're promoting and putting front and center our owners brand, and we're not kind of hiring them. And we're not trying to have these two parties be siloed. In all of our communications on our site, on the host page, they're logoed with our partners. The Miles: Mm-hmm. Paul Buonopane: communications that we do send to travelers, it's not promoting stay as much as is promoting the operators, the people who actually provide the experience, who own or who manage the properties themselves. Miles: Nice, okay, yeah. So I guess, you know, when a lot of people hear direct bookings, they think, you know, I build a website, I need to go run some social media ads, probably some Google ads. I guess, you know, stay's advantage is that it's it's bringing some of that discoverability to that person's brand and direct booking website. Paul Buonopane: Yes, that's right. mean, people hear direct bookings, right? And they think there's, you know, build the website. You have to do paid search and paid social and get Google ads. And all of a sudden that becomes a different proposition. You own a business, you own a business, you're in hospitality, and now you need this different skill set. That can be a lot of different routes, but sometimes that means learning it yourself or hiring people. First day, there's zero build required. You don't need a new website. You don't need ad spend. There's no learning curve. If you're unhospitable, it's the easiest integration we have, frankly, out of the 10 that we do have. You toggle a button on, and we take care of the rest. You're live usually within 24 to 48 hours. And we bring in the demand. I mean, I've been saying that generically, Miles, but I Miles: awesome. Yeah. Hmm. Paul Buonopane: think our strength is customer acquisition, is traveler acquisition. And I think there's a lot of opportunity with where our stay is for property managers and owners to come on and be out live within a few days and then to get 100 % or a high percentage of the traveler man for their area. Miles: Nice, that that's great to hear 'cause I think, you know, just kind of putting myself in the ho shoes, they're probably thinking, you know, guests know and trust Airbnb. it you know, it's an a a household name now. how does you know stay build trust and and make sure that it's getting demand from travelers as well for that sort of Paul Buonopane: Yeah, that's a good one. Honestly, we're working on this with our owners and our managers, because I think that's where the trust has to be. For Miles: Mm. Paul Buonopane: travelers, we're not asking them to trust Day. We're pointing them to the owners of the property manager site in one way or the other. And we're promoting their brand. We're linking to their website directly from property pages. You can't do any bookings or any financial transaction. As a traveler on our site, they're not subjected to any fees or anything like that. So I think kind of see that as an advantage. I guess should be booking with the operator, not a faceless marketplace, even though I think we have a lot of good visibility with Scott and our team. At the end of the day, we're not involved with the transaction. And why that's important for hospitable users is that they should know that we don't try to inject ourselves in that transaction. We want what they want. which is travelers to go to their website or to their booking venue of choice. It's not gonna be stay, not gonna be staywithstay.com and book their properties. That's really what our whole entire aim is. Miles: Nice. That's that's great to hear. and you mentioned before briefly, obviously hospitable. we're on the hospitable host podcast, so we should talk about that a little bit more. I guess you you kind of briefly touched on on the process. Maybe you can explain a lot user, if they decide that they want to kind of you know partner with you guys, kind of get listed, how's that process work? It s sounds super easy. Can you maybe kind of talk us through that a little bit? Paul Buonopane: Absolutely. So we've built the integration with, with hospitable for I'm very fortunate that along with me, our head of tech was with former VP at TripAdvisor. We've been doing these integrations for a long time. I think we've done Miles: Mm. Paul Buonopane: a really good job of integrating with hospitable, but we'll find out over time. It's simple and documented and there's a welcome video by Scott Mcgillivray on our documentation, but effectively what it says is you find stay in the, in the admin hospitable login environment for channel partners. and then you click connect when you log into hospitable, you authorize that and that's the extent of it. It takes a few minutes, then the properties are all made available to us in the API within 24 or just the weekend, the next business day that the properties will be live. The only other thing you would read out we ask you to do, again, this is written out, is to send us an email and just let us know that you've done that. And then that whole process takes probably five to 10 minutes of active effort and then maybe one to three business days total. Miles: Nice. Sounds super easy. I like it. Cool. and then kind of thinking you touched on this already of you know, stay stay being an alternative and and not necessarily you know, you're you're happy for hosts to just get bookings, right? You want them to fill their calendars. how do you think that works in terms of kind of what's a good diversified booking strategy in your eyes? is it important to kind of just get fully booked wherever it is, or is it more important to think about I want some of my bookings from AB, I want some of them from Virgo, I want some of them from Stay. how do you think about that? Paul Buonopane: Yeah, I hate to give a qualified answer, but I have to. I mean, it really depends on how OTA reliant your business Miles: Mm. Paul Buonopane: is. A lot of times, and our sales leader and myself, we're talking to folks daily. If you're 90 % plus reliant on Airbnb, on Verbo, the last thing we will advise you to do is to walk away from that. And we know the realities of that. We think a good metric, good realistic metric is to look at it as a year over year target. a property manager or an owner is 90 % reliant on those two sites or similar sites. Next year try to get to 80, set that with a realistic number involved. And for the most part, the way we talk about when someone is that reliant is that we're in good addition to the mix. We're a demand source, we think and we know from years of development that we're driving incremental and new traffic. and that we've got a lot less competition than those other sites. So from our side, everything is measurable. The traffic that we send to your website is directly measurable. The direct booking requests that we send to hospitable, that's measurable. And we think that when you achieve that incremental improvement in lowering your percentage of bookings from the large sites, that it'll be easy to connect that to your partnership with STAEDT. Miles: Yes, yeah. And obviously, you know, I think some some hosts might think, well, if I'm getting loads of bookings and my calendar is full, why wouldn't I just rely on, you know, one channel to a degree? But obviously, you know, I think the the message is that if you rely too heavily on one channel, what happens if something happens to that that one channel, basically, right? And you want to have kind of backup source of leads and bookings, right? Paul Buonopane: Definitely. And you see flavors of this on some of the Facebook groups and other other place, other Miles: Mm. Paul Buonopane: venues where owners and managers talk about their experiences. Some of them complain about mysterious changes in volume. So other Miles: Yeah. Paul Buonopane: other are just subject to what we've all seen, especially in the last 12 months acutely, which is the margin fees going up and what was once 15 % for certain groups of owners and managers are now 15 % for everybody. I don't think I'm telling anyone that's watching this or listening to this, anything they don't know already, but that is going in one direction. It's certainly not down. Miles: Yeah, definitely. Okay, cool. So for anyone that's probably listened to this and actually doesn't have a direct booking website at all, maybe they've just launched their direct booking website, hopefully through Hospitable. what is kind of like your number one recommendation of like key thing that they should be doing in the first thirty days? Paul Buonopane: Shameless plug here. I've got two Miles: Mm-hmm. Paul Buonopane: answers. Shameless plug is obviously connect to stay if you're hospitable takes minutes of effort and to authorize us. We have no direct booking fees. We have no additional any fees other than subscription fee for your property. So I think it's a no brainer from an ROI perspective. The second answer is just less self serving. You see this a lot. think this is the second described as the second problem with the large sites, but I think it's a primary problem when it comes to developing organic channels for your business. Everybody knows it takes a while. Let's not set it and forget it. At the start, you've got to collect your traveler data. And then you have to have a plan for what to do with that traveler data. And there are varying levels of sophistication. But I usually say there's an 80-20 rule. For book guests, it's an obvious one. If have a book guest, you're going to go back and try to get it repeat. For folks that don't book with you, that's still valuable. I think the best way to think about it is in 18 months, if you're doing a great job of accumulating your guest data, not just people that booked with you, but also people you've talked to, and you have a segmented plan on how to reengage with those people, your percentage of direct bookings and bookings where you don't pay a 15 % fee or higher is gonna keep going up and up. Miles: Makes sense. and I'd love to kind of get your thoughts on kind of misconceptions around direct bookings, because I think for a lot of people it's still kind of a it's a bit of a big beast to tackle. what would you say is kind of a a common misconception that you hear from hosts? Paul Buonopane: man. mean, it is that you build the website and then, you know, the traffic will come. And I know that's Miles: Mm. Paul Buonopane: maybe a little bit, you know, that's a little bit obvious. But that's kind of the starting gun. It's definitely an ongoing effort. And I think I like to think about it in terms of like this like snowball effect. Giving up too early and basically saying, OK, well, it's been four months. What I've been doing isn't working. I don't think that's, I think that's calling it quits too soon. I see, to see some chatter about this and we hear this from, from owners and managers. And that's basically that they don't really build up the review count, build up their emails and phone numbers that they've had until their lists. They, you know, they get too impatient. I think over time, what you want to see is a lot of small contributions from different areas, referrals, repeat guests, email. Obviously, I feel like if you can build up a social following, it's totally hard to do in 2026. It's not like 2016 that all those owned assets and that audience that you can build over time. I think that's what takes time. And I think people kind of throwing their hands up a little too fast. That's what would be my answer. Miles: Yeah, that makes sense. And then I'd love to get your thoughts on AI, 'cause it's I think it's a topic that's touched on on every podcast these days. how do you think AI will change kind of guests discovering and booking vacation rentals over the next few years? Paul Buonopane: I mean, Steyr started this venture on we have something called AI guided search. And I think that discovery is going to be way more personalized. I know that's a common answer, but I think that that is the area that I think as Airbnb and the other sites have evolved. There's tons of choice. There's tons of supply. And I think everybody kind of immediately thinks technology has therefore improved the traveler experience because there's more choice. But I think there's too many choices. And I think the way that AI can make an impact on the traveler side and the traveler experience is personalized recommendations. And that in combination with the many dynamic pricing solutions that are out there, I think is really going to be the first thing that happens on AI. hosts, mean, what's our hope is that getting structured data and more I should say alignment between how some of these models work and the ways that we're collecting data and getting data from the property owners and property managers. I think that that's going to them find the right guests, the right type of guests, the right pricing of guests. So I think that, you know, I think it'll be a little bit more subtle, but I think that AI is going to help both sides of the marketplace. Miles: Nice, yeah, that's that's great to hear. would love to kind of just go back to Stay briefly. any any success stories that you can kind of share of you know people that have started using Stay and you know starting to see kind of bookings because of it and kind of improvements in their business bottom. Paul Buonopane: Absolutely. So on average, we try to generate 20 to 25 booking requests per property per year. And through our survey data that goes back a few years now, we see converting the owners and managers converting somewhere between 10 and 20 % of those booking requests. That's what we aim for. Out West, it was a very soft off weather year for a lot of the ski areas. And without getting super specific in terms of the name of them, we were able to get that volume for one of our Park City based property management companies and they actually exceeded that conversion rate. And I think, despite the soft season, I think that that came from them owning at the time, owning that a few of our overall markets on our site. And... What did that translate to? Their cost for property is pretty nominal because of the volume-based discounts that we have available for large partners, but they've saved five figures in OTA fees for sure that hopefully if things continue, they won't ever have to pay again. Miles: That's that's awesome to hear. Yeah, that's fantastic for the bottom line for sure. good. one final question, I think, from me. so kind of one final piece of advice for our listeners. if you were to give them, yeah, a piece of advice to kind of make their vacation rental more resilient, what would it be? Paul Buonopane: I mean, you said this a little earlier, but it's the first thing that comes to mind. And it's why we're, we've started today. Don't be relying on one side of one channel. Even if you feel great, if it's organic and you're getting a lot of organic traffic, that can change with an algorithm change. If it's Airbnb and they change their fee structure tomorrow or they change their sort, how much does that hurt your business? I would say start now. I think Folks who are good stewards for the business know when times are good, you don't get complacent. You do try new things and you stick with it. I think that the direct bookings snowfall, snowball I should say, snowfall, Miles: Mm-hmm. Paul Buonopane: just talking about ski resort, snowball is like a real thing. think if you're happy where your direct bookings are, don't get complacent. And if you're not happy, start today. The last one more self-serving thing. Miles: Nice. Paul Buonopane: Everyone should know if you walked Miles: Correct. Paul Buonopane: into the end, hopefully you're interested, you can talk with our team. We are looking for personal relationships. You have a dedicated human on our team. This is not, you know, poor service that I think is a developing trend in the larger sites. And we're offering 20 % off for anybody that starts with us. Really looking forward to, you know, at the end of the first year, I'll stay being a no brainer renewal because the ROI is off the charts. Miles: Nice, awesome. and obviously, if you're a hospitable customer, you can go into your account, go to integrations, you can search for stay there, scroll down to the S section, obviously. what is the website, Paul, if people want to go and directly look? Paul Buonopane: Excellent. Yep. Stay with stay.com. Miles: Perfect. Awesome. so that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much, Paul, for joining us. loved the insights, it was great. Thank you. Paul Buonopane: Thank you. Miles: Thank you for listening to today's episode with Paul at Stay. If you enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to hospitable hosts on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.