The Bookster Podcast: Common Holiday Rental Property Manager Mistakes

Transcript

Hello, I'm Simon and welcome back to the Bookster podcast from inside the SaaS Holiday Rental Software Company Bookster based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Follow along as Bookster discuss their inner workings and their journey to where they are today.

Thank you for joining us and we hope that these conversations are insightful but ultimately helpful.

Today as always I'm joined by Robin Morris, co-founder of Bookster, how are you Robin?

Minute 1

Good morning, yes I'm fine, I'm good.

I'm a little bit warm in this little booth but I'm alright.

Good, good and we're also looking enough to be joined by Adam Aaron, how are you Adam? I'm good thanks.

Good, can you maybe just give us your job title again, explain a little bit about what you do at Bookster for those of you who haven't listened for a while? Yeah, I am the support lead at Bookster.

Most of my job is onboarding new clients but also day-to-day support, so answering tickets, chats, that sort of thing.

Great, thank you.

Right, well today's topic gentlemen is going to be, in the nicest possible way, what do clients do wrong? In your opinions of course.

So maybe Robin, I don't know if you want to start us off with something that you get frustrated at or whatever with your clients or what you want to say about that?

Minute 2

Yeah, I mean I suppose it's a bit unfair to criticise or go after our clients, feels like a slightly silly move to be honest, now that I think about it.

But I suppose we should have invited some clients on here to defend themselves.

But I suppose what's interesting is that people do tend to do similar things that we think are counterproductive to their own success.

And it's just interesting to discuss it and see that might ring true with some clients who might be listening or people running other types of software SaaS companies.

So yeah, for example for me, a little bugbear is that they don't, so when you use Bookster you need to fill out all your property information, so you know, descriptions and things like that.

Minute 3

We then sync across to Airbnb, booking.com, verbal, etc.

And for some reason clients, they just don't always fill that information in, even though they are syncing up to these channels or on photographs, they don't title their photos or put descriptions.

Now some of that might be, we might be a little bit to blame in terms of the usability of Bookster, etc.

But for some reason it's something that people are just, you know, once they've uploaded the photos, they just leave them.

And so yeah, they don't describe them or add content, etc.

I mean, and the other thing is when you look at a lot of these photos that people put up, they're not professionally taken, holiday home photos, you know, it's just taken with your,

Minute 4

your camera, your, you know, your phone camera, etc.

So I would say that around just basic content, property content, that's a massive area where, you know, our clients need enormous encouragement and pushing to get that right and just to literally go in and add details to their properties.

In terms of, sorry, Robin interrupted you there.

But in terms of the photograph, sort of meta data, I guess, what is it that doing that brings to the booking or the, you know, why do it basically? Well, if you leave IMG 0484 or whatever, that shows up on your, maybe your Bookster's website, inside Airbnb.

Minute 5

So it looks a bit odd.

But also it doesn't, you know, those are key words that people search for.

So Google will pick it up on your website.

So people searched for holiday home in Caithness with Hot Tub.

If you've got a photograph of a Hot Tub and you've labeled it Hot Tub and you've, you know, said, here's our Hot Tub looking out over these wonderful views of Caithness.

You've got a much better chance of coming up in search because you've labeled that photo.

And then Google might show the photo and you might get a click through.

So, yes, partly to do with search engine optimization, partly to do with when someone's viewing your property.

It's not going to help in terms of converting to a booking if they see this IMG, whatever, blah, blah, blah.

And finally, for people with, you know, maybe visual impairment or whatever, if they've got something that's, you know, a screen reader that's reading the page,

Minute 6

it may not be able to interpret all the photos.

I mean, although AI is now starting to be able to do some of that, still the case that screen reader is going to look at the title and description of a photo and show that or read it out to someone that maybe has visual impairment problems.

So there's accessibility issues there too.

So there's kind of a whole bunch of reasons why it's a good idea to make sure that's up to you.

Just to touch on accessibility, people often mistake accessibility for disabled people or disabled users.

Another massive reason to make your site accessible is if you think of a search engine as a disabled user or, you know, they are literally blind,

Minute 7

your accessibility is going to help index the content.

So there's no bad reason to do it.

There's only good reasons to do it.

So yeah, so for the client, it might seem like a tedious sort of thing to have to type in names of all the pictures.

I don't know if it's tedious.

I think they just don't think about it.

Right.

They don't, and as Robin said, maybe it is our fault a little bit in our UIs, maybe we should be forcing that on them a bit more, or maybe they should be listening to our podcast and then they'd know.

Well, the other one is good, is that right? The time it takes is not that much.

So, if you think of how would, if I were blind, if I were a search engine, how would this be helpful?

Minute 8

And it's kind of self-explanatory.

Okay, that's good to start with.

I don't know if you've got anything that sort of, you know, you get annoyed at or frustrated at perhaps? So generally from an onboarding perspective, there's a very specific set of tasks we have to go through that will generally take around an hour.

It's very counterproductive if the client goes into that meeting hyper-focused on just details of something specific to them, rather than the general, we need to get books to set up so that it's working, because there's certain things that just need to be in place before we cover the details.

And the details are much easier to get sorted once that initial structure is in place.

Minute 9

So I'd say a mix between impatience or not willing to maybe go with the flow of the onboarding process.

We found that it's really, really important to do that initial onboarding.

So either saying, I'll do it myself and get back to you whether I need anything, or I want to focus on this particular detail rather than all the settings you need to go through to make sure they're working for me.

It must be quite tricky, though, I guess to, you know, obviously you can understand that a client is more concerned with their particular details and the general sort of look of it perhaps, I don't know.

Yeah, it's a question of like we will get round to the details and chances are we'll probably cover them during the onboarding anyway,

Minute 10

in a way that answers the questions you may have.

I'd say about 90% of those questions are answered during the onboarding process just naturally, with the information you're setting up and filling out, you'll sort of naturally come round to the things versus if they immediately go on, I want to make sure, you know, I want to see what the email does, or I want to see what it looks like from a guest's perspective.

It's like, well, you know, if your payments are all inaccurate, we're going to be emailing inaccurate emails asking for payments.

So let's get that sorted first.

And there's a certain amount of you just need to trust us and you need to let go of the control for a minute, because we will guide you in what we have determined from statistically, you know, we've done it lots of times,

Minute 11

we know what the issues generally are.

And if we don't cover your specific issue, you will have time at the end of the process, you know, to certainly ask and we'll certainly cover that then.

But you're starting from a much better place if you've got the foundational, I guess, Bookster skills in place before trying to tackle anything complicated or specific.

So you want them to let Bookster see the bigger picture, I guess, and let them see the bigger picture.

And if that doesn't cover their specific questions, by all means, let's go into the details, but let's not start out without covering the bigger picture first.

Are there any examples or any occasions when you think, I mean, you've said about the photos missing description of any other sort of missed opportunities that clients might miss because they're just not aware of or they don't want to do it a certain way?

Minute 12

Yeah, I think one thing that comes up quite often is someone that's had one little bad experience on channels, like, for example, on a booking.com or something, where, you know, maybe they've had a bad guest or maybe they couldn't get through to booking.com support or help or something like that.

And then they, you know, just sort of refuse to be listed or to go on to that channel.

So, yeah, I think that what can happen there is rather than sort of just saying, right, OK, well, I've had a couple of bad experiences, but I'm just going to, you know, give them a few more chances and see if I can build up a bit of, you know, authority in that channel and get some bookings, see if I can get momentum.

Sometimes people sort of do write off a channel and they could, what tends to happen is they do that for quite a long time.

Minute 13

And then eventually they kind of give in and go back on to it when really they should just, you know, maybe one or two bad experiences isn't representative of everything.

And once you've got yourself set up correctly and you understand how people are expecting you to interact with them, then things can move a bit more smoothly.

So, yeah, so sort of having knee-jerk reactions to certain channels can be can be a kind of obvious, I think, a mistake.

I think you touched on something, the knee-jerk reactions, not just to channels to anything.

Like, that's a really bad strategy in general.

But if you take a moment to just take a deep breath, if something goes wrong, rather than having a knee-jerk reaction, and that goes for channels, but it goes for so many other things as well.

Minute 14

I think that's a really good point is to not just react, but to stop, breathe, think, and then react.

And you're in a much more calculated way.

You're much more likely to cause other problems with a knee-jerk reaction that's going to make your life much more difficult and much harder to get out of.

It's like quicksand.

It's making you sink rather than doing something in a strategised way.

Yeah, I mean, an obvious example of that is, so say you put your property on in January, but you only have availability in July and August, September.

And thinking that you're going to get bookings for those months that are six, seven months away is quite unreasonable, because actually as the time of booking approaches, the chances of getting a booking basically go up.

Minute 15

And in fact, over our time running Bookster, there has been a trend towards later and later bookings, but not more and more last-minute bookings, as it were.

But as you, if you might be, you know, listed your property for a month or two months and not really be getting very much or listed a few properties and not be getting that much, but it's because your availability isn't available until further into the future.

So from a guest perspective, you know, they'll probably come and book four weeks in advance, six weeks in advance or something.

But if you're not waiting till that six weeks, then your chances of getting bookings are quite lower.

And yeah, you do get people knee-jerk reacting to that.

They go on for a couple of months and then, oh, you know, not getting anything.

There's some massive problem.

Minute 16

Right.

I'll take all my properties off or I'll take a property off or use, you know, use a different channel or whatever, but or maybe blame us.

I don't know.

But yeah, being patient and understanding when you're most likely to get a booking is quite important as well.

And then from Bookster's point of view, I mean, how much stay, I guess, or sway do you guys have with a client to say, well, look, no, just hang on, stay on booking.com, whatever, for another few months or whatever.

And do you have the ability to say that to clients or how does that work? If they decide that we can say it, they can do what they want.

Yeah, we will always give friendly advice when asked.

Ultimately, we're a tool that, you know, they're using the tool.

So it's ultimately their decision.

Minute 17

We can give them some broad data and say, you know, across our client base, this is how far advanced people book.

So we could, we could give them some feedback on that front.

And I suppose this also leads in potentially to that sometimes people's they think of us as more of an agency when we're not, we are just a tool, we're a software tool.

And so we don't necessarily know what your prices should be.

We don't proactively promote your properties as in, you know, we're not going in updating your property for you and doing some of that work that you really need to do yourself because we don't, we don't know about your property.

Minute 18

We don't know what the things are that are nearby that are attracting people to the area or to your property or etc.

So we don't, we're just making sure that your properties synced up, the prices are correct, that you've got a website that's running, you're able to take bookings, etc.

But we're not giving you advice on what your prices should be or, you know, what are the things that might specifically work for you.

And I think it's quite a difficult line really, even for us it's quite difficult line because people will ask us our opinion, you know, non boarding or support or whatever.

And sometimes we will give it because, you know, we're humans.

So, you know, but it's, it's, but it sort of then strays outside of the boundary of what might be we perceive as our role a little bit where it's like, well, you know, do you think my prices are too high is a question we asked.

Minute 19

Well, I don't know.

I'm not sure.

Yeah, and there's probably there isn't really a right or wrong answers that possibly anyway.

And so, yeah, sometimes we get asked for advice, I suppose, that is not within our, really our knowledge or what we're offering to our clients really.

It must be quite frustrating at times though with your experience and your knowledge to see a client perhaps not do the right thing in terms of your experience and not to be able to say well hold on.

Don't do that because you're going to get more brickens if you do that.

There must be times when it's frustrating for you guys.

I mean, the things that come to mind for me is is trying to game like channels around around the policies like, you know, for example, if you've if you've got like a you've got a bad review rather than respond to the review, which comes across as as human and you're a reasonable person you do list and then create a new listing.

Minute 20

And then get banned from the channel and then get no bookings and as I if you just responded to the review and kept your listing, you know, you're fighting against the grain of how that channel works by by not doing that.

There are there are if you're constantly turning your listing offline and online again and then that sort of thing.

The search algorithm on the channel is going to probably punish you and stick you lower down because you're not as reliable.

Minute 21

A client for their clients, the guests.

So fighting all that stuff constantly when you think you're you're getting ahead of it is actually counterproductive.

If you if you just take a little time to stand still and observe what's going on around, you know, in your in your particular situation.

Okay, you got a bad review.

So if put yourself in a guest perspective, not not you not take yourself out of your own issues or property manager shoes and put yourself in the guest perspective.

If you're reading a bad review, but you've then got 10 other good reviews, it might actually come across that the guest is being unreasonable.

And in which case is like, you know, allow people give them the benefit the doubt that they will be able to come to that conclusion.

If you're doing a good job, it will generally come come through anyway.

If you have a guest that is literally, you know, the guests from hell.

Minute 22

It will come across in their review if they are being that way.

And people are smart enough to know the difference.

If you consistently have the shower was smelly, then maybe do something about the shower.

But if it's literally, you know, the guests was like, Oh, you know, there was a party across the road.

Well, that could have been a one off, you know, you could respond.

Yeah, we've actually had a conversation with that neighbor.

And they, you know, they realize that, you know, people are sleeping and, you know, they've agreed not to do it in the future.

And so, okay, that shows that you're being proactive.

And all the while you have not taken your listing offline.

So there's still chances of getting bookings.

Whereas if you just say, Oh, get you know, just do the most drastic thing possible, yank the plug.

You're going to close yourself a lot more work.

And it's not to your benefit to do that.

Minute 23

Yeah, yeah, I suppose.

Yeah, things that feel when you first start up your property business, if you're new, things that feel like are quite dramatic or disastrous, like a bad review.

Yeah, you might.

But it's probably worth paying attention to say someone like Adam's reaction, because you might be like, Oh, right.

Okay, that's fine.

Because he's seen it, you know, hundreds of times.

So yes, it's probably worth gauging the reaction of something that's gone wrong, or our reaction to it.

You know, like, you know, if you receive a payment and it's 10 pounds less than you expected, or something like that, you know, when you're or your pricing isn't quite you know, you've set your prices, you thought you were going to get 1000 pounds, but you get, you know, 950.

Minute 24

That's something to learn from rather than just go, Oh, you know, the system's not working or cancel the booking.

Don't cancel the booking.

Canceling the booking like that is really a bad idea.

It's a bad idea from the guest point of view.

It's a bad idea from the, you know, the, if you're on a channel that you've, you know, canceled the channel is going to treat you badly.

Because you treat the guests badly.

So don't, yeah, put yourself in the guest shoes rather than I'd say, yeah, the number one thing I could recommend to clients as far as where they go wrong, not to put themselves on our shoes, but to put themselves in their guests shoes.

Yeah, if they can do that, then chances are they're going to do things right.

Yeah, yeah.

We treat yourself, I guess is the key thing.

Exactly.

As you say, all your so very much.

Minute 25

And so, I mean, we've already, well, we're sort of over already, but I just want to keep going a little slightly because I'd like to bring up the topic of chat, GTP and other things like that.

How do you guys feel about their sort of, or the input of AI, I guess, to what you guys are doing.

Adam, what's your view? I say in the beginning, it was, you know, when it first came out a couple of years ago, and you get people just doing a brain dump of, you know, whatever this thing is, it's got intelligence in the title.

So I'm just going to trust it.

I think we're coming in slightly round to it's settled a bit and people are actually finding, okay, well, this is a good use for this tool.

This is not so they are using it in the appropriate places.

Minute 26

I would say, you know, in terms of the where the clients go wrong with it, they just automatically trust it because a computer said it.

I would just don't take off your critical thinking hat when when using those tools, they are just tools.

Don't just blindly trust it that it's correct.

It's going on a statistical model.

It's not actually intelligent, at least not yet.

So take what it says with with a grain of salt and actually read through what what it's it's recommending you do if that's what you're asking at, rather than just blindly doing it and blindly following along.

Yeah, always check what what it's told you.

You know, you might be using it to see right.

Okay.

Generate a description of my property or what are things that can do nearby this particular location or something like that.

Minute 27

Or so these models tend to be quite good at quite static information, but not so good at more dynamic information.

So, like if you said to, you know, what events are happening near me in the next month, it might not work so well.

But they generally as Adam points out, they do hallucinate things.

And so, yeah, it's quite dangerous to sort of say, you know, generate a description and not be through it because it might well come up stuff that's just not true.

You know, focus on things that aren't important.

Like, you know, the picture of the living room with the plug coming from the lamp going into the soccer.

But nobody cares.

Yeah, you know, really take that bit out if it's not relevant to the guest experience.

Minute 28

Yeah, so that's where they might go wrong if they were.

If they are using these tools, they should be pretty careful.

I mean, we, you know, we're using some of these tools inside Bookster a bit already or not already.

So, yeah, it's been around a while, but obviously I'm using for coding a bit too.

And, you know, we're using them.

But you do have to be very careful about what it comes out with.

Make sure you're double checking that information.

Yeah, yeah, just use with care.

And I guess that might be the same.

I mean, do you guys have experience of dynamic pricing? Is that something that you guys deal with? Yeah, so we have dynamic pricing kind of built in.

Minute 29

But again, I would say, yeah, it falls exactly the same thing.

So, yeah, I always say to our clients, use it to as a guide, you know, a kind of seasonal guide.

You may want to charge more, you may want to charge less, but it will take account of seasonality.

The very nature of holiday rentals is they do tend to be different to each other.

So it's not like a hotel where you've got 50 rooms and you can take a signal from, you know, someone books three rooms.

Or not someone, three people, maybe, book three different rooms.

And then, you know, it happens very quickly.

And then the dynamic pricing can respond and say, well, there's demand here, so I'm going to push the prices up.

That doesn't happen in holiday rentals.

So, you know, you've got a unique farmhouse.

So how do you know, you know, whether a price should go up or down? Well, properties around, you can maybe say they go up or down.

Minute 30

So there might be a good signal in terms of seasonality or maybe events, perhaps.

But what it won't get is the uniqueness of that property.

So it's just going off other properties round about.

But they might all be, you know, small cottages with two bedrooms or one bedroom.

You've got a farmhouse with six rooms.

If that's the only farmhouse with six rooms within 10 miles of where you are, the dynamic pricing might not really be able to fully understand or to give you a price that is correct.

Or, I mean, correct is reasonable.

So, yeah, with dynamic pricing, where our clients tend to go wrong is they can take it as gospel.

And it's kind of a bit like exactly like Adam said with AI, because a computer said it is true.

And then because they have, they tend to be knowledgeable in that area.

Minute 31

So they'll look at the prices and say, oh, this is a little rubbish.

Why are you even offering this? But it's very difficult for us to explain to clients.

Look, it's quite a good guide.

You can increase your prices.

You can decrease your prices.

But you can use the dynamic prices as a baseline.

But we're not saying these prices are gospel truth, that that's what you should use.

But that's perhaps down to the way we've implemented our UI as well.

Perhaps we should be saying price guide or seasonal guide or something.

I don't know.

Maybe there's ways of.

No, no, no.

This episode was all about blaming the clients.

All right, yeah.

One last thing I want to say is, well, actually, what we do can get quite a lot of

Minute 32

people to think about is that we're not just coming to Big Star and leaving because they don't like a bit of it.

Or they'll like it.

These are certain mindset of type of person.

Now, it could be just as they're in this discovery phase, but what happens is someone say they are using a different bit of software and they spot that Big Star does something that they like.

So it's like, oh, Big Star has instant websites.

I need an instant website.

Right.

I'm going to move away from this other software to Big Star.

And then they're like, oh, but Big Star doesn't have this thing that I was using.

Or it does have this thing, but it does it in a slightly different way.

Minute 33

Oh, I was, you know, I was, I don't know, I had a guest book generating software that worked in a certain way on this other software.

Why don't you have that? And it's that they'll move because of one bit of functionality, but forget that their existing platform does a whole load of stuff.

But they just assume we'll be in the other bit of software.

So you get people leaving and then coming back because they're like, oh, you know, I was tempted away to this other thing because it did this, but it doesn't actually do all the things that Big Star did in the way that I really like.

Or alternatively, they come from some other bit of software and they say, oh, you guys have, you know, an instant website.

So that's why I came.

But you don't do this or you don't do that in the way that I am used to.

So I'm going to cancel and go, you know, and then they start constantly hopping between different bits of software because they're looking for something that does everything exactly the way they want, rather than saying, right, okay, except that this bit of software doesn't do everything exactly the way I want.

Minute 34

So, you know, I'm just going to, you know, go.

Yeah, I think that comes back to not going against the grain in general.

You need to whatever software you use, and whether it's Bookster or something else, you need to kind of be willing a certain amount to just go with it and see where it takes you.

If there's something that is a red line, then by all means, you know, switch product, go to something where that red line isn't crossed for you.

But in general, everything's going to be a compromise somewhere because it's an opinion at the end of the day.

We've coded it in a certain way because we have an opinion.

Minute 35

There's actually.

It's not going to be everything.

Yeah, sorry.

I was going to say that this is possibly for a topic of another podcast, but the likelihood is that what AI will allow people to do is use a platform like Booksters API's and fill in those gaps to some of the functionality in the way that they do want it to work.

So they might use, you know, Bookster for everything really, but then they might want their own analytics tool or their own dashboard or something, and they want it to work in the way.

And actually the bar for creating those types of tools is a lot lower now than it was before.

So yes, you want the kind of solidity of the pricing being correct and it's syncing up to the channels and doing a lot of the stuff that you want it to do.

But you might actually what we will find, I'm sure as time goes on, we've already had a bit of it already, but you'll find people saying, oh, actually, I want to do X or Y or Z.

Minute 36

And they're just going to write it themselves using AI to do a certain little thing that kind of scratches a niche for them.

And, you know, as long as we've got nice well documented open API, then they can do that and, yeah, they can get the information out the way they want or push information in the way they want.

It's a brave new world.

Well, definitely be up for discussing that on another episode.

Good.

Right.

Well, that sounds like that's a good place to leave this episode.

We have run on a bit of it, so as my full badge that is an interesting conversation to carry on a little while.

So thank you both for your time for that.

We will be back soon with another podcast and potentially about AI and that'll be an interesting conversation as well.

So for the meantime, Adam, thank you very much for your time today.

Minute 37

Thanks for having me.

And Robin, thank you again for joining us.

Thank you.

And we will see everyone very soon and take care.

Bye bye.

Bye.

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