Hello, welcome back to another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

I'm Annette Grant, and together we are Thanks for Visiting.

Let's start this episode like we do each and every week, and that is showcasing one of you, our incredible listeners who is going over to strshare.com, sharing everything you can about your short-term rental so we can share you here on the podcast. Annette, who are we sharing this week? We're mixing it up a little bit.

I know. I'm so excited. I think this might be the first time that we've done this. We are taking you direct to cornerstonecottageacadia.com.

Direct book.

I'm taking you directly to their site. I want you to check out their direct booking site and you're gonna see it right away. Book direct. The other thing that you are gonna see all above the fold, super easy. They have a popup that says, join our mailing list. Be the first to know about calendar openings, exclusive offers, and area seasonal recommendations, and that anyone can put their email in there and they are collecting those. Of course, they say we respect your privacy, so they're gonna follow everything there. And also, right when you go to their site, they have a connection to their Instagram. So I can, again, trust but verify, see who they really are. See their social media presence. And then get to it. I can go ahead. When I click book direct, it is very similar look and feel that, um, guests are used to, looks very similar to um, let's say Airbnb. But I can go in, I can check the dates, I can select it, check the rates and book. And so I just want everyone to share 'cause it's very, um, important for today's episode. I want you to check it out again, cornerstonecottageacadia.com. They are crushing it with their simple, yet effective direct booking sites. And it is our goal for all of you at the end of this episode to feel empowered to start your own. So, Sarah, how are we gonna help them with that today?

Well, the reason we are sharing this very specific website is because they are users of Future Stay. It is a product we are highlighting in today's episode, and we wanted to show you what it actually looks like and feels like because Future Stay is built for. We're gonna give you a new word and we'll dig into it a little bit in today's episode. It's built for rental preneurs, and it is the solution for hosts who have one to three properties and gives you the freedom you crave, but you feel like you've never been able to be a part of the direct booking movement because you don't have. 50, 60, 7000, 200 units. We say one to three, but you can have more than one to three on Future Stay as well. But in today's episode, we're gonna interview Phil Kenard. He's the founder of Future Stay and a longtime advocate for independent short-term rental hosts. He built the platform after realizing how limited the options were for everyday hosts, AK rental entrepreneurs who needed tech that was simple, affordable and designed with their needs in mind. So Future Stay supports thousands of rental preneurs, um, and help them build direct booking sites, manage their properties, and earn more money without needing a big team or complex tools. And I already know it. All of you are thinking you're nervous about the quote unquote risk of not having it be quote unquote secure on Airbnb. Hang out for this episode 'cause you are going to be blown away by the solutions that future state can offer you. And it's built just for you, the independent host, the rental preneur. Phil, we are so excited to have you on this show today. There are so much happening in the short term rental world, and I think you might have the keys to unlock the next phase for so many of our listeners. So if you don't mind, real quick before we get into it, a little bit about who you are and why you do what you do right now.

Yeah. Thank you guys for having me. I'm super excited. Also, this is definitely a timely conversation. Uh, I'm Phil Kenard. I'm the founder of Future Stay, and, uh, Future Stay helps rental preneurs. So people that are starting out, uh, on their journey to short-term rental success and want to use short-term rentals to change their life, but not necessarily build a 200 or a thousand property enterprise. They just wanna set themselves up for, uh, for the life that they can control. So we help, uh, rental preneurs make more money with their short-term rentals, and we do that with our technology. Why do I do what I do? Really simple. I am a rental preneur. And so, you know, about 10 years ago I was renting out my apartment in Greenwich Village that I thought I could afford at the time. I went out on a limb and bought it, and it was way too much money for me, could not afford it. And I turned to short term rentals as a way to, uh, to, to keep it up afloat and keep myself financially above afloat and, uh, above, above water. And what I realized really quickly was I needed something to help me take direct bookings so I could avoid just paying pure commission on everything and something to really help me stay organized and make more money. And there wasn't really software that was built for people like me, the rental preneur. There was lots of complex softwares and PMSs and all those sorts of things, which were a little more than I needed. I just needed something really focused on making more money. As a software entrepreneur, I decided to build it myself. And so I built Future Stay. And uh, over the past decade we've helped, uh, over, we built over a hundred thousand short-term rental, uh, direct booking websites and helped thousands of rental preneurs all over the world succeed.

Alright, before we go any further, this word rental preneur, I think I understand what you're saying, but what does that mean to you?

So, a rental entrepreneur is obviously like a port manto of, you know, rental and entrepreneur. And for me it's really simple. I've been an entrepreneur for, I, I wanna say my entire life. Um, you know, since I was probably about 11 or 12 as I think when the first time I sold anything in my life, you know, and entrepreneurship is a great way of controlling your destiny, of taking independence and taking your life into your own hands. And I think there's an entire generation of people that are using short-term rentals to control their future. It's typically someone who's doing this either on their own or with family, not through a large business, right? They don't want to do this as a job. They want to do it to create flexibility and freedom in their life, and they use rentals, short-term rentals as a tool to achieve those means. It's typically someone that is, you know, operating, you know, 1, 2, 3, a handful of short-term rentals and is, uh, is looking at it as like a way to kind of create some leverage for themselves, and that's what we call the rental preneur at Future Stay. One important thing I want to say here, and maybe we'll talk about this some later on too, is a lot of times people that are getting started in the short term rental industry, they listen to podcasts or they'll go into communities and they'll see people with a hundred or a thousand rentals and they'll say, oh wow, those people are so big. Like, I'm not insig, I'm, I'm insignificant because I don't have that many rentals. Well, just so everyone knows here. Almost everyone in the short term rental industry has less than five rentals. Over 90% of hosts have less than five rentals. So you're in good company if you're a rental entrepreneur. You're not just someone that's just starting out and not important. In fact, you're the most important person in the short term rental industry. And that's kind of why Future Stay exists is to help rental preneurs succeed.

Ooh, I love that you just said that we are the most important. I don't think, um, independent hosts hear that enough, especially with the current ongoings, um, with, I'm just gonna say it with Airbnb, I feel like the independent host, the host with one, two, or three are really feeling the, um, just the, the crunch of like, wait, are we being discarded? Are we not important? How are we supposed to continue to be rental preneurs when it feels like, it feels like there are some new rules, some new things being kind of forced upon us, upon us when we are the true property owner. That, that's a hard pill to swallow. So it's really refreshing, Phil, to hear that we are the most important and we have to keep that at the forefront as these challenges, as pivots, as changes come up to remember that we still are in control. So it's, it's refreshing to hear that from you and, and just know that we are still in control of our freedom, of our destiny, of what we are trying to build in the first place, or why we got into this in the first place.

Yeah. Well, we're, we're, you know, Future Stay exists to help rental preneurs stay in control. But the reality is, if you don't take control of your destiny with short-term rental, someone else will control it for you, right? Mm-hmm. Platforms like Airbnb, and we're an Airbnb partner. I've been a partner with Airbnb for almost a decade, right. And, you know, I've listed on Airbnb. I have great things to say about it. It's just, it's an, it's an essential part of most host strategy, but it can't be your entire strategy. Right. Your strategy's gotta be for you and for your own future and your own destiny, and you have to take the right steps to control that. And, and I think, you know, the last thing I'll say about this is one of the main reasons Future stay exists is because in an industry that is, you know, 90 plus percent controlled by the supply, controlled by rental preneurs, the reality is most companies in the space are focused, most tech companies are focused on large managers. There's nothing wrong with that, that's not bad. Right? It's because large managers, obviously, if you can, if you can sell a product to someone that has a thousand properties, you're gonna make a lot more profit than if you can sell it to someone that has one property. Right? And it's a, it's been a, uh, that there's been a kind of race to the top in terms of people trying to sell to the largest managers in the industry and building the best software and the best feature for the largest managers in the industry. And the reality is rental preneurs need a little bit of a different approach. They need a little bit of a different tool set. And so a future state, we've been super focused on. Making sure that we build the right tool for rental preneurs who are busy. They're professionals, they're super intelligent. They're people that have, uh, really, that have really, uh, you know, they've taken short term rentals as a way to kind of open up the next stage of their life. Um, but they don't have all the same resources that a professional manager does. And so that's kind of how we focused the product and the platform really focused on helping rental preneurs succeed. We're not, we don't really serve large managers or those kind of enterprise managers. We're a hundred percent focused on helping regular rental preneurs like myself and like you guys get to the next level with their short-term rentals.

And I can tell you all, when a software company has one focus and they don't try to serve everyone, you're gonna get a better product for you, the user, because that company is all in on serving that particular kind of user. And that, that, I look for that in software myself, Phil. Like, I wanna make sure that that software is gonna gimme exactly what I need in this, in this situation. What do you say? 'cause there are still some listeners out there and some hosts out there who feel like Airbnb makes it so easy to just use Airbnb. You interact with a lot of rental preneurs. So when it, the light bulb goes off for them and they see the value of using Future Stay and they see the value of diversifying outside of just Airbnb, what is it that that, that gets that light bulb going off for them?

Yeah, that's a great question. And the answer is not specific to Future Stay, right? This is for every rental preneur you can use Future Stay, you can make your own solution up. It doesn't really matter. There's a point in time that every Airbnb host realizes that Airbnb isn't the end of the journey. It's actually the beginning of the journey. And that's a great way to start, right? And so people will find themselves, and I know we've all had this moment. You're sitting there and you're looking at your occupancy. You're looking at your average daily rate and you're saying like, is this good? I don't know. Is it good? Like just, is it good? Not that it's bad, you don't know the answer. You know what's next? How do I grow beyond this? How do I either make more money doing the things I'm already doing or you know, or start doing additional things to make more money, right? Because you kind of have a bunch of sunk costs already there with your property and your operations. How do you improve your margins, improve your top line revenue and take less risk while doing all that? Those are the questions that rental preneurs ask themselves, right? Yeah, sure, I can go add five more properties, but like, why do five X of thing that I'm doing right now when I could take the thing I'm doing, make it more efficient first, and then go on from there? And I don't just mean operationally efficient. I mean like. Getting all the value you can out of it. And so that question of like, is this good? Is there something next? Is the question that when rental preneurs ask that, then we know we can help. And I'll tell you what's next. And again, this is not just Future Stay specific. What's next is making sure that your Airbnb listing is really performing right? Oftentimes I'll have people say, oh, should I, I hear people you know, have a conversation with entrepreneurs, oh, should I list on VRBO? Should I list on booking.com? Should I list on this channel? Should I list on this channel? And the answer is maybe depends on where you are in your journey, right? Like, if you're doing one thing poorly, why add seven more things that you're also doing poorly? Why don't you do the thing you're doing already best? Do that the right way first. So the first thing that we do at Future Stay when we, when we onboard someone and onboarding a Future Stay takes literally under six minutes, right? It's pretty crazy how quickly we can connect to your Airbnb account. Spin up your account at Future Stay. One of the first things that we do for everyone, in addition to giving 'em a beautiful direct booking website and listing 'em on Google Vacation Rentals, we'll get back to that, is we get them set up for an Airbnb optimization. And the reason why is think about like, you know, when you're back in university, or even right now, you guys are sitting down and you're like, all right, I'm gonna write this piece of content. I'm gonna write this, uh, this research paper that I've put together. You have to have someone proofread it. Right? You know, and these days, like maybe AI's helping right? For that too. But the, but the reality is like no matter what you put out in the world, if you only look at it with your own pair of eyes, there's gonna be mistakes in it, and there's gonna be red flags in it, right? And so one of the first things that we do is for every customer on Future Day Amplify, we review their Airbnb listing top to bottom. We give it like the 48 point, uh, Jiffy Lube style checklist, top to bottom right. And. We, we typically find one of 11 red flags on that listing, and those red flags significantly impede bookings. So, you know, when, when we, when we're done and we get your listing all optimized, our average customer sees about 16% more bookings on Airbnb just from getting their listing set up correctly.

Okay. Phil, you gotta give us one of the red flags. We gotta give something juicy to the, to the listeners.

I'll, I'll give you a couple of the 11.

Oh, I like it. I like it.

So, so I'll give, I'll give you my favorite two red flags, right? One of these is something that is based on how, and Airbnb is easy to use, so it's something about Airbnb being complex, but there's so many questions and they always change their UI around. It's very frequent for someone to have a mismatch between the beds and bathrooms that they create on their listing and the actual number of guests that are allowed to stay at the listing. Yes. So very frequent. You say frequently you'll see. Four bedroom house with two bathrooms. And then when you actually look at how many guests are permitted, when you try to fill out that little ticker and you're trying to book it, it's only permitting like three or four guests. And then every other guest is either an upcharge or sometimes you can't add more than that. That's the kind of thing that's very easy to miss. 'cause it's buried in the details of your listing. It's not creative. It's a, it's a numerical field. And you would think, look, I listed four bedrooms. Come on Airbnb, you got, but no, there's a separate field for that. And so little things like that can end up with a very, very high bounce rate on your listing. Meaning people find your listing and search, maybe you were ranked highly, they end up on your page and then they're like, oh, it's a four bedroom house. That's exactly what I was looking for. I'm gonna bring eight people. Oh no, I can't. And so when the, when people start bouncing off of your listing, I. That tells the algorithm you're not a good match for that type of guest. And what does it do? It decreases your appearances in search. And so all of a sudden you didn't even know it, but you just hamstrung your Airbnb listing just by entering the wrong number in a field because you've given a feedback loop where every single time someone bounces you get less and less likely to show up. Little things like that are very, very common. About 10% of people do that make have a mismatch in terms of beds, baths, and the number of in the numerical fields and little things like that you don't even see them, but those slowly erode your ability to succeed on Airbnb.

Okay. What's next? You said you were gonna give us a few. That's one. I'm getting greedy, so,

okay. I'll, I'll give you, I'll give you one of my favorites.

Ooh. Okay.

And this is my, one of my favorites because it ties into direct bookings. Oh. So it's not an issue for, that's why there are 11 of them, 10 of them are for direct book for Airbnb optimization. And the 11th is actually for direct bookings. And so everyone knows that you're not allowed to write your website or any contact information in your Airbnb listing. Obviously that's a, it was against terms of use before the new off platform policy that Airbnb released. The OPP as I like to call it. For those of us of a certain age,

Yes, I'm down with OPP. I like it. Well, I don't like it, but I like, I like the analogy.

And so it was, it was against, it was against the policy of policy platform before and now it's even more explicitly laid out as being against policy. Right. But you are allowed to do other things. And so one thing that you can do and you should do on your Airbnb listing for every person that has a direct booking website, is you should utilize, and this is part of a, a, uh, a phenomena that we at Future Stay have observed and we've kind of helped teach people how to use it. It's called the Billboard effect, which is part of our direct booking loop strategy at Future Stay. The billboard effect. We didn't make that up. That's a real observable phenomena that exists in the real world in hospitality. Going back before short term rentals were even big. Um, the Columbia, uh, Cornell, uh, hospitality school in New York did a study on OTA and direct bookings for hotels, and they found that 72% of people that booked on a hotel's direct booking website had previously searched on an OTA and saw that hotel on a OTA. The OTA started saying to hotels, you should list on our OTA, not just because you're gonna get bookings directly from us, but you can consider this listing a billboard for your hotel, right? Obviously, if you have links to the website and things like that, that makes that number higher. But even if you don't have those, guess what people do? They end up on your Airbnb or your OTA listing, they look for identifiable information such as the name of your property, right? For example, they might look for, you know, a Annette's, uh, Riverside, uh, shanty. That's a terrible name for a property. Well, let's just, it's

Shanty.

It's your shanty, right? And so it's ironic. It's 'cause it's, it's fancy. That's why you called it that. So, Annette's Riverside shanty. Um, and if you've written in your Airbnb description, we can't wait to host you at a net riverside shanty in lovely Gainsville, Tennessee, right? People will just literally copy that entire string, pop it in Google, and then guess what's first for that? Well, you're the only website on the internet about Annette's Riverside shanty in Gainesville, Tennessee. So you pop up first, not your Airbnb listing, not your VRBO listing. And if you don't utilize the billboard effect in your OTA listings, which is again, not against terms of service and also expected by the OTAs. If you don't do that, that's an 11th red flag. Meaning you as a rental entrepreneur aren't, number one, you're not showing the potential guest all the trust building signals that you should be, because they might want to Google you too, just to make sure you're legit. They may end up booking through Airbnb still, but they want to make sure that you are who you say you are, and you're also missing on, on direct bookings.

Ooh, I, I like what you just said of cross-referencing even to get booked on Airbnb because, well, Sarah and I just, um, got back from an event and the, heard it over and over again and was the term trust recession. And we do believe we are in it, and it's on so many different levels because of ai, because of people checking in. You know, you can use it in any, um, any field. But for us, I get that. I, if I'm looking for an Airbnb, I go to their Instagram, I go to Google, I make sure that that listing is who they say they are on the OTA on Airbnb. And I love that you're even sharing that. It could help you get booked via Airbnb or VRBO because you have that direct booking presence. Because here's what they might be doing because the guest is in a trust recession. They might say, Hey, I'm gonna book first on Airbnb, I really wanna book direct with them, but my first day, let's do it this way, and then the next time mm-hmm. They'll go direct. And so I've never really heard that philosophy, Phil, of them, you know, I, I know going to social media, but yeah, going to the direct booking site just to confirm, but then still booking on Airbnb, that's a really great way to, you know, gain that trust from your potential, from your potential guest. And they know that the pictures, the pictures here are the same as the pictures there. Is is really a big, a big thing that's happening.

Yeah, I think, I think what you're saying is a really important point, right? If you're doing this correctly, when we talk about the direct booking loop, it's called a loop because it's a process of using the tools that you already have, such as your OTA listings, the communications that go out, the time that the guest is in your property, and you have op, you have the ability to capture information from them directly to generate more direct bookings. It's kind of a feedback loop that grows and helping you get more and more direct bookings as your short-term rental operates without having to do a lot of additional work. But trust is at the center of all of those things, and I don't mean to say this and look, this is, we don't need to get complex, and we're talking about booking funnels and those sorts of things. We can have a masterclass on that at a different stage, right? What we're talking about here is just, this is a journey. It's like when you as a consumer buy from a brand first, you just want to get your feet wet. Your first booking may or may not be direct. Sometimes it is, right? But you might want to try from a trusted retailer, but I can guarantee you if I have an Airbnb listing, if I'm looking at an Airbnb listing and I've already looked at the direct website, visited on social media, seen the personality of the host, seen guests talking about how they had a great stay there, guess what that's gonna do? It's gonna prime my mind as a consumer to have a better experience and to be more likely to do things like sign up for your newsletter or share my email address with you, or maybe even add some upsells to my stay because you've already primed me to have a better experience because I know that I see other people experiencing great things with you. So that trust, that is something that you have an opportunity as a host to start building in advance. And here's the thing, guys, when we talk about rental preneurs, and I'm not gonna use the word versus because it's not a battle, it's not rental preneurs versus professional, quote unquote, or big, or enterprise managers. Because we would win. rental preneurs would win because we're at 90% of the industry anyway, but it's not a versus, right? When we look at the two different groups of managers, enterprise managers do all of these things. They're already working to build trust. They have entire marketing teams and departments. They have post booking flows, they have multi-channel messaging. What we want to do at Future Stay, and what you guys wanna do too with your community, is we wanna level that playing field, and we wanna make it easier for rental preneurs to do the things that matter to guests. Why? Because, yeah, we want to give good good guest guest experiences, but ultimately because that allows us to succeed, that allows rental preneurs to build their own direct independent business no matter what channels they're on. Not saying get off the channel, stay on those channels. That's how you feed your direct booking loop. Mm-hmm. Right? But having control in doing all the right things is what helps you succeed as a rental entrepreneur.

I love that. The first step for people who commit to Future Stay. As their direct booking platform that you go through their Airbnb listing and make sure that the checkpoint list of all the things that would make it be a good listing and have it convert a looker into a booker, we say here at TFE is the first thing you do 'cause we have to have something good to work with. I know that a lot of our listeners are nervous. They're like, okay, great. Then how do I, like, how do I start the direct booking process? Like what, how, how do I get people to know about me? You are saying it sounds like the Billboard effect is a great first step. Mention the name of your property in your description and that isn't against terms and conditions on Airbnb. Is that the first step? Is there anything else you recommend to get someone feeling like they could actually have a direct booking, um, process before the end of the year?

Yeah, before the end of the year. I mean, look, uh, you should be able to start today and regardless of you, can you be using Future Stay? Or you can go do this on your own on a free website builder, right? You should be able to get your first direct booking in weeks, if not days, right? And so step one, this is gonna sound painfully obvious, but step one is you need a direct booking website, and your direct booking website needs to be able to take bookings. That sounds like, you know, a platitude here. But the reality is, like about 80% of rental preneurs don't have a direct booking website that can take bookings. And so if you don't, you know, if you don't, if you're not on the field, you can't play, you can't play in the game. So you gotta start by getting your direct booking website, and I would recommend strongly having a direct booking website that syncs availability with your listings. And if you're just on Airbnb. That's a great place to start to make sure your availability is synced. One, when we talk about trust indicators or trust signals, as we like to, to call 'em at Future Stay having, one of the things that makes guests, people that have shopped on OTAs before really skeptical is when they look at a direct booking website or even an Airbnb listing and they see a hundred percent availability, right? When you look at a listing and you're like, oh, this has never been booked before, or the calendar's wrong, like, which one is it? Either. Both of those are bad, right? And so you, whatever you're doing, make sure your calendar is synced, and if you don't have any bookings block sometimes off that way, it looks like people have started staying in your property and it looks like maybe they just didn't transfer the reviews over. I don't know. But this is a real property, right? So the first thing is get a direct booking website. Make sure that it's set up the right way. Make sure that it's synced with your availability and has the right same pricing or similar pricing to your OTAs. You'd be surprised. Sometimes I see people come on and they say, well, it's a direct booking, so I'm gonna charge more because I have more, in their minds, more risk. So I need to charge more to mitigate the risk of the booking. Interesting. Well, we can talk about that direct booking pricing in a second here, but that's the first step. Just get set up for success. And once you're set up for success, then yeah, there's a myriad of things that you can, that you can do next.

I know the top two, besides just how do I get a direct booking site? The next two questions that we get all the time are, how do I take payments now? How do I take payments from these guests? Because Airbnb just does it for me. So would Future Day help us set up payment processing?

Yeah, that's part of the, that's part of what's required, right? Perfect. So when we talk about getting a direct booking site, here's literally what I mean. You need a website that is your own, where you can control all the content of it. Number one. Number two, it's got a link of it. It's gotta have all the same, when I say same, it doesn't need to mirror, but it has to have the same depth of content that you have on your Airbnb listing. If it has less content than your Airbnb listing, I wouldn't even bother calling it a direct booking website because no one is gonna book it. The Airbnb has selected that content, uh, for, you know, literally tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of testing and billion, many billions of dollars of optimization have gone through. Making sure that's the content a guest needs to book. So if you have less content on your own direct booking website, it doesn't count, right? So you need your own website. You control as much content as your Airbnb. It's got to have linked availability. It's gotta have accurate pricing. We can talk about pricing strategies in a minute, and it's gotta have a way to take payments online. Now, can you set up a direct booking website that's inquiry only? Yes. And that may be okay with you. Your conversion rate, the percentage of people that are gonna book will typically be lower, but you could have an inquiry only direct booking website, but you do need to at least be able to take full transactions online. And the last part is this. If your direct booking website, or at least the way that you're taking these, these payments online doesn't have protection for you, then it's gonna make you res reticent to take bookings. You know, a lot of people are on Airbnb. Airbnb gives you air cover. And you know, I will say about air cover, what Airbnb says about air cover. Air cover is not insurance. Air cover is a great supplement to your own insurance and protections for your short-term rental. Those are quotes, that's what Airbnb says about air cover. So you, as a short-term rental owner or operator need your own insurance to protect your property in case of something catastrophic. But in case of regular wear and tear, I would suggest using a damage waiver. Right? Very simple. You take a small nominal fee, you add it to the guest, the guest. Feel secure because they know they're not gonna be hit with a 500 or a thousand dollars security deposit that they have to pay and hopefully get back. Right. So you gotta put that in there too. In terms of protection for stays. If you have all those five things, that is a direct booking website that's ready to go and that's actually what Future Stay gives you right outta the box. When I say that you can set Future Stay up in under six minutes, you get the website, you get all the content mapped from Airbnb, you have full control over it, there's no commissions on any bookings on Future Stay. That's also important too, if someone's taking a chunk out of your direct bookings. Is it really a direct website? I don't know. You're still paying commission. So yeah, there's no commission on anything for Future Stay. It has your payment set up to go directly to your bank account and there is protection for every booking in the form of a damage waiver and also, uh, automated guest verification.

So you answered all there. Oh yeah. You answered my second question, which was. Them host trusting guests. What about insurance? How do I know that, you know, who's staying in my property? You covered that. And then there's this ringer, this last question that I think holds everybody back, is it, it's kind of like what comes first to chicken, another egg. Because you're like, should I invest in a direct booking site when they don't even trust themselves that anybody's gonna book it? And I think you mentioned it earlier, like you're just not even, you're not even playing ball if you don't have the site set up. 'cause I feel like that people don't wanna make this next investment of the direct booking site because they're like, well, who's gonna book it? And so it's like, well, no one can book it until you have it. Right. It's like they're they're not, they're not able to.

Yeah. It feels like a chicken and the egg, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. But it, it's not. So here's, here's the way that I like to look at it. And, and again, you can, you can run these numbers yourself, right? And you can decide for yourself whether or not you should have a direct booking website. The reality is that most rental preneurs. Operate at fairly low margin businesses. That's okay because they're building wealth. Their, their assets are appreciating and they're using the bookings to pay off some of their mortgage or all their mortgage, or maybe their mortgage plus a little bit extra. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a great strategy for building wealth and building a portfolio for yourself and your family. But let's do the math for a second. If you're operating a business, let's just pretend you're at a 1% margin today with your short term rentals. Pick a number, right? You're paying anywhere between 15 and 22% in OTA commissions on every booking. Now, you may say, I'm not paying that. The guest is paying that. Well, that's true, right? The guest is technically paying it. But if I'm selling something for a hundred dollars and you guys are willing to buy it for $125, then I and someone, and you do buy it for 125 and someone else takes the 25. I just lost $25 that I could have made. Mm-hmm. Right? So in reality, I'm still have, I still have that gap between what I'm willing to sell something for and what the guest is willing to pay. And so that, that gap, if 15 to 22 or 25%, depending on whether you count, you count the processing fee that would've made my 1% margin business for that, at least that one transaction go to 20% or 25%. Why does that matter? That matters. Because when you're talking about that big of a gap in the margin between almost nothing and maybe a 25 or 30% margin, you don't have to have a hundred percent direct bookings. For this to be meaningful in terms of your profit and your bottom line for your business. That's super important. People get into this zero sum game thinking, well, if I don't have a hundred percent direct bookings, why am I going to, how do I get to 50% direct? How do I get to 20 guys? If you get 10% of your bookings direct, that's a difference between losing a few thousand dollars a year. Or a few hundred dollars a month on your short-term rental and making a few thousand dollars a year and or a few hundred dollars a month on your short-term rental. That takes your business from being in the red to being in the black in many cases just by getting five, 10, 15% direct booking. So part of this is just figuring out what are the goals, right? What is the number that I would need to bring in, in terms of direct bookings, in order to double my take home at the end of the year, my profit at the end of the year from short term rentals? And that's something that, you know, we can help people calculate. Maybe we can add this to the show notes, but we have a double up calculator and people can calculate this on their own. And for many people it's a, it's under 20% direct bookings to double your take home. So the real question is like, you know, how much is it worth to you to be able to set an attainable goal and achieve that goal? Turning your business from potentially something that really is more of just an investment or potentially a loss into a positive. And if you find the right partner for short-term rental website, or you build your own for free, right, which you can do, it takes quite a bit of work, then yeah, it's a hundred percent worth it. You don't have to set a lofty goal, set an attainable goal, and hit it, and then go from there.

I think that's where, and myself included for most things in life is we wanna go, you know, zero to 60. We wanna go from all on Airbnb to all direct booking and or like you said, 50% and it's like, wait, it really is in the slow, steady, small inch by inch tortoise in the hare type percent. Like we all have friends and family. Most of us have friends and family that stay with us. We have repeat guests that stay with us. So this is an exercise. Listeners go through your, if you have your historicals, go through your reservations and see how many of 'em do you have their phone number, you probably have a phone number of a few of them. How many do you have their email address? You know, maybe you're not as intimate as a phone number, but you probably have their email address and how many of them have stayed with you multiple times? And I think that's a way in your mind to just start to see, you already have, let's, let's talk sales terms here. You've got some really hot leads because they should be repeat, you know, you should have a lifetime value of that guest because they were coming back. So that's where it's like, let's not even start thinking about new traffic. Let's think about our past guests that have stayed with us. And I can guarantee if you've been hosting for a while, you have a repeat guest again, you have someone in the future, maybe look at your future bookings. You have that friend, that family member, um, that repeat guest that's coming. And what did they do? They booked via Airbnb and they could have just booked on your direct booking site had you had one available to them. So I think that's actually the exercise that we need to do is. Instead of just thinking about all our new guests, it's like, who are our past guests and or how could we go out into our community, our favorite coffee shop, our networking event, pass out some business cards, you know, go, kind of go old school on some things like that and think about how can I get 5% to 10% of, of those direct bookings? And I think it's like I'm getting fired up about it because we all have that network somewhere. We just have to tap into it or, and, and make the effort.

Yeah. You're, you're a hundred percent. And there's this, there's a really interesting, um, pattern here, which is that if you look at any kind of business, I don't care if it is a, you talked about a coffee shop. I don't care if it's a coffee shop, a software business, or you as a short-term rental operator, the way every business works is they spend money to promote their thing they're selling. And that's a, that's the highest value activity that they have. It's also one of the most expensive things they do. They promote to an audience. They get a customer and they make money off of that customer. Every other industry, every other thing you sell other than your short-term rental, every other kind of business takes that customer, nurtures the customer, captures their data, tries to create a repeat customer out of them, and cycles the value of that customer because it's way more expensive to get a new customer than it is to keep your existing customers happy in every industry.

Mm-hmm.

In short-term rentals, our entire industry works the opposite of that, where you pay new money for every single customer and then you, for rental preneurs, at least you ignore them and hope they will somehow find their way back to you, even though you don't have any tools to actually sell anything to them. And so the direct booking loop is really just a set of strategies and tools to stop doing that. And work like every other business on the universe, like the local coffee shop, just let the people come back.

You put it like that and it just, it, it really, and I don't know what I don't know, is it Airbnb's brilliance? I don't know what it is, where the rental preneur has lost sight of the thing that has worked for every other industry, but for some reason we're like, but not us.

And, and, we'll, Phil, we do it all the time where we're like, everyone is a small business owner. I mean, most of them have more invested, 250,000, 500,000, a million, 1.5 million invested in their small business. But when you ask what the marketing budget is, that is non-existent. And if we were to have a, you know, if we were to go to small business meetup and everyone would be chatting about their marketing and what their marketing budget is, and our marketing budget is, it is that percentage that we give to Airbnb. So I actually, I would encourage everyone take that percentage and that can be, you know, broken down into so many different places in your PNL. But the way that you just said it was brilliant is any other business we would be trying to nurture that customer, get them back, and understand that lifetime value. Um, and we're in hospitality. That's where there's really, um, a disconnect is because hospitality is all about connecting. And we're also like, you know, not reconnecting with the guest and letting them cycle, cycle through.

I, I know what every listener is thinking right now though, Phil, and I'm hoping you can shed some light 'cause you have a relationship with Airbnb. Right? But I'm not allowed to nurture an Airbnb guest if the guest came to me from Airbnb. Can I, and do I have to send them back to Airbnb to book with me again? What is your insight there? Mm.

So Airbnb was very, very clear in their new off plan OPP off platform policy, uh, that rolled out on May 10th. Um, I wanna talk a little about the structure of this because as everyone listening, or many, some of some of your listeners know, there was also an Airbnb summer update that hit, uh, I think at the beginning of last week. And, you know, just a few weeks before the, two weeks before that was the Airbnb off platform policy that actually went live that was announced a couple of weeks before. That was an intentional sequence of events. Airbnb released the new policy changes, previewed them, then wanted to get a little bit of consumer feedback and, and also guest and host feedback, let them go. It largely go unchanged into action. And then after they were in action, released the services, uh, marketplace. If you look at what the content of the services marketplace was, that release, it was largely focused on making sure that Airbnb could expand the outer ring of its ecosystem so it could take those people that captive audience of literally hundreds of millions of us as guests, right, and provide more value inside of a closed ecosystem to those guests and do it in a really smart way. You know, we talked a little bit about Airbnb and why they have such a tight grip on the short-term rental industry in the rental preneur. It's because Airbnb is amazing at doing a number of things. But one thing specifically, they understand trust. They understand how difficult it is to go on the internet and trust that you're going to go sleep in a random stranger's, you know, bed really. And you know, and the random stranger trust that you're gonna come sleep in their bed and that everything is gonna be fine the next day and everyone's gonna have a great time. Right? And so they pioneered the right ways of building that trust, which is why this new ecosystem expansion of bringing services into short-term rentals is a, is kind of a stroke of genius. I will say that obviously there's a lot of frustration because what ultimately they're saying is now we're gonna let more people into your house and those people are gonna be providing services that you don't necessarily even authorize. I am, I'm gonna knock on some wood over here. And the reason why is I'm going to, I'm gonna bet that, and this Airbnb said some things that allude to this, that at some point in time the services marketplace is going to give hosts a little bit more control back. And I think what they, what they're going to ultimately do is let hosts decide what services they are going to offer and also let hosts bring their own services to the table in a way that fits inside of the Airbnb ecosystem. So you get to fine tune what experience you want to give to your guests right now to go. So that kind of paints the picture for their whole evolving strategy. To kind of go back to the, the specific question here of what exactly can you do to stay in touch with those guests, where, where's the line drawn between you owning them and not owning them? Airbnb was really explicit in their new pol, their new OPP. What they said is that you cannot ask for contact information, any external contact information using Airbnb's owned channels. So you can't ask for it in your messaging, uh, email workflow that goes out, or your Airbnb chat workflow workflow that goes out and you can't do anything that tries to take current or future bookings off platform. They're very explicit in their language there. What they did not say was, they didn't say that you can't create a relationship with a guest and that guest can book, cannot book for you directly. They said you can't take a booking that was going to happen on platform and take it off platform. So something has to already exist to be moved. So you can't move a booking that does not exist yet. Right, right. The old language was not this explicit. This was very lawyered over. And so what they literally mean is they're not saying you can't get a future booking from a guest. They're saying you can't use Airbnb's messaging to get contact information and or move the current booking you're discussing, or any future bookings that are being discussed, right? Mm-hmm. Off of the platform. Now, once the guest stays, or if you're using communications outside of Airbnb official channels, you can ask for contact information such as, for example, they can come stay in your property. You can require the guests to, uh, give their email in order to provide a non-required, like you can't do this for entry to the property, but for a non-required service like wifi.

Mm-hmm.

So you can say, enter your email to give me, to get access to the wifi. I'm gonna capture that information. You have to, they have to, you have to get the permission to market to them, but you can then email that guest in perpetuity as long as you're not moving an existing booking off of Airbnb. So the answer to that's the policy, the actual answer is once someone is in your property, as long as you're not using Airbnb official messaging, you're, it's all fair game. They also added, I'm gonna give you guys a loophole that they added, and this is a really, really big deal. In the prior version of this, they were very unclear as to when you could actually ask, uh, someone to leave the Airbnb channels and communicate via a different medium. In the new OPP, they specifically state. If a guest requests or indicates a preference for, for having a, uh, for future communications outside of the Airbnb official channels, you can then ask for their contact information and contact them in that way. So that literally means if I book your property, Sarah, and you say to me, Phil, would you rather chat on WhatsApp? And I say, sure. You can now literally say, okay, please share your WhatsApp with me. They actually write that line as one of the few enumerated out exceptions to their policy as long as the guest expresses a preference to communicate outside of the channels. And that's actually required in EU law. Yeah. And so that's where they've done that. And so they have to respect that. Yeah.

Letting the guest opt in to how they want to communicate.

You're saying the loophole then is us teeing them up, basically saying, would you like to communicate this way?

Why not?

They don't have to. You prefer to do X? Yes. Right. I like it.

And that could be a part of your automated message after the guest books. If you would like to communicate via, we'll just use your example of WhatsApp, please feel free. I know WhatsApp is, is big. We learned, Annette and I spent some time with Phil in um, the UK and everyone in the UK is on WhatsApp and we're like, we are behind everyone. Everyone drops in WhatsApp with us. Anyway, if that is the preferred channel of communication, it could be or email or would you like us to text you and your and your group directly? You can ask these questions and prompt your guests to say yes and opt in and start that nurturing process directly with them that way.

Yep. You can start it early that way. But even if you don't do that, if you don't feel comfortable, although you can check for yourself, it's Right. Enumerated out directly in the terms of use and i've asked Airbnb about it directly to confirm also, and they've confirmed If you don't, even if you don't feel comfortable, you can still, when the guest is on premises, capture their information as long as you're not doing it in a way that prevents them from getting access to your property. You can't say, give me your phone number, or you can't check in.

Right.

That is against ob obviously against, you know, their, their platform policy. Right.

So let's go. I do wanna talk about Future Stay, Phil, because you are offering something to our listeners that they don't get offered often hard to say, which is a direct booking platform that's built for the rental preneur. And so you are saying that they could get is so is the direct booking site. Talk to us about how pretty it is because we care as hosts. We care about how beautiful the property is and making sure that it's as great of an experience as they get on Airbnb. Talk to us about the Future Stay direct booking platform that experience.

So well. We, we already talked about how easy it is to create one and how quickly you can create one and how it gives the full kind of checklist of everything you need for the guest to trust you and for you to be able to take bookings and you to trust the guests too, right. And protect you. In addition to that, it's just absolutely gorgeous, right? Obviously you can't see it right this second, but when you look at it, you'll say to yourself, Hey, you know what, this looks kind of like a fancified version of an Airbnb listing, and that's intentional. Yeah. Airbnb is the highest converting short-term rental booking site in the world. So like, you don't have to completely reinvent the wheel. Yeah. It's an experience that literally hundreds of millions of, of travelers around the world are comfortable with. They present information in a great way. So we've taken that, we've added a little bit to it, and we've also given you the ability to make it your own, but right out of the box, and this is really important for everyone to know, this isn't go build your website like you were building it on Wix or WordPress. You're going to click a couple of buttons. You're going to have a website that's automatically set up for you, and it's gonna be gorgeous right outta the box and work right outta the box. It's very, very easy to use. So it's beautiful. But more importantly than it looking good, you gotta feel good about it. Right? It's also super high converting, right? And there's another trick under the hood here. So you ask the question earlier, which is kind of like, even if I do all these things and I start this direct booking loop, and I'm put my, uh, my, the name of my property and the location and my OTA and I start capturing information and I start texting people to get, that's gonna take a little bit of time, right? I'm not gonna get to, to 10% direct bookings in the first year, am I? Well, we, we have a, a secret weapon at Future Stay, and the secret weapon is Google Vacation Rentals. And so if anyone does not know what Google Vacation Rentals is, you can see it yourself very easily. Just type into your search bar vacation rentals and just enter the name of your location and you'll see a list of vacation rentals. You'll see it, it'll look kind of like a Google search widget. Or like a Google Hotel widget, but it's actually Google Vacation Rentals. It's an interstitial widget that sits inside of search and it typically sits above things like paid ads. So you'll see it above Airbnb listings or above VRBO listings. And Google is basically doing a thing that they always do where they try to get a big list of, they try to index the world's content and display it in a way that that browsers and searchers can consume it. Right? They're doing that with vacation rentals and they're trying to list all the vacation rentals in the world. So you're saying, Phil, well, if they're trying to list all the vacation rentals, what do I need Future Stay for to list? There won't they already have me? So they do actually grab about, you know, 30 40% of listings from OTAs and put them in Google Vacation Rentals on their own. The problem is, guess where those listings go? They go right back to your OTA listing. And so you don't get any savings or any benefit from having Google List, you list your VRBO listing or your booking.com listing on Google Vacation Rentals. You're still paying the full commission. But if you're working with the Google Vacation Rentals partner, like Future Stay, we were actually their launch partner, uh, they selected us as one of two companies to launch the product, the Google Vacation Rentals product and service with you have your own website listed on Google Vacation Rentals as the official site of that property, right? And so no commission, zero commission direct bookings. Someone goes on Google, they do a search, they see your website, they see your property listed, they click on that button, it goes directly to your Future Stay powered website, and they can complete that entire booking without you paying any commission to Google or to Future Stay or anything like that. All that goes directly in your pocket. And so Google Vacation Rentals is, you know, everyone knows, they think Google is the number one place of that. Place that travel searches start over. 70% of travel searches start on Google. They may end up on Airbnb or your own website, but that's where they begin. So listing there is super, super important. That's a secret weapon That Future Stay has also to get you listed there. Uh, and usually, usually it takes about like two to three business days. Um, but once you go live there, you'll start seeing traffic to your website as well.

And I wanna pair that with this little thing that you kind of said before we dove into something else, which is Future Stay also has built into it guest verification. 'Cause that's, if it's not insurance or what happens if I don't have air cover, which we went over. That is not insurance. And it's definitely not your insurance. It's supplemental. Is guest verification. 'cause hosts feel that for some reason guests on Airbnb are this safe, easy to trust, uh, pool of leads. Talk to us how Future Stay has has solved that problem with rental preneurs thinking that.

Yeah. So just so everyone knows, you know, Future Stay is for rental preneurs, but it is a big business and we've served thousands and thousands and thousands of rental preneurs over the past decade. We've processed hundreds of millions of dollars of bookings. And when you do that, you, you see patterns start to emerge, right?

Mm-hmm.

A clo easy example. You know, you guys know this, and listeners, I hope you know, and if you don't, you're gonna learn right now. If you see a same day booking from down the street from your property, cancel that booking

No good.

That's not a booking, that's a party, okay? Right. Or a crime. It's you probably both. Right? And so all those sorts of rules that, uh, that let you know that a booking is not going to be a real booking, or that there's risks such as the name of the booker doesn't match the credit card, et cetera, anything like that throws up an alert in our system. So any booking that is not 100% kind of clean as a whistle. Gets reviewed by an actual team of people that have been reviewing bookings at Future Stay for, you know, the better part of a decade. And when those bookings look like they're suspicious at all, we do an ID verification with that guest, and the guest has to verify their ID to move forward with the booking. And guess what? We're pretty good at this. And so about 90% of the time that we send out an ID verification request, the guest, uh, canceled on their own because that was actually buying, actually not a real booking. You know, the reality here guys though, just so you know, is you know, over 99% of bookings are legit, right? These are not the people that are booking direct booking websites. Here's the crazy part, that's not where scammers go. When scammers want to book a property, they create, they get a fake ID and go to Airbnb because they're not professionals. They don't know how to find direct booking websites. It's way easier for them to try to scam a hundred hosts at the same time on booking.com or Airbnb or VRBO. They don't go to your direct booking website to book you. That's the, the funny part of all this is you're likely to see more scammers and more fraud or encounter more scammers and more fraudulent bookings on an OTA than you are directly, because it takes a little bit more work, as we all have just been talking about, to find a direct booking website. So that's where scammers start.

I know we probably have some hosts out there, myself included, like, do you consider yourself a PMS then? Like would your or, because I know some of our hosts have a PMS and they're like, well, I want a website, and they haven't used the website that their PMS has. Could they use Future Stay? I, I know that that, 'cause that's some stuff that I know listeners are probably thinking right now, or I don't really want a PMS. Is this a PMS?

Yeah, those are, those are really good questions. So let's answer them in the opposite order, right? Sure. The first is, if you're using an an existing PMS. And you either don't like the website or the booking engine, most PMSs don't really provide websites. They provide booking engines that you can plug into a website. Mm-hmm. So you kind of don't like the solutions that they have for direct bookings, or in some cases some PMSs charge a commission on your bookings if you book directly, which is, as I said earlier, not really a direct booking. So if you're falling into either of those camps or if your PMS doesn't connect to Google Vacation Rentals, so you're kind of worried you're not really gonna get any bookings in the first place, you can a hundred percent use Future Stay in addition to your PMS. Future Stay can still onboard you directly from Airbnb and then Future Stay you can sync your future, stay with your PMS, the reservation data. Some PMSs are able to pull out full reservation data from Future Stay. Some only pull the dates blocked. Um, and so depending on which pmms you're using, you may be able to have literally all the data flow directly into your PMS from Future Stay. And you can use Future Stay just for the direct booking website, the Google Vacation Rentals listing and the Airbnb optimization. Now, the onto the second part of your question, which is, you know, is Future Stay a PMS? Well, I'll tell you this, uh, so I, I'll answer that in more detail, but a lot of times we'll see people sign up for Future Stay to augment their existing PMS. And if they have one or two properties, they'll say, wait a second, Future Stay has a lot of the same features that I'm already, that are in my PMS, which I maybe was not super happy with in the first place, or maybe I was, but now I'm paying kind of twice for these. Why don't I just use Future Stay instead of my PMS? Mm-hmm. And that happens all the time. It's very, very common for people to, especially if they only have one or two or three properties to use Future Stay instead of a PMS. And the reason why is PMSs are what does PMS means, property Management System. They are solutions designed for property managers. Professional enterprise scaled businesses to ring every last ounce of operational efficiency from a large scaling business, that's what they're for, right? Yeah. They're also organizational tools. And yes, as a tertiary benefit, you can list on a bunch of channels sometimes, and so that can help you make more money. Future Stay is designed the opposite way around. Our first job is to help you make more money, right? And in doing so, when you come to Future Stay, if you don't have a PMS and you're getting set up to make more money, you have your direct booking website, you have your Airbnb optimization, one of the first things that you're gonna need is to make sure all your calendars are synced up together, and, and lo and behold, and all your pricing can be controlled in one place. Low and behold, you've already kind of solved half of what a PMS does just by getting set up, syncing your calendars, controlling your information from one place, et cetera. What now let's talk about the nuances. One of the major differences between Future Stay and a conventional PMS. Is that if you're using a PMS and you connect it to Airbnb, Airbnb blocks your ability to control all of your availability settings from within your Airbnb account. And they do that because they're assuming, Hey, you must be a big professional manager. 'cause you're using professional management software, right? And so you don't wanna log into Airbnb anymore, right? Don't you want to use this other software for everything? Future Stay doesn't do that. You're, you're allowed to use your Airbnb settings and also Future Stay at the same time. So if you're someone that's comfortable logging into Airbnb every day and you're comfortable controlling your, your Airbnb account directly from within, you can connect to Future, stay sync it with Airbnb, keep your availability sync, but manage your listing separately, your pricing separately, your content separately. Or, and, and also we don't block your availability control. So you can still log in there every day and, and control that separately. But if you say, you know what? I want a little more power here. I want to control my Airbnb from Future Stay. You can flip the switch in Future stay, it doesn't cost anything extra. And now you can sync it to Airbnb like a full PMS where all of your availability and pricing and everything is all controlled by Future Stay. It's up to you based off of how comfortable or not you are with Airbnb. That flexibility's really important for most rental preneurs, especially those that just say, look, I'm not ready for a PMS. I just want to get my feet wet and get a direct booking website set up. Only Future Stay can do that for you can keep you synced with Airbnb and not take control of your Airbnb account, at least if unless you want it to later on down down the road. So the answer is, are we a PMS? Well, not technically, no, but we are a system that helps you make more money, helps you control your calendars, helps you control your pricing, sends out messaging to guests for you, et cetera. We do a lot of the things that a PMS does. And the reality is, the secret is most rental preneurs don't really need or want a PMS. They want a system that can organize everything, help them manage and set their rates. And yes, we have built in dynamic pricing as an example. You don't pay any extra for that. We help you manage and set your rates, help you optimize your channels, and then help you just succeed. And, you know, that's more important than a lot of the operational stuff for most entrepreneurs.

I love it.

Yeah. I was not expecting those answers honestly.

I, I wasn't either.

I'm here for it.

It sounds like ultimate flexibility and however the rental entrepreneur is showing up, it sounds like Future Stay can meet them where they're at and if they're ready to pull a lever or flip on or off a switch, they can do that and it's not gonna really change their Future Stay subscription or, or anything of that nature.

You're, you're a hundred percent right and I think one of the most important things to say here is, and I gotta, I have to admit. I'm a product guy. I've been building software for my whole life and I, I think a lot about product and how to make a product that helps, that solves a big real world problem, which is why I love this industry and I love Future Stay. You know, I love changing rental preneurs' lives and setting up for success, but what's really, really important to remember here is that we have a great service team at Future Stay too. And the service is really half of what makes rental preneurs lives easier. I just talked about a lot on this, on this call, right on on this podcast. There's still a million questions that people that are listening probably have. And when someone comes to Future Stay and they are either a user or a customer of Future Stay, or they're just learning want, interested in learning more, we have an entire sales and support team. And this isn't just before the sale. If you're not gonna, you know, then you can't get any support. And then we send you to Knowledge Base. We have support that is literally five star award winning. Go look at Future stay reviews. You'll see it for yourself. I love the product, but half of our positive reviews are about how great the support team is, and we do that intentionally. It's because if you're a rental entrepreneur, this probably isn't your full-time job. You probably get home after a long day of work and you take off your hat from either you were an architect or a consultant or a doctor or an engineer or whatever you were doing right. All day long. And then you're like, your brain is fried and you're figuring out how to run your short-term rental. The last thing that we want you to do is have to like figure a new career path out.

No, go to a Knowledge Base. It's terrible.

Yeah. You said those words.

Yeah. So we, I mean, yes we have a Knowledge Base of course, but like way easier to pick up the phone and call real people at Future Stay who will actually just walk you through and tell you what's right for your business in terms of how you should be set up. Um, and so any questions that anyone has, no matter where they are along their journey, we can help with that.

Love it.

This is so, okay. So we do. Phil, we do have an offer to everyone listening that they wanna check out Future Stay. So can you explain what you're able to offer our listeners? They wanna learn more, dive in and use Future Stay for their direct booking.

Yes, definitely. So I think it's really important. We talked a lot about trust on this call for people to trust something before they have to commit, right? They have to learn to see if it, if it's right for them. We've built Future Stay around that entire principle that people should really kind of know what they're getting before, you know, being charged for anything. Um, so at Future Stay, uh, in partnership with Thanks for Visiting, we have, uh, an awesome offer here. Number one, um, you can go to future state.com/tfe, thanks for visiting and sign up and you get, uh, an additional 25% off of the annual subscription for Future Stay Amplify. That gets you, uh, the direct booking website, Google Vacations listing. The, you know, the connection to Airbnb as strong or as light as you want it, you can choose either way. It gets you our award-winning support and, uh, it gets you revenue management automatically built in. So you can look at the pricing, you can apply it, you can set your own rules around pricing. All that functionality, um, all included at kind of one monthly cost and course the direct bookings and the payment processing, et cetera. Um, I really strongly recommend trying it out. There's a 14 day free trial, so you get to try it before committing. Um, you know, a lot of times people will go get signed up and they'll just absolutely fall in love with the product. They'll show it to some friends, friends and family. They'll end up getting their own direct bookings just by showing it off to the people in their friends and family that say, oh look, my friend just got a direct booking website and before they even have their trial up, one of their friends has ended up booking or something like that, right? So I recommend getting it out there, uh, go trying it and, and seeing if it's right for you. And, uh, we have a really, really high customer satisfaction rate. So I, you know, I think it might be even more importantly, once you get set up, go sign up for the Airbnb optimization so we can start getting your Airbnb, uh, you know, so you can start, stop missing out on that 16 to 20% more bookings that people often see.

I love it. And just. Add on to the trust factor. We spent a significant amount of time with Phil. First of all, we hung out with you last year, but then this year we actually got to do kind of like a, a short-term rental group, uh, mastermind hangout, talk about all things short-term rental. So we got to know Phil on a deeper level. One of our team members learned about Future Stay when we shared with them that we met Phil and she got onboard into Future Stay within weeks of learning about it. So we're excited to offer this to our listeners who want more control, but they also love Airbnb and love. They understand it, they know how to use it, and it's just like the whole knowledge base thing of during the day they're doing one thing and they come home afterwards. They wanna run their short-term rental business, and you've made it easy for them to be able to do that. However, they're showing up, uh, to, to their short-term rental business. So, anything else you wanna share before we, we sign off?

Yeah. So one thing, and, and I correct, please correct me if I'm wrong here. I think your team member that signed up already got her first direct booking also.

Yeah. No, she's, she's, she's all in. She loves it. It was easy.

She, she's a rock star, so she knows what she's doing. Right.

Well, and um, well it's her first short-term rental too, Phil. So I think that says a lot. She wanted to get into the short term rental world. Um, and of course hanging out with Annette and me, it can get very addicting. So she did it and then she decided on, she doesn't wanna waste any time with just having Airbnb. She wants to get a good habit going with accepting and getting comfortable with direct bookings. And so she's done that with Future Stay.

Yeah, that's a really important note. So a lot of people listening probably already are listed on Airbnb and there's probably almost just as many that are not on Airbnb, and they're trying to figure out whether or not they want to dip their toe in, just like your colleague did. You can create a direct booking website yourself before listing on Airbnb. Here's a little secret. You can set that up. You can put it in inquiry only mode and just start showing it to people so you can make yourself comfortable, right? You can do that while you're on the Future Stay free trial, Future Stay.com/tfe, right? So for that additional discount for future, Future Stay amplify annual but, here's the secret. When you're ready, you can push all the content from your Future Stay direct booking website to create an Airbnb account. Mm. So you can create your Airbnb account from Future Stay. You can do this in whatever order you want. So if you're, if you're sitting around and you're kinda like waiting for your sign of like, should I really try this? I'm not ready to just open this up to the internet and let strangers stay at my property. Like, this is your sign. You can start today. Take control, keep your independence, and when you're ready, flip whatever switches you want. And if you don't even know what the switches are. Let our team tell you all the different, uh, the different permutations and options and help you find out what's right for you.

Or if you're a parent at home this summer, get a direct booking site. Have your kids charge your kids to stay there. Oh my gosh. Or your in-laws or your relatives. Just make a direct booking site for your home. Start charging, start charging folks.

I love it.

Oh my gosh. All right, Phil. We'll put the future state.com/tfe in the show notes and we want everyone to know about this option. We want them to be excited to yes, have Airbnb, a tool in your tool belt, but take control over your short-term rental business. However, that is, we're not telling you exactly how, and I like that Future Stay allows that flexibility. Yeah.

Thank you for, for this, for this option for hosts because it's something I think we're all hungry for for sure.

With that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

I'm Annette Grant, and together we are. Thanks for visiting.

Talk to you next time.