[00:00:02] Speaker A: This is short term rental management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Carl.
Today on short term rental management, Google Vacation rentals. What is it? How does it work? How do I get bookings? How do I connect it to my management software? What the heck is this? Google Vacation rentals. And how do I use it? We're going to cover that today on short term rental management.
This episode of the short term management show is brought to you by short term rental, long term wealth. This is the book in the STR space written by my lovely wife, Avery Carr. It has hundreds of reviews on Amazon and it will teach you literally everything you need to know about STR, short term rental, long term wealth, the book wherever books are sold.
So here we are, shorts from rental management. Another glorious Tuesday morning. If you're listening, you know when the show first comes out. And today we are talking about Google vacation rentals. Everybody wants to know, what is this thing? How does it work? Of course, I got my buddy Chuck Kramer here. He's head of policies, procedures, et cetera, at the short term shop and just an all around wonderful gentleman and scholar. And so, Chuck, what is it?
I can connect Google vacation rentals to my property management software and I can get bookings on Google. But what does that actually mean?
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Okay, let's start by talking about what it's not. It's not an Ota like Airbnb and Vrbo.
They do not accept bookings.
It is simply an index that will then send the potential guest to your direct booking website or your proxy.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Wait a minute, what's a proxy?
[00:02:02] Speaker B: I was just going to explain that.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Sorry.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Some of the property management software companies, in order to facilitate this and get connected, have set up something called a. I call it a proxy. They call it a global landing page, they call it a private page. Whatever it may be, it's a substitute for having a direct booking site so that when people view your property on Google vacation rentals and they click on it to book or find out more, it goes to this more global page. You do not have your own website, you do not have a domain name, but it will go to this website run by your PM's company, software company, where they can book your property. So it's more popular to have your own direct booking site. And probably in the long run it's more valuable to do it that way because then people may just come back directly to you the next time. People are creatures of habit.
But if you want to get on and get on quick or your PM's system doesn't yet support this in another way. The proxies or global landing page is a very fast way to do it.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: And that's directly through my management software.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Okay. So in other words, I'm on my management software, whether it's, I don't know, guesty for hosts, let's save, or maybe hospitable, that's a popular one.
And in my experience, there's a button on there. It just says Google vacation rentals. And you just basically, it's not, is it integrated? Is that even the right word? What am I doing?
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Yeah, it's actually, integrated is a good word. The connection is very deep and as a result Google is extremely picky about exactly how the information is sent to them from the PM's system.
And there are several go arounds. It's like trial and error.
You're going to click a button or check a box, whatever your software does in order to connect, and it's going to connect you up and it may take a week or two. Google's a big company. This is not their main focus, so they're a little slow.
Plus this is new for them. They're reworking the system that they created for hotels.
So they're constantly making changes to make it better, easier, more efficient, et cetera. There'll be some back and forth. They may come back and say your description is too long or your pricing doesn't match the way they want to present it, and you'll need to make little subtle changes. I've been on Google vacation rental since about the end of July. And other than that, back and forth to tweak setups, I havent had to change how I do business and thats important to me.
I want to do business my way.
Ive just had to make some minor changes. The other thing youve got to remember about Google is remember they dwarf everybody in this space. If they wanted to, they could probably write a check and buy Airbnb and Expedia and home to go. They could buy all these companies probably out of their petty cash or cash on hand if they wanted to. They're huge. This is one small piece and it's tied into their overall search business. When they came out with their travel site a while back, they tried to do bookings through the site, hoping they could, I guess, peel off some affiliate revenues, some kind of thing. But they eventually learned that they're going to make more money selling advertising.
If the ads are going to appear down the side or across the bottom and they've been quite successful with that. Their travel business, that is the hotel and flight business has been a good source of revenue for them, is the.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Primary target here, the single family homes. Is this geared more towards companies that are renting large amounts of properties? Is it even. I guess as a guy that only has x number of properties, I'm sitting here thinking, am I even worth Google's time? What is Google's maintain objective here? Is it to go after guys like me or is it to what is it?
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Well, Google did start out that way. Their first partner was Marriott Villas and homes I think it's called.
And then they tied in a couple of other large ones. But I think this was in the long run it was just a matter of simplicity. It's easier for them to work with a large company that has a dedicated tech staff that will work with them to get through all of these issues before they could start to open it up to smaller companies and smaller providers. Now as for why it's, you know, are you worth their time?
[00:06:39] Speaker A: No, no.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Am I worth their time? No.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: But collectively, anybody listening to this call, to this podcast, probably not worth Google's time. But I mean, in other words, Chuck, do I feel like I'm dating out of my league here or can I actually get somewhere with this thing?
[00:06:58] Speaker B: You can. And this is based on my own experience and it's like any other advertising venue for your, for your property.
We've had, I looked it up before the call here. We've now had 23 bookings on Google vacation rentals. Not a huge number, frankly. It's better than Burbo for the same time period. But it's increasing and we're starting to see more and more traffic from it. One of the second big advantages you get from being on Google vacation rentals is if someone simply goes to the Google, Google search engine, google.com and puts in two bedroom cabin weirs Valley, you got a good chance of showing up in those first few pages after all the sponsored ads, of course, because you're deeper into Google's search database now.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Wait, how did I become deep? By being on there before everybody else?
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Well, by being on Google vacation rentals.
[00:07:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I got you. Have you tried this from the guest perspective? What does it look like if I'm a guest and I'm searching on Google to try and find a house? Have you tried that?
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I have.
It could be a better experience.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: I get the impression, sorry to interrupt, that. It's supposed to be almost like booking a flight where you're pulling flights from 100 different websites at once right there on Google. Was that the original vibe of this? And is that maybe not how it's working or it's supposed to be working or what?
[00:08:23] Speaker B: That's, that's the theory behind it. You know, that's, that's the practice they want to put in place. They do that with hotels too. You know, you put it in there, you put in dates and all that and it'll show you a list. And in some cases, like with the hotels. And it'll do this with the short term rentals too. If your property is available through multiple avenues, it will show you the prices for each one. One of the things that catches people off guard when they go to Google vacation rentals is they suddenly find that their property is listed by companies that they've never heard of.
There are about a dozen of these aggregators. They're similar to Trivago, except for short term rentals.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: What's Torago?
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Trivago, it's a hotel search engine. It's a meta search engine.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: They have commercials.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Yeah, they do.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: And there are these companies out there who have agreements, usually with Vrbo, but also with home to go, where they can scrape their websites or tap into their APIs as a partner and then they can list your place for rent. Now when you go to these sites and you click on book, it actually takes you to Vrbo in the long run. But in the meantime, you're on Google vacation rental. You do a simple search. Two bedroom, weirs Valley, secluded hot tub. You get a list. You see your, you know, you see a property which is yours, you click on it and there will be your price along with maybe three other prices from these other places. VrBo and Airbnb does not allow Google to index their sites, so that's why they don't show up.
Home to go does. Whofi does, so they show up on there too.
And every time that I've checked, my direct book price is always lower. So it drives people to my direct book site.
[00:10:13] Speaker C: This episode of the short term show is brought to you by the short term show shop. 30 year fixed mortgages, tax benefits and long distance management training made easy are just a few of the perks of owning a short term rental. The short term shop can help you buy and learn how to manage your property from anywhere in the world. Just go to theshorttermshop.com and click get connected again. That's theshorttermshop.com and we are brokered by exp see you all over there.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: I have, I have a website that I have. I say it's a boostly website. Mark Simpson, his company, and he's been on the show and he's a big, big name in this business. I have one of his and we connected that to my hospitable, which is again my management software. Very simple, easy to use software. No plugging here, by the way. I don't.
Hospitable, doesn't know who I am. I guarantee they know who Avery is. But anyway, the website goes to hospitable and then from hospitable it goes to Google. That was actually a bit of a trick to make that work.
There was again, like you said, some waiting and some emails and some communication that needed to be done because I wasn't using the, as you called it a minute ago. What did you call it? The website on hospitable. The start with a p proxy. Proxy. I wasn't using the proxy website. I was using my own website via hospitable and then up to Google vacation rentals. So that's how I have mine, first of all, that's how I have mine.
My stack, if you will, got my boosly website. And then I go through my management software, which you could do your own website on wherever, WordPress or whatever if you're savvy with that stuff, which I used to be, and then you get busy. But long story long, I then connect it to my management software and then from there, the Google vacation rental on the management software is connected to my actual website. So that's how I have things done.
I guess my question to you is, when I'm getting a direct booking, how do I know if it came from Google vacation rentals? I don't think hospital tells me that's.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Up to your pm's software.
I can only speak for owner res at the moment.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Okay, owner Res, what do they do?
[00:12:22] Speaker B: But there is an identifier. Yeah, there is an identifier that passes through said this booking or this inquiry is coming from Google vacation Reynolds, although you're still going to answer it the same way you would any other direct booking. But for analysis and in terms of the source of the booking, it's going to say Google vacation rentals. Once Google passes it off to you, they're done.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: Right. Let me put that another way for the listener. When I get a direct booking, I don't look at it, I just. Okay, great. It's a different color on my dashboard. I don't really care where it came from. But I suppose I should look into that to see whether it's coming from Google or whether they're just, I don't know if they're searching for me or what. So anyway, long back to my original point, I probably is the same thing on my management software as it is on Ownorez. I've just never looked. I don't really care where it came from, to be honest. I just care if I'm booked, you know, so.
Okay, cool. So in other words, my system's probably working. I just haven't really paid that much attention, more than likely. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: I mean, you should know where your bookings are coming from.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I should.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: You know, I mean, we spend a lot of time, and you've talked about it before between Airbnb and Verbo and, you know, if you need to, you need to bump up your Vrbo at times, you know, by maybe overpricing your Airbnb for a little bit. You know, it depends on where you want to focus on getting your bookings.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: You're right, I'm going to pay more attention.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm not going to argue for one or another. That's. That's not the purpose here. That's a different podcast.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: I'm pulling it up right now. I'm looking at my most recent, um, direct booking and see if I can figure out how.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Yeah, so, you know, rough numbers. Uh, it's. Mine's almost exactly 20%. For the time period, 23 out of 116 have been from Google vacation rentals. So.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Wow. Okay. So it really is as simple as that, right? We're just basically getting a website. We're having our management software get a website for us. There's a button on the management software that will integrate with Google vacation rentals and people can find you on Google, much like booking a flight.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: And it will just go right to your management software dashboard. Usually it's going to be like a different color, different. Differentiated in some way from Verb over booking.com, comma, Airbnb, etcetera. And you would treat that like no different than any other direct booking. Give me one or two minutes on direct. Like, let's say I've never had direct booking. Like, what does that look like and how do I handle that different than an Airbnb booking?
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Well, that's going to depend on your PM's. But I mean, in short, you're going to be. You're going to need to message directly with the guest because there's no messaging system between you and theme, you know, Airbnb requires you be on their platform. VRBO requires you be on theirs. Booking now requires you be on theirs. So you need to decide email or text. We actually ask our people which they prefer, and then for us, our system is fairly automated.
It just goes out. I don't do anything different. I don't personally, I've got it all automated.
I will tell you that I breathe easier, I smile more and I relax when I get direct bookings because I'm no longer beholden to some minimum wage customer service representative that gets involved in the booking somehow and doesn't even understand their own company's rules. In this case, it's my place. It's my rules.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Actually it's just for if anybody's interested. I slightly prefer when they book on platform than off, but I don't really care. Direct booking comes in. It is nice to know that they can't ruin my life.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: But, but I do like the, just kind of the overall vibe. Like, you know, there's a system here with verbo and this is how things work with Verbo and this is how things are going to go. I kind of prefer that just a little bit. But, but yeah, I'm actually a lot.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: More structure and that's good for some people.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: Yeah, the structure, I do like that. I like that a little bit. So, and I'm actually looking at my, I currently have at least on the portion of the calendar that I can see right now, which is only until like 1 July. I've got two direct bookings and from what I can tell, neither one of them tells me where it came from. So maybe I'll, again, I'm on hospitable, I'll look deeper into that. But owner, we have confirmation. It will tell you if and when it came from Google. So that's cool. Nice to be able to keep track of that. I'm sure it's on here somewhere, but I'm not able to find it. So again, just to recap, simple as that, you don't even have to have a website.
You can have your management software. Almost all of them to my knowledge, the ones that are still relevant are doing one click, create your own proxy website and that can go directly to Google vacation rentals. Chuck, it sounds too simple. It sounds too easy to be true because I do get a lot of questions about this and everybody's like, how does this work? It's so confusing. Can you give me break it down for me in 1 minute and then tell me if it really is that simple? Or not.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: All right, remember, it's not an OTA, it's a search engine. That's where most people get confused. They think their guest is going to book through Google. Doesn't happen that way. It's just an index. After that, it's being passed off to you. It's also free. No fees for you or the guest, which is another bonus. It means they can actually spend less money. You can make more profit.
Well, I don't know what to say. I don't know how much more you say about it. Is this the future?
[00:17:49] Speaker A: Is this the future? Am I going to be living in a world where I'm looking for SEO on my Google vacation rental listings to try and raise myself up in Google searches or something like that?
[00:18:01] Speaker B: When you say that, because that can matter if you want to show up higher, which means you have to have a separate area for a description so that you can tweak it differently than you would Airbnb or VRBO. But there are lots of guests out there that like the idea of dealing with a billion dollar company. They like the structure as well as some hosts do, and they're always going to be booking through an Airbnb or VRbO or whatever. Hometogo booking.com comma, who fees.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: So before I bulldoze you and talk too much, and I asked you if this was the future or not, you briefly mentioned no. Give me your thoughts there.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: Well, no, that's exactly why. It's just another piece of the puzzle.
There are a lot of people that like that structure, and Airbnb spends a lot of time and a lot of money advertising and trying to build trust. They're trying to say, trust us, we'll take care of you. We got your back.
And that resonates with consumers. So, especially with some of the bad press that's gone around about tons of cancellations last minute by the host, et cetera, et cetera, safety, etcetera. People like knowing that they think that they've got a lifeline there by booking through Airbnb and Vrbo, as opposed to going to somebody's direct book site. You don't know them, you've never heard of them before. You're going to give your credit card information. You may not understand, you're not actually giving it to them, but it sure is going to look like it.
There's always going to be a place for the others. This is just going to be an alternative.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Got it. I just, it just spent 510 minutes setting it up. Maybe a few little tweaks if they come back and say, this wasn't what we wanted, get it up and running. And then just another way to get a booking here.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it can actually take a few weeks to go live because their response time is a little low. They don't have, like hundreds of people dedicated to this. I don't know how big the team is, but it can't be very big. I've worked with Google in other ways for a long time, and the other thing to remember about Google is they're an engineering company, a software engineering company, and that's always their first approach to something. So.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Okay, great. Well, there you go. You heard it here first. Google vacation rentals on short term rental management. If you want more info on this, join our mastermind. Please come join
[email protected]. and of course, we do have the long term rental, short term rental long term wealth Facebook group, which is the biggest short term rental Facebook group that is independently owned. And Chuck's hanging out on there quite a bit, and so am I. And we were available. Long story short, I'm available. I want to talk to you. Come hang out with us. And of course, the shop always wants to sell you a house, too. That's no secret. The shorttermshop.com.
chuck, thanks for the hang, and we'll see you soon. Don't overthink it. Exactly.
