Hospitable Updates

[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 Miles is here from Hospitable. I actually met Miles in real life in Mexico. I think that was last fall. Pockets con. We were in the coffee shop and just kind of happened. It was fate. And here we are. So Miles here with a little update on the world of vacation rental management and property management softwares. And Miles, tell us a little bit about yourself. [00:00:43] Speaker B: Sweet. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on, Luke. So, yeah, I occasionally get back to those conferences. It was great to meet you in Cancun. I'm the head of marketing here at Hospitable, so I'm the one that's picking out which conferences we go to, running our marketing website, running our ad campaigns, letting the good people know a bit more about Hospitable. Essentially, I'm from England originally, hence the accent. But I'm currently based in Toronto, Canada and have been for about six years now. [00:01:11] Speaker A: Is. Is Hospitable based out of Toronto. [00:01:14] Speaker B: Now we're fully remote, so we're all over the place in Canada. I think we have someone in Montreal, someone in Vancouver, but we have people all over the US all over Europe, Asia, Pacific as well. We've got a little bit of everything everywhere. We don't have a head office. Fully remote. This business. [00:01:30] Speaker A: Love that. That's the way to go. We've been the same way since pre covered. So we were, we were cool before COVID before COVID everybody thought we were crazy. What do you mean there's no office? And after Covid or literally the day Covet happened, everybody was like, can you tell us how to do this? And we were like, it's the exact same as having an office. You just don't have an office, you know. So anyway, tell us a little bit about Hospitable in general and let's, let's speak to the person who's clueless at the top of the show here. I don't know anything about management or I don't even own a home yet. What is a property management software and why is yours the best or whatever you want to say. [00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll get the pitch out of the way for sure. So I think when you think about property management software, the easiest level, what we want to do is bring your calendar from Airbnb, booking.com, vRBO, other, you know, listing channels into one place and we want to just make it easier for you to manage those. We don't Want you to get double bookings. We also want to make it easier to kind of manage all of those inboxes in one place. Right. There's a lot of messages coming in from guests. You've got a message cleaners as well. What we're doing is we're just centralizing all that information to allow you to manage it all from one place. That's at the basic level. You know, the easiest way to describe what a property management software does, manages all your listings, all your communications from one place. I think the pitch that we normally give for a hospitable is typically that, you know, we're one of the most powerful from an AI standpoint, so we really can automate so much of that messaging side of things for you. And we're also one of the easiest to use. We're super easy to get started with. We're very simple, clean layout and we don't overwhelm you with too many options and settings and too much functionality. The idea is that everything that you need is in there, but we don't kind of, you know, sell you on too much stuff that you don't need. Basically. So very easy to get started with two week free trial. Most people get up and running in those first two weeks and they're away and automating so much of their property management. [00:03:43] Speaker A: Let me, let me, allow me to give me a little bit of a history lesson here and please correct me if I'm wrong. It was about 2017 when all these software started coming around. Maybe 2018, you guys started your journey as smart BNB and it was really marketed more so as just easier messaging. It was a lot easier. You guys were, you were top notch when it comes to messaging guests. And then of course, we were able around that time to start getting some software integration with the OTAs, Airbnb and VRBO. And they were starting to kind of communicate a little bit with, with property management softwares and they were resisting. I don't know what the inner workings of that looked like really, other than just having conversations, but it seemed to me like the platforms were resisting, but eventually got to the point they had no choice. Then we had basically an onslaught of these things come out of the woodwork. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people doing the exact same thing as you, otherwise known as the competition kind of phase of the journey. And then we had a situation where Airbnb and VRBO kind of stopped resisting altogether. They realized, I think we don't have a choice here. And there was also a certain point in time and again, I hate to pry and forgive me if I'm misspeaking here, Airbnb went on a journey to pay anybody that had the word BNB or AIR in their name to change their name. Which happened to you guys. I don't know the paid is the right term, but there was some sort of communication there where we saw lots of companies change their name. You guys then changed your name to Hospitable, I would assume for some similar reason. And then now we are in my eyes again. I'm speaking out of, you know, just pure, you know what I know personally, my own research are thriving in a world where a lot of the competition is now dying off and being swallowed up by a bigger company and just not, you know, just disappearing in some cases. And you guys have really taken it and run with it and because of that you are surviving. And from what I see. And again, yes, I do use Hospitable, but I'm not in any way miles and I have not put together a coupon code or some sort of affiliate code that I'm going to give out at the end of the podcast. There's nothing like that here. I'm just, I do use it and I'm a fan. But in my eyes, as a guy that's knee deep in this world all the time, you guys were really. You're right now probably top three, maybe four. As far as popularity, I don't know what your revenue looks like as a company or any of that. We don't even need to talk. I don't want to know. None of our business. But I will say that on a day to day basis, dealing with overnight rental clients, which is what we do for a living at the short term shop, it's usually it comes down to either hospitable or owner res and then there's sometimes host away hostfully and guesty. I would say guesty's probably number three that we hear about around here. Now again, we are dealing with smaller owner operators in most cases. If you're an owner operator or a property manager that has 50 plus homes, 100 homes, maybe guesty is more in the conversation, maybe hostfully is more, I don't know. But where we are, these are owner operators. Maybe they're bringing on a VA to help with messaging, things like that. In my space, you guys are top dog and I would kind of use the, I would use the word sexy. I think that you have the sexiest software out there. It's so easy on the eyes. It's Simple. And that's where I'm at any of that. Fair to say anything that needs to be corrected in that history lesson. [00:07:33] Speaker B: I mean, I think it's a pretty good brief overview. I think that's great. I think you're right that, you know, we were born out of the messaging side of things. And we also, historically, yeah, just focused on that owner operator segment. Right. That is the biggest part of the market. Right. Most Airbnb hosts and the majority are individuals with one to seven properties. And I think we're one of the few that actually focused on building a product that's, you know, sexy and easy to use for those individuals. Right. And messaging was the. The first place that we started because that was like the biggest win, like the. The biggest challenge for those owner operators. And you know what they were wasting so much time on syncing time into. Now, obviously, we've kind of, you know, growing up, in a sense, growing up market, and we're offering, you know, more solutions for property managers as well. But I think because we're born out of that simple to use for the individual that actually has to use the software, person that actually pays for the software and has to use it on a daily basis. I think because we're born out of that, we have kind of simplicity at our core and we always want to make sure that we're delivering software that is kind of gives you that wow experience. And, you know, from the get go, you can see the value of it and you can easily get the value out of it and, you know, find it easy to use. So, yeah, I think excellent history lesson. I think that's just a little flavor that I wanted to add on as to the why on, you know, probably why we're cropping up so much on those owner operator conversations that you're having. [00:09:03] Speaker A: So the way I look at it is, as far as the competition is concerned, you know, the. There was too much came out of the woodwork. We got saturated in these softwares. And let me ask you this. Is it very much like, if we wake up and we go to work today, we will take market share? Because that's what it looks like to me. And that's. That's how I work things. You know, everybody says, oh, there's too many cabins in the Smokies. How are you ever going to rent one? And I'm like, dude, mine are packed all the time. And it's because I get up and I go to work every day, you know, and is it as simple as that? Get up and go to work and you will survive? [00:09:32] Speaker B: I think so. I mean, I wouldn't say that we can't do nothing, but we, you know, we put in a hard day's work and I think that there's, there's demand to be captured there. So if you put in the hard work, it's a case of how much of it can you capture. Right. So it will, to a degree, you know, grow market share its own. But we want to make sure that we're, you know, growing as much as we can and helping as many hosts as we can. [00:09:56] Speaker A: And it shows, it shows when you're on your dashboard with a software that's doing well because you guys are implementing changes that people like you do these town halls, which is extremely helpful for us. And I would assume that's where you get a lot of your ideas for things that need to be added and changed. [00:10:13] Speaker B: For sure, we're very open in terms of what we're building. So obviously the bi weekly town halls, but we're also very open in the feedback, right? So those bi weekly town halls, fully public, anyone can come on there and give us feedback. They can complain about something, they can tell us they're super happy about something. And the great thing is that because it's public and people can keep going back whenever they want. If we don't action a piece of feedback, you know, people are going to come back on every two weeks, you know, town hall after town hall, and they're going to keep saying the same thing. It's going to become pretty obvious when we're not actioning feedback. Right? So those are great for kind of keeping us honest and actually listening to customers and showing that we're actioning that feedback. So let's say every two weeks we have to build something of great value because we have to go on stage and present. Here's the, here's the new thing that we built, here's the improvement that we made based on your feedback and then again, get even more feedback on that. And we, you know, we have a public feedback board as well. Feedback.hospital.com Go and check it out. Add your feedback there. If you're using, you want to give us even more ideas and suggestions. And we also have a great community. We've got a Facebook group at the moment that we're starting to shift across to our own domain to kind of help that thrive even more and give even more people access. But that's fantastic place where we get so much, you know, contribution from the community in terms of feedback for us. But also them sharing ideas with fellow hosts as well, which is always fantastic to see. And we're really kind of growing. You know, I think we have four and a half thousand hosts in there at the moment, which is just a fraction of our customers. But it's fantastic to see other hosts sharing tips and ideas of each other, not just ways in which we can improve our product. [00:11:54] Speaker A: Are you saying that the goal is to come out with a new feature or system every two weeks, or that just happens? Or is the goal to get the software to the point where everybody's happy and we're just not there yet? Or is the goal. You're blowing my mind a little bit with this two week thing. [00:12:12] Speaker B: I mean, I don't know if the goal isn't to release something new every two weeks. We release something new every day, to be honest. And we have a Slack channel that basically, basically tells us all the updates from the engineers and what they've released today. So we can try and keep up with everything that we're releasing. It's very difficult to keep up with it. The bi weekly town hall is just a nice little yardstick for us to make sure that we are delivering value for hosts. Right? Not only do we want to grow the software and satisfy more needs of our customers, but we also want to make sure that we are correcting anything and improving what we've already released. We don't want to just release brand new features all the time. We also want to make sure that what we have already released is still satisfying everyone's needs because there could be software that were released two years ago that doesn't do quite exactly what it needs to do today because of maybe a policy change or something like that. So we're always making sure that we're, you know, keeping up with the latest improvements in the industry, but also going back and making sure that we're keeping all of our customers happy. And so like I say, the, the bi weekly town hall is just kind of a good. Well, we really do have to make. We deliver value every two weeks. We're delivering it every day, I think, anyway. But the, the two week thing just kind of keeps us honest, I think, and honest to our audience. [00:13:34] Speaker A: So let's wrap up the first section of the show, which I want to leave that for the new folks that have no idea what they're talking about. If you're, if you're looking for something easy and sexy to help manage your property there again, there are several options out there, but Hospitable is definitely Cream of the crop. Top, top notch, definitely. I would say top three worth looking at. It's very easy. And to me, your only downside was prior to your metrics page, that was, that was a downfall for you guys. I was, it was hard for me, harder for me to defend you back in those days. That's been what, two years now, I think since you added. At least a year since you added the metrics, which makes it very easy to figure out now how much we're making. So I see, I see very, literally no chinks in your armor. I think it's a fantastic option. And again, I use it myself. If that's a testimonial for anybody, I'm not getting paid in any way to say that we're not going to get to the end of this program. And say, by the way, if you use this code to sign up, you'll get 20% off and then you're going to find out that Hospitable is actually paying me. That's not happening here, folks. Okay, so anything else we need to say to the noobs or the fresh folks before we move into possible current users? [00:14:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think so. Other than, you know, we're not giving out a promo code on this call, but there is a 14 day free trial for everyone. [00:14:54] Speaker A: So if you have one you want to give out for, just for you, no problem. [00:14:57] Speaker B: No, no, no. It's not good. But there is, there's always a 14 day free trial of our software. So I encourage you, if you're looking around and you may be, you know, someone might be making you sign up before you can actually see the product for Hospitable, you can go out and test out yourself, connect your Airbnb account, see what automated messages will look like for you, see how the calendar and check out some of our other features that I'm sure we'll get onto in a second or two. But I just encourage you to, yeah, 14 day free trial is available for everyone. Please go take a look on our website. You can even book a demo call with our team. If you're unsure on something, if you're not sure how something works, let us know. And we're always quite open and honest on what we do do well and what we might not do for you as well. If there's a specific requirement you're looking for in a software. [00:15:44] Speaker A: Are you a real estate agent that wants to work in a fun family environment? Then join us at the short term shop. If you are interested in moving to the beach to sell houses. We can help. Theshortermshop.com careers we are hiring in the best vacation markets in America. If you are a rockstar agent or want to become one, Please contact us theshortermshop.com Careers love it. All right, let's move on to the folks that are either happy with the software they have or are using Hospitable and talk about updates and things. So the thing I'm hearing about right now is the dynamic pricing. I'm getting a ton of questions about that. Should I look into it? Should I just stick with Price Labs or I'm brand new, should I even bother with Price Labs? So answer those questions for the masses here, if you don't mind. Explain to us how your dynamic pricing is working. [00:16:46] Speaker B: For sure. Yeah. So embedded dynamic pricing at time of recording, it was launched last week. So it's a brand new feature totally built into Hospitable and the calendar. So it just means that it's one place to go again to manage everything with your calendar. You don't have to go across to a third party tool to manage your pricing and then come back into Hospitable to kind of push that out to Airbnb. It's totally included in our host, pro and mobile plans, so everyone can get access to this. For those people that are currently not using a third party integration for dynamic pricing, I think that we should call out that like the first month for this solution. Really what we've built as like the, the mvp, the, the thing we just launched is really for them, like that was our kind of key target market for this. 37% of our user base currently don't use any dynamic pricing or they're using Airbnb smart pricing, which is obviously, I think you probably agree, look, not the best solution most of the time. And so what we built that for was basically them. So the dynamic pricing feature is really kind of a simple tool for you to kind of get your feet wet. And dynamic pricing actually have dynamic pricing switched on. There's no additional subscription the fee like you would have with an external provider. And it's super simple, easy to use, set your min max prices, you can adjust your base price and you can see a 24 month preview of what it's going to do to your prices. So that's kind of first month. That's what we've launched just now, May 2025. Over the next two months you're going to see the functionality built out more and more. And in the next two months you're going to really see as, as a competitor to some of those third party options, just to name a few. Obviously Price Labs Beyond Wheelhouse are the kind of ones often we see coming up. Other providers are available, but we are looking to build it out as a solution that actually can be competitors to those. And again, just makes Hospitable a hub for more things and means you don't have to have these additional subscriptions and you don't have to have this additional complexity of more things connected and potentially more things to go wrong. Right. And if you're not sure why something set on your calendar at $450 a night when it should be $400 a night and you don't have to go across multiple channels to figure out where that's coming from, you'll be able to see in one place that look, it's hospitable, that sets my prices and I can tweak that very easily from my hospital calendar. I don't have to jump into Price Labs or another provider in order to do that. [00:19:20] Speaker A: So the thing that I like about what I'm hearing is that you're not trying to pretend Price Labs are Wheelhouse or beyond don't exist. You're saying that they do exist. Feel free to use them if you would like. But here's this other option over here. Or maybe if you're just trying to get your feet wet and you want to give this a try, we have it in house for sure. [00:19:42] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So we have six integrations with different dynamic pricing providers. We're in no way going to stop supporting those. We're going to continue to give them all the API updates and access that they need for those to successfully run, just like we do with any other integration provider. And we just encouraging people to kind of come and take a look. You can go and preview what our prices would be if you use our dynamic pricing tool, compare them side by side. You know, if you're happy with how it performs versus, you know, your Price Labs, your Beyond or whatever subscription, then consider making the switch and saving yourself that separate subscription. Right. Like I said, it's totally included, so no additional fee to you. Just adding more value to your existing. [00:20:23] Speaker A: Hospitable subscription without doing some sort of screen share demo, which we won't do today. How sophisticated is it? Can I set up Seasons? Can I set up, you know, more than one, Is there a base rate, all that kind of stuff? [00:20:37] Speaker B: Yeah, so some of that sophistication is coming in the next two months. We really Kind of launched on the most basic setting of taking historical data. So five years of historical calendar data, you know, information on your property, some seasonality built in, some local events built in, you know, local area, area demand. The idea to start with is you set minimum maximum rates, you can adjust the base rate if you want to do and basically you tell us do you do the recommended, you want to do aggressive or conservative and that's it. To start we are adding in more seasonality control, length of status counts and that kind of thing. But those are coming in kind of the next two months and like I say, we want to do it as like a really simple solution to start with something that is more for those that probably haven't used dynamic pricing before or maybe they are using dynamic pricing but they're a bit overwhelmed when they go into that dashboard of their current provider. Something that, you know, you don't need the Ferrari, basically you can get by with the Toyota stealing that quote from John Ann because if you can't drive a Ferrari, what's the point in having a Ferrari if you can't, you know, keep it on the track and you going to be better in the Toyota? So that's the idea of the starting launch is simple but anyone can use it. [00:21:59] Speaker A: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, who's Joanne and what was the quote? [00:22:02] Speaker B: John Anne. Sorry. From tech tape Revenue manager. So basically he said there's no sense in having a Ferrari if you can't keep the Ferrari on the track. If you can't drive it, you'll be quicker in a Toyota. Right? Simpler controls, easier to use, you'll get to your destination quicker. [00:22:17] Speaker A: Because my quote, that this is the Luke Carl quote, is, has always been that Price Labs is the race car and you are the driver and if you don't know how to drive, you're going to crash it into the wall. I've been saying that for years. So I'm, I'm, I don't know this gentleman. You're fair enough, lady. [00:22:33] Speaker B: It's a man. [00:22:34] Speaker A: Maybe he sold it. I'm going to, I'm going to take credit for it and pretend he stole it from me, even though he, I'm sure he has no idea who I am either. But I do agree 100%, you know, if you don't know how to drive that car, it's not going to go well. [00:22:46] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [00:22:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, cool. Would I have, is there a world where I have any need for both Price Labs and dynamic pricing on, on Hospitable? I would Assum. [00:22:58] Speaker B: No, no. So, you know, we'd encourage, if anyone's, you know, coming to try out hospital dynamic pricing, you, you can, sorry, take a look at preview whilst, you know, Price Labs or another provider is still switched on. But if you do decide to switch on our pricing, then you'd switch off the other one. What you could do if you really, you know, want to just wet your feet with just one property and if you have multiple properties, you can actually switch hours on for just one property and, you know, switch it off on Price Labs for that one property, for example. But otherwise, you know, you're going to get kind of a clash of dynamic pricing software. You have both running on both properties. [00:23:33] Speaker A: You mentioned five years historical data. I'm sure that this is not a problem. But if, if I'm new and I'm like, well, my property's brand new, I don't have any five years, you know, that doesn't matter, I would assume. [00:23:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that doesn't matter. So we're just going to more heavily weight things towards kind of local demand and kind of typical seasonality fact factors. Right. If we do have historical data, it's, you know, better because obviously we can see how, you know, your property has performed in the past. But if not, the algorithm just weights itself to some of those other factors. So we can still calculate it. It's just going to be calculated in a slightly different way. [00:24:08] Speaker A: Is it fair to say that your dynamic pricing is simple for sure? [00:24:14] Speaker B: I think everything that we build is simple, but in the terms of it's simple and easy to use. It's not simple as in it's not sophisticated, the back end, but it just that anyone can go in and use it. [00:24:28] Speaker A: I see. And it will get a little bit more sophisticated as time goes by, for sure. [00:24:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Watch this space. Next two months. [00:24:35] Speaker A: Right. Key takeaway here is that it's not an additional price, which is, I think that's going to draw. Draw a lot of folks. And really, again, Miles, I hate to put it this way, maybe I don't, but this is a funnel to get people to Hospitable. Oh, you want dynamic pressing? We have it already over here. It's no additional charge. Use Hospitable and give it a try. [00:24:55] Speaker B: For sure. And I think so. You know, we want to get more customers because of it. It's also to kind of resolve some of those issues with existing customers asking us questions about pricing. So if someone comes into support and says, my pricing's not right on Verbo or Airbnb, or wherever. The amount of things that we have to check because they've. They've got price labs or will has switched on and then we have to check that they've got the settings correctly and hospice ball, we've got to check their Airbnb account. And the idea is that we're just making it more simple that we're in control of that full pricing process because we're the ones pushing pricing to their calendar on Airbnb, etc. This makes it easier because we're in full control if there was an issue. Hopefully there never is with ours, but we can very quickly resolve that issue for a host rather than having to kind of ping a third party provider or ping the channel that they're listed on as well. It just simplifies it. [00:25:49] Speaker A: I love everything I'm hearing here, Miles. I love everything. Even if you decide that you want to use the, you know, the fancy race car version of pricing software, which I've been using for so long, it's probably going to be difficult for me to. To transition. I think I'm happy where I'm at. I still love what I'm hearing. I think it's wonderful that you guys are. That you care. You're coming out with things that people are asking for and that's why you're a leader. That's why you're a leader. So to wrap up the dynamic pricing, because I'm getting that question a lot, it's no additional charge. It's very simple right now. It will remain simple, but more robust as time goes by. [00:26:30] Speaker B: Correct. [00:26:30] Speaker A: Cool. Anything else on that as we move on to. We're good. [00:26:36] Speaker B: That's perfect. [00:26:37] Speaker A: Wonderful. All right, what else? We've got some new AI, you know, stuff coming out. Talk about that, if you don't mind. [00:26:44] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So some listeners might already be using the AI Knowledge Hub, some might not be. So our Knowledge Hub is basically a way to train our AI on your property. Right. So we have a couple of different functionalities with AI, essentially allowing you to click a button and draft messages for you, or you can draft a message and you can click AI to kind of improve it. Right. If you are not super happy with a guest and you want to quickly fire off an answer to their question, you might be a little bit snappy in your response, but if you click Improve AI, it basically just needs help for it. You kind of makes it a bit friendlier and kind of addresses the guest in a nicer manner. [00:27:24] Speaker A: Do I need that? I find that there's Two types of hosts. There's the hosts that are really good at pricing and they stink at guest communication. And then there's the guests that are really the host that are really good at guest communication. They stink at pricing. I'm definitely leaning towards the pricing category of those two. Also, the fact that I've been doing this for so long, it's, it's, you know, it's, it gets to the point where it's like, oh God, that happened 16 times last month. You know, you get, yeah, you've never seen anything. It's nothing's new anymore. So I do like that it can polish up my message because there are times there, if you're the type of host that I am, that's, you know, again, I'm a pricing wizard. But man, I'm not always super good at being, you know, ass kissy. So if I could push a button and have it polish up my ass kissing a little bit, that's, that's great. I love that. [00:28:16] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. And, and the thing that we're doing as well. So like I said, kind of the Knowledge Hub is kind of a newer feature and that's basically making that pusher button a bit more educated on you and your property. Right? And how you would answer things. So you can upload a PDF of kind of your guidebook and some more information on your property. You can input how you would respond to certain questions. So if you've got those questions that come up all the time about how to connect to the Wi Fi, how to get the hot tub to work, etc. Etc. You can basically load that information into hospitable. And our AI is going to use that to answer guests. Right. So it just means that it's making sure that it knows about you and your property and your specifics. So the answer is always going to be 100 accurate. It's not just trying to figure out what is probably the best answer. It knows the best answer because it's going to pull from your source material. [00:29:08] Speaker A: Are you saying that I can upload my existing third party guidebook and it will pull the information from that? [00:29:17] Speaker B: So it depends on who you're using. So currently, if you're using touchday, you can click a button, connect your touchday account and it'll just pull in the guidebook from your account. If you're using another provider, what you're going to need to do is essentially kind of do a printout. So save as a PDF, essentially that document and then upload it. We are expanding kind of who we connect with and different sources. But currently you just have to kind of export what's in your existing guidebook into a PDF and upload it there. Yeah. [00:29:48] Speaker A: Guest asks I have my hospital or my. I have my Touch day integrated or uploaded, whatever you want to say. Is it integrated or is it uploaded? [00:29:57] Speaker B: Well, it's integrated. [00:29:59] Speaker A: Okay, I'm integrated with Touch Day. Somebody asked the wifi question. Is hospitable sending them the section of my Touch day that mentions WI fi or are they just pulling that information and sending them copy? [00:30:14] Speaker B: Sending them copy. So it's putting it into a conversational manner. So it's answering it as if you're answering it. Right. So we don't want to just go look here at the guidebook that I've already sent you. Right. And pinging them back to the guidebook that they should have already looked at instead bring it into the conversation in a natural manner. So sure. Here's the WI fi password. If you have any issues connecting, let me know. That kind of thing. A bit more conversational rather than just being clearly a automated response. [00:30:42] Speaker A: Well, I will say that, Miles, sometimes it comes in handy for the type of host that my company, the way we host, to simply shoot them. And I'm not. Maybe WI fi is not the perfect example. Shoot them that sec that page from the Touch day and be a bit passive aggressive and say, hey, hey dummy, we already gave you this information because like if they get, in other words, if they're getting grumpy with you about something like how dare you not tell me that the shower curtain was, you know, white. Well, here's the section from my guidebook that tells you what color our shower curtains are. I'm so sorry that that was not what you were expecting. You know, an expectation type of. I do like to do that. Look, like I said, a little passive aggressive occasionally and put it on them. You know, hey, not my fault you're a dumbass. Like you said, you should have read this. But also the ultra customer service oriented host is more likely to prefer the way you guys are doing it right now with just sending the copy and giving them the warm fuzzies. That's probably the better way to do it. Maybe there'll be a way to do either one someday where we can can choose whether we send the hospitable link and say nana Nana or whatever. We already sent this to you. I keep saying hospitable. I meant Touch Day. You get the point. But what a, what a, what a exciting world. We're Living in here at miles. [00:32:05] Speaker B: I know, I know, it's crazy, right? [00:32:08] Speaker A: It is rather crazy as a guy that again, I've been in this space a long time and in rental real estate in general, I'm not just this, you know, over this Airbnb type. I love Airbnb, don't get me wrong. But I have hosted, you know, I've got apartments and, and I love a good long term rental. And this space is so exciting. There's none of this exciting stuff happening in long term rentals. It's boring, you know, so. And when I first started, you could not connect Airbnb and VRBO together. You couldn't even connect the calendars together. It was a nightmare. And then eventually, I think it was, what, 2016, they came out with their icals and all of a sudden you had a way to like keep track of bookings and nobody knew what the hell an ical was, you know, at least I didn't and I was pretty young at the time, you know. So anyway, very exciting stuff, man. I love it. What else? So we got the AI. Anything else on AI? [00:33:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean there's, there's tons. I'm not going to go through them all because we're constantly releasing stuff. I think one exciting thing though is our copilot feature. So that is essentially, I like to call it, I mean the, the, the developer building, it might disagree with me, but I like to call it essentially chat. GPT built it into your hospitable account. So you can go to the copilot, you can ask it a question about anything related to your hospital account. So any information that we've got in there from any old listings, what your booking calendar looks like, if a mess, if a guest has checked in yet, anything like that, and it'll give you a response. So it saves you having to dig into your metrics report or dig into your calendar to see how many bookings I've got next month and that kind of thing and just instantly see that information. So it's just going to make it so much easier to kind of, you know, again, manage your properties, save you time and get to answers quicker rather than having to find, you know, where in the menu is such and such setting, where in the menu do I see how many nights I've got booked over the next month for the X property. Ask it any question about your account and it'll find you the answer for you and it'll tell you where it's from, from. And I'm just going to say you know that the next iteration of that is that, you know, for now, it's basically just giving you that information. What we want to do in the future is actually be able to action steps that you give it and instructions that you give it. So if you want to say, oh, there's a hurricane incoming, we need to kind of cancel reservations and let the guests know. We'll automatically message guests that information. We'll block out the calendar so no one else can squeeze in a booking. And we'll let the cleaners know that the check in and check out dates and cleanings have been impacted because of this change in the calendar as well. And that's all going to be done automatically for you. So you don't have to go in and manually do any of those things. [00:34:50] Speaker A: Yes, it's on the bottom left of your dashboard. Is it fair to say this is something along the lines of what? I'm going to sound old right now? Like, Siri is supposed to be like, I'm asking this thing questions and it will give me the answer for sure. [00:35:06] Speaker B: I mean, I probably sounded old when I said it was chat GPT building. Again, someone smarter than me would probably tell me off. But that is the idea that, you know, you can surface any information and it's just one simple interface to find out that information. [00:35:18] Speaker A: This is very useful for people bringing somebody, bringing on a new, you know, assistant or front desk manager or office manager or VA or whatever the hell you want to call it. But this would come in handy. How many people sleep at this home? I could just ask right there instead of having to go look for it to show. [00:35:40] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the idea. [00:35:43] Speaker A: Very nice, Very nice. All right. Any more updates, Copilot? That's pretty cool. [00:35:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, there's a ton. I think we talked earlier about kind of that improve with AI button and the ability to draft messages for you with AI and knowledge base. [00:36:00] Speaker A: Yeah, sorry, I'm cutting you off. My wife hates when I do that, but you know how that goes. There's a little. Hold on, I'm cutting you off. There's a little red button in my inbox that says right now. I'm looking at it right now. Kitchen sink issue. Explain that to me. Explain that. What is that? [00:36:15] Speaker B: Calling stuff out for me? Yeah, you should stand here and do the pitch link. So, so, so this is our sentiment analysis. So what it's doing is basically it's analyzing conversations and checking if there's any issues for you. So obviously, as you can see in your account, it's raising a red flag to kitchen sink issue, whatever's going on there. And the whole point is that we're trying to get you to address issues before they become like a big issue. Right. It's flagging that this message that we've just seen come in could be super important that you might need to get a maintenance person out to check on this. You need to kind of, you know, guest relations act on this now and essentially there's an issue to resolve. So again here we're just trying to make it easy to kind of alert you to some of the important messages. We're automating as much as we can, but some stuff is obviously needs human intervention. And what we're trying to do is kind of alert you to those most clearly and make sure that you can see those and action those. So awesome that you have an example. But hopefully you get that kitchen sink sorted too. [00:37:18] Speaker A: I already did actually. Thank you. And when I first noticed it, what are these things called? [00:37:23] Speaker B: We call it sentiment analysis. And so they're alerts basically, inbox alerts, alerts. [00:37:28] Speaker A: When I first noticed these alerts, I just, you know, these are especially helpful for folks with a lot of properties. But I was very annoyed. I was like, what is this AI crap? Because you gotta understand, as a landlord, my whole life is filled with things that are breaking all the time. It's constant. I got termites over here, I got a parking lot falling apart, I got a refrigerator broken over here, I got a toilet needs to be replaced. And it's just constant, constant. I mean it's like the, the day to day Trello board is, it's, it's a lot. And now all of a sudden my man, my property management software on my, my overnight rentals is giving me red alerts saying hey dumbass, come over here and do your job. You know, And I, when I first saw those, I was so annoyed that it was, I was almost like, how dare you, how dare you bring this to my attention? Like I, I didn't know how to do my job. But now that, especially since I hear you explain, is extremely helpful. You can just fly like let's say it's a weekend or maybe you're on vacation or maybe it's Friday afternoon and you're getting ready to not work over the weekend. We can go to our inbox, fly through, look for these alerts, make sure they've been addressed and then hopefully maybe the automated, everything else is taking care of the non alert stuff and we can move about our day. So I'M a fan. Now that I've heard you explain how, how they work. Which. Yes, the kitchen sink which was the guest's fault that clogged up the garbage disposal was taken care of by a, excuse me, a quarter inch Allen wrench being rotated left and right underneath the disposal as you are to supposed the dispose all as you will and fixed it. And by the way, I did also find. I went over there and did that myself. By the way, Miles, I've got hundreds of properties not afraid to turn around. Let's go. Well then there was also a fake fingernail in the disposal on the top of the disposal. I had to pull that out. That was kind of gross. So I don't think that was the reason why I had the red kitchen sink alert on hospitable. But isn't that amazing that I now have this AI that can send me a notification that there's a fake fingernail in the sink at one of my rentals. What kind of world are we living in? [00:39:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. Yeah, you've given a prime example there of the use case for this and I love that it's been so effective for you, even if it made you a little angry at the start. More red flashing things. I know not what anyone. [00:40:15] Speaker A: I was really just trying to be funny. Okay, well, let's talk about the future of property management software and also where we are as far as bookings are. Are you seeing a world where with the sophistication of all these softwares, I, I got to be careful what I, what I say. I don't want the PMS's to be listening or the, the OTAs to be listening and remove me in the middle of the night. But are you seeing more power going back to the people at some point? Are we not there yet? Are we. Maybe we'll never be there. I don't know. [00:40:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's tough. They're the OTAs and the channels have such a, a stronghold on industry. Right. You can't get away from the fact that they have a pretty big audience there. We are seeing direct booking grow more and more though, for sure. More hosts taking that on and rising to the challenge of trying to move more of their bookings there. And I think that's a positive change. I think we're speaking to journalists asking us about the direct booking movement and what it means and why it's good for travelers and hosts. And obviously the idea is that, you know, more and more trust signals are being built in. There's more verification checks to, to make direct feel more safer and trusted for travelers. And I think hosts and travelers are seeing that. It's a way to avoid commission. Right. It's a way to save a little bit of money. Both the host and the traveler can actually save on that. So I think we are seeing a bit of a shift there. I'm not going to say that we're going to completely see a complete shift across and the majority of bookings are going to start coming through direct anytime soon. But we are seeing hosts take a lot more control over their booking calendar and pushing more and more to their own direct booking website versus relying purely on one booking channel, as many have had to do in the past. [00:42:16] Speaker A: We love you, Airbnb. Right? We love you. [00:42:20] Speaker B: We do. [00:42:21] Speaker A: Of course, we love you. What about the future management softwares? Are you tuned into that? Are some of them dropping off the planet? Where, where are we going there? [00:42:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I, I won't speak specifics on, on who's dropping off and, and that kind of thing, but I think there is obviously, you know, consolidation in the market for sure. Right. And there, there are some dropping off because, you know, just not offering all of the solutions that hosts are kind of needing. Something that we're trying to do is essentially, you know, try and be a short term rental super app. That's what we're building towards, being a kind of a consolidated place for all of your needs. So, you know, dynamic pricing is one of those upselling ability, direct booking website, more and more being built into the software as one place to go for everything. You know, I think that more and more property management software are going to move towards that and potentially it's not going to be all these small ones that can keep up with all the development. As we talked about at the start, we're releasing more and more stuff every week to be able to kind of become a short term rental super app. Ultimately, some of those small players might not be able to keep up with that. So we'll see, you know, how that plays out. But I think there will be more consolidation for sure and only, you know, a few remaining top competitors within the next couple of years. [00:43:43] Speaker A: I agree. All right. Did we miss anything? [00:43:47] Speaker B: Oh, I mean, there's so much to talk about all the time, but I think those are the good cliff notes for the audience for today. [00:43:52] Speaker A: Luke, I think we put together a fantastic program and Miles, I would love to have you a reap a regular guest, you know, maybe if it's even once a year to Come in and talk about updates, things like that. You're a very, you're a ray of sunshine. And I, I appreciate you. And, and I love, I love your product also. I do. I love your product. I have no complaints at all. So glad to hear. [00:44:19] Speaker B: And if there is any complaints, DM me offline athletes. [00:44:22] Speaker A: Oh, I would not do that. I wouldn't do that. [00:44:23] Speaker B: But joking. [00:44:24] Speaker A: No, I don't have any. I really don't. It was the, it was the, the metrics. When you got, when you came out with the metrics. And it wasn't even just the metrics. That was the thing for me. It was the fact that you were doing stuff. Let's do some stuff around here. Let's do our jobs. I think there's just too many people living in this early post Covid era that we're trying to find a way to strike it rich and never work again. And I'm not seeing that from you guys. I think you're waking up every day and putting in an effort and that is important to me. So thank you. [00:44:58] Speaker B: Awesome. [00:44:59] Speaker A: All right, well, hospitable do is. I don't even know is it.com? [00:45:03] Speaker B: It is. It's hospitable dot com. You're right. [00:45:07] Speaker A: Hospital. I've been using it every 20 minutes for years. And I just bookmarked at this point, hey, just. I just put H OSP and it pops up, you know. So anyway, thank you for your time. We, we appreciate you. And that's it for us at short term rental management. Don't overthink it. It.