13. Use guest data to improve direct bookings

In this episode of Fully Booked STR, Steve Haase and Petar Ojdrovic explain how short-term rental property managers can use guest data to drive more direct bookings and repeat stays. They cover how past guest history, booking patterns, stay timing, and guest preferences can reveal revenue opportunities that generic marketing misses. If your guest database is mostly sitting unused, this episode will help you start turning that trust into better follow-up, stronger campaigns, and more measurable bookings.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Good morning, everyone, and happy Friday. Hope everyone's doing uh really well today. I'm joined by my co-founder Steve Hossey here on the uh the really, really cool episode that we have today around how to use guest data to grow direct bookings and how to collect guest data, how to activate guest data, and how to leverage that guest data to grow your calendar, to increase occupancy, uh, to increase revenue per night. All of these really cool things that make a huge difference if you're a hospitality operator. If you're a short-term operator, if you're a boutique hotel, it doesn't matter. Guest data equals more revenue period. So let's talk about that, Steve.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Yeah, sounds good. Nice to be here as always. Uh, we're we're changing the angle of the show a little bit to focus on being fully booked. Yeah. Because that's really what everyone is after is having the full value of their properties, the full value of their assets realized. And so uh we're gonna help you do that. Data is at the core of being fully booked because you're either uh running on data or you're running on hope. So you can you can run your business on hope, but it's not gonna get you too far. Um honestly, when you look at sort of search engine optimization, Airbnb optimization, all of these things, that does kind of fall in the hope category because you're putting the growth of your company in somebody else's hands, whether it's Google for search, Airbnb for discovery, when you focus on guest data, you are bringing control into your company rather than putting it out. So um between the two of us, Peter, who would you say is the uh more conversant in guest data? Where where are we on the scale of data expertise?

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Honestly, I think that's a really tough question to answer because you were at Shopify for a while and you got to see those like Black Friday charts where you have like millions of transactions and events just popping up all over the chart. And I think Shopify is uh is one of those platforms that that just understood the data problem really, really, really well and built around the data problem really well to make it easier for people to sell and easier for people to sell effectively. But on the other hand, I'm a complete nerd. So I live in databases and tables. So maybe I haven't seen as much of like an impact like global scale as you have. Uh so I think it's like a like a tie, honestly. Like I think uh it's more of a complimentary thing than uh yin and yang. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

You're living in the data, and I'm seeing it activated around the world, and you know, together we uh form Voltron or something, something like that.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Or yeah, I like that one. Um, I want to talk about actually your time at Shopify because I think this ties in really well to hospitality. E-commerce is a world that runs on data, uh, vendors, advertisers, like having that customer data around how people are interacting with the product, what they're clicking on, why they're clicking, how much time they're spending on certain pages. Like, can you imagine an e-commerce world or a Shopify world without that? Like, if you're just kind of putting a storefront up there and like having no real visibility into how your customers are interacting with it.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Yeah, it's called 2001.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Okay, that's harsh.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

Like the early days of the internet, you're like, I don't know what's happening. I someone came to my Google told me there's someone on my site.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

And then I see an order come in. Okay. That's that's kind of the extent of it. But yeah, over the years, people realized if I know exactly where someone is clicking, not just on a single page, but their entire journey is extremely valuable. And then if I know more about who that person is, now we're getting into the world of what Meta has created and why they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Because trillions are they in the trillions?

SPEAKER_00 3:52

No, they're there's a I think they I think they might be. I think I know they're like number three or number four on the Fang chart.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Yeah. So anyway, yeah, their evaluation is huge because they have all the data on all of us, let's be honest. Um, so why we as short-term rental operators and technologists would not want that same level of sophistication is beyond me. That doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

So I guess what we're what you're saying here, and I know this is this is going to be a tough pill to swallow for a lot of folks, the data picture and the data uh pipelines that exist in short-term rental and in hospitality are like at a 2001 level, essentially. You're you're you're informed when somebody makes a booking. You have some visibility into what occupancy rates are and and what your RevPAR and ADR and these things are, but like it really seems to me uh that that that for the most part, like the data picture is very incomplete. And all of like the useful customer data is hoarded by OTAs and marketplaces that are never going to share that with you. So like Airbnb has a lot of good data, like booking.com has a lot of a lot of good data, Google Flights has a lot of good data, but they're never gonna share that data with you. So as operators, you're kind of stuck for the most part in this 2001 space where your data picture is very incomplete. Uh, we see a lot of folks that run websites on hosted PMS pages that have no analytics and no tracking and no cookies and no pixels and nothing like that. And that tends to make the ability to market to people that interact with your brand and people that interact with your with your um with your properties very difficult. Not only because you don't know who they are, but also you don't know what they want, like what they're looking for, why they booked, what their uh preferences are, like all of these things that you know many other verticals have figured out how to integrate into their marketing and go to market stack here, uh until you know we put our nerd brains to the task of solving that problem. Um, like a lot of these things didn't really exist.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

Yeah, and it goes way beyond just the website. If you think about the direct booking process, the website is part of it, but you have to do something to get someone to that website. Yeah, and once they're engaging with your website, you have to do something to close that deal. Maybe someone's looking at a property, are you doing something to follow up on that interest? If someone has sent an inquiry because they're you know just poking around, how do you make sure that doesn't fall through the cracks? Yeah, and so we're talking about guest data, but it's really the system from identifying the person, engaging them in the right way, yeah, and helping them complete that transaction. Yeah. And so where do most people miss in that flow?

SPEAKER_00 6:50

The place where most people miss is in treating all of these data points as silos, as events that are not connected to one another. And that's that I think is a very large, it's a big mistake because all of these events fundamentally are connected to one another. Somebody attempting to make a booking and opening an inquiry and messaging around what their wants and needs are, and then pausing for three days before actually making a booking until an automation uh that we run sends them a message. Like these are not independent events, like somebody randomly showed up on a website, somebody randomly clicked inquire, somebody randomly decided to book three days later. Like these are all very connected events that that are underpinned by them being a persona, them having um you know specific wants and needs as to why they're traveling, why they want to book, why they want to stay with you, et cetera. Um the the biggest mistake that people make is is is I wouldn't even say it's a mistake, honestly, because the tooling just didn't exist to connect these events. Uh so I would say like it's not really a mistake as much as it is like you know, not doing as much as you can with the data that you have, because the tooling until we came around just wasn't there to collect that data, aggregate that data, build like a very thorough, deep, good persona with the data, and then like turn that into marketing, turn that into events, like event-based messaging, turn that into signals that show buying intent and travel intent and all these different things. Um, yeah, I think it'd be naive to say it was a mistake. I think the more correct thing would be to say, you know, it just wasn't the tools, just weren't there to do anything cool with it.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Yeah, it's it's a missed opportunity based on a really challenging tool set. Yeah, that's what we're here to solve. And uh, you know, if one of the things that I love most about the Yada platform for property managers and owners is that you can see a contact in its full experience, past stays, future stays, interactions with your site, interactions with your marketing, things they're interested in, message history, you really get that full picture of who that person is. And it kind of what it brings up for me is a data point that most hospitality uh operators don't leverage, and that's lifetime value.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Oftentimes you're looking at RevPAR, you're looking at occupancy rate, you're kind of treating the listing as the main thing you're focused on rather than the guest. Because you're a lot of managers assume that the guest is a one-time experience. You know, they come, they're gonna go, and that's gonna be it. Maybe you have some sense of guest remarketing, but most people don't treat that first guest not as a $2,000 booking or a you know $500 booking, but instead as a potential $10,000 lifetime relationship, $20,000, maybe even $50,000, depending on you know the the scale of your operations and how frequently they travel. If you think about lifetime value instead of stay value, it changes the importance of having that guest data in a significant way.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Yeah. It really does. Um I think a lot of that is is again like just kind of the function of what the tools were designed to do. So a property management system is designed to manage properties, like, you know, make sure that the accounting is in order and all these different things. The data model and the mental model around like a listing and like like the listing being the primary thing, and then it's kind of guests and revenue events and things like that tacked on top of it. That is a completely different mental model and like a completely different set of priorities than treating the guest as the most important piece of data. And this is actually, if you look at um pretty much like every other hospitality industry and hospitality vertical, the guest and the visitor is the most important piece of data. So for airlines, it's all about like like they don't have they don't care about individual seats. Like seat 23B is no different from seat 14J, right? It doesn't matter. Same with hotels, like you know, room 405, yeah, it might be a little bit cheaper than room like 1307, which is the presidential or bridal suite. But at the end of the day, the core piece of information that is critical to those companies to grow and to have that like increase lifetime value and maximize lifetime value is understanding the guest behavior, understanding who that guest is, identifying that guest, tracking them through the life cycle, not in like a creepy way, but just understanding why they are spending $2,500 to be there, right? Like nobody spends $2,500 accidentally. They do it very intentionally, they do it with a lot of purpose, they do it because they want to. You need to understand why they want to do that. And then it like, you know, once we start moving outside of you know the airlines of this world and maybe the top three or four hotel brands that have built their own data pipelines to manage this stuff, you start getting into this really weird space where the priority shifts from the guests and the guest data collection to like listing, property, you know, number of pictures, title optimization, things like that. Uh, again, to the detriment of being able to grow quickly, to the detriment of being able to grow well, and to the detriment of being able to increase lifetime value. So what we see a lot of is is again, this is because the tooling just wasn't there. Uh, this huge emphasis on trying to increase occupancy rate and revenue and revenue per stay through like Dink and Doink upsells for like an early check-in or things like that, or optimizing the listing title and things like that. So Dink and Doink upsells actually detract from customer LTV or like lifetime value, because if you if you nickel and dime somebody on an early check-in, they're probably not going to want to come back. And the data tells us that. So if once you start using a data model and integrate a data platform into your stack that lets you understand customer behavior at scale, then you can really start doing these things that increase lifetime value instead of short-term gains on trying to increase like revenue per night. And and you know, across the board, wherever you look at it, it's probably about a dozen times cheaper to get somebody who's been with you to come back than it is to go through the whole rigmarole of having them book in the first place, because that booking in the first place involves you know, 500 people looking or like scrolling and browsing and maybe clicking on something and booking, then paying the 15.5% or 16.5% marketplace fees and all these different things, and competing with a million other people who are like I'm in Miami, there's a hundred thousand short-term rentals here, probably. Like if somebody's visiting and I have an STR, I have to compete with a hundred thousand other, like very similar, like let's be honest, like very similar units. If I have a relationship with that guest, I know who they are. I'm only competing with like maybe their internal monologue about like why I shouldn't travel or not. I would much rather compete in that arena than in the 100,000 identical, uh identical properties arena.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Yeah, like let's talk about ad campaigns, for instance. If you're trying to get direct bookings through an ad campaign, good luck. I mean, seriously, good luck. Because you are competing against Expedia, you are competing against Airbnb, you're competing against people that have tremendous brands, tremendous trust factor with the traveling public, and probably much deeper pockets than you. I mean, maybe maybe your business is an exception, but these these are big companies, big companies with tremendous ad budgets. Um, if someone is going to choose your direct booking, your you know website over Airbnb, you've got to have, I mean, I I don't even know what the what the what the logic is there, what what what kind of algorithm uh you need to have in place. But if someone has found you through one of those other doorways, you know, one of those channels, and then you re-engage with them, you now have their attention, you have their trust. They've experienced you firsthand, and you know, the the desire to switch is probably not that big. Like it takes effort to find a new place. Exactly. So one of the ways to use that guest data to improve direct bookings is to be in touch with your past guests to get them to book direct, right? Use the OTA as the front door once they've left, re-invite them through your direct door.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Yeah. I I like you just hit the nail on the head so hard. Um a good guest data platform lets you do that, and it lets you do that re-engagement in an intelligent way. So then instead of just talking to them about random happenings in Miami, you're referencing again because you have this data platform that underpins every guest journey, like lifetime journey, not just you know, that one singular stay and that one singular night. And because you've got a data platform that can that can really understand that guest from way before they booked until way after they left for the third time, you can use that as collateral in every subsequent piece of messaging to drive a much higher engagement rate, to drive a much higher booking rate, and to be like in front of the guest and in front of your clients and customers in a personalized, intelligence, intelligent way. And I want to not necessarily shift gears, but I want to bring another really important topic into this conversation, which is personalization. Hospitality is one of those industries where personalization is one of the biggest factors to customer satisfaction. So personalized experiences, uh, once you move past like airport motels and people staying somewhere for need, um, personalization is one of those things that consistently ranks as the highest factor in propensity to like book again and repeat book and like open rate of communications. I think that's like generally true for most industries. Like if you can personalize your relationship to your customers and to your clients, like you're gonna do a lot better. And hospitality that holds true even more. So having a data platform that you can use to reference again automatically, because you know, we don't we're not advocating that anybody manually goes through like 15,000 contacts and figure out what they did and what they said and how much they spend, you know, we do it all automatically. But the fact that, you know, we can look at, you know, a hundred thousand, we have some users that have a hundred thousand guests in their in their pipeline and in their in their contacts database. The fact that we can look at that and personalize a hundred thousand emails based on stuff that they mentioned in the past, reviews that they gave, questions that they had, like requests that they made around like betting or like welcome basket, things like that, you know, positive sentiments that they expressed during and after their state. That's where you go from high-leverage marketing to like infinitely high-leverage marketing, where every communication, every touch point, every activity that happens between you and a guest is personalized to their experience and their journey with you in the past.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

Yeah, so just to get into the details there, what that means is your guest communications should reference as much of that data as possible, right? So you need to, to your point earlier, you need to break down the silos between them. So you need to have the guest data. So, what were the stays, who else stayed with them, what did they talk about, what is their persona, right? Was it business, family, friends, you know, yearly celebration, whatever. Um, what were the conversations, what were the amenities that they enjoyed, right? You kind of paint that whole picture of this person so that you can be relevant when you speak to them, and also they can feel seen when you reach out to them. And then you put that picture into your messaging. It's not it's not enough to just have the picture, and it's not enough to just have the messaging. When you put the two together, then you get the ultimate re-engagement. You're actually reaching out to people because most operators don't reach out, right? They they they'll they'll do the kind of post-stay review uh and then leave it there. So you're reaching out to people and you're doing it with what you know about them. Yeah, and so that's how you go from you know 2% direct bookings to 6%, 15%. We we've got people who are north of 50% direct bookings, and it's because they've created the systems to use the guest data to re-engage and aim for that increase in that channel.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

All right, speaking of systems, let's do a shameless self-plug over here. Uh, I want to compare. So it's it's not really a self-plug because I want to talk about what I think everybody should start doing right now. And that is first to like if you're not gonna use Yada, I don't care, spin-up segment or rudder stack or post hoc or any of these like customer data platforms, it it'll be a little bit complicated if you if you go sort of like the you know, build your own stack route, but it's doable. Um, and start collecting guest data, like not just you know, the stay, but like when they went went to your website. Like, did they click on your guidebook portal? Did they engage with loyalty? Like, find a way to collect that data with Yada, it's really easy because we integrate it with your property management systems, with your messaging channels, with your loyalty portals, your widget on your website. So we kind of do it all in in one, like literally, like I think it's like a 10-line of code widget that you just paste into your website and it starts collecting all that. And if you're connected to the PMS, it does it as well. Um, but if you want to do it independently, you can set it up with segment or rudder stack and just start collecting that data. And it's actually really cool, like to see that stream of events that happens on a contact and that happens throughout the system as a whole. It's really, really cool. The like the first thing that you're gonna that you're gonna see when you start doing this is just like how much you're missing, or like how much was missing from your PMS, from your OTA, from your existing stack. Because for every PMS, Of data that we that we pull from the property management system or that that were given by the OTA, we can add another 20-30 enrichment points and data points that that that augment that. Um once you've got that data, uh, if you go with Yada, it takes about five minutes to set up, something like that. I think our record is 10 minutes, maybe 11, for being uh you know harsh on ourselves here, uh, to get that data collection in place. Um, you can start activating it. And you know, with us and and with what we've built, you know, it's very straightforward to turn that data into campaigns, into signals, into journeys. And it's really cool to see all those messages that get generated reference all of the stuff in that data platform. So, like, what did the guests talk about before? What kind of reviews they gave, like, you know, why they booked, when they booked, how many people, was it for a wedding party, was it for an anniversary, was it for a romantic getaway, was it for business travel, et cetera? Seeing all of those things referenced in the messages and in the content that gets generated by the system, and then seeing all of those engagements start trickling out automatically. Uh, like what one of our users, Alex, was saying yesterday, uh, when I when I was talking to him, he was like, holy crap, I'm seeing these signals things go out automatically, they're driving really good engagements. You know, it's it's like, yeah, that's the point. You know, you're using all of this data platform capability to drive really targeted direct messaging. So, my recommendation, like, you know, if we're just talking about like we we, you know, we've talked a lot about like why it's really important. My recommendation for everyone would be to spin up a data platform right now, either Yada or something else. Like, granted, the other stuff is not hospitality focused, so it might be kind of a little bit more painful to kind of aggregate it under one roof, but spin it up, look at the data that's coming in, and then very quickly be able to see how those things um start uh start impacting your your your your outcome marketing and your guest marketing going forward.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

You gotta do something.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Gotta do something. Otherwise, you're building your business on hope, and uh, you know, that's risky. It's really risky stuff. So um, to get fully booked, put those systems in place. If you want to have a chat about it, uh we are here. We are very much here for that chat. So stop by yada.ai uh demo and we'll do a uh repeat booking assessment, a marketing assessment for you. We're happy to talk through your systems and what can take them to the next level, whether it's Yada or something else. We really are here to help you evolve your operations and create a great business.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

So yeah, thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_01 24:47

Anything uh anything you want to share before we wrap up, Peter?

SPEAKER_00 24:49

That's it. You know, just hop on in for free repeat booking and revenue and marketing assessment. You know, we are here to to build great product, but also to help folks do marketing and help folks set up the systems that let them market. So that's our biggest priority, and we'd love to hear from anyone that's doing marketing right now, like how they're doing it and what's working really great. And then for folks that have yet to embark on this journey, uh, you know, we're here to have a conversation to help you, help you, you know, get your take the first step. You know, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. And I think it's important for everybody that's building a good short-term rental business and a good hospitality business to take that first step in marketing, activating their guest data and being smart about it and being proactive about it. Because if you're not standing up for your business, nobody else is.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Preach!

SPEAKER_00 25:42

All right, talk to you next time, everybody. Bye-bye.