The Rise of Easy Travel: How it Impacts Short-Term Rentals

welcome back to the short-term riddle riches podcast I hope you're doing really well out there wherever you are I've been bouncing around for the last four weeks I just got back from a nice little trip in Europe and I want to give you a couple of my insights the main one being that it's just easier to travel than it's ever been ever ever and easier travel means more travel for more people which is good for your short-term r so stay tuned I want to talk about

the major reasons why it's easier than ever and how it's going to affect you and your short-term rentals welcome to short-term rental riches we'll discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to acquire manage and scale your portfolio I'm your host Tim Hub welcome back I'm glad you're here again uh so I was sitting in a restaurant in Lisbon about 4 weeks ago just flew across the pond as they say so went from South America over to Portugal

and we got a recommendation from the hotel we were staying at yes I was staying in a hotel I don't always stay in shortterm rentals I tend to stay in hotels usually when I'm either at a work conference or when I'm just staying somewhere for a couple days and we were just stopping over in Lisbon uh before heading over to Poland actually where we spent a week and it was an amazing amazing time but anywh who the person at the hotel when we were checking in

gave us a restaurant recommendation so we showered up we took an Uber and we headed over there and when we got to the restaurant the waiter was talking to us and he asked us oh yeah which hotel recommended you and I just I drew a blank I had no idea really what hotel we're staying at it got me thinking gosh it is just so much easier to travel now you can literally go somewhere where you have no idea really where it is but luckily for Uber

or Google Maps you get there just fine and then you can totally forget where you need to go back to and be just fine as long as you have your cell phone right so make sure you don't lose your cell phone so I want to talk about really five ways why travel is just so much easier than it's ever been and this is this means that more people are going to travel right the less friction we have that uh keeps us from doing something the more

chances are that we're actually going to do that thing the the more friction there is to pay for something for example if you've ever tried to pay for something online and uh maybe the website wasn't set up very well and you had to go through a whole bunch of steps and ask you a whole bunch of things the chances of you actually making it through that checkout cart are a lot less likely assuming it's not something that you needed uh then if all you had to

do is Click one button so planning is way easier than it's ever been right we do most of it these days on our cell phones yes most of people booking our airbnbs are doing that on their cell phones and there are some differences if you haven't looked at the mobile version of Airbnb for example lately make sure you do our title for example the title that we have for our property shows less characters on the mobile version than it does on a desktop version so something

that we need to be aware of we need to know how people are booking our short-term rentals because that's going to help us tailor our listings a little better but we'll save that for another episode with AI and everything coming down the line this is just going to get even easier for us in fact a lot of this can just get lumped into one AI assistant travel concierge type process and I know this is being worked on in a lot of places already so that you

can go from booking your flight to booking your hotel to booking experiences all in one swoop so that's coming that's coming down the line so we're doing most of this on our cell phones it's easier than it's ever been it literally only takes a couple minutes to book a trip now and if you've been in the short-term rental space for a while I'm sure you've had your fair share of guests that only spent a couple minutes booking your property and they didn't read all the instructions

they didn't look at all the photos they didn't look at your uh your notes or your guide book and I'm guilty of this too when I'm in a rush or I don't have a whole lot of time or I really just want to get something done I just book places and sometimes they don't meet my expectations but a lot of times that's my fault right so a good trip always comes down expectations we talk about that a lot uh and that is another episode uh in

itself as well so the number two reason why it's it's easier to travel than it ever has been is it's easier to pay for things right especially if we're talking internationally so I was just abroad or I'm always abroad again guess you could say so I have cards that work internationally they don't charge fees I have a debit card from Charles Schwab for example where I can withdraw money anywhere in the world and they refund my ATM fees and now they have bank accounts like wise

if you've heard of that where you can actually store multiple currencies right on One debit card uh or one online account and so paying for things is much much easier most places are moving away from cash I was out somewhere recently and I forgot my wallet and then I remembered oh wow I can pay with my watch so there's more ways to pay than ever before now we have the contact contactless payments and so that part has gotten way easier we don't need to exchange currency

all the time although I do recommend if you're traveling internationally uh you do a little research see if it's country where they still accept more cash I know down in Columbia here where I am right now it's good to have some cash on so what I recommend is when you fly into a new country maybe just take out a little bit of cash at the ATM uh one quick tip if it asks you to convert fees let your bank do it and not the ATM because

they charge you like crazy exchange rates like 133% or something like that paying for things is much easier most of it's done just with credit card from our mobile phones arriving to our travel destinations is easier than it's ever been before we don't need to print out map quest in structions I remember those days actually I remember in Germany a long long time ago when I was uh backpacking around I I've traveled a lot too for those of you that haven't listened to the podcast I've

probably been around 80 countries hundreds of cities a lot of them I've gone back to multiple times I love traveling that's why I got into real estate but it it keeps me sharp it helps manage my properties better because I tell you what every single time I stay in a short ter Ral almost every time I should say I'm always learning something or I'm at at least thinking of something new in a new way that I didn't think about before so it keeps me sharp I

like to think it keeps me a ahead of the curve if you haven't stayed in your own property I know if you've got a whole bunch of properties that's not super easy to do or maybe it's not something you want to do but I highly highly suggest it or I highly suggest you have someone stay in your property for you because there's always things that you're going to pick up there's always a couple little things that our guests aren't telling us that would actually improve our

property so I went on a little bit of a tangent there but arriving to the property or the hotel or our destination wherever going now is so much easier because we just use Uber uh or we use Lyft or a lot of foreign countries have other services like Uber or Lyft you can just Google real quick and you know or ask chat GPT what's the Uber of Albania for example we were just in Albania recently so arriving to a destination is much much easier than it's

ever been before when it comes to our short-term rentals of course we always want to make sure we have a picture of our entry door a picture of our building or actual property so then when our guests are arriving they don't know our property right they're seeing it for the first time you want them to be able to recognize it so they don't feel lost staying connected is easier than it's ever been before so this is my fourth Point here I didn't even need to change

my SIM card so I actually have multiple numbers I have a US number Colombian number Brazilian number and you know what I could use any of them anywhere pretty much in the whole world without even changing my SIM card in the US I use a service called Google fi uh it's actually what I use most of the time my cell phone does allow me to have two SIM cards now and my Google F happens to be a digital SIM card though you can arrive to a

country you've never been to before and and when you're getting off the plane a lot of times you'll see that there's some sort of digital cell phone service where you can maybe just get it for a couple weeks so what is the moral of the story here is we don't want to lose our cell phones right that is that that that could be challenging that can be really challenging for a while I was carrying around a second cell phone I just leave it in my luggage

in case something happened I remember the days when I didn't have cell service showing up to these places this wasn't that long ago right uh or I had to use Skype or get internet to make a a phone call long long distance overseas or whatever happened to be this part is just so much easier now we can pretty much go anywhere without having to change our phone numbers do anything and it's also very affordable so check out Google F if you haven't used it before it

works in the whole country works in the whole world pretty much when you arrive to a new country it sends you a little message and says we've got you covered internet's also becoming way more available than it ever used to be I have a friend that has some land outside of Rio de Jero down in Brazil there is no building structure or anything like that there but he has internet yep he has internet from starlink that's Elon mus company that's come up and about and I

hear really good things I also have another friend here in Columbia that's doing a development outside of medine where I am currently and it's not hooked into fiber optic or anything like that and his Starling just arrived so we have internet access pretty much wherever we need to be these days as well okay so to kind of wrap things up here uh it's easier to plan our trips than it's ever been before it's easier to pay for them or it's easier to pay for our experiences

and our travels in general especially if we're traveling International it's easier to arrive than it's ever been before because we have all these services like uber and Lyft it's easier to stay connected because we can get a SIM card for our cell phone that works in the whole world or we have internet access pretty much wherever we go these days and the fifth thing I want to mention here is that it's easier to travel with different use cases so what do I mean by that we

can travel as a group now and we don't have to find five hotel rooms we can of course D stay in a short-term rental or stay in an Airbnb so fortunately my brother and sister-in-law were able to meet up with us out in Europe and we booked a few airbnbs the accommodations worked perfectly they have kitchens they were bigger uh lots of space and also in very good areas I've got a couple more podast I'm going to come out with some more insights that I learned

over these last four weeks but we have more options now so traveling is just easier than it's ever been before we also have people that just don't want to live as permanently as they did before gone or the days when we have a 30-year career right and I would say that you know uh if we have kids that is different but a lot of us are waiting to have kids Millennials uh for example Jin NZ they they're valuing experiences they don't want to be tied down

to long-term leases and so for those of them that can and work remotely these days they're traveling more and this is not going to stop right we know that people are living in short-term rentals now uh it's easier to travel and work abroad than it's ever been before and so that makes me bullish on short-term rentals of course it comes down to us knowing who's going to be staying in our property are we going to have international guests we need to know that we need to

know exactly who Our Guest Avatar is so we can set up our property perfectly for that guest create an incredible experience for them get incredible reviews and just keep the cycle running right so I want to thank you for tuning in again I hope you've had some great travels recently or maybe you have some coming up but until next time I hope you have a fabulous week want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals well it all starts with the properties

you acquire but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that there is no charge it's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to rest methods.com that's reest methods.com