Unlock Direct Bookings for Your Airbnb with StayFi CEO Arthur Colker

well welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast I'm really excited to have a special guest on today he's the CEO and founder of what I believe is probably the best way to get direct bookings and the best way to build an email list for our shter rentals and that is Arthur kker welcome to the show Arthur thanks Tim for having me so you founded or you're the CEO of stafi and we've talked about this on the show so I think most of our audience is

at least familiar they've heard the name St before but I'm really excited to dig into the specifics with you today because it's powerful you guys jam-packed it um I guess before we do that though can you give us just a real quick background and maybe where you started stayy yeah so I actually found the short-term rental industry kind of accidentally prior to stafi I managed and ran a marketing agency primarily focused on digital marketing and we had a variety of types of clients from B2B art

sales to D Toc fashion brands um and one of our customers happened to be a short-term rental company called heirloom which actually owns and operates vacation rentals with investors so kind of a different model for somebody that has 200 plus properties in their portfolio and when they hired me they H were completely dependent on Airbnb and verbo and they wanted us to develop a independent brand and develop a marketing strategy to start driving direct bookings uh and as a marketer working with a brand the first

thing we always want to look at is uh what customer data do you have because in this industry in particular those are the folks who it's going to be easiest to to convince to book directly with you just because most consumers are used to booking through an OTA like airb be or verbo and maybe they don't yet have the trust to book with a short-term rental brand because there aren't that many that are wellknown uh and they said well in fact we have almost no guest

data because Arab and verbo don't share that data with us and we don't have the rights to use it even if they did so we really approach them with let's first find a way to seamlessly collect data from every guest that stays with you also one unique aspect in this industry is unlike hotels you can have many many guests staying in a property and so there's a lot of value in the non- booking guests as well and we looked at a ton of different ways to

do this we kind of settled on hey wouldn't it be nice to put in a system like you see at a Starbucks or a hotel or an airport where when the guest logs into the Wi-Fi they have to provide their information because we know that's part of the journey every guest will go on is joining the Wi-Fi as opposed to some other techniques that require the guest to go do something that isn't the natural part of the stay like filling out a form or you know

requesting them to do this extra activity use some guest guide book or tablet that's just not the natural part of what every guest is going to go during do during this day and initially we looked at just purchasing one of these systems from the companies that do it at coffee shops right because there's a lot of great companies out there that work in other verticles but it turned out their Solutions didn't really work in the short-term rental industry whether from a pricing perspective capabilities Hardware um

so I thought hey this is an interesting Niche to explore more we could probably build a very basic product for heirloom uh that does what we need and from there it really just snow B snowballed as we discovered that heirlooms problem was a problem that almost all short-term rental operators face in building a direct booking brand um and so we developed a product that we could start selling to other short-term rental companies and then it just grew from there and we kept adding more and more

features that our customers were asking for yeah no fantastic idea you know you you definitely fill that need for a lot of us uh and like you said it's it's pretty seamless I mean someone checks in your property really the first thing that they do most of the time is connect to the Wi-Fi and if that property happens to be a seven bedroom home and there's 24 guests there then you're probably going to get 24 emails most of the time right uh and so the list

creation can happen really quickly it's it's crazy because we have customers that manage three four 500 homes and over the course of using stafi they have lists of hundreds of thousands of guests which is insane and their you know a single email message can drive hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue from one email newsletter so the way that it can scale especially for large companies is just insane uh but it really we find it works for companies at all stages so uh we were just

working with somebody with one listing who only had Airbnb and had 70% occupancy approximately and for her to use stfi even to get just one incremental booking a year will pay for stafi or subscription service with a great return on investment and she now sees a few bookings come in every few months from repeat guess so just the ability to First capture that information and then of course now we have all the tools you need to then follow up with guests to actually Market your company

you'll see obviously it starts out slower because you're starting to build that list but the effects really magnify once you know have hundreds thousands or even hundreds of thousands of guests in your database that you can go after and Market your Properties or other services that you offer which is a whole other area we could dive into as well yeah yeah yeah it's super valuable you know and and it also decreases our Reliance on these OTAs right right I I did a episode I don't know

it's probably been a few years ago now when I had a lot of my personal portfolio under one Airbnb account and we had some housekeepers messaging us like hey how come the properties aren't showing up and I'd log in I'm like they're showing up to me everything looks fine uh and then we had more housekeepers messaging us I'm like okay there's something weird going on here and the calendar was also drying up a little bit and we found out that we had missed a support email

somewhere in the hundreds of emails that Airbnb sends us and they took our listings down but they didn't notify us on the calendar and so you know we lost thousands of dollars that week probably and so ever since that day we're like okay we're now on multiple Airbnb accounts we're on multiple channels but the real goal is to get these bookings coming directly and so you guys at stayy me you're just making that easier for us for sure yeah and I'd say the the great news

is is a lot of the other players in the industry are also uh on the direct booking bandwagon let's say and are also making it easier for folks to have a direct booking website to accept direct bookings because a lot of the hesitancy we see around folks who are used to maybe just using one or two channels is you know how can my bookings be protected you know how am I going to have damage waivers or insurance that covers a direct booking how can I have

a rental agreement how do I process payment and just about every property management software out there which is definitely the first software any operator is going to use if they're professionalizing they all offer a direct booking website and many now offer bundled in services that you can opt in for so an example would be hospitable which is a PMS they have like a basic direct booking product but they have an advanced one that bundles in damage waiver contracts Insurance everything so that your bookings are as

protected or even more protected than an OTA booking uh because that's the other side is right like we can help do marketing but you also need a system to accept direct bookings in a safe and compliant manner uh and so it's great to see that all the other tools in the industry have really aligned and are putting focus on this area so that you know everything can work together harmoniously so that you can safely accept direct bookings and have all the tools you need to go

out and also Market to your guests which we can also talk about those strategies because I think people also get intimidated there in terms of I've never done marketing I don't know how to do emails right it's actually I say there's a lot of ways to do it that don't require any real marketing expertise on the operator side to start driving those direct bookings as well yeah great points there I mean when when I first got start with short-term rentals creating your own direct booking website

was like you know you had to be a programmer or something you know it was quite difficult uh and now like you said you know you can sign up with hospitable or you can sign up with pretty much any of the major Property Management platforms now and boom you click a button you got a direct booking website but as you mentioned sometimes the marketing becomes a little intimidating you know what do I do with these emails how do I contact people regularly and do I have

to go in all the time and do that and you guys have some great features to help assist with that you want to touch on that for a sec yeah so in Sai we have our own email and text marketing tools but we also integrate with just about every other third party tool out there so if you just want to use this for email collection you can send data to a tool that you maybe already use or love using like a mail champ is definitely the

most common but there's 20 or 30 we can integrate with and we integr with zapier which can send data just about anywhere you'd like you could imagine but then of course we have our own tools one great thing about our email tool is that in addition to the data we source from the Wi-Fi we also integrate with most property management software such that if you have any real emails in those tools we also pull them in so if you've been getting emails another way and it's

in your PMS we also will ingest that data so you have all the emails in your Universe coming into one tool automatically and you can do the same thing for instance with forms on your website then once the data is there uh we have some guides around what to do the the first type of email we always recommend people set up is an automated email or emails or sometimes called a drip campaign where whenever you collect an email whether it's through the Wi-Fi or your website

or your PMS you can then trigger one or a series of emails automatically and why that's great especially if you're not that proficient on email marketing or you don't have the time to do it is that you can set up emails one time that you know will get sent over a course of a period of time so one example be a Wi-Fi welcome Series so in stafi we collect the email from the Wi-Fi then it triggers an email that you write in stfi that can you

know introduce your brand especially if you have a lot of Airbnb bookings they probably don't know that you exist separately from Airbnb and they think of you as an Airbnb you can write an email introducing yourself explain you know give them some recommendations maybe provide a link to a guide book about this property if you have that and then let them know you're available to help them and the ways and then in seven or 10 days you could send another email saying hey hope you enjoyed

your stay just in FYI if you want to stay here again or at one of our other properties you can reply to me or go to our website and then you will get a better rate than booking through a thirdparty website like Airbnb and then you can send an email in 30 days and then in nine months you could send an email saying hey you stay with us nine months if you want to come back next year because we have so many operators that operate in

these like very like people travel every year to this destination Tye that again rebooking email for next year is one where we see a ton of conversion and then when it comes to the style and design of these emails we have a ton of templates in our Tool uh but if you're a little hesitant around design plain text emails are your friend especially at a smaller scale because you can make those emails appear as if they're coming from your email inbox and then people will also

naturally reply to those so you can set up a simple plain text email with that information uh that you just write out or have chat TPT write for you for instance and then guests will also just naturally respond to that and those have high open rates and engagement rates so you don't even need to design a templated email or what you think of as an email newsletter to have success with emails because you can also send plain text emails and not even worry about design and

that's where I think some people don't realize you know you don't need that design component to have success with email marketing in our industry a lot of guests actually prefer that onetoone relationship with the operator that we kind of facilitate or make it look like you're sending this email spontaneously uh as opposed to getting an email maybe from what makes sense when you're a larger brand with more marketing resources where it then looks more like a fancy templated email you would be more accustomed to getting

from a hotel or an e-commerce brand right yeah some excellent points there uh I think one takeaway here is that like people still open their emails right I mean uh I guess our our physical mail is becoming less and less like I don't even have I have a physical mailbox but it's virtual like in another country you know and it gets scanned anyways but I definitely open my email um and so it still is an effective approach and and I I don't see that really changing

that much do you no definitely not in the near to medium term you know and we see the I call them trans actional or kind of emails triggered by let's say a Wi-Fi login those can still get we see open rates of 5060 70% because when it's at that point in time where there's an activity the guest is doing that's associated with the email that drives very high engagement rates and then a newsletter will kind of be in the 20 30% open rate range which is

very typical for this industry um and we see that across all of our customers and it hasn't really changed you know an email still by marketing standards considered the highest Roi Channel across most Industries because unlike Google ads or Facebook ads where you have to pay every time you serve an impression with an email tool once you collect the email you can email them really as much as you'd like within some parameters and like the marginal cost to send an email is very low because like

all other tools we just charge based on how many contacts you have so like the cost to send this email to a guest or to get that impression is much much lower than with you know doing digital marketing where you have to pay for each impression uh so the roi3 mail is still rated number one for all channels and it's where we see our customers Drive the bulk of their direct bookings because emails also has this billboarding effect right so even though they guest may not

click through the email to make the booking because you've emailed them consistently every month they your brand is top of mine when they want to book their next day and that's really the most important thing is because most people are not in Market to purchase a trip to your destination most of the time it's actually very rare that they're like in the mood to book a trip to Orlando right that main only happened once a year um but the key thing is that when the guest

is ready to go do that they need to remember your brand so that they also check your website in addition to going to the OTAs because they're probably going to do comparison searching uh and that's where it's if you've been consistently messaging the guests letting them then know that booking direct is probably going to be less expensive they definitely will come to your website and do that search now whether you have inventory and can service them at the dates that they want that's like a different

question uh but at least you know if you've been consistently emailing they most likely will come to check uh your availability and rates for the dates they're interested in and that's what we really want to achieve with Emil emils just make sure that brand awareness is there when they're ready to start researching their next trip for sure for sure yeah it's an easy way to stay in touch and it's also easy for us as owners or property managers to offer the lowest prices on our direct

booking website right we don't have you know depending on what commission model you have with Airbnb or booking.com I mean these fees can add up to 15 plus percent between the guest and and the owner or the property manager and so um you know like with my personal portfolio we we always have the lowest prices for the guest on our direct booking website but we still make more right and the guest pays less so it's it's a win-win and um there's also a lot of value

just in in the list you know uh being able to send an email off like you said and and have less Reliance on on the OTAs and stuff like that and and then you know if someone's building a portfolio if they ever want to sell their properties in the future they've got email list where that's not going to go away it's something that we actually own I I've I've heard a lot of content creators you know recently kind of saying like hey we can we can

work with these algorithms and do everything we can and then one day they can just change the algorithms air Airbnb can just change the algorithm right but they can't do that if I mean they can't just take our email list away right yeah I think you bring up a really good point which is you know the the list of guess is a really valuable asset for a few reasons one if you ever want to sell your business right how your business is going to be valued

is what revpar are you achieving right so if if the the list goes with the business right if you compare yourself to your competitor and you have a massive email list that you're driving bookings from your occupancy rate will be higher than folks that are just using OTAs so you will have something real and tangible to sell to a potential acquirer because you have this list of loyal guests that stay with you on a regular basis and want to come back with you and book direct

and then you're actually purchasing your brand in addition to just the idea of like I'm P purchasing a bunch of homeowner contracts right um the other side is helping you acquire more properties for your portfolio obviously if you have a robust direct booking business you're going to be able to achieve better results for owners if you are a property manager uh by you know getting more bookings for their homes and if you go to a new owner and say hey in addition to listing your properties

on all the channels which of course everyone else is doing uh you can also have the advantage of having this proprietary list that no one else has of guests that you know visit this particular destination uh and then you can Market their property to those guests so it's a great thing stafi and the related marketing efforts are things we see a lot of people build into their pitch to owners uh to help them with property acquisition and then the other thing is if you also do

real estate which a lot of our short-term rental operator customers do guests are also great potential leads for home purchasers who then will also want their properties managed so we do see a lot of folks in both email marketing and some of our us other guest engagement tools when the guests log onto the Wi-Fi Market you know interested in purchasing a home have you thought about buying a home in this area uh because people that travel frequently to those destinations are often the people that if

they can will end up purchasing a second home um and so and that way your list also becomes a lead source for your real estate business yeah great Point great Point yeah there's a lot of you know in a nutshell it's to get more emails right and get more direct bookings but you guys have a there's like a lot of other value components there um and you guys also have the ability well you create a easy way for someone to create a splash page right right

that's the page the guest is going to see when they log in for the first time but then you have some ways to sort of sell some commissionable things on top of that can you talk about that a little bit yep so the Wi-Fi login process is two steps the first step is the guest joins they see the captive portal is what we call it sometimes called a splash page where uh they enter in their name email phone number they have a you know you can

customize the checkbox to get opt in and have guests agree to other terms if you'd like and then after that it takes them to a page we call the homepage if you ever use Link tree it's a very similar type of product where you can basically just have a bunch of buttons that will advertise different things to the guest so some typical things that are advertised on that page would be a guide book a link to your website a link to book this property again but

then we also have two partners that are integrated and are free to sign up for one's called the hostco and the other is called vator the hostco is essentially a free store for your listing where you can sell both your own goods and services as well as they have a bunch of thirdparty services that they can sell and you get a commission from obviously the majority of the money is made through selling your own Services the most popular being early check-in and late checkout are the

two biggest money makers we see people also offer things like mid-stay cleans stay extensions pool heating and then physical items can be things like firewood amenity kits things like that what's great about this homepage where you have all these listings is that it's a website or Stat it's a page that you can also link to outside of the Wi-Fi experience so that's when it comes like early check-in obviously if they are logging into the Wi-Fi it's a little late to buy early check-in uh but you

can also send the homepage through your property management software's automated messaging and say like hey you know if you'd like to to P purchase early checkin you can do that here and then all of those um purchases through the hostco are request based so you'll get a request and will say like so and so wants to purchase early checkin for this property and then you can approve or deny it and if you approve it it will go ahead and charge their credit card uh and then

you typically it could be like 3040 $50 to sell that service the other partner is called vior they're the they're owned by Trip Advisor they're the largest tour and activity Marketplace in the world uh and we sign you up for their affiliate program where you will earn an 8% commission from any tours or activities that you recommend or sell through that platform and so you can feature those in the homepage and of course obviously again sending them in advance of the stay the homepage will also

give guests some ideas about things that you love and want to recommend and then if guests click on those links and book within 30 days you get that 8% commission for anything through vior uh so both of those we see you know it definitely varies by how well people Market them but people are making anywhere between you know 30 and $200 a month per property just through the upsell pieces uh especially if they Market their own Services aggressively and that would be things like early checkin

late checkout and things like that because that's where you can make Revenue yeah that's awesome yeah constantly adding new features and changes and uh another thing that that came to mind mine is another sort of side benefit let's say you know we have a home that sleeps 10 people and you have 20 people's emails come in when the guest checks in then you you know that there's too many people staying at that property don't you and so and sort of a roundabout way you can also

use it as a way to ensure that you know there's not too many guests at your property yeah so we have a few different types we have two main Wi-Fi alerting features so in stafi we have occupancy alerting which you just talked about so we actually if you connect stafi with your property management software the occupancy alerting even becomes Dynamic so we actually look at your current reservation and we'll let you know if there's more guests there than have booked and we also we don't do

it based on devices so if you log on to stafi or to the internet with your phone and your computer we still only count you as one unique guest uh so we do our best best to DD devices and then let property managers or owners know when there's more guests than our book there you can also have it be static so if you only really care if it's over some threshold you can also set it up that way the other of course obviously is we do

Wi-Fi outage learning alerting and we do both going offline and online because there's a lot of now that we see the status of Internet across tens of thousands of properties mostly in the US but all we have properties all around the world it's very common you know for internet to go out for 5 minutes seven minutes so we have some tools where you can say hey alert me if it's more than 30 minutes and then when it goes back online and that way you can know

you know before guests even arrive what the status of the internet is so you can address whatever that issue is you know most commonly guests like to unplug things so they may have unplugged the Internet you may just need to power cycle the modem router um or there could be in the case we see some property managers where they have 10 properties in an area and you literally see the internet go off in all of them at the same time so it's pretty easy to tell

it's like okay this is an internet service provider outage or there's a power outage because internet is going offline across properties all at the same time so you just have a lot more ability to manage the internet across Properties by having all of the status in One dashboard yeah it's amazing I mean you guys designed a wi-fi system Marketing System specifically for one industry right uh and so I'm sure when you first started with the company you didn't have all the features you have today right

no definitely not uh the first version of stfi was just you know it wasn't even a user interface it was just you told us what you wanted your captive portative to look like and then we would send the data to MailChimp right so it's definitely evolved a lot and we have some really cool things coming over the course of this year which I'm super excited about especially on the marketing front kind of new tools to make marketing even easier uh and some interesting new um Integrations

on Wi-Fi that will let us service more types of properties and make it easier to set up stafi depending on what type of Internet equipment that you have already yeah awesome well I'm excited to see the changes and you guys were really kind to create a coupon code for all of our listeners and so for anyone listening out there if you're catching Us on YouTube you can head to stay.com slstr riches and you can use the coupon code riches when you sign up you get three

months at 50% off so I appreciate you guys doing that Arthur again that's stay.com slstr riches um so yeah I guess in a nutshell I mean we're using this with my properties it's super easy to use you basically you know they're great routers too they have a good reach you basically plug them in you can create this this splash page you can get your list building the marketing can kind of be handled for on the back and you can add in some of these other uh

sort of cool features is is there anything else you want to want to add yeah I mean it kind of goes on and on the different possibilities so if somebody wants more information or wants to know what they need for their properties um if you go to stay.com to our demo page you can book a one-on-one demo with one of our reps who will give you a personalized demo of the platform walk you through all the different features and answer your questions on the best way

to get it set up uh so if you have questions or just want to learn more that's really the best way to do it and that way you can uh see everything in the platform firsthand and get a sense for how it all works yeah awesome well thanks Arthur I got I got one more question for you before we wrap up here um and that is the the name of our podcast is short-term rental riches a lot of times when people hear the word riches they

sort of associate it with you know Financial riches but we know that um there's a lot more meaning to it than just the finance side of it is there something in your life or some sort of habit or something that you've picked up recently that's enriched your life in a non-financial way oh definitely I would say um I actually hired recently a business coach um which I think has just added a lot of value to give me because I'm a solo founder which I think can

be very challenging you know most people in police software have a co-founder someone to bounce ideas off of um but as a solo founder I reached out to a bunch of friends interviews to different coaches and it's nice to have that outside perspective of someone who's worked with a lot of different uh CEOs or Founders uh especially as you grow a business because I you know in previous jobs I'd only managed two or three people and now we have a team of almost 20 so just

making sure that I'm being a good manager uh and giving people the right opportunities and structures to excel in this environment and make them happy to be a part of this organization is just really important to me and how we establish that culture and so uh hiring that type of help who's kind of both therapist and Coach I would say has just added a lot of value to my life and made it a lot clearer about you know what we're focused on here at stfi yeah

that's that's a great tip uh I mean there's a reason why the best athletes in the world still have coaches right and the biggest businesses have um have coaches and so that's that's excellent advice and to all of you out there you know we talk about going to conferences a lot I'm sure you will see Arthur and stayy at at um you know your next short-term rental conference so get out there it's worth spending a little bit of money to to meet people and to hire

coaches because it can just help out in so many anyways so um thanks a bunch Arthur for coming on we really appreciate having you on and great Insight it's a great tool again anyone out there you guys can head to stafi outcom riches and Arthur and their team put together a discount for you for the first three months and so looking forward to seeing additional stuff that you guys add on in the future I feel like it's kind of just getting started with amazing amazing product

so thanks Arthur thanks so much for having me until next time I've dedicated years figuring out how to manage my personal portfolio remotely and it wasn't always easy and it took a long time but now my amazing team can professionally manage my properties without me and good news our team can also manage yours let us save you the stress and headaches and some money by offering you an industry low fee to find out more about partnering with us head to Str Str riches.com hit the property

management button answer a couple quick questions and meet with me personally that's Str Str riches.com rest easy knowing that with my team your properties will be in excellent hands