What a Direct-Booking Website Builder Wishes Every Host Knew

18% of all chats started on chatbt is travel related. So you're going to start to see this big shift in the market if you are a host that is okay getting three or four stars and is pretty mediocre in terms of what the stay is like then don't invest in tour direct bookings. You can build a beautiful website with clawed but if it's not showing up in results then no one will book it. There is a lot of AI garbage out there. This is not written

by a human for another human. Within the first 7 days of the new year, they got $60,000 worth of bookings. They slammed our our system. Welcome back to Short-Term Rental Rich's podcast. Happy you're here again. I've got an amazing guest today on something that I know all of you are really curious about. We've talked about it a little bit in the past, but we haven't gotten really detailed on it. And so today we have Gil Chan with us. He's a co and founder of Crafted Stays.

He's also the host of the Books Solid podcast. Welcome to the show. Yeah, Tim, it's great to be here. Great to uh chat again. We were on your podcast not too long ago and we got to talking about direct bookings and that's essentially what you built your business out of. You're a short-term rental host as well. Give us the little background, Gil, for people that maybe haven't heard your podcast yet or haven't learned about Crafted Stays. Yeah, so yeah, like like you mentioned, I'm a host

myself. I got in kind of like in that gold rush period right during the pandemic there. So got in at a pretty decently good time and we were also like we were hitting our revenue run numbers like quite well after the first year but we started to reflect back and look at and realize that a lot of our revenues actually most of our revenues were coming from one OTAA about 95% of our revenue was coming from Airbnb and that got us into somewhat of an uncomfortable

place. So, we started to look at diversifying our revenues away and we're looking into getting direct bookings. And we found out that we had either the choice of using the PMS provided websites or if we wanted anything better, we would have to hire an agency and probably spend anywhere from $6 to $14,000 on a custom build. To me, my day job, my W2 at that time was in e-commerce. Shopify was one of our biggest partners. And I realized one day that if I wanted to start

an e-commerce business, I wouldn't go hire a bunch of developers, have them build me a custom site, and I wouldn't do that. I I would sign up for a Shopify account. I would put our products onto it and choose from five different themes and by the middle of afternoon I'll have one of the highest converting websites out there. And I realized that hospitality really didn't have anything like that, especially short-term rentals. So I coded the first version of what Craft Days is today, shopped around with

a bunch of my mastermind peers and they collectively convinced me to go all in and that's what I did. I left my W2, hired the best engineers I've had a chance to work with over the last 15 years in tech, and we've been just helping more and more hosts really become independent and diversify the revenues away from the OTAs. So, yeah, that's kind of where it all started and why we went down this path. Awesome. Well, well, thanks for the background and and yeah, direct bookings

are something that everyone wants, right? No one wants to pay the 15 12% commission to Airbnb and Booking.com. And as you mentioned, a lot of the options out there are sort of templates from the PMS systems. Can you talk a little bit about why these templates just aren't ideal? Yeah, it's less so the templates themselves, but it's more kind of the structure that's around it. In most cases, most of PMSs will probably only have one template and then you can change the color schemes and then

you can also change maybe the hero image that lands on it and and the title in there and that's pretty much it. And then otherwise, it's a wall of your properties there. If you have only like one or two properties, it'll just show that those one or two. It doesn't allow you to show your story. It doesn't allow you to put in what you typically see out of a vacation rental websites. The local guides, the about us pages, the blogs, all of that is you you

really can't build that on on the PMS websites. And that's probably one of the kind of the biggest differences. And also for some of our property managers that are looking to use their website also as a business card for them to attract new clients, new homeowners, there's not really that ability to do that on a PMS website. So you mean attract for property managers looking to attract new clients, new owners. That all goes into their website, which usually always houses the direct booking website as well.

Yeah, typically we see property managers create like a management page in there that tells them about their services, how they work, how they onboard, maybe has a contact us form on the very bottom of that page. That's pretty typical for a lot of our almost all of our property managers and we now even include that as one of the standard pages that we create on all of our templates. So, if you were to sign up for us and catch your properties onto it and then choose

variet themes, most of the themes already have a property management page already kind of built out where you can then swap out the imagery, the value props, kind of how you work, your process, but the scaffolding is all there already. Our audience is a really big range. We've got a lot of people that are just getting started. We've got a lot of people, maybe one property, maybe it's a vacation rental they use part-time, and then and then we certainly have a lot of property managers. I

want to get back to the to the individuals because I think that's probably more of our audience, but just why we're on the property management subject. You know, I'm in a lot of mastermind groups and stuff as well, always trying to, you know, stay ahead of the curve, learn everything. And a lot of property managers out there are kind of confused on actually how to set up their website because on one end, they're marketing to their guests where they have their direct booking website, but then

they also want to pick up new clients there and so they're also like trying to sell. So yeah, how do you guys handle that? What what are your thoughts on that? Some folks will defer to having two separate websites, one for their management side where they can be very deliberate on that and then have one that's geared towards guest. We actually prefer that they house it all together for multiple reasons. One is most of your the folks coming to your website are going to be guests.

Probably 100 to one probably is a is a good estimate in terms of like traffic there. So, out of out of all the people that might visit your website, maybe you'll get one homeowner that's interested in having rent out their home. The rest of it is going to be guest. And if you put up a management tab on the very top, a page on there on the menu, it's very easy for a homeowner to see that and and click on it and realize, okay, that's where

I find out more information. Probably not more than one or two sections on your homepage that talks about some of your management services, but that is going to signal to homeowners that that's kind of like where to find the information. The other part is like you want to build that site authority. So from an SEO perspective, you have to invest into your SEO. And if you were to have two different sites, you're going to basically invest that two times over. Whereas, if you were to build

one cohesive site that has a management page on there, but it's geared towards guests on the front door side, you are able to kind of use the guest side of things, the volume of traffic that you're getting in there, all the content you have in there to help build that site authority for you to be able to have that management page actually surface when someone's looking for things. So, it kind of goes both ways. From homeowners perspective, there's very low friction for for them to find

out what they need. And actually, if anything, them browsing your set of properties, knowing how you take care of guests, knowing the quality of your site, that's actually good content that they want to see onto it. They want to see the homes are has professional photography. They want to see that the booking flow is very easy because they they'll imagine their own homes in that. So, it it really helps you as a good business card. Yeah, great points. And, you know, I think SEO now AEO

from the AI side of things. I think a lot of times when people hear these acronyms, it kind of just, you know, rolls over their head. And where it doesn't get passed through so easily is with the big OTAAS. Like they understand this better than anyone, right? Airbnb and and Booking.com. And they also spend millions and millions of dollars to market to make sure that our reservations come through them and not us so that we pay them the fees. So I guess let's talk a little

bit about like how much does it matter to have a direct booking website? you know, if you have these other companies that are experts in design and and AEO and SEO and spending millions of dollars, why is it important to have a direct book inside? Yeah, this is this is very analogous to kind of what I was used to kind of prior to being a host myself, property manager myself and starting the company. In e-commerce, we have pretty much the same divide there. For a lot

of e-commerce brands, they'll post and they'll rely on Amazon as pretty much their channel. And at some point they may decide to spin up a Shopify store and go independent. And the brands that really are able to survive and able to build something with a lot of momentum are usually the ones that have their own stores. They have their own channels. They may still leverage Amazon, but they're not solely dependent on it. And I see the same thing kind of happening in kind of the vacation

rental space there. If you think about it, Airbnb is very transactional. If you want to get that booking there for the weekend that you want to fill up, you can lower your price, but you're you're chasing that specific transaction. Whereas direct bookings is a little bit different. It's not like you can spin up a direct booking website and expect to see your direct booking rate reach 50% within the first few weeks. It's not like that. It's more of a compounding game. So, as you build out

your direct booking website, you may start to email market your past guest. You may invest in your social media, but all those things compound over time. Your followers compound, the way you do messaging compounds, the content that you have on your website compounds, your site authority compounds. Like all those things start to compound on top of each other to a point where that second, the third year, that's where you start to reach the 30, 50, 60, 70, 80% direct booking rate. And that's where you have

a lot more control. If you have a weekend that's free or a last minute cancellation, you don't have to necessarily lower your rate. You can email your past guests and let them know that there's availability. So, it gives you a lot more control over how you want to fill your calendar and not necessarily basically just lower your rate in order to get on first paid. Yeah, great points. And, you know, we see this firsthand with some of the properties we manage. You know, especially the luxury

properties where maybe it's a place where families have been vacationing every year and they love that place. that's the one they want to go back to. I mean, to pause on that, that was a really good point. Like, a lot of times some of our property managers that invest pretty heavily in direct, they'll open up their direct calendar way earlier. They may open up their direct calendar 6 months, 8 months, maybe up to a year to allow their direct customers to book again before it's available

on the OTAA. So, if you have those families that come back to you year after year, if you have those folks that like to spend the holidays at your properties, you basically can leave it open for them to have the first bookings. And usually when you have file bookings like that, there is a premium on those bookings as well, too. So, it starts to generate you additional revenue on top of kind of what you would typically get if you were just on the OTAAS. Yeah. when

it gets into the premium luxury segment, there's really we're going to do a whole episode on this cuz we started working with some some really amazing properties, but it it's quite different the operations, you know, there's there's a sales process that goes into it and having different calendars, for example, negotiation levers becomes a bigger point and having a website that allows you to kind of facilitate those changes is really essential uh when you're working with some of these luxury properties. Yeah. Like we have a property

manager that is coming to us. They have a single property that generates over a million dollars in bookings a year. And to them, they can't represent their property the same way that they would on on an OTAA. They can't talk about their amenities, break down each room. Like they really can't paint that picture on on the OTAA. It's just not the same. Yeah. And there's there's also limitations, right? Like Airbnb doesn't allow you can't advertise more than 16 guests. And if if you're talking about a

large property, right, that sleeps 30, then uh you got to find other ways to get that that message and content out there. Um so that's one of the nice things with direct booking websites, right? I mean, they're infinitely customizable. We can build them however we see best fit to run the business. I I know you guys have a whole bunch of insight on the back end and I want to jump into it. But before we move on to that, if we look at the other end

of the spectrum, which is probably the majority of short-term rentals out there, you know, properties that have more average daily rates on the on the lower end of things, how important is it for them to have uh a direct booking website or does it depend on property type? It depends a little bit, but I would suggest that you want to be nurturing it over a long period of time. like the earlier that you get started, they start to collect those emails in there. And it really

depends on kind of how you see yourself in hospitality. If you are a host that is okay getting three or four stars and is pretty mediocre in terms of what the stay is like, then don't invest into direct bookings. Like that is not your place. You're not going to get the repeat bookings. It's going to be really hard for you to attract the right folks. It's it's hard for you to get all those reviews in there. But if you are a host that cares a lot

about the guest experience, you you want to make sure that they have a great time, you want to make sure that they come back and want to come back to you, those are the folks I would typically recommend going into direct booking. So, it's not necessarily for everybody. If you do have somewhat of a unique stay, something that is more of a destination, that's more reason to have a direct booking website because when you go on social media or folks are sharing it, it's you have

a lot more content to kind of build around it. Um, but nonetheless, if if you are a host that really cares about the guest experience, that's that's I think the the first thing to to consider. But if you're not, then don't go into triple. Good advice. Okay. I I know there's some people out there and they're thinking, Gil, that's great. You know, you guys build custom websites, but I just saw on YouTube that I can pull up Claude and build a website in, you know, 9

seconds. Can you talk a little bit about like just AI and the tools available and uh you know, everyone used to use WordPress in the past, but now you can build websites with AI. What's the difference between, you know, working with craft crafted stage for example and like what Claude might create? Yeah, we we see a lot a lot of these and I think there's this huge rise in AI now and people basically vibe coding their their own websites and I think on like the surface

level they look really good. If you're looking for a good billboard of your property, they look really good. You can kind of customize the colors, the layouts the way you wanted them to. Do you want rounded corners or sharp corners? Like it allows you to kind of have a a canvas to kind of build on top of. We've had a couple property managers that kind of started down that path, but they're not seeing kind of the results that they wanted and they kind of wanted us

to kind of audit the the work that they done. A lot of the websites, the vibe code websites we've seen don't have the kind of the foundational the e-commerce foundation kind of underneath the scene there. So things like schema markups, making sure that Google Analytics is tagging each every single event that is coming through, not using this probably a big one of the biggest ones is not using the PMS widgets. A lot of folks that are kind of vibe coding their websites, they're not API integrated.

They're not a partner of the PMS and they're trying to allow bookings on there. So, they'll typically use the PMS booking widgets. There's usually a piece of code that the PMS provides you so that someone can search for rates and availabilities and so on. Those booking widgets, they're not great for conversion. Like, they're usually one widget that you can use. It's served on both mobile and desktop. They look usually more like the PMS's and less like your website. So there's usually some discontinuity between it. So

you can pretty obviously see that like it's not part of natively the site underneath it all. It's just it doesn't go through kind of the same rigor that for instance when we build out our websites. We build it for folks that have one to five doors. But we also our platform is serving customers with hundreds of doors as well too. And a lot of times we'll run tests and see what changes could we make on the website perhaps maybe on the mobile navigation or on how

the booking flow is and we'll see if that if that test will either positively impact conversion or negatively impact conversion. And if that test goes well with this one client we'll roll that out for everybody. So the the platform is consistently improving. We've done at this point over 210 product releases since September of AEO and GIO and then conversion. Those like the big focus areas that uh we spend a lot of our time on. So it's it's something hard for a single property manager to kind

of vibe code. You're you're only end of one in terms of being able to test and see like what converts. But for us, we got a pretty big base of customers that we are constantly testing against. Yeah. Yeah. Great point. You can have a beautiful You could have an amazing property, not not even just a website, but if no one no one finds it, no one will book it, right? So, you can build a beautiful website with Claude, but if it's not showing up in uh

in results, then no one will book it. That's probably a good segue into SEO and AEO. And you mentioned another one I haven't even heard of that started with a G. What are all these acronyms and and what do they mean and why are they important? Yeah. So SEO is like kind of the the most known term is search engine optimization. It's typically what you refer to when someone's going onto Google searching for something and kind of where does it land? Is it on the the

first page? Is it on the second page? Where does it which rank is it? And that's search engine optimization. And the goal there is to optimize the content, your site authority, the performance of your website, the citations, all of that to make sure that Google has enough meat to kind of refer you as a top choice when someone's searching for a specific search query. And so that's kind of the traditional SEO. And then there's two new terms, AEO and GEO, that kind of popped up in

the last, I would say, two years, two, three years. GEO probably been a bit firmer over the last 12 months or so. But AEO refers to an answer engine optimization. GEO is the the generative side gener um generative engine optimization. And basically what it refers to is AEO is typically what Google will summarize if someone is doing a Google search. So usually you'll see on the top of a search if you're looking for something or you're asking it a question, it'll give you a summary of

what it found online. And what you want to do is you want to be referred to if someone's asking for the best place to stay for X Y or Z in this area, you want to a popup as a recommendation on there. And so that's AEO. And then could to go a little bit further down is when someone goes in Chachi BT and Perplexity, they're planning out their trip. They may give details on where they looking to go, what they're looking to do, and eventually where

they want to stay. Um, and they're asking for references or recommendations on where to stay. That's the GEO side of things. They're all built AEO and GEO is built under the same foundation as SEO. So, if you are a property manager/host that has been doing fairly well in SEO, you've been nurturing it over time, you're writing good content, you know what people are searching for, and you've been nurturing that over the last few years, you're in a pretty good place as AO and GEO is becoming

more and more important. If you haven't really invested in SEO or in the past, like you should be because about 18% of all chats started on ChattBT is travel related. About 20% 18% of all traffic is coming because of traffic travel related queries. So a lot more folks are now using these chat engines to plan out their next stays. So, you're going to start to see this big shift in the market where it may be less relevant to optimize for the traditional searches or on the

OTAAS because now we're seeing this big shift in and guests really finding their stays through kind of a more chat experience. That's an interesting part of the equation. You know, having people find you and may maybe outside SEO, you know, there's ways to put your information on the OTAAS, right? sort of subtly to to get across that you have a brand that you have a company and that maybe you have a direct booking website. Do you have some tips on that side of things? Because it's

it's easy to cross the line, right? Get flagged by one of these OTAAS if you're too Yeah. Um any tips there? Yeah, there's there's a few. I think we we call it the billboard effect. Uh you want someone to see your billboard on someone else's property. Property being Airbnb. And kind of the most subtle way is when you're introducing your property, the first like first few lines of it, you say, for instance, like welcome to Pillows Pool Retreat. And it kind of gives that property a

name. And then you talk about all the great amenities, what's a bit more about the property. So kind of the normal 500 character short descriptions. And then at the very end of that, the last few characters you pretty much write out hosted by Explore State Today. And those two kind of bookends allows the guest to know, oh, there's a brand name for this property and this is the property management company there. So, you can just do that. You don't even need to change your profile to

say your property management company's name. Um, just doing that alone will start to kind of drive traffic from the OTAAS over to direct site. I've known some property managers that will even put the property management name within the title themselves and they've been doing it for years without any repercussions. I'm not suggesting that, but I have seen some folks go really bold and put it up there. What I would not suggest is ever to send your link directly inside messages. Never put the com inside your

messages. You could put it at the end of your rental agreement as the kind of the landing page to go to. you can put in other areas, but do not put like if someone's asking you, is there a way to book direct? We typically say although you can book with us in many different channels, including uh including our websites, we encourage our guests to book with us the channel that they found us in. Um so kind response. Yeah. Uh so it kind of signals like yeah

you can book with us other places but in respect to Airbnb or VBO or booking like we suggest that you you book where you found us so it doesn't get contested in any way if if if they were to kind of look back at the messages or if their AI bots are looking at the messages. Yeah that's that's good advice. I you know from our end the properties we've seen that did have repercussions were through the messaging. you know, we have some properties being taken down

and sometimes it was by accident, you know, like they were setting up their VBO account and they, you know, put in an automated message and it went out to a bunch of people and VBO found it, flagged it, and sometimes, unfortunately, they they actually flag the address and it can be a real challenge to get a a listing back up on OTA if you get it taken down. So, we haven't seen that through, you know, people sort of sneakily putting their property management company on photos

or, you know, changing the screen on the TV or having it in the body of the text. I haven't I've heard like fears of that in like middle of 202 where Airbnb was investing pretty heavily in AI. They're starting to use AI to do the reviews, uh, disputes there, and there are suspicions that they were going to start looking at your photos and start flagging one, but I haven't seen any like widespread kind of auditing on that. Well, let's see. So someone's once they have their

direct booking website set up and let's assume they haven't gone the template version for a lot of the reasons we talked about. You know SEO doesn't work well. It's not customizable. It it doesn't fit maybe the rest of their website. Widgets don't convert well. So let's say they they've got their custom website set up. What are some of the additional features that you might put on a custom website that really enhance the experience versus one of those template versions? Yeah, I I think the probably the

the biggest difference like so for instance, we have a lot of folks that come to us because they have a previous website that was built on WordPress. Maybe an agency had built out their website and they're now looking to update it. A lot of the reasons why they come to us is really for kind of that platform effect. They like knowing that we're built on a platform that is constantly maturing, constantly adding new features in there. Whereas typically, if you have an agency built on WordPress,

typically the agency was would charge you x thousands of dollars to build out the website and they'll charge you some monthly hosting fee to kind of keep it up and and running. But they're not kind of going in there and making changes. They're not optimizing things. So you typically your website may even have the old copyright from when it was built. Um, so you might have like copyright 2023 in there indefinitely until you ask them to kind of update things. But for us, we like like

I mentioned earlier, we are constantly doing tests and iterations and seeing what converts. We made a lot of changes on how AI crawlers are able to kind of go onto your site and pick up the relevant information. We recently launched a feature that allows you to do a price comparison specifically on your property pages. So, if someone is looking for stay, they're putting in their arrival and departure dates, the amount of guests that they have, and we pull a quote directly from the PMS. So, it's

it's a live quote. And then right below that, we have a little box that says, "If you book direct, it's going to be this much. If you were to find us on Airbnb, it'll be this much. If you were to find us on VBO, it' be this much." So it gives them a sense of and a comfort knowing that this rate is going to be lower by X amount versus doing another search on the OTAA because what you don't want them to do is get them

that down that far down the funnel. They're high intent. they're interested in in booking with you and then they do a price shop and they go on to Airbnb for instance and they look up your property and they see the price is a little bit higher but they at now at that point their browser their main active tab is now Airbnb and they're starting to search search around they're poking around Airbnb does a pretty good job at referring also other properties that they can stay at

as well too and at that point you pretty much lost the attention of of that guest and that's what you don't want to do so we rolled out a feature that allows them to do a practice nurse and on your site so that you're keeping that guest attention to where you want them to be. You want them push them further down the booking funnel. Yeah. It's kind of the difference between working with us versus an agency build is the just the constant nurture that we have.

Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. So, so what do you guys build on today? You you have your own platform. Is it just, you know, it's no longer WordPress? It's just a bed of code programming language or kind of. Yeah, you can think of it that way. So me and my team, I've been in product management for 15 16 years now. Been at six different Silicon Valley startups. Prior to starting Craft Days, me and my team had built two other e-commerce platforms. So that's kind of when we

got into our space, like we knew how to optimize our websites for SEO, how to make them performant. And so when we built Craft Days, we built everything ourselves. We bu every single brick we laid ourselves. We're not using a third party white label platform. We're not reskinning WordPress or go high level or anything like that. Everything is built inhouse. So everything from the backend admin to the website editor to the front-end templates and even more recently some of our AI tools. We have this new

tool called Arya that allows you to run a full-blown SEO report. You can even b code your own website on our platform. So you can tell it to spin up landing pages for specific collections. All that is built brick by brick within in house. Awesome. Awesome. It's exciting, isn't it? Uh just today the the AI can help us do so much more, so much faster, right? We still have to know what we're doing though, right? You know, back to your earlier point uh with with people

uh creating a really beautiful page that doesn't actually convert. Yeah. That's kind of what led us down kind of the path of creating Arya in in the first place. We had a pretty good platform where anyone that wanted to build a full-blown website with a bunch of different collections and be able to change all their headlines and their SEO contact, they had all the tools and facilities to do so. But we realized that some property managers either one didn't have the time or two didn't know

didn't have the knowhow to really optimize their websites. And so kind of the first thing we wanted to tackle was to make sure that even if you're building your website on our platform that you didn't take the kind of the placeholder images that we may put in there or the placeholder copy text that we put in there and we want people to customize it. And a lot of times like I said earlier like property managers are one of the busiest peoples that I've had a chance

to meet. So when they're spinning up their websites their challenge with that and everything else that they had to do. One of the first pieces that we built was the Arya sighteline report that reads your entire portfolio. It reads all your reviews. It knows where your properties are located, how you describe them, and then it takes that and does an SEO third party analysis. It it's the same tool that if you were to hire an agency to build out your website, it'll take all of that

information and then do a search and see what are people searching for in the area, what are the key terms, what are the things that you have a chance to rank for, um, and then present that to you. So then you get a summary of all those details. And then it starts to ask you some pretty specific questions. Who's your ideal guest that you want to stay at your property? Why did you build this in the first place? Who are you trying to attract? What do

you want people to feel after leaving your stays? So, it helps um our AI tool to really understand what makes your property management company different than everybody else and how should you position yourselves, how should you write those taglines, what should what keywords should you be optimizing for, and then run reruns that report and provides you this pretty thorough report that typically what you would get when you're working with an SEO agency. Kind of like that's the the first part of it. And then we we

call that the brains of it. And then inside the editor where you're normally dragging and dropping and building out your direct booking site from scratch, rather than dragging and dropping and changing headlines, you can actually instruct Arya to build out your homepage. So you can say take my sighteline report and update the copy on my homepage. and it'll go through all the headlines, all the descriptions, all the value props, all those cards, and updates them all to copy that is specific to you. So, you now

get the power of being able to kind of vibe code your own website, but you're doing it on a very, very strong foundation. Um, so that really changes the game of how even smaller property managers are able to build these really high performing sites without having to become an expert at all these tools or h having to hire an agency to build it. That's awesome. That sounds amazing. Uh, love to love to see it in action. And yeah, that really speaks to how deep you can

go and just really any part of the short-term rental operation. You know, there's there's so many layers to every single piece and direct booking websites is just another important piece of that. I'm I'm curious though, Gil. So, let's say someone's got a great property. They think it's a a really good uh opportunity to build their own business essentially, and so they need a direct booking website to do that. Um, they've gotten a really great direct booking website. Maybe they're working with you guys. Is that enough?

you know, is that enough for them to actually get the bookings or do they need to be actively involved in email follow-ups and maybe text blasts and all these other things? And are those things that you guys are also looking at? Right now, we we're solely focused on one discoverability and two conversions. So, we want to make sure that people are having uh websites that are visible by AI that they can crawl. And so if you have the right content in there that is interesting to

the chat engines or the answer engines that is able to kind of pick that information up um you still have to do the work. For us we invest pretty heavily in SEO at craft stays for our own business there. Been nurturing it for the last 2 years. But if you open up a incognito Chrome browser and you search direct booking website builder we're probably going to be the first position in there and it's because we invest pretty heavily into it. We make sure that our partners

are linking to our websites. We are making sure that we have good content in around there. We have good guides in there. All the content on on our website is really geared towards signaling to Google that this is what we're all about and really making sure that if prospective clients are looking at a website that they're able to find everything they need. So we we optimize quite a bit, but we're now at a point where we don't have to do kind of paid marketing to to

get those eyeballs in there. But it does take a bit of time there. It didn't happen overnight. Not at all. So like and you can take many different ways, different different approaches. I know property managers that they want to spend on social. So they'll invite influencers to stay at their properties. Their influencers will share. And some of our largest customers are using that as a platform to win direct bookings. We have a property manager that ran a campaign on December 31st, New Year's Eve basically. And

within the first 7 days of the new year, they got $60,000 worth of bookings. They slammed our our system. They had massive massive amounts of volume there in terms of traffic and they were able to convert a high number of them into into bookings. So, it really depends on kind of your tactic there. I would say that kind of the lowest hanging fruit is collect emails from your last guest and hopefully you're delivering really strong hospitality. Guests love love staying at your place. they they they

think about the great memories that they had there and they want to kind of repeat that type of experience there and hopefully you're delivering on that. And if you are, then I would recommend really spending a bit of time to collect emails from past guests, put them into some sort of funnel and build out a 12-mon sequence email. That's probably the easiest thing you can do. You set it up once. My recommendation is within the and email them every single month for the first 12 months.

And maybe in the very beginning, you might want to send out two or three emails to kind of warm them up, but the first nine months, you're just talking about all the great things to do specifically in the area. You may not even mention your property at all in those emails because it's not about you. They've already stayed at your place. You maybe you can the first email can kind of warmed up and says, "Thank you for kind of staying with us and hope you had

good memories." But outside of that, like you want to focus the attention on kind of the all the different attractions, all the things to do, the locals favorite spots, your favorite restaurants, the hidden gems, all of those things. And what you're trying to do is you're you're trying to build trust and you're trying to give value out of there. And then month nine, you can then give them perhaps a coupon to stay at your properties again. And typically you want to do that month nine because

if you have for instance a typical for instance 60-day booking window um they're probably thinking about their next vacation one month prior. So you want to get them right as they're thinking about their next vacation, their next annual vacation. Um and that's I think that's the easiest thing to do. You set it up once, you have some mechanism to collect emails either through StayFi for instance um using the modem or QR codes in your properties or in your guide books, but some sort of funnel that

kind of puts their emails into your email service provider and then you set up a 12-mon sequence. Um you set up once maybe spend an afternoon doing so. Um and then you you can almost forget it. You don't even have to maintain it. You don't have to send out manual emails every so often. That's that's the the bare minimum that I think everybody should be setting in place. It's so easy. Yeah. It's it's way easier to do than it than it ever has been. Right. I

probably set it up in like 30 minutes. Yeah. Although I would, you know, there is a lot of AI garbage out there and it's good. You know, just review things. You know, if you're out there and you're creating templates with AI, just review them first. Make sure it doesn't sound like a robot. Yeah. And you don't have to make the emails super fancy either. Like you don't have to have like full-blown like interactive emails and and so on. Some of the best emails could be more

text based as well too. So you don't have to feel like you need to get everything polished. And sometimes you're right, like the more polished ones have that fingerprint of AI that people see and like, okay, I'm not going to read this. This is this is not written by a human for another human. Well, I know um we could keep talking about all these little pieces, you know, much much deeper. Uh Gil, but as we wrap up here, how does someone get started with Crafted STS?

You know, what's it cost? Do you guys connect to the the majority of PMS's? Can you give us a little bit of how someone might get started with you guys? Yeah, so you can go on to our website craftists.co. Um there's a get started button on the very top. Um and there's many ways to work with us. You can do self-service. So if you're a property manager that has anywhere from one to six stores and you want to just get started and build out your direct

bookite website as as quickly as possible, um you can do that. Uh we also do offer white glove and custom services as well too. So, if you're in the property manager, that's probably over 12 to 20 doors. Typically, that's when we start to build out their website for them. We'll build out their landing pages, their collection pages, set them up really on a really good platform for them to kind of build on top of. Um, so you can do that. Um, in terms of kind of

like how much we cost, um, normally it's $89 for the first two properties, um, and then $8 for each additional property. Um, right now we have a $20. Yeah, that's per month. Yeah. Yeah. Per month. So, if you're self-service, um that's how much it should be per month. And then right now, we have a $20 promotion where it ends up becoming 69 for the first 12 months there. So, you can get your direct booking website pretty economically without having to hire a big agency to kind

of build it out and spend thousands and thousands of dollars on on doing so. And probably your hosting cost would probably be cheaper than here with our service than paying the agency to build it out and then pay them hosting on top of it. It's quite economical. And that's kind of why we we built the company in the first place. We we didn't want really high barrier to entry in terms of knowing how to build out a really high performing website, but also making it like

economically infeasible. Like we didn't want to make it where people had to invest really heavily into doing so because we believe that property managers very early on into their journey should be nurturing this because the earlier that you get started in your direct booking journey, the easier it is, the earlier it is that you'll be able to get those doubledigit direct booking rates where you start to be independent on. So we didn't want that high barrier to entry. Yeah, for sure. and and it is an

investment, you know, like it doesn't happen overnight. But, you know, for you guys out there that maybe don't have a great direct booking site set up, just remember, you know, 15% Booking.com, Airbnb, it doesn't take a lot of reservations to to pay for something that you're building building a business on top of. So, yeah, like our property managers that are two years into it, the ROI that they're getting on our platform is enormous. And that's that's another reason why we we we we we stip in

the first year is that we want folks to kind of get started and really not have cost as a prohibitor to to do this. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Gil. For for anyone out there, if you haven't heard his podcast yet, it's Booked Solid. And make sure to check out Crafted Stays, and we'd love to have you back on in the future.