Host to Host Direct Bookings That Pay Peers Instead of Platforms with Na’ím Anís Paymán

Summary and Highlights

👤 About Na’ím Anís Paymán

Na’ím Anís Paymán is the Founder and CEO of Zeevou and the Chief Nucleator at Communitise. He studied Natural Sciences at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, and started providing short term accommodation in Cambridge and Oxford while still a student. That business grew across multiple UK cities and eventually into guesthouses and hotels, reaching a £25M property portfolio built the hard way through spreadsheets, 2am guest messages, and OTA commissions that climbed every year.

Unable to find software that matched the reality of running multi location serviced apartments, he built his own. Zeevou launched in 2020 and went on to win Most Innovative New Hospitality Technology at the Innovation and Excellence Awards, Best Channel Manager at the Shortyz Awards, and VRMB’s Keystone Award for Best Small to Mid Sized RPMS. He is based between the UK and Albania, and still spends a large part of each year meeting operators in their properties and at meetups.

🔧 The Six Month Deadline That Produced a PMS

Na’ím did not build his platform gradually alongside the old one. He handed in notice on his existing PMS, told two developers they had six months, and moved everything on the day the contract ended.

Roughly 150 units migrated at once. Then came two weeks he describes as manic.

The developers had not fully grasped that availability has to decrease every time a booking lands. Double bookings flooded in. It is a useful reminder for anyone assuming booking logic is simple, and part of why we usually advise hosts to launch a direct booking site with a PMS already in place.

🤝 Why He Made the PMS Free and Built ZeeLink

Zeevou is now free. That decision came from a specific frustration.

Na’ím watched margins compress across the industry while platform costs climbed. He points to Airbnb moving from roughly 3 percent to 15.5 percent under its host pays model, alongside years of other increases. His conclusion was blunt: the OTAs appear to be the only ones making serious money, and everyone else is scrambling.

So he asked a different question. Instead of paying OTAs, why not pay each other?

ZeeLink is the answer. Hosts share inventory with one another, advertise each other’s properties, and earn commission when they pass a booking along. The bigger the network, the more valuable it becomes for everyone in it, which is exactly why the PMS underneath it costs nothing.

📈 The Portfolio Problem That Holds Small Hosts Back

Here is the part that will land for newer operators.

Na’ím names portfolio size as the rate limiting factor in direct bookings. If you have two units, the effort of building a brand rarely pays back fast enough to feel worth it.

Pooled inventory changes that math. A host with three properties can market thirty. Someone pitching for management contracts can show owners a credible portfolio under their brand. Larger operators with existing traffic can monetize the inquiries they cannot fill themselves rather than losing them.

He also sketched out uses beyond hosts. Travel influencers currently trade a stay for a post, when they could earn ongoing commission instead. Marketing consultants can prove they drive bookings before asking for a retainer. Management companies can use it as a lead source. If you are still mapping your channels, the Direct Booking Quadrant is a good companion read.

🧠 The Real Difference Is Mindset, Not Tooling

Gil asked the question every operator wants answered. What separates the clients who get consistent direct bookings from the ones who stall?

Na’ím’s answer was immediate. “Dare I say it’s probably not the tools, but it’s a mindset.”

The hosts who win set the site up properly, then keep going. Initial SEO structure, ongoing blogging, rich snippets, structured data, optimization for both traditional search and AI answers. Letting a beautiful site sit untouched produces very little, no matter what is integrated behind it. Our guides on optimizing for Google and ChatGPT and the GEO framework for vacation rentals cover the mechanics of that work.

They also promote relentlessly. Book direct prompts in every email footer and invoice. Peak dates blocked on OTAs when the calendar will sell out anyway.

📞 Website Bookings Are the Smaller Half

This was one of the more grounding moments in the episode.

Even with everything dialed in, Na’ím says website bookings are a small proportion of total direct bookings. The larger share comes from repeat guests who email, WhatsApp, or call. Contractors and traveling nurses rarely go back through a booking engine.

So his team built for that reality. One click extensions with the price and payment link ready to send. Deposits, rental agreements, and data capture handled in the same flow.

The lesson for hosts is to stop treating the website as the whole of direct bookings and start treating it as one entry point among several. That is the same argument behind building an email list from your direct booking website and running a proper repeat bookings email strategy.

☎️ Call Every Guest, Then Use What They Tell You

At his management company, whoever was on shift called every guest the moment they booked.

Why are you coming to the area? Planning another trip? Interested in a different part of the country where we have inventory?

Gil pointed out the second benefit. Those calls hand you a wealth of content intelligence. When your team knows exactly why people visit, your blog and local guides write themselves, and your SEO landing pages target the right intent.

Na’ím then extends it into data. Who is your ICP? What market are you actually serving? Where is the gap? OTAs analyze millions of data points to optimize conversion, and independent operators can run the same discipline at a smaller scale using analytics and guest behavior data.

He shared one flywheel worth stealing. Trackable voucher codes, capped by volume, distributed through newsletters and social, with every resulting booking attributed back to the code. Guests become the referral engine.

💸 A Clear Warning on Paid Ads

Na’ím is not against paid ads. He is against paid ads as the starting point.

Before spending, he wants the funnel, the data capture, and a plan for maximizing lifetime value from each lead. Then he wants tracking that follows a guest from first ad impression to confirmed booking, including rate plan, time on site, and campaign ROI.

His final test is the one most operators skip. Compare that real cost, including marketing and design staff, against what you would have paid the OTA. And remember the OTA can be top of funnel rather than the enemy, which is the whole idea behind the billboard effect.

Gil agreed and added that organic channels compound while ad spend evaporates. If you want the counterpoint from an operator who runs ads well, Amber Knight’s episode on why traffic alone will not fill your calendar pairs neatly with this one.

🛠️ You Are Probably Underusing the PMS You Already Have

One of the most quietly useful things Na’ím said: most people do not need to switch their PMS.

They need a marketing strategy first. Discount codes, guest messaging, segmentation, and lifecycle automation already exist inside most systems and sit unused. Talk to your provider before you migrate.

Only when you have genuinely pushed the tools to their limit does a new tech stack make sense.

⚠️ What a Vibe Coded Website Quietly Gets Wrong

Gil raised compliance, and Na’ím ran with it.

Yes, you can generate a beautiful website in under a minute. He uses AI for internal tools himself. The moment it faces the outside world, the questions change.

Are you blocking availability before taking payment, or letting a payment through while another channel books the same night? Is the site legible to Google and to AI assistants? Are the rich snippets there, the structured data, the GA4 ecommerce tracking, Search Console, Tag Manager? Then add GDPR, which applies to any host anywhere serving a single European guest.

“You feel like you’ve won, but I think that’s the start of the journey.”

His suggestion is a good one. Point your AI energy at custom dashboards that help you understand your business, not at rebuilding infrastructure that already exists. Zeevou now ships an MCP connector so operators can interrogate their own data through Claude or ChatGPT. If you want to understand how AI assistants decide who to recommend, read how ChatGPT actually picks vacation rental sources.

⚡ Rapid Fire With Na’ím

📚 A book that influenced your career or life?
The Balanced Scorecard, read just before COVID. One case study described a business separating what it could control from external market conditions. Months later he lost roughly half of a 250 unit portfolio to lockdowns and handed back fixed rent arbitrage deals. The book helped him see that his institutional knowledge and his team were the real asset. He kept the team together, borrowed where needed, and reasoned that whoever survived would be stronger on the other side.

🧭 One piece of mindset advice for someone starting something new?
Do not rush it. Be data driven. Get systems and processes in place before expanding, and scale at a pace where your learnings can actually be documented. His most valuable skill took ten years to develop: drawing decision flows in tools like Miro or FigJam. Guest loses a key, and every step is already mapped. Those flows become your training material. Operators building toward this will find systems before more properties and Lisa Roads on scaling to 175 properties useful next.

🎯 One tactical takeaway someone could act on this afternoon?
Join ZeeLink. It takes a couple of minutes, and you can paste an Airbnb link to have your listing generated. Beyond that, think about your business as a brand, decide which market you want to serve, and start capturing data to test whether your assumptions hold.

🔗 Connect With Na’ím Anís Paymán

Personal site and free consultation booking: naimanispayman.com
ZeeLink host network: zee.link
Zeevou: zeevou.com
Communitise: communitise.com
LinkedIn: Na’ím Anís Paymán
Facebook: Na’ím Anís Paymán

He mentioned on the episode that he reads and replies to his own messages across platforms, and that he personally welcomes new members into the network.

🚀 Listen, Then Build Something Others Can Refer To

The full conversation carries more nuance than any summary can hold, especially around network economics, guest segmentation, and what actually breaks when software meets 150 live properties. Give it a listen wherever you get your podcasts.

One theme worth carrying with you: direct bookings get easier when hosts stop competing for scraps and start sending each other guests. That applies to referral networks, to mastermind groups, and to the operator communities forming across our industry. If you are not part of one yet, find one. Then bring what you learn back to your own brand, the way Yvonne Halling did when she took a four room B&B from €10K to €100K without a single OTA listing.

And when a guest finally lands on your site, that site needs to close. 🏡 CraftedStays gives short term rental operators fast, mobile first, SEO ready direct booking websites with real PMS sync, structured data, and checkout built for conversion rather than decoration. No agency invoice every time you want to change a headline. Start your free trial at CraftedStays.co and turn the traffic you are already earning into bookings you actually own.

Transcription

Na’ím: I’ve seen the vibe coding, and I’ve done vibe coding for various bits, and we use it for internal tools. But as you say, once you start interfacing with the outside world, you have to be very careful. There are other issues besides data privacy. There are security issues. There are double booking issues. Yes, you can vibe code a website, but what logic are you actually using to create the booking? Are you blocking availability before taking payment, or are you allowing payment to go through, and in the meantime another booking came from another channel, and you end up with a double booking? How are you ensuring that the website is actually legible by AI and by Google? Are you putting all the rich snippets in? Are you making sure the data structure is there? Are you building integrations to Google Analytics, GA4 ecommerce, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, all the nice stuff? It’s very easy to get a beautiful looking website up and running with AI in 30 seconds or a minute. You could even get to integrating the PMS, and you feel like you’ve won, but I think that’s the start of the journey.

Gil: Before we bring on our guest, I wanted to talk about something I’ve been hearing a lot from hosts. I keep hearing the same thing: “I know my website isn’t converting, but I can’t afford $8,000 on an agency to rebuild it.” Here’s the thing. You’re learning all these marketing strategies, you’re driving traffic, and you’re putting it all to work, but if your site isn’t built to convert, you’re basically lighting your energy and money on fire. And even if you could afford an agency build, every time you want to test something or make a change, you have to pay them again. You can’t iterate, you can’t test, and you can’t improve. You don’t need a custom $10,000 website to get the conversion rates that matter. You just need the right platform. That’s why I built CraftedStays. It’s purpose built for short term rentals and designed from the ground up to help you drive more direct bookings. You can finally turn that traffic into bookings, and you can keep testing and improving as you learn. You can make changes all on the platform. You don’t need to learn something new. So if you need help or you want to get started, go to craftedstays.co and start your free trial. Now let’s bring on our guest and get deep into hospitality and marketing. Hey folks, welcome back to the Booked Solid Show, the show where we bring top operators to discuss hospitality, operations, and direct bookings. On today’s show I have Na’ím from Zeevou with us. He’s grown his portfolio to 500 doors and had the difficulty of finding the right tools to scale his operations, and ended up building his own PMS. Since then he’s extended his capabilities to build a decentralized OTA that allows property managers to list other people’s properties and earn a commission. This is a novel way for folks to get into direct bookings without building their own direct booking engine. I’m excited for him to share his story, why he started this in the first place, and the learnings along the way. So without further ado, let’s bring him in. Hey Na’ím, welcome to the show.

Na’ím: Thanks for having me.

Gil: We’ve been looking to connect for a long while now, so I’m glad we were able to get you onto the show. It gives me a good opportunity to get to know you much better. Maybe to kick us off, can you introduce yourself and what you’ve started?

Na’ím: Yes, sure. I’m Na’ím. I’m based between the UK and Albania. I started operating in the UK and built up a business of about 500 plus units across serviced apartments, guesthouses, hotels and so on. Parallel to that, I built some tech for ourselves, which I then made available to others as well, and more recently I’ve been working on how tech can serve as a force for collaboration between hosts.

Gil: It’s a very interesting story. I’ve seen so many folks go down that path where they see a big opportunity. They’ve grown their portfolio and then they find some restriction. That’s actually how we started CraftedStays in the first place. I was looking to build our own direct booking website and I couldn’t find any good solutions out there, so I ended up creating my own for our portfolio. What have you seen as examples of that which you’ve admired over time?

Na’ím: Of tools that others have built, or how that relates to what we’ve done?

Gil: Other stories where a founder was previously a property manager and they built something. Do you have any examples of them solving a real problem?

Na’ím: I haven’t actually used that many third party tools because I started building my own tech a long time ago. But I can relate in the same way. I started by building a cleaning app, because we were using different PMSs and cleaners kept missing jobs. They didn’t show up on time. So I decided I wanted to build my own. At some point I realized the APIs of the PMS we were using were so bad that things just kept breaking. So then I said, well, we have to build the whole PMS. And it went from there.

Gil: Talk to me a little about that. We’ve thought about the idea of doing parts of a PMS, because a lot of times we support property managers that don’t have a PMS and are only on the OTAs. But whenever I get that urge to create a PMS, I shrivel up a little, because there’s so much that has to go into a PMS. As you were building out your PMS, how did you think about it? It’s a massive project. How do you make it a standalone? Did you continue to use your existing PMS and start offloading tasks one by one into your own internal tools?

Na’ím: No, we went all in. When we decided we were going to build a PMS, the PMS we were using had a six month notice period, and I’d missed the previous year, so we were tied into another year automatically. The next year I handed in notice, and we had two developers, and I said, look, you’ve got six months, and I need a full PMS because I’m leaving. This was, I think, August, and the contract ended in February. So end of January we went live. We moved everything, about 150 units across, and we were flooded with double bookings like there was no tomorrow. The developers hadn’t understood the concept of availability, that availability has to be reduced every time you get a booking. So there were two weeks of mania. But we learned a lot along the way. I learned how to build a SaaS company from scratch, and it’s been exciting. To your point about wanting to build a PMS, we’ve made the PMS free now. Zeevou is completely free. So if you or anyone ever wants a PMS without being tied into anything, you’re very welcome to start using ours and offering it to your customers as well.

Gil: Why did you decide to give Zeevou away for free? A PMS is one of those things where, I know you’re bootstrapped, but there are so many private equity backed and venture backed PMSs out there, and they’re backed because there’s a sizable market of folks willing to pay for a PMS. Why did you go the free route?

Na’ím: A number of reasons. One was giving something back to the community. For years we had a free tier in Zeevou, which was essentially booking engines or basic direct booking websites. I’m a big advocate of helping people get more direct bookings as a way of reducing costs and dependency on OTAs, building a business on their own feet and growing an organic business. It’s the same reason we bootstrapped. Organic growth is really good. At some point I realized that the only people out there making serious money seem to be the OTAs, and everyone else is just left scrambling, especially with Airbnb now hiking their fees from three to 15.5 percent, and various other price hikes we’ve had over the years through platforms. With inflation and costs rising and margins getting squeezed because nightly rates aren’t picking up everywhere at the same pace, I thought, what can we do to help all operators, all hosts, help each other? So instead of paying OTAs, I had this idea. Why don’t we pay each other? If we’re referring bookings to each other, if we can do affiliate marketing for each other’s portfolios. And that’s how ZeeLink was born. The idea of having this host to host network with booking referrals, earning commissions when we pass bookings. That is a very clear justification for making the PMS free, because obviously the more people we have in the network, the more powerful the network will be, and the more money we can all make and stop putting money in the pockets of the large OTAs.

Gil: So just so our audience caught that, Zeevou is the PMS you created, and it was bred out of your own operations. You poured your own heart into it because you were trying to solve your own problems that weren’t met by the other PMSs available. Eventually you opened it up and found a new model that allowed you to give away the PMS for free. You found a model of helping hosts market for each other through what you call the decentralized OTA. I want you to get into what that is, but that ends up becoming almost two separate products working inside one ecosystem.

Na’ím: That’s right. They’ve got shared tech as well, and they’re running on a similar platform. The idea is, you know everything about direct bookings. It’s about the relationship you build with your customer, with your guest, and it’s about the brand. You’re building a brand. Often when people are starting off, they think, okay, I’m going to list on Airbnb, I’m going to list on Vrbo, I’m going to get lots of bookings. But the moment Airbnb decides that CCTV shouldn’t have been in your yard despite it being on the listing, you lose your business overnight. So the idea is, how do we build brands that are resilient to OTAs deciding on a whim that your business has to go overnight? As part of that, I feel strongly that we need to build a brand and a relationship with our customers, and we can build on that. The portfolio we have to offer is usually the rate limiting factor in whether it makes sense to spend enough time focusing on direct bookings. So the concept was, what if we manage to get pooled portfolios? If we all share inventory with each other, even if we’re not directly operating that property, if we’re not the primary host, we can still advertise for each other and help each other. So if you share your listings with me, then I’ve got a bigger pool that I can advertise, and I can build a stronger brand. At the same time, if I get bookings and I share them with you, I’m helping you fill your calendar. So it’s a win win.

Gil: Who is the user or the community leader? Are they other independent hosts themselves, or do you find these are typically organizations or property managers with larger portfolios? Who builds the brand that attracts all these users?

Na’ím: By talking to people, I found there’s a real mix, and everyone seems to be interested, which is great. We’ve got smaller users who are just starting off and obviously just want more bookings. Whether that’s from Airbnb or Booking.com or Vrbo or a direct site, they’re very happy to join the network and receive bookings from others. It also helps some of those smaller users showcase a larger portfolio. So if they’re talking to owners, trying to win management contracts, they can say they’ve got a larger portfolio in their brand that they’re working on, and showcase that through their websites. At the same time, larger operators who’ve got an existing customer base of guests, and who get inquiries, spare inquiries, traffic coming through their websites, they’ve already built some brand. They’ll obviously have a lot more overspill that they’re happy to feed into the ZeeLink network and also monetize by earning commissions.

Gil: What does that look like from a monetization standpoint? Do you have smaller users who could get a revenue share or commissions by being the marketer for other property managers? What does that look like from host to host?

Na’ím: Exactly. It could be someone who doesn’t even have any units, or is just starting off and doesn’t want to take on the risk of arbitrage or purchasing, or hasn’t been able to find customers for their management services. They can just come and set up a site, get people to share their inventory with them, and advertise on their behalf. That’s one opportunity. Another is someone who’s really good at marketing and has the skills. Not everyone has the skills to attract direct bookings, or is really good at sales and has built up relationships with insurance companies, corporates and so on, and doesn’t have anywhere to take their bookings. So it could really be a whole variety of people, and how they put it to use.

Gil: Have you explored other communities? I know for instance on Facebook there are a lot of Smoky Mountains groups where owners collaborate together. There are DMOs that are basically the area guide for a specific region. They work outside of it, they’re more unbiased, but they’re there to help drive overall traffic. Have you explored that space outside of the host side and more into organizations?

Na’ím: Not yet. We’re very new to this. We came out probably about two weeks ago. We’ve got a couple of hundred hosts on there, but obviously we need a lot more. To start with, we’re launching on the host to host idea because that was the primary target. But we have thought about working with DMOs, hospitality associations, mentors, anyone who’s got a group of hosts around them and wants to help them get more bookings, or at the same time wants to add a revenue stream for themselves. So if any of our listeners fall into that category, I’d love to have a chat with them about how we could work together.

Gil: Especially the mentor side of things. I meet a lot of mentors and influencers who have a community they’ve built, and they’re working closely with a lot of property managers that meet a quality bar they appreciate. I can see that being quite helpful for them.

Na’ím: Yes. Another use case would be travel influencers. Travel influencers at the moment will get a free night or two free nights, or might get a couple of hundred bucks. The idea is that by setting up in this way, they could get ongoing commissions on the work they’ve done, royalties almost. Or marketing companies, or marketing consultants. Rather than asking for money upfront, you can prove yourself by showing that you’re good at getting direct bookings. List on my site. And then once you’ve won their trust, you can say, well, are you interested in my marketing services? Or take it further. If you’re a management company and you’re trying to find leads, prove yourself by showing you can attract bookings for them, and then say, are you interested in any of my management packages or additional services?

Gil: With any type of marketplace, there’s a network effect that picks up. In your view, what’s the flywheel that once it catches on, things really pick up and you have massive success? What do you project for ZeeLink and where you want to take things?

Na’ím: We’ve tried to build a bit of a pyramid around that flywheel idea. Anyone joining early on stands a chance of earning more, because we’re giving away part of the platform fees that an incoming host pays us in the first year to the person who referred them. So if you bring us a host, you’d get 20 percent of what we earn from them in the first year as a referral commission. And obviously the sooner you get in there and the sooner you refer people, the more you’ll earn, because only one person can invite each target host in.

Gil: That’s quite clever. I like that quite a bit. It’s always challenging with any type of marketplace if you don’t have both the supply and the demand. The marketplace will fall apart, or won’t have the engine to even get started.

Na’ím: That’s right. Because we had existing customers on the PMS side as well, we had a couple of thousand property managers who were already there, so we had a good base to start from and we’re just expanding from there.

Gil: Going to the Zeevou side, you’ve built quite a bit into the PMS and quite a bit into the direct booking engine as well. What have you seen historically as features you’ve had to invest in, or certain things a property manager has done, that really separate the clients who work really well on your platform and get consistent direct bookings from the folks who struggle to get started in the first place? What’s that delta?

Na’ím: Dare I say it’s probably not the tools, but it’s a mindset. You probably know this. You have built sites for people who go off and do really well, and others who just let it sit there and expect bookings to flood in, and the reality is that doesn’t really happen. We’ve built integrations to things like Google Travel and Google Hotels and vacation rentals, but again, the amount of bookings you get just by letting it sit there is not massive. The people who get the most direct bookings are the people who actually set up the website properly, in terms of initial SEO setup, ongoing blogging, optimization for GEO and SEO. We’ve got some of these things built in with rich snippets and structured data and so on. But it’s really about making sure you keep putting content out there, and that you also promote your site. For example, in the emails we send out, or on invoices, we’ve always got a prompt of book direct and save 10 percent, or up to 10 percent. Or blocking out peak dates on OTAs to make sure your website is the only one distributing out there when you know you’re going to sell out anyway. And then even with all of that, I’d say website bookings are a small proportion of your overall direct bookings. We see a lot of our users get direct bookings from repeat customers. Some of them will go through the website. A lot of them, especially when working with contractors or traveling nurses, will be people who are just emailing you or WhatsApping you or calling you and asking to book direct again. So we’ve built various tools to make it easy to take those direct bookings in the PMS, the ability to extend the booking easily, or even if they came from Airbnb or Booking.com and they want to stay a couple of extra nights, you’ve got a one click extension. Just say when they want to check out, what the price is going to be, click send. They get a link where they pay. Security deposit, payment, rental agreement, data collection, whatever you need. It’s looking at the entirety of the different routes through which you can absorb direct bookings and making sure you’ve got tools to deal with all of those, rather than just one avenue.

Gil: I agree with you on that. I think the property managers who do really well really focus on the mindset of, how do I think about the entire engine, not just one part of it? Direct booking is not like an OTA where you spin up your site and all of a sudden you have 50 percent direct bookings. It doesn’t work like that. And whoever promises you that story is probably not telling you the full truth. It does take energy. And there are many different paths to do it too. You mentioned repeat bookings is one path. Organic SEO, AEO and GEO is another path. Email marketing is another path. Social influence is another path. There’s no right or wrong answer. I think the nice thing about our industry is that everybody comes in from very different walks of life and very different experiences. The hospitality and the types of stays they have are very different. Therefore, when you’re trying to go out and market, it often comes internally. What are the skill sets you’re really good at? What are you passionate about? And how do you do it? There are a lot of stays that are really good at hospitality, and they build up a book of business because their guests really enjoy staying with them and want to stay with them again. As long as you have that funnel to bring them back, and you have to build that funnel, they’re not going to automatically come back repeatedly. But if you build that funnel, you can do amazingly well, especially because that compounds over time. Every single year you’re hosting another set of guests, and some of them may be repeat, but you also get exposure to new ones. Over time, I’ve seen hosts that three or four years in, most of their book of business, or a good chunk of it, is repeat bookings, because they have their hospitality well dialed and their email marketing to bring them back well dialed. You’ve got to find the right recipe that fits the ingredients you have.

Na’ím: Yes, very true. As you say, hospitality is where we are. We’re in the hospitality business. So we need to stand out, and that’s also one way of differentiating from the service you get by booking through some large multinational company like Airbnb. If you’re booking direct, you get that relationship, and you’re also able to serve the guests a lot better. I’d say it’s also about sales as much as it is about marketing. So yes, working on the website, working on the SEO, the GEO, the AEO, all of that is great. But you also need to actually call people up, I think, and build up the relationship. One thing we did in our property management company was that every time someone booked, the moment they booked, whoever was on shift called them and found out a bit about them. Why are they coming to the area? Are they planning another trip to the area? Are they interested in staying in another part of the country where we have something in our portfolio? Now with ZeeLink, we can even distribute them to other operators if we don’t. But the more proactive you are in creating these bonds with your guests, the more successful you’ll be in the long term at driving direct bookings.

Gil: Just to interrupt you there for a second. I think that does two things. When you start to reach out to your guests, you get the ability to create that one to one relationship, but it also gives you a lot of data on how you should be approaching your guests. Why are people coming to your area? That also helps you on the content side. So if you are optimizing for AEO and GEO, you’re writing blog content, and you have a good intuition now because your team has called every single one of your guests and you understand why they’re visiting you. That’s a huge wealth of information you can use to make sure you’re generating the right type of content to attract more of those folks organically.

Na’ím: Exactly. That was a point I was going to make, that you need to also look at data when you’re working on direct bookings. These OTAs have millions of data points and they really analyze them to optimize conversions. We’re talking about mobile responsiveness on websites and making sure there are conversions there, but also overall looking at what type of customer is staying with me. What market am I serving? Who is my ICP? As I said, you’re building a brand. You have to take your brand to market. You need to analyze your positioning. You have to see where the gap in the market is and who we can serve. Once you have all this information at hand, you then have to build email campaigns. You have to look at how you drill down and go further. One thing we do is that everyone who stays with us, we capture that information online, or we try over the phone to get that information in, and then we try to keep engaged with them. Back to your question about the concept of the flywheel and the decentralized OTA and the host network in ZeeLink, the same question applies to guests. How can you turn your guests into your biggest promoters, getting them to be evangelists and bring more guests to book with you? One of the things we’ve developed over the years is the ability to create voucher codes tied to certain promotions, and then very importantly, being able to track every booking you get off the back of each voucher code. You can have those voucher codes limited by saying, I’ll give out up to 10 bookings at 50 percent off, and then blast that out through a newsletter and through social media or whatever it is, and get guests to refer their friends through those codes. That’s one of the flywheel concepts there.

Gil: I like the positioning and the way you’re thinking about it. In some ways, some of these features are fairly universal across the different PMSs, but in other ways the positioning and the way you think about some of these things, like discount codes. Most PMSs have some sort of discount codes, but using them in a way to attract your previous guests, making sure they’re coming back to you, thinking about your email funnel and the guest messages you send, and how you make that more natural and tightly integrated into your PMS. I think that’s one way to think about it. How do you leverage your PMS in a very effective way throughout your entire business process, to make sure that you’re delivering the right hospitality, but also that you’re able to leverage it as a marketing tool as well?

Na’ím: I’d say there are two points related to that. One is that I always say the devil’s in the detail. That’s why I built my own PMS, because everyone claims they can do everything. When you actually start using it, it’s not that useful. The other point is that most people are underutilizing their PMS. They probably don’t need to switch their PMS. They just need to put their thinking hat on and come up with a marketing strategy and see how they drive more direct bookings with the tools they already have. If they really feel they’ve outgrown them, that they’ve pushed the tools to the maximum, then it might make sense to look at a new tech stack. But it’s not always the case that you actually need to look for a new PMS. You’d be amazed. If you talk to your PMS, you’d find out they have a lot of those options built in. The one thing I’d caution against is looking at paid ads as the main way of driving direct bookings without first having built all the funnel data capture, the system and structure, and being very clear on how you’re actually going to use the leads and make sure you maximize the lifetime value you get out of each lead. And if people actually want to go into paid ads, be very careful to make sure you can track the data all the way from when that guest first sees your ad to when they’ve booked. You can look at things like which rate plans they book on, if you’ve got multiple rate plans, or how long they spend on your site before they convert, which buttons they click on to get to the checkout point. Which campaign did you spend money on? How much did you make back from that campaign? What is your ROI? Are you paying more than you would be paying OTAs for paid ads? Take into account your marketing staff, your sales staff, design costs, whatever it is on top of that, and make sure you get a real ROI figure and compare that to the cost of working on an OTA. And the OTA itself can be top of funnel for you. So it’s not the only way to go into direct bookings. And as you said, I fully concur, direct bookings is a long term game. You’re not going to crack it short term, so don’t go and burn cash on ads.

Gil: I wouldn’t usually recommend someone doing paid ads until, like you mentioned, they have their funnel baked in, their recapture system baked in, that they have pixels, that they have a full funnel view. Usually you can blow a ton of money. If you start running ads and you see the spike in traffic, but you don’t know where they’re dropping off, it’s hard for you to optimize for it. And unlike other organic methods, ads can get very pricey very quickly. You can spend a whole bunch to bring in a lot of traffic, but if you don’t have it optimized, you just blew through all those leads. And if you want to try again, you’ll have to spend the money to run your next set of ads. I like the difference between that and doing something like SEO and AEO. Those things build over time. It gives you consistent traffic that you can then optimize on an ongoing basis. So for me, my first recommendation is to really take advantage of the hospitality you already deliver and make sure that you’re giving a good experience, making sure every guest wants to come back to you, and then giving them a funnel to keep you top of mind the next time they’re thinking about a trip. A lot of that has to do with making sure you’re capturing their email and email marketing them on a very consistent basis. That’s actually the first thing I would recommend someone do, even before setting up an Instagram account or setting up an ads account. Do that, and then put in Google Analytics and understand your funnel view. Then you can figure out where you want to go next. But if you don’t have that funnel and the analytics, you can easily bleed and not know where your marketing spend is actually going.

Na’ím: Yes. I’d go further and say, depending on portfolio size and how much time and effort you want to put into it, if you’re at a certain scale, you also want to be looking at segmenting your customers. You might have different types of customers staying, so you want to make sure your CRM can filter by people who are there for business and people who are there for leisure. You can drill down into that data and then run campaigns that are specific, which helps especially if you’re trying to do outbound targeting as well.

Gil: Do you recommend any tools to help with that segmenting and email marketing, or any type of marketing? Or did you end up not finding any good tools out there and building it yourself internally?

Na’ím: We built a lot of it internally. We’ve built the whole data capture, both for newsletter subscriptions to the websites, but also, most importantly, any time we get a booking from any channel we get them to go through our online check in process, guest portal, pre check in form. Part of that is capturing not just the email address but also their marketing consent opt in. In Europe we’ve obviously got GDPR, which is data privacy protection, and which by the way also applies to hosts in the US or elsewhere in the world who are hosting even a single guest from Europe. So we capture that information, it goes straight into the CRM we’ve built in Zeevou. We’ve actually built a couple of CRMs, two for guests, one for individuals, one for companies if you’re working with corporates, and one for owners to help with the owner acquisition side. Then we’ve got automated messages you can trigger at different points of the life cycle, and we always blast with book direct, as I said, in the footers of the emails, the HTML emails, and the invoices. Book direct, book direct, with a link to the website. Then we also have the voucher codes we’ve developed that work with the booking engine on the websites, and the ability to send those out, say a week after the stay or a month after the stay. Come and stay with us again, or refer a friend, use this code, they’ll get 5 percent off. All those sorts of bits and bobs.

Gil: You mentioned a few things I found interesting, more on the compliance and website compliance side. You mentioned GDPR, you mentioned consent. That makes me a little nervous in this day where a lot of folks are vibe coding a lot more. We’re seeing people even vibe code websites. It makes me a little nervous because when I look at some of these, they don’t have some of the fundamentals that we had to learn, and we had to learn about compliance. We did a full sweep of California compliance, because I’m in California. We’ve seen folks not having their websites accessible, so we had to spin up weeks and weeks of learning about how to make sure it’s accessible. How do we make sure we have the right privacy policies in place, the consent manager, all those different things. It makes me a little nervous that folks are now vibe coding their own websites with some of those things not in place. I don’t know if you’ve seen the same thing on your side.

Na’ím: I’ve seen the vibe coding, and I’ve done vibe coding for various bits, and we use it for internal tools. But as you say, once you start interfacing with the outside world, you have to be very careful. There are other issues besides data privacy. There are security issues. There are double booking issues. Yes, you can vibe code a website, but what logic are you actually using to create a booking? Are you blocking availability before taking payment? Are you allowing payment to go through, and in the meantime another booking came from another channel and you end up with a double booking? How are you ensuring that the website is actually legible by AI and by Google? Are you putting all the rich snippets in? Are you making sure the data structure is there? Are you building integrations to Google Analytics, GA4 ecommerce, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, all the nice stuff? It’s very easy to get a beautiful looking website up and running with AI in about 30 seconds or a minute. You could even get it integrated with the PMS, and you feel like you’ve won. But I think that’s the start of the journey, because there’s a lot that goes into a good website that you could probably vibe code, but most importantly it’s the knowledge. And secondly, why would you vibe code when there are solutions out there now that give you that website with tracking and everything out of the box? Want to vibe code? Go and build your custom dashboards that help you really understand the data in your business. In our PMS we’ve got an MCP now that people can plug and play into Claude Code or ChatGPT, whatever they want to use, and really drill down into what we were discussing earlier. Who am I selling to? What’s the market? How can I improve? What complaints am I getting on my reviews? Whatever it is that you want to analyze, start working on your business. Don’t waste time reinventing the wheel.

Gil: I would double down on that and say there’s a lot of data we can get and learn from. You mentioned using your MCP to run reports. You can also run it against your reviews, against your segment data, your marketing messages, and it really helps you out on the full marketing piece. But in terms of the front end website, there are a lot of complexities. It’s an ecommerce website at the end of the day, and there are a lot of bits and pieces that go into it that are hard for a lot of folks to learn and stay on top of. It’s one thing to get that first MVP up and running, but making sure it’s consistently maintained and in compliance is another thing.

Na’ím: And things keep changing. Tech keeps changing. You have to make sure you’re keeping on top of any vulnerability changes, integrations, PMS APIs might change. You have to keep on top of that. Recently, for example, Google spun out, I forget what the shorthand was, AAOE or something, the authority tooling for blog posts so that they can see who the author is. You can specify what the author of the blog post says and provide a bio and so on, so it’s clear that it’s not AI generated content. How many people who vibe coded their website even know this is a thing, or went to update their vibe coded website to make sure they now comply with these new requirements Google’s put out there, to make sure your website doesn’t end up on the 10th page but keeps staying at the top of the first page?

Gil: It goes on and on. Na’ím, we usually end the show with three questions. I love to geek out about that stuff. So the first question. What’s a book that has influenced your career or your life?

Na’ím: It’s a good question. For career, probably one that stands out is The Balanced Scorecard, which I read just before COVID hit. I know it’s not the most modern take on running a business, but I found a lot of it very useful. There was one particular paragraph or sentence about a case study where a business had separated out the running of the business and the factors it could control from the outside market and changes in the market. It talked about how they managed to navigate a very difficult situation by consciously being aware of what they’d built, and that the problem was just temporary market conditions. Soon after that, COVID happened, and obviously everything went to mayhem. I was just building up my property management company at that point. It had about 250 units. We ended up losing about half of them, some on fixed rent arbitrage that we just handed back and said, look, I don’t owe you any money. I’m not allowed to put anyone in here because the government’s shut everything down, so you can either have the keys or switch to a management deal on a commission basis. Some of those people did, some didn’t, so we lost a lot of the portfolio. But equally, what I’ve come to realize, thanks in part to reading this book, is that I’d built up a huge amount of institutional knowledge and human capital, and a team that was running all of this. So I thought, if I manage to keep the team together and continue building that, even if I’m losing money in the short term, I’ll borrow, I’ll do whatever it takes to get to the other end of this beast that seems to be going on forever. Surely at some point there’ll be an end to it. That’s exactly what we did. I thought whoever survives this period will be strong on the other side and be able to conquer more of the market. So that was one very influential book for me.

Gil: It sounds like it came at a very serendipitous time, when it was most beneficial.

Na’ím: Yes, it did indeed.

Gil: The second question is, what’s one piece of mindset advice you’d give to someone who’s starting something completely new?

Na’ím: Specifically within our niche, I’d say don’t rush it. I don’t know if it applies to other niches. But being data driven could apply to any niche, and make sure you’ve got systems and structure and processes in place before looking to expand. Especially in our niche, there’s so much involved in running a property and so much firefighting. The 3am guest message, the fire alarm that goes off and the smoke alarm that wakes up the neighbors and gets the fire engines in. Make sure you’ve thought things through and scale at a pace where your learnings can be documented and captured and turned into systems and processes. That will mean that once you start bringing people on board, you can train them properly, rather than letting them decide on the spot how to deal with different situations. And once you get to the point of hiring people, make sure you really spend time, which is something I didn’t do enough of, training them on the systems and processes you’ve set up. The one skill I’d say is really worth trying to learn, which has taken me 10 years to get to, is drawing flows and documenting things in flows. There are a lot of tools out there like Miro or FigJam or whatever you want to use. Just put in a nice little box. If this happens, then this should happen. And if you’ve got a decision diamond where you’re saying, guest lost the key. Okay. If a guest messages and says they’ve lost the key, the first thing you do is inform them there’s a spare key. The second thing you do is keep note that they lost the key, so you can replace the lost key. The third thing you do is call up the local locksmith who holds a copy of your key and ask them to make a copy and send it to you. Whatever it is, think through these scenarios and just put them down every time they happen. Document them really clearly in a visual way. At least I love visual. I don’t like long written documents, they’re difficult to read. And then you’ve got your training materials ready. So whenever you bring someone in, you can either spend time with them going through it, or you can say, please take a look at this, and if you have any questions, let me know. And when they find themselves in that situation, they’ve got a very clear step by step guide on what they should do.

Gil: It also lowers the anxiety on both sides. As a leader, you can know that your team is delivering high quality, but also the team isn’t rifling through and making guesses. It’s not a good experience for a new team member, or even an established team member, to have to figure things out, or to relearn something another team member has learned previously. All these workflows happen because you’ve been through it once, or you can anticipate it happening, and there’s some thought that goes into it. If you can think about it and harness that once, it leverages itself on an ongoing basis, especially as your team grows or you have to hire new folks. It’s a great resource to invest in.

Na’ím: Yes, and it goes hand in hand with the branding and the marketing. One side is capturing business and the second one is delivering. These flows sit at the heart of the quality of what you can deliver. Whether you automate some of them by using AI or using a PMS or using whatever tools and integrating things up, that’s just one way of you delivering your hospitality service to your guest. So making sure those are documented, and that you keep improving them, is very important. It’s not that you’ve got a first version and that’s it. Something else happens, you go back and improve it. Making sure you do that on an ongoing basis is obviously very important to the long term success of the business.

Gil: Absolutely. Last question. We talked about a lot of different tactics that property managers can put into practice to either get started in direct bookings or amplify their direct bookings. What’s one tactical takeaway you’d recommend to them to either grow or get started in the first place? What’s something they can do in the afternoon?

Na’ím: Join ZeeLink. It’s basically direct booking expanded through the power of community. It should take a couple of minutes to join. You can copy and paste your Airbnb link if you’re already listed on Airbnb, and we’ll scrape the information and produce a listing for you in a couple of minutes. Other than that, think about your business as a brand and think about what market you want to serve, and start capturing data. We talked about this a lot. Start collecting data to prove whether what you think is right or not, and then keep iterating on that.

Gil: Yes. It’s a huge pleasure to have you on here. For folks who want to keep in contact with you, how can they best reach you?

Na’ím: You can visit my website, naimanispayman.com. I don’t know if we can include that in the caption or something. Or zee.link, Z E E dot link. You can book a free consultation there, and I’ll be very happy to have a chat with you. I try to talk to everyone myself and welcome them into the network and see how we can collaborate.

Gil: Awesome. Again, I appreciate you sharing your knowledge, why you started a PMS in the first place, your journey through that, and now creating ZeeLink. I appreciate you walking us through that entire journey and all the little nuggets you learned along the way.

Na’ím: Well, thanks for your time. People can find me, sorry, on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn, all the other places of course as well, and feel free to message there. I pick up on all my messages.

Gil: Awesome. I’ll be sure to grab those and we’ll include those in the show notes.

Na’ím: Sounds great. Thank you.

Gil: Thanks. Till next time. Bye.