Direct Booking Fundamentals I Learned Over 30 Years in Vacation Rentals with Michelle Marquis

Summary and Highlights

👩‍💼 Meet Michelle Marquis

Michelle is a fractional executive, strategic advisor, and one of the vacation rental industry’s most recognized thought leaders. Her 30 years cover property management, hospitality technology, revenue management, sales, marketing, product strategy, and executive leadership.

She spent about 12 years at Navis (now Revinate), a company built entirely around direct bookings. While she was there, it grew from roughly $1.5 million to nearly $40 million in revenue. She later led revenue and innovation at TravelNet Solutions before founding The Marquis Effect. There she works as a fractional executive for property managers and technology providers, including Guesty and PriceLabs.

Michelle is also President and a founding member of ShortCuts4STR, a collective of experienced vacation rental consultants. She received the Pioneer Award at the 2025 Vacation Rental Women’s Summit, and she wrote The Bossy Girl’s Guide to Leadership. Her latest project, Shortlistr, curates what she calls “no brainer” tools, where the value clearly outweighs the price.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Channel strategy covers every place a booking can come from, including web, phone, text, and WhatsApp, not just your OTA list
• Larger operators who once booked 100% direct now sit closer to 30%, and they want that share back
• AI search is opening a window for independent operators who publish real local knowledge
• Adopt AI only after you know what good looks like in your own processes
• Every direct booking plan comes down to three levers: eyeballs, conversion, and revenue
• Phone calls still matter for high consideration stays, and how you handle them affects conversion

🍸 From Fax Machines to AI Search

Michelle’s early career sounds like another planet. Inventory went to Expedia by fax. Pacing reports lived in Excel files she updated every Monday. She kept paper notebooks from past years so she could compare pickup across six room types.

Then Vrbo arrived as a flat fee marketing platform, and bookings still came in direct. When it switched to commissions, operators were furious. Michelle remembers T shirts printed about it. Over time, Vrbo simply became part of the distribution mix.

That history shapes how she thinks about building a scalable direct booking strategy. Every new channel looks like a threat at first. The operators who come out ahead treat it as one piece of a larger plan.

🧭 Channel Strategy Is Bigger Than Your OTA List

For Michelle, direct bookings are king and OTAs are second in command. Her real point is that you need a channel strategy, not a fight between direct and distribution.

Airbnb and Vrbo are table stakes. Beyond them, she counts Marriott, Hyatt, American Express, and dozens of other outlets. Voice and text bookings, WhatsApp included, are channels too. If you have been thinking of OTAs as the enemy, the billboard effect offers a more useful way to see them. Tim Hubbard makes a similar case in his episode on scaling 220+ properties with maximum distribution.

🤖 The AI Search Window for Independent Operators

Gil shares CraftedStays research that stands out in this episode. For very specific searches with several amenity filters, OTAs dominate the AI answers. For discovery questions like where to go, what to do, or where large families should stay, independent operators show up far more often.

The reason is simple. OTAs don’t have local boots on the ground. The operators getting cited write from real experience. Damian Sheridan’s story about a local bar guide that booked a 16 month stay shows exactly this. For the mechanics, see our guides on generative engine optimization for vacation rentals and optimizing for Google, ChatGPT, and AI search.

Michelle offers some perspective. Most property managers got into the business by accident. They don’t know where to start with AEO, and many can’t keep up with it on their own. As recently as February, she says, one industry company told her AI search wasn’t worth worrying about. 👀

🐢 Slow Down Before You Automate

Michelle’s message is also the headline of the episode: “Slow down. Let’s get back to some basics.”

The AI hype makes operators feel they’ll be left behind if they don’t automate everything right away. Her view is that AI works best when you already know your best practices and processes, so the bot carries out something specific and intentional.

Gil agrees. When a team knows what good output looks like, AI helps them go further. When they don’t, it produces slop. Sabrina Mulligan’s episode on AI guest communication that keeps a human brand is a good companion listen on this.

👀 Direct Booking Fundamentals: Eyeballs, Conversion, Revenue

This is the core of the episode. Michelle looks at every direct booking plan through three levers.

1. Eyeballs. How are people getting to your website, and is each source actually working? PPC, AEO, organic content, and social ads all count here. With one client, she found tens of thousands of dollars in wasted ad spend. Her rule is to inspect what you expect. If tracking is your weak spot, start with UTMs in Google Analytics and traffic tracking for direct booking growth.

2. Conversion. Once guests arrive, do they book? Michelle took one client from 0.25% to 0.85% conversion. With stays averaging around $17,000, you can picture how much revenue had been slipping away. Amber Knight covers the same gap in why traffic alone won’t fill your calendar.

3. Revenue. Michelle says direct bookings typically run about 30% higher in value than OTA bookings. One lift she saw came from showing guests a side by side of Airbnb, Booking.com, and direct rates. CraftedStays now has this built in as a direct booking price comparison tool. Activity and tour add ons help raise booking value too.

☎️ The Phone Still Closes High Consideration Stays

At Navis, Michelle’s team tracked every inbound call. Vacation rentals, she explains, are high consideration purchases: expensive, complicated, and important. Take the guest bringing an 80 year old grandmother on a third visit to the area. That guest needs to talk to a person.

Calls may now be a smaller share of bookings, maybe around 25%, but raising phone conversion from 25% to 35% is real money. She has even written her own seven non negotiables for these calls. You’ll want the full episode for that part. 📞

🥩 Direct Is the Steak, Airbnb Is the Icing

Gil and Michelle also discuss Airbnb’s new direct booking link and its 6% fee. It’s cheaper than the standard fee, but as Gil points out, you still don’t own the guest. You can’t pixel them or capture their email.

Operators building a real engine have newsletters, retargeting, and repeat guests. If that’s your goal, start with our guides on collecting guest emails and email marketing for vacation rentals.

Michelle also adds urgency. After years of growth since COVID, many markets expect a flat year, and the industry hasn’t seen that since 2008. If independent operators don’t get better at direct bookings, she warns, Airbnb and Vrbo will.

⚡ Rapid Fire with Michelle

📚 Book recommendation: The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Her copy sits at her meditation station and looks well worn. Be impeccable with your word, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions, and always do your best.

🧠 Mindset advice for starting something new: Patience. Cut yourself some slack and give yourself grace.

🎯 One tactical takeaway for today: Evaluate your eyeballs. Look at every way people reach your website and ask whether each one is really working. She adds that this matters most when business is good, because that’s when nobody looks.

🤝 Connect with Michelle Marquis

💼 LinkedIn: Michelle Marquis (her most active channel)
🌐 Website: The Marquis Effect
🧰 Project: Shortlistr

🚀 Listen, Connect, and Start Booking Direct

This recap covers the highlights. The full conversation has more, including Michelle’s take on hotel tech, the legacy software she expects the industry to retire, and the story of a client who grew from 200 to 800 units. 🎧 Listen to the full episode on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to keep learning with other operators? 💬 Join the Booked Solid community and get new episodes, frameworks, and direct booking conversations from hosts building real businesses.

If Michelle’s framework showed you a conversion gap, your website is the place to fix it. CraftedStays gives you a fast, mobile first, SEO ready direct booking site that syncs with your PMS and is built to convert the traffic you already have. Build your brand. Start booking direct. ✨

Transcription

Michelle: Larger property managers want more direct bookings, period. Most of them were built on the backs of direct bookings, and if you think about direct bookings going from 100% down to 30%, they want more direct bookings. There are some things that are leveling the playing field. AEO is leveling the playing field. Until the inventory catches up and the relatability catches up, Airbnb and Vrbo are probably going to win there. With Aria, that’s a real game changer, and not many property managers have access to something like that to go earn more of the direct business that is coming through AEO.

Gil: Before we bring on our guest, I want to talk just a little bit 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 really 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 really can’t improve on things. You don’t need a custom $10,000 website to get the conversion rates that really 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 some help or you want to get started, go to craftedstays.co and start your free trial. Now, let’s bring on our guest and dive deep into hospitality and marketing.

Hey, folks. Welcome back to the Booked Solid Show, the show where we bring in top operators to discuss hospitality, operations, and direct bookings.

On today’s show, I have Michelle Marquis. Everyone in the industry is racing to adopt AI right now, and Michelle’s advice is to slow down. She has spent three decades in vacation rentals, 12 of them at Navis, and now runs The Marquis Effect, working with companies like Guesty and PriceLabs. Today, we talk about what actually drives direct bookings, why some property managers do not know where to start, and the one thing she would have you evaluate today.

So, without further ado, let’s bring her in.

Gil: Hey, Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michelle: Thank you so much for having me, Gil.

Gil: I’ve been wanting to have you on the show for a little while now. I’ve seen you all around LinkedIn, and you’re doing a lot of planning behind the scenes in preparation for VRMA, so I appreciate you taking time away from all of that. I can only imagine what the last few months have been like for you, leading up to the next few weeks.

Again, I appreciate you taking the time. For folks who don’t know who you are, Michelle, do you mind giving an introduction?

Michelle: Oh my goodness. How do I abbreviate this? I have been in this industry for three decades, so a long time. I’ll give you a few things that were different. There was no Vrbo, there was no Airbnb. I was a property manager, and distribution meant that I had some of my inventory on Expedia.

And algorithm meant that when the account manager was in town, we would go have cosmopolitans. Revenue management and how to get ranked was about how many cosmopolitans we’d had. And then lo and behold, I would get ranked the next day.

To get the inventory on Expedia, I had to fill out a form and fax it to them. There was no live integration, so I couldn’t give them all of my inventory. I had to give them a set amount of each unit, fax over what was available, and hope and pray that it didn’t get booked between the time I sent the fax and three weeks later when something got booked.

Revenue management and pacing reports meant I had Excel documents that I updated every single Monday. They showed what was on the books for the future, what my pickup was from the previous year, and what my projections were by room type, and I had six room types.

I had notebooks I would literally pull out from previous years to compare the same period. How much was on the books last year? How much is on the books this year? What did I pick up last year? If I pick up this much, how far ahead or behind pace would I be? So that’s where I came from.

I was a client of a company called Navis, and Navis was 100% about direct bookings. I know we’re going to talk about that, and I’m excited to do that. They hired me to write their best practices on how to drive more direct bookings. I was there for about 12 years, and during that time they went from about a million and a half in revenue to almost $40 million in revenue.

I was involved with product management, sales, marketing, and every piece you could possibly think of. I then had a noncompete with them for three years, so I had to find something to do with myself. I did consulting with a company in Barcelona, and I also worked with a channel manager that is no longer in business.

So I got to know distribution really, really well. I believe direct bookings are king, but I also believe that second in command is OTAs. They’re a part of your distribution, and it’s really about a channel strategy, not a distribution versus direct booking strategy. I know we’ll talk about that a little bit.

I then worked for TravelNet Solutions. I was there for three years, and they brought in private money, and you know how things go when that happens. Then I had a three year noncompete with them. For those three years, I decided to start my own business, and that’s The Marquis Effect.

It’s what I do today. Guesty is one of my clients. I chose them because I think they’re the most forward thinking property management system out there. I also work with PriceLabs, which is revenue management. And then I have a group of products that I call The Shortlist. They’re products I believe are the no brainers out there.

Their value is larger than their price, so they’re no brainers, as I call them. That’s The Shortlist. So that’s what I’m doing now.

Gil: That’s amazing. As I think about the trajectory of change over the last three decades, the last five years alone feel like so much has happened. I’m interested in hearing how much actually occurred in the earlier days.

Was it stagnant at some point? What were the big milestones? During that time you had other OTAs come into play. We had Vrbo, Airbnb, and now all the buzz seems to be Airbnb. So what changed in that period, and how did it change your idea of channel strategy?

Michelle: Okay, a few things. Remember that 30 years ago, websites and booking engines were just getting started. Talk about back to the basics, right? People were still printing brochures and leaving them out at gas stations and places like that.

So very, very basic. The first game changer was Vrbo. They were the first distribution, and when they first came out, it wasn’t distribution, it was a marketing platform. You paid a flat amount to have your listing, and you got bookings direct.

They didn’t book online. That by itself has changed. Then Airbnb came in and has supported an entire industry that didn’t even exist, let’s call it, seven years ago. These are companies that built their businesses on Airbnb and Airbnb alone.

They didn’t have a direct website. I have a client who, when I first met them, had about 200 units and no direct booking website. So they built one. I’d call it an okay one, not a great one, because they were like, “We need a website. We’ll build a little website.”

Now they have moved on and built a pretty complicated, big website, and they’re not 200 units, they’re 800 units. They’ve done some amazing things. So back to Vrbo: they came in and shook things up. When their pricing model went to commission based, the industry was so mad.

There were T shirts made about how bad Vrbo was for the industry. Not kidding. There were entire sessions of property managers talking about how bad they were for the industry. In time, they just became part of your distribution. So when we talk about channel strategy, I look at it as not just which OTAs you list on.

Channel strategy to me also includes direct bookings, and that means online bookings and voice bookings, because there’s both now. Now there’s even text. People are booking via WhatsApp. That’s all new. So those are channels, and then the other channels are Airbnb and Vrbo, and those are what I call table stakes.

You kind of have to be there. And from there you’ve got Marriott. I did a demo with Savvy today, and it looks super interesting to me. There’s also American Express, and there’s Hyatt. I met with BookingPal earlier this week, and there were probably 40 different channels you could and should consider listing on.

So that is now part of a distribution strategy. It’s not just OTAs and which ones you should be on. It’s all the other places you’re getting bookings from as well.

Gil: You mentioned early on something I hear quite a bit from property managers who have been in this a very long time: they built their business on the backs of direct bookings, and everything was only direct bookings. You mentioned the brochures in the very early days and how things have shifted.

For some of the larger property managers, where has that trend gone from possibly being 100% direct bookings to some other percentage? Where do you see it landing right now, and do you see it going up or down?

Where are things trending from your vantage point?

Michelle: Super interesting, whether they’re going up or going down. I would say that larger property managers want more direct bookings, period. Most of them were built on the backs of direct bookings, and if you think about direct bookings going from 100% down to 30%, they want more direct bookings.

Now, can they get it? I don’t know. There are some things that are leveling the playing field. AEO is leveling the playing field. I think until the inventory catches up and the relatability catches up, Airbnb and Vrbo are probably going to win there to start. But I think it’s a real opportunity for individual property managers doing the right things, like with your product and your AI. What was her name?

Gil: Aria.

Michelle: Aria. With Aria, that’s a real game changer, and not many property managers have access to something like that to go earn more of the direct business that is coming through AEO.

Gil: That’s very interesting, because we’ve seen some of this. We did some research, and what we found is that right now, when you search for stays, you get a mixture of both independent operators and the big OTAs. We found that searches with about three different filter criteria, where people are being very specific about the amenities they want, typically lean toward the OTAs. More than 50% of the results that come back are from the OTAs.

But the top of funnel searches, where people are doing discovery planning, thinking about where to stay, where to travel, or which attractions to see, seem to resonate toward independent operators. Independent operators have that real local knowledge, and they are coming up far more than OTAs.

If you think about it, OTAs don’t create that type of content. They don’t have that content machine. They don’t have local boots on the ground. And typically, the ones coming up are not using AI to generate everything. They’re putting their own experiences in there.

Their local team knows all the best spots, so they’re being very specific with their recommendations, and those are the ones coming up in top of funnel searches. Also, when you start asking where to stay in an area without very specific criteria, but the criteria is something like large family stays, the independent operators who build deep landing pages for those are coming up.

So it’s very interesting right now. I can see this bifurcation between OTAs and independent operators. We’re all fighting for different places. But I do think independent operators have a small opening where, if they do it well and focus intently on organic strategy, they have an unmatched chance to get a lot of bookings when people plan their stays through these chat services.

Michelle: That makes a ton of sense to me. And that’s where products like what you’ve developed need to get out there. They need to be more widely adopted, because otherwise, where do you start? Property managers don’t know where to start.

Gil: It’s so complicated, because even when we started doing our research on how to optimize for it and what to do, people have known SEO for a long, long time because it’s been so well researched, and not just in hospitality but in every single industry. But there’s so much changing in AEO and GEO that it’s really hard to understand.

If I’m optimizing for this, what do I do? Do I do the schema stuff I’ve been hearing about, the llms.txt? Do I work on performance? Do I write different content? It’s a lot for folks to take in if they don’t keep a pulse on it every single day.

Michelle: Well, the thing is, Gil, most people get into being a property manager by accident. They’re either really good at marketing, or they had a couple of their own homes and said, “All right, I can do this, let’s add more.” Generally speaking, they didn’t say, “I’m going to be a property manager in the vacation rental space, and here are the things I need to know and the gaps I need to fill.”

They don’t do that. So, like you said with the different things people could do to their website, they don’t even know where to start. In general, they don’t know where to start, which means they need to hire somebody. And not everybody is on the cutting edge of what AI is doing to marketing and search.

Gil: We focus more on the infrastructure side, and we have a lot of data products built in. I’m interested in seeing how agencies show up as people seek help, because there’s a bit of fear happening right now in the broader short term rental industry that if you don’t keep up with these things, you’re going to be left behind.

I don’t know if the resources and agencies are out there saying, “If you need help with these types of things, come to me.” I haven’t seen that. I do know some are focused on this, but not a whole lot. I don’t know if you’re seeing the same thing.

Michelle: I can tell you that as recently as February, I met with a company in our industry, and they told me they weren’t worried about AEO. They weren’t worried about AI and how it would affect websites. It was a nonissue. They’re not saying that today, but that wasn’t very long ago. They thought it wasn’t something they needed to worry about, that it was hype.

The other thing is that there is a ton of AI hype, and not just in marketing but in automations. What should you automate? Should you automate everything? Do you lose the humanity in it if you do? There’s been so much talk about it that people are nervous.

They feel like they need to hurry up and implement, because if they don’t, they’ll miss out while all their competitors are doing these things. I just recorded some content for my social media, and what I was telling people is, “Slow down.

Hang on a second. Let’s get back to some basics here.” What are the basics you need to be doing? And if you’re going to adopt AI, hallelujah, but make sure you have gone through everything and you know what your best practices and processes are. That way, when you do have the AI bot live, it’s doing something very specific to how you want it to run. I think people are adopting it…

Gil: I think that’s such a good point, because what I see, even in our own practices, is that when we know what good looks like and what the output should look like, we can start to work with AI in a meaningful way. But if we assume we’re going to use AI to automate something and we don’t judge the outcomes, it can come up with a lot of slop.

We’re seeing a lot of slop, not just in hospitality but all over the place, as people try to do more and more. But I find that operators who have a craft, and are really good at that craft, can use AI to elevate it. They reach much further and move much faster, and it doesn’t come at a quality compromise at all.

That’s because they put the energy into understanding the fundamentals they need to pay attention to, and how to apply AI, quote unquote, “the right way.”

Michelle: Yeah. Agreed. Absolutely agree.

Gil: You talked a bit about fundamentals, and right before the show we were talking about what you think about when you’re really investing in direct bookings. How do you think about the fundamentals of direct bookings, and what do people need to invest in if this is a channel they really want to attack?

Michelle: I look at a strategy or plan to get more direct bookings in three ways. The first thing I call eyeballs. How do you get people to look at your inventory? How do you get more eyeballs today than you got yesterday? When I talk about more eyeballs, it could be that you’re spending money on PPC, on AEO, or on other organic ways to get people to your website.

You could use a product like BookingsCloud, which is a social media advertising product that I think is awesome. But that’s how people get to your website. So the first thing you need to look at is what your strategies are to get eyeballs to your website, and evaluate each one.

How am I doing each one? Am I doing it well? PPC is a big, dark hole of money. To really know whether it’s working for you, you need somebody who’s really good at tracking so you know you’re getting an ROI.

I worked with a client, and I started looking into their PPC investments. The amount of things I found running wild and wasting money was not a few thousand dollars. It was tens of thousands of dollars. You’ve heard the saying, inspect what you expect.

So look at all of those things as far as eyeballs. The next thing, once you’ve shored up the eyeballs and you’ve got people coming to the website, is conversion. What is your conversion rate? I had a client whose conversion was about 0.25%. I did a few things for them, and they got to 0.85%.

This client’s stay value was somewhere around $17,000, so you can imagine how much revenue was being lost out the other end. What are you doing to get people to convert once they’re on the website? How many clicks are they getting through?

Are they just pouring into one area and then leaving? You know this, because this is what you do. Pay attention to that. The third thing is that direct bookings are always higher, to the tune of about 30%, than OTA bookings. So the third thing is how you get more revenue from the individual people searching on your website.

There’s a tool called Direct Booking Tools that shows on the website, here’s the rate on Airbnb, here’s the rate on Booking.com, and here’s the rate here. That was one of the things we did, and it helped increase the conversion rate because guests saw they were getting the best deal on that platform.

So that’s an example of converting more from existing traffic. That’s how I look at things.

Gil: To summarize: one is driving more traffic, the eyeballs you mentioned. Two is making sure your onsite conversion funnel is really well dialed, that you’re measuring different parts of the funnel and optimizing for it.

And three is making sure you maximize your revenue. As you think about that 30%, does some of it come from upsells or other opportunities to increase the booking value altogether?

Is that part of it…

Michelle: A way to increase…

Gil: …or is that outside of it?

Michelle: No, that’s some of what they do. They work with a company, I’m sorry, I can’t remember the name, that sells activities, tours, chefs, that sort of thing, and you can add them right in.

Gil: Like a Viator?

Michelle: Like a Viator, but…

Gil: Yeah, like a Viator. There are a few, and Xplorie is another one. There are a bunch of different ones, and we’re starting to dabble in that as well. I’m interested in hearing from your side, and this is maybe a bit selfish because I obsess over this, but where do you feel the infrastructure is right now?

To give you a sense of where I’m coming from, I come from ecommerce, where there’s a lot of infrastructure and a lot of tools that connect well together. When I look at our industry, I still see websites being created on WordPress.

I still see a lot of challenges connecting these tools together. The example I give on the show quite often is cart abandonment. It existed 10 years ago, but it’s really hard for an operator to make sure that if someone comes to the website, and maybe you collected their email from a popup or they started entering it at checkout, but they got to the credit card screen and abandoned it…

We still don’t universally get that customer back into the funnel. Do you see the same thing? Do you see it shifting? Is it not that bad? Where do you see things right now?

Michelle: I think it varies. I think it’s rampant that we’re still very old school. Then I see things like what you’re doing, frankly. This is all new. Nobody’s doing what you’re doing. I also got some feedback on AirDNA’s new revenue management platform, and the person who saw it has been in revenue management for years and years.

She knows all the different companies, and she was speechless. She literally said, “I don’t even know what to say.” It was that good and that forward thinking, and built on AI, so if you want to make a change, you can make it just like that. She was blown away.

So I think some of it is going to be cutting edge, but we have so much technical debt. Think about the PMS companies. Some of them are having a really hard time adopting AI, because everything was written in code that now needs to be redone.

Even Amazon has to redo their code every, it used to be 10 years, but it’s probably every five years now. And our industry is not a huge market, which is probably why we haven’t seen some of the more sophisticated players come in. The market itself is not that big.

Gil: I feel that as well. Ecommerce is huge, and that’s why it has changed and evolved so quickly. There’s so much money being poured into online commerce, even since the dot com days. You’ve been in the industry for 30 years now, but in many ways we’re still very much in our infancy.

This industry hasn’t been around long enough. In contrast, look at hotels. We’re ahead of hotels. I actually worry more about the hotel industry in terms of speed of adoption than our industry. At least our industry…

Michelle: I was going to say hotels are behind us, I think.

Gil: Hotels have very legacy systems that have been around for many decades. They have booking systems. They don’t have a PMS in the same sense. They have four or five different tools for channel management and guest communications, and they’re all very separate. So if you’re building technology, even something like what AirDNA is doing on revenue management, or what we’re seeing with automated messaging, that’s really hard to do in the hotel space because everything is so fragmented.

I am hopeful that our…

Michelle: Yeah. They went from on premise PMSs, right? That’s really what they had. Then Oracle developed a cloud version, I can’t remember what they called it. But through that process, when they were kind of force marching people over…

Gil: I pay attention to Cloudbeds and their news quite often, because out of all the PMSs on that side of the industry, they’re probably the best in terms of adopting new technology.

It’s very interesting seeing where things are and where they’re going. I’m interested in hearing from you. You’ve seen a lot of evolutions and a lot of disruption in the space. What do you think we should all prepare for next as this industry matures?

Michelle: Probably retiring a whole bunch of technology that we’ve been using and are used to using.

Gil: What’s an example?

Michelle: I don’t want to call anybody out, but there are PMSs, or even some one off technologies, that were built on a song and a prayer.

Gil: Mhm.

Michelle: So that’s one. The other thing is that we really need to do direct bookings better. And if we don’t, Airbnb and Vrbo will. We know that. They’re large publicly traded companies.

They are going to do this well. So how do we, as individual business owners, do it?

Gil: What do you think is missing? If you could wave your magic wand and say, “This is the one problem in our industry that’s holding us back from driving more direct bookings,” what could you put your finger on?

Michelle: That’s a great question, Gil. I don’t know if I have an answer for you.

Gil: It’s a very loaded question. I’m sorry.

Michelle: Honestly, like I said, it’s back to the basics. Inspect what you expect and really do it well. Business has been good every year since COVID. Up, up, up, up. This is the first year I’m hearing that things are going to be flat. So now everybody has to pay attention. We haven’t had flat business since 2008.

Gil: Mhm.

Michelle: So what are we going to do about it? Inspecting every detail of our overall strategy, and eyeballs is probably the weakest.

Gil: I would agree with you on that one. It has been a lot of challenging years. I’ve heard mixed things. Some property managers say they’ve actually seen nominal growth since last year, and others are seeing a downward trend.

At a more macro level, I’ve seen it flatline, more so than what I hear anecdotally. And because of this, we’re having to spend a lot more time figuring out whether we’re spending our ad dollars in the right place. Are we converting? Should we be doing something differently?

But I’m also very hopeful that there are more mature systems and tools that let us mobilize commerce in a much more meaningful way than we have seen in hospitality. Maybe because I’m so close to it, I’ve been seeing a lot of new technologies come online, and folks have many more tools than they had before.

I’m hopeful that it starts to democratize direct bookings in some ways, where it’s much more accessible and there’s more structure in it. That’s what I’m really looking forward to. It might not happen overnight. It might happen over the next 18 months or so, but there’s a lot more energy and a lot more light being put into direct bookings. We even heard Airbnb say, “Here’s a direct booking link.”

I don’t know if you heard the same, but that was very interesting to see come through.

Michelle: Oh yeah. 6%.

Gil: That’s really funny, because that 6% you’re going to give them, yes, it’s a discount off the 15 and a half or whatever the rate is in your market. But you’re not owning the customer. You don’t have any way of pixeling. You have no way of capturing email.

That is not ultimately your customer. You’re sending them to a channel that handles the checkout for you at a discounted rate. But the operators who are really mindful know the difference between Airbnb being a checkout and actually building an engine.

“I’m bringing back repeat customers. I have my book of business. I have my newsletters. I have my ad campaigns. I’m pixeling.” Those are the mature systems. I think property managers who figure that out are going to be in a very, very good place.

Michelle: You know what we also have, Gil, is an entire business model built on Airbnb. For them, direct bookings aren’t core to what they do, or even something they care to do. It’s this thing where they go, “I might get a few more bookings from that. That’s kind of cool.” Not realizing that direct bookings should be their steak, and Airbnb should be the icing on the dessert, not the main business.

So there are a whole lot of people out there who don’t care about direct bookings.

Gil: I do see that shift happening, though. A lot of folks are waking up: “I put my property on Airbnb. It’s doing quite well. I’ve started to grow my portfolio. I’m cohosting.” Then they realize, “A lot of my revenue is now on Airbnb,” and they change all these different things.

I think that’s what’s driving a lot of the wake up and energy toward direct bookings right now, even for those who built their entire business there.

Michelle: Yeah. I mentioned my time at Navis, now Revinate. We tracked every phone call that came in. I call anything in the vacation rental industry what’s called high consideration. High consideration is anything expensive, complicated, or important.

When somebody is booking something high consideration, they’re more apt to make a phone call. I know that has dropped for sure, but there are still people. I have a client whose calls I listen to, where people say, “This is the third time we’ve come to the area, and I’m bringing my 80 year old grandmother, and I need to make sure we have these things taken care of.”

They can’t do that without talking to a person. So I hope people looking at direct bookings are looking at the voice side of their business, because it’s another way. Remember the eyeballs? In this scenario, they were on the website, they converted into a phone call, and now you have them on the phone. What do you need to do to convert that booking?

I actually wrote the seven non negotiables, things you should do on that phone call to get people to convert more. That’s an area I don’t think we spend enough time on, because it’s a smaller piece of the pie than it used to be, but it’s still very relevant.

Let’s say it’s 25% of the pie. You can have a real effect on booking more of those by handling them a certain way. So it’s something I think companies should be looking at.

Gil: It’s almost as if there are direct bookings from the marketing side, all the digital marketing you should be doing. But if you look at any organization, they typically also have a sales team, and the sales team knows how to close clients, what to think about, and how to take care of them.

Then you have customer service reps who make sure you’re delivering on that service or product. In many ways, hospitality is not much different from any other organization, where there are different parts of the business you need to nurture in order to grow it.

Michelle: Yeah, and you can increase conversion. If conversion is 25%, what if you can get it to 35%? Those are real dollars.

Gil: Awesome. Michelle, this has been fabulous. I’m very grateful to get your take on how things have evolved over the last 30 years, what you’ve seen, what we’re seeing that hasn’t come to fruition yet, and where things are going. I really appreciate you giving us your time.

We usually end the show with three questions. First question: what’s a book that has inspired you in your career? What’s one you come back to?

Michelle: The Four Agreements.

Gil: Nice. I haven’t picked up that book. What’s the premise?

Michelle: It’s basically four things. I have it at my meditation station, and you can see it’s very worn. Be impeccable with your word, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions, and always do your best. Those are the four agreements you have with yourself.

Gil: Michelle, second question: what’s one piece of mindset advice you would give to someone starting something completely new?

Michelle: Patience. Be patient. Cut yourself some slack. Give yourself grace. Grace and patience.

Gil: And Michelle, last question. We talked about a lot of different strategies and things property managers should be paying attention to. What’s one tactical takeaway they can put into practice today to either get started in direct bookings or amplify their direct bookings?

Michelle: Evaluate your eyeballs. Start there. Go evaluate all the areas and ways you’re getting people to your website, and whether you’re doing a good job at it or not.

Gil: I love that. We don’t scrutinize the metrics often enough, so I think that’s very tactical advice.

Michelle: Especially when business is good. When business is good, you just don’t look at things like you would if you were struggling.

Gil: Awesome. Michelle, where can folks follow you? How can they keep up with you and everything you do?

Michelle: You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m very active there. And I have a website, marquiseffect.com.

Gil: Awesome. Thank you again, Michelle, for sharing all your knowledge and experience with us today. It was a huge pleasure having you on the show.

Michelle: It was fun. Thank you.

Gil: All right, bye.