“You’re talking to everyone, and therefore you’re talking to no one.” 🎯 Ali Haney never planned to get into short term rentals. Twice, a plan fell through, and a rental took its place. Today she runs a branding agency for hospitality and hosts across multiple states. In this episode, Gil and Ali talk about the step most hosts skip: vacation rental brand strategy. You’ll learn how to find the guest who actually makes the booking decision. You’ll also hear why marketing works more like a spider web than a funnel, and how your past reviews can write your brand messaging for you. Summary and Highlights 👩‍💼 Meet Ali Haney Ali Haney is the Founder and CEO of Brand & Market, a marketing agency building independent legacy hospitality brands. She owns and operates two short term rentals, cohosts a third, and has been in the industry in some form since 2019. Ali is a former high school English teacher who never lost her love of learning. She is also a former wedding photographer who knows how to tell a compelling visual story, and a current superhost who knows the STR industry from the inside out. She hosts The Brand & Market Podcast, now more than 115 episodes in. Outside the agency, you’ll usually find Ali, her husband Caleb, and their three kids covered in paint and plaster dust while they work on their latest boutique hospitality property. 🏡 🔑 Key Takeaways 🏡 Two Plans Fell Through, and Rentals Took Their Place Ali’s first rental started as a last effort to keep a house. Her husband was active duty military, and orders moved the family to a new duty station. They tried a year as long term landlords and didn’t love it. So they turned their first home, about half a mile from the Intracoastal Waterway in North Carolina, into a short term rental. The first booking came in over Thanksgiving 2019, just before COVID changed everything. After the military, the family chose Kentucky and moved to 90 acres on the Bourbon Trail. Ali’s dream was a wedding venue. Zoning offices and neighbors pushed back, and even with the permit approved, the restrictions meant she couldn’t deliver the experience she wanted. So the property became a short term rental in 2022, and it still runs strong today. In 2025 the family added Luna, a 30 year old geodesic concrete dome in the mountains of Virginia. 🌙 Ali is honest that none of it was easy. There were natural disasters, tough guests and two road washouts on check in days. 🌙 Every Property Needs a Story Before Ali buys, she looks for a story she can tell. Luna came to her as “The Toasted Marshmallow,” and the name felt a little kitschy for where she wanted to go. She renamed it Luna as phase one of a planned micro resort. A mirror house called Sol would follow, giving guests the sun and the moon on one property and a reason to come back to collect every experience. The road washouts mean that expansion is on hold at Luna. The idea itself is not. Ali learned that the more you share a vision out loud, the more opportunities find you. She recently submitted an LOI on an assisted living facility she hopes to turn into a boutique hotel in her hometown. If you love the idea of a destination brand with many units, Steph Weber’s story of building a 12 cabin micro resort with 30 to 50% direct bookings is a great companion listen. 🧱 Vacation Rental Brand Strategy Comes Before Marketing Ali admits this is the unsexy answer. Direct bookings used to feel optional. Since Airbnb’s host fee change, she says, they don’t anymore, and you can read more about that shift in our breakdown of Airbnb’s simplified pricing. Her advice is still to start with brand strategy, not tactics. Here is what she means by brand strategy: The goal is to attract the right guest and also repel the wrong one. Without this foundation, Ali says, content creation turns into frustration. We explore the same idea in why your values matter more than your amenities and the power of defining your perfect guest. 👩‍👧 Market to the Person Who Makes the Booking Ali shared a Joshua Tree micro resort she worked with. It had three very different units: a studio, a party house with a pickleball court and outdoor movies, and a wellness house with saunas and cold plunges. The question was how to brand them as one. Her answer was two layers. The primary avatar is a multigenerational family from Southern California celebrating a milestone. Grandparents retreat to the studio, parents enjoy the party house, and the youngest generation sings karaoke at midnight. 🎤 Then she went one level deeper and asked who actually books. Most likely it’s someone in the middle generation, probably a woman around 35. So the messaging spoke to her: all you have to do is say yes, and everyone can plan their own experience once they arrive. That message lifts the planning weight off her shoulders. Terri-Leigh Huleis takes a similar approach in her episode on how guest avatars shape profitable rentals. 🕸️ Think Spider Web, Not Funnel One of Ali’s favorite books, Oversubscribed, describes the 7/11/4 rule. Before someone buys, they spend seven hours with you across 11 touchpoints on four channels. That’s not a straight line. So Ali asks clients to picture a spider web: The job is to speak to the same guest in many ways until they reach their next easy yes. Repurposing reels across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok can widen the web without tripling your workload. For projects raising capital, PR and podcast appearances help people find you when they search your name. Paul Anderson shares more on this in turning Instagram into a funnel. 🎥 Founders Belong on Camera One of Ali’s clients runs a boutique hotel in Sevierville, Tennessee, with deep ties to the local community. The property