“Anyone could be ranked number one. Just slash your prices.” That line from Bart-Jan Leyts sums up a trap many hosts fall into. Ranking first on Airbnb or Booking.com means nothing if your revenue goes backward. This episode of the Booked Solid Show is a little different. We usually talk about building your direct channel. This time, Gil sits across from someone who studies the other side of the table. Bart-Jan is the founder and CEO of Otamiser, an AI native revenue management service that handles OTA ranking optimization for over 25,000 units. You’ll hear how Airbnb’s algorithm thinks differently from Booking.com and Expedia. Bart-Jan explains why a fully booked calendar can quietly hurt your ranking, and why owner stays and split calendars carry hidden costs. He also shares what conversational search means for your listings, and a simple fix for guests who copy your Airbnb title into Google and find nothing. Whether you run one cabin or a full portfolio, this one will change how you look at your listings. 🎧 Podcast and Summary Highlights 👤 About Bart-Jan Leyts Bart-Jan Leyts is a 26 year old founder from Belgium and the CEO of Otamiser. He studied finance at Ghent University, and right after graduation he and his cofounders began doing hotel revenue management for family hotels and small chains across the Benelux region. They noticed something early. A property’s dynamic pricing only worked as well as its position in search. That insight turned a small rate management side project into a company that now optimizes rankings and rates across Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, and Vrbo. Bart-Jan later brought the same thinking to short term rentals, starting with Casiola in Orlando and then launching a self serve tool called AutoRank. Today Otamiser blends software, AI agents, and hands on revenue managers into one service. 💡 Key Takeaways 🔁 Bookings, reviews, and consistency drive OTA rankings. Titles and photos help, but mainly as conversion accelerators. 📅 Booking pace matters more than most hosts think. Selling out all at once can stall your visibility. 🏡 Owner stays and calendars split across channels limit the inventory each OTA sees. ⭐ How you respond to a bad review can matter as much as the review itself. 🤖 Conversational search is coming to the OTAs, and listing accuracy will decide who gets shown. 🔍 If a guest pastes your Airbnb title into Google and can’t find you, you have an SEO problem. 🎯 Visibility Is Buying Bookings Bart-Jan’s first experiment was simple. On Booking.com, his team joined the Preferred Partner program, which carries a higher commission. Then they raised rates to offset it. The result was net positive. His takeaway? Guests don’t scroll far. They type one search with all their filters and book from the top. Expedia once told his team that roughly 75% of bookings go to the first 15 listings shown. More eyeballs really do buy more bookings. That doesn’t mean chasing the top spot at any cost. As Bart-Jan points out, anyone can rank first by charging $10 a night. Ranking and revenue are not the same goal, which is why Otamiser ended up tying its ranking software directly to pricing. If you’ve been thinking about pricing as a standalone task, Mridul Bansal’s breakdown of the three signals behind dynamic pricing pairs nicely with this part of the conversation. 🧭 Two Kinds of OTAs, Two Different Games Bart-Jan splits the OTA world in two. Booking.com and Expedia were built for hotels. Their algorithms favor the listings that will make the platform the most money, and paying more commission can move you up. Airbnb and Vrbo are content OTAs. Their algorithm leans toward the listing that best matches the guest and is most likely to earn a strong review. That means your photos, descriptions, and settings carry more weight there. Vrbo sits somewhere in the middle. He also notices the platforms drifting toward each other. Discounts that used to be a Booking.com specialty now show up on Airbnb and Vrbo too. For more on what’s shifting inside Airbnb specifically, Dan Rivers covered why Guest Favorite now outweighs Superhost in an earlier episode. 📅 The Hidden Cost of a Full Calendar This was one of the most surprising parts of the episode. Bart-Jan ranks the top three factors as bookings, reviews, and consistency. Booking pace is the one he calls most underrated. Some property managers sell out a listing’s whole calendar and celebrate. But once nothing is open, the platform stops indexing it. When dates open again, the listing practically starts over. Owner stays work the same way. A month long owner block can hurt Airbnb rankings. And a listing split evenly between Airbnb and Vrbo shows each platform only half its availability. Bart-Jan doesn’t recommend going all in on one OTA though. A single suspension could take down the whole business. The answer is balance, which is also the heart of building a scalable direct booking strategy that doesn’t depend on any one channel. ⭐ Your Response Matters as Much as the Review Every host gets a bad review eventually. Bart-Jan says what happens next is what counts. If guests complained about construction noise, updating your listing to say the work is finished helps Airbnb feel confident showing you again. He also shares an honest observation about smaller hosts. They often rank higher, and many are exclusive to Airbnb. But Gil and Bart-Jan agree it’s more correlation than cause. Small hosts tend to describe every detail, down to the shampoo brand and the coffee maker. That care shows up in reviews. Vee Venski talked about a similar habit of tracking daily rank changes after every photo or title tweak. 🤖 Conversational Search Is Coming to the OTAs Bart-Jan believes every OTA will move toward conversational search. Instead of filters, a guest might simply type, “I want a two bedroom home in Orlando.” From tests run alongside people at Booking.com and Airbnb, one factor keeps rising to the top: listing accuracy. If your

🎙️ “You Also Need to Just Be a Marketer” That line comes early in this episode, and it sets the tone. Many hosts believe an AI native direct booking website is the finish line. Build it, make it pretty, and wait for guests. Rick van der Plas has seen enough sites to know that story rarely ends well. 🌐 Rick is the Chief Technology Officer at Hostaway. His team built Booking Website Pro from the ground up, and he joined Gil to compare notes. Both of them have spent years solving the same problem from different sides. The result is one of the most candid conversations we’ve had about what makes a booking site work in the age of AI search. Summary and Highlights 👨‍💻 Meet Rick van der Plas Rick leads product and engineering at Hostaway, one of the largest property management platforms in short term rentals. He joined a little over two years ago, during a period of hypergrowth, to help the company prepare for scale. He doesn’t come from hospitality. His background is software engineering in SaaS and B2B, and he happily calls himself a nerd who loves figuring things out. That outside view is exactly what makes this episode valuable. Rick holds STR tech to the standard of mature software industries, and he believes our industry has set the bar too low. 📈 🔑 Key Takeaways 🧭 Why Hostaway Doubled Down on Direct Rick puts it simply. Hostaway customers want to hedge their bets. OTAs remain a major revenue source, but operators want more control over how they present themselves. They also want more repeat guests and a stronger position in the niche or region they serve. At the same time, AI is reshaping how guests search. Rick says that journey is still changing every single day. That’s the same shift we covered with Kin Sio in our episode on how AI search visibility is rewriting the booking funnel. Hostaway already had a basic booking website. Customer feedback revealed its limits. Many operators ended up putting their own site in front of the booking engine just to control their brand. Booking Website Pro was the answer. If you use Hostaway, you might also enjoy our Hostaway PMS guide. 🧱 Three Principles Behind an AI Native Direct Booking Website Gil asked how Rick approached such a massive build. Rick named three principles his team will never compromise on. 1. You don’t need to be a developer. 👩‍💻 Operators want control without hiring someone or learning to code. 2. It must live inside your daily operations. 📅 A site that sits apart from your calendar and pricing creates more work, not less. 3. It must be AI native. 🤖 That means no AI bolted on later. For Rick, it means building alongside an embedded AI that handles the broad strokes, so you can iterate on content and positioning much faster. It also means being findable by the AI tools your guests already use. Rick connects this to Hostaway’s AI CoHost. Because it understands your whole business, your website becomes one more signal it learns from. Gil shares how CraftedStays approached a similar challenge with Aria, which studies a portfolio before it builds anything. 🔍 Search for Yourself the Way Your Guest Would This is the most practical moment of the episode, and it costs nothing to try. Rick asks operators to picture their ideal guest. Imagine a surfer looking for a beach property near a local surf shop. 🏄 What would that person type? Which keywords would they use? Now search for your own property the same way. How many searches does it take to find you? Rick says the honest answer is usually a hard no. Sites miss the right keywords, load slowly, break on certain pages, or lack the semantic formatting that search engines and AI need to read them. If this exercise stings a little, start with our guide to niching down your SEO with Craig Webb. It pairs well with our ideal guest framework and our post on long tail SEO. ⚖️ Static Structure vs. Dynamic Relevance Gil and Rick agree that data can overwhelm operators who don’t come from marketing. Agencies read Semrush and Ahrefs reports all day. Most property managers don’t. Rick splits AI visibility into two parts. The static part is structure. Your markup must be clean so machines can read your site at all. You’d be surprised how many booking sites still fail here. Our breakdown of on site, off site, and technical SEO covers the basics. The dynamic part is relevance. Rick suggests becoming the local authority on events and experiences near your properties. 📍 That’s how citations grow. Damian Sheridan made the same case in our episode on the bar guide that booked a 16 month stay. For a deeper framework, read our guide to generative engine optimization for vacation rentals. Rick’s final tip here is simple: make one person accountable. Without an owner, content quietly fades. 🤖 Do You Still Need a Full Time Marketer? Gil shares what he sees across CraftedStays. The operators with the strongest results either work with an agency or have a dedicated marketing person. Rick offers a respectful counterpoint. That was more true before AI. Tasks that once filled a full time role can now move much faster with the right tools. The real question, he says, is whether direct booking is a genuine strategic focus for you. If it is, the time investment is now far smaller than it used to be. Michelle Marquis shared a helpful caution in her 30 years of direct booking fundamentals: adopt AI once you know what good output looks like. 🔗 Why Hostaway Built In House Gil asks the obvious question. Why not use an existing website builder? Rick’s answer is refreshingly honest. If every partner integrated as deeply as CraftedStays, Hostaway might not have needed to. But customers on WordPress and Wix kept asking how to connect everything, and the pieces never quite

Michelle Marquis remembers when an algorithm was a night out. When the Expedia account manager came to town, they’d go out for cosmopolitans, and the next day her listings ranked higher. 🍸 She tells the story with a laugh, but it frames this whole conversation. The tools have changed completely since then. The direct booking fundamentals underneath them have barely moved. In this episode, Gil and Michelle look at where direct bookings stand after three decades of disruption. They cover why so many operators freeze when it comes to AI search, and the simple framework Michelle uses to find where a property manager is losing money. 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 🍸 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

“The goal is actually deeper connection.” 💛 Rachel Alday started Abode Luxury Rentals with her husband during the 2008 financial crisis. Eighteen years later, they manage around 200 luxury homes across Park City, Jackson Hole, and Sun Valley, and over 60% of their bookings come direct. In this episode of the Booked Solid Show, Rachel tells Gil what she wishes she had known sooner. She explains why she hires for the hospitality gene, and why she treats every guest issue as a chance to earn a lifelong client. You’ll also hear about the property lore project that gives each home its own story, and the simple branding move you can set up this afternoon. 🏔️ Podcast Summary and Highlights 👤 Meet Rachel Alday Rachel Alday is the Co CEO of Abode Luxury Rentals. She cofounded the company in 2008 with her husband and business partner, Rob, right in the middle of the financial crisis. In hindsight, that was either bold or slightly unhinged. It turned out to be bold. Over nearly two decades, Rachel has grown Abode into a respected multi market luxury brand known for design forward homes and deeply human hospitality. Today, Abode manages around 200 homes across Park City, Jackson Hole, and Sun Valley. Nightly rates range from about $1,000 to $20,000. With a background in corporate marketing, Rachel now writes and speaks about leadership through care, clarity, and boundaries. She believes luxury should feel elevated but never distant. She lives in Park City with Rob and their three children, and her book, Please Do Disturb, releases November 10. 🧬 Hiring for the Hospitality Gene For roughly 12 years, Abode had no formal hiring process. Rachel admits interviews were mostly friendly conversations and gut instinct. Around 2019, with close to 30 people on staff, she and Rob realized they had an incredible team without knowing how they built it. So they brought in company culture consultants to figure out what was working. The answer she keeps coming back to is the hospitality gene. You can’t train it. Rachel describes it through the end of a shift. One person clocks out and leaves. Another documents every open guest issue, briefs the next shift, and texts a teammate later to make sure everyone is okay. Her early hiring shortcut still holds up. People with long restaurant experience, especially servers and hosts, often carry that gene. Gil shared a similar lesson from CraftedStays. His first customer success hire, Kin, told him he could teach website skills but could never teach someone to care. Listen to the episode for Rachel’s candid take on why a little codependency might be a hiring green flag. 😄 🧹 The $400K Lesson and the Fear Behind It Rachel’s biggest regret is surprisingly operational. She wishes Abode had brought housekeeping in house years earlier. When they finally did, EBITDA improved by roughly $400,000. They already knew the standard they wanted, so there was no reason to leave it in someone else’s hands. The deeper lesson is about fear. Rachel remembers panicking when Rob hired their first part time runner at around $12 to $15 an hour. She was wrong, and that hire helped unlock growth. Now she tells her team, and herself, not to make decisions from fear. Gil offered another way to see it. The real challenge is delivering the same quality at the next stage of scale. Growing from 20 to 40 homes, or from 100 to 200, means deciding what your team should look like before you get there. 🏡 100 Homes Before a Single SOP Here is the part that made Gil stop her mid sentence. Abode passed 100 properties before building real SOPs. New hires learned through ride alongs with the property management team for one to three months, because nothing was written down. What held it together was an unusually close team. Family members work side by side. One company value is “deep roots grow.” Rachel wants teammates who genuinely like each other, because winter in a ski town is intense. Now Abode has strong processes, and those are what let the team keep its standards consistent across 200 homes. Tim Hubbard made a similar case about systems in his Booked Solid episode archive conversation on scaling across dozens of markets. ✨ Property Lore and the Power of Storytelling Rachel is honest that she doesn’t think the vacation rental industry has truly strong brands yet. To her, a real brand is one people recognize even if they have never stayed with you. Still, Abode has built serious brand equity, and storytelling is the newest piece. It began with the About Us page on the Abode website. That page tells the real story of how the company started, instead of listing facts. It worked so well that Rachel and her collaborator Neely now write “lore” for every property. Each story blends homeowner details with a sense of place and a touch of magic. The next step is bringing those stories into the homes themselves. Why does this matter for direct bookings? A big share of the joy of travel happens while guests are still planning. A story gives guests something to feel before they book. It also gives them a reason to remember you. If you want to build that kind of identity, this guide on building a direct booking brand guests remember pairs well with this segment. Hear the full episode for her story about arriving at a Jackson Hole ranch compound and feeling her shoulders drop. 🌄 🔧 Conflict as the Path to Luxury Direct Bookings This is the heart of the episode. Rachel loves the service recovery paradox. Guests who have a problem handled beautifully can end up more loyal than guests who never had a problem at all. In fly to markets, she assumes people will arrive tired and frustrated. A water heater will fail, even with perfect maintenance. So Abode trains for conflict, not just friction reduction. The goal is not only fixing the toilet.

“Direct booking is a commercial system, not a website project.” That’s the line Kin Sio opens with on this episode, and it sets the tone for one of the most tactical conversations we’ve had on AI search visibility yet. Kin runs revenue and marketing operations for more than 40 independent and boutique hotels through his firm, Lights On Digital. In this episode, he walks through how hotels define their booking funnel, why rate parity quietly kills more direct bookings than any marketing mistake, and what his AI search research is turning up across dozens of properties, including why TripAdvisor and OTA listings are outranking hotels’ own websites inside ChatGPT and Perplexity answers right now. If you manage anywhere from one property to a hundred, this conversation will change how you think about where your next guest is actually discovering you. Podcast Summary and Highlights 🏨 Meet Kin Sio Kin Sio is the CEO of Lights On Digital, a hospitality commercial strategy firm that runs revenue and marketing operations for more than 40 independent and boutique hotels. He spent six years in product management at Microsoft, then helped build Coinbase’s international exchange, before acquiring Lights On Digital in early 2025. Most of his work this year centers on AI search visibility, testing whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews actually name a property when a guest asks where to stay. He also hosts the Lights On Podcast and splits his time between Hawaii and Seattle. 🏗️ Where Hotels and Short-Term Rentals Actually Diverge Kin’s world runs on scale. A single hotel can carry the same distribution complexity as an entire short-term rental portfolio, because one property has to sell tens or hundreds of rooms every single night. That’s why hotels lean on RevPAR (revenue per available room) as their central metric. It normalizes performance across a 30-room boutique and a 500-room property, and Kin sees larger STR operators starting to adopt the same benchmark. Worth checking your own numbers against, especially if you’re managing multiple units in one market and can’t tell whether a slow week is noise or a real problem. 💵 The Rate Parity Leak Nobody Notices Ask Kin where most hotels bleed direct revenue, and the answer isn’t marketing. It’s price. He’s seen properties where the direct booking price on their own website was higher than what showed up on Expedia, purely because of fragmented systems between the property management platform, the channel manager, and the rate distribution layer. Guests notice instantly, and they book wherever it’s cheapest, usually not direct. Before spending another dollar on ads or content, Kin’s advice is to check that your rate is identical across every channel your property lists on. It’s the cheapest fix in the entire conversation, and one CraftedStays customers rarely have to think about since PMS-synced pricing keeps that layer unified. 📈 Ads Buy You Time, They Don’t Build Equity Kin doesn’t dismiss paid ads, he’s seen returns north of ten to one within two or three months when they’re run well. But he’s clear about what ads are actually for: buying time while you build the channel that compounds. Organic and social, done right, becomes the highest-ROI channel long term, but it takes real patience, typically three to six months before it moves the needle, sometimes six to twelve before it becomes a consistent revenue driver. Ads fill that gap. They don’t replace the need to build one. 📱 Why Unpolished Content Is Outperforming Pretty Rooms One of the sharper points in this episode: hotels are overproducing content, and it’s hurting them. Kin’s read is that polished shots of pretty rooms and pretty pools have become interchangeable across the entire industry, and travelers have stopped responding to them. What’s converting instead is user-generated, first-person content, ideally from a micro-influencer trading a stay for authentic footage, or from the property owner simply walking through the space on camera. If you’ve been holding off on video because it isn’t “professional enough,” Kin’s data suggests that’s backwards. 🧭 The Destination-First Content Play Kin’s framing here applies directly to short-term rentals: almost nobody starts their trip by searching for a specific hotel or property. They start by choosing a destination, then work backward into where to stay. That means content built around the destination, not the property, is what actually intercepts a guest early in their planning. Local guides, itinerary posts, “what to do with kids in [destination]” content, these aren’t just SEO plays anymore. They’re also exactly the kind of structured, specific content that AI models pull from when answering travel questions. (Note: Kin references a McKinsey study on guest touch points during this discussion; the specific figures haven’t been independently verified for this writeup and are worth confirming before citing publicly.) 🤖 Inside the AEO Shift: Who AI Actually Trusts This is the part of the episode worth relistening to twice. Kin’s AI search visibility research across roughly 20 hotels found that third-party sites, TripAdvisor, OTA listings like Expedia and Booking.com, and earned media from outlets like Travel + Leisure, are getting cited by AI models far more often than the hotel’s own website. AI tools break a single guest question into what Kin calls a “query fanout,” multiple sub-questions answered by pulling from wherever authority already exists on the web. That makes public relations and third-party mentions more important to AI visibility than most operators realize. He and Gil also worked through a common misconception: traditional backlinks are losing weight as an SEO signal, but that doesn’t mean your presence across the web matters less. What LLMs weigh instead is entity reputation, how consistently and accurately your business is described across every place it’s mentioned, not how many links point back to your site. Buying backlinks won’t help. Getting mentioned accurately, repeatedly, and consistently across the web will. 🧩 Structured Data and the Multi-Engine Problem Since AI models read structured data rather than raw page text the way a human would, clean schema markup on your website reduces

“You have to ask. You have to read.” Jeff Iloulian spent five years building a 150 property portfolio in Los Angeles, and set up close to 300 units along the way. He also once checked out of IKEA with 48 shopping carts and a $40,000 bill, then watched most of it break, chip and peel inside a year. In this episode of the Booked Solid Show, Gil sits down with Jeff, cofounder and CEO of HostGPO, to talk about what that portfolio actually taught him. Not just about furniture, but about where bookings really come from. Jeff’s direct booking strategy had nothing to do with paid ads or email funnels. It came from reading guest messages closely enough to notice who kept showing up, then walking across town and building the relationship himself. That instinct led to Netflix, Warner Brothers, UCLA faculty housing, Lakers players, and one film shoot that covered nine months of annual revenue. If you have ever wondered why the same guests keep booking your place, this conversation gives you a way to turn that pattern into a channel. Summary and Highlights 🎙️ Direct Booking Channels Hiding in Your Guest Messages with Jeff Iloulian “You have to ask. You have to read.” Most operators go looking for direct booking channels in the same three places: ads, social, and an email list. Jeff Iloulian found his somewhere far less glamorous. He found them buried in guest inquiries he almost did not read. This episode is part cautionary furnishing story, part masterclass in noticing what your own inbox is already telling you. 👤 Meet Jeff Iloulian Jeff Iloulian is the cofounder and CEO of HostGPO, a community buying group built for the short term rental industry. Before that, he was an operator. He started with a single Los Angeles property in 2015 and grew to roughly 150 doors over five years through lease arbitrage, property management, and a mix of creative deal structures. His background is unusual for the space. Jeff studied Economics and Philosophy at Columbia, earned a JD from UCLA School of Law, and practiced business and intellectual property litigation for three years before the entrepreneurial itch took over. He describes himself as a person who refuses to accept that something has to work a certain way until he has tested it himself. He also loves music, tacos, and travel. 🛒 The 48 Cart IKEA Run Jeff’s origin story starts across the street from his own home. A developer bought a great property and planned to demolish it, but Los Angeles permitting takes 12 to 18 months. The house sat empty for weeks. Jeff had just read a New York Times DealBook piece about lease arbitrage, so he knocked on the door and proposed a deal: pay a small amount, furnish it, run it, and hand it back with 30 days notice. They said yes. He set his booking window to 30 days out and started welcoming guests personally. Then came the scaling problem. Four adjacent units to furnish at once. Jeff brought his entire 12 person team to IKEA, rented a U Haul, and checked out with 48 shopping carts. The line wrapped back into the store. Checkout alone took two and a half hours, long enough that the cashier’s shift changed mid scan. The bill landed around $40,000. He asked for a discount and they laughed. 🛏️ Why Cheap Furniture Is the Most Expensive Thing You Can Buy The units were terrible. Everything broke, chipped, or peeled. But Jeff’s point is not about IKEA specifically. It is about the real math of a broken bed frame in a live rental. You block the calendar. You order a replacement. You lose a day or two of revenue. You pay for junk removal. You build the new bed. Then you refund the guest it broke on. Do that a few times and the “savings” evaporate. Linens compound the same way. Buy sheets from one store, restock at another when the line gets discontinued, then patch in something from a third. Now a bed has a cream pillowcase, a bright white flat sheet, and a duvet that matches neither. Guests notice immediately. So do your cleaners, who are now sorting mismatched inventory on every turn. This is the same logic behind data driven design decisions and why designers like Courtney Petrovich treat furnishing as a revenue decision rather than a taste decision. 🧵 The Hotel Standard Nobody Told You About Jeff has been in the industry 11 years and says he is still learning. His example: a 60/40 cotton polyester sheet behaves completely differently depending on how it is woven. If the synthetic yarn sits inside and cotton wraps the outside, dirt binds to the cotton and releases in the wash. That is what stain release actually means. Other details he had never considered until vendors walked him through them. Fitted sheets without hem lines, so they go on in either direction. Color coded thread inside the seam so cleaners can tell kings from queens from twins at a glance. Case packs, so you order 72 pillowcases directly instead of breaking apart 20 full sets to find the pieces that actually wear out. The best operators Jeff sees do one thing consistently: they set standards, then plan replacement cycles 16 to 18 months ahead and phase inventory in. Boring, and it works. It is the same operational discipline Ishita Lalan and Lisa Roads have both described from different angles. 🎬 The Direct Booking Channel That Started With One Email Here is where the conversation turns. Jeff’s property management company was never brand forward. Luxury homes, cabins, apartments, studios, all under one roof with no single consumer facing identity. Paid ads made no sense, because there was no unified brand to send traffic to. So he asked a different question. Not “how do we market our brand,” but “where do the people who want these specific homes already live?” The answer arrived as inbound. A trickle of emails

“We are the local experts.” Damian Sheridan spent eight years doing SEO for property managers before he built one of the biggest education brands in short term rentals. He knows the technical side cold. So it says something that his best story about local content direct bookings is a 600 word page about which bars in his Spanish village show football. Nobody would call that a booking strategy. It brought him a guest who stayed 16 months. In this episode of the Booked Solid Show, Gil sits down with the co founder and CEO of Scale to unpack what actually gets properties found now. Gil shares fresh research from roughly 24,000 AI search queries and a finding that surprised him: the sites getting cited had fewer backlinks than the ones that did not. Damian explains why that feels fairer. You will hear how pre arrival guest questions become a content calendar, why the lowest hanging fruit in your business is the email list you already own, and the 30 second video almost nobody records that quietly converts browsers into bookers. Whether you are running two units or two hundred, this one gets specific fast. Summary and Highlights 👤 About Damian Sheridan Damian Sheridan is the co founder and CEO of Scale, an educational brand serving the short term rental industry. He started out in 2012 as an SEO consultant working directly with property managers, and spent roughly eight years in that seat. Clients kept asking him for help with Facebook, branding and everything else adjacent to direct bookings. He kept saying no, then pointing them toward people in his network. That pattern became an idea. In late February 2020 he put his own money down on a London venue and ran the first Book Direct Show, about three weeks before international shutdowns. Seven Book Direct shows later, he and co founder Gianpaolo have built Scale into a global events brand with a news outlet and a supplier directory called Connect on the way. Damian now spends most of his time in Spain, where he also hosts. 🍺 A 600 Word Page About Football Bars Booked 16 Months of Nights Around ten years ago Damian owned a small apartment in a whitewashed Spanish village. He wanted fresh content for the site, so he spent an afternoon walking his town taking notes. Best bars for this. Nearest laundrette. He wrote guides for all of it. One piece ran maybe 600 words on the best bars in town to watch football. Three bars, which games each showed, which leagues. It ranked. Nobody writes that page because nobody believes it produces bookings. Then a traveller searching for somewhere to watch a match landed on his site. He did not book that first trip. He came back later, referenced the page directly, and asked about availability. Across the following three and a half years, that guest stayed roughly 16 months in total. All from one page written laterally. This is the same principle behind long tail SEO for direct bookings and the reason SEO landing pages built around specific guest needs keep outperforming polished homepage copy. 🔗 Mentions Are Quietly Replacing Backlinks Damian turned the tables mid episode and asked Gil how much backlinks still matter in AI search. Gil had just finished a study running roughly 24,000 simulated traveller queries across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. The team scraped the sites that got cited and pulled backlink profiles for both groups. The cited sites averaged 0.8 times the backlinks of the sites that were never surfaced. Fewer links. Still cited. What separated them was content depth and structure, not domain authority. What did correlate was mentions. Not links, mentions. Being named in a PMS roundup, a Reddit thread, a local blog, a comparison post. Reputation, in other words, in a form machines can read. Damian’s reaction was immediate approval. The old link buying era never resembled how brands actually earn trust. If you want the mechanics, how ChatGPT picks vacation rental sources and the GEO framework for vacation rentals both go deeper, and the study on where property managers already win in AI search shows which engines favour independent operators. 📬 The Data You Are Already Sitting On Ask Damian for the single most overlooked opportunity and he does not say SEO. He says the mountain of guest data most operators collect and then abandon. Email addresses. Phone numbers. Booking dates that quietly tell you it was somebody’s anniversary or a family trip. He is not describing a monthly blast that shouts book now. He means reconnecting. Reach out around the same window next year. Tell them what changed in town. Keep the line open. Gil sees the same pattern in CraftedStays data. Operators clearing 80 percent direct bookings almost always run a system rather than a single tactic. They capture emails at booking, again during the stay, and again on the homepage. Then they nurture. Then they layer SEO and paid traffic on top so the funnel has volume worth nurturing. If that is the gap in your business, start with a repeat bookings email strategy, then work through ten proven vacation rental email marketing strategies and the complete guide to collecting guest emails. Sam Mistretta covered the compounding math on this in his episode on guest retargeting. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Your Inbox Is a Content Calendar Nobody Reads Here is the idea Gil admitted he had never considered. Guests have been asking you questions for years. Pre arrival messages, mid stay texts, the same three concerns every summer. That archive is keyword research written by your actual customers. Damian’s point is simple. If these people are asking, other people are asking, and almost nobody has published the answer. Gil gave a concrete version from his own cabins. Families booking a place with an indoor pool want to know about pool alarms, locked doors, key codes, whether they need to bring floaties. A parent planning that trip has no idea those

“Use OTAs as billboards.” That single line from Mridul Bansal reframes the whole direct versus OTA argument. Mridul is a Product Marketing Manager at PriceLabs, and he spends his days between the product team and the hosts who actually use the tool. In this episode he opens up the box most operators treat as magic. He walks through the three inputs that decide what your property gets priced at tonight, why market data on its own will steer you wrong, and how a hyperlocal read on your competition matters more than a radius on a map. Gil and Mridul also get into the new PriceLabs mobile app, what the MCP connector unlocks when you point Claude at your own revenue data, and the tier of revenue management maturity most operators have not stepped into yet. There is also a candid moment about what you should and should not try to vibe code yourself. If you have ever looked at a rate recommendation and wondered where the number came from, this one is for you. 🎧 Summary and Highlights 🎙️ Who Is Mridul Bansal Mridul Bansal is a Product Marketing Manager at PriceLabs, the revenue management platform used across hundreds of thousands of listings worldwide. He has been with the company for close to three years. His role sits in an unusual spot. As he puts it, he is the voice of the customer inside the company, and the voice of the company back out to customers. That means constant conversations with hosts and property managers, feeding what he hears into the product roadmap, then making sure operators actually know what got built and how to use it. Mridul is based in India and speaks regularly on revenue management, pricing strategy, and data driven hosting at industry events and webinars. He is a firm believer that market data should inform decisions rather than replace judgment. The part of the job he loves most is the people. A pilot who runs a rental. A lawyer. A school teacher. All connected by the same business. 📊 The Dynamic Pricing Strategy Behind Every Rate Recommendation This was the heart of the episode. A solid dynamic pricing strategy is not one calculation. Mridul broke it into three layers that stack on top of each other. Market data. PriceLabs pulls publicly available listing data from Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com. ADR, booked rates, active listing counts, and pacing against the same week last year. The algorithm reads demand signals without always knowing the cause. When rates in a market spike 60 percent for one weekend, the system reacts even if nobody has told it a concert is coming to town. Your own performance. Occupancy and pacing compared against your history and against the market. Mridul used a sharp example here. Say December occupancy sits at 80 percent versus 90 percent last year. That looks like a decline. But if the market is down 20 percent, you are outperforming. Your rates may not need to move at all. Your preferences. How aggressive you want to be. Whether you would rather fill every night on thin margins, or hold rate and accept empty nights. There is no universally correct answer here, and Mridul was clear that the tool is meant to reflect your goals rather than override them. Those three combine into the recommended price. If you are still setting rates on gut feel, the systems first approach to scaling a short term rental business is a good companion read. 🔬 Anyone Can Get the Data, Almost Nobody Can Clean It Gil pushed on something interesting. Operators in Facebook groups are vibe coding their own pricing tools, scraping public data and building a model. Mridul’s response was more generous than expected. He confirmed the data really is public, and that PriceLabs does not use one customer’s private data to price another. In theory, you could gather the same inputs. The moat is what happens next. Owner blocks that look identical to bookings. Duplicate listings. All inclusive rate displays that hide the real nightly figure. Commission baked into a booked price, so a $300 booking yesterday cannot become a $300 recommendation today. Twelve years of nuance sits inside that cleanup. “It’s not just about gathering the data. It’s really about treating that data right.” That line stuck. 🗺️ Why a Radius Around Your Property Is the Wrong Map The hyperlocal piece was the most practical stretch of the conversation. Draw a circle around your property and you will pull in comps that are not comps. Mridul used a lake example. Properties on the far shore show up inside your radius, but no guest is weighing your home against theirs. Gil matched it with a real client market. Lake Anna has a warm side and a cold side. The warm side is private and not open to the public. Pricing between the two is dramatically different, and there is no amenity checkbox in your PMS that captures it. The same logic applies to a stadium. A property near the venue and one ten miles out are living in different markets on concert weekend. If your comp set is wrong, every downstream decision is calibrated off. This is the same specificity that makes SEO landing pages for vacation rentals work, and the same reasoning behind investing in amenities that actually move revenue rather than generic upgrades. 📱 The Mobile App Was Built to Solve Two Problems Mridul’s proudest recent launch is the PriceLabs mobile app, and he was deliberate about what it does not try to be. Problem one is quick edits. Change pricing from wherever you are, in seconds, without opening a laptop. He mentioned one customer who adjusted rates from a yacht, which he found both flattering and slightly concerning. Problem two is awareness. Plenty of hosts have automation running correctly and simply want to glance at what this weekend is priced at, or Christmas, or the week before Thanksgiving. Gil’s own use case landed here. Thanksgiving moves every

“Pay your peers, not the platforms.” That one line explains most of what Na’ím Anís Paymán has built. He scaled a UK portfolio past 500 units across serviced apartments, guesthouses, and hotels. When the software could not keep up, he gave two developers six months and a hard deadline, then migrated 150 units onto a system he owned. Today he has made that PMS free and launched a host to host direct bookings network where operators refer guests to each other and keep the commission inside the community. This conversation covers why a free PMS makes commercial sense, how smaller hosts can market a portfolio they do not own, and why Na’ím believes the biggest gap in direct bookings is mindset rather than tooling. Gil and Na’ím also get into paid ads discipline, guest data, voucher tracking, and the quiet risks hiding inside a vibe coded booking website. 🎧 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

“Real fraud that’s aware of your loopholes will not come in looking sketchy.” That’s the moment this episode shifts from guest screening 101 into something a lot more unsettling — and a lot more useful. On this episode of the Booked Solid Show, Gil sits down with Ela Mezhiborsky, Co-Founder and President of Autohost, to talk about guest fraud prevention in an age where AI can fabricate a convincing, sympathetic, entirely fake guest from scratch. Ela walks through how fraud has evolved from fake IDs to synthetic identities, why “gut feeling” is a liability instead of a filter, and why screening guests properly is what actually lets you say yes to direct bookings with confidence instead of fear. Whether you’re just getting your first direct booking site off the ground or you’re managing a growing portfolio, this conversation reframes guest screening as the thing that protects your hospitality — not the thing that gets in its way. Summary and Highlights 👤 Meet Ela Mezhiborsky Ela Mezhiborsky is an industry advocate and public speaker focused on trust and safety as AI reshapes hospitality. A former short term rental operator and Cofounder & President of Autohost, she speaks on “bad AI,” guest verification, fraud risk, bias, and why yesterday’s solutions can’t solve today’s problems. Ela started as an operator running Quickstay, a property management company in Toronto with just over a hundred units, before cofounding Autohost with her childhood friend Roy Firestein, who brought a cybersecurity background to the hospitality problem she was living every day. 🚨 Why an Operator Became a Fraud Fighter Ela didn’t set out to build a guest fraud prevention company. She set out to run a property management business. Somewhere along the way, scale exposed a harder truth: guests could also be the problem.What started as an internal decision tree for her support team, flagging one night local bookings, flagging last minute reservations, flagging certain platforms, eventually collided with something much darker. Escort services. Money laundering. Weapons posted on Instagram from inside a rented unit. That escalation is what pushed Quickstay’s internal spreadsheet into becoming Autohost, a platform now integrated across many major PMS providers, including the ones covered in our Hospitable PMS guide. 🎭 The Guest Who Looks Perfect Might Be the Problem For years, fraud had a look. Fake IDs. Stolen credit card numbers. Sketchy behavior an experienced host could spot.That era is ending. Ela explained how AI now allows bad actors to build synthetic identities from scratch: a convincing photo, a plausible online footprint, a warm story about visiting a daughter at university. These personas don’t look sketchy. They’re built specifically not to.“We’re starting to doubt what we’re seeing,” Ela said, describing a strange new instinct where a guest profile that looks too polished can be more concerning than one that looks rough around the edges. Voice cloning has made it worse. A fraudulent “guest” can now pass a phone call, stay in character under pressure, and even lean on emotional appeals faster than a host can catch them. 📊 Objective Data Beats Gut Feeling Every Time Here’s the part every host needs to hear: intuition is not a screening system. It feels like one, but it isn’t.Ela was blunt about why. “Sketchy” is subjective, and subjective judgment opens the door to real bias, while giving sophisticated fraud an easy way to slip through by simply not looking sketchy at all. Autohost instead builds its guest fraud prevention approach around objective signals: device fingerprinting, whether a credit card was recently flagged, whether an email address was created hours before the booking, whether a listed location matches the device’s actual location.None of this replaces hospitality. It removes the guesswork so a host’s team can stay focused on the guest experience rather than quietly playing detective, a theme that echoes what Abby Grous from Hospitable shared about payment side fraud screening on an earlier episode. 💳 The Chargeback Problem Nobody Budgets For Chargebacks came up as one of the quieter costs of direct bookings, and one of the reasons some hosts hesitate to leave OTAs at all.Ela drew a clear line between two very different problems: real fraud, where a card was genuinely stolen, and “friendly fraud,” where a guest disputes a legitimate charge after the fact. Both hit the same merchant account. The difference is that proper guest verification gives an operator something to fight back with: a timestamp, an electronic signature, a verified ID on file, instead of a guessing game with the payment processor. 🔓 Screening Is an Enabler, Not a Barrier This might be the most important reframe in the episode. Ela argued that treating direct bookings as inherently risky, and responding with blanket rules like “no one night stays” or “no local bookings,” isn’t caution. It’s a financial mistake dressed up as prudence.“Better safe than sorry” sounds responsible. It isn’t strategic. Restrictive policies quietly choke off the direct booking revenue an operator worked hard to build, without actually solving the underlying risk. The fix isn’t more rules, it’s proper screening, paired with a brand guests already trust, the same trust building work covered in building trust on your direct booking site. 🧰 What Guest Screening Actually Costs to Run One thing likely to surprise newer hosts: guest fraud prevention isn’t reserved for large operators anymore. Ela was once restricted to onboarding only larger portfolios at Autohost and got pushback from small hosts who wanted access and couldn’t get it. That gap has closed.Cost typically runs from cents to a few dollars per reservation, scaling with how much verification a jurisdiction or contract requires. Compared against the cost of one bad chargeback, or worse, a property used for something it was never intended for, the math isn’t close. Whatever platform a host uses, a PMS, a direct booking site, or a standalone tool, the point is simply to build a verification step into the guest journey, the same way brand trust and OTA to direct conversion get built into the rest