From 3% to 15%: Why Platform Fees Changed My Business Strategy with Orlie Benjamin

Summary and Highlights

Guest Bio 🎯

Orlie Benjamin is the founder and CEO of Lasoh, a marketing SaaS platform built specifically for vacation rental operators. Before launching Lasoh, Orlie spent her career leading customer-centric innovation at Fortune 500 companies including American Airlines (where she managed the Priceline channel and revenue optimization), Victoria’s Secret (omnichannel marketing strategy), and NetJets (designing digital experiences for high-net-worth clients). She’s also an active vacation rental operator, running The Acres in Hocking Hills, Ohio. This unique combination of enterprise marketing expertise and hands-on STR experience positions her to see gaps in the industry that others miss—and build solutions that actually work for operators at every stage.

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Why This Episode Matters 💡

The vacation rental landscape shifted dramatically in late 2024 when Airbnb restructured its fee model, moving from a 3% host fee to a consolidated 15.5% operator fee. This isn’t just a pricing change—it’s a fundamental shift in the economics of relying on OTAs for distribution. Orlie walks through what this means for your bottom line and why the $20,000 you might be paying annually in commissions could become your marketing budget instead.

But this conversation goes deeper than just reacting to Airbnb’s changes. Orlie shares the marketing playbook she refined at companies where customer lifetime value and repeat purchase rates are foundational metrics—concepts that most STR operators don’t even track. She explains why fewer than 20% of operators monitor repeat booking rates, and why that single metric might be the most important indicator of business health.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re cobbling together marketing tools that don’t quite fit your workflow, or wondered why the STR industry doesn’t have the kind of purpose-built marketing infrastructure that ecommerce platforms offer, this episode gives you both the context and the clarity you need.

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Key Takeaways From the Conversation 🔑

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The Economics Have Changed

Airbnb’s fee consolidation transforms a 3% cost of doing business into a 15.5% margin hit. For a single property generating $100,000 annually, that’s the difference between paying $3,000 and $15,500. Orlie puts it plainly: “That can turn a whole business upside down depending on what sort of margins things are running with.”

Marketing Budget vs. Commission Fees

Instead of viewing that 15.5% as a fixed cost, Orlie suggests reframing it as your available marketing budget. In her own direct booking business, she spends significantly less than that percentage driving traffic to her properties—and owns the customer relationship in the process. This mental shift changes everything about how you evaluate direct booking investments.

The LTV Blind Spot

In retail and ecommerce, customer lifetime value is fundamental. Yet most vacation rental operators calculate value based on a single stay. Orlie explains: “The number of customers you have multiplied by the number of visits they have multiplied by the average spend per basket—those three things multiplied by each other equals value of a customer.” When you start tracking repeat booking rates and guest spend across multiple stays, your entire revenue strategy shifts.

The Ownership Imperative

OTAs deliberately disintermediate the host-guest relationship. They mask contact information, control communication channels, and own the data. Meanwhile, when you capture guest information from the entire travel party (not just the booker), you create opportunities to improve the stay, sell additional services, and build relationships that generate repeat bookings without additional acquisition costs.

Purpose-Built Tools Matter

Generic CRMs are designed for salesforce workflows, not nurture marketing. Email platforms like MailChimp weren’t built with vacation rental use cases in mind. Orlie’s background in enterprise marketing showed her what’s possible when technology is purpose-built for an industry—and she’s building Lasoh to fill that gap for STR operators.

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The Marketing Stack You’re Missing 🛠️

One of the most striking revelations in this conversation is how operators are trying to force-fit technology from other industries into vacation rental workflows. Orlie has seen operators using Airtable as a makeshift CRM, running into limits with Zapier integrations, or spending heavily on consultants to hand-code campaigns because the software doesn’t anticipate their needs.

She draws a comparison to buying a Ferrari with a stick shift but not knowing how to drive stick. The system is only as valuable as your ability to use it. This is why she’s focused on building Lasoh as a platform, not a consulting agency—the goal is to create technology that either empowers operators directly or makes consultants dramatically more effective with their clients.

The conversation around SaaS versus services is particularly relevant for operators trying to decide whether to build their own direct booking infrastructure or outsource it. Orlie makes a compelling case that software scales, services don’t—and that the right platform creates compound value over time.

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When Strategy Meets Execution ⚡

Orlie’s tactical advice is grounded in clarity: “Be really clear on your strategy.” If you’re going all-in on Airbnb, make sure the math works with the new fee structure. But if you’re committed to diversifying distribution and going direct, you need to know exactly what your next step is.

For some operators, that’s launching a direct booking website. For others, it’s selecting a PMS. Some need to start capturing guest contact information. Others are ready to activate that data through email campaigns and relationship marketing.

The key is not trying to do everything at once. Identify where you are in the direct booking lifecycle, commit to the next step, and execute with urgency. As Orlie puts it: “You can never manufacture more time.”

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Building Super Fans, Not Just Bookings 🌟

The hospitality discussion in this episode is worth the listen on its own. Orlie reframes vacation rentals not as property tech, but as hospitality businesses—and hospitality is fundamentally about experience design.

She explains that brand isn’t just logos and colors. It’s the promise you make and your ability to deliver on it. Great hospitality brands set expectations and meet them consistently. When you do that well, you build trust before guests even arrive. That goodwill becomes a buffer when small things go wrong, and it turns satisfied guests into superfans who tell their friends and come back year after year.

This philosophy directly ties into why owning guest relationships matters. Every touchpoint—from pre-arrival communication to post-stay follow-up—is an opportunity to build that trust and create memorable experiences that generate demand for your properties specifically, not just properties in your area.

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The Startup Mindset for Operators 💭

Though Orlie’s primary audience is fellow entrepreneurs building in the STR space, her advice applies broadly to any operator treating their business seriously. Her mindset recommendation: “Just do it. Accept the messy.”

She’s a self-described recovered perfectionist who’s learned that progress beats perfection every time. Getting started, even imperfectly, creates momentum. Waiting until everything is perfect means doing nothing.

This mirrors the challenge many operators face when considering direct bookings. The infrastructure feels overwhelming. The options are confusing. The investment seems risky. But the cost of waiting is compounding—every month you don’t own your customer relationships is a month you’re building equity for Airbnb instead of yourself.

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🔥 Rapid Fire Questions

What’s a good book recommendation?

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries—particularly relevant for anyone in the early stages of building something new, whether that’s a startup or a direct booking channel. The book helps you understand how to validate your business model without building everything at once, and how to recognize the inflection point when you’re ready to scale.

Orlie’s second recommendation: Tribal Leadership, which explores how people form tribes of 20-150 people and how shared values influence behavior. As operators build their own brands and customer communities, understanding tribal dynamics becomes surprisingly relevant.

What’s one piece of mindset advice for someone starting something new?

“Just do it. It’s okay if it’s bad and it might be bad, and just keep going. Accept the messy, accept everything as a win or a learning opportunity. Having fear about starting or not being ready to start is ironically the worst thing because then you do nothing.”

What’s one tactical takeaway for direct bookings?

Be crystal clear on your strategy. Decide whether you’re committing fully to OTAs or investing in direct booking infrastructure. If it’s the latter, identify your exact next step—whether that’s getting a PMS, building a website, gathering contact information, or activating your existing list. Then commit to it and execute with urgency.

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Connect With Orlie 🔗

Website: lasoh.io
LinkedIn: Orlie Benjamin
Instagram: @orlie.benjamin
Lasoh LinkedIn: Company Page
Lasoh Instagram: @lasoh.io
Lasoh Facebook: Facebook Page
Lasoh Facebook Group: Community
YouTube: Lasoh Channel

Orlie is genuinely open to connecting with operators at any stage of their direct booking journey. Book a free demo on the Lasoh website—even if the platform isn’t the right fit for you right now, she’ll help you figure out your next step and connect you with resources that can help.

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Ready to Take Control of Your Bookings? 🚀

The window is closing on cheap OTA distribution. The operators who build direct booking infrastructure now will own relationships, maximize lifetime value, and create compounding revenue advantages that become more valuable every year.

If you’re ready to stop paying 15.5% indefinitely and start investing in your own marketing engine, the first step is getting your website right. CraftedStays builds fast, mobile-optimized, conversion-focused websites specifically for vacation rental operators—the same professional standard Orlie talks about in this episode.

Start your free trial at CraftedStays.co and see why operators are choosing purpose-built platforms over expensive agency builds.

Listen to the full episode now to hear Orlie’s complete breakdown of the marketing shift happening in vacation rentals—and why the operators who move quickly will have an insurmountable advantage.

Transcription

Orlie: Be really clear on your strategy. There’s a lot of things that are changing right now in terms of Airbnb. I’m really curious to see what VRBO does. The VRBO has like their moment to shine right now if they choose to. But if you’re gonna say, I’m all in on Airbnb, I don’t want to invest in a direct booking infrastructure, then be all in on Airbnb and make sure the math, maths around these differences in sort of the platform fees.

Orlie: But if you are committed. To diversifying your distribution channel and going direct, decide exactly what your plan is and what your next step is and commit to it. For some people, it’s a direct booking site. For others, it’s getting a PMS. For others, it’s gathering contact information. And for some it might be taking that contact information and doing something within and engaging with their customers.

Orlie: Just depends on where they are in their life stage of the direct booking journey. But whatever it is, make sure you’re clear on your plan around across distribution and you know what your next step is and like commit it to it.

Gil: Before we bring on my guest, I wanted to talk just a little bit about something that I’ve been hearing a lot from Host. I keep on 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 letting all these marketing strategies, you’re driving traffic and you’re putting it.

Gil: 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’re having to pay them again. You can’t iterate, you can’t test, and you really can’t improve on things.

Gil: 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 build craft estates. 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 on testing and improving.

Gil: 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 wanna get started, go ahead and go to craft estate.co and start your free trial. Now, let’s bring on our guests and dive deep into hospitality and marketing.

Gil: Hey folks. Welcome back to the Books Solid Show, the podcast we’re being on top operators to discuss marketing, revenue management, and direct bookings. On today’s show, I have the pleasure of interviewing orally Benjamin. She’s the founder of Lasso, a new marketing platform, specifically tailored for the short-term mental space.

Gil: On today’s show, we discuss why she started the business in the first place, the gap she sees in the market, how she’s launching this in the first place. Some of the changes that are happening within the OTAs that’s driving a huge momentum of direct bookings in our space and how what it takes and the ideology behind starting a SaaS company versus a consulting agency.

Gil: So we get to nerd out a little bit about that stuff, but it’s a huge pleasure to bring her on and just have her talk through the early days of lasso and kind of what she’s building out there. So I’m really excited to have her on. So without further ado, let’s bring her in.

Gil: Orlie, welcome to the show.

Orlie: Hi Gil. Thanks for having me.

Gil: Yeah, it’s good to finally get you on the show. It’s, uh, quite nice to get another entrepreneur in the tech space, specifically in hospitality on the show, it’s a great pleasure to have you on.

Orlie: Well, I know we’re gonna have an easy conversation ’cause we spent a lot of time talking prior to this, so I’m looking forward to chatting with you.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe to kinda kick us off, do you mind giving folks an introduction on who you are?

Orlie: Sure. Hi, my name is Orlie Benjamin. I am the founder and CEO of a software platform for the vacation rental industry called Lasso. It is a guest experience and marketing technology software platform that enables operators to own their book of business, reduced dependence on Airbnb and maximize revenue.

Gil : Tell us a little bit more about the software. Like what, what is it doing behind the scenes? What are you doing? What problem are you solving?

Orlie: Sure. I would say that the problem I’m solving is that operators of vacation rentals, when they use booking platforms are not. Enabled to own their book of business because booking platforms such as Airbnb are purposefully disintermediating the relationship between guests and hosts. And so one of the things that Lasso does is it turns.

Orlie: VRBO or Airbnb into lead generation because it enables operators to capture contact information from the whole group that’s staying at the property, not just the booker guest from the point of booking, not at the point of arrival. And so when operators have the contact information for their guests, they have the opportunity to.

Orlie: Sell them more things, improve the stay and create a relationship which can result in super fandom. And so from my perspective, the first thing that’s important is knowing the customer and being able to contact them from there. What lasso does is it enables operators to maximize revenue through things such as upsells and uh, sort of e-commerce like experiences.

Orlie: And then once the stay is complete. It enables operators to get reviews from the whole group, which helps improve engine optimization, whether it’s search engine or gen generative engine optimization, because we have a proprietary Google Review flow that weeds out bad. Feedback and ensures only the good reviews are the ones that end up on the internet.

Orlie: And then from there, it’s traditional marketing, right? It’s uh, CRM infrastructure, so you can manage the contacts, and then it’s also simplifying email and text message campaigns by creating templates so that people can just go shopping for the campaigns they want, as opposed to having to build them from scratch.

Gil : Nice in your. You’re an operator yourself. What kind of led you down this path? Maybe we can rewind just a little bit and give us a little backstory on kind of like where you came from and kind of what led you down the path of wanting to invest in and wanting to invest into this company.

Orlie: So my background professionally is that I’ve worked in solely Fortune 500 companies in some sort of customer centric role. I worked in pricing strategy at American Airlines where I actually managed the price line channel and a lot of the. Sort of revenue maximization innovation at the time. And then I went to Victoria’s Secret where I worked in omnichannel marketing strategy.

Orlie: That was a lot of digital and in interpersonal marketing, uh, strategy and, and implementation. And then I went to NetJets, which is a private jet company owned by Berkshire Hathaway. And my job there was to design the experience for billionaires through digital. And so my whole career has always been about what is a pain point that a customer has and how do you provide them with value?

Orlie: Through some combination of knowing the customer in some combination of, of digital and technology. And when I. I built my own vacation rental business. The first thing I looked for was some sort of marketing tech stack, because I’ve always worked in businesses where owning the customer relationship is super important.

Orlie: And you know, having these customer relationships turns, I mean, owning a book of business owning customers is essentially an annuity builder, right? Because when your customers come back, you have to do less acquisition marketing ’cause your existing customers turn into. Something that compounds over time with high lifetime value.

Orlie: They come back, they tell their friends, you can reduce your marketing effort over time when you nurture your, your existing customers. And I realized pretty quickly there wasn’t really a marketing tech stack specific for this industry that accomplished the goals that I would want to achieve as kind of someone coming from corporate America looking to use the same playbooks that I would do in a large company for my own business.

Orlie: And so when I found that hole. I cobbled together a, a tech stack on my own and realized pretty quickly that using third party software wasn’t working. A lot of the CRMs out there are designed for Salesforce, not for nurture marketers, and there was a lot of. You know, use cases that were very specific to vacation rental management that would require a lot of software engineering to make a third party tech stack work.

Orlie: And that’s when I made the decision to build it myself because I talked to other operators. They also articulated a need and an interest in owning their book of business and having a better marketing tech stack. And, you know, I felt with my, my experience working in these large companies, my passion for hospitality.

Orlie: My desire to do it for myself and seeing that there was a demand for it, it just felt like it made sense in terms of, um, something I would have interest in and have skill in.

Gil : That’s interesting. You mentioned a few things that I, I can empathize with. I, I come from. Also the eCommerce background. I also come from a lot of SaaS background as well too. And I a hundred percent agree with you in those different industries. There are purpose-built software for marketing for each one of those industries, and they’re actually different tech stacks based on the different industries.

Gil : Um, and in our industry, you’re right, there’s nothing out there that is particular to our workflows. The touch points that we have there. I’m interested in hearing from you, kind of like what have you seen people kind of cobble together and kind of where things start to fall apart.

Orlie: I’ve seen so many different Frankenstein efforts in talking to operators and doing discovery. I’ve seen some more sophisticated operators start using Airtable as if it’s a CRM, but that Airtable falls short when you can only create so many zaps from Airtable into the marketing email. Software, the email marketing solution, and there’s sort of not a bidirectional, um, enhancement that’s happening where it should.

Orlie: I’ve also seen things that are cobbled together, but they don’t work as intended ’cause people don’t have access to software engineering. And so they have a wish of how something would work, but there’s a lot of gaps because hiring a software engineer to build something custom is expensive. And if people are not technical, which most people operating vacation rentals don’t have software engineers on hand, um, for both a sort of a capabilities and a sort of a budget perspective, it’s really expensive to do that.

Orlie: So, you know, I’ve seen people using a lot of off the shelf email messaging software such as MailChimp and um, in some cases Klaviyo, which is more of an e-commerce product. And then I’ve also seen, uh, people using some of the point solutions that are specific to the industry with a lot of spend on consultants.

Orlie: And so the consultants are coming in and they’re managing. You know, a variety of different campaigns, but they’re hand coding those campaigns and so a lot of money is spent not on tech, but on consultants that are ena, like bringing the vision to life. So from, from my perspective, I think the tech isn’t serving folks, and I think there’s a lot of bespoke consulting that’s happening that could be simplified by enabling software.

Orlie: If those consultants can start operating the software instead of having to really tactically create things on their own.

Gil : So is, is your goal to enable. The property managers to take it on themselves, or do you still see a world where the consultants would still take on the marketing efforts, but they’re using a purpose built tech stack specifically for industry?

Orlie: I think both scenarios are viable. It depends on the business and, and what kind of. Resources. They wanna in-house first. First outsource, right? A larger operator, it might make sense for them to in-house a marketing resource because if the technology makes it easier to do, it’s easier to operate if they’re large and they can afford the salary and, and the economies of scale.

Orlie: Makes sense. But I actually think that a lot of marketing consultants will end up using my software because I think these consultants will now have. More exciting software to do more things. ’cause the consultants are not engineers and they have wishes and dreams on how to do stuff, but a lot of the software falls short for them.

Orlie: And so they’re gonna have the ability to provide more outcomes for their clients that are operators with, um, you know, a, a broader toolkit. So I think, I think it’s gonna go both ways. It’s just gonna depend on the operator’s size, internal capabilities, and business strategy.

Gil : Yeah. What was your inspiration for starting this in the first place? Like where did you. Get the idea of wanting to create this. Was it other industries, other software solutions from other applications? And you’re like, oh, I wish we had this specifically in our space. Like where, where did the inspiration come from?

Orlie: It honestly came from all of the different places I’ve worked. So when I worked at NetJets, we built a proprietary guest experience portal. I mean, that was part of the work that I was a part of, and so. Imagining this private jet experience from the point of booking to the point of rebooking was literally part of the role.

Orlie: So that idea, the guest journey, the owner journey in the context of NetJets, that was very much already something I had done. And then. Having worked in Victoria’s Secret, it just felt really natural to want to own the customer data, wanna segment the customers, wanna think about journeys. I know the value of really segment messaging and really segmented promotions, and so just again, having seen a lot of this work.

Orlie: In retail, uh, you know, I wanted to bring that capability and then I, I’d say from American Airlines working in pricing strategy, it’s really all about revenue maximization. And, and I think one of the, it’s very clear how important revenue maximization is. I mean, look at Price Labs. They’re crushing it.

Orlie: They have, I believe, 450,000 units using their software. That’s more than any PMS. And that’s because of the value of changing the nightly price. But when you think about how you revenue maximize, it’s not just how much money someone spends per stay. There’s so much more to maximizing revenue. It’s um, how often does that guest come back?

Orlie: How much does each guest spend per trip? Yes, the nightly price is one lever, but there’s also other ways to get guests to spend more, whether it’s upsells or it’s concierge level items, or it’s. Um, e even e-commerce izing some of the, the aspects of their trip. I just think there’s so much untapped opportunity that I’ve seen work in these Fortune 500 companies that it makes sense that this industry isn’t there yet.

Orlie: Because first of all, it’s basically only been 10 years since direct booking came around, both from the perspective of Airbnb and PMS providers and also taking on the onus as an operator. Is a really big commitment when Airbnb provides a really nice platform for what has traditionally been only 3% of the business.

Orlie: But now I think with these pricing changes that are happening around the platform, fees moving from being sort of blended from the host. The guest to being entirely from the host, right? Like that’s a very big margin change to go from 3% to 15.5%, I believe, of gross income, not of net, which is also a big distinction.

Orlie: So I think the distinction there is, um. Now the marketing budget analysis just changed because now operators are no longer just spending 3% of their business for lead gen from Airbnb. They’re now spending 15.5%. And so that gives you a lot more margin to think about going direct with if you’re, if you’re willing to put in the work.

Orlie: So I guess the point I’m making is there’s nothing C or new that Lasso is doing. It already works in other industries, it’s just the industry is underserved.

Gil : Yeah, I, I, I definitely think that our industry folks are almost figuring out from the ground up how to market their stays, and there’s not really a playbook or a te a set of tools that allows folks to really, really know how to. Run that effectively. Whereas in other industries, you go to SaaS, you go to e-commerce, there’s a very distinct playbook that folks will do.

Gil : They’ll, there are clear KPIs that they look at. You mentioned one small thing about like the L-T-V-L-T-V is something in retail that we think about a lot in, in e-commerce, we think about a lot. It’s not just about. That one checkout, it’s multiple things. How often, what’s the repeat purchase rate? How often, how quickly is it that they’re, they’re coming back to book to book with you or to purchase from you?

Gil : Like the LTV for many hosts and property managers is equal to their one stay, and that actually is very, very wrong in many ways. If you look at a big hotel chain, the LTV for a single user is not one stay.

Orlie: Most operators, I did some, um, research before I even decided to commit to the software. That was part of how I made the decision. And I asked, um, over a hundred operators, how many of them monitor repeat booking rates and less than 20% monitor repeat booking rates and the, and the 20. Percent that do right.

Orlie: Monitor these repeat booking rates actually will tell you, I’m not even entirely sure how accurate this is, because you have to decide how are you defining a repeat booking if. Jill and Jack both stay, but Jill booked the first time and then Jack booked the next time. They’re both guests. They’re both customers, but do you consider that a repeat booking?

Orlie: They both show up, but there’s just a different booker next time. I would say yes, that’s a repeat booking, but access to even knowing who’s in the property to be considered a guest, to then define them as a repeat booker. I don’t even think that information is readily accessible, which is part of what I’m trying to solve for is like giving people better understanding of who their customers are and, you know, what is the repeat booking rate.

Orlie: And, and kind of going back to your point of lifetime value, LTV, you know, in retail, the way you make money is the number of customers you have multiplied. By the number of visits they have multiplied by the average spend per basket. Like those three things multiplied by each other equals value of a customer.

Orlie: And then you decide what term of time you’re looking at, whether it’s a year or a lifetime. But so much of what’s happening in the vacation rental bus business is it’s just focusing on. One visit, no one’s looking at the spend for visit. No one’s looking at visits per guest. And so to me, those are really white spaces.

Orlie: Those are opportunities to maximize revenue. And I, I look at price labs and I’m like, look how much demand there is for revenue maximization. That’s one lever. It’s just, it’s just the price per night. But there’s all these other levers out there that just aren’t available yet without being like. Crazy sophisticated and putting a lot of elbow grease into it and, and I think those are the things that need to be unlocked for operators.

Gil : Yeah, so you, you’ve been working on this for a little while now. Kind of how’s the progress been so far in terms of the capabilities and the things that you’ve wanted to build and kind of like what do you see happening over the next year and how do you wanna close on some of those use case gaps that you see are really important?

Orlie: I am happy with what I would refer to as our 1.0 product. There’s a lot more I wanna build. I think our 1.0 product provides value on its own. Uh, our 1.0 product is really all around the data capture and the e-commerce ization of the guest journey. The next product will be the marketing tech stack, which we’re working on right now.

Orlie: And we will be, um, data testing that with an early set of customers. In fact, if anyone here is listening and they wanna be an early beta tester, reach out to me because we’re always. Looking to design with customers. Although I am an operator, I think it’s very important that I design with design partners, which means I listen to the different customers use cases, and I build for the, for the industry, not just based off of my own opinions, because that would be called, I’m Eric quoting now that that’d be called me marketing.

Orlie: Right. And I, I don’t assume I know everything, I assume, but it’s better to listen to others and listen to other pains, uh, in order to drive better product strategy. So. There’s a lot I wanna build, uh, but I also wanna make sure that what I’m building aligns to the pain points that guests have and that operators have.

Orlie: And so a lot of the prioritization of how these things are rolling out will, will really be in response to the, the feedback from operators of vacation rentals.

Gil : Yeah. And as you’re building this out. How much of this is kind of leveraged through kind of building out the platform and the capabilities there versus maybe eventually some SER service offering? Do you see yourself kind of going down that path of helping folks kind of on the service side, or do you want to fullest focus solely on kind of the enablement technology side of things?

Orlie: It is such a good question. I mean, my objective is to be a software company. I have seen scenarios where service enablement is necessary to be successful. I will use HubSpot as an example. HubSpot is a software company, but it has certification. For service providers because they are certified to be able to operate the software.

Orlie: I can see a world where lasso builds out relationships with marketing consultants and they become lasso certified because they, on behalf of the software know how to operate it. I don’t see a world where we build our own consulting arm unless there’s some use case that’s so. to what we’re doing, and there’s not a match in the ecosystem of consultants that is being found.

Orlie: I’ve already, in the time we’ve been in business, every time lasso, you know, everything’s people, systems and process, and if lasso on its own doesn’t solve it. I say, let me connect you to someone who can get you to the point where you can solve your goals. And I, I, I think a lot of my calls end up with me connecting, uh, a potential customer to a, a potential marketing consultant.

Orlie: So from my perspective, it’s a very complimentary relationship with marketing consultants because at the end of the day, having a system without someone driving the strategy behind it is not particularly useful. I would compare it to. Buying a really nice Ferrari that’s stick shift, but not knowing how to drive stick shift.

Orlie: And so if someone can drive stick, they’re ready to go. They can take that car out. But if someone can’t drive stick, then they have a system they can’t use. And so the system is only as good as the people behind it.

Gil : Yeah. Yeah. I think we at K Craft SAS kinda have a similar mindset where when we’re trying to build things, we try to make it easily accessible by whoever’s on is on the other side of things. And we try not to go into the service side of the business. And so if someone comes to me and says, can you help us with our email marketing?

Gil : Or Can you help us with the brand? We probably can, but actually there’s probably a lot other folks can that can do it 10 x better than us. And so I much refer, I much rather refer folks to folks that we trust in the business that have done it. This is their bread and butter, this is how they think about the world.

Gil : And those are actually very symbiotic. Relationships there. Um, they get to know our platform. They, they are often, they’re serving multiple one of our clients on the platform. They’re helping them out with specific use cases that are gonna be way better than we handling it themselves.

Orlie: Yeah, I, I agree very much with that approach. I. I think it’s really hard to be a services business and a software business. They’re completely different capabilities. I mean, one is selling a product, the other is selling time, and the whole point of a software business is to sell, sell an unlimitedly scalable product.

Orlie: And so I think that having a great working relationship with the experts in the industry that understand marketing and and can become. Grassroots promoters of your product is just way smarter than trying to build my own marketing agency. I actually have done consulting. I did it for one year, and I, I, I, I don’t wanna be in the business of consulting.

Orlie: I wanna be in the business of software.

Gil : Yeah, it almost also forces you to mature the platform as well too. So when you see a problem there, you can serve that problem. By throwing manpower into it. Or you can find a scalable solution and leverage technology to solve that same problem there. Um, and if you’re focused on building the most mature platform that solves these use cases, it almost forces you to always think about, okay, how do I solve that for not just this one person, but how do I serve it and build in a way that serves a mass market of folks?

Gil : That’s how I think about it.

Orlie: I agree with you a hundred percent. And I actually think, you know, strategy is not only what you do, but it’s what you don’t do. And when. You’re in the consulting business, everything can be bespoke and everything can be customized. But when you’re in the software business, you have to be really smart around what serves the most people and what do you not do because it’s a distraction.

Orlie: And I think the mindset is very different across consulting versus software scalability, because it has to be the right product for most people. Versus consulting is all about creating something custom. I mean, it’s almost comparing if artists use it, like it’s almost like fast fashion. Mass produced fashion is gonna be a product that works for most people at a more affordable price that’s scalable, whereas something couture is very custom.

Orlie: It’s very expensive, but it’s perfect for you. And so I think that that’s a decent comparison in terms of this concept of custom made versus sort of mass made.

Gil : Yeah, I, I, the, the example that you gave about like a very, like when you go from the consultancy side of the world, you can fix a lot of things with just manpower. And I see that that’s actually. Prior to craft to stays, that that’s actually how you would build specifically for our industry. That’s how you would build websites.

Gil : It’s all bespoke. It’s all someone out there that’s coding out this website, giving you your own instance. And for me, I see a lot of inefficiencies on that. I see a ton of inefficiencies, especially when the same templates are used over and over and over again. And I think in your world, you’re probably seeing.

Gil : Some people that are cobbling different systems together in different ways, and they’re not really leaning on the learnings of how you build this in a very sustainable way. And I think that that’s where I think over the next few years, we’ll see these platforms like ours, like really maturing, kind of like how PMSs have now matured in a place where you come to expect certain use cases and certain functionalities out of each and every one of the pmms Now.

Orlie: Yeah, and I think to your point on that, a great PMS anticipates your needs and has already solved it. Whereas a less mature PMS is still learning what those needs are and still building toward it. And I think the distinction, kind of going back to the question you asked me earlier, is that you might see very custom websites because there’s all these requirements.

Orlie: I think the problems I’m seeing are actually not a lot of custom. I see a lot of holes ’cause it’s a lot easier for someone to build a custom website with a web developer ’cause it’s visual and it’s, you know, you can understand it. But when you start. Stacking together a whole bunch of technology that requires a level of like backend data infrastructure and front end interface that is too much of a lift for these operators.

Orlie: And so instead of those wishes coming true, there is no engineering around the use case that they would wish. And then that just doesn’t exist. And so there’s a lot of point solutions that may or may not be industry specific that are being sort of thrown together with a lot of holes and that they, they sort of half accomplished the goal.

Orlie: Compared to what it could be if it was all stitched together really nicely.

Gil : Yeah, I would actually even argue, like even in the direct booking space. Probably half our engineering team is specifically focused on kind of the, the backend side of things, the non-visual things of it, because that actually becomes the things that makes it easier for people to set up the sites that they want to have or make sure that there’s a seamless integration.

Gil : Like I see some of the stuff that folks are doing with WordPress plugins and it’s, I’m not surprised that it’s buggy the way it is because it’s not meant to be built that way. Um, and. It’s actually a lot easier if you build it from the ground up, specifically for the use cases, similar to kinda what you’re, what you’re saying there.

Orlie: Yeah. I mean, I think what’s nice about. The world of direct booking websites is most of the use cases, 90, 85% of these use cases are the same, and there’s a lot more stability when you directly plug into a PMS or you directly plug into email messaging software or any other part of the, the tech infrastructure, because WordPress is constantly updating all of its open sourced software, and then you have to do all this regression testing and things break, and it’s, it’s.

Orlie: It’s a lot of web development investment. I have personally have a custom WordPress site and I, I spend probably more money, uh, maintaining the site than I would if I just switched to crafted stays, which is what you and I have talked about. I need to switch to crafted stays so that I can save money and have simplicity.

Orlie: ’cause it just makes sense ’cause of the scalability. You’ve removed all the need for all the custom work because you’ve anticipated the needs of what someone needs on a website and you just kind of tee it up for them.

Gil : Yeah, and I think that that same goes with kind of your platform there is like it matures over time. So there are certain marketing campaigns like when you launch your 2.0 and you’re doing marketing campaigns on behalf of these property managers, that stack is gonna improve over time. The use cases are gonna improve over time.

Gil : The capabilities are gonna improve over time. And the nice thing about like SaaS products is that. Because we’re billing on a subscription basis, you constantly have to add value. So from our side, our perspective as, as entrepreneurs and as the owners of these, these platforms we’re encouraged to keep on maturing the platform, keep on building on these things and keep on adding value to it.

Gil : Where I think it’s actually the, the inverse on the consulting side of it, it, you kind of deliver that one piece of. Software, maybe there’s a hosting fee, but a lot of the, the money is upfront, whereas on our side it’s, it’s very different because you’re constantly making sure that there’s ROI on the other side of things, so, which is for me is actually a good encouragement.

Orlie: Yeah. I mean, consulting as a business model has zero barrier to entry and immediate cash flow, but is completely capped in terms of scalability. ’cause you only have so much time to sell and software’s the exact opposite. It has barriers to entry because you have to invest in building software, and the scalability is in theory unlimited if you have a large addressable market, but you have to make sure you make the right bets at the beginning or else you’ve built the wrong thing and it all is garbage.

Orlie: So there’s just different risk reward approach.

Gil : Yeah. Um, what have you seen more recently that, like, I, I’ve noticed that in the past, I would say five to eight months, there’s been a lot of changes, specifically with Airbnb and maybe also VRBO has made some changes as well too. I don’t know if you’ve seen on your side a higher increase in demand or desire to go direct.

Gil : Um, have you seen anything on your side?

Orlie: Oh, I mean, I think the time is now. I think that the couple of big changes, particularly from Airbnb have been this change to the pricing structure around platform fees. I mean, traditionally it’s been 3% for a host and 15% for a guest, and the shift. Of consolidating platform fees. I believe it’s October 27th of 25, which I don’t know when this will air, but you know, that’s about a month from us talking right now. That is gonna change everything. And there’s also some chatter that I’ve been seeing around beta testing this whole, um, masking phone number so that the guest phone number is not actually shared and it’s completely controlled by the Airbnb platform. And there have also been a variety of changes around, uh, chargebacks and all these other risk mitigation aspects.

Orlie: So, you know, Airbnb in the last three months has done more than it’s done in 10 years in terms of reducing, um, control for the operator, which I think, you know, should be a, is a very clear signal to operators that Airbnb feels that it’s in a position at this point where it has enough operators on the platform that they don’t need to worry about them leaving. And that they’re really optimizing for the guest experience because the guests are where a majority of the money comes in from. And I think it’s actually really similar to what Uber has done, where Uber has been able to sort of change the pricing structure for drivers change the relationship that these drivers have with anyone coming in. The distinction between your typical Uber driver though and your vacation rental operator has a lot to do with the guest journey. Uh, there’s an interpersonal aspect with that driver. That engages with the person in that car if they can engage. And that in many cases doesn’t exist in a vacation rental experience because so many vacation rental managers are remote.

Orlie: And so, you know, operators are definitely waking up on the, the risk that having an intermediated distribution channel provides to their business. Because when your margin goes from 3% distribution channel to 15.5%. That can turn a whole business upside down depending on what sort of margins things are running with it.

Orlie: Also, you could think of that as your marketing budget. You could say, well, I have 15.5% of my overall business to use for direct marketing, and I either give that to Airbnb. Or I could build my own direct to consumer capabilities for probably less than 15.5% of my business cost. And so I think it’s, um, it’s changing the financial, the unit economics here, because 3% is nothing but 15% sizable.

Orlie: And I think it’s, I think the direct booking desire is just exploding right now. Everybody’s sort of waking up and trying to figure out how to. Change the distribution dynamics because nobody wants to be stuck giving 15.5% of their margin with no control over chargebacks and no control over communication.

Orlie: And you know, someone claims and there’s a fraudulent issue and now it’s your problem. I mean, there’s just like a lot more risk and a lot more margin, uh, happening here in the Airbnb situation.

Gil : Yeah, you make a really good point about. Uh, new paying commission fees and how, and in the inverse, that could be a marketing budget there. Like if I look at just one of my properties, just one of them, I’d probably, if a hundred percent of it came from one OTA, it’d probably be about 20 k worth of commissions.

Gil : And that’s actually a pretty big marketing budget there. If I were to spend that on just driving my own marketing. That’s a ton of marketing dollars.

Orlie: I have a pretty sizable direct booking. Pipeline for my business. And I can tell you I spend way less than 20% of my margin on marketing. I mean, obviously some of it’s ’cause I’m familiar with how to do it and I could run it a little bit more efficient, efficiently than maybe someone who doesn’t have the experience that I have.

Orlie: But 20% is a huge amount of money to spend on marketing. A lot of businesses don’t even spend 20% of their budget on marketing, so it’s a lot to give up.

Gil : I meant 20 k. 20 $20,000.

Orlie: my bad. Sorry. 20. Well, well, I don’t know what percentage that is, but you know, when you think of it in terms of percentage, I think it’s worth comparing it to Airbnb as a marketing budget.

Gil : yeah. And I think that what folks don’t realize is that it’s 20 K on an annual basis. That means every year if a hundred percent of my bookings comes from Airbnb, I’m continually pay them 20,000, 20,000, 20,000 indefinitely, whereas.

Orlie: And the opportunity cost of not having your customer information means that those customers that you have never got to turn into annuities that make you have to market less because they come back. And in my personal experience, my direct bookings actually fill up some of my less desirable booking curve moments.

Orlie: So my Airbnb bookings are almost always at the highest intent moments, whether it’s summer. Or fall. Those are my peak season, but my winter bookings, my weekday bookings, they’re more often than not direct bookings. And that’s because someone’s choosing to come stay at my property because of demand that I’ve created.

Orlie: Not someone’s going to Airbnb looking for a property in a location. And when you flip the script on being white labeled inventory that someone stumbles across versus being able to create demand for yourself, your occupancy rate is much higher and you just, I mean. That changes everything. The average occupancy rate for vacation rental businesses is 55% in the United States.

Orlie: If you can move from 55% to 65%, your costs aren’t really any at all variable, right? You, you pay for the mortgage, you pay for the cleaning fees. Maybe a little bit of variable costs on amenity items, but otherwise it’s almost entirely pure. Pure profit. So that’s where the, the marketing also has a huge upside, which is demand generation.

Orlie: And I think that might be the most important thing. And I’d love to, if anyone comments on this podcast, I’d love to hear from those that feel like they have a healthy direct booking business. How much demand are they driving? You know, it’s one thing to be reactive to someone’s Airbnb search, but when you can drive your own demand, that is an incredible position of power to be in.

Gil : Yeah, I, I, I find that the host that, or the property managers I talk to that is driving significant amount of direct bookings there, their whole marketing strategy, the way that they go to market, it’s very, very different. They’re not worried about the reviews as much. They’re not worried about being on first page, um, as much.

Gil : And yes, they do. They want to be there, but. A lot of their revenues is compounding revenue is revenues that they’ve earned throughout the years, and I think that that’s probably one of the biggest differences with direct there is that you’re not paying this 20 K annually. You may invest the first year to really build out your entire campaigns.

Gil : Maybe you’ll spend on consulting. But that second year, that third year, you have a much larger email list. You have more loyal followers on Instagram. You’ve dialed down your messaging there. And the second and third year, that’s where I see folks have significant amount of impact on their direct bookings.

Gil : Whereas when you’re on the OTAs, you could be a, you could be a host for 10 years and have a couple bad reviews, and it just starts to tank you, and there’s no. Equity in that outside of maybe just the Superhost badge that you might have.

Orlie: I mean, I couldn’t agree with you more, especially for anyone who’s looking to sell their business. Part of the business asset is the Rolodex of customers. I mean, that is, there is intellectual property in that, right? And so it’s not just having an Airbnb page and having a website. It’s the ability to turn an existing customer demographic into an annuity.

Orlie: That’s what marketing good marketing does. That’s demand generation. That puts a multiple on the business that’s so much higher because. It’s essentially going back to the lifetime value conversation and sort of the repeat business conversation that’s recurring revenue. And the favorite acronym for any investor is recurring revenue.

Orlie: That is their favorite thing, whether it’s annual recurring or monthly recurring, as we know in SaaS, but also in this world of vacation rentals. Repeat bookings. It is a huge KPI. It’s probably the most important KPI in terms of evaluating the health of your, um. Your business demand, right? Because if you have repeat bookings, like that’s that much less demand generation.

Orlie: You have to do that much less reliance you have on Airbnb.

Gil : It, it’s nice to, like, if you ever talk to any of our listeners here, you talk to a, a boutique hotel manager and the way that they think about how they deliver service, how they bring people back, is very different than the short-term rental world. Um, especially back in the day. Um, I think things are starting to change, but.

Gil : I, I’m always very fascinated by how boutique hotel managers like run their management and how they think about things, because I see as a, a nice little hybrid between really folks that do it at large scales, but also, um, they’re a little bit more scrappy as well too.

Orlie: I, when we think about what vacation rentals are in terms of a business model, it’s funny, I get. Asked by a lot of people, oh, you’re property tech. And I’m like, no, no, no, no. I’m not property tech. This is not an asset class that’s just property. It’s actually a hospitality business. And a hospitality business is an experience business, and the job of an operator of a vacation rental is to be financially viable, is to have great operations, but it’s also to create demand, right?

Orlie: Because you could have the tightest operation with a very low occupancy rate, and you’re not winning. I actually think a lot of this comes down to brand, and when I say brand, I don’t mean logo, font, and colors. I mean, the definition of a brand is the promise you make in your ability to deliver on that promise.

Orlie: And when you’re talking about a boutique hotel, they set an expectation and they, they deliver that expectation through the experience. Every touch point. Is part of the brand value proposition, and that’s part of why I think that the guest experience is so important. ’cause it’s actually how you build trust.

Orlie: And when guests come in before their stay has started and they’ve already had a positive experience, there is goodwill that already exists. Should something go awry, something tiny, something you know permissible, you don’t get that. Reactive, um, discomfort from a guest because you’ve already built that positive goodwill with them.

Orlie: That’s brand building and branding is also everyone being memorable. And so yes, these operators should have logos and names and be known, but they also have to build. It promises and deliver on promises. And it’s so much more than just a creative exercise around design. It’s around experience, strategy and experience design.

Orlie: And so to me that’s what’s really cool about hospitality. Like great hospitality brands, they set an expectation and they deliver on it. And it’s consistent. And, and when we really think about what Airbnb is, it’s a trust economy, right? No one would ever go stay in a stranger’s house. Without some feeling of trust.

Orlie: The way to combat the need for Airbnb is to build your own trust economy. And you do that by having great delivery of an experience that your customers are happy with and they talk about with their friends and they become super fans and they, they rave about it on social media. I mean those are all branding aspects ’cause it’s around the experience.

Orlie: Create super fans.

Gil : Yeah. I’m curious, slight tangent there, where did the name come from?

Orlie: Uh, it’s a misspelling of a cowboy’s rope because one of the things even we were talking about earlier is I just feel like. You gotta wrangle everything together, right? You have to have this journey from the point of the guest booking to the point of them rebooking that works. And all that has to be wrangled into one experiential solution.

Orlie: So, uh, for me, you know, you can’t buy anything from a domain perspective. It’s spelled appropriately anymore. So I just misspelled the word lasso, which by the way, phonetically trips a lot of people up. I’ve learned that. Um, but it’s, it’s just about wrangling things, like bring it all together.

Gil : I like that. I like that. All right, Orlie, we usually end the show with three questions. First question, what’s a good book recommendation for me? I’ve been doing a lot of reading, um, and I’m always looking for the next good book read. What would you recommend?

Orlie: Have you, have you read the leann startup?

Gil : I have, it’s been probably 12 years since I picked up that book.

Gil : Yeah.

Orlie: I would, I’d put that one at the top of your list only because where we are as founders, I think it’s very relevant to refresh on ourselves, on, you know, what is the why behind our business? How are we commercializing? What is our strategy? That book is less relevant to the listeners. Of this podcast, ’cause many of them are not in the business of building startups.

Orlie: But I actually think there’s a lot of application ’cause it’s really around the basics of entrepreneurship. So I’m a huge fan of that book. And if that one, you know, if you’re like orally been there, done it, I can give you another recommendation, but I’m, I’m currently rereading it for the second time. I think it’s that good.

Gil : Yeah, it’s been, it is been a long while and I, I still remember the premise is really around like, how do you really prove out your, your value prop, like your business viability of the idea of the product, whatever you wanna build there to the market where you’re not having to build. Everything all at once and deliver that big bang there where people know you about this certain thing is like, how do you piece together this in the Scrappiest way possible?

Orlie: I also think one of the really important points of the book is how do you know when you’ve built enough and you can scale? At speed. And I think that inflection point is really hard to pinpoint because how do you know you have enough enough customer traction to say, this thing is validated, now I can blow it up and go faster, versus this thing is not entirely validated and I’m going too fast and the wheels are gonna fall off.

Orlie: I think that’s like a really important inflection point for any early stage business. And I think that is probably really relevant to the stage you’re at because you have paying customers. You have a great early, early product. Could you throw a whole bunch of fire on it right now and everything would grow and, and get bigger, or would wheels come off?

Gil : I feel pretty confident.

Orlie: Well good. So maybe this is not the right book. We’ll have to pick another book

Gil : Yeah, it, it, it might be still, still worth worthwhile to read. I, I’ve been now at like seven other startups. I feel like I’ve been in that world for so long, but it’s actually probably a good reminder.

Orlie: I’ll throw out another one. Also not as relevant for your audience. It’s called Tribal leadership.

Gil : Okay.

Orlie: And um, what I like about this book is it talks about the concept of how people, so birds flock. Fish School and Humans Tribe, and it’s about the concept of how a tribe is between 20 to 150 people and how there are cultural idiosyncrasies around tribes.

Orlie: And we built tribes as um, leaders of our own organizations and we also build tribes around us through partnerships and through customers. And so thinking about people as tribes and sort of their shared values is a really interesting thing as you think about influencing behavior.

Gil : Interesting. I haven’t, I haven’t got that recommendation, so I definitely wanna pick that one up. Um, second question. What’s one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new?

Orlie: Just do it. It it’s okay if it’s bad and it might be bad, and just keep going. I, I would, I would consider myself a, a recovered perfectionist. And so much value comes from progress, even if it’s not the right thing at the beginning. And so accept the messy, accept everything as a win or a learning opportunity.

Orlie: It’s not win-lose, uh, just get out there and do it and continue to be open-minded and flexible and just, and just flow with it until you find where it all makes sense. But you know. Having fear about starting or, or not being ready to start, like ironically is the worst thing because then you do nothing.

Orlie: And so I think just, just do it. Just go out and do it and start and, and be okay with not being right and, and fix it and just get better. I talk about this with my 10-year-old son all the time. He’s trying to learn sports and I’m like, Ron, I’m like, do you think any of these professional athletes just got out on the field and they were perfect?

Orlie: No. They work at it.

Gil : Yeah, and you cannot get better until you hit, you take that first step, like I still remember the very early days of CTA days and it’s nothing like what it is now. And had I feared myself on what I would have to build, I probably. Wouldn’t have endure it. I probably wouldn’t have taken that step, but like just going at at it with just like your blinders on it, the next immediate step, that was really beneficial for me to just take the plunge.

Gil : Awesome. Early last question. What’s one tactical takeaway for someone that is either trying to get started in direct bookings or trying to amplify the direct bookings?

Orlie: I would say the first thing is be really clear on your strategy. There’s a lot of things that are changing right now in terms of Airbnb. I’m really curious to see what VRBO does. The VRBO has like their moment to shine right now if they choose to. But if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna say, I’m all in on Airbnb, I don’t want.

Orlie: To invest in a direct booking infrastructure, then be all in on Airbnb and make sure the math, maths around these, uh, differences in sort of the platform fees. But if you are committed to diversifying your distribution channel and going direct, decide exactly what your plan is and what your next step is and commit to it.

Orlie: For some people, it’s a direct booking site. For others it’s getting a PMS. For others, it’s gathering contact information and for some it might be taking that contact information and doing something within and engaging with their customers. Just depends on where they are in their life stage of the direct booking journey.

Orlie: But whatever it is, make sure you’re clear on your plan around across distribution and you know what your next step is and like commit to it. But kind of going back to my, just do it comment, um, it’s really easy. To have a plan that you never execute on and time passes and, and you can never manufacture more time.

Orlie: So I would just say operate with a sense of urgency and commit to your next step and do it.

Gil : Yeah. And for folks that don’t really know kind of how to navigate that, like if you go to the K crafted days website, we actually have a guidebook on some of the fundamentals where the first thing that if you’re thinking about really committing to direct bookings is you have to have a PMS in place.

Gil : And then what comes after those pieces. It could be your website, your branding, your marketing, really understanding your infrastructure there. But definitely for folks that. Aren’t sure what that next step is. Take a look at that guide, figure out like where you are in that foundations and whether or not you have everything that you need to be successful at direct bookings, and just really take that next action step.

Orlie: I would, I would say anybody who’s listening to this, I’m not in the business of consulting. You can book a demo with me for free on my website and I will listen to where you are in your business and even if lasso isn’t the right fit, I will connect you with someone. Who will help you get to your next step.

Orlie: I’ve had plenty of conversations with operators that don’t have a PMS yet. They don’t have a direct booking site yet. And because lasso requires a PMS, uh, lasso is not something they can engage with yet because it comes later in the commitment of the life stage of direct bookings. But I’m, I’ll gladly have a 45 minute conversation and do some discovery with you to kind of get a sense of what is your plan and what are your next steps to commit to?

Orlie: And regardless of it being lasso. it may not be the right fit. I’ll, I’ll gladly give you a free, uh, 45 minutes of consulting on that topic.

Gil : That’s awesome. Awesome. Kind of to that point early, where can folks learn more about you? How can they follow you? You know, where can, where can folks stay? Stay in tune.

Orlie: If you’d like to follow my LinkedIn. Uh, it’s my name. slash Orlie Benjamin is my personal LinkedIn page. We also have a lasso LinkedIn page. The lasso website is lasso.io and we’ve got a variety of social media channels for both, uh, the lasso business as well as some of the content that I’m putting out around marketing and, and educating vacation rental operators on how to think about distribution.

Orlie: So Instagram. Facebook, there’s, there’s a million places. Hopefully some of them get tagged in the podcast so people can easily find those. But I’m very active on LinkedIn. I will respond to you if you reach out to me, and my email address is Orlie, O-R-L-I-E at lasso spelled incorrectly, LASO h.io. So you can also message me that way.

Gil : I’ll be sure to drop. Those links into the show notes, so folks can just click and not have to, not have to spell or copy and paste over. Um, so we’ll include those into the show notes. But Orlie, it’s been a huge pleasure to have you on the show and really talk to us through why you started this company in the first place.

Gil : What the gap you see in the market is, and really why now is kind of a ripe time for a lot of folks to really invest into the direct bookings. Or maybe that they’re not ready yet and they’re, they wanna double down on, on the OTAs, but really figuring out. Which path they wanna go to next, and really how to be successful in that.

Gil : So I appreciate you sharing all that.

Orlie: Thanks for having me. It’s always fun to talk to you. I know we have some similar philosophies and, and I would challenge anyone out there to challenge me. I love a good, intelligent conversation, so come find me too and push back on my ideas. I’d love to hear what I’m not thinking of. Seriously.

Gil : awesome. Thanks Dorothy. I

Orlie: Bye. Thank you.