Hotel Guest Experience Strategies for Short-Term Rentals with Katie Cline

Summary and Highlights

👤 Meet Katie Cline

Katie Cline is an award-winning publicist, hospitality veteran, and short-term rental operator. She led global PR and communications for iconic hotel brands, including The Ritz-Carlton, W Hotels, St. Regis, and The Luxury Collection in both New York and London.

Today, she hosts two podcasts — Second Home First, focused on helping people turn vacation homes into wealth-building investments, and Suite Success: Masters of Hospitality, a Hospitality.FM original, where she interviews the brightest minds in the hotel and hospitality industry.

Katie owns and operates three short-term rental properties in upstate New York — Trout Landing (near Lake George), Gallant Fox (in Saratoga Springs), and The Lazy Oar (on Seneca Lake) — and co-hosts a fourth. She also publishes a free weekly newsletter at BuyYourSecondHomeFirst.com, helping readers turn vacation home ownership into a practical strategy for building long-term wealth.

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✨ The First 10 Minutes That Make or Break Your Guest’s Stay

One of the most memorable takeaways from this episode comes from Katie’s time working with Le Méridien. Research conducted during her tenure found that the first 10 minutes of a guest’s stay determine the tone for everything that follows.

If those initial moments go well — the directions were clear, the lights were on, the door code worked, the place was clean and comfortable — guests spend the rest of their stay looking for evidence that they made a great choice. That’s confirmation bias working in your favor.

But if those first moments go sideways — a missed turn, a dark entryway, a missing key — the guest will spend the remaining days noticing every cobweb and slow response time.

For short-term rental operators, this means auditing your arrival experience from the guest’s perspective. Are your directions foolproof? Does the porch light stay on long enough for a family to unload a car at night? Is the temperature set right when they walk through the door? These are zero-cost, high-impact details that shape how your property gets reviewed, remembered, and recommended.

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🏨 What Hotels Get Right (And What Short-Term Rentals Can Do Better)

Katie brings a rare perspective to the short-term rental world because she’s spent years sitting in hotel boardrooms where guest experience was dissected and refined. She watched brands like Ritz-Carlton build systems around every guest touchpoint, from reservation confirmations to concierge outreach.

But she also sees something hotels struggle with that short-term rental operators have as a natural advantage — humanness.

When a guest books two nights at a hotel, they receive a polished but formulaic confirmation email. When someone books with Katie, she can respond as a real person. She can say she celebrated her own dad’s 70th birthday at the property and share what he enjoyed. She can mention that she’s a parent too and offer to have the pack-and-play set up before they arrive.

That personal connection is something hotel brands spend millions trying to replicate. Independent hosts already have it — they just need to use it intentionally. If you want to build a brand that stands out, leaning into your humanity rather than hiding behind automation is one of the most effective things you can do.

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🤝 Hospitality That Costs Nothing but Pays for Everything

One thread running through the entire conversation is that the most impactful hospitality gestures are often free. Katie referenced a story from behavioral scientist Rory Sutherland about a cafe that set up comfortable chairs outside its entrance. The chairs didn’t generate direct revenue, but they communicated something powerful to everyone walking by: we care more about your experience than about squeezing every dollar out of you.

That same principle applies to short-term rentals. Katie challenges the common mindset she sees in host forums — the idea that providing “enough shampoo to get them started” or “a few garbage bags” is sufficient. If a guest is paying $1,300 a night, needing to run to the grocery store for garbage bags on day two feels like a miss.

It goes back to knowing your guest. If your property commands a premium ADR, the expectations for basics such as supplies, cleanliness, and amenities should match. And the good news is that stocking up on garbage bags and providing quality toiletries is one of the cheapest investments you can make, given their impact on reviews and repeat bookings.

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🐾 Surprise and Delight Without the Risk

Katie shared a fascinating hotel story about personalization gone wrong. A colleague was traveling to a hotel property, and the team had pulled photos from her Instagram to create a custom welcome featuring her dog. The problem? The dog had passed away the week before.

The lesson isn’t to avoid personalization altogether — it’s to balance surprise and delight with risk management. Katie applies this through small, thoughtful gestures that carry very low downside. When a guest mentions they’re traveling with a baby, her cleaner knows to set up the pack-and-play, place the high chair in the kitchen, and have a baby gate ready. When someone brings their dog, bowls and a treat appear upon arrival.

She also made a deliberate choice about welcome notes. Originally, she wanted personalized cards with each guest’s name, but the risk of a wrong name (or a leftover card from a previous guest) was too high. Instead, she uses a handwritten note without a name — “Welcome to Trout Landing. So happy you’re here.” It delivers 90% of the warmth with none of the risk.

These are the kinds of systems-level decisions that allow you to deliver consistent hospitality without being on-site for every turnover.

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🔄 Automation vs. Humanity — Finding the Balance

Katie had a candid moment when she talked about setting up automated messages early in her hosting journey and realizing they didn’t reflect who she wanted to be as a host.

Her approach now is to ask open-ended questions when a guest books — “What brings you to town?” and “Have you been here before?” — but only when the timing makes sense. If a guest has already told her they’re coming for a birthday celebration, sending an automated message asking the same question signals that no one is paying attention.

She shared her own experience booking a high-end lake house in the Finger Lakes. She spent significantly more than usual because it was her family’s first trip as a family of four. From the time she booked until about a week before check-in, all she received was an automated message.

That gap between the investment a guest makes and the communication they receive is a missed opportunity to build the relationship that leads to repeat stays and referrals. It doesn’t mean you need to manually message every guest for every booking, but at minimum, the moments that matter most — confirmation, pre-arrival, and arrival — deserve a human touch.

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🏗️ You’re Not Just an Investor — You’re a Host

One theme Katie kept returning to is that many people enter the short-term rental world as real estate investors, but the moment they open their doors to guests, they become hospitality operators. That shift in identity matters because it changes how you approach everything from property design to guest communication to building your direct booking brand.

Katie’s own journey illustrates this perfectly. She didn’t get into short-term rentals because of a passion for hospitality operations — she was a New York City resident looking for an affordable way to become a homeowner. The first property near Lake George was driven by sentiment and lifestyle. But once she saw how her hotel background translated into guest satisfaction and profitability, she leaned into it fully.

Three properties and a co-hosting engagement later, she’s proof that treating your rentals as a hospitality business rather than a passive investment leads to better outcomes on every metric that matters — reviews, revenue, and the kind of repeat bookings that don’t cost you a marketing dollar.

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⚡ Rapid Fire with Katie Cline

📚 Book Recommendation: Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara — Katie loved it not just for its hospitality insights, but for how the author elevated it beyond a trade book into great storytelling that anyone can enjoy. She also recommended Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestley and 10X is Easier Than 2X by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy.

🧠 Mindset Advice: Encourage yourself to fail more. Katie shared that when she reviewed her previous year’s goals, she realized she’d achieved most of them, which meant she wasn’t setting goals ambitious enough to push her. This year, she’s putting the “ridiculous” goals on the list, the ones she has no idea how to achieve. Success at year’s end might look like more red lines than check marks, and that’s the point.

🎯 One Tactical Tip for Direct Bookings: Invest the time in building your own brand. Know your unique selling points from both your destination’s perspective and your property’s perspective. A strong brand shouldn’t appeal to everyone — it should give people a visceral reaction. The ones who love you will really love you, and that’s how you build the kind of loyalty that drives repeat bookings and referrals.

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🔗 Connect with Katie Cline

🌐 Website: ByKatieCline.com 📩 Newsletter: BuyYourSecondHomeFirst.com 🎙️ Podcast: Second Home First | Suite Success: Masters of Hospitality 📸 Instagram: @ByKatieCline | @BuyYourSecondHomeFirst | @SuiteSuccessPodcast 💼 LinkedIn: Katie Cline 🎁 Free Resources: TheFiveStarRental.com

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🎧 Listen to the Full Episode

This conversation is packed with hospitality wisdom you won’t find in a typical hosting guide. Katie’s rare blend of five-star hotel experience and hands-on short-term rental operation makes this one of those episodes you’ll want to revisit.

🎧 Listen now on your favorite podcast platform and catch the full Booked Solid episode.

Ready to build a direct booking website that reflects the quality of your hospitality? Head to CraftedStays.co and start your free trial. Your brand deserves a site that converts — and your guests deserve a booking experience that matches the stay you’ve worked so hard to create.

Transcription

Katie: A lot of what I think about in my own short-term rental journey is how do I take lessons from the hotel space and apply that to short-term rentals? So a great example of that is thinking about the art of the arrival. And when I was working for La Meridian, we did some research that found the first 10 minutes of a guest stay set the tone for the entire stay.

So if you have a great first 10 minutes, you’re gonna spend the rest of the trip. Most likely happy. And if you have a bad first 10 minutes, like it’s really gonna be hard to recover from that. So what does that mean for me as a short-term rental operator? It means did I give good enough directions to my guests or did they drive past the house too many times?

If they’re arriving at night, does the light come on? Does it stay on long enough to unpack the car to get the kids out of the car? Did they have to dig around for a physical key or did I give them a personalized code to the lock? Was it super clean when they walked in? Was it warm when they got in there?

If it, if it’s the wintertime or was it cool if it’s summertime? You know, all those things. We as humans have what is called confirmation bias, and this completely supports all the research that La Meridian did, which is like, so you had that great first 10 minutes. You as a human want to spend the rest of your stay looking for things that support the fact that, ah, I knew it.

I’m so smart. This is the best place. Or if you have a crappy first 10 minutes, you’re gonna spend the rest of the time being like, see, I see another cobweb. This place is disgusting. Or see, it took her five minutes to respond to my message like, she’s really not paying attention or grateful for our booking.

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 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 improve on things.

You don’t need a custom $10,000 website to get the conversion rates that really matter. You just need the right. That’s why I build CraftedStays. It’s purpose built for short term rentals and designed from the ground up to help you drive more direct bookings. You can finally turn that traffic into bookings and you can keep on testing and improving.

As you learn, you can make changes all on the platform. You don’t need to learn something new. So if you need some help or you wanna get started, go ahead and go to CraftedStays.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 Booked Solid Show, the podcast we’re bringing top operators to discuss hospitality, operations and direct bookings. On today’s show, I have Katie Cline on the line. She’s a podcast host for herself. She actually operates two different podcasts. The first one is Second Home First, where she focuses on really helping folks get into short-term rentals and be able to use that property for their own purposes.

And Suite Success, which is a B2B podcast where she brings in top operators. In the hospitality industry to really share kind of how they think about hospitality. She’s on a mission to help others get into short-term rentals and really to share. How folks really think about hospitality and really how to uplevel each other.

On today’s show specifically, we talk about hospitality in great lengths here. It was a really good show. She talks about a lot about the guest experience and how we should think about all the little moments and really how that ultimately leads to more repeat guest bookings there. So without further ado, let’s bring her in.

 Gil: Hey Katie. Welcome to the show.

 Katie: Thank you. I am so happy to be here with you today.

 Gil: Yeah, I love having another podcaster. We talked a little bit about this on right before the show, but I love having another podcaster on the show. It’s nice hearing to like the, my quality on your side, like when I’m hearing it, it sounds really audibly nice. Um,

 Katie: you can feel the difference and I love that we’re comparing like software systems and mics and everything,

all, all the nerdy details behind the scenes.

 Gil: I can geek out and I probably have a lot to learn from from you, especially given that you not only run one show, but you run two shows. So I think that might be a kind of a good introduction. If you don’t mind, tell me more about, tell me who you are.

 Katie: Absolutely. Well, hello everyone. I am Katie Cline. I am a fairly new real estate investor. I started investing in short-term rentals about three years ago, and now I own and operate three properties. I also co-host or manage a fourth property. Um, and as you mentioned, I am the host of two podcasts. One show is called Second Home First, and that’s really aimed at people like myself who just.

Wanted to own a vacation home and became kind of an accidental short-term rental owner. And then my other show is called Suite Success Net Suite, like Hotel Suite that is now owned by Gift. And that interview is hospitality leaders to really get under the hood of why hospitality matters, what cool companies are doing, and how we can apply that, whether it be to our own hotels, our own short-term rentals, or just your own life in general.

 Gil: Nice on. Do you have any listeners that kind of. Listen to kind of both perspectives or do you feel like there are like two separate audiences at this point where like you’re nurturing them and you’re branding them very differently?

 Katie: I am branding them very differently. I see them as two very different ecosystems, but I have had some people reach out to me and

tell me that they listen to both. I think it always comes down to like what the subject matter is or who you’re interviewing, if it can pique somebody’s curiosity. So there is a lot of. A lot of overlap there. And my background before I got into short term rentals was working in the hospitality space. I oversaw global PR and communications for some of the world’s best hotel brands. That’s brands like Ritz Carlton W Hotels, St. Regis, the Luxury Collection. And I did that in both. London and in New York.

So that’s given me like a really wide purview into people, places, systems, um, approaches. And I really like to think about it as, as varied as the conversation can be. So sweet. Success. I almost like to think of as a diary se. Of the CEO, um, style conversation, like getting under the hood of who people are as people and not just the talking points. And then on second home, first I do three different types of episodes. One is solo episodes with myself, where I really go. In deep on a topic. So if someone is trying to understand how do I even check regulations around short term rentals, I have an episode on that. I then have, um, expert episodes. So I bring in people from the process, like if you’re in, if you need to have a mortgage lender or a real estate agent or an interior designer, just understanding these people who would be really integral in the home buying and then operating process. And then the last. Uh, type of episode is what I call real stories, and that has been super fun because I bring on people who have also bought their second home first. And when I first started the show, I kind of thought. By and large, everyone will have a similar story to me, which is, I live in a high cost of living place.

It’s ridiculous to buy a home here in New York City where I’m based. So they decided to buy someplace else, and they realized that they could earn money from that as a short term rental as well. But really what I’m seeing is the more people I interview, the more. Different types of stories I’m hearing, and that’s what I love so much about this world, this industry, about short-term rentals in general. Really it’s all about like what works for you, what do you want, and then how can you find a way to make real estate, make that possible?

 Gil: Yeah. Did you follow BiggerPockets kind of going into this or have, have you listened to BiggerPockets?

 Katie: I did start listening to them. Once I invested in my first second home, I now have three properties. Um, so once I kind of knew we were going down this path, I became a voracious consumer of every podcast book. Blog, you name it. Um, and

fun fact, I.

actually won a ticket to BP Con two years ago. I entered some Instagram contest as people do, thinking nothing of it, and then got a DM saying You won a trip

to Cancun.

I Did and it was amazing. It was so much fun.

 Gil: I, I hear really good things about BB Con. Um, uh, and more so kinda like the previous ones. I don’t know if that has changed at all. Um, I, similar to, to you, I consume. A lot of content, especially podcasts, especially in the earlier days. And when you’re mentioning the, kinda like the, the real story of people and how they bought their second home and how it’s very diverse.

It reminded me a lot about the episodes I listened to on the BiggerPockets when Brandon and David Green were on there and they would go through these stories and it was just so. Inspirational on the other side, and at that point I had zero doors, I had zero. And for me, I, I don’t know, many of our listeners know this, but I actually started on the long-term rental side.

So we purchased properties on the long-term rental side, and it took me probably. Two years before I had the nerves to buy our first property, I’m based in San Francisco. If I buy anything in California, it would wipe me out or wipe out all of my savings. And so we had to figure out like, okay, if we were to invest, where do we invest and how do we do it remotely?

And it took me a lot of courage to get through that. But if it wasn’t for the BiggerPockets podcast. I would never have gone into long-term rental. That ended up opening my eyes to short-term rentals and doing everything today. Ironically, kind of like how you mentioned like surprisingly like how you want that BP Con ticket 

 Katie: Mm-hmm. 

 Gil: full circle there.

Ironically, we now, so David Green, you probably know, he’s also a short term rental operator and he has his own thing that he’s doing right now. He is using craft as days for his direct booking website.

 Katie: Look at that

full circle moment right there.

 Gil: I remember we were on an onboarding call, um, and we’re setting up his site and it just felt so weird seeing him on Zoom because I’ve seen him, I’ve listened to his podcast, I’ve seen his background, but he’s talking through me like, 

 Katie: Hmm. 

 Gil: he’s, he’s talking to Brandon or he is talking to Rob, and.

He’s not talking to me. And when I was on Zoom with him, it just felt so weird that he was responding back to me. It, and I just, I had a little bit of like a fanboy moment of like, oh my God, like the content that you provided change the trajectory of the things that I did and kind of what led me here.

Like it’s all these little seeds that get planted along the way. It’s not one big thing, but he was a small portion of that seed.

 Katie: Exactly, and even that story that you just shared about starting in long-term rentals and how it took you two years to get the courage and everything like that is just proof of how personal this is for everyone. For me, my husband and I were living in the UK for about six years and we were so happy there.

I had wanted to move to London for my entire adult life. So the fact that we had done it and made it like I was just so ecstatic to be there and it was even better than I thought it was going to be. We ended up buying a small flat there, thinking that when we eventually moved back home, we could keep it as a long-term rental, and we actually still have that to this day. But when we moved back, unfortunately the, the impotence for us moving back is my mom is really sick.

She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 59 and a half years old, and so at a certain point as I watched her disease progress, I just was like, I have to be closer. I need to be here to help with her care. I need to be here to support my dad. So we moved back to the New York City area. They live on Long Island, very close by. This is where we had been living before we moved to the uk, and I was really. Quite frankly depressed to be back because I didn’t wanna be back in New York City. I wanted to be in London. I was happier there. But I felt an obligation is a, is a hard word, but like I felt a pull to want to be here for my mother, you know? And because we were moving back to New York City and we weren’t sure now we were moving back as parents when we lived here last time, we did not have children. We didn’t know if we were really gonna like living here. And even if we liked living here, just like San Francisco, it is. Astronomically expensive to buy here. So that is where the idea of buying our second home, first of buying a property in, uh, near Lake George in upstate New York. It was a place that my husband and I had been camping every summer when we were living here. It, it really held a lot of sentimental value to us. It was a place I knew I wanted to continue to return to. To build memories with my family and friends, and I thought, Hey, I come from hotels. Maybe if I, you know, use this as a short-term rental, maybe I can make a little money to cover some of my costs. And now that feels like such a naive sentiment because of course, very quickly I saw, not only was I covering all of my costs, but I was profiting off of this. So then a year later. We had the opportunity to do it again, a place 40 minutes south, um, in an area that we are, we were thinking we’d want to move to. And we have decided we do want to move to, because it was a great short-term rental market. So we could actually set up an investment property, but we could also decide do we like it here?

Do we wanna move here and really get to know the place? And then this year we just, um, purchased our third. Which is in the Finger Lakes, and that was really driven for the fact that I love being by water. I really wanted a waterfront home. As you can imagine, waterfront homes near New York City are even more expensive than New York City real estate, so finding that property is on the water in the finger lakes, were still fairly approachable in price.

Yet you have a big tourism demand from a short-term rental scene. Felt like such a win-win. So a very kind of lifestyle investing route. That was all started by a horrible tragedy in my life. Um, and I never would’ve gotten into this entire amazing world of ours, had the worst thing in my life not happened.

 Gil: Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I get the sense like you. With all the different list listeners or guests that you bring onto the show, there’s a, you mentioned that there’s wide variety there. What are some of the notable stories that like inspires you or you’re like, you wanna play that episode back to yourself again?

 Katie: Yeah, I, one of the most watched episodes was of Sweet Success when I interviewed Rory Sutherland, and he is a TEDx speaker. He’s a New York Times bestselling author. He is a chairman of Ogilvy uk and he is just. Incredible. He’s a behavioral scientist. And so a lot of what I think about in my own short-term rental journey is how do I take lessons from the hotel space and apply that to short-term rentals?

So a great example of that is thinking about the art of the arrival. And when I was working for La Meridian, we did some research that found the. 10 minutes of a guest stay, set the tone for the entire stay. So if you have a great first 10 minutes, you’re gonna spend the rest of the trip, most likely happy.

And if you have a bad first 10 minutes, like it’s really gonna be hard to recover from that. So what does that mean for me as a short-term rental operator? It means did I give good enough directions to my guests or did they drive past the house too many times? If they’re arriving at night, does the light come on?

Does it stay on long enough to unpack the car to get the kids outta the car? Did they have to dig around for a physical key or did I give them a personalized code to the, to the lock? Um, was it super clean when they walked in? Was it warm when they got in there? If it, if it’s the wintertime or was it cool if it’s summertime?

You know, all those things. Right. And when I got to interview Rory Sutherland. He is just such a creative, such a brilliant mind, and he said something that we as humans have what is called confirmation bias. And this completely supports all the research that La Meridian did, which is like, so you had that great first 10 minutes.

You as a human want to spend the rest of your stay looking for things that support the fact that, ah, I knew it. I’m so smart. This is the best place. Or if you have a crappy first 10 minutes, you’re gonna spend the rest of the time being like, see, I see another cobweb. This place is disgusting. Or see, it took her five minutes to respond to my message, like, she’s really not paying attention or grateful for our booking. So I think about his conversation a lot just because it’s rare when you’re in front of somebody and you just hear them. Talk and you’re like, you are a brilliant, brilliant mind. And the amount of views on that YouTube video I think are just proof that he has such a loyal fan base and following,

 Gil: Yeah, I was gonna ask like is the, the viewer accounts kind of driven because people love his content? Or maybe even perhaps like that episode was so valued by the listener that that ends up getting shared to others, and I’m sure you probably like snip it out and you’ll post on Instagram or people are like, oh, Ashley, that 52nd snippet of that conversation.

I want to get back to and listen to the entire episode.

 Katie: Yeah, it’s so interesting. And I also think our job as hosts sometimes is to really see where the guest wants to take us. And I got a comment from somebody on YouTube that said, I really like how you just let him riff and you’re not constantly like jumping in. And I. It

was true. I mean, I just was watching the brilliance unfold in front of me that I was like, keep going, please.

We’re listening.

 Gil: Yeah. Yeah. I think oftentimes as, as a host, like you can probably empathize with this, like your, you almost, your brain is super active during the entire conversation. It, it, I think I much rather be on the guest side. The guest side. I feel. Like, I am being served, like someone’s serving me. Um, whereas on the whole side, your brain is constantly active, um, and you’re thinking about like, okay, how do I react to certain things or what do I ask follow up questions on?

So like, it’s, it’s, it’s a very different way, like if anyone gets into podcasting or if anyone’s listening to a show, like the psychology, the thinking that happens on the show is, is not taxing. But it, it does take a lot of mental work.

 Katie: I like that analogy of being served. It’s like the difference between showing up to a Michelin restaurant, Michelin starred restaurant as a guest, and being the maitre d and the server and the chef, and the. The busboy and all of the things at the Michelin Star to make sure that experience is so great.

You’re right, it’s a lot of mental gymnastics in there.

 Gil: Yeah. On, on what you mentioned earlier about kind of how Rory talks about kind of the, the guest experience. As you kind of reflect back on that conversation, how did that change maybe some of the things that you started to put into practice, or maybe you change your SOPs or you change the way you monetize things.

Like what, what you’re like, oh. There’s, I need to fix that one thing in there, or maybe I’m now gonna do an audit of my entire workflow. Like, what did you take out of that and put into action.

 Katie: I, I wouldn’t even say it was just specific to Rory’s conversation, but in general, like I think we’re so privileged to get to talk to people, whether it be thought leaders in the space or people like myself who are just. Regular people looking for freedom and optionality and they’re having to do that through a second home. Um, it just makes you like reassess what you’re doing, like you said. And I think a lot of things I’m starting to think about are systems. Like how do I make sure things take me as little time as possible, but don’t lose what I think is so crucial. And Rory did talk about this, about, um, we wanna make sure that wherever we’re spending our time, wherever we’re spending our money, that the person on the other side of the transaction values that and sees that.

And a great example he gave was a cafe in his area, um, that they set up these like beautiful chairs in this little seating area out front of it. And he’s like, what that shows the guest right away is like, Hey, I’m interested in you having a great experience and I’m not looking to maximize the amount of money I can get out of you for your very first transaction. So it’s such a silly example, but I think of the very first, and actually I think only time I’ve been to Chick-fil-A, when they opened in New York City, friends of mine who were from the South, they were like, oh my gosh, we have to go like, let’s go. There was a huge line out the door for Chick-fil-A and I had never been there before. And so we’re standing in line. My friends are explaining the menu and like suggestions and whatnot, and they have someone going through the line with an iPad taking orders to like keep everything moving super fast. And my friends were like, oh, it’s her first time. She’s never been here before. By the time I got to the register to pay, somehow they had communicated that fact. And when I got up there they said, oh, we heard it your first time. This is on us. And I think that’s a great example of what Rory was talking about, where if you go into some place and they’re like nickel and dimming you and you’re like, oh my gosh, they just wanted to get as much money out of me as possible this one time, your likelihood of returning that second time is gonna be much lower versus if they’re like, you’ve never been here.

First coffee’s on us. Welcome. All of a sudden you’re so indebted to this place. And I think about it with, I have a local coffee shop that’s close to me. It’s about two blocks away, and I have another coffee shop that’s about three blocks further, and I like their coffee more. I think they have better coffee. But the guy at the first place is so warm, so welcoming. He’s always asking about my children, asking how it is that I’m like, you know what? I’ll take this slightly less good coffee because I really like Mike. So you know, those types of things of like hospitality is. It really does add up to our, our bottom line.

And I think people think like that’s the fluffy stuff. Like no, this is actually how you get repeat guests, you get returning guests, you get, like you were saying, shareability and people passing along. Like, you gotta go stay at this place if you’re in the area.

 Gil: Yeah. And I think that that goes to like any services business there. Um, this is kind of a weird example, but We had to go to the UPS store the other day, and we have a typical store that I go to that’s kind of near our house, but I was dropping my daughter off at ballet and we had to go to a new one.

I was like, okay, I need to do some Amazon returns. I’m gonna go to this one. And the experience was so much worse. And we’re talking about a UPS store where it’s a franchise, but the typical one I go to. They smile, they look at you, they help you out. They make sure, like if you walk through the door, they, and there’s a line, they, they kind of like wave to you.

But the hospitality at a, at a UPS door is, was really good on that one. My neighborhood one. And then I visit the one that’s near my, my daughter’s ballet school because I had to run an errand while she was, she was in dance and the guy didn’t even look at me the entire time

 Katie: Yeah.

 Gil: and. Yes, it’s very like utility.

I went there to do something. I, I, I needed something done, but just the feeling walking out of there, I just felt very unappreciated and it almost made me appreciate my neighborhood store more because of that. And I, I, it’s a very weird story to tell, but it, it, it really helped me understand like there.

Even the most mundane things, even something that could be utility, just how you treat people, how you make them feel special, how you make them feel heard makes a huge difference on like whether or not you wanna come back. Like, I really don’t wanna come back. It’s not a pleasant place to like do things.

I’m wearing, wearing an errand. It’s a chore, right? It’s not something I like to do, but it, it doesn’t feel like that.

 Katie: It’s a great story to illustrate that. Like hospitality isn’t everything, or at least it could be. Right. And look, there is a human element here too. Like maybe he was having a really bad day and you just caught him on a bad day, maybe. Sure. But there’s also the point that like it doesn’t cost any extra money for the place that you typically go to look up to wave to smile.

And yet that’s what you’re reporting back on of like. That has bought your loyalty. That’s actually something I think about a lot of times, like the things that I can take from hotels and do better in my short-term rentals. But having been inside those boardrooms and those conversations in hotel companies about what the competitors of short-term rentals are doing better than hotels, I do think that is a really unique advantage that we have our humanness over corporateness.

So if you book. A two nights today at the Ritz Carlton or at any hotel, you know that after you hit book, you’re going to receive a very form confirmation email and sure. Hotels are constantly thinking about ways of like, could we put the concierge email? Could the concierge reach out to you? Could we give you a WhatsApp number so you can text us?

Like they’re constantly thinking about ways. So it’s not to say that that’s all you get. But the converse is like when people book with us, how can we show them a little bit of our humanness? And so when I first, um, listed my, my first property, I was originally thinking that like my photo would be my logo and.

That my name would be my property name. And very quickly before I launched, I, I realized, no, actually I want them to know they’re being hosted by me, by Katie. And I had to kind of strip away the polish and professionalism, which is still important, to give them a little bit of like the authentic humanness.

So when someone says, Hey, we’re visiting because it’s my dad’s 65th birthday, I can say, we actually celebrated my dad’s 70th here, and here were some things that he really enjoyed. Maybe your dad would too, or you’re visiting with a newborn. I can say, you know, we’ve done this drive a lot with two kids.

Guess what I, I’ll have a pack and play ready for you. And we also have a high chair and a baby gate in case that’s useful too. So just those little things that I think builds connection with somebody. Before they even arrive. Um, and that goes to recommendations too. Like how can we, if somebody says like, do you have a great restaurant in the area? I shouldn’t be, first of all, giving them a list of things that if they just searched best restaurants in Bolton Landing, they’d be able to find themselves. I should really be kind of curating that list for them. And I’m not talking about things that take. Tons of time. And I also understand that as your portfolio grows, your time shrinks.

So

I’m not saying this is for everyone, but for me, as someone who’s managing four properties right now, I’m able to do this and I can do this in a, in an efficient way as well. But really the point is if a bachelorette party is coming of like young 20 something women, or if a multi-generational family with elderly parents and a newborn baby are coming, I’m probably recommending them to different restaurants. Because that’s two different groups and that’s two different use cases. And that’s something that I can do to really curate the stay for them. Now, going back to again, like I think we hear a lot about automate, automate, automate. And I think there are a lot of things that we can automate and things that we can like have set and ready to go so that we can be faster and smarter. But at the same time, we don’t wanna automate at the sake of losing the humanity. I had set up automated messages when I first launched my first property, and I just felt like it was falling short on who I wanted to be as a host.

So. I ask certain open-ended questions. When people book, I say, what brings you to town?

Have you been here before? If I’m asking, what brings you to town? At my property in Saratoga, and it happens to be the weekend that we’re hosting the Belmont Stakes, one of the Triple Crown horse races in the us. I look like a fool as a host. Like shouldn’t I know what brings them to town or. If the guest has already messaged me and said, Hey, we’re coming to town for my dad’s 65th birthday.

I shouldn’t then say, what brings you all to town? It very clearly is like, this is an automated message. You know, and I think about it from the guest side too. Over the summer we had booked a beautiful lake house to stay in the Finger Lakes. It ended up ironically being when we closed on our Finger Lakes house, but I had no idea about that six months prior when we booked it, and I spent.

A pretty penny on that. More money than I typically spend, um, on a vacation. But it was gonna be the first trip as a family of four. My son was gonna be Bo born about two or three months prior, and so I thought, I’m gonna splurge. I wanna make sure like we get what we really want. And for probably, I don’t know, until we, until about a week before check-in, all I received was an automated message.

So I just think we need to like balance a bit of automation and tech with human and hospitality.

 Gil: Yeah, and it’s, it’s, it’s challenging as like if you’re doing this as maybe what you call like a side hustle, and this is not your, not your thing, but I think it’s a good reflection of like. Actually taking a step back and thinking about what the guests would want to feel like. If you kinda like root yourself on that, you can almost know where you can go wrong.

If you’re constantly thinking about what do the guests think, what do the guests care about, what are the things I need to overemphasize on? And maybe where are the things that maybe I don’t need to spend as much time on? It helps kind of guide you on like where you, where you should be spending your efforts.

But going back to like one of the things that you mentioned earlier, it doesn’t cost you anything to give good hospitality. 

 Katie: Mm-hmm. 

 Gil: Uh, I, I almost wanna like double click into that. Prior, when I was in, like in my early college days, I did retail jobs 

 Katie: Mm-hmm. 

 Gil: and I basically paid that, paid my way through college.

Like my, my parents didn’t pay. I, I had to basically earn my way through college. And, and one of the things I learned is that like the folks that actually give good hospitality, the ones that smile, the ones that say hi, they actually end their shift happier.

 Katie: Mm-hmm.

 Gil: And whereas like the, the places you may go to where the culture is more like, okay, we’re there just to, to get them what they need.

They also end their day even sadder, like it, it kind of reinforces itself. 

 Katie: For sure. 

 Gil: And I, I think like what I’m picking up is like there’s actually. And I would love kind of your idea on like whether or not there’s more aspects to this, but like there’s almost two parts of it. Like there’s one of like the culture side of things.

Do you care about hospitality? What are the values you, you, you care about? How do you wanna show up for your guest, whoever you’re servicing? And then there’s the system side of it. Like how do you set things up from a systematic perspective to make sure that. On a consistent basis, you’re able to deliver on that quality there.

Those are like the two things as you’re thinking, as you are talking about all the experiences that you had in hospitality, I was like, what are like the few threads along the way that it’s consistent no matter if you’re in the restaurant industry, if you’re on short term rentals or hotels or whatever it is, it’s to, what I’m like trying to draw back to is like, is those two things, or maybe there’s even more aspects to it, but to me those are seem like very core elements to it.

 Katie: I think Danny Meyer says it really well. He calls certain people hospitalitarian and almost alluding to the fact that like some of us are just. Born with hospitality in our blood. I do think, like you said, then the systems or the environment that you’re in are either gonna like exacerbate that or like kill it.

So we don’t wanna do that. But um, you know, for example, if you’ve ever flown in or out of JFK airport, I personally believe that that’s where hospitality goes to die. I don’t know that you could ever be hospitable in JFK airports. Like horrendous. But all joking aside, it’s true. Like if you are someone who wants to be happy, who wants to like find the best in people, you’re going to do it.

And I similarly worked a lot of retail jobs as well and you know, going back to the guy at the UPS store and us all having bad days, there were plenty of days where I remember thinking like, oh my gosh, get me outta here. Or looking at people who were in the shop shopping with their friends and thinking, I wish I was shopping with my friends right now, but. What’s going to like, make it better for me if I sit there and feel sorry for myself or if I go over and say, Hey guys, what are you looking for? Anything I can help you with today? And then all of a sudden you start chatting and you build a relationship and a rapport, and maybe they’re buying a little bit more because you made them feel so welcome there.

Right? Just those like little things. Um, on, on the podcast too, I’ve interviewed people and I always ask them like, for great hospitality, great examples of hospitality they’ve experienced in their own life. And the, it’s like a complete run of the gamut. I’ve had somebody talk about an experience at Cheesecake Factory because the waiter was so good, so attentive, noticed certain things, you know, brought the kids food right away, made sure there were extra crayons, things that us as parents were like, oh, thank you for doing that. It can be anywhere. And like we said, it doesn’t have to cost money to do it. It can be free. It actually is going to pay dividends in the long term. And then the systems that support it, like what are the things that we can actually do to encourage ourselves to allow ourselves to be hospitable? So for myself, it’s having those like quick lists of like, these are good suggestions for families.

These are good suggestions for people with traveling with dogs, like copy paste. They don’t know that this came from a Google Doc, and it’s super easy for me to do. They think that they’re like, wow. Katie knew that I was traveling with my dog, Becky, and she made sure every place she suggested Becky could go to. And similarly with like kids and pets. As someone who’s a parent and who had a dog for 10 years, they are part of the family. And I feel like, especially in big cities, I mean the amount of times that I almost feel like I have to apologize that I’m bringing my children with me, it’s unfortunate, right?

Because I still wanna go to great restaurants and great experiences, but there’s this mental feeling of like, I’m an inconvenience for being there because I’ve brought my kids. And actually just recently I went to like a. Cool place for brunch in Manhattan and I booked with not only my children, but my sister and her kids.

Her kids are a bit older, but still the amount of things that they gave at the table, they had coloring things for them. They had this weird funky sticker thing that they could do. They had these like pop-out pieces that would create a little 3D dinosaur. What that

said to me silently was, it’s not an inconvenience that your children are here like you are all welcome here.

So when I think again about my short-term rentals, it takes one extra text message to my cleaner to say the next guest is checking in with a dog. Or the next guest is checking in with the baby and she knows then, okay, I’m gonna set up the pack and play. I’m going to put the high chair in the kitchen.

I’m gonna put dog bowls out in the kitchen and I’m going to put a cute little dog treat that I have, um, that I give to each of them. And it’s just like something that again, I think silently conveys to my guests. All of you’re welcome here. All of you are appreciated to be here and again, as parents, we’ve all been to that point of like digging around in all the closets and trying to find the pack and play that they said they had and freaking out that you know that they definitely didn’t include it.

The fact that you can walk in and it’s all ready to go, I think again, adds to that arrival experience and that ability to really relax into your new surrounding right away.

 Gil: Yeah, I think that that’s so important. I think it’s also challenging too, like if you’re an operator, like for me, my, my properties are from afar, so it’s not like I can go in there and set it up and put it out there. I almost, I have to depend on my team there and setting that expectation with the team, having checklists in there and, and really making sure, like in some cases, even pictures there, because it’s like, what you don’t wanna do is set that expectation.

You tell the guests, I put this out for you. Um, and give them. Some assurance that they don’t have to worry about this, but your team also has to make sure that they deliver on that experience too. So I think there’s a bit, a bit of like making sure that the team that you hire and they have supporting you along the way.

We now have it where we inspect our properties, um, regularly to make sure that like things that our cleaners don’t catch, we don’t want our. Our guests to catch. We wanna be able to catch that ahead of time. Um, and the inspector, they’re there to scrutinize things. Just like how if we have a guest that may be a little bit more particular, they’re gonna scrutinize things too.

So I’d rather our team do it than anyone else.

 Katie: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Uh, all of our properties are far away too. They’re at least three to five hours away too. So I’m not doing any of this myself. It is a reliance on the team and also like kind of bringing them in the fold and explaining, you know, why this is important. I think I’m lucky. One of them is a, a mom herself.

So I think. She gets

it. Um, and for the other team, she has an amazing, amazing eye for detail. So she really appreciates it too. But, you know, these are nec not necessarily things that I think we need to market or merchandise either. We don’t need to be putting out photos of the fact that we have a welcome gift for them or. Pictures of even like the doggy bowl setup or the doggy treat or anything like those, I think in the hotel language would be those surprise and delight moments. So

I’ve confirmed to you that there will be a pack and play at the property. I have not confirmed to you that it’s already set up imp perfect for you. Um, and then similarly, I also do think about like what is that risk reward for anything that you do. So. Originally, I loved the idea of doing a handwritten welcome note, and it would be lovely if I could put each of my guests name on it, but we’ve heard horror stories about how that could go wrong, and I just thought, like to ask my cleaning team to do it.

And what if the wrong card gets left out? Now what we do is we still have a handwritten note, but we just don’t have a name on it. Like, welcome to Trout Landing. So happy you’re here. You know, if you need anything, we’re right there from Katie, whatever. So it’s like still gives you probably 90% of the warm and fuzzies that if you had a card that was written, dear Katie, but at least it mitigates those issues, um,

 Gil: much rather have it, you’d much rather have it have no name than the wrong name. 

 Katie: Yes, exactly. 

 Gil: I’ve seen that where, where maybe it’s like one of those like white erase car like blocks where, or chalkboard and someone writes it and the cleaners didn’t erase it and didn’t put the new name on it. And that’s, that’s way worse than not, just not having anything at all.

If 

 Katie: Right, because then people start to think like, wait, is it double booked or was it cleaned in between? And then you’ve heard those like crazy scintillating people magazine level stories of like, they wrote the mistress name instead of the wife’s Dave, or you know, all those

 Gil: Oh my gosh,

 Katie: just thought, we are not doing names, we’re not doing names.

 Gil: I didn’t even think about that one. And I do not want to, I, I don’t even wanna,

 Katie: Well, actually, do you wanna hear a story about, uh, personalization gone wrong? This was from the hotel world. So when I was working in hotels, we would travel a lot and we would always be staying at our hotels. And the hotel teams constantly tried to go above and beyond for everyone. But of course they would also do that for corporate employees. And a friend of mine was traveling to a hotel once, and the hotel decided to like take photos from her Instagram. I think it was her and her dog, and I can’t remember what they did with it, if it was a poster or like a pillow cover or something. And it was really intended to be like, welcome to my friend and her dog, because they knew she was always traveling with her dog. Well, a week before that trip, her dog passed away. So that’s again, a great example of like

all the best intentions in the world. Slightly creepy maybe ’cause they’re pulling things off Instagram. But if it was public, okay, maybe fine, but can really have the prote propensity to go south. So that balance of like, how can we surprise and delight, but like how can we make sure it’s not gonna go south?

 Gil: yeah, and it’s almost. Impossible to like surprise without putting some of that risk in there when you’re doing something almost that bold. Um,

 Katie: That bold. Yeah, that personalized too,

versus you know, here’s a handwritten card and a welcome bag and a welcome gift that the likelihood of insulting you is very low.

 Gil: And I don’t think you necessarily need to go that bold in many ways. Like these small little touches, they actually go a really long way. 

 Katie: Yeah. 

 Gil: I, I think like. A lot of times we get numb to a lot of these different things that happen around us, and it’s oftentimes like when you go to a restaurant or you stay somewhere and things just almost seem to almost fall in place, you kind of behind like the, the, the thought in the back of your head is like, oh, this is actually a really good experience.

You don’t really think about like, oh, this is actually curated for that. It was like that was intended to be there because someone had thought through the entire design of your stay. Um, so it, it is a lot of intentionality and it doesn’t have to necessarily be like super bold in your face.

 Katie: Yeah, it can just feel seamless and easy and appreciated. I mean, little things like sometimes I see on like host forums and host groups, people being like, oh, I don’t need to provide shampoo and conditioner. People will bring their own, or like I provide enough. Coffee or uh, garbage bags to get them started.

They can go out and get more garbage bags for the rest of this day. And I think that’s again, where we get into this like nickel and dimmy phase. And to your point, it really matters who your guest is. If you are operating a super budget place that people who are going to book our booking because it’s affordable, that’s a different story than my properties, which are, you know, high earning, a really high a DR in the peak season months if you are paying. $1,300 a night to stay at one of my houses. I think it’s kind of annoying that on day two you need to go to the grocery store and buy a full box of garbage

bags when you probably only need like five more. Fair enough. Right? I think that’s a fair point on the guest to expect there to be enough garbage bags for their stay.

So going back to like, who is your guest? What are their expectations and how can I be just one step above that, even in if it’s in a way that doesn’t cost you any money to do that.

 Gil: Yeah, and I think part of it is that the folks that get into short-term rentals, we somewhat, almost accidentally, or we kind of get into it, not. Expecting like hospitality, like very few end up getting a short-term rental because, oh, I want, I love hospitality and I want to serve other people. That’s usually not the motivator of bike.

Spending hundreds of thousand dollars for a down payment and purchasing a property and designing it all. Like it’s usually not driven because you have a passion in hospitality. Very few it could happen, but very few. It’s usually because of some other motivator, wanting to buy a second home, wanting to get, investing has starting to build, build your, your nest egg or somewhere you wanna retire to.

So there’s some other motivation behind it. And so a lot of times. Yeah, we as hosts, homeowners, we get into it and we’re learning all these different things all at the same time. You’re learning how to design a place, you’re learning how, like you’re learning what A ICP is and who you’re trying to tailor towards, what the, the messaging is like.

You’re trying to learn all these things at once and its. Extremely. I, I, I bet you, you purchased your first property three years ago. I bet you you still remember that short period of time where you signed your paperwork and you brought in your first couple of guests and that whole entire experience.

 Katie: I can tell you the first, the name of the person who booked my first My property first. You know, I remember thinking at the time, I’ll always remember every single guest, and now thankfully we’ve had so many guests through the doors that I’m like, it’s. I don’t even remember who was there like four days ago, but they would never know it.

They would think that I thought the sun and moon circulated around them, but it’s true. The, the learning curve is huge. I think what you just touch on is absolutely crucial. A lot of people get into short-term rentals as a real estate investor, but what we have to remember is when we open our doors to guests. We are no longer a real estate investor, or maybe we are just like

in the background. We are now a host and we have to put hospitality first because that is going to make or break our entire success with the business, which will then hopefully allow us to invest in another property and another property.

 Gil: Yeah, and also like to add on top of that, it’s like you’re also now a business owner as well too. Like you have to now learn. All the ins and outs of how to provide great hospitality, but also how do you operationalize this as a business? Because as you continue to scale, and maybe you wanna purchase more properties, you may, you’re hiring a team, you’re doing taxes, you’re doing a lot of different things that like you never anticipated.

You were gonna do when you bought the property. It’s very different than a long-term rental. You find a tenant in there and maybe you have a property manager, but when you’re the host and you’re the homeowner, there’s a lot that you have to learn along the way. And so I think like because of that, folks almost have to be reminded every once in a while to kind of go back to like, okay, these are the fundamental things I need to think about.

This is how I serve my audience.

 Katie: Mm, exactly. Serving your guests. I think that’s crucial. Whereas you hear a lot of sentiment of like frustration around guests, or a great example, what we were talking about with the Ritz Carlton will send you a confirmation email. You see a lot of chatter of people being like, well, I didn’t receive a message from my guests explaining like who they were coming with and why they were coming. Well, the Ritz-Carlton isn’t expecting you to like email them and be like, I’m Katie, I’m traveling with. These exact people, and I hope it’s okay that we stay and let me justify it. No, this is a transaction. So we need to think about how we’re serving our guests as much as we need to realize that they are paying for an experience and how can we deliver on that?

 Gil: Yeah, Katie, we covered a lot of topics. I usually end the show with three questions. First question, what’s a good book recommendation for me?

 Katie: It will probably be no surprise that I’m gonna recommend this one, but Unreasonable Hospitality. I loved that book. I loved it for a lot of reasons. One, everything we were talking about in terms of hospitality can be anywhere at any price point, and oftentimes doesn’t cost a lot of money. But I also really liked what the author did for the industry, which is. Yes, a ton of people in the hospitality space read it, but I think he really elevated it outside of just a trade

book and was able to bring in just great storytelling. So it’s a really enjoyable read. It’s not a traditional non-fiction like, let me get my pen and paper and take notes along the way. I just thought it was really, really well done.

 Gil: that, that one gets recommended. Quite a bit on this show, uh, for very good reasons. Like we’re, we’re in the, we’re in the world of hospitality and it, it does deserve a lot of credit. Um, second question, what’s one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new?

 Katie: This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, particularly with the new year starting, and I think we need to encourage ourselves to fail more. And I am a very type A perfectionist human, so that is even an uncomfortable sentence for me to say out loud. But what I do every year is, you know, put together some.

Almost goals for the year ahead, less resolutions more about goals. And when I was looking back at last year’s goals, I saw that by and large I had achieved a lot of them. And that’s not like a, Ooh, look how great I am. Let me pat myself on on my back. That really showed me my goals that I was giving to myself were things that I pretty much knew I was able to do, even like down to. I, I, I had a maternity leave for an example, and I wanted to make sure I was going to get paid for a certain amount of maternity leave, and I really wanted longer, but I was like, no way that’s going to happen. And then it actually ended up happening. And the point being like, I didn’t even put in my goals. What I really wanted, I put what I knew I could achieve. So this year I’ve kind of told myself, let’s put the ridiculous things on this list. The things that I’m like, I have absolutely no idea how that could ever possibly happen, but maybe just by putting it there, maybe I’ll get one step closer to it. So I’m almost looking at success at the end of this year to gonna be more red lines of like.

Didn’t do that. Didn’t do that, didn’t do that. As opposed to like more tick boxes that I, I did everything that I set out to do.

 Gil: Yeah, that’s, that’s, I I love that. I, I’m reading a book right now. I don’t know if you’ve, you’ve heard of it, the Science of Scaling. 

 Katie: Mm-hmm. 

 Gil: it talks about, and I’m not quite as far into the book, um, but the, kinda the premise of the book is that a lot of times we will set ourselves goals that we think are achievable and.

Even a stretch achievable, right? We may say that we want to grow four X this year and maybe only the previous years we grew two x or whatever it may be. So they’re, they’re pretty still massive goals, but we think that they’re achievable. But oftentimes you may need to stretch way beyond that where your goals could be growing.

Two, like several orders of magnitude more than that, where it then changes your perspective of like, okay, if I were to achieve that goal, I couldn’t just work more, I couldn’t just hire two more team members. I would have to tackle the problem very, very differently. 

 Katie: This is exactly like, have you read 10 x is easier than two x.

 Gil: yeah. Yeah, exactly.

 Katie: I, that was another book I thought about recommending when you had just asked me. But it, it’s really an interesting mindset shift too, of like, you can’t just do more to get more. Because if you said to somebody, like we were talking before we started recording, like, everything you have going on as a parent, if we were like, okay, um, you just need to double the business and the way that you’re gonna double the business is by doubling your hours.

You’d be like, that is physically impossible. So shifting that mindset of like, well, how. Could I do that? That is, yeah. That’s where the magic happens, right?

 Gil: I, I just looked it up, ironically, thereby the same co-author.

 Katie: Oh, there you go.

 Gil: That’s, that’s, that’s kind of why there’s that linkage 

 Katie: cake many ways. 

 Gil: Yeah. So Ben Hardy, uh, he worked with Dan Sullivan quite a bit, um, and Dan, he’s, he’s wrote a lot of good.

 Katie: their whole, their whole background.

 Gil: Yeah, where Dan wanted to write a, a bunch of different books and had a lot of different ideas and Ben Benjamin Hardy had like very little experience.

So he went on the coattails of folks that were doing really well and he’ll go to them and say, I’ll write your book for you. Uh, I’ll be your ghost writer. Not actually really ghost writer. He’s actually on the book. Uh, he’s actually an author on there, but he’s not the one feeding the knowledge into it.

Right. And then he learn all these different skill skills and he. I found that there’s actually this one little gap out of after he wrote 10 x is easier than two x, and that’s why he wrote the science of scaling. Um, so.

 Katie: You know what? Not to go back to your book question yet again, but there is another great one that I think you would love to. It’s called Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestly. He has been on diary of a CEO twice and he’s done like a round table episode, and his second episode on Diary of a CEO was fantastic. I just think the way that he thinks about marketing is so accurate for today’s day and age, so that it’s a really quick read and really, really powerful.

 Gil: Yeah, I, I felt like I, I, I read through part of, I, I have its tendency of like reading through like a third of a book and then picking up the next interesting book. Uh, but that’s what, 

 Katie: have a couple things going on, right?

 Gil: yeah, a little bit of, uh, um, this impatient ness I would say. Yeah.

 Katie: You’re like, get to the point guys. Give it to me in a, in a summary, please.

 Gil: Uh, I, even though I, I, I, I could totally, I, I, I opted for a service called like short form, where it gives you like a very excerpt version of a book. And I felt, I felt very displeased. I didn’t get all the stories and all the different things that they put into it. So I started reading the actual books, uh, after it.

But then I still feel like, oh, I found this another interesting book that someone talked to me and maybe, maybe having. This podcast every single week and having such good books thrown at me every single week, it’s challenging, keeping up with all the good re because I, I wholeheartedly appreciate it when my podcast guests give me book recommendations.

Because if very smart, knowledgeable people is reading something that they wanna talk about and that they wanna share, I wanna respect and I want to like, I wanna learn what they’ve learned and, and, and such. There’s also a capacity of like, the number of hours I have in my life. 

 Katie: Exactly. 

 Gil: So it’s tough. It’s tough, but I, I still like, love asking the question.

Um, and just hearing like how, like what’s interesting for people? What are the things that they like to learn? What are the found? Actually probably more so what are the foundational things that. People have learned that applies to multiple parts of their life. Um, and, and that’s kind of why, like you’ll hear me say on this podcast, I tend to like the timeless books, the books that have been written maybe 30 years back.

Those are my favorite books to read.

 Katie: Yeah.

because they stand the test of time for a reason.

 Gil: Exactly. They’re, they, they’re built on foundations. Um, but every so often I’m looking for that nugget of like, okay, what was written in the last five years that is quite like that. 

 Katie: Mm-hmm. 

 Gil: so I appreciate, I appreciate you throwing several books for me to start one third of the way through.

Um, okay, last question. What’s. We talked a lot about branding and um, really how to think about hospitality. What’s one tactical advice that you would give to someone that’s either trying to get started in direct bookings or trying to amplify it, or even trying to bring more guests back into booking with them again?

 Katie: Invest the time in building your own brand, and I think that’s thinking about. Really your unique selling points, both from your destination’s perspective and your property’s perspective, and then putting it together in the way that you want to present to your guests, and remembering that a good brand, a good brand. Is not vanilla. It’s not pleasing to everybody. And I think a lot about W Hotels, which I worked for, and I think what is so powerful about W as a brand is when you walk into a W hotel, you immediately think. Wow, I love this. Or, oh, absolutely not. Not for me. And that’s good. The ability to kind of weed out who you are and who you aren’t means you actually stand for something and therefore the people who like you are really going to like you. And actually after years of working for them, I would hear so many stories. We’d be visiting properties or doing, um, workshops or what have you, and we’d be onsite and we would talk to a guest and say, you know, oh, we just opened this hotel. What made you come here? W Punta Dita, for example, I remember a guest telling me, I had never heard of Punta Dita before, never once considered coming here, but the fact that a w is here, I thought, well, must be a cool place.

Better go check it out. And I think that’s the type of brand loyalty that we’re trying to build. And we can only do that if we really know who we are and who we cater to.

 Gil: Yeah, it makes me think about like one of the, the, the stays that we’ve had probably a couple years back. We went to. Ani, uh, in Hawaii and we 

 Katie: I’ve been there. Yeah. 

 Gil: Yeah. It’s, it’s a really nice place. And like we, we don’t typically stay at like really expensive luxury hotels. That’s for us. Our kid’s gonna run around like, I don’t want them breaking anything but this, this was something worth kind of splurging on.

And. I just think about like the experience of like the check-in. They ask you why you’re visiting. Is this the first time they give you a little pin? It’s all these little like moments, like the Disney moments, and I don’t get the same feeling that I get from visiting Disneyland. Like even though Disneyland is a very magical place, Alani like kicks it up a few notches and maybe it’s because you’re staying there, you’re sleeping there, you’re playing in the pools.

You’re basically, you can’t escape it for multiple days, right? You shouldn’t escape it for multiple days.

 Katie: You don’t want to.

 Gil: You don’t want to, but they think about everything. They think about like making sure that you have towels and they make sure that, like there’s different pools for all the different age ranges. Um, they think about like where to position the seats and all the different things.

And I think like that’s kind of going back to like what you said earlier about like the hospitality industry, specifically in the hotel industry. They obsess over the entire guest experience and. They know exactly, kinda like who’s bringing, who they’re trying to bring in, who they’re serving, what that experience looks like across the entire journey there, where it feels very magical.

Um, so like that kind of like, as we’re kind of wrapping up the show, that is like one of those like magical moments that. And we’ve been to now Alani multiple times. Um, and our kids absolutely love it. And I like, if I ever want to escape, I will spend two x or three x the hotel price to be there because I know as a parent my time will be stress free.

My kids will enjoy it, I’ll enjoy it. I don’t have to worry about do I have all the right things I need to bring. I just get to have a good time with my parents. And I think like that’s kinda like the, where I wanna end the show is like. As we think about how do we serve our guests, like we want to give them that same feeling there like, we understand you, we understand why you’re visiting us.

And it could be family friendly stays. It could be the bachelorette, it could be you visiting four corporate or whatever it is. There’s different use cases of why people are choosing their place, why are they visiting there? And the better that we can understand that use case, the problem that we’re trying to solve, the problem that I’m solving when I’m.

Booking a place at Alan is I need to escape. I need to break away and I need not to think about it. And if you think about the problem there, then you can then solve that problem. So much better than just thinking about, I’m doing a family friendly stay.

 Katie: Yeah, and if we go back to what Rory Sutherland told me, what they did was they didn’t try to milk you for as much money as you could that first day. Everything they did built your loyalty, and now as you said, you’re willing to pay whatever it is because you know that that experience, that time, that’s super valuable to you is going to be worth it.

 Gil: Yep. Katie, it was again, really great to have you on the show, um, and just have you share all the knowledge that you’ve gained, also, all the knowledge that you’re passing through to us from other, other guests that you’ve had on your show. I really enjoyed our conversation today.

 Katie: Thank you so much for having me. I had so much fun chatting with you. I.

 Gil: Likewise, and I’ll make sure to include your two shows onto, um, our podcast show notes. So if any of our listeners here wanna listen to either episodes or either, um, podcasts, they’ll have links to those.

 Katie: Thank you. I appreciate that.

 Gil: All right, till next time, bye.

 Katie: Bye.