Navigating the Future: AI and the Evolution of Short-Term Rentals with Tom Powers of Guesty

Summary and Highlights

Guesty: Built on Industry Expertise

Guesty’s journey is a testament to solving real-world problems. Founded by property managers, the company has grown into a leading force in vacation rental management. Tom highlighted several standout aspects of Guesty’s approach:

• Deep Industry Roots: Many employees come from hospitality, bringing valuable expertise.
• Commitment to Innovation: With over 230 people in R&D, Guesty focuses on rapid feature development and seamless integrations.
• Employee-Focused Culture: Their support for the Ukraine team during tough times showcases a commitment to their workforce.
• Customer-Centric Approach: Guesty builds features that genuinely address property managers’ pain points.

Challenges Facing Short-Term Rentals

Tom shed light on significant hurdles in the industry:

• Organized Opposition: Well-funded groups use PR tactics to paint short-term rentals negatively.
• Regulatory Pressures: These tactics can lead to strict regulations that harm property owners.
• Emotional Narratives: Anti-STR campaigns often rely on emotional arguments that are hard to counter.

How Operators Can Respond

To combat these challenges, Tom offered actionable steps:

• Get Involved Locally: Attend town council meetings to understand regulations.
• Join Industry Organizations: Support groups like VRMA and Rent Responsibly.
• Share Positive Stories: Highlight the economic benefits of short-term rentals.
• Stay Vigilant: Advocate for sensible regulations rather than outright bans.

The Role of AI in Vacation Rentals

We also explored the exciting applications of AI in the industry:

• Current Applications: Automated messaging, dynamic pricing, review intelligence, and personalized content.
• Balancing AI and Human Touch: Both Tom and Gil emphasized the importance of maintaining a personal element in hospitality.
• Future Outlook: Tom predicts a growth cycle for AI startups followed by industry consolidation, indicating we’re just beginning to adopt AI in vacation rentals.

Key Takeaways for Newcomers

For those entering the vacation rental space, Tom offered invaluable advice:

• Leverage Available Tools: Use free features from platforms like Airbnb.
• Continuous Learning: Utilize educational content on platforms like YouTube to stay informed.
• Focus on Hospitality: Remember that vacation rental management is fundamentally about providing exceptional guest experiences.

As the short-term rental landscape evolves, success will come to those who balance technological innovation with a genuine commitment to hospitality. We’d love to hear your thoughts: What do you think about the future of AI in vacation rentals? How do you balance technology with a personal touch in your property management approach? Listen to the episode and let’s discuss along…

Transcription

Tom: The problem is what the STR opposition has deftly done and that everyone that’s thinking about that’s in this business and thinking about getting in this business that you need to know is they have successfully crafted a narrative that STRs by their nature are bad and negative things. even to emotional levels that it’s like evil, greedy, destroying the community.

So when, when people have an emotional buy in to that level, it doesn’t matter if you show up to that town council meeting with some economic report of what it does for the community and how many tax dollars and how many people it employs. It doesn’t matter any of that because it’s bad and evil to begin with.

To its core. So there’s nothing good about it. It’s just something we have to deal with, regulate, stop, protect, and all these words.

Gil: Hey folks. Welcome back to direct booking simplified, where we break down the strategies and tactics to win in direct bookings. On today’s show, I have Tom Powers from Guesty. Tom, welcome to the show.

Tom: Hey, great to be here, man. Good to see you in the Poconos the other day.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. You’ve been, you’ve been pretty busy. What’s what’s been going on on your side since then? Wow.

Tom: the software side of our industry right now. So we are just busy as we can be. I mean, we’ve got new customers coming in every day. Our onboarding pipeline is almost even, I mean, we can always squeeze more in somehow, but like we are really onboarding a ton of people right now.

It’s very exciting. It’s an exciting time at our company in particular. It’s an exciting time for this industry. But yeah, man, just been busy. Been road tripping a lot. I’m actually about to plan out the rest of my travel for this year. I probably got seven more events to do this year, , so,

Gil: What’s up with the highlight one? So I’m guessing you’re going to be at but what other events are you, are you planning to attend?

Tom: Uh, we’re doing one in Portland, Maine is having another small show, kinda like the Poconos. Uh, a lot of the small shows are really good. Um, there’s another one in Vermont. We’re going to do later this year. We’re also doing a road show out your way, uh, the, which I’m going to invite you to, of course, the Palm Springs and San Diego.

Um, we should have some, a lot more details on that. That’s going to be in. Early December, I think like December 6th through the 4th. So we got plenty of, uh, there’s a little bit of a ramp there to plan for that, but would love people even listening to the podcast. If you’re in the Palm Springs or San Diego area, this is going to be like a free event.

It’s going to be pretty fun. Just like half day type of thing. Um, but yeah, so just busy with that. What else am I doing? God, I don’t even know, man. We’ve got the, the Darm data revenue management conference as well in December. Um, that’s cause it should be exciting. That’s in Sandestin this year, which is actually one of our large enterprise customers too.

So pretty cool.

Gil: Nice. Nice. Um, kind of introduce, do you mind giving folks a brief introduction on you yourself particular and kind of what you, what you do within guesty?

Tom: Yeah, sure. So I’m the market manager for the East coast and, um, I’m a property manager 

as well. I, um, I’ve managed, Long term and short term property and done a lot of real estate related things, flipping houses and stuff like that for over 20 years now. And, um, for about 15 years, I was a full time, what I would more call, even a traditional vacation rental manager in a beach market down in Charleston, South Carolina, the Folly Beach Island, and, um, managed full time vacation rental, full staff, private laundromat.

You name it, the whole, the whole works for about 15 years. Um, I recently sold that a couple of years ago, kind of cashed out on some personal real estate, took a little break, you know, um, it was a good time to sell obviously in 2021.

Gil: Yeah.

Tom: for real estate holdings and stuff.

Um, but it took a little bit of a break and basically I was a guest, a user. And then, um, guest, he decided roughly two years ago to really double down, um, on the whole business model in general, but especially in the United States. And they actually, uh, basically reached out to me and, um, You know, here I am.

Um, and I’ve still owned some short term rental properties and I even still kind of reluctantly co host for some friends. Um, I say that because one, I’m just super busy and you know, it is a lot of work, but you know, a couple of good friends. Okay, I’ll take care of you. Um,

Gil: Are they all scattered in different areas or are you concentrating most of your efforts in one market now?

Tom: Um, it’s pretty much in the same market. Yeah. And then I’ve actually still with one of the properties that I’ve got down in on the beach, I actually just let another property management company take care of that for me. But then I’ve got a couple of cabin situations going on up in Western North Carolina, kind of like the basically think like Asheville Boone, kind of Western North Carolina mountain market.

Gil: Nice. Nice. So are you self, do you have a team that’s managing this with you or are you now like self managing?

Tom: Yeah, on the ones I’m taking care of myself, of course I use Guesty, um, which certainly helps. And then I’ve just got really good cleaning people in a good maintenance person, good handyman company. And I just, I just pay them extremely well. And so I don’t really have to inspect, like I spot inspect probably 10 percent of the time, but they’re, they’re very trustworthy.

Um, you know, and we’re super hosting and all that good stuff. So they, they do a good job. And you can kind of get away with it on a small scale if you pay people real well. And I, I pay Extremely well.

Gil: So are you now. Yeah. Yeah. So someone, all the operations is pretty much in like cruise mode right now, where you don’t really on a regular basis have to tend to it too much.

Tom: Managing three properties, I might spend two hours a week, maybe,

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tom: know, all the, I’ve got all the messages automated, but still I’ll personally touch something or whatever. I had to go buy a grill the other day for one place because my other guy was too busy or whatever. I had some spare time. I had to go by there anyway.

So, okay. Go to Lowe’s by, you know, every once in a while, some nonsense like that, but for the most part, it’s pretty good. And I stay at my places a lot too. So I kind of live a digital nomad lifestyle. And so when it’s open, you know, I’ll be there for a week or two at a time sometimes. And you know, I take my own opportunities for some maintenance or deep cleaning or something like, but yeah, it’s, it’s on cruise control, like as with modern technology.

And even, even if somebody is just doing straight Airbnb. Like if you really leverage all the tools, just even inside of Airbnb, like you can put it on cruise control.

Gil: I agree with that. I, so we have three properties of our, our own. I, and I think I showed you one of them. Yeah. We met in person and for the most, I appreciate that. Um, for the most part, they’re actually pretty self sustaining. Like I, I likewise similar to you. I’ve, I’ve now gotten to have a pretty good solid team there.

There’s things I had to check and I still have inspectors come on a monthly basis, but for the most part, I don’t have to worry too much. And I try to schedule out my maintenance in advance. So we try to catch things like all the filters we have on, like, Like every couple of months we’ll, we’ll switch them out.

Um, so we’re trying to, and we have pool cleaners and all that stuff that kind of maintains a pool. So like, we don’t really have to maintain that much. I would say most of my time is either on revenue management. So I’m constantly tweaking my pricing, even though I use price labs. Um, and on just guest communications, just when guests reach out.

But for the most part, I would agree with you that most of it is somewhat passive at this point. And that definitely will change if we end up scaling our portfolio to a larger portfolio. But for now, it’s, it’s pretty well sustaining.

Tom: Yeah. Um, yeah, the, uh, the whole deal with the short term rental game. And I say it that way with some sarcasm. Um, you know, a lot of people jumped into this game in the last couple of years because why not? It’s hot. Of course, the government printed out trillions of dollars. It had to go somewhere, right?

And quite often it’s gone into real estate holdings, which is typically not a bad investment. Now, I think you’re doing a fantastic job monetarily. Your business. Uh, your, your rate of returns exceptional. I do pretty good on my places. Um, I’m, I’m somewhere in around a 12 to 13 ish percent tracking this year as a net return on the, um, asset value.

So that’s great. Um, you know, the reality is. People need to be at six or 7 percent minimum or you’re just better off not having the headache and put it in your Roth or something, dude, you know, like buy some dividend paying stocks or something like there’s some REITs and stuff out there that are paying eight, 9%.

Like you’re just better off doing that and not worrying about it when the refrigerator goes out on the 4th of July. Um, so, you know, it can be done. And I think with, with knowledge, things like this podcast are great. There’s so much knowledge out there. Um, I mean, you can join mastermind groups or whatever.

I’m a little cynical on that too. Like there’s this thing out there called YouTube. I don’t know if you ever heard of it, but pretty, pretty good knowledge out there. You know what I mean? Um, but anyway, like, yeah, if you do it right, if you get good advice, If you follow other people’s examples that are successful and you have the right and you deploy technology the right way, regardless of whatever it is deployed the right way makes you can, you can have a nice, it could be a fun experience and then.

You can go anytime you want to plenty of Facebook groups out there and subreddits and stuff like that and just see people crying all day about how they’re, they don’t have any bookings and this is terrible and blah, blah and you know, like, Hey, you need to put that thing up for sale. You need to sell it.

And then just forget about it. Just chalk it up as a loss. Like it’s not, it’s I, I do cautiously tell people, I have lots of friends that have seen my success with it over the years. They get really, really, you know, maybe they, they come into some money somehow, whatever way, and they get all excited wanting to buy a place.

And it’s like, you know, but, but I don’t want a property manager. I don’t want to do this or I don’t want to do that. And I want to make 20 percent return. And I’m just like, Okay, cool, man. Go have fun with that. You know, I won’t be involved with that at all. I’ve told many, many friends not to get into this business and I’ve helped many friends get into it if they’re ready to do the right thing.

Right expectation.

Gil: Yeah. I would say I learned, I think I went into it also kind of like in that wave of like build longterm wealth in this, um, but probably over the, like the last, after year one, I actually really enjoyed hosting, um, it ended up becoming something that I really ended up liking to do and end up being pretty good at it as well too.

Um, and the returns are really great. So like, I can see. Like I don’t necessarily need to grow my portfolio X times over, over the next few years. I’m actually pretty happy with the portfolio that we have right now. And if this business goes well and I can buy a couple more properties and sure, but like, I don’t see myself going out.

I don’t see myself growing, like needing to significantly grow either.

Tom: I think there’s, I think there’s a good, uh, a good need, maybe needs too strong of a word, but some people need to hear that. You don’t have to 10 X your life, dude. You know, like, don’t get me wrong. I’m all into some of that alpha type stuff or whatever, and building the longterm wealth and all that stuff.

And I used to be hardcore into all that 10 X your life and, Gary Vaynerchuk type of stuff or whatever else you want to say. I’m here to tell you as I, especially I’ve gotten older and even just dealing with some things, taking care of my aging parents and things of that nature, whatever, like. Like it’s great and all 10x your life and all that mentality.

But in the meantime, if you’re not being able to live your life and also be modestly okay with like pretty good success, like it doesn’t have to just be effing crushing it all the time. And you don’t have to leverage yourself to the hilt and blah, blah, blah, and go buy 10 properties tomorrow. Like there’s a lot of people getting their clocks cleaned out.

I mean, there’s people losing their retirements, there are people losing their marriages. I mean, it has got to be, it’s, I think it’s okay for the pendulum to swing a little bit the other way in our industry and tell people just to calm the hell down. Sometimes like you don’t need to go buy five condos right now in Myrtle Beach.

Believe me, you don’t.

Gil: Yeah. I mean, I’m fortunate that like, I was able to leave my W2 with the, the three properties that we have and that it’s able to sustain enough to actually fund this company. Um, it’s done quite well. And if I have the freedom to do what I want and see how I can grow this company, that’s happiness to me.

And I get to spend time with my kids too.

Tom: And that’s it. My, my, what I’m just saying there too, it’s not like it’s, I’m not saying don’t go do it and don’t be, you know, be bold and go for it, 14:00] but just realize too, like. Like there is wisdom in some of the most simplest concepts, like, you know, a good bird in the hand is worth two in the bush or whatever, those kind of things, maximizing a couple of really nice quality properties.

And yeah, sure. Add to the portfolio when you’re comfortable to do so is great. And that is a fantastic way to build long term wealth. Um, but yeah, you don’t have to, I see too many people grow way too fast, way too quick. I’ve got a person I’m working with in a, in a market in Georgia that she grew in two years to managing owning three properties and managing 20 others.

And she has got built on top of terrible processes, but she somehow makes it work. She’s losing her mind. She’s juggling the phone while dropping the kids off at school and all this kind of stuff. And it doesn’t feel like she can hire somebody to help her out because somebody Some crackhead cleaner screwed her over on something like that.

Now she’s like doing all this stuff herself, losing her mind. Can’t even take the time to implement things like what we can help people out with, with tech stack related automation stuff or whatever. I’m too busy to learn it. Can I just hire somebody to do it? I’m like, yeah, that’s called a property management company.

You sure can’t.

Gil: That’s what you’re supposed to do.

Tom: Yeah, well, and that’s what she wants to be. But in other words, what not to linger on that too long. It’s just there’s, there’s, uh, there’s well proven roadmaps and processes on how to do this business. Right. And people, people need to open their, their ears up to that and, and, and avail themselves to people like yourself, you know, that, that are, you’re walking the walk, man.

Not only with your. properties, but with the product you created and the service you’re providing people, it’s coming straight from the heart, right? It’s coming absolutely from your lived experience and you got the passion about it. People need to place a value on that, um, level of, of, you know, engagement and commitment to it.

You know, they, when, whenever they’re evaluating a business like yours or even like mine or whatever, like, I’m a property manager too. I use this thing as well. I know it works cause I use it very effectively, you know, and I’m sure you do the same thing. Talk a little bit more about how you decided to do what you’re doing with the, with the crafted stays venture.

Gil: Yeah, I mean, well, I like to lean on where my strengths are, and I’ve been in product development for the last 15, 16 years, specifically in the last, Six years, I would say I’ve been in e commerce and Shopify has was one of my strongest partners. And I saw what they were able to do for the e commerce industry and how they’re able to open the doors for folks to really start up their own shop.

And then I looked at our industry and we have some pretty archaic systems in many different areas. Uh, specific, specific. specifically on like the marketing and direct booking side of things. Um, there’s not a lot of choices. You can hire a design agency to build out your site. You can use some of the tools that the PMS provide to build out their sites as well too.

Um, but if you’re looking for something a bit more robust, there isn’t really anything on the market. Um, so I

Tom: just, yeah, no, there’s, it’s true. There’s some other things after the podcast I want to show you to some other kind of like secret things that myself and some other people have been working on. I can clue you into, but yeah, you’re right. There’s a big gap in the direct booking world. Um, you want to know what my first direct booking website was back in the day?

A

Gil: what was that?

Tom: Myspace page,

Gil: No kidding.

Tom: dude, I rocked it. I told you now, listen, this was like 17 years ago or maybe 18 years ago. Now I don’t even know. It was like right before the economic crash of, of 2006, 2007, whenever I had the real estate crash, when I got into the business and, um, When I bought this place into this place, uh, you know, there’s a legacy vacation rental management company there on the island that had been there since like the 60s or something, you know, and they had a terrible website with just like a static, bad resolution thumbnail photo.

Like they still mailed people a catalog magazine type thing. every year to their base. And there was, I mean, VRBO had just come out. There was not even a dream of Airbnb at this point, or maybe there was or whatever it was back then, you know? Um, and after the first season, like a lot of people that kind of find themselves getting into this business.

Um, I came back to the house after the summer season, the furniture’s all rearranged, the deck furniture’s trashed, you know, the money really was not very exciting. They even got some bad reviews. And, um, I never forget walking into the office and this place managed like 280 houses on this island. Right?

And again, big real estate operation, you know, whatever. And they’re like, well, yeah, your place is really basic. I mean, that’s just all you’re going to be able to expect. And the place needed an uplift. And that’s what I was doing in the wintertime. I’m like, okay. I mean, just the attitude, the arrogance, you know, it’s very typical story is how a lot of people get in this business.

And I took it over that next summer, doubled the money. You know, I mean, I was like in my space, Craigslist, early Facebook, um, you name it, you know, uh, but anyway, yeah, it’s evolved a lot since then. Um, for sure. But in some ways that like, I, I really hate that Craigslist didn’t double down on getting, kicking out the scammers and stuff like Craigslist used to be a very viable place to get direct bookings.

And in fact, many people forget. That’s where Airbnb first hacked into the whole Craigslist ecosystem to drive a lot of their initial traffic back in the day. That’s how I first came across Airbnb myself as a traveler. I used to couch, I used to couch surf all the time on Craigslist back in the day. And I would start clicking on listings and it was taking me to this Airbnb thing, of course.

And even back then I thought, oh, this is stupid, you know, but

Gil: Uh, things have, things have changed. I mean, even like your story about like you taking on management over from a property management company, a legacy property management company that still happens actually today. Like the property that the property that we were talking about earlier, uh, my pool cabin in Gatlinburg, I’m more than doubled it in, in less than a year.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, after taking an over management on that one, um, I think it was making 65 K prior to like when, when they sent me the financials, like 65 K and now I’m probably in like the one 30, one 35, one 40, we’ll see where we end. But like, like we, we more than doubled our revenues there. So like you’re absolutely right.

Like if you really take care of your properties, you really try to figure out like how do you maximize it. You can greatly increase revenues.

Tom: The biggest threat to the legacy, what we, what we even call inside, like internally as we kind of scope out the market, um, potential for like us as a company, we call it the U. S. and the United States VR. Market opportunity. We call it the vacation rental. When you, when you really see somebody, the title and somebody’s company name that says vacation rental, that really tells you that they’re typically a legacy type of company that they’ve been around since before Airbnb, that kind of Airbnb is kind of a good delineation point of like, anyone that was prior operating that business.

And they often have old school mindsets, even if they’ve relatively stayed current with their technology and been progressively minded in that way. Um, and some of them have grown quite well and quite very nice businesses and they do a very decent job. But the most apex example of that being Vekasa, I mean, yeah, everybody knows the story there and it’s, you’re going to do better.

Just pure Airbnb single platform running it yourself and just paying a cleaning person really good or getting on a marketplace like turno. You’re going to double your money or at least 70 percent more than it’s on somebody like Vacasa or some of the other big ones that just treat it like a number.

And just want to anyway, you know the drill,

Gil: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. How did you come to choose Guestie in the first place? So before your, you were an actual employee of the company, you’re a user. Like why did you decide Guestie over some of the other options?

Tom: um, because they, they were kind of first to market in a lot of ways. I mean, even though they used Reynolds United or whatever, but just they had a viable, uh, and actually, uh, just to be completely clear, I used a company called Kigo, which is now a guest company. Um, they were first to market. With a viable Airbnb integration and Airbnb, like many places, it came into my local market, like a tidal wave, you know, and just in one, in one season, just completely upset the Apple cart.

And it helped me grow. I doubled my amount of listings and under management and my amount of homes. In roughly one season by being the first person in my market to be able to syndicate people onto Airbnb effectively.

Gil: Okay. And I was How outta your portfolio, your personal usage, like where do you see Guesty outs, outshining, some of the other PMSs out there?

Tom: Um, guesty if you don’t mind me giving a shameless plug or

Gil: No, absolutely.

Tom: true. Um, guesty is the largest SAS software company in the world for this particular niche. Um, we are larger in fact by an order of magnitude of four times than our next closest competitor. And we are 10 times larger. Then our average competitor and, uh, and those metrics are in employee count.

We have over 800 employees worldwide. 16 offices. We operate in 88 different countries. We have five offices just here in the United States. Our United States team alone is over 150 people. Now that’s larger than most companies, entire employee count. Um, of those 250 employees, we have roughly about probably 230 of them are in tech, pure tech R and D development roles.

For example, our Airbnb API team alone, just that team is 22 people. Um, that, so when we say we have the best possible API connection to Airbnb, it’s really not some sales. smoke. Like we really do. Um, it’s a real live connection. Actually, you know, we guess he was started by a pair of brothers. They were in the Y Combinator program out there.

I’m sure you know a little bit about that and your spin and they were in, they were a part of their Y Combinator cohort was some of the early Airbnb people too. So they’re actually really good friends. And I mean, Airbnb actually doesn’t like give anybody preference. The Airbnb operates very fair with anybody.

In the PMS world, but there’s just, there’s APIs and then there’s APIs and then there’s the frequency of what you connect to. For example, we just launched a really, really cool new Airbnb review dashboard feature that nobody has right now. I’m sure other people will have it soon, but as Airbnbs recently opened up some fresh end points, we’re like.

Instantly doing it because we’ve got that. When I talk about the size of the company, they’ve done me wrong. The large companies, sometimes that can be a negative thing. You can get drowned in corporate bureaucracy type stuff, or it’d be too slow to be nimble and things like that. Um, but the ability that that many developers that are employees of ours, okay.

That’s a big difference. They’re not subcontracted and stuff like that. These are employees of ours that get paid well, that are all about the company and we can rapidly develop where we’re rapidly developing more features than anybody else and providing better support. Now, I will say this to be fair, I’ve just, everybody has to understand the Best product in the world without good support and like customer support and tech support, you know, it can still not be that great of a thing.

And every company, especially in modern SAS, every company has had a growing pain. And it’s just part of our macro economic culture over the last 10, 15 years where things got subbed out way too much and offshored way too much. And of course it’s kind of too hard and you can burn through capital if you’re not careful with, with labor overhead and things of that nature.

So the, the striking, the balance of modern SAS higher level support, especially in a hospitality industry like we’re in. It’s a challenge. Everybody’s got that challenge. The only way to solve for that is more people, which is what we’re doing. So that’s one of the reasons why we’ve grown. I mean, our North American team 2 years ago was probably.

50 people today. It’s 150 people just in North America.

Gil: Yeah. I can totally empathize on the API side of it, of it, when you said, There’s APIs and there’s API is like, we, at least here at craft of stays, we try to be pretty good partners to all of our PMSs. And we find that some are actually very welcoming to. roll out new products together to ideate on APIs together to really figure out, like, how do we solve some of the problems together?

And then there’s some that just, you’re just another one on the marketplace. And the ones, the ones that actually do collaborate, like those are the ones that are very innovative. They’re constantly pushing the needle. They’re constantly making their, their product better, but they’re also the joint product together as well too.

And for me, like those are the partnerships that I really enjoy because at the very end of the day, the customers are actually the ones that. Get the best benefit out of it because we’re, we’re constantly pushing the needle, constantly pushing each other.

Tom: Yeah. I mean, and, and anybody just, for example, you can Google guest, the open API and see the full open API site that we have as well documented. How did you find working with the guest? The API?

Gil: It’s actually pretty deep. Um, the thing that I found interesting was the, the payment side of things. So where I saw where guestie was a bit different was that rather than relying on a bunch of widgets to do some of the checkout stuff, you actually open up your payments, APIs, and guest pay as well too, and allow people to build out their own checkout pages, which is not easy for a lot of folks that.

We’re building like WordPress sites, but for us, it’s amazing because we’re able to pun intended, like craft our own, like checkout pages and checkout flows and it allows us to have much better tracking.

Tom: Well, exactly. And like, and don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton of people that just use the guestie booking engine and they just plug that in and it’s, you know, it’s a redirect going to the listing page, which, you know, it’s hard to capitalize on the SEO that way, much less measure it. Um, so yeah, I mean, our, our payments API is, uh, one of the, one of the stands out in the industry for sure.

Um, yeah, I mean, again, I can almost sound like a broken record. It. It kind of comes back to just what I’m saying, like without human beings and the initiative and the capital. I mean, guess we’ve raised 430 million, you know, um, and we’re spending it on either acquiring other companies. We just bought rentals United recently or merged with them and a very, very healthy merger by the way.

Very good. And just over the years with other acquisitions that we’ve done, um, like when we say that we have. the best channel management possible and channel distribution, OTA connections, whatever. It’s not a lie. Like it is the stone cold truth. And in fact, and if people, it’s easy to do the research and see who, and I’m not throwing any shade, even Guesty when it was on its rise back in the day, even used Reynolds United.

Itself as it’s, as it’s distribution solution and Reynolds united is gold standard and distribution. And there’s other PMS is out there to this day that basically white label Reynolds united. Like it’s no big secret. It’s really easy to see the code when you look at them and I’m not saying who they are, unless somebody wants to give me a call and do a demo, we can maybe discuss that.

But, you know, like frankly, Um, there we are best in class. I can, I can unabashedly say that we are best in class for channel distribution and direct O. T. A. Connections or whatever you want to call it, including our own open A. P. I. Booking engines and payment engines for people’s direct websites and including many, many companies like yourself and others in the industry that provide websites and marketing services like If they’re, if they’re doing something that’s good, if they’re not already connected with guesty like you are, then all they got to do is email partnerships at guesty and we’ve got a pretty straightforward process.

Gil: Yeah. Culturally, why, where do you see guest D separating from some of the other PMS partners? I, I. I understand like the economy to scale and how much you’ve grown, how much, um, how big the company is now, how many employees it is now, but it had to start from somewhere much smaller at some point, like what led to a lot of success more culturally.

Tom: I would, um, I would highly recommend, um, everyone to check out the guesty YouTube channel and maybe you could put that link to that in the podcast. Text or something. Um, it tells the story really, really well. Um, there’s tons of stuff there. You know, the, the founder Amiad Soto and his brother founded this back in the day because they were managing their own Airbnbs and stuff like that and saw gaps that they thought they could fill.

And of course it grew from there. So the culture in guest is in its fund fundamental DNA. of people that are in the hospitality industry. So everything’s built on top of that, that from that mindset that this is, we’re doing this to solve a problem and to make things more efficient or better and however you want to say it.

Um, so just from there, like, you know, just so many people at the company. Of course, there’s lots of different disciplines and certainly there’s many people in the company that have come from other industries, but they’re often very adjacent industries. We’ve got a lot of people, for example, that worked for like toast or something like that in the past, you know, very kind of adjacent hospitality SAS type of stuff.

A lot of people like me, certainly like ground level property management type people. Um, like in our accounting product, a lot of people don’t realize we have a full trust accounting module as part of our service that people can get in that department, seven of the people, including the product, the project product manager, our CPAs.

you know, real licensed CPAs that designed our product and run it and maintain it and evolve it. You know what I mean? That’s just that kind of, um, and that’s not cheap by the way, right? Like we’re, we’re going to do very well this year and we might get into the black, but just to put a final point on your answer of culture.

One of the reasons why we weren’t in the black last year is we, we do have a over 100 team members in the Ukraine. Not only did we not let any of them go, we’ve actually hired more people in the Ukraine as they’ve been going through a very challenging situation in the last couple of years. Um, and we didn’t cut anybody’s pay.

You know, I mean, it’s, it’s a good company to work for. And that, that translates all the way down to product and support.

Gil: That’s awesome in your, um, Tom, during our dinner that we had at, um, at the Poconos conference, you gave a talk there. Uh, that’s definitely a talk that I want you to share with some of our listeners today. Um, if you don’t mind kind of going into some of, some of the topics that you’re very passionate about.

Yep.

Tom: vote where now short term rental licenses are capped. You can’t even pass them on to your children and stuff.

It’s really wacky. It’s completely screwed a lot of people up. There’s lawsuits happening because people have been really damaged financially. And it’s just really, really, you. It started from this local community group started up and, you know, they’re like, you know, short term rentals are getting out of control and this and that and they had, they had started up right before covid and then of course, and everyone in our industry, we all have to be rational and and admit.

It everything got out of control. Okay. And yes, there was more people on the island than ever before and I’m sure that some party houses were happening and I’m sure somebody ran over somebody’s bushes and I’m sure somebody parked in front of somebody’s drive driveway in the cul de sac or something and told somebody’s wife where she could shove it.

I’m sure all these things, literally all these things that did happen because these stories are shared, these dramatic stories. Now, granted limited, that that was a moment in time of all that pent up travel demand, all that money flushing into the economy, all the crazy house buying. So you know what? In fact people were displaced out of relatively affordable longterm rentals.

It did happen. Okay. It did happen that things got out of control. It did happen that party houses emerged. It did happen that people with a pure investment, uh, and more or less greedy goal that would never even set foot in the property would buy a house from Chicago and never even see it and just throw it up on Airbnb and not give a crap.

All those things happened and it happened around the world. And we as an industry, We’re not good enough. And a lot of this can, you can lay right at the feet of Airbnb itself, but we were not good enough at curtailing that and being mindful enough. Some of us were, and there’s plenty of examples that stand out and show a true, um, a true, good sterling example of How things should be, but that wasn’t enough places and enough and happened fast enough.

I think dramatic improvements have been made even to Airbnb’s credit. They’ve made improvements on curtailing the party house type of stuff.

Gil: Yep. Silence.

Tom: Um, rational, good operators like yourself. I like to include myself in that. I’m a good community member. I love these communities too. I live in these communities.

as well beyond the investment. But that all being said, many places, including my hometown and everywhere around every one of us that’s in this industry from here to Ireland and every point in between, okay, Australia, you name it, all of these issues. He said what happened recently with Manhattan, you’ve certainly seen plenty of it throughout Southern California with the regulatory restriction.

And although the pendulum swung really far on kind of a wild, wild West industry, It’s certainly swung way too far back on the other end and we got to find a middle balance to my point in and I’ll try to hit the high points on what I did to get the talk. I gave her that dinner about the hotel industry being behind a lot of this stuff.

This is really nasty stuff. This group that formed up that was anti short term rental, they started sharing some really just nasty stuff and it got very tribal on the island. To this day, it’s very sad. The whole island got very divided and even this vote that went down was only a 51 percent in their favor.

So 49 percent and keep in mind that that’s not counting the hundreds of people that can’t vote in this local markets that are because they’re second homeowners and they can’t vote there. So it’s really an abnormal situation politically and it’s not fair. It’s real taxation without representation going on.

It’s very, very unfair. And anyway, this group of like old fuddy duddy Karen esque type people, they were putting out some sophisticated content. It’s a pretty sophisticated website. And I’m just like, I know these people, you didn’t make that website, you know, and where’s this money coming from? I mean, they’re doing like sophisticated mailing campaigns and all this stuff.

Where is this coming from? So we started doing some digging on some of these articles they would share. They’re just, you know, you’ve seen these kinds of articles, baby left at Airbnb or something like that, or, you know, party house or house catches on fire, whatever, you know, um, Survey shows that the communities are very concerned about unfettered short term rental growth.

And I didn’t move here to have a hotel next to me or whatever. You’ve seen these endless articles. Well, we started noticing that a lot of these were not only written by the same person, but had the very similar format. And we trace that back to an organization, um, called, uh, community. I can’t remember the website exactly, but stronger communities or something like that.

com. Um, I’ve actually got a YouTube video about it where I show all the forensic work that we did, the investigative work. So anyway, you go to this website, we started to research it. It turns out, although it says like, you know, for stronger communities or whatever, and it purports itself to be like this open community website, like we have concerns about, you know, uh, urban sprawl and affordable housing.

And we have concerns about schools and stuff like that, but yet every one of over 450 news articles that they had on there, like really crafted, highly professionally crafted, shareable, like, you know, press release type content. Everyone, not, not 99%, 100%. I looked at all of them, all put short term rentals in a negative light.

So I

Gil: So there wasn’t any, there was not any other article outside of just short tormentals.

Tom: Bashing short term rentals.

Gil: Yeah. Okay. All right. Um,

Tom: We dug deeper. We dug deeper. And wouldn’t you know that we found out that one of the partners in the company at one time, it’s also now the vice president of government and uh, public affairs for bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, wait for it. The American hotel and lodging association.

Well, how about that? How about that? Isn’t that interesting that not only, not only in this website, the stronger communities website, right? Can you get all this content? They click funnel you right into, Oh, do you have a local organization that’s trying to protect your community against short term rentals?

Sign up right here, templated websites, templated newsletters, whatever. I don’t, we don’t know the whole extent of it. We’re still investigating it, but you get the point. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of the former partners of this public strategy, basically PR, Firm, um, lobbyist type firm. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of their partners is also the VP of government and public affairs for the American hotel and lodging association.

It’s dirty as hell. It’s just the terrible way to do things, especially because we’re in the hospitality industry with the hotel industry ourselves. And frankly, You know, I’ve talked to even hoteliers and people in that and expose them to this and they’re shocked by it. Legitimately had no idea that this was going on behind the scenes.

And of course, I mean, traditional lodging absolutely did see a threat in the rise of short term rental. And, you know, and then they’ve, they’ve even adjusted, I think quite well to it with a lot of, I mean, you look at all these products like the true hotel brand by Hilton, you look at state bridge suites, things of this nature that have gotten more, you know, condo esque accommodation level type of stuff in their hotel product.

But, you know, they didn’t have to be so damn nasty about it. I mean, that is just a dirty, shameful thing. And believe me. I’m not done with this investigation. This was not done by guesty, by the way. I want to make sure that that’s have has a distance. This was done by our local advocacy group. And to pin this back into people listening to this, what they need to do, you need to be aware of what’s happening politically in your state down to your exact town.

And it doesn’t matter. If you’re in a traditional place, well, they won’t ban stuff here. Listen, this just happened in Tybee Island, Georgia, which again, legacy debt vacation and second home destination. My market there in Charleston is legacy as it gets. I mean, it’s been a, the town was incepted to be a vacation rental second hometown in 1961.

That was the formation of the town. That was the reason it was, I mean, it’s just tell your ride, Colorado, of course, your major Metro markets, but you know, you look at everything in Southern California, I mean, you can go to Ireland and see this, you can go to Auckland and you can see this, you can, you can go.

wherever you want to go and you will see this very consistent messaging from the anti str people and it’s no mistake and the hotel industry people that are behind it need to be called out on it. It’s not fair. Some of it might not even be legal and we’ll see that that’s a conversation for another day.

But whatever the case may be, It’s not the most of the people in the hotel industry do, and I wanna be very clear to the hotel, anybody, any hotelier that might listen to this or anybody even big in the hotel industry that might come across this content. It’s a small faction of people playing really, really dirty and nasty stuff that to, to the gap behind this and it’s time to stop.

It’s time to come together as an industry and it’s time to call out those people for who they are because it does not smell like hospitality to me. When you use tactics like that, because that, that kind of stuff again, and these articles are probably true. Most of them out. Let’s, let’s say that they are, let’s say that the fidelity is 95%, which is probably being very gracious, but let’s say that it is, let’s say it’s a hundred percent.

It doesn’t matter for my point. The point is, you know what, when you write an article about how somebody had a meth lab in an Airbnb, guess what? They got them in super eight motels too, buddy. Okay. You know what I mean? Like, it’s just nonsense. Like, yes, there’s problems. And yes, there was a certainly a problem that got exacerbated by the whole COVID situation.

But those things can be solved with sensible regulation and enforcement. It’s, it’s very common, uh, trope almost with a lot of these local draconian regulations that get passed. Like you’ve already got regulations on the books for a noise ordinance. If there’s a party house, why don’t you go shut it down?

Like let’s take that guy that’s running the party houses license away. You don’t have to ban rentals in the whole Island. Like it’s nuts what’s gone down. And part of that is because these people latch onto these negative news contents, they know what they’re doing at these PR companies. They’re masters at it quite definitely.

I mean, I, I, the, the only credit I’ll give them is Job well done, you succeeded and your job is just a nasty damn job. And no, I mean, they should be called out on it, but like those people latch onto that negative stuff. It builds a bedrock sub conscious frame that the problem is I’ll, I’ll, I’ll shut up for a second.

I’ll take a sip of my drink, um, my soda here to keep my throat going. The problem is what the. STR opposition has deftly done and that everyone that’s thinking about that’s in this business and thinking about getting in this business that you need to know is they have successfully crafted a narrative that STRs by their nature are bad and negative things.

Even to emotional levels that it’s like evil, greedy, destroying the community. So when, when people have an emotional buy in to that level, it doesn’t matter if you show up to that town council meeting with some economic report of what it does for the community and how many tax dollars and how many people it employs.

It doesn’t matter any of that because it’s bad and evil to begin with. Okay. to its core. So there’s nothing good about it. It’s just something we have to deal with, regulate, stop, protect, and all these words. I mean, I get really fired up about it because, and I’ll, uh, I will leave it one more point. Here’s a real example.

Don’t think it really affects me. Oh, poor little rich person, your beach house, whatever. Look, how about one person that retired school teacher. Widowed military wife. They scrimped and saved, bought this place years ago, fixed it up over time to move into in retirement. And now she’s ready to move to a different phase of her life into assisted living.

And because she didn’t have an active STR license, can’t get a new one had her house under contract before a referendum vote occurred. But part of the conditions was, if this goes through, then the person’s not interested anymore because they can’t short term rent it, which most people American dream type of thing.

Like you just don’t have the cash to have a pure second home. Okay. There’s nothing wrong or evil or greedy. about renting your house out a little bit to cover it. In fact, it’s quite the tradition. I mean, don’t get me started, but anyway, house is under contract for 1. 5 million. Referendum gets passed, drops out of contract.

She ends up having to sell for 1. 1 million about a year later. No boo hoo. You lost 400, 000. Listen. That’s that person’s retirement. You just took 400 grand away from that lady needlessly. You call that, that, that lady’s not black rock. Okay. That lady’s not anything like that. That’s a retired school teacher that they worked their butt off for years and they happened to yes, benefit over time by having a second home investment that became their primary home.

Now that’s the person that, that I, Advocate and fight for his people like that. And that story is not a one off story. Various variations of that story are hundreds of them.

Gil: Yeah. I remember when you told the story during the dinner and my, my jaw dropped when, when you mentioned that, like, it was actually crafted by the hotel and lodging industry. That was a huge surprise. Maybe just a last kind of question on, on this topic. What do you think as. Operators ourselves, how do we get around this?

How do we like fight back?

Tom: Yeah. You got to join. Well, a couple of things. Step one is just really understanding what’s going on in your local community. Go to town council meetings and things like that and proactively and be positive. Like don’t go in there with a chip on your shoulder. Like be positive, see what’s going on. Talk to people at the city.

You know, see what, see what’s happening, really get to know your situation, figure that out up to the state level and see what’s going on. Many states have initiatives. There’s been some good victories recently. Um, one good resource you can do that as certainly as a VRMA vacation, rental managers association, vrma.

org. There’s also rent responsibly. org. Um, inhabit IQ also has some of their competitor of ours, but I’ll totally shout them out. They have a whole division with the government affairs types of things. You can go to just google inhabit IQ and go on their website. It’s something that’s in there somewhere.

Um, you know, so there’s organization, almost every state, especially every major state that’s got a big tourism industry. in a big short term rental industry has a state level. For example, myself and some other concerned property manager and real estate people founded the Property Owners Association of South Carolina.

There’s of course the Vermont group. There’s the Poconos group that Ricky started up there. They’re also part of the Rent Responsibly Network. Excuse me. We are as well. So Florida, for example, has a great, very long legacy state level organization. The favor organization FAVR really, really good, um, benchmark actually of, of what the state level organization should be.

You know, Arizona has one, whatever. Like, so there’s getting involved super local and then just spending time educationally, you know, figure out if you’ve got a state level organization, join it, give them a few bucks. You know, help them out, maybe donate some time or expertise, uh, because it’s a battle.

Like if you like this industry and if certainly if you’re invested in it and have a, have a spurt, certainly longterm goals, then one of the number one threats, it’s not bedbugs. It’s not your cleaner smoking crack and not showing up. It’s not whatever. It is some usually small group of hyper vocal people that are super negative that don’t care about you and they already have themselves that you’re bad and evil in the first place and just greedy and they won’t care what they do to you.

Your investment, your family, nothing. They in fact sickly think they’re doing something virtuous and that’s a really, really potent combo.

Gil: Yeah,

Tom: yeah,

Gil: Awesome. Tom, I think I wanted to talk about one more topic. Just maybe just briefly there. Um, you gave a. Uh, talk at the Poconos conference about, about AI. Um, could you give folks, our listeners, um, maybe a cliff notes version of that, um, some of the highlights from, from that conversation.

Tom: sure. Uh, yeah. The basics of it is, you know, the title of it is too, and I’m doing this at VRMA as well as the California roadshows that are coming up and stuff like that. This is kind of like my, every year I do a different subject on my talks and stuff. The tagline is, What is happening with AI in our industry?

And the subtitle is what’s actually working and what is smoking in mirrors. And so the, I break that down into several, anybody actually wants to reach out to me too. I’ll send the deck PDF version of the deck over. You can check it out. Um, and I’m going to be recording it too, but like the gist of it is with AI, I mean, big buzzword, right?

AI, AI is just everywhere right now, right? I hope you got that NVIDIA stock early, although it’s crashed down today for some reasons. It’s interesting. I’ll probably pick up some more, but like, you know, AI is obviously a big deal. It’s coming. Um, it’s actually been here for a while. I mean, AI stuff has been totally crazy.

Being played out in the pricing algorithms and things and all that jazz. Um, you know, the easiest thing to understand about AI right now, that’s actually working and I think doing something that’s beneficial, saving time, saving money, you know, doing some novel things for you. Um, messaging is the, probably the easiest thing to understand, like.

I’m totally okay with an AI answering somebody at three in the morning, what the checkout instructions are or something like that. Or where’s, where’s the trash go? What’s the wifi code? Static data information automation sharing. I don’t know if that’s a right way to phrase that, but you know, that kind of stuff like, sure, just go ahead and let a bot reply to that.

I’m not quite ready to turn full communication over to AI. Nobody has that right. I’ve researched the topic very well. Now it’s right on the around the corner and that’s fine. But there’s nothing today that full automation replaces your human touch. You can get very close. But, um, so there’s that. One of the things I think that a lot of people are going to start hearing, and you can say you heard it from me first, but you know, everybody understands dynamic pricing by now and a new thing you want to start to understand that’s on the horizon that’s happening now, but really on the horizon is dynamic content and dynamic pricing.

Marketing that AI can do like AI going out and, and posting for you in the right localized Facebook groups, for example, for direct bookings, uh, AI rewriting your listing description and automatically changing that every month to hack into the Airbnb internal search algorithm. AI potentially doing cool things like if somebody is looking to book your cabin in Gatlinburg in the fall, how about we show a thumbnail of your autumn cool, you know, fall color pictures, but how about if they’re booking in the summertime?

It’s showing also an extra thumbnail of the water park. That’s 10 minutes away. Or something like that, right? Or your pool extending your pool a little bit more or something. So like that kind of stuff is happening in various versions today, various versions of success, a lot of stuff happening in the review world, like not only automated review response, but even like, you know, review intelligence, especially for larger operators where, you know, You’re managing 392 properties.

That’s a lot of you’re not going to read every review. But do you want to read the 13 reviews that mentioned the word air conditioner? You probably want to read those reviews and see what’s going on and maybe start and and then have the A. I go ahead and create a level two inspection task. How about that?

So like there’s pretty cool stuff going on Some of it people have to be careful. Okay, I’m not gonna talk trash about any competitors, but A lot of the stuff. Oh, we’ve got AI this and that. Like, dude, it’s just chat. GBT plugged in. Okay. I’m like, it’s not, it’s not doing anything magical, um, that you can’t do yourself for like 3.

Um, so there’s some smoke and mirrors out there. And there’s some unproven things that people are doing, but I think, you know, it’s obviously rapidly evolving situation with AI. And, uh, definitely if you want to stay on a competitive edge, you’re going to incorporate it. You’re going to want to incorporate it.

It doesn’t have to be dystopian. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It doesn’t even have to cost somebody their job. It’s a tool. It’s a better tool quite often that, you know, it can make somebody, Perform their job better. So it’s an interesting,

Gil: I always see like AI kind of falling into maybe like three or four different categories. Like there’s one of like the content summarization where you’re able to distill information down into a level content generation. Um, being able to, to generate content and we see a lot of this in a, like AI image generation, even which I’m still kind of iffy about.

And then there’s like the automation slash like processing of it. Those are kind of like the four, like three or four different categories that I see as like where AI is like really beneficial. And for me, I would say like, or I’ve had the chance to like really benefit from it is really around like guest messaging and like replies.

Like those are the areas where I think like folks should be leveraging AI probably more effectively today.

Tom: I think step one. Yeah. Some automated reply stuff and certainly even just reply suggestions are cool. Like, like even guesties reply is really good. Like, if you’ve answered the question before, When they’ve asked, is there a good pizza place around here? And you’ve answered that. Yeah. Dino’s is two blocks away.

You can totally walk there and it’s great. And they have, you know, uh, half off pints on Tuesdays. Then if you answered that two years ago on Airbnb, then that’s reply suggestion will pop up for that property. And you just sit bam and send it, you know, like that’s happening today and some automated type of things.

I see. I’d still think people should keep it very. Very segmented on what they’ll totally let full auto reply do. But on stuff, like I said earlier, like you don’t need to think about automatically replying. What’s the wifi. Just do

Gil: Yeah, that’s, that’s true. That’s true. We’ve been, uh, we’ve been trying to, so actually the Google team has been trying to engage with us because we’re capture stays as a Google’s for startups. partner. Um, so they’ve helped us a lot in our infrastructure. And that’s kind of how we’re able to have our site like load times.

So, so quick because we’re leveraging a lot of their capabilities and they’ve been asking us to leverage some of their AI capabilities. And so far Like right now we don’t have any AI built into it and we’re trying to figure out like what is the right use case specifically that we want to leverage AI for and not just build in AI just for the sake of it.

Um, I think like probably next year. Well, that’s when we start looking at how to integrate more effectively into AI.

Tom: I’ll send you my deck. You can see what the landscape looks like and see what some other people are doing. And I don’t think it’s necessarily bad practice to just see what’s out there, too. I mean, there’s a lot of great ideas out there right now being tested out. Of course, the market is the open markets, an interesting place to test such ideas.

A lot of money. Being raised a lot of money being raised. Um, and I think there’ll be like everything. I think that I think we’ll get into, we’re probably at the beginning of a five year cycle of a lot of startups that are actually starting to gain, you know, they’re getting past minimum viable product phase.

They’re getting into some, they’re proving some monetization models out and some conversion rate marketing models out on growth. And as that matures, you know, Like anything else, there’ll be some, uh, consolidation and, you know, there’ll be two or three emergent, uh, best in class people that will do it. And, and companies like Guesty, we’ll be doing, we’ll be doing our own versions of that.

We’ll be interfacing with third party people. Um, we’ll be doing combinations of things too, like any healthy, uh, company would.

Gil: Yeah. Awesome. Well, Tom, I usually end our show with two questions. Uh, one’s a mindset question. The second one is an action question. So on the mindset one first, what’s one piece of mind mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new?

Tom: Uh, 100 percent know from day one, you’re getting in the hospitality industry. You’re not getting in the real estate industry. You’re not getting in the property management business. You are in the hospitality industry. First and foremost, if you’ve never like been out in the food and beverage industry, you know, before, or done some kind of aspect of customer interaction and enjoyed it.

Like if you’re not quite a people person, which don’t get me wrong. I have no plenty of introverted people do quite well, but still like, Yeah, I think you even said it to like, once you really got a taste for this and you quit your main corporate type job, like you just because you liked being a host, you know, um, and that that’s fundamental to success and just success.

A big component of success is just general happiness in your daily pursuits right in life. So if you’re. not going to be happy being in a hospitality type mindset and wanting to help people and solve dynamic problems because it’s a crazy ass business to be in. Sometimes, you know, if you don’t have that, then you’re just not going to have fun.

Go do something else.

Gil: I like that, I like that,

Tom: the second

Gil: uh, the second one is kind of more tactical, more tactical. What do you want folks to take away from today’s conversation that you want them to put into practice? Silence.

Tom: takeaway there tactically is just, there’s so much out there. That can really help you out. It can help you save time, ultimate commodity, certainly save money, be more efficient in your processes.

And if you’re, and you know, growth doesn’t mean you have to add 10 more houses next month. Growth can just be the growth of your, even your own direct personal property or whatever, and maximizing that quite like what you’ve done with your Gatlinburg pool house place. Um, You know, that can be done right now today just with the tools that are free inside of Airbnb.

There’s a thousand videos out there on YouTube giving free advice. You don’t have to join a $2,000 mastermind or something like that. Don’t get me wrong. That might be something good for you. But like there, you can ta you can take direct action today with, uh, just a plethora of things that are out there available.

And you need to, like anything else, especially if you’re coming into this and don’t quite have a background in something like this. like anybody, any professional, you need to increase your knowledge and train yourself. You need to spend an hour in the morning every day with a cup of strong coffee and watch some YouTube videos and explore the backend of Airbnb and things of that nature.

And then of course, if you find yourself at growth or scale or whatever, and whether it’s a company like ours, or there’s, there’s several other good companies out there. Like, I, I’m very honest with people when they have their tech sec, for example, I, you’re on owner res. I think owner is. Great product for its niche.

I think it’s a great product for a smaller operator when you get more sophisticated and you’re managing, you know, 50, 60, 70 properties or something like that. And you have owner statements and things to do. There’s other graduations and levels of the PMS software and other third party providers out there.

But like there’s, there’s a lot of good solutions out there that are, that could be very affordable and very effective. We’re also one of those things, very affordable and effective too. But there’s also. But there’s also ones that are a total waste of time and not good for you. And you’re going to be switching a year later.

And if you’d want to know about any of those, just reach out to me. I’ll let you know what the score is.

Gil: Awesome. Thank you, Tom, for being on our show. I love the passion that you have for the industry. I have all the folks I met. You, your, your, your character, your personality, definitely definitely shown through. and I love just hearing what you have to say. About your, how involved you are in the community, how much you care about things.

So I appreciate that.

Tom: Thank you for saying that. Um, yeah, it’s, um, it’s a great industry. I want to see it thrive. I love to see people successful in it. I think it’s a wonderful thing and it can certainly help build generational wealth. It could also be a good family business for a lot of people. So there’s nothing wrong with our industry.

That’s even, I think what I finished at the dinner, I was like, that’s what pissed me off the most about this. It’s like. I am not a bad community member. My rental house is not a blight on the neighborhood. It is not. And I resent that very deeply that how that has been framed.

Gil: Yeah, I agree. I think most, most hosts aren’t like, they really do care about the services they offer and they really care about the community. So I a hundred percent agree with you that I think there’s definitely a bad light shined, um, probably a big spotlight shine by, by, by the hotel lodging companies.

That is a bit, a bit unjust.

Tom: Very. Yeah. And it needs to be called out. So thank you for helping shine that light. Share that story.

Gil: Awesome. Thank you, Tom.

Tom: You got it, man. Thank you.

Gil: I talked to you there. Bye. 

Yeah.