Direct Booking Made Easy by Simplifying the Guest Experience with Abby Grous from Hospitable

Summary and Highlights

In our latest episode of Direct Booking Simplified, I had the pleasure of speaking with Abby Grous, product manager at Hospitable, one of the top PMS of today. From simplifying guest booking experiences to tackling the complexities of direct bookings, Abby shared actionable insights that every host—whether managing a single property or a large portfolio—can learn from.

Here are the key takeaways from our conversation:

Simplifying Direct Bookings for Everyone

Hospitable’s mission is to “gift time back” to its customers by creating tools that are simple to use and quick to implement. Abby emphasized the importance of designing features that work seamlessly for the majority of users, rather than catering to niche requests. This philosophy is reflected in Hospitable’s 14-day free trial, during which users can fully set up and start taking bookings in as little as a day.

What this means for you: Whether you’re new to direct bookings or a seasoned host, Hospitable make the process straightforward and accessible for both the host and customers

Understanding the Full Guest Journey

Direct bookings are more than just creating a website. Abby broke down the guest journey and how Hospitable supports it at every stage:

• Guest vetting: Ensures you’re hosting the right guests.
• Payments: Options like Apple Pay and installment plans make transactions easier.
• Fraud and chargeback protection: Reduces risk for hosts.
• After-stay management: Includes damage protection and tax compliance tools.

What this means for you: Direct bookings don’t have to feel overwhelming when the right systems automate these processes.

Carving Out Your Niche

Abby and Gil discussed the importance of understanding your guest avatar. By focusing on a specific audience—like young families in my own business—you can tailor everything from property amenities to marketing copy, creating an unforgettable experience for guests.

Pro Tip: Highlight features that matter most to your ideal guest. For example, families might appreciate photos of high chairs or baby gates in your listing.

Tools for Hosts of All Sizes

While Hospitable is often seen as a platform for small hosts, Abby dispelled the myth that it isn’t suited for larger property managers. Recent updates, like owner statements and rental agreements, now make Hospitable a strong contender for scaling operations.

What this means for you: Whether you manage three properties or thirty, Hospitable can grow with your business.

The Power of Partnerships

We also discussed our partnership between Hospitable and CraftedStays, which simplifies onboarding and makes direct bookings more seamless. Abby shared the story of a joint customer who increased their direct bookings to over 30% of total reservations, with a 75% conversion rate boost after adopting our tools.

Key Mindset Advice from Abby

Abby’s advice for hosts and product developers alike: “Get as close to your customers as possible.” Understanding their needs and challenges will help you craft better experiences, whether it’s for your guests or your business tools.

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Take Action Today

If you’re ready to simplify your operations and take control of your direct bookings, start by leveraging tools that are designed for ease and success. Hospitable and CraftedStays ensure you spend less time managing operations and more time delighting your guests.

🚨 As a special thank-you to our listeners, Hospitable is offering 25% off your first three months. Click here to learn more and start your journey toward more streamlined hosting.

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Transcription

Abby: I think hospitable takes a really unique approach to product development. And this is one of the things that drew me to hospitable and it’s looking for new opportunities. And that is that hospitable’s mission is to gift time back to our customers. And in doing so, we know that we need to simplify things.

So we are in a relentless pursuit of simplifying our product. And when we deliver a feature, it needs to be as easy to, as possible to start using that feature. And this is like a, a kind of a unique change for me coming from the B2B world, especially the enterprise B2B world, where you might have. One particular customer who needs the product to work in a specific way.

And you design a feature for that customer, or you have a million feature flags to make it super customizable because everyone has different preferences on how the product should work. And that’s just not hospitable approach at all. There’s a true mission to make the product work for the majority and to alienate the, what we might call like the.

The loud minority at some time. So that’s something that’s really interesting. And you can see it even in like our, in the settings and configuration of hospitable, it’s, it should be easy to get set up and using it. You can do it within your 14 day trial. It doesn’t take a month to start using hospitable and see value from it.

Gil: Hey folks. Welcome back to direct booking. Simplify. We break down the strategies and tactics to win in direct bookings on today’s show. I have Abby from hospitable Abby. Welcome to the show.

Abby: Hey, Gil. Thanks for having me.

Gil: Yeah, it’s good to good to see you again. We saw each other last week. I don’t know when, when this is going to specifically air, but last week we were at Burma together.

So I got a chance to meet you for the first time, even though we’ve had Slack conversations and work together elsewhere. So it was really good to see you in person.

Abby: Yeah, same. It’s such a treat to get to see people in person in this remote first world. So it’s great to see you.

Gil: Um, you just joined the hospital team not long ago. Did you get a chance to see the team prior to some of your recent travels? Because I know that actually Vermo was not your first stop, uh, traveling with the team.

Abby: Well, it wasn’t supposed to be. Um, so prior to Verma, hospitable was on a bit of a roadshow where we’re meeting our customers in different cities around the U. S. I’m in based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Um, so we had a, one of those events in Orlando. Um, unfortunately it was scheduled right around the time that hurricane Milton hit Florida.

So, um, we didn’t, we did have to cancel that event and unfortunately I didn’t get to meet the team there. So at Vermo was the, that was the first time that I actually met the hospital team in person as well.

Gil: Yeah, it’s, it’s kind of amazing. Like my last company, we will end up becoming very remote first. So you end up onboarding onto a new company. You end up seeing everybody in like small little rectangle boxes on your computer screen for a long while. And you see them for the first time and sometimes you probably worked with them for a very, very long time.

And you’re like, wait, do we meet in person yet? So it’s always kind of odd when you got to do that transition and see each other. So I’m happy you actually did that early on too.

Abby: Same. I’m very lucky that the timing worked out that way.

Gil: Yeah. And hospitable is a pretty remote friendly team. Is that right?

Abby: Yeah, everybody. We’re completely remote and there’s pretty, there’s no headquarters of hospitable. Uh, everybody is dispersed. Um, a lot of people outside of the U. S. Um, so everyone’s all, all over the world. We’re a global team.

Gil: Nice. Nice. Um, maybe to kick things off a little bit, um, can you give an introduction to yourself and yeah, let’s maybe start there. Silence.

Abby: Um, was a B2B, uh, healthcare SaaS company. And if you think about the fact that hospitable automates all of the, the tasks that you need to do to run your short term rental business, the company that I worked for previously was kind of similar in that it automated all of the tasks that you need to do as a provider or medical practice to see your patients.

So. help patients schedule appointments, um, come into the office, complete their intake and registration, um, verify, uh, verify their insurance, pay for their health care, um, all of those things. And at that company, I actually led our payments product team. So we helped, uh, bill and collect payments from patients for our provider clients.

Um, but we are also a payment facilitator, So we actually own the payment processing merchant, um, underwriting and funding. Um, and that was a significant portion of that business. So, um, when I joined hospitable and specifically the direct team, um, Given the, the, the ways in which, uh, hospitable supports our customers for direct bookings, um, and that majority of our customers, um, use hospitable as a merchant of record, um, in many ways, the, the direct booking product is in many ways, a FinTech product.

And so my experience, um, within payments is, this has been applicable to, uh, the direct product management role.

Gil: Yeah, I want to tease that out a little bit because it’s like a lot of folks may think like, oh, she’s now in charge of direct and folks may assume that that’s just one portion of the software, but there’s actually a pretty like multiple layers to it.

Making direct work the way it does and making it as seamless as always. It does like, it’s not just the front end site that you guys provide, but there’s also making sure that links everything links up on your channels properly. There’s payments, there’s checkout, there’s the widgets. Like talk to me a little bit about like, as you think about your role and your responsibility, like how do you break down all the different parts of direct for you?

Abby: Yeah, and I think this is that’s been eye opening for me joining the team as well. There’s there’s so many things you need to think about when it comes to direct hospitable. So, um, there is the I’ve kind of prefaced this before, but there’s two different ways that our customers can use hospitable and, uh, direct booking specifically.

So, um, we have our basic offering, um, which is just you set up a direct website. And all of your direct bookings are managed through hospitable as your PMS. And then you just hook up a payment processor to your direct booking website. Um, and you kind of manage the rest yourself. So that’s one option. And then the other option is our direct premium, which actually.

majority of our customers opt into. And, and that is where hospitable manages kind of takes all of the risk and complexity out of direct bookings for you as a, as a short term rental host. So, um, I, for me, it’s been easiest to kind of think about this throughout the guest journey of completing a guest booking, um, to think about all of the ways that The, the direct product works.

So if you think about like the very beginning, um, getting a direct booking online, we have our direct booking website available, um, to our customers. Very simple, easy to get set up on. Um, but a lot of people, um. You might not want to take bookings from just anyone online. Um, the nice thing about using an OTA for that is you, you get some protection there.

Um, so that could be a fear, um, when you start to take direct bookings. So with direct premium, what we actually do is we offer guests vetting, um, before the, You can actually accept that request to book. Um, so that’s one component of it, um, as part of the guest journey. And then, of course, payments is a, is a big part of it.

Um, and, you know, If when we talk about like our product and especially as hospitable as the merchant of record is like, there’s some unique things we could do with payments there. We, we recently added new payment methods. So we just recently added Apple pay. Google pay is like on its way as well. Um, we also added payment terms, so ability to, you know, pay, um, a portion of your booking now and the rest closer to check in.

Um, also as a merchant of record. Uh, hospitable offers. They there’s fraud screening that happens when the guest, um, submits their payment. And we also offer chargeback protection. So there’s a payment component is, is big. Um, and then once the guests arrives, you have the rest of hospitables product to kind of manage your direct bookings and messaging to guests, um, before their stay.

And then once the guests has their say, we also, if they leave, we also offer damage protection. So that’s an after the stay thing, um, and then managing taxes. So, um, calculating your taxes and remitting taxes in some states. Um, and so all of those different points of the, the guest journey, we kind of have to think about as the direct product of our, from our site, um, to, uh, making sure that we have all of the.

tax compliance things figured out as well. So there’s, there’s a lot there.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. I bet. Um, as you think about your roadmap and you don’t have to expose too much, because I know sometimes roadmaps always in, in changes and you don’t want to commit to things, but what are some of the things I like you’re really excited to, to tackle in your new role? I’m

Abby: it’s actually, we can share a lot about our roadmap because the unique thing about hospitable is, uh, we’re, we’re constantly building in public. So, um, we talk about our roadmap on the, all the time. We talk about it actually bi weekly on our town halls that are available to anyone to join, to hear about what we’re working on.

Um, so some of the things. that we’re, we’re looking at in the near term, um, is some optimizations that we can make for midterm bookings. Um, so that’s something I think can be really interesting. Uh, we, like I mentioned, we support payment terms. So we support the ability to pay a portion of your booking now and the rest of it closer to check in.

But with midterm bookings where the stays exceed 30 days, you need to look at monthly payments. Um, and paying overtime throughout the duration of this day. Um, so that’s something that we’re looking at. Um, we’re also looking at ways that we can, um, improve conversions on our, our site. When I talked about the addition of, uh, Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Um, other payment methods there that we’re looking at, this kind of goes along with midterm bookings is, is paid by bank. So you can actually link up your bank account and pay that way. Um, which is great for everybody because we can, uh, we’ll save on interchange fees for those payments. And we’ll pass that cost savings along to our customers.

Um, and to guests, and that’s important for midterm bookings because you’re paying, you’re paying. Those are big, bigger transactions. Um, so those are just some of the things that are kind of in the near term, um, our roadmap and, and things I’m excited about.

Gil: Nice, nice as, um, Uh, since we’re both kind of in the product space, their product principles are pretty important to us as we think about how we think about the product, how do we design it, how do we meet our user needs? Like, what do you feel are some of the strong product principles that you think about when you’re thinking about direct or maybe even more holistically the hospital product?

Abby: Yeah, I think hospitable takes a really unique approach to product development. And this is one of the things that drew me to hospitable when it’s looking for new opportunities. And, and that is that hospitable’s mission is to gift time back to. Our customers and in doing so, we, we know that we need to simplify things.

So we are in a relentless pursuit of simplifying our product. And when we deliver a feature, um, it needs to be as easy to. Is possible to start using that feature. Um, and this is like a kind of a unique change for me coming from the B to B world. Um, especially the enterprise B to B world where you might have one particular customer who needs the product to work in a specific way.

And you design a feature for that customer, or you have a million feature flags to make it super customizable because everyone has different preferences on how the product should work. Um, and that’s just not hospitable approach at all. Um, there’s a, a true, uh, mission to make the product work for the majority and to alienate the, what we might call like the.

The loud minority, um, at some time. So that’s, that’s something that’s really interesting and you can see it even in like our, in the, the settings and configuration of hospitable, it’s, it should be easy to get set up and using it. You can do it within your 14 day trial. It doesn’t take a month to start using hospitable and see value from it.

Um, so I think that that’s something that is, has been really interesting for me.

Gil: Yeah, I’ve noticed that myself too, um, because like when I go into, for instance, like hospitable, when, when we set up our demo account, our test accounts that we work together on, Um, I remember going into the messaging platform and you guys already have, you start a brand new account. You guys already have all the triggers and all the templates for the major milestone points where you want to message a guest.

Um, and like, I played a lot of different PMSs before, and actually that was like one of the best. Big things I saw very easily on is like that you can get set up on hospitable and start using guest messaging, start automating the messages. And you guys even provide templates to go off of to make it easiest for someone to just flip the switch, toggle that message on and start using it right away.

So that was, that’s like one example I saw. But the other example like is when kind of like Specifically in your realm, a lot of folks come to me because they’re coming to me for direct bookings, and some of them may have the hospitable direct booking engine already kind of set up, and some don’t, and if they don’t, we actually walk through it together on our onboarding calls, and it’s very, very easy to get set up on direct bookings.

Set up your payment payout methods, you set up either the, the self hosted site that you guys have, or you’re able to add widgets with us. And like we onboard our customers within 10 minutes, like it’s really, really fast.

Abby: Yeah, that’s great to hear. I think that’s the goal. Um, and I’m happy that that was your experience because that’s even something I want to look at and making even easier for our customers, um, to not, you know, miss out on the steps that it takes to get set up on, on direct bookings. I think we did a really good job of, um, Making that evident when you’re signing up for hospitable, like you mentioned, having those messaging rules already there for you.

I think there’s room to grow even within the direct onboarding side. So, uh, but good to hear that it was, that you already thought it was pretty easy.

Gil: Yeah, I mean, we look at it pretty intently at Crafterstays because we onboard all of our customers and we try to make it turnkey and probably similar to your folks, like, A lot of folks aren’t necessarily they don’t come from a tech background. They don’t come from a years and years of hosting background, even sometimes.

And, but they want the best tools that are available to them. Um, so we try to make it very easy when someone sets up a site, we provide them with the best different templates, depending on how big their portfolio is, what type of stay there are. Um, and we try to actually give them even boilerplate copy that we, that we’ve spent a lot of time on crafting to make sure that if someone wants to get set up, they have something that it’s a good base to jump off of.

Um, so it’s actually like really nice to see more and more companies kind of in our space that takes a much more like heavy handed approach to make sure that like folks are set up for success and they’re not having to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to, to get everything all set up. Silence.

Abby: a, a key component to your short term rental business. And so we want to make it possible for you to set up direct on hospitable and take a direct booking the next day.

Um, and, and we do a lot of that by taking the complexity and risk out of it, as I talked about with direct premium, but you know, there’s still, that’s, that’s not the end of the work when it comes to having a successful direct booking. booking business. You still need to put some time into your site and to really like craft that experience to your guests.

And I think that’s where crafted stays kind of takes over and helps make it really easy to not only take direct bookings, but make that a really key component of your business and make a beautiful well designed site that performs well in conversions and brings people in through through that channel.

Gil: Yeah, I like, it’s actually really fabulous to work with your team because I think we think about how we serve our customers in a very similar way. Like we consistently think about how do we beta test things out, how to get user feedbacks. You guys have your bi weekly calls like you mentioned earlier.

But like, for me, I still do a lot of onboarding myself because I get to talk to people. I get to talk to each one of our hosts that are setting up and understanding what it’s like. And one of the things that we do when we set up someone that’s using, for instance, hospitable, they will still have to copy their widget codes over to us.

And like, that’s been a pain point for, for like some of the onboarding stuff. It’s not that hard, but it takes a few minutes per property for you to copy over those widget codes over. And what’s been nice is that. When we talked to your team about how do we make the experience better? How do we make the onboarding experience better?

How do we actually make the sites look even better and more integrated? And you guys were actually able to create a new set of APIs for us to be able actually not to use the widgets for the booking, the booking flow, but to actually use it via the API. So we’re actually in the process of redesigning that so that when you connect your hospitable account over to practice days.

All you do is really connect your two accounts together. We’ll pull in all the properties and you don’t have to copy on all that widget code. And that was only possible because like you guys have a pretty like product forward, customer forward mindset of how to serve customers. And that’s like, that’s that to me, it means a lot because like that, I want all of our customers have a really good experience and it’s really nice to have you guys share that same kind of mindset there.

Abby: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the same like having the goal of making things As simple as possible for your customer extends out to partners as well, because we have the same, you know, mutual interest of, um, supporting our customers. And I think like we were, I was even speaking with our platform team this morning about ways that we can make it easier, um, to, to bring in direct bookings, um, for our partners that help build out direct booking sites for our customers.

So it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s total, it’s. Total shared goal on, on our side.

Gil: Yeah, I, if you, well, we already kind of do this, but like, if you guys ever need feedback on APIs, that’s, that’s one thing that you can definitely throw over, over our fence and we’ll, we’ll definitely work together through those.

Abby: Yeah, that’s great. Best kind of partnership.

Gil: Yeah. Um, Abby, what have you seen as like some of the, the traction that you’ve seen both on people that are using direct on your side, but also working with our kind of our joint partnership together?

Abby: Yeah, I think we had a great example of a shared customer who already had some good success on, uh, using hospitable, um, and for direct bookings. So, um, we did a profile on, on this particular customer, um, OC Adventures, and they Set up a direct booking site on hospitable initially just using our own hospital hosted site, and I believe saw a direct booking within a day, which is great.

That’s, that’s great. They’re already taking direct bookings. Um, but I think there was a desire there to, to um, Increase the, the volume of direct bookings and the proportion of their bookings are coming from direct channels versus the OTAs. Um, and so they partnered with you and the crafted stays team.

And I think saw a pretty significant increase in the portion of their bookings coming through direct. I think they’re up to like 30 plus percent of their bookings through that channel, um, as well as a. Really solid increase in conversion. I mean, they saw like 75 percent conversion increase, um, after working with crafted stays too.

So I think that’s, did I get those numbers, right?

Gil: I think so. Yeah. Like I know the exact customer that you’re talking about and like, we work with him pretty intimately because like, he’s very passionate about driving his direct booking rates. And when he first shared with me what the increase was, I was blown away because He has, he hasn’t been on our platform for all that long.

Probably now it’s probably when he told me it was probably like six weeks in. So it’s been like about over, over two months since he’s been using us and I was not expecting that rate to be so high. Um, so it’s actually really good to see someone that has done really well on, on the platform on hospitable using their direct booking engine and starting to get some traction.

And then seeing that really like amplify by working together, like that to me is like the dream story. It’s like someone is now able to cover their mortgage, OTAs. And, and over time that. He’s at 35 right now, and he’s he just started like that that long ago, and that’s increasing over time. Like pretty soon.

He’ll be at the 50 60 percent rate. I have no doubt that he’s going to increase that over time.

Abby: Yeah. It’s, which is amazing. And I know you’ve, you’ve spoken about that a lot too, of like the ability to kind of have some freedom of how much of your business is reliant on Airbnb, um, and, and Direct really gives you that opportunity. And I see it even as like a consumer of, um, someone who often books short term rentals on Airbnb or other channels.

I think there’s, there’s. A lot of consumers now are a little more sensitive to, to price. And there’s a lot of people who are savvy enough to know that if I am on Airbnb and I see a property that I like, I can search and see if that is, if it’s, if I have the ability to actually book directly through that host or that property manager online, so I think, I mean, that it, the fact that it’s A little more commonplace.

And the fact that you have an excellent website that brings people in and helps with conversions, I think that could totally make it possible to make that a significant portion of your business.

Gil: Yeah, um, I know direct is pretty pronounced in like larger property managers. Like when you’re getting to 40 properties plus maybe even 20 properties plus like direct becomes a pretty significant portion of. Of your overall, um, bookings there. Um, Why do you think that direct was so important for hospitable?

Um, even when the host is small or maybe set a different way. Do you think that hosts can still be successful at direct bookings when they may have a handful of three to five properties? Silence.

Abby: so if you can partner with. Or you use a really effective tool like hospitable or crafted stays that kind of takes out some of that complexity or work, you can absolutely be successful at it. I, um, I think it also comes down to. Being at what we hear a lot of people talk about. I think I’ve heard you talk about this on your podcast as well is like creating a really unique, unique experience for your guests and really figuring out what your niche is.

Um, and when you have that in place and a really good direct booking website, I think you can. Definitely make it work.

Gil: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. Like I’ve seen it’s and it’s a little bit surprising sometimes when I see this, but like I’ve seen hosts with one or two properties and they’re able to climb that direct booking rate really early on because like you mentioned, they know who their guest avatar is.

They know how to speak to them. They know how to Like manage their copy on their, on their website to make sure that they’re drawing people in. And that’s consistent with some of their social media as well, too. So like every touch point, they’re trying to draw someone in there and really make sure that like, if you’re going to stay in this area, I’m the best person, or I’m the best property management company for you.

Um, and there’s many different ways to leverage that, but. I don’t think it’s necessarily a numbers game. I do agree that like, if you have more properties, it’s easier to cross pollinate and have someone stay with you in one market or one property and stay at a different one. But I’ve also seen folks with just a few properties that done really well because they deliver a really boutique experience.

It’s very fun. Like it feels more than just the five star you get on, like on, um, on Airbnb. It’s, It’s a really good experience where they want to come back. They want to refer other guests or other friends over to that place. Um, and they’ve done phenomenally well.

Abby: Yeah, definitely. I’d be curious to hear from you. Like, what are some of the things, I mean, you talked about knowing your, your guests avatar and really personalizing the experience to them using social media. Um, but I’d be curious to hear from you, like, what are some of the things that you did within your own business that you feel like really helped bring, bring people in through the direct bookings channel?

Gil: Yeah, I think the major thing that we did was really understand, like, who are we serving in the very beginning? When we first purchased our property, we didn’t really think about like, who’s actually staying at our, our place. It was our first one. We’re getting into short term rentals for the first time.

We had to figure out how it was to be a hose, how to take payments, how to market ourselves, how to design, how to refer, like, like everything we had to figure out everything. When we got to our second property almost a year later, we started to, all that stuff was somewhat like automated at that point. It becomes very passive because you have all your systems in place.

Um, and over time we started to figure out like, okay, these are actually the people that we love hosting. They have a really good stay at our properties. And we ended up finding out like our niche. And is really around young families. Um, and it’s really around folks that have like parents that have kids under the age of 10.

And so now when we think about our properties, where we’re buying, um, the types of properties we’re buying, how we want to monetize it, it’s really geared towards those young families. And so, For instance, our photographers now know that anytime they’re taking pictures or refreshing pictures for any of our properties to always unpack the pack and play, open it up next to the master bedroom, take a picture of that with a, with a blanket draped next to it.

We have our high chair taken out with the kids, utensils and bowls and plates and so on. So like, if you’re going through either on our direct booking site or our Airbnb listing or VRBO listing, like You know, that like this day was geared towards you. And so we have a lot of families that stay with us at one of our places, and they know that like, we take care of them.

They don’t have to worry about a baby gate that’s being available. They don’t have to worry about bringing high chairs. So, and we’re fortunate enough to be in a, Like seasonal vacation market. So where folks are coming back year after year. And so if you, as a parent myself, like if I have a really good stay, that’s first off, like it’s really stressful to travel as a young parent.

I have two kids myself and it’s really, really challenging sometimes. Um, and you’re having to juggle, you’re having to bring a lot of things, especially if you’re flying, flying into it and just knowing that like, when you get to the place and all those things are taken care of, like I would pay 2, To go back to the same place.

And for me, that’s what we do when we travel, we find a good place. We’ll go back to the same place. It’s not for us. It’s not, it’s less about like, Oh, can we find the next hotspot? No. It’s like, how do we make this trip as stress free as possible? And so we now understand like. And we’re the ideal, ideal guest avatars for ourselves.

And just knowing and empathizing with that model, it allowed us to really want to make sure that we’re delivering the right product. So like making sure that the stay is nice, it know, we know what to put in the guidebooks, what to put into all those different places, what to say in our direct booking site, what to say in our emails.

And so when you, when you think about the entire guest experience, it threads all the way through. It’s not just the website. It’s not just all the things that we put around to kind of guide them back to our website, but it’s thinking about the entire guest experience and who you’re really crafting that towards.

Abby: Yeah. Yeah. That’s super, super interesting. And I can tell like how you’ve spoken about your, your business and previous podcasts. Like you are very thoughtful and you, and you care like deeply about your guest experience. And I think that’s admirable. And I think maybe a lesson that can be learned for, for other, um, hosts and what I, what I think I hear others talking about at hospitable is like, That’s a, that’s a lot of reason why hosts are in this business.

Like you care about your guests, about providing an excellent experience. And that is a real source of pride. So like use tools like hospitable and crafted stays and other things that make it easy to run the day to day part of your business. So that you can focus on the thing that is so human about having a short term rental business and just crafting like a really excellent experience for your guests.

Gil: Yeah. And like, I think that not everybody really, really has the essence of being a, like a really good host and enjoys it. Like, I don’t think it’s necessarily. for everybody. There’s a lot of folks that have reached out to me. It’s like, I want to get into short term rental. And I was like, okay, this is what it’s like to be a short term rental host.

And like, it scares a lot of people away, but it also draws a lot of people as well too. So like, and there’s many different asset classes. Like you don’t necessarily need to invest into short term rental. That is not necessarily for everybody, but I do find that the people that really care about the folks, the people behind who they’re hosting, and they care about the guest experience.

They want them to have a good stay, and they feel bad sometimes maybe like if they made a mistake and things aren’t exactly the way that they want. It’s not really about the five star experience, but it’s really about like making sure that the person on the other side They’re paying thousands. They’re, they’re traveling really far to stay at your place, that they’re having a great say, and the people that really care about that are the hosts that do really well in the long run.

And, and that includes in the revenues, in their direct booking rates, like overall, like it just percolates everywhere.

Abby: Yeah, absolutely. Especially on the smaller scale. Like, that’s how you differentiate yourself as a smaller host against the property management companies that have a big portfolio of properties, I think.

Gil: Yeah. I, I’m really happy that, that like, no matter what scale you are. that you have tools available for you because like,

Abby: Mm hmm.

Gil: possibly like a few years back before hospitable even invested so heavily into direct, like those types of tools were only available for the big property management companies and the property management systems out there.

And what I’ve seen is that you are now lowering the barrier to entry so that anyone has those tools to be successful. And it’s the same thing for us. Like, The reason why we started the company in the first place was like, we felt that direct bookings, if you really wanted a really well crafted site, it shouldn’t cost you thousands and thousands of dollars.

And what that does is that you are putting a barrier to entry for folks to get into direct bookings. And I felt like that was unfair just because you don’t have a large portfolio, just because you’re not bringing in millions of dollars of revenue doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be investing into direct bookings.

So like that to me was like very counter to it. We ended up really starting the company because we had a passion to really make sure that no matter what size you were, you had the tools available for you. And surprisingly, a lot of folks now are in the larger end of the space where we have hosts that have dozens and dozens of properties that still leverage us.

And they like it because like, We are so tightly integrated back into the PMS and the, and the way that we craft our websites, they’re not based on WordPress so that we have full autonomy to build it. However we want to scale, however we want mobile optimize and SEO, like all those things. It’s pretty much like at, like we have no boundaries on how we want to expand this.

So it’s been really good kind of seeing the evolution, but like kind of back to the point, like I’m glad that. No matter where you are, you have the tools to be successful in the industry, not just direct bookings, but all in all guests, messaging as well, too. Like being able to leverage all the channels altogether.

Like those tools are now at everybody’s fingertips.

Abby: Yeah, I think like democratizing having a short term rental business. Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting. And I think to your point around, You know, if you build for, um, the smaller self managing host, you like, you know, there’s still a huge opportunity to, to bring that product to, uh, property managers who have larger portfolios because anyone can benefit from having a really simple, easy to use product.

I think that model of like building for the smaller, um, host and going up market. I think it, it works well.

Gil: Yeah, and we’ve, we’ve matured our system quite a bit. Like we’ve ended up spending four months to basically rebuild our platform to scale for larger hosts. But like one thing that we really kept in mind was like, we didn’t want to make it where you had to be an expert in any particular field to be able to use those tools.

We still wanted to make it easy. Like that was one of our design principles was can someone get started? Can someone have a really well looking site within 15 minutes? And if we can do that, and then we can bake in all the complexities kind of behind the scenes, kind of like in those like drop down advanced settings, like that to us is a success. Um, maybe kind of like to like the last topic I want to cover with you, like, what are like, A lot of folks, they think about like hospitable. It’s really for those smaller operators there. And I’ve actually seen this actually not being true is that like you get to a point and like hospital doesn’t work for you anymore.

That to me is a myth because I’ve seen some pretty large customers, um, that actually use both practice days and hospital at the same time. And so like, do you believe that that’s true? Do you like, do you think that like hospitable only works if you have a small set of properties or to kind of scale, uh, to a much larger scale as well too?

Abby: Yeah, well, I think I think maybe before there were some things that were absolutely needed that hospitable did not have, um, for the larger property managers. Um, that has been a focus of our team. And recently, uh, we actually introduced a, a new pricing tier, uh, for called mogul, uh, for those larger property managers with features like owner statements, which was a key thing that I think was coming up, um, within that market, that was just a, a gap in our future set.

Um, and so I think. There’s there’s two two ways that I’d answer this one. Sure. There were some gaps and those are being addressed with owner statements. I think rental agreements was another thing that was missing for a long time. Um, and we, we introduced those for direct. I’m actually in the process of bringing those to all bookings, um, outside of direct as well.

So we’ll work to close that future gap. Um, but just going to the back to the point that we just made, is that like. Anyone can benefit from something being very easy to use. Um. It’s it’s being able to get set up on hospitable on on a P. M. S. with in a day and not a month is beneficial to anyone. Um, and having that automation in place is key.

So I just I think that as we close the feature gap, there’s there should not be a limitation on who can use and benefit from, um, things being simplified and automated with hospital.

Gil: Um, Nice. Nice. I look forward to seeing your growth. Um, I still try to attend. I don’t get always to attend your, your town halls, but it’s always been like really nice to see it because like you guys are very welcoming. Product centric, you guys are very user centric and you guys see for feedback early on and like you have open Q and a’s at the very end where anyone can ask any questions that like things aren’t perfect.

Like there are gaps in the product. There are things that you guys are like that will have to change and like just being open about what those are, how you’re spending your resources, what, how the product is evolving and just like letting that out there. I think overall it leads to a much, better experience for the customer, but also it allows you to focus and really know like, okay, this is what people are saying, because I’ve done product development where, especially in, in, in the B2B space, like you could be developing in a silo for a very long time.

And you feel like you are, maybe you, maybe you get feedback from one customer that that’s very loud and has a specific customer ask, uh, or feature asks. And, you know, You end up doing this feature creep where you’re just adding more and more features in there. But like having that town hall being like in the forefront, talking to a lot of different customers, you end up overall, like just building a much better product in the long run.

It takes more time and efforts, but the product ends up becoming a lot stronger. Silence.

Abby: and only deploy every product. two, three weeks or whatever the deployment schedule is.

It is constant. Um, there’s also a lot of motivation to be able to deliver on a feature and talk about it on our bi weekly town hall. So that keeps us on a quick cadence. Um, and, and yeah, like you said, anyone can join and ask questions. Um, anyone can book office hours with, um, any of us on the product team, which is.

Great for customers, but honestly, great for us as product managers like work. We get the opportunity to constantly speak with customers. Um, so yeah, it’s an exciting place to be as a product manager for sure.

Gil: Yeah, I love it when, uh, Andrew comes in, he’ll, he’ll talk about all the product updates and we’re like, Oh, we just tried to release this one right before the call, but we couldn’t make

Abby: Yeah, exactly.

Gil: or he’s like excited, like, or he’s talking about a feature that like, he’s been hiding for a long time and just showing that off.

Um, so that’s always, that’s always exciting.

Abby: Yeah, definitely.

Gil: Awesome. Abby, I usually like to end with two questions. I’m, I’m making a slight modification to one of them, but kind of in the same vein. Um, one of them is a mindset question and one of them is a big kind of takeaway question. So kind of on the mindset question, kind of as you reflect back on what has made you successful, what’s the one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone?

Silence.

Abby: focus on centering around the customer. Um, I actually started my career on a client facing team and I attribute like all of my success as a product manager to being.

Constantly looking for opportunities to speak with customers, um, to engage with them at the, that’s a big, big thing for me. Um, yeah, I think that’s, that, that’d be my big mindset is like, how can you get as close to your customers as possible to speak with them constantly? To like have a really good, strong customer intuition to make decisions about your product or, you know, or of course your business.

Gil: Yeah, you, you kind of brought me back to my like corporate days of being in tech. And I remember a lot of folks will end up wanting to get into product, uh, from many different departments and I’ve all, and I’m one to like. mentor and try to shepherd people through the organization and figure out like, what’s their passion?

Where should they go? And I’ve always found that folks that came from the CS and the CS like, like department, and they wanted to get into a product. There’ll be very hunger, like, Gil, how can I help out? Can I take on a project? Can I be an intern for this thing? And they’re just, they’re like, So passionate about it because they care so much because like their day job is answering and fielding questions from different people and they want to make the product better and they get so much such a high volume of requests coming in.

They’re having to prioritize like what’s important. How do I serve the right amount of people? Um, so like. I love it when I hear like folks coming in from like the go to market specifically more the CS side of things

Abby: Yep. Yep. Definitely. It’s a, it’s a great transition into product.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. So anyone, anyone listening to the show that’s uh, trying to get into product development, uh, if you ever, if you’re in a CS role, that’s a really good transition.

Abby: Yep.

Gil: Awesome. Um, on the kind of the more actionable side of things, um, for direct bookings, what do you encourage folks to kind of take action on today?

Okay.

Abby: on, on the software side, like make it happen, you can start taking direct bookings now, even for a small portion of your business.

Um, and then I guess the, the takeaway also that I’ve, I’ve heard. Um, from, from you or for, from folks that are getting started on the direct booking side is, is just as we talked about today, like how can you carve out your niche and really know your customer. Um, and, and center your direct bookings business around that and, and really differentiate yourselves from their, the competition.

Gil: That’s great advice. That’s great advice. Awesome. Abby, before we kind of end the show, um, I know you had a special promotion that you kind of wanted to run with, with the team here. I don’t know if you want to talk about it or we can leave it in the show notes.

Abby: Yeah, I’ll just plug it here and we can leave the link in the show notes, but just wanted to plug hospitable. Um, you can, anyone can sign up for hospitable and get a two week free trial for all of our users, but we also have a special offer for listeners of this podcast. You can get, I think, 25 percent off for first three months on hospitable.

So we’ll drop the link in the show notes.

Gil: for doing that for, for our listeners here. So if you don’t have a PMS, you’re trying to get started, um, and you want to get really to really automate a lot of your business and spend a lot less time doing some of the tasks that you do on a regular hospitable is a great system, um, to help you scale.

Awesome.

Abby: Thanks.

Gil: Thank you Abby for, for being on the show. I know I pulled you in even though you just started with the hospitable team, but it seems like. In the last two months, you’ve really like really absorb all the culture of hospitable. You start to understand the customer base pretty intimately. So I’m glad that I was able to have you on the show.

Abby: Yeah, I’m glad as well. I’m, I’m still learning. So it’s great to, to learn from you about your experience and I’m sure we’ll be working together, uh, quite a bit more in the future.

Gil: Absolutely. Thank you, Abby.

Abby: Thank you.

Yeah.