Okay, everybody. So we are living in a time which is data drives everything is, is King. You need
to know what is going on in your industry, in your market. And today we are diving in with a special
guest who's going to show us how we can get the very best out of the data that's available to us.
And we can go and look for this data. So if this is your first time here, you're listening to the
Booskey podcast. This is a podcast that gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the trainings,
and the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookends. My name is Liam Carolyn,
and my special guest today, we've got Faustu, he's the head of strategic partnerships at price
labs. Now, some of you will be listening to this again. Yeah, I've heard of price labs. Yeah,
I know what it does. Well, even if you've heard of price labs, they're constantly constantly looking
at new features and data all the time. It's worth just going back looking at your settings,
listening to the experts, listening to people who are from price labs, and how you can really
perfect your your comps and your data sets. And that's what we're going to be doing today.
If you've not heard of price labs, please do type price labs into a Google search. They're an
amazing company and they help you with dynamic pricing. So before I cover too much of that,
let's dive in. Let's say hi to Faustu and welcome in on along. So welcome along. Hi,
Liam. Thank you for having me. Thank you for the invitation. So I was introduced already,
but we'll introduce a little bit more. So my name is Faustu. I'm with with price labs for
three and a half years now. We were a small team. Now we are very big team. At the moment,
I've done some other things in price labs, but at the moment I'm working with the strategic
partnerships mainly focused on Europe and Latin. Yeah, and I was a price lab user before,
so I was a revenue manager before joining price labs and that was a price lab user for
three years before joining the team. So for people who don't know what price of this,
we are a revenue management system. Basically, it's played to be in three different
main schools or features that is dynamic pricing, market data, and reports. The idea is for people
to be able to apply, like, see their strategy, look at metrics, look at the KPI, see how the market
is doing, and apply those topics and strategies inside price labs. Don't need to be jumping between
systems, etc. I have all in one in terms of a revenue management system. I'm a big fan of price
labs because one, I use price labs in my short-term rental business itself, but also the more I find
out about price labs, the more I use it and the more I realize the value of it. So if you're a host
who's listening to this and you've only got one property and you're just wondering what's going on
in the market, then, you know, price labs can help you with that. But also, if you're a property manager
and got a huge portfolio, likelihood is you're already using, you know, price labs or a dynamic
pricing tool. But even if you're already doing that, just make sure you're relooking at some of the
settings and what your team could do to get the very best out of it. And today, we're finding out
about a new bespoke custom data report, which is really cool. So I'll hand them like over to you
fast too, and yeah, take it away with what you want to share with everybody. Yeah, so basically,
and just to explain why it's important to be always updated, even if you're using a tool for
years, it's always, when you're using at least a revenue manual system, you should be able to keep
updated, look at your revenues, it doesn't matter which one you use, you should look at the updates.
Because it's really like, revenue management is a complex topic. And the biggest difficulty that
we have is trying to make the product as easy to use as possible in spite, it has to solve a complex
topic. So there's also, there's always a lot of updates, a lot of new features, a lot of
features that are, it's the same feature, but the way it works changes. So if you're not keeping
updated with your revenue management system, and if it's a good revenue management system,
probably you are only getting like 30, 40, 50, 60% of it. I've seen some clients that really don't get
everything that they can do of the tool that they are, that they are using. And about this
market report, like custom diary report, we noticed that one of the big, we created our market
dash was that basically it's a market data tool. So you can use it, even if you don't have
properties, and you are not using by the dynamic pricing, just if you want to get some market
data, you can use it. So it's, it's an independent tool of the dynamic pricing tool, but we noticed that
a lot of our users, so that's like, it is awesome, we can get data, we can look at market data,
we can see how the market is going, but we always struggle to be able to define what market is for.
So because it depends, right, if you have to be able to do a right segmentation to get the best
start of it. So this is in terms of revenue management, like traditionally what we call it
Comset. So we have to define our own Comset, and it's our competitors that we want to track,
right? Or even if you are investing in a market that just wants to look at market data, you have
to be able to select what is a market, what do you want to track it? So this is one of the main
updates that we had in the market dash course that you can create your custom data report. So
you can create even one by one, go listing by listing in a certain region, in a certain area,
and the market dash was can have different sizes, so you can get a market dashboard with 1,000
listings, 5,000 or 10,000. It's a very wide area, in some country, depending on the city,
might be more than one city, 10,000, listing. And you can customize and create your own Comset,
you can work with one by one, even manually, if you know your competitors, or based on certain
criteria. Imagine I'd only want to see two bedrooms with more than a certain ranking,
and more than a certain number of amount of reviews that has a pool and the set packs, for example,
something like that. So you are able to select your criteria and create Comsets based on
that criteria, and then you can look at the market, market data, market behavior, etc. But
specifically made for you, so you can create the ones that you want to track. And why is this
important? This is important because this will remove the main issue for someone that is new
to market data in the 90 present days. How do I know that you are using the right data? How do I
know that you have the right data? How do I know that you that I am able to benchmark with my
real competitors? So that's how it works. It's giving you a full transparency and giving
you a total freedom to create your market data, create your Comsets, and being able to benchmark
your results to your Comset, not to everyone else's Comset. That's cool. So basically if I'm a
host and I'm thinking, Hey, do you know what? I'm in one market. I'm going to go to the market,
which is 50 miles away or whatever it is. I don't need to subscribe to price labs with
the listing straightaway. I can just go there and just get the market data. I can get the custom
market report and then get that data. And not only that, I can actually see the data sets of
who will be my competitors. What sort of data will host and people like myself be able to get
access to? Just give us an overview of what we can see and why that's going to be important.
Yeah. So that you have access to the main KPIs like in your,
or, of course, your bike ever is digital rate, popular seed, length of stay, the booking window,
and people booking in your market. You can see this by periods, for example, in the last year,
in the last 30 days and the last seven days, but you can also see the average per month.
You can look at the occupancy as well. One that I really like is length of stay, so you can see
the occupancy. And what and the length of stay, what is the weight of each length of stay in those
all? So for example, is my market very strong in bookings of more than 30 days or is my market strong
in bookies of two days or one day to understand it's the debt total occupancy. What is the percentage
of nights that come from bookies of two nights or seven nights, etc. And so usually these main KPIs,
you can also compare your prices. You can even see like the most common amenities, the cancellation
policy that your competitors are using, the value of extra gas that your competitors are charging,
the amount of people going weekly discounts, look at these comes. So there's a huge amount of
information. And why is this system concept very useful? Because we will be able to see at the
least level. And you can open the link and see it in this case, our market, as for the moment,
have Airbnb available, we will add parking dot com at some point. I don't want to tell which state
because I don't want to overpromise. But we are using bookie dot com data in our dynamic pricing
tool, we are planning on adding it to the market dashboard. And you can see all this data,
you can create your concepts. And then all these graphs, all these information, all these
will be for each concept that you have. As you can navigate through concepts. So you can create
eight concepts if you want and give it some name. And then you can change and see all the data
of the market for these concepts. Very important as well. You can see future data,
what is on the books today, right? What is confirmed today, but you can also see past data. And
usually you can see at least the last year, you can see how it was in terms of occupancy,
the art, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They know all other metrics. So I think the main could be
as you're covering in this, even some experts like cancellation policy, mandaties and all the rest.
Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two busily books that we brought out,
the book, direct playbook and the book, direct blueprint are two of the top rated and the best
selling in the hospitality category on Amazon. For just two pounds, you can grab both of those books
right now. The foundations and the structures that you need to put in place is in the blueprint.
And then for a 101 mark in tactics, that is in the playbook. So go and grab a copy on Amazon.
Now just type in book, direct playbook or the book, direct blueprint. And we'll see you on
your side. And the good thing about that is that even for hosts who are just focusing on one area,
I mean, myself, we focus on one particular city. But we have different types of houses, you know,
some can cope with 12 people, some can only cope with the studio apartment. And obviously being
out to compare those two completely different data sets is so important for us. You can actually
look at, hey, what is the average price for, you know, a one bedroom studio versus a five bedroom
house? And as long as you've got an idea of what those are, you can then take that and put that
into your, you know, you're listing your figures even before you take on a property. And that's
the fantastic thing is that you can have a good idea of how well a unit can be performed well
before you commit to whatever that unit is, whether it's bought arbitrage or management.
Also, the end that we just add one thing in this feature with the Comset, there's also one
thing that that we added that is very important. You can use this market that they're short,
but after if you are using one and after you have the, the Comset's created in the, in the neighborhood
data, for example, that is in the dynamic pricing tool, like a feature that calls neighborhood data,
or even in the portfolio of these, that is the report into those price levels, you can select
these Comsets to use a benchmark. So instead of using the default data, you can go there and
customize and say, I want to now to benchmark with these Comsets. And the same for your,
for the portfolio list, that is your results. So your result, your real data, like from your
properties, then you can say, okay, I want now to benchmark with the Comset that I created.
And this is, and this is very useful because at the end, the same, we want to compare if our
result was better or worse than our own specific concept that we created. So if it's very simple
to use it now in price level. I know there's a lot of people who have listened to this and go,
do you know what, I'm just not very techy. I don't understand the figures and the numbers.
What would you say to those people? How does price lab help to sort that out? You know, like for
the people who just don't know what to do, what, what kind of features and tools and how,
what would you say to them? So we have several, like several ways of helping, like, that we have
daily webinars. For example, in English, we have webinars in five languages, but daily it's in
English. Then we have weekly in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese as well. We have our supporting,
that speaks all these languages. I think a couple more, but at least this five are covered officially.
So you can end a work 24 hours, seven days a week, so you can contact our supporting,
but of course, if you need a call and depending on the complexity of your account, you might be
able to do it with the help of our support team or you might be assigned an account manager that
will help you to set everything and that will help you, like, by weekly calls, for example,
the beginning or weekly call at the beginning, then monthly calls, quarter calls, whatever you
might need. For example, in my case, in spread time, with the in charge of partnerships,
I still do some accompaniment with all clients, because before I was doing a comment with
the business development, so I still have like monthly calls or with some clients every quarter,
because they just wanted every quarter. So we have our, is the account manager that is well
assigned to the clients, but it depends a little bit on the complexity of the account, the size of
the account, et cetera, how it is related. If you have one property, but probably our support
team will help you to set up and do your own borrowing, but if you have like 100, you probably
will need some specific settings that you will do it with on boarding calls with us. But
for everyone, our support team is really great. I think it's probably one of the strengths of
press lines and they are very fast and fast and friendly and they can help you set up everything.
And I think from what I've seen, one of the benefits, because I'm not a tech person,
but as soon as you go on there, you know the, there's a setting on there which you can select and
that'll say, recommended settings, you press it and that'll say, do you want longer midterm
states? Do you want short-term states? You select and it says, hey, this is what we would recommend,
but you can override it, you know, you can say, actually, you don't want it one night's day,
you can have a minimum two night's day. And that's the cool thing is that it just gives you
very easy settings to be able to have a starting point. And of course, you can tweak as time goes
on, which is, which is cool. So you mentioned midterm, you know, there's some people who want
longer stays. And for me, this is one of the things which in our area, we do have contractors,
they stay for longer periods. Would you have any advice for those people? What should they be looking
at? So if you're somebody who isn't trying to get the most optimum price on a single, say Saturday
night for that one night's day for 12 guests, what should the people who do more midterm
stays be looking at if in price labs? I think if you focus on midterm states, I think in general,
not only in terms of pricing, in general, your strategy should be a little bit different,
like you should adapt your description, you should adapt maybe your photos, you should adapt
even your product, your apartments having amenities that what people want for a midterm,
but in terms of certain strategies, I was saying that if you can focus, but you have to be very careful
with booking windows, you have to have a very good strategy of booking windows. If you focus on midterm,
probably it's not a good idea to accept, for example, someone checking in in three weeks,
what do you do with the next 20 days or 90 days or 80 days? Can you sell it daily? If you can,
if you want to focus on midterm, but you still accept like two days or three days, four days in
gaps or in the last minute, you should have this very clear, okay, I want to focus and you should
use, for example, in price labs, you can use the minimum state setting because at the end when
you're focusing midterm, price in some cases start to become like not the priority, the minimum state
is the priority. So you have to have to be sure that you can set a good minimum state strategy.
In price labs, you can do something, for example, if someone is booking more than 50 days in
a vast or 30 days in a vast, I want the minimum of 30 days or 15 days, but for the next 10 days,
I will accept the minimum of three or four or five or six or seven. And using this at opening gaps,
I think it's the most important is playing very well with the minimum states. Don't accept 30 days
for someone that wants to check in in 10 months, but open like in less minute. So having your minimum
minimum state strategy is very important. And one very, it seems very simple, but I've seen when
I was a revenue manager as well, that sometimes people forget, if you're selling daily, but you
want to focus on midterm, use your monthly discount. Sometimes people say, I don't want to give 40%
of monthly discount, 35% is very high, but in reality, what is your average of a single amount? It's
60%, it's the same having 100%, it's 40% of discount, then having a 60% if you're selling daily,
if the price is the same. So you can still have daily prices and use weekly discounts, monthly
discounts, or by weekly discounts to set your strategy in terms of mental state.
If you're struggling on how to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start,
then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boosley and our team right now. We can walk you
through exactly what we're offering, how we can help you, and give you a portfolio of websites
that we have worked with that are matching not only on niche, but could be in your location as well.
Boosley has helped over 2,000 hospitality businesses all over the world, increase their
direct bookings. And if you are interested, then all you need to do is go to boosleyboostly.co.uk,
or slash call, and book in an appointment with one of our sales team.
Cool, that's really cool. And I mean, just drawing everyone's attention to that point that you can,
you know, like if you've got midterm stay three weeks out from now, you can set your,
you know, orphan nights, in other words, you can't take another three week booking into within
the next two weeks. So you can set it to say to set two seven nights days, or you can
three nights days, whatever it is that you want to take to fill that gap and make sure your counters
nice and full. And the benefit of a host who, you know, say you don't mind short term stays,
but actually for anyone booking more than two months out, that you'd really want a minimum of
seven nights, you can do that. So you can have a two nights day as your basic, but for a future,
you know, for over 30 days or over 60 days out, you can set it seven days. And it's just great
to have that flexibility that, let's be honest, the online travel agents, they're basically like,
hey, how many days do you want? And if everybody sets it just two days or two nights days,
then you know Christmas is going to be booked. You know, the high in demand dates are going to be
booked with these just two little short stays. Whereas you might have got a longer book. And
this is the benefit where it isn't just looking at price, you know, the most optimum price.
It's actually helping you to get the best length of stay, reduce cleaning fees that way as well.
And, you know, all that cool stuff. So one question I'd love to ask, and this all the talk at
the moment is about AIs, is there anything that price labs is going to be doing around AI,
or is there anything else you're excited about that's coming along in the future?
Um, I think AI, of course, is one of the main publics everywhere. But I also think that we still,
like, at least even I, like the majority of people, I don't think we are very clear what AI
means and is like, everyone talks about AI, but at the end, I don't know, is machine learning?
Yeah. Is it? It's like, what specifically is AI? So if machine learning and other things,
if all of this is AI, so of course, price labs is the AI as well. Uh, I think some people think
that AI is some other thing. So at the end, without having a standard definition of AI,
I'm not sure what we should consider AI, but we, of course, we use AI and we use big data,
like even, even, we create even a small tool that it's like better, just,
since everyone can go to our website and do it, uh, that we, we already do the chat,
IPD, uh, under the code, right? And you just put the location of your property.
If you want to target my couples, et cetera, the language, and it will give you a title in
the description, for example, for your, for your, your listing. So we use AI, we use AI
without editing, but I'm still not sure sometimes, then I go to a lot of events,
if people ask about AI, and sometimes I'm still not sure exactly what is the, the boundary of
AI. Is this AI or not? Is this or not? So at the end, I will say that we use AI already,
but I think it's still a lot more opportunities to add.
That's a very good answer. I think one of the, one of the most interesting things that we will see
with AI is if you, if you work worldwide and you have clients worldwide, the speed will not be,
the, of adapting AI will not be the same for everyone, right? You might adapt AI in your operation,
if you are a host, for example, very easily in the US, some cities in Europe, but then if you want
in some cities in Latin America, you cannot have AI and be completely AI, if you have
power cuts, for example, and the, and AI will not work. So at the end, I was, I think it's
going to be interesting because AI is very accessible everywhere, but then there's some infrastructure
issues that will, AI will be, adapt much easier in some places than others. So this is my personal,
the curiosity, how we'll also adapt depending on the location and depending on the target of
the Europe of their guests. You make a very good point, as you say, power cuts often in, in,
you know, virtual assistance, there's often power cuts and things like that. AI isn't going to work
your guests, not going to get a response at that stage, aren't it? So that's a very good point.
Fausto, I just would love to ask just a couple of questions about yourself before we let
everybody know how they can go and find out more information. So just give us a bit of background.
What did you do before price labs? What was your, your history? So I've worked in the tourist
many events for many years. So I, I used to, that's for the tourist management. I've worked
with the, with the tour operators and travel agency for some time, and then I went more to the
event site. Then for, I went to Columbia to spend three months. I stayed for five years.
So, and I started to work in short and rental there. I've worked in the hotel before,
but they shot them red specifically. There was a project there that I really, I didn't know
anything about short and rent as only hotel. And then I just got in love with the industry.
The thing that I most, that I loved the most, it was a bit time. It was like maybe in 2015,
2014, there was so many things new that we can create that was nothing. Like when I started to look
for information, when I started to look, for example, for a revenue management course about short
and land association, nothing existed, right? So everything was new. So we could create a lot of things
that were new and innovative. So that's why I enjoy. And I worked in that company that was a
pretty large company. And we're doing a very interesting project between holy vehicle working,
short and rental, like 10 years ago almost. And I started in operations at that. I went to
revenue management. I stayed with them for some years. When I left, I was a price fund user
in my coincidence, I was leaving and price fund was starting to grow. So I just started with,
I was invited to join price funds. And I've been here and I will stay here for the moment,
for the moment, but I don't have any plans. I really like price funds. I think it's wonderful.
The main, the main work, why I decided to save price funds was mainly by the team,
because of the team and the project, but mainly because of the team.
Yeah, it really shines through. I mean, everybody I talked to at price labs is so helpful. The
support is so good. Everybody, she has gems of knowledge. I mentioned just before we went live
that I was speaking to a representative of your team and they taught me about the price.
There's a setting within, if you subscribe to price labs, which is about the aggressiveness
factor of the date. So on peak dates, it pushes the price up and on trough dates, it pushes it down,
basically, you see more likely to get a booking. And they just gave me some help over that. Instead of
having it as aggressive, I needed to have it as sort of slightly less aggressive or normal and
things like that. And just getting that kind of help is just ideal. And what I love about asking
you about the background of the question is you mentioned that you fell in love with the industry
and so many people listening to this. At some stage, I mean, don't get me wrong, there's this
frustrating times in short term rent or sure there is. But for the most part, this is an industry
which is good fun. We help people come and stay, create lifetime memories, and that's fun in
yourself, isn't it? So yeah, thank you so much for today. So just before we share the details,
I'd love to just know, is there a movie or a TV series or something that we should all go and
check out that you absolutely love at the moment that we should all stick on our watch list?
I've seen one, but it's going to be hard. I don't know, maybe there is, I'm not sure if it's
worldwide in Netflix, then it was a series, but it was a Portuguese series in Netflix that I really
love it, plus one of the first that I really like. And the name is Salm, I don't know if it's
and it's it's based on true story in the sort of islands. I think that is something interesting if
people want to look at. I think it's worldwide in Netflix. Yeah, well, if not, they'll have the subtitles
and stuff like that. So we can go and check it out. So where can we find out more about price labs
or yourselves? You can go to our website. You have a chat. You have the email. If you want to talk
with me specifically for something, it's I can tell you it's files to edpricelove.co. My email,
you can send me an email, but you can write on our website and our support team will answer you
or write the right things or support edpricelove.co. Thank you so much for our stuff. That is fantastic.
Was there anything we missed along the way? Or is that is that everything? I think it's everything.
I think we covered everything. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for today. So as a host, go and
check out price labs. If you've listened to this and you're inspired to go and check them out,
please do so, but also share this with somebody else who maybe has to get some value out of it that
might not know about price labs or some of the awesome new reports, custom data reports and things
like that, which are coming out. Thank you for listening to Boosley. We know there's a lot of places
you can put your attention and really thank you for putting it with us. That's it for now. We'll
see you on the next one. All right for now.