The Secret to Boosting Business in Hospitality: Knowing Your Guests

Hi and welcome to the Boosley podcast. This is the podcast that gives hosts all over the world, the tools, the tactics, the trainings. Most importantly, the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookends. My name is Liam Caravan. I'm Mark Simpson's co-host and this is the mini series on the Boosley podcast which goes behind a successful business which you need to know about as a short-term let host and hospitality owner. So today we are joined by a very special guest. We've actually got Hannah Oden if I pronounce that correctly. It's Oden but it's fine. I always, I should check before we go live. But yeah, all the way from Superhog. She is based in the UK and Superhog is this amazing company which we're going to find out about today which Boosley as you know is all about direct bookends and part of people's worry when it comes down to direct bookends is how do we know who our guest is and if we can trust them only are they going to be a good guest. So today's episode is all about how Superhog as a service can help you know your guest and Hannah's going to be fielding the question. She is the real regional manager and in sales from Superhog and she's also awesome. She's always a ray of positivity. I've spoken to him many times. No worries. I've spoken to her many times in the past both from my own business but also on behalf of Boosley. So welcome along Hannah. Thanks for being here. Thank you for inviting me on. It was a pleasure. Cool, cool. So let's get started. If you wouldn't mind introducing yourself obviously your role within the company and really what Superhog does. I know I've given you a bit of a lead up there but you have. You've told them everything that they need to know. Yeah, so I'm in part of the sales team at Superhog and I guess my job is to entice property managers to buy our service in a nutshell. But obviously I do things like that I'm doing today so I'm quite well-rooted in the industry and like to do webinars and at the conferences and stuff like that. So yeah and yeah I've been at Superhog since since it started. So Superhog's been around for like four years. So yeah I've been one of the I like to call myself one of the OGs which is some sort of Gen Z language or something isn't it an OG? Old person is what I would say. So yeah I've been there for the full duration of seeing Superhog go from like you know the idea to what it is now. So yeah it's been very enjoyable so far. That's cool, that's cool. And before we talk more about what Superhog does what is your history? What did you do I guess before you got into guest verification and the hospitality industry? Yeah so I have worked in insurance so in the insurance industry everyone goes boring. For her since I was 17 I won't tell you how old I am now but it was a long time ago. And yeah I just I went to college for a bit but I was like I always wanted to work I always just wanted to take money. So I joined an insurance company and I worked my way up to being a manager there and then I just decided that I wanted to take the leap out of there and do something different and the opportunity with Alex God, whole technologies is the company in the UK and then we got Superhog as well. So it was kind of like a leap because it was local to me down the roads we've gone off this round by where I live but it was a startup company as many are in this industry and it was a bit daunting I was a bit like shall I, shall I join but I'm really glad that I did and to me what we do is an insurance it's you know solutions for the industry and it's a completely different industry compared to insurance like I say it's not boring. So that's what I've done basically before this has just remained in insurance and that is it. That's cool though because the thing is where about so you're based in the UK? So I'm about now from London so I'm in the south yeah I do like it. What I love about Superhog in general or Godhog is that it has started off as a relatively small you know sort of problem solving thing which has allowed hosts now all over. Am I right in the belief that you guys are everywhere now? You're all over the world. We're global yeah we're global we've got a lot of traction in the US in the last 12 months so we're doing exceptionally well there but everywhere we are everywhere. That's cool and this is a great thing about hospitality in general is that there's not just the hospitality side there's so many different new pieces of tech problems being solved and they serve a global market which is exactly what Superhog does. And we should briefly mention we were talking about family just before we came on here. I've got a little boy your family is all still there you can now work from home is that? Yeah so this is why you can see everything here. I have an office office I'll say that at home and yeah I work half and half the week here and then and half the week in the office but to be fair my teams and the sales team are not in the office down the road. They are in Barcelona the US, Australia so that's why I do kind of half the week at home because you know I just really go into the office to you know get out of my four balls really and just see a few other big books but yeah it's really it's really great. I can't work from home and I can do you know speak to clients by zoom. I mean I'm so used to doing this type of cool because I'm using the same every day. We've done it plenty times haven't we? And the cool thing is you then get to spend time with your family and like we said it's half term and stuff like that which is cool so yeah. List I've into into Superhog so what problem does it solve and why? Lots I'll say. So Superhog prevents by guests essentially from staying in your properties in all shapes of forms and I have this conversation with property managers like every time that I'm a lot I'm on a call that you know your perception of a bad guest could be anything. It could be a criminal, it could be someone that trashes the place, it could be someone that stays but there's a charge back. There's like so many different reasons why you would say that someone's a bad guest. In fact we actually had this like chucked around the offense the other day like what's everyone's interpretation. Everyone was like worried they were going to say like they'll you know give a bad answer but I don't think there is like one answer for a bad guest it could be multiple different things so we do that by vanidating who the guest is in order to prevent damage happening or financial loss happening down that end. So that's kind of like our bread and butter it's always about prevention. We then also provide a deposit management solution which includes a way that we can monetize damage protection for property managers so we can actually make you money and provide that plot for damage in case you need it which obviously is something that a lot of property managers come to us for is deposit management they don't want to do it anymore they don't want to have to pay the fees to the to the bank and all that kind of thing so we take that off of the property manager as well and provide that and then the most important thing which I actually think is the most important thing but I don't think everyone thinks it is is the big stuff so what happens when something really does go wrong in your property and like I don't know a fire and the guest causes a fire and like what have you got in place for that so we have protection in place for for the big stuff I like to call it. So yeah that's it in summary. 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 Boostley 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. Boostley 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 boostleybosty.co.uk forward slash call and book in an appointment with one of our sales team. And they do say prevention is the best cure don't they so it's something which we talk about a lot here at Boostley when we're talking about direct book and websites. The number one question I get is well obviously Airbnb do host cover what do what happens if I get a direct book and then you go let's be honest you're getting all that extra income you're getting the higher you know there's no book and fees and you can easily charge your guests the difference and you know sort of make some extra profit but then also responsibility then falls to the hosting question but there's lots of tools there's lots of ways that you can verify the guest and the cool thing is that there's companies like Superhog which can do that for you you don't even need to have to worry about how you're going to do it you could just come straight to Superhog and have that done for you so we covered what regions obviously it covers so literally any host and most of the people listening to this are going to be in hospitality or some sort of host somewhere in the world they might be thinking well I like the idea of direct bookings but how do I how do I prevent these problems and I like what you said there about what is what is a bad guest because some hosts consider there's a bit of washing up left that could be a bad guest but what we're really talking about here is the people who are out to cause a real problem within the property isn't it is is people who are smoking trashing having parties all of all of that side of things which which was really you know sort of what it covers so yes let's go with how does it work so if i'm a host yeah what is the process for how do i stop that guest from from causing problems um so yeah so what we implement is a way of verifying the guest we do that through communication so we have to we have to get the guest to do something once they've booked so essentially what would happen is um the guest would book we would then follow up in some shape or form with a verification link the guests would know that this is coming to them before um so you would communicate to them properly beforehand because obviously you get pushed back otherwise so we communicate with the guests get them to verify we can do that through a manual integration link that pms or we have a direct api that some people will build to and then what happens is the guests would then be going through that verification they would provide their email telephone number address that id and then once they're verified or we look at the verification obviously um if they're verified we give them the green light if they're not verified we give you the red light i was gonna don't know why i thought about the brown light i know don't know what was thinking about red light it could be a brown light then you know like how how much your situation is i don't know what yeah i don't know all my frameworks thinking then but yeah so essentially we're giving the green light all the the red light if the guest is verified or not um and that's us saying great we think they're okay we think you should be confident hosting that guest in that process we can also um as i said earlier do deposit management so we can add in a step for the guest complete which would include either a deposit um paying a deposit or a damage wave of fee and the guest would come to the end of their journey and then we would tell the the host that the guest is verified or not on that basis the host then has i mean what we provide is a toolkit really so we are not here saying like don't you know cancel your bookings that's not what we're there to do but we are there as risk management to say we're not sure who this person is you may want to think twice about about hosting them but yeah the process works that we send communications to the guest through various different ways of integrating once they've booked and then once they've completed that we let the host know and that's done before checking so the other way there's a lot of things we obviously do in that process like a verified a guest is verified we are providing protection for that as well and then the guest still goes on and causes damage so we have a resolutions portal in the host account that they can then obviously add in the claim and everything and and we will pay out on that basis so that's kind of it in a nutshell it's really really simple it's really really simple there's no like huge amounts of integration that needs needed basically what what i like there is that you provide all the information for hosts to be able to make their own decision like you say you're not getting involved and going to cancel this you know this needs to happen yeah it's ultimately like having an ace in the hole for a host where everyone knows through Airbnb you get kind of the past reviews but I allow people to book who have got no reviews you know I allow people who have just joined the platform I don't know anything about them so if I was to use you know know your guest from super hog I'd actually be able to find out you know have they just created an email address have they just bought a bulk burner phone and that side of things how how you know what is the experience of all that and that's the cool thing I think there's a couple of things worth mentioning here first of all when we talk to guests so when we talk to hosts a lot of the time when they're talking about direct bookings the first question I always have when they're worried about if a guest is going to cause damage through a direct book and is I go how many times does it happen so far what what what claims have you done talking through the last 12 months and it's usually it's either zero or a handful yeah but this is the cool thing that you know even just one or two could be quite costly so just having this tool and all that information at hand just allows you to make a little bit extra you've got a little bit more due diligence as to whether or not that guest is going to look after your place yeah and then having that option it's almost like a triple layer of protection because you've got the the verification you've got the the insurance you know sort of waiver that side you can take a deposit or that side of things and then yeah so you've got if there is a problem well then there's a resolution so it is really good a good system and certainly we here recommend it loosely yeah I mean I mean I like to call it the complete solution and people often ask us like who do you compare to you like and it's actually really difficult like question to answer because there are similar services out there in regards to like the verification process but they do it completely different and we do there's obviously insurance providers out there but they're only based in like certain countries so we have like everything together in one toolkit and that would be I think well that is our USP in my eyes is that everything is is in one place and everything is is everything that we created is a thought from you know a property manager like originally we didn't have deposits and damage waivers we had just you know a guarantee in place and everything's evolved because of us talking to you know to property managers and being in the industry even to one extent that recently and this is what kind of business we are if you work with us we actually added in an extra verification tool mainly for the US market so we were asked about a certain check on the sex offenders register in the US mainly because it was it's now become state law for Arizona and nobody else as far as we know is doing it anywhere like not even the big OTAs and we've done it so we've created it we've implemented it within a very short piece of time so obviously we're getting a lot of people from Arizona contact us because they have to they have to put their guests through this check as part of the state law so that's the kind of thing that we will do as a company and how we're different from others is doing stuff like that within you know a quick thought process and getting it done so that's how I like to say that we're differentiating between the rest of the rest of the services out there that is you make a really good point there's so so many times when we do this podcast we're talking about what the latest regulations are and they're different every you know country continent state town you know like there's so many different regulations out there and as you say with Arizona with this new regulation well you're able to actually help with that and I think this is something that we're going to see more broadly across hospitality about the responsibility of hosts making sure that guests aren't causing problems to neighbors to you know antisocial behavior and all of that stuff well this is this is that triple check as you say is what can help with it I think it's a really good initiative one thing you mentioned and one thing I want to pick up on as I know there's going to be hosts out there want me to ask the question is how does this work for guests is this is this something which puts off guests from bookin in general how would you answer that so I mean it's difficult actually to answer in regards to like whether guests get put off because we don't see that kind of side of it as a as providing the service you know the property manager see that but we've never had any feedback from property managers to say my guests you know my occupancy is down considerably because because I've implemented super hogs if anything it's obviously staying the same we're getting better for them but in terms of the guest process it's very simple and it's I always say the same thing it's always about communicating with them first as long as the guest knows what they're meant to do before they didn't booked so we provide all of this we provide all the wording and stuff you know we wouldn't just allow you to just go off and just make it and you know make it all up and stick it in this thing and hope for the best we you know have wording that we specifically say put this in in your listings on the OTA's or on your website to tell guests what exactly what's expected of them if they book with you because the thing is that is going to put off the bad ones the good ones are going to keep doing it you know they're not going to worry about about having to verify because they are genuine people they're booking your property for a holiday you know it's staying with their family or whatever they don't mind providing that information so as long as communicating first great and then the process of actually doing it takes a couple of minutes the only thing I think that you would we do get the occasional pushback on is maybe the ID feature the giving of email addresses and things is just quite a normal thing for people to do online like when they register on a website and and bits like that but the ID feels like oh I'm giving my ID over to someone on the internet I mean everything's secure we have a proper you know data protection policy in place and all that kind of stuff but yeah they that's the only thing that we we may at times get pushback on and normally the guests would come directly to the host or to ask them we would just reassure them and say look it's just part of the booking I mean I gave this scenario yesterday that it is no different than when you had to give your passport over to someone in a hotel like I remember for a day wouldn't they they keep it yeah they put it in the safe that's crazy yeah like I remember going to Morocco and having to hand over my passport to put in the safe and they were like they weren't giving it to me back and I was like oh my god like I'm in this country I don't know anything about you know and I was really nervous obviously I got it back and it was fine but like like we did that and that was natural it's all we're providing essentially is like a front desk check-in process it's just that it's online and it's only because of the dangers online everyone talks about you know sharing data and that kind of thing but that's obviously our responsibility to make sure that we're keeping that data you know safe and and stuff like that which obviously we do and it's all regulated and stuff so that's the only kind of thing but other than that like we get you know the majority of our guests have no problem going through there's a lot of our accounts that guests are 100% going through like there's there's not you know a complete amount of drop-off and then people canceling because of it and the people that do cancel bookings because of it as in guests are probably the ones that are up to no good and that's the kind of the whole point in what we're trying to do here exactly I think that's the two biggest takeaways from that is the ones it puts off you wouldn't want anyway you know like we've you know if we've got guests who aren't happy to hand over ID then usually it's because they don't want a they don't want their identity to be known for a certain reason isn't there a reason yeah exactly and like you say hotels have done it for years and you know it's still a here in the UK there is still a law that every short-term rental should be taken proof of passport you know that as in it is a thing here so doesn't get enforced but ultimately we can always lean back on that so i've got some questions here hannah which is from the busily community i check this i said that we were having this conversation today so these are their questions what are the biggest mistakes that you see hosts make regarding guest verification and how do they overcome this well at the moment i i get a lot of people just saying that they're just taking your ideas like like you just said like a lot of clients so i speak to you just say oh i'm taking their ID and it's just you know i just put it in my email i mean that's not secure at all no like if their their ID doesn't do anything and i've i've had this from people where they're just like yeah i've got their driving license great what is it told you well nothing nothing you know yeah did you get a picture of them with the driving license no i just well like could be one that they found you know what i mean it's just not it's not necessarily their idea is it so exactly it's not so proof like what are you actually doing and the other thing is the other thing that people always say is oh you know if i'm a bit if i think it's a bit of a red flag i'm not quite happy with them i'll go and search on the socials accounts and on the reviews and i'm like how long are you taking to do this like do you actually have the time to sit there and research all these people and maybe someone that's got you know one property and it's you know they haven't they've got another full-time job or whatever and they've got the time to do it fair enough you know like they might have time to do that but do you really want to be doing that would you not rather use a toolkit that's actually you know it's hands off you don't have to do it it's actually got biometrics in place so like our id and that like our email address checks and like real checks it's not just like me sat at a desk going oh this guest let email address i'm not sure about that oh the id oh they look a bit i don't think that's that person like everything is everything i feel like i always want to laugh when i say that because i can just imagine someone doing that we're doing like our our system is automatic it's doing real checks on these people's information and reporting back on it so it's going to save that person time and potentially money and help them scale a bit more if they want to scale and boost and add to their portfolio you know it's going to take something away from them so yeah so what they're doing i don't think it's enough to secure like at the end of the day something bad happening at the other end of it so why not use something like ours ask that's not expensive and is actually going to do real checks quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two boostly 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 101 marketing 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 the other side the next question i've got is do hosts get to keep the email address that's collected for marketing purposes so they do and that is um that is that shows in the account so the guests do sign to confirm that so we do have an agreement and they confirm that they've agreed to our terms in that respect so that's part of their journey um that they go through in that verification um so yeah and that is accessible in their account currently and they can then market to that cool cool and there's a second part to that question which is do you super hog then market to the guests your services or any way shape or form or does that email just get left for for the host or so it does so we don't currently mark market to the guest we don't we used to have like a guest product but we've kind of wiped that out for a while so we played this thing on our host products at the moment so you know currently we don't market tuned them because we don't other than the damage waves at which there were obviously already getting that through the journey anyway there there isn't anything else that we're providing the guests currently does super hog integrate with CRMs like mail chip port or similar not at the moment no so we are creating and this probably will be something that we do do because there's so much in our roadmap but we are at the moment building something out and our tag to build a report so you know you can get access to those email addresses and stuff stuff a bit better than what we've currently got otherwise i don't know if you can't cover the email address we talk about i'm so much here at bushley to uh market to the guests so i'm sure that's gonna gonna go down a storm once uh once you're able to do that but like you say people have got access to them individually anyways we've got access to them it's just it's not pulling that into you know like he said into a CRM currently no worries so do i still need other insurance if i use super hog products for instance there's ones out there from like proper and safely there's there's kind of a lot of insurance based products out there what else does a host still need i guess is the question yeah so it's always um advisable for them to have their normal i was there's so many words i could use here underlying normal buildings and contents insurance for the property so it's your home um you need to have that obviously um and this is for things that aren't caused by guests because that's not what we're covering here we are only covering risks uh caused by guests so if there was a fire in the house but it was an electrical fire we aren't covering that if the guests causes a fire because they leave us to correct but that's what we're covering so if you don't have normal buildings and contents insurance then you're not going to be covered for those losses so we would always say that you should have those it's not a term of our policies um any more but you know it'd be advisable to have that and that includes people that are doing rent to rent rental arbitrage like they would want to make sure that the landlord has some sort of insurance on the building because those risks aren't covered on our policy that's cool that's cool and to expand on that i mean me as a host i can only speak from my own experience here in the UK but i know the landlord's got the building insurance i do rent rent or rental arbitrage for americanism and i still have public liability insurance um and legal indemnity insurance for you know as well so yes and then we still verify you know and and and do that so it is kind of you're covering everything that the guest could cause which makes sense that yeah yeah yeah which is cool yeah i mean as a business so in the UK we do um we do have access to like public liability that you said and professional indemnity so that's another thing that some of our clients take out with us is through guard talk so guard talk still do that but yeah so um we would if someone asks us you know what type of insurance should i have as a host like we would suggest that you would get some sort of business insurance in place as well but you know it's not something that we say you have to have as being part of what we do but obviously um you can only have so many insurances kindly yeah absolutely and i think that answers the question i can't remember if it's from terry or somebody in the community but they basically you just needed to know you know do they still need that building insurance well yeah you do um this is focusing on the guest and the guest in that of yes that's not things so yeah that kind of brings us towards the end and if we come towards the end we like to just do a couple of fun questions Hannah just to break the touch we can relax and uh us all of the uh all of the questions from the community so just some fun questions to end what are you most excited about currently either in business hospitality or in life in general okay i will give you a life one um i'm currently in the process of looking to buy a short term rental in spain so that's um me and my partner that's our dream we've got um we've got a small portfolio of properties in the uk you'll be shocked to know none of them are short term they're both non-dads but yeah we're looking just to get our first one in spain this year fingers crossed um so that's about something i'm i'm literally got this massive math but like on my desk of spain this is like my visual like where where am i gonna buy you need to speak to it so there's some members in the bushel academy there's there's somebody called niki she's also she knows spain so well she's one so um i'm gonna connect you to after this and that's really helpful she's very good she knows where you know well i i guess it's a personal choice but it's meant to buy for for the best investments and that'd be great thank you so um what resource do you think that everybody listening should go and check out either a book a movie a podcast or anything at all does it have to be hospitality related or everybody in life needs to go and check out yeah i um there's a great book do i i probably look like a reader i i don't know but there is a friend who looks like but it's me it's me i'm a reader um there's a book called um you can change your life by louise hay and it is all about our mindset and how we think about things and there's tools in there that like achieving goals and leaving the past behind you and it's a real good thinking book um about how we think so that is my what i think everyone should buy check out so how to change your life did you say it's how to change your life by louise hay yeah i'll give it a download on audible listening to audible driving along to yeah and then it brings us to our always final question which is what is your mantra in life or is there a quote or a saying that resonates with you i have a Albert Einstein quote which i like um i am into like everything that i think everything's energy in this world is everything goes from one thing to another even when we're not here anymore so my quote is everything is energy and that's all there is to it match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality it can be no other way this is not philosophy this is physics i like that i like that i've not heard that i mean i get to hear a lot of different sort of sayings and some come up time time again but yeah i like that that's really cool and yeah based in science as well which yeah it's all about positive mindset so you know if you're positive if you're going positive things are going to happen and that's just like nor will everyone knows oh everyone has heard of that right but it's to do with your vibration your high vibrations and low vibrations yeah so that's why it's saying like the match the frequency of your reality you want so it's interesting yeah it's one to one to think about as well i um i've got i'm in a room at the moment and i've got quotes surrounded like i can't think about it just fixed but i've got quotes surrounded so that might make them all and so thank you for that yeah but Einstein he's got loads of good quotes you should google him now so that brings us towards the the point where we throw the floor open to you hannah how can everyone come and get any touch and find out more about super hog and and obviously we haven't talked about the costs and stuff like that because all that stuff can change over time but the best place to go and find out more about uh super hog is is where um so we have our website which is i should know the uh we've just changed the website which is why i'm going um it's now you're against dot super hog.com and you can also email the sales team which is just sales at super hog.com i don't like to be um selfish and just give you all my email address because i i've had i'm part of an amazing sales team and you know the listeners here might be based in spain or somewhere else so we've got people dotted around that will obviously be better for everyone to sort of talk to so yeah um that email address and that website cool cool we'll add it to the show notes as well so that is knowyourguest.superhog.com you can go and check that out now um and you know book a book a demonstration call demonstration that way yeah yeah that's cool so thank you so much for answering all of our questions today uh hannah that has been fantastic to have you on it's always a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you. Was there any questions i missed or any final cheers before we bring it to a close? No i don't think you've traveled everything though it's really enjoyable to speak speak with you today thank you thank you hannah and thank you too if you're listening on the bougie podcast or watching on youtube we know there's a lot of places you can put your attention and we thank you for spending that with buesli we hope this has been useful for your book and direct journey and i hope you can now go out there and have some more confidence to get those direct bookings thanks for listening