Using AI to take your STR operation to the next level

All right, Luca, if you could do me a massive favor, just tell everybody, tell all of you, as all the listeners, all the watchers, a little bit about Journey, a little bit about you, and how you got this job. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yes, like, I'm co-foundering CEO of Journey. I was born and raised in Italy to just give you a bit background about myself to most to US, specifically LA. This is about 2008. A couple of years after I moved there, this was like early Airbnb, and there was not much done online in terms of short-term rentals. And one of the things I realized is that short-term rentals, especially for luxury villas, was done all through brokers. And if you will search for luxury villas online, you couldn't find really anything. So I launched that's how I got involved in the industry is by seeing this problem launching a landing page. And literally, this is one of the first companies doing Google Ads for luxury villas in LA. That landing page did over $1.2 million in revenue next to us on the first year. And yeah, that was the very, very beginning of the industry. Obviously, short-lived, like within a thousand of 12 months, we had something like maybe shifting competitors, including like one fine-stay luxury three-punch of other companies. But that really hooked me into the industry. And from there, obviously, since they became a free crowd of pre-weekly, I still also managed my company with the idea of utilizing technology to make that business as scalable as possible. A company with a time of school, gas-wiser, grew that company to 300 units across 60 different cities in the US. And in the process of doing that, I built a massive amount of frustration in trying to make different technologies work together. I've been a customer of many DMS companies, and I've been trying to make him work, you know, things like access control system alongside, but guess, a replication system pricing, different type of IoTs and different type of OTAs, all work as a single system. And I think that was interestingly enough is when we were doing this, and we were some mention money at the time, just as a management company, was kind of the time most, you know, the time of Sunde and other major players, like lyrics and stuff like that. So we kind of all started, like, in the same time where everybody was raising money, and I figure out, even because they all had a very common problem, which was the one of the tax back. So obviously, smaller players had the same problem, but on the large scale, it was even bigger. And I started realizing a lot of people were spending a lot of resources to build this system in house. And so that's also what we did, but we did it with the idea of, why after we built it, we said, hey, we're fixing a big industry problem by putting everything into single place. So why don't we develop that into a product and stuff selling it to a lot of people with similar problems of ours. And that's, and that's how a journey was concerned. Hmm. It really is a very common entrepreneurial journey where you scratch your own itch, and then on the back of it, other people go, Oh, like, Luca, how did you guys do that? You know, can you do that for me? And, you know, and it grows and it grows from there. So talk to us a little bit about journey. What is your USB? What's your elevator pitch? Because, you know, as we, as we all know, in this game, there's a lot of choice. I mean, there is a lot of choice out there. So how does journey separate itself from everybody else? What's your unique selling point? Your, your, you know, your taxi pitch, your elevator pitch? Yeah, I can't give it another pitch, but I want to say something to answer your first question, how we separate ourselves from, from, from everybody. And that's why creating an alternative to this very messy, fragmented environment. So, we want to create a finite environment. We want to create a full alternative to, to everything else. So we say, Hey, instead of you're trying to figure out all on your own, we have done that for you. So we took a completely different concept and idea of how, how things have been done, right? Like if you go to a PMS, the idea, journal PMS, the idea is that they connect with as many service providers as possible. We want to have as many verticals as possible, but we want to have maximum one or two providers, per vertical. And the reason being is because if you have pricing, if you have a channel manager, and it's you have a guest notification system, access control system, IOTs, like all these different verticals, and you choose multiple providers for vertical, this system are not going to work well one another, because the combinations are almost infinite. The very technical problem with a very user and trouble, the technicality is that you only understand that when you've tried to build different systems on double top, typical PMS is that you understand that that's not going to work. And it will work for a percentage of the user, I think it's the minority, but it's very much like, full customizations, but then you have to have very high technical knowledge, or have a finite product. Perfect example is an output product, right? Apple, that's exactly what they do. And and that's the reason why a lot of people have iPhones is because it's the final amount of solutions that you can have by doing that, those solutions are built specifically for that platform. Number one, those solutions work well together, you don't get viruses, you don't get bugs or limited amount of bugs. And so all of those things comes as a big advantage. That's exactly what we did, we chose one vendor per category, usually, sometimes two, and we go as deep as possible with those vendors. So for instance, for pricing, we chose Willhouse and you will have 100% of Willhouse functionality embedded inside of our system, right? And then we did the same thing with a how to host outhost, it's fully embedded inside of our system. Now, back in general, we already did with charge PPT, we created our own AI, which we will post, there are more details on the AI side, but that's fully embedded into the system. And so as a user, you really need to learn one system, not multiple, and you cannot great downgrade whatever service you want. The frustrating part of what's happening in our industry is that if you are a user today, you want to come in the industry, or even if you're a large user, but let's take the example of somebody that just started. They have to do weeks longs of months long of research, or research on who they want to use. Once they choose food to use, it's weeks longs of onboarding for your PMS, weeks long of onboarding for any service that you want to use and making sure that it's integrated with PMS. We just removed entirely all of that. For our system is a one-click process, what we are launching on the 16, it's actually off-made, it's actually off-potential when this goes live, half-launched on the 16, it's what we call journey 2.0. We are making a one-click process. So as long as you have an Airbnb account, you log in on your Airbnb account, we're in our platform, all your information, all your studying, everything gets the important inside of our system. I'm great to wheelhouse out of hosts, or our access control system is as easy as a one-click on the bottom. That's it. That's how the industry should be working. That's how we think we're changing the game. Are you a long answer? No, it's a great answer. The question that I have then is, are our hosts, wheelhouse fantastic companies, how are you making this decision to go with them? Because obviously in the dynamic pricing world, you've got many partners, obviously, or host as many different partners. What's the reason for going with them? Why not, I guess, if you're looking at the elephant in the room, why not open your services up to multiple, because technically you could be missing out on potential customers there? Yes, it's true, but we say, hey, the people that want to have that full-level customization, let them all be in a bucket, but it's a small bucket. That's the means, I guess, like we started understanding that there is in the industry that they think that everybody wants this high-level customization when in reality, people want simplification. And if you look at every industry, whoever comes in and simplify things without a compromise on the end product, that's really the challenge, comes out as a winner. So that's all our mission is. And we say, hey, listen, the end of the day, is there a real big of a difference between pricing software and a little bit there is. And number one, we chose wheelhouses. Sounds like a big advertising for wheelhouse, but we as split tested, basically every pricing tool that there is in the market. And wheelhouse came out on top. That was just as simple as that. And so we chose them with the addition of, hey, you know, you have to build custom API to work with us, because we don't want to work with your typical API connection where it doesn't give you any functionality, so you have to give us a sane amount of functionality. We want basically everything that can be done in your platform, be done on our platform. So that's how we chose the partners. And that goes for every partner we work with. And we're not stuck to be like, hey, there is someone who comes out that is 10 times better than who we're working with. We're not going to work with them. There is that option. And there might be an option that future where there's going to be a couple options you can choose from potentially we don't we haven't we haven't decided that yet, but no more than a capital, because each single one of them needs to be fully built for our system. 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 Bruce Lee 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. Bruce Lee has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world increase their direct bookings. And if you are interested, then all you need to do is go to boostly B O O S T L Y dot co dot UK, or slash call and booking an appointment with one of our sales team. So the me then the question is, who would you say watching this right now would be your, you know, your crush client for for journey? Are we sort of talking to people that have got one property to maybe 20 properties? Or a lovely question. Yeah. So who would you say you work with best? Because I've got my opinion and my assumption, but I would love to know your answer first. Yeah, I would love to hear your opinion as well. But I can tell you one thing. I've built this product because when I started my management company, I went from a single unit to 300 units. My needs have to change constantly throughout that journey, to attend it. And I couldn't find a system that would adopt for my needs quickly in us. And I have actually built a product that it would be perfect for me at a time. And my goal is to have a product that doesn't matter to your single units. And it's me that is you can start as simple as easy as possible, which is far through the big announcements that we're making on this fix. But at the same time, it can scale as complex as you want to. But the reality is that the different system matter relatively. But once you start being trained to a single system, you don't want to switch if the system can adopt for you. And so our goal is to be your solution for the very beginning to the very end of your journey. So my assumption with this product is that, and again, at Boostly, we work with hosts in the past. And when they come into our world from one property, and we've taken on the more that we've grown and become more known in the industry, we've had people come and want to work with us that have got hundreds of properties in their listings. And what we've developed and what we've devised is our crush on our cringe list. And over time, we've realized that anybody over 100 listings isn't suited to work with Boostly because they've got all of the things in place. So they've put you know, more majority of the time, they've got a PMS majority of the time, they've got pricing majority of the time they'll have an SEO guy majority of the time, they'll have Facebook ads, Google ads, go into a certain pages, they'll have met attacks and all that things. So they've got a spider's web of a business. And they look at Boostly because we've got that API integration into their PMS, which is, you know, majority of the time would be a guesty or a host-made ones that charge a stream, and then they want us to try and connect a bridge that was broken in the back end. And for what we do and how we work, it doesn't match. So all of our headaches and all of our, you know, stress and customer service calls has been on those situations. So we very quickly pivoted and gone right. Our crush client from now here on in from May 1st to moving forward is one to 20 properties. Those are the ones that we work with the best, we have the best impact because majority of them don't have a PMS majority of them don't have pricing software. So they've got Airbnb, right? And a lot of them don't even have their though, or booking.com set. They're definitely out of email marketing. So when we take them on boards, and again, without the pun intended, we take them on a journey, we join their journey from property one, and let's say we can grow with them to property 2021, we can jump in at the time where we can mostly have a market impact. If they grow to 100, great, we're already in the system. We're already behind the scenes doing all the connecting, which is cool. Well, that's for us. And the way that you talk about simplicity, and I love that, because any question that I ever ask in my own business, and when I'm doing coaching calls, I ask them is how would this look if it was simple? And simplicity always wins. We make it a habit in entrepreneurial life of trying to do things the hard way. My grandad always said to me when I was growing up, he said, there's two ways of doing things, Mark. There's the easy way, and there's the way that you take. As I've grown, I love it. And I've improved, and I try and simplicity always wins. And so the way that I would assume, if I was speaking to a potential boost customer and they're saying, listen, I don't know what PMS to go with, and I say, well, where are you at? I'm a property one. I'd been more inclined to point them to your way. And if I was speaking to somebody that was a couple of hundred properties in, that's got all these things in place, because like I say, at the moment, you're very limited to say, right, your dynamic pricing solution will be wheelhouse. Your auto host will be in. You know, so that's my assumption, but that's a very cool answer. Okay, let's very quickly pivot. I go on. Yeah, but I want to wrestle what you said because you said too many good things. Okay, go for it. Go, go, go. Yeah, no, I think you're 100% right. I mean, who we target is one thing, but this product is built for. If you're building it from scratch with our product, it can scale into the thousands of units. What I'm going to be targeting is not going to be someone who has a thousand units a day between your, like you said, as much harder sell. I just want to say one last thing about the big release that we just made is that we are planning to really try to change things on how it's been done and to make it very much accessible. And having people familiarize themselves with technologies. And so one thing that we have launched is that anyone that is with a minute out of a host or a wheelhouse or only wants to use a PMS solutions only, they are going to have full access to our PMS and the reconnection with Airbnb and the reconnection with GPT for fully for free. Because our business model is making money on everything else that we can give you in terms of solution on top offs. And this is very much a big game changing that is coming in the industry should have come earlier to be honest from other players. But we want to be the first one to bring it to market. So let's talk about this because it is the big new shiny object. People are saying that AI is coming. AI is here. And we as an industry as vendors, as partners, as leaders in the industry, you have to adopt and move fast and bring it to our customers and eventually it will be to the Joe public. So this is interesting. So a couple of weeks ago, you're in London, you were talking about AI in hospitality. Can you just give us please like the cliff notes of your talk and like how you see AI and how it will impact hospitality moving forward for not only Q2 in 2023, but Q3, Q4 and I was thinking for in 2024 as well, please. Yes, I'm extremely passionate about this topic because and one of the things that came up actually at that conference was I think a lot of people are underestimating what's happening. And it's very normal why people are underestimating this is because we are used to linear growth on any type of technologies like even computing power because computing power was strictly correlated to cheap power development and those computers double in power every two years. AI is not strictly related to its development to hardware, it's purely software. I mean, obviously there's some hardware around it, but hardware can take it at much bigger power than what it is right now and AI doubles in power about every three months. So you now have a compounding effect. So that means that in the last three months, there's been more development in AI and more advanced in AI than in each entire lifestyle. Okay, so that's I think what humans have a hard time wrapping your head around it. Right. And so with that, it comes the fact that it's going to impact almost every single industry that we know us. Number one, it's already impacting them and there's already solution that are happening. They're already doing things, but two is you're not on top of it, you're going to be left behind. Okay, and this here comes a second, I think, probably misjudgment that people are having on AI that they're saying he was going to take over millions of jobs and it is true that he's going to do that, but he's going to be the millions of people that are not going to adopt quickly enough because just as much as they're going to take those jobs away, it's going to create millions of other jobs because it's just elevating and enhancing what humans can do. So we are going to be able to do a lot more things, a lot quicker, a lot better and a lot greater. So I just want to say that as a first, as the first step of August, someday opening, to answer more specific what's going to impact and how is going to impact our hospitality. I think the quickest one that is happening, we are journey, we're launching it, but I'm sure we're not the only one working. This actually stuck in the conference of interest, there's been a lot of people that have been talking about similar topics, which happens to think we're more ahead of other people because we're going to start working on it for a long time, but we're definitely not going to be the last. Is automatic against against communications, tax support and review management. I think those those three are going to be the first ones. They're going to they're going to come and play. What I love that one of the questions was like, okay, but obviously there's everybody is used to like a bit typical chat box, but they've been existing until now and they're horrible and I agree with them. This is very, very completely different because if you look at GPT or charge GPT, for instance, answering your narrow question is a lot harder than answering a finite set amount of problems that you can give it with a trained database. So that already happens. That is already a higher level than what a normal customer service can do. And I think within a month or two, we're going to see hundreds of solutions. We're bringing, I think, one of the first ones free to market to the market. We're only thinking we're not going to enable for fully for free is the auto response and some customizations on the settings. But the two, but one of the biggest pushback we got was so this sounds like it's going to be impersonal answers to guests. And it's not going to be going alongside the savings style of your company. What about your branding and all of that? And this is a matter of misconception that exists in the in the AI is actually going to be able to create a higher level of customization. It's going to be able to remember way more information about that specific asset than any other human. You're going to be able to customize based on your style and based on the type of preferences you're renting and based on maybe your management company and a specific owner as specific requests, you can customize each answer to that. That's something that me as an expert, having experience, and I've been working with hundreds of different management companies with 20 to 7 customers, support something that is extremely hard to do with humans. Yeah. But it's going to be extremely easy with AI. Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two Bruce Lee books that we brought out, the book Derek Playbook and the book Derek 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, Derek playbook or the book, direct blueprint, and we'll see you on the other side. So let me just jump in quickly. You are you are right. We are moving into a world of personalized approach, personalized marketing and humans are fantastic. We are all human to you and I are human, but we have to sleep. We get ill. We get cranky. We forget, you know, we like alcohol. We speak as an Italian and a British guy. We like we like our booze, right? And so because of that, we forget and stuff. These AI robots, they never sleep, they never complain, they don't get sick and they work 24 seven. And you're right. AI is going to remove a lot of jobs. It's going to remove a lot of a lot of fiber. 90% of five is going to disappear. But I say this to everybody, it's going to remove the crap and it's going to remove the average. The cream always rises to the top. So if you are somebody who is worried, it's because you're not very good at your job. Number one, number two, what this is going to do is going to help free up time for business owners, entrepreneurs and your staff. Every single business should be looking at how can they improve their productivity by 30% without adding on any more headcount, which is again, what we're doing every single day obviously we are building out a 24 seven bot using Cody, which is a fantastic AI tool that will plug in and we basically upload all of our documents, all of our PDFs, all of our arguments, any YouTube video, anything like that, we uploaded to this tool and it learns it, it programs it and it replies with our voice, which is going to be key. So anybody who says it's not personal or whatever, they're using the assumption of what is currently here, which is those chatbots, which yes is an awful user experience, but it will get a heck of a lot better. So for everybody in hospitality moving forward, you can know full well that a question will come in, whether it's a platform or direct, whether it's an inquiry or a question and it will be answered professionally with your tone, with your personality and quickly, which in the world of TikTok, where we want everything within seconds, we want to watch a video within seconds, you'll be able to achieve that because end of the day, who wants to be awake at 2am answering a message about Wi-Fi or a microwave not working or somebody's being locked out because they're too drunk, right? And that's that is what this will bring. And you know, depends on when you're watching this, if you watch us on the day this podcast goes out, you are literally at the most up to date, as we ever are, two, three months, like you say, in three months time, but maybe hundreds of us solutions and journey may have even got even better with all the things that it can offer. So you've got to stay atop of this. And like I said at the very start, AI isn't coming, AI is here. And right now is the business owners that are being impacted. And then the next will be the guest, it will be your bookers. Amazon already announced that it is looking to bring in chat GPT into Alexa because Alexa's is currently struggling and it needs an upgrade. And that's the next thing. Just imagine now talking to your device, but wanted to the left of me here, and it will be able to book a holiday. It'll be able to make an end, you know, to book a stay book a hotel book a short term rental. Right now, if you ask that question, you want me to do it. So it's going to impact business owners now, which it currently is in 2023. Everybody's being impacted doesn't matter what industry you're in. And then next, it's going to be your customers, Joe public. And if you're at the forefront of it, and your vendor, whoever you use, isn't currently implementing it in Q2 or Q3, then you rid the wrong vendor. You need to be upgrading and going to people that are at the forefront of this. And so journey's being one of them. Fantastic to see. Okay, as we look to wrap this up, where number one, can people come and find out more about journey? Number two, if anybody wants to reach out to you, pick your brains about AI, is there any place that you like to post socially about it? And number three, what's your final takeaway from this podcast? What's this like, the thing that you want everybody listening to take away from this? Yeah, well, journey. You are and why.com, definitely, if you're interested in the business. I'm pretty rich. I try to be pretty rich, but at the same time, I'm easy by all. I'm pretty active on my LinkedIn. And it's my name and last name, look at the middle. So feel free to ask me or follow me there. I'm happy to answer any questions like the amounts or any questions specifically about AI, even if you just share information. And then take away. I mean, at VQ Center, just make sure you're on top of this, because it's evolving much quicker than people are thinking. And it's actually a lot easier to use them than a lot of modern technologies were used to internet early age. But this is much more and it's a lot easier for a lot more people to develop tools and build things. So make sure you're on top of it. Fantastic. Thank you very much. So Zambello is Z-A-M-B-E-L-L-O on LinkedIn. If you put that in on LinkedIn with Luca, L-U-C-A at the front, journey is J-U-R-N-Y.com. Please do go check it out. Fast, fast growing, probably management software solution. It looks to keep it simple for all. And yeah, it doesn't matter whether you're at property one, probably 10, probably 20, property 30, and you're looking to have a simple solution, which everybody is, then definitely go and check them out. Can they book a demo? Can they get a free trial? How does it work? If someone's like on the page right now, how does that sort of work? Yeah, our PMS with a connection with Airbnb is fully free. So anybody can do that. And then you can also look at them all if you want us in the product in more details. But you can literally run as many Airbnb's as you want on top of our platforms and use our basic AI system, the more advanced offices for premium. And they don't have a great R4 premium, but that's what we're bringing. So if I wanted to get started for free, I would come on, create an account. And if I just connect just my Airbnb listing, that's free for all. That's correct. It doesn't matter how many properties I've got. Doesn't matter. And then from there, there's a general upgrade as you go. Brilliant. I love that. I love that. Okay, well, go check that out. It really is worthwhile. J-U-R-N-Y.com start for free. And as you grow, as you go on your journey, journey will be there with you, which is lovely. Luca, appreciate it. I really look forward to tapping into more of AI with you. I'll send you a message out of this because I've got a WhatsApp group just for AI chat. Love it. I'd love to have you part of it. But for everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in. As always, this is the podcast that brings you the tools, the tactics, the training, and the confidence to increase your direct bookings and cut down on your overliance on Airbnb and the OTAs. We are here three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It doesn't matter whether you listen on Spotify, on Apple, Android, or you like to watch the videos on YouTube or LinkedIn or any of the social medias we are here for you. All I'm going to do is Google, go from there and choose your podcast listening of your choice. With that being said, we're going to stop today's recording. Luca, thank you. Thank you everybody for tuning in.