How to Stay Ahead with AI and Automation in Short-term Rentals with Shiven Vinod Khera

Are you struggling to keep up with the latest advancements in vacation rental management or feeling overwhelmed by the complexities of automation and AI in hospitality? Imagine losing out on bookings and revenue because your competitors are leveraging cutting edge technology to provide seamless and personalized guest experiences. Tune in today's episode to discover how automation and AI can transform your vacation rental business, drive revenue, and set new standards for guest satisfaction.

You are listening to the Direct Booking Success Podcast, bringing you all the information you need for your short term rental to stand out from the crowd. I'm your host, Jenn Boyles. As an owner and manager myself, I know how hard it can be to navigate the hospitality industry. I'm here to help so you too can have Direct Booking Success.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Direct Booking Success Podcast. I'm Jenn Boyles, your host. Thank you for including me in your day. It is lovely to be here. Today I'm going to introduce you to someone very special. His name is Shiven Vinod Khera. As the co-founder and CEO of LinkBase Technologies, Shiven has been at the forefront of revolutionizing the vacation rental management space. With a focus on automation, AI messaging and data driven guest experiences, he's transforming the way we think about hospitality. His innovative approach has earned him recognition, including the top 40 under 40 award by the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce. Welcome, Shiven. Good to see you today.

Thank you. Thanks, Jenn. Thanks for having me.

You're welcome. I'm so glad you're here. So 40 under 40, that's quite an award to get.

Yeah, I mean, I was very, very impressed with myself as well. I was very lucky, I would say that the committee was lucky to, you know, nominate me and to get me that award. I had just finished university, then I was at the university, I was quite active as a student. And in these top 40 under 40 nomination awards that the city of Kelowna, where my university is at, they actually had a lot of spots available for young and upcoming talent. And that was only in that year that they started doing that. So I was very lucky. They thought that I could be one of those people and I was very grateful that they did select me.

That's wonderful. Now let's get back to your beginnings because you're in Canada now, but that's not where you started your life, is it?

No. I was actually born and brought up in New Delhi in India. And that's where I actually finished my high school as well. I finished my 1st 18 years of my life in New Delhi. And what an awesome experience, honestly. Like, if you've never been to New Delhi, you have to go there. It's an amazing city. I have all my high school friends there. My parents are actually in New Delhi as well. And then I moved down to Canada at University of British Columbia, Okanagan, to study for my undergraduate degree right after.

So for those who are listening who may not know the geography here in Canada, Kelowna is in the same province where I'm in. So I'm in Vancouver. It's in the province of British Columbia, but Kelowna is sort of in the interior in the Okanagan area. It's like Canada's Sonoma valley. That's wine production. It's a great, great dry heats mountains, foothills and lakes. It's a beautiful place. So how did you get from New Delhi to Kelowna and find the University of British Columbia there?

That's a very, very good question. You know, the truth is I had not heard about Kelowna. I'd been to Canada before I'd been to Vancouver. I'd been to Toronto, the biggest city, when I was still young. I had traveled to Canada, but I'd never been to Kelowna. Neither had I heard about it till the time I actually applied to the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. And when I got accepted, I had a couple of offers and just UBC for me just stood out. And I thought, hey, this just sounds right. This is where I think I'll find community. And also Kelowna was a smaller city, so I thought, I come from New Delhi. That's the place I've lived my entire life. Why not try Kelowna and see how it is and. Gotta go. I'm so happy that I came to Kelowna because it's the most wonderful second home. I've met amazing people here. I just had one of the best university experiences and I'm just so glad that it ended up being Kelowna that I came to.

Yeah. And, well, you've stayed, so that's a testament to how amazing it must be because you have stayed after graduating from university. So tell us, walk us through your business journey, because you have the heart of an entrepreneur, don't you?

And so how did you get into the vacation rental space? It happened when you were at university in Kelowna, did it?

That's correct. And funnily enough, for the vacation rental space. I had no idea that I would one day go into this space at all, just because I found it very fascinating, but never something that I thought that I would build a business in. We were actually me and my business partner, Brandon, who's absolutely fantastic. At that time, we were building something similar to a doorbell for a school project. The concept was that we were basically taking a microcontroller and trying to connect that to the cloud for a school project that Brandon had. Actually, I wasn't even involved. I was his good friend with Brandon, so I was just helping him out, and we were having a lot of issues connecting that thing to the cloud. It's not that easy, and there are so many steps. And so once we figured it out, I told Brandon a lot of other people would have issues connecting whatever microcontrollers they're using to the cloud. Why not, now that we've figured this out, why not make that process easier? So we came up with this cool idea for an IoT platform, an integrative things platform, wherever I could use various microcontrollers. And we made the process of connecting them to the cloud very, very easy. And then we came into the whole issue of, okay, well, we made this really cool thing, but how do we sell it? Because at the end of the day, university research is very, very different than getting a concept on the ground into the market. And so then we said, how about this? Why don't we go around and talk to people about what their problems are and how our platform can actually solve it. One of the first few people that we met were actually property managers in the vacation rental space. So I actually owe a lot to them. And I just know that property managers in this space are one of the best people because they were the ones who gave us time of the day and they had issues with their locks, and they said, hey, can you just write a simple system where the lock code changes and is sent directly to guests? And you were like, yeah, I think our platform can do that. And that's how, that was our first entry. And then we discovered the entire industry and it just grew from there.

It's interesting because everyone that I asked the question about, how did they get into this space, how they get into vacation rentals, short term rentals, it always seems to be a weird story, like a weird path or by accident or no one seems to go out of their way to say, yes, that's the space I want to be in, and then build a business around it. So I find it really great that your story is like that too, that you had made that product, and then you were looking at who would benefit? And it was vacation rentals who came to the rescue there. So now that you've been up and running for a while and you've created this product called LinkBase, I want to talk about some areas that are often overlooked by property managers in vacation rental management. What kind of areas do you see in your experience that are often overlooked?

Well, that's a very good question, Jenn, by the way, because property managers are working very hard. You have to give it to them that this is not an easy job. It's difficult. You know, you're dealing with so many different unique guests. You have different properties. You have to manage them, you have to get them cleaned, you have to get them up and running, you have to make sure your ratings are good, your systems are in place, your vas are in place. Answering questions. Now, of course, there are certain areas that sometimes do get overlooked. And one of the biggest areas, and I can tell you that stat as well, Jenn, it's that if, like when guests book a certain vacation, on an average, about 30% of their budget is spent on accommodation, and the remaining 70% is actually spent on things that they do at the location where property managers are able to make money is on that 30% because they've captured the guests already to come to their property, but the remaining 70% is generally very vastly overlooked. And, you know, the reason is that because property management is such a hard job and it takes a lot of effort and time, property managers generally, for them or for any business, is hard to create an easy, efficient system so that they can tap into that 70% just because people are busy managing that 30% of just getting that guest in and getting them out and just making sure they leave a very good review. And so upsells and the actual revenue that people can make is something that's vastly overlooked. Like, think about it this way. When people, if you just know from a guest that they're flying in, that means they don't have a vehicle. So if you have an easy connection with a car rental company, and you can use AI to collect the guest data, and you can use aih to hook them up with that car rental company that you already have a system in place with, and you have good technology to make it easy so you don't have to lift a finger, you can actually make a lot of money. I think this is one of the areas where I think upsells and affiliate upsells are crucial. And I hope property managers can start and start to make money off of that. Another area that I can mention is just going off, and upsells are even in that 30% that property managers do capture, which is accommodation. A lot of the money goes back to the owner because it's the owner's property, and property managers are just making a small cut off the accommodation fee. But when it comes to upsells, they make 100% of that. So not only does it boost the bottom line and the profitability, it's something that increases sustainable growth along with time.

Yeah, some really great points there. I think that using the word upsell, I think people go, ooh, it doesn't sound so great that you're trying to upsell your guests, but the idea is that the guests are spending, I think you said, 70% of their budget in your location. Why can't they spend some of that with you?

Right, exactly. And I think it just goes two ways. Because the guest actually wants the convenience as well. We've seen a lot of our hosts say to us that they've actually increased their reviews and increased their guest experience and just made more money by doing things with just connecting people and making it easier and efficient to provide those extra services.

Yeah, you're a matchmaker. You're matching the guest with what they need and want to experience while they're there. So can you give us some ideas of those sort of typical upsells that are leaving money on the table?

Yeah. Yeah. So what are some of the other options that people could have? We've talked about late checkout, early check in and taxis. What other things can you think of that would be great for property managers to look into in their area?

Some of the other ones that we've seen are, at least here in Kelowna, one of the major ones are boat rentals and car rentals. People want to have luxury car rentals for example, as a service they want to have that people want to book boat rentals. And so property managers don't have to provide the service, neither be affiliated with connecting them or having staff on hand to make sure the connection is smooth. If you just have good technology and you have an agreement with a company and you're able to bring them on, it works extremely well. We've seen people do all sorts of things from wine tours to boat rentals to pottery classes. And what we saw was that property managers already had a lot of these ideas in place. They already thought, hey, it'd be so incredible only if our guests could do this. But it's just hard to have an easy, efficient way to connect that guest to the business. And that's where you need really good technology so that you can set it and forget it and make the connection seamlessly.

Yeah, I guess if you don't have the tech, then it's a manual process. And I can imagine all the things that property managers already are doing in their business, in their lives to then have that added on thing. And I can see that's why a lot of people aren't doing upsells, because they're thinking it's a manual process. And when somebody asks me for an early check in if I can do it, sure, just do it. Not think about having to charge them and what that would look like. And you said earlier about using AI. So how does AI come in with these, with these upsell options?

Absolutely. So that's a very good question, Jenn, as well, because AI is the next generation of hospitality in many aspects. I don't think that in terms of guest experience in general, I would replace many, many things right away just because the guest experience needs to be personalized. But there are going to be a few aspects of your business that you can actually let AI handle on autopilot and certain aspects of business that you would want to use AI for in the background, but not just let it run your business. The one thing that you can let AI run is your upsells. And I can give you an example as well. Imagine if you had a tool that could basically collect guest data and find out why the guest is coming to your property, and then all the businesses that you already have or you're working with, figure out which business is the most relevant and create and craft a unique message based on the conversation you've had with the guest previously and say, hey, would you be interested in this? I thought that you could use this. This is one of our best in the city, craft a little message and send that out to the guest. Not only does it enhance the guest experience, even if people do not book it, it adds that personalized touch. But you're actually helping the local economy. You're able to generate more income as a property management company, and you're using good AI. You're just using conversational AI and providing good information in the most curated fashion to the guests in the right fashion. And you're giving information that is relevant for guests as well based on what you've collected from them as guest data.

And when is the best time to be doing the upsells? When is the best time in the guests journey? After they, I guess after they've booked, when is the best time to get in touch with them to sort of find out what they need?

So generally what we've seen is about two, two and a half weeks before. That's where the most bookings come into play. With upsells in general, generally, we like to send information out right away to guests so that we start, you know, in various ways. We're able to collect guest data. We store it. And right around that two and a half weeks point, that's when people start planning some of the few things that they want to do. They obviously plan some of the major things, but there are always slots and areas where the guests are still planning, and they start looking at those right around two, two and a half weeks prior. That's the very best time for hosts to actually make it more convenient for guests to have that information and to book different experiences. I would say two, two and a half weeks before is just the prime time.

Yeah, I guess when they're really getting into that planning of what they're going to want to do and see when they're there. And again, they're spending that money already. So why don't they spend a little bit more with you as well as helping to create a better guest experience because you're being seen as a person that is really helpful.

Oh, 100%. Absolutely. And I want to just take a second and give shout out to this company called Mount that, you know, I'm sure, Jenn, you would know by Maddie, because they've created amazing experiences on their platform all across North America and maybe beyond as well, where property managers can just plug and play their platform. And we actually integrate directly with Mount as well as LinkBase. So property managers are able to find local gems that are already on boarded by Mount and you can provide those experiences to your guests which your guests for sure are going to be, wow, we never thought that we would be doing this, but here we are. This is pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah. And you've got the tech. There's no big time suck on your end. You're not having to spend the time to figure this out. You've got the tech there that will help you. What else can you tell us a little bit more about LinkBase and what it does?

Absolutely. Very happy to do that. So we basically are a guest experience platform. We plug and play with all major property management softwares, and we basically do three things. First is automate access, which means we work with major smart lock companies across the world, including Solto, Slot, Yale, August, and we're able to automate door codes. So every time we're booking comes the code automatically changes and is sent directly to guests, as well as there is a lock and unlock button right on the guest web app as well. So it's one touch access. So we make it very, very easy, as well as we have step by step check-in instructions with pictures so that guests can just see exactly where everything is and enter that property, because that's one major aspect. The other thing that we do in access itself is automating the lobby access. I'm sure a lot of people who have properties in apartment buildings feel that they have to be on their phone for a long, long, long period of time just to make sure that the guest is able to check in. Sometimes there are late night check-ins that are happening, and you just have to wake up to make sure that you can buzz the guest in when they call from the enterphone of the building. With our partnership with civil solutions, we're actually able to completely automate that as well. And we work with enterphones all across North America. And so in terms of hardware, all the hardware already exists and already works with LinkBase and Sibo. So that's access that we automate in full. Second thing that we automate is we're able to collect more guest data to enhance direct repeat bookings. This is so important. I mean, who better to talk to than you about this? But it's so important to collect guest data for you as a company and to make sure that you can convert those guests who have had an amazing experience with you and you've invested your time, effort, energy to come along and book with you again. So we allow for at least gathering that data so then hosts can talk to people like yourself and know what to make sense out of that data and how to actually use it. To get more direct repeat bookings. And the third is obviously upsells. Our technology is very, very proficient in both direct upsells that you want to provide yourself, like early check in, late checkout, other things that you can provide yourself as a host and make directly all the money. Or number two, have affiliate upsells where you partner up with different companies and you're able to give them to your guests so that the guest has a better experience. But the other companies are able to provide better services to those guests. And actually you make money in the middle of that piece of upsells. We also partner with companies like Mount, who add an extra layer of experience where if guests book, then it adds tremendous opportunities for the guests as well. So these are three major things that LinkBase does as a guest experience platform as a whole. And we're completely automated, plug and play, and excited to just make that guest experience better.

Yeah, and I think going back to the very beginning of this conversation when I was asking you, what do you see property managers overlooking? And I can see where the LinkBase is really filling the need there. It's that three pronged approach there to help property managers with the tech that they necessarily don't have. And I think you're right in not wanting to leave that money on the table with the upsells and that. And is it quite an easy thing to set up?

It's actually quite easy to set up because we've really learned a lot from property managers. We've been in this space for about a year, a year and a half now, and we've really learned from a lot of property managers that we worked with. So we understand the workflow of property managers. And this tool is specifically built for property managers and the busy workflow. And so we have systems and checks in place so that upsells cause the minimum amount of work for property managers while it just automatically generates money for them. So we've gone ahead and figured that out from our technical aspect of things, generally with direct upsells, things like early check in, late checkout, if there is a good process behind it to provide those, and a good process to see if something like that can be provided or not, it is something that's an easy sell. It is something just checking up the calendar and just accepting that request or denying that request based on what the calendar says. So what we've seen for a lot of property managers, big or small, they've been able to do like they've been able to adopt direct upsells right away, and they may not do as many, but early check in day checkout people just go ahead with and are able to make money right away on those. And as they start working with one or two upsells, then people have actually come back and said, hey, we want to add way more upsells to this because I think this works. People are wanting these and that's how it goes. So people are actually excited about putting a little bit of extra work in direct upsells, if you, if you may say, even though direct upsells require a little bit of work, then affiliate upsells where you're just connecting. But we've seen a lot of growth in that aspect as well.

That's great. That's great. I'm going to put your link to LinkBase in the show notes when you've got a special offer, don't you? For those listening and watching this podcast episode?

Yeah, we actually do. So I just want to say, shout out to Jenn. I met Jenn at CanStays and I was at her session and what an amazing session. I will all respect you, Jenn, and the work that you do. It's incredible. And I just want to make sure that anybody who's listening to your podcast, we from LinkBase, if there's something we can do, is we would be happy to waive off our onboarding fee of $600 and also provide a LinkBase at no cost for two months. So you can actually try and see if this platform works for you or not. So if you are looking for enhancing your guest experience and getting those five star reviews and making more money and not leave money on the table through upsells, if you're listening to this podcast and if you work with Jenn, then we can give you two months off and we have that $600 fee till August 15.

Thanks, Jenn. Thank you so much.

If you have enjoyed this episode, please follow the show on your podcast app of choice and on YouTube. And don't forget to leave a rating and a review. I'd love to hear more about what you're enjoying and what you'd like to see more of next time on the Direct Booking Success Podcast. I'm going to be speaking to a special guest about how to find the right niche for your short term rental. And no, this has nothing to do with limiting bookings. In fact, it's about the opposite about getting more bookings with guests who are a perfect fit for your property. So make sure to look out for that next episode. Until then, go out and take action for your own Direct Booking Success.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Direct Booking Success Podcast. For more information about this episode and others, head to the website directbookingsuccess.com/podcast. See you next time.