Starting an Online Travel Agency in Canada to Help Hosts with Dany Papineau

Hi. On this episode of the direct booking Direct Booking Success podcast, I'm speaking to the founder of an online travel agency. But before you think I've locked my mind and have gone completely off brand, you need to hear his story and why he is creating this OTA for our industry. You are listening to the direct booking 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 Direct Booking Success. Hello and welcome to another episode of the direct booking Direct Booking Success podcast. I'm Jenn Boyles, your host. I am so happy to be here. Now, back in April, I attended the first CanStays Rental alliance conference in Banff, Canada. This was a groundbreaking event, as it was the first conference with solely canadian content on canadian soil. The networking at this event was off the charts as people came from across Canada to learn from each other and to make a difference in our industry here in Canada. And if you don't know, Canada is the second largest country on this planet. It is so big that it's usually faster to fly to London, England, from Vancouver, where I am, as the plane goes north over the globe, than to fly to the Atlantic coast. And this is why it was so amazing to see so many Canadians from all over to attend this event. One of these amazing people that I met was named Dany Papineau. He is from Quebec, and he has started the very first Canadian booking platform called WeChalet. And today I have him with me. Dany, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for the invitation. That's funny that you mention this, because quite often when I pitch WeChalet to different people and investors and stuff like that, I keep saying Canada is the second biggest country in the world, and we're monopolized by foreign booking platforms. They're all american platforms or european platforms. So we shot an emerging, like 100% canadian platform in Canada right now, which is crazy to my experience.

No, it is crazy. And I know that we're the second largest, is that we're talking landmass. We're massive. And if you look at a map, just for anyone who is thinking, I don't understand how this works with Canada. If you look at a map, Canada, we've got three coasts, and then the other one is a border with estates. We live really close to the border because most of the land is maybe not the places you want to live. You know, bears, moose, you know, mountains, snow, ice, prairies. Prairies. Well, no, we shouldn't say that to all the people of the prairies, but we do. We don't have a huge population, but we have a huge landmass. So it takes a while to travel to other places, parts of Canada, for sure. So let's start, Dany, with your background and how you started in short term rentals.

As you're saying this, and I shouldn't be, but it's just starting from somebody saying Airbnb is having someone sleep in your bed. You know, like, how creepy is that? As a way to, like, introduce short term rentals to someone? Yeah, it really is, isn't it? Someone is sleeping in your bed.

In your bed, yeah.

But going from that to having, you know, guests in your place, learning by trial and error, you know, starting Airbnb secrets, you know, trying to help others with what you've learned, and then you go viral because you're so good at your marketing.

Yeah.

Only to be landed with a huge bill from the. From the Canadian government.

So who did you actually take to court then, Dany? Was it the government or was it, or was it Airbnb?

Yeah, yeah. Speaking about these old fashioned websites, because the actual industry of vacation rentals, short term rentals, that sort of sector of the hospitality industry is older than. Then we are. You know, like it happened way before Airbnb. However, Airbnb came in with their muscle and really blew up the industry for good and bad. You know, there's good points and bad points. Yeah, yeah. But I can see that these smaller players that were trying to help vacation goers, you know, find a chalet or a cabin, you know, kind of got left in the dust. So they had put together some websites but never got it up to scratch, really. And Airbnb just came in and went right past them.

Yeah. And you'd think that these websites would have disappeared. They haven't grown like crazy during COVID They're still mom and pops. Like, professional property managers don't use them usually. It's more like people don't want to get paid on their table. And the door, it's different, it's another economy that they.

Yeah.

Um, but with the evolution of the market, with taxation. Platforms need to collect taxes. We do now. Platforms need to, like in Quebec, there's a CITQ number. It's a number you need on your listing to be legal to do it. So platforms need to collect this data from last September. So they really decided to go for the transactional websites first. But these sites are coming up, too, so it's a quickly evolving market in the last ten years. It's been a little crazy. Everything that's happened in the last ten years and where it's going right now.

I know you said that you had the URL, the domain name years ago, but was it really that experience of Airbnb not taking any responsibility for that tax bill? Was that sort of the catalyst that made you go, this is just not fair?

It definitely is something. It's definitely a chip on my shoulder. When I launched Airbnb secrets, I was in love with Airbnb. I was. I was a super ambassador of Airbnb. I thought, you know, when I got to know it, it was underground. I was in film, and told all my friends, artists, everybody. I told so many people, friends, and entrepreneurs. So I helped. Like, I went to their workshops that would be in Montreal. I told them tips on how to grow in Quebec to the team. When I launched Airbnb secrets, the Toronto team approached me to see what we do with this guy? And when this tax thing happened and I saw what they did to me, I was like, okay, you don't care. So, yeah, it became, it is still a chip on my shoulder. And I quickly realized that Airbnb is a very traveler centric platform. And you don't have a platform if you don't have hosts. And it's something that I take to heart. Hosts are our business partners. We don't have a business without a host. So I want to create a host centric platform and this philosophy will take us on another journey, I think. Just this approach.

Yeah, I think so. And I really want to get into that space that you are looking to fill and the differences. But first, I need to address the elephant in the room, if you will, because this is called the direct booking Direct Booking Success podcast. And I talk about direct bookings. Right. And I've essentially brought you in to talk about your new online travel agency. This may sound counterintuitive, however, it really isn't. And listener, I want you to know that even though we're talking about Dany and his extraordinary story and what he's put together, you need to have bookings come from multiple locations for the best results. And that includes otas as well as your own website. And so my advice is always that your focus should be on your own business and your own bookings. But use the platforms that work for you to benefit you. But just don't put all your effort into them, because like Dany was saying, they're a company, they're out for themselves. They're not there to help hosts.

Yeah, there's the public speech and then there's the actions. Actions should speak for themselves, ultimately. So it's one thing to say things in public, but, yeah, the way you behave is another thing, I think. Because on WeChalet, we are property manager centric. You know, we have big property managers. Our biggest one right now has about 150 listings, and we're onboarding two right now that have like 300 plus listings. And quite often what I noticed a lot of property managers is they're really good at doing the physical part of things, like taking care of, like cleanups and presentation of the house, but they're not good at the online part on creating stunning listings and, and all the marketing part of it. They're not good at that. So ultimately, as WeChalet have grown, I want to create tools that will help property managers into that segment. And I feel like even if you have your own website as a property manager, at some point you need to spend money to put ads on Facebook, create blog strategies, create influencer strategies, whatever you do, and you need to spend money. So on. WeChalet, it's free to list right now and we can import all your Airbnb listings for free. About 90-95% of the work is done. All you have to put after that is pricing. So you can use a platform like WeChalet to create leads for your business. And then if you want to create repeat business with your own and you know that travelers would get from any platform, you do it. But I think it's a wise move to be on different platforms because even if you have your own website, you won't ever be able to go get all the leads that Airbnb can bring you. Or as we grow and all that type of stuff.

Yeah, I think, you know, it's just putting your effort into your own website and the marketing there. Yeah, you know, you hit the nail on the head there. Property managers get into this business because they want to look after guests, they want to manage the property. No one, I think goes into it, very few maybe that go into it and go, yes, I can get into all the marketing I've always wanted to do. You know, if you really want to do marketing, you just go into marketing. And I know that the clients that I help are people that have come into this and they're killing it on the hospitality and the management side. Side. But they're like, I need help with the marketing side.

Yeah, it's time consuming too. You know, the help, but it takes a lot of your time and consistency because how I approach you in Jenn from like, hey, do you want to do your podcast, whatever, because you're talking about direct bookings. But, WeChalet. We live from fully direct bookings from scratch. It was a white page we chalet. So there's a lot of stuff that I had to learn. They can apply to any property managers ultimately, but WeChalet use a tech platform. And I feel like property managers will, you know, most property managers will never be a tech platform. They might use other tech tools like PM's and stuff like that to still get direct bookings. But we sell it right now. It's a tech and we're at the intersection ultimately of travel and property management indirectly because we do calendar synchronizations, all these types of PM's and other platforms and ultimately at finance tech because we automate all payments, taxes and deposits and like waivers or whatever.

So, yeah, I don't think, I didn't.

Know what I was getting into. I didn't, I did not know what I was getting to when I got into this. But yeah, yeah.

So you've got, and so becoming an OTA, for lack of a better word, you know, I know it's emerging, but, you know, it's, we don't have, a lot of us don't have high opinions of OTAs online travel agents because of what of their behavior and how they have treated hosts. That's a hard space for you to go into, but of course you've got to keep hosts happy, but also you've got to be marketing yourselves for guests so that guests book on the platform.

Yeah. And what you don't understand from an OTA comes from property management. And it's really hard to understand that. What's very different from being a property manager is we don't have the power of accepting a booking you do on our platform. Yet we create all the tech it creates. So much money is created at WeChalet, you know, and plans, like so many strategies, bring travelers and then some hosts deny, cancel, deny, not accept. That's crazy. So right now we've created a full host onboarding team to re educate hosts, you know, to come and we chalet and put their pricing up to date and everything. And if you refuse bookings because your calendar is not up to date, because your pricing is not up to date, we pause you, but we help you, we contact you. Hey, Jenn, we see that you put on a pause. It seems you don't know how you do calendar synchronization. We will help you. And just that it's been helping us get, we're growing about 300% a year for the last three years in a row. So it's been getting us to get more bookings and more trust from hosts and travelers ultimately.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love this because we talk about why you're doing this. We can see the journey you've been on and I can see the personal reasons, but I can also see the differences. I asked you, well, first I said, what are you crazy about? I think, or at least I thought that. But then I said, how do we differ from Airbnb, then booking.com, comma, then Vrbo, the platforms that are already killing it in the market. I think you've just demonstrated it. But tell us more about how you're differing.

Ooh, jungles. That sounds exciting. We don't have any of those in Canada, do we?

We don't. But if a lot of Canadians love to go to Mexico, I love it. I love Mexico. And there's a lot of Canadians that have homes in Mexico, and they run them on other platforms, and it's not sold out, so they need to diversify their offers. And there's, like, Costa Rica, many southern destinations, and Europeans.

I love hearing how you explain the brand and what you're about and what you're going for, because there is a hole in the market.

There is.

I'm guilty of it. I said it to you. I think of those three big companies.

Yeah, I love it. My first properties were. My first property was in the French Alps, you know, and my biggest property that I had was in the Austrian Alps, and it was a chalet. It was classified as a chalet. So, you know, I totally get it. This outside adventurous lifestyle where you're really living like a local, not just that, but going and doing adventurous activities. So I think it's great.

Great. So you're in Canada right now. That sounds like Mexico is the next area you're going to go into. But you're open, right? You're open to find out where the desire is. So, yeah, if people are listening, if you're listening to this and you're going, that sounds so cool, I want him to come to our area, contact Dany and tell him. Are you open to that, Dany?

Yeah, for sure. If you have a. At WeChalet there's a little chatbot at the bottom and you can talk to us pretty much right now we're open 12 hours a day, seven days a week. So we take the messages. If it's at nighttime, we'll get back to you in the morning. And we have a full host onboarding team that helps people to list their place on our platform. And quite often what I see with property managers, the blocker can be the PM's because I don't know what, how big the property managers are. The ones that listen to your platform, are those people that have five properties or are those 500 pictures that are different?

It's a very wide range. It really is. It really is. But the PM's, I think, is a blocker for anyone, really, because it's so big and so all encompassing.

So, yeah, it's big. And we see people, we see property managers trying them all one by. They try one for three months. Oh, no, we don't like, give them all to the other ones. It's interesting to see it from our perspective. Perspective. But, yeah, right now we're integrated into price labs. So quite often just like an intelligent price thing for a lot of property managers, that helps, like, just to live with us. Even if they use the PM's we're already integrated with the host away. That was our first PM's we delivered or just about any day now to deliver Lodgify, which also a lot of people use. And Guesty is coming up probably like, I don't know if it's gonna be the summer or in the fall, but yeah, and another one that's probably not that well known from your audience, but huge in France and in Quebec called the reserve. They have 100,000 plus properties in France and about 20,000 listings in Quebec. So that's another one we're doing this year.

Yeah, well, there's PM's, there's software all over the world. I know of ones out of Germany and England and Scotland and that don't necessarily hear about North America. I know there's a lot of them. And you've got a lot of work cut out in front of you, don't you? You've got a lot of work to conquer the world with.

WeChalet is a brand, but we got something going. AI for us is going to be amazing. It's pretty interesting what we're about to do. I think it's going to help us a lot, actually. We're already starting to ultimately use it in some listings to help with conversions, but we're about to use it for other stuff. And I think it should help us actually scale more quickly, more efficiently, and even with a smaller team, which was not possible to do just like even two years ago or something like that.

So brilliant. Well, thank you, Dany. I wish you the best of direct booking success. I really do. The way you're positioning it is just so human and so heart led that I just know you're going to be a big six.

Thank you.

Thanks, Dany, for coming on. And if you've been listening and enjoying this episode of the direct booking Direct Booking Success podcast, please let me know what you've liked and what you'd like to hear about by leaving a rating and review on your podcast app or Google under direct booking Direct Booking Success, or comment on YouTube. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button where you're watching or listening so you'll be notified of new episodes when they drop. And if getting more direct bookings is something you'd like to do for your own business, head to my website, directbookingDirect Booking Success.com and sign up for my next free masterclass. The next one is happening on June 13, but you know, if you're listening to this episode after that date, don't worry, there'll be another one coming up quickly so you can head to that website and save your spot. I'd love to see you there. In the next episode of the direct booking Direct Booking Success podcast, I'm going to be speaking with a very special guest about how to choose your PM's your property management software. It is always one of the first questions I get when hosts are looking to move away from their dependency on the otas. So look out for that new episode when we dive into the world of property management software. Until then, please take action on your marketing and go out in search of your own direct booking Direct Booking Success.