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

00:00:00 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:02:04 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:02:29 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:03:21 - Dany Papineau

Yeah, it's my life story that leads to that. But yeah, when I was young, I didn't speak English at all. So when I was 20 years old, I ended up going to Banff in Alberta and the Rockies. I was going there for a summer to learn English, and I used to study civil engineering. After three months there, dropped out of civil engineering, ended up living in the Rockies for like, two years, working in gears or, and our beautiful ranch in Alberta. And this journey led me to come back to Quebec and start to work in film. I worked for 20 years of my life in film. I went back to Vancouver at some point, living six, six years in Vancouver in filmmaking. And it led me to create a film that I was an actor, you know, filmmaker, producer. Ultimately, I made a film that took ten years of my life to do. I went to a bunch of festivals. It was all over the theaters in Quebec, but financially kind of led me on the verge of bankruptcy around 2012 and decided to put on a duplex that we had first in Montreal that we had renovated with my boyfriend. So I decided to put it on sale to pay the debts to my family and friends. And while it was for sale in 2012, I asked my realtor, is there a way to, you know, rent the place where it's for sale? And she said, you know, have you heard of this thing called Airbnb? I was like, no. It was 2012, totally underground. It was not in the media. No friends were talking about it. I was like, what is this? Like, well, people can sleep in your bed while you're not there. And I was like, oh, this is weird. But it led me to accepting my very first booking in the Christmas of, like, 2012 to 2013. It was like, you know, people from Toronto actually come into Montreal for four days for $800. And that got me started into the short term rental adventure and being a newbie at the time. There's no education online about this. So you were thrown into it. And, yeah, I had people like, you know, my neighbors calling me, like, at two in the morning, there's 30 people in your backyard doing a party, had people stealing my tv, people stealing my art from my walls. So I was like, hey, I'm an actor, filmmaker. There's no education really, online. Why not create a blog? Online course, airbnbsecret.com, that I launched in 2015. And the story and the media was because I learned how to market my film. So I use these techniques for my blog. Broke filmmaker makes more than $200,000 on Airbnb. The news became viral. It was like in Australia, France, India, and the next morning in Quebec, all the government came, knock on my door. Quebec, which is the IR's tourism Montreal, city of Montreal, and ended up getting a back tax bill of about $52,000 at that time. Because at that point, yeah, I'm giggling.

00:06:00 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:06:18 - Dany Papineau

In your bed, yeah.

00:06:20 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:06:36 - Dany Papineau

Yeah.

00:06:37 - Jenn Boyles

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

00:06:42 - Dany Papineau

Yeah. It's because if you look back at 20 1520, Airbnb and Uber were all over the news for not collecting taxes. So in Quebec in 2016, almost like the government of Quebec wanted to kick out Uber of the province. They were about to shut down. The Internet seriously kicked them out. And kind of the same thing with Airbnb. And, you know, over the years, I've followed a lot of the story of the taxation of Airbnb in different countries. And let's say the first place where they really got legalized was mainly in San Francisco and back in the day. If you go back in the articles online, you might find an article saying that the city sent them a back tax bill of $20 billion to Airbnb. Not to the host, but in Canada, Airbnb doesn't really exist because when you get paid, you get paid from Ireland, which is tax friendly place in the world. So the government didn't jump on the platform, they jumped on hosts, but with Uber, they jumped on the platform. So I ended up, like, really, like, fighting this. This bill in court. You know, it took almost four years. It did its thing, but.

00:07:47 - Jenn Boyles

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

00:07:52 - Dany Papineau

No, it's the government. Because Airbnb doesn't have, like, I did so many things, try to call, to talk to an Airbnb, the Airbnb open events back in the day. So I went to Paris to meet with them, had one in San Francisco and also in Los Angeles, and talked to the highest ranked people in legalization. They were like, oh, yeah, we'll follow up with you. We'll follow up. They never did. Because what I realized in the end is if it's not the host that pays the bill, it's them. So they don't want to. They don't want to pay the bill. And if you look at the story of Airbnb, it all started in New York. They got their hands on suggesting the law that it should be the host that would get the fines, never them. That's how it kind of started this entire thing. But I didn't know that at that time. So that led to getting settled, you know, off court in 2019. By the same time, when I shared urban secrets, it went viral. So over the years, about 30,000 people started taking my course, had free courses, and paid courses. I became kind of like in Quebec, they called me the Airbnb Ching in the media, which I thought was good. But yeah, I became closer to them all around these years, a lot of the PM's were emerging on the market like the guesties of this world. A lot of the pricing solutions and intelligent pricing, like Wheelhouse, the Lodgify, all this stuff emerged in this time. So a lot of them would approach me because they wanted me to experience their product and to try it out and then to talk about it to my crowd. So that led to me becoming a property manager, mainly virtual property manager, with properties mainly located in old Quebec City, which had a very touristic area of Quebec and Montreal, and then my own chalet that I bought in the eastern townships. And I started to realize it was really easy to fill up your calendars just in a city on Airbnb because it's an urban centric platform. But as soon as you got more into the nature side, mountain resorts and stuff like that, you couldn't just be on this platform because it's not strong enough to fill your calendars all the time. So you need to be on other sites. And if you look in Quebec and in Canada, like in Ontario, there's a lot of these foreshadowing rentals. There's these very archaic websites. They're like Craigslist or chalets, and they're not fun, to be honest, because they're very archaic. So that's where it came from. The idea of WeChalet. I bought wesley.com for $10 in 2015, but really started to work on it more like 2018. We launched publicly in March 2019 with about 100 properties and then a year later was Covid. It became illegal to rent chalets for three months. That was a kind of crazy, crazy time.

00:10:30 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:11:16 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:11:34 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah.

00:11:35 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:12:07 - Jenn Boyles

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?

00:12:24 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:13:28 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:14:32 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:16:12 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:16:50 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:17:48 - Jenn Boyles

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

00:17:52 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:17:57 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:18:29 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:19:28 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:20:02 - Dany Papineau

This is kind of funny. It's planet Earth with eight 9 billion people and you just name three companies as there are just three companies. It's like if there were just three companies selling cars or just three companies selling burgers or just three companies selling, shoot, Nike got invented 15 years after Adidas and converted. And there's not just McDonald's that sell burgers, there's other types of food and other types of burger shops. So I feel like it's very limiting to think that, okay, Airbnb exists and that's it. It's been done. It's not the case. And being a generalist like Airbnb, you can't fix all the specific problems of different sub niches. And outdoor is a huge segment of the market, the outdoor nature adventure. And there are problems that are really specific to this market that it's really hard for big urban centric platforms to address. And quite often I had a hard time at first when people were asking me why we chalet. With my first coaches we got into incubators and different incubators, we chalet. But right now Airbnb is urban centric. Probably 60% of their booking is more from cities than nature booking.com. hotel centric. There's vacation rental and a lot of hosts hate their payments. And Vrbo, their positioning is like a whole house centric. Vacation rental. The whole house. So no one's building an outdoor lodging brand. And quite often the example I give is there are 6000 ski resorts in the world. The big ones you live in Vancouver like Whistler or Trombles in Quebec, all have a partnership menu on their website. Go on whistler.com. you'll find a partner in these partners. It's all outdoor brands. So you'll find a car company. The outdoor car company is going to be a Subaru or it's going to be like a Nissan finder. It's not going to be a Honda Civic. Then there's going to be a clothing company. It's going to be like Helian sin or the north face or Patagonia. There might be a beer company, Kokanee on the west, you know, on the west coast, usually there's an energy drink. Red Bull is cut off there. But in Canada there's a guru. It's like nature drinking there to drink. But where's the. The outdoor brand, the lodging brand on the global scale, there's no one's taking that pole position. And this is where I see WeChaletl. The global outdoor brand. You know, it needs to be as well known as Celine Dion and as Cirque du Soleil on a global scale. And we specialize in nature, connecting people together to nature and all that segment. It's huge, you know, and mountain lakes, beaches and jungles. This is where we want to be on the global scale.

00:22:32 - Jenn Boyles

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

00:22:36 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:22:54 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:23:05 - Dany Papineau

There is.

00:23:05 - Jenn Boyles

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

00:23:10 - Dany Papineau

Yeah. Everybody just thinks of that. And, you know, the Airbnb game on the market. The RBO was. Been on the market since 95 or 97, booking.com since day one of the Internet. They came on the market late. They came in 2007, 2008. They were able to gain market shares, but they grew. Their pitch was selling air mattresses and kitchens, but it grew into a need for people wanting to rent more than just air mattresses. And for me, chalets, we chalet because, you know, people are like, oh, it's a chalet. It's a big chalet thing. I'm like, no, you don't see the big picture, man. It's like, chalet, what do you do? You know, we chalet. We first. You know, when you rent a chalet, it's for the weekend sometimes. So on the weekend, we. It's a group, usually. It's always with people. And the chalet is like the emotion that you have. You know, you're with a loved one, you're chilling. You're, like, usually connected to some outdoor activity, nature. So for me, this is the idea of the brand: we connect together to nature adventure.

00:24:08 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:24:34 - Dany Papineau

And there is like, if you think of that, there's one that came on the market, they raised $100 million. It's called the hip camp. They came out more in, I think, 2010, 2012 and. But they're more like camping and they overlap a bit with us more in New York or glamping. But on Witchelle, we have so many different types of properties from very low end to super high end. And we have yours. We have glamping, we have like a bunker, like someone renting a bunker underground. And it's been renting, but we also have super luxurious stuff that's more like 5000 a night for a big group. So I want ultimately to have all the inventory and WeChalet have all the types of inventory specifically. But, yeah.

00:25:14 - Jenn Boyles

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?

00:25:35 - Dany Papineau

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?

00:26:04 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:26:16 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:27:07 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:27:27 - Dany Papineau

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.

00:27:57 - Jenn Boyles

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.

00:28:11 - Dany Papineau

Thank you.

00:28:11 - Jenn Boyles

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.