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Growing up in the hospitality industry gave me a unique insight into its ups

and (smelly 😊 ) downs! In today’s episode, I give you some insight into my background, growing up in hospitality, my creative education, and managing properties around the world. I let you in on some of the things I wished I had known in the hope that it will help you in your quest to direct booking success

Topics discussed

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Website: https://directbookingsuccess.com/

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennboyles/

Join me at the virtual Direct Booking Success Summit (27-29 September 2022). 

Transcript

03 - What I wish I had known

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to episode number three of the direct booking success podcast. Today, I'm gonna share with you what I wish I had known when I first started, but first my backstory. I want to tell you a bit about my story.

I grew up in Canada, Vancouver, Canada my father was a hotel general manager he is retired now. Worked all over, you know, in Vancouver and, up in lake Louise as well.

So I got to see the benefits of working in hospitality. I got to see sort of the, I guess the glamor, if you will, if you could use that word as a little kid, I got to benefit from the, the fancy dinners and getting all gussied up and, really enjoyed it.

The dinners, the events, they used to have a huge Christmas event with Santa Claus and all the kids from the, from the hotel would come. And we just had really great [00:01:00] times, lots of great memories from my childhood, cuz we didn't see my dad, you know, it was very long hours and, you know, hospitality hotels 24/7.

So it wasn't like he was gonna be home every night at five o'clock it really depended on what was going on. And as kids, we didn't realise that. I remember my, my brother having a three piece suit at three years old and we'd go to this resort and, they had a live band after dinner and him and I dancing ugh, we've got pictures, but anyway, it was, it was good childhood and I really got to see the fun and the sort of glamorous side of hospitality.

My first jobs as a teenager were in one of my dad's hotels. I helped with the mini bars. um, and I also worked in the laundry room. Now, if that is anything that's gonna put you off hospitality, it is being in the laundry room. It was [00:02:00] disgusting, especially when we had a fish restaurant that would, put all their napkins, you know, in, a big, plastic bin liner, bin, big bag and leave them over the weekend. Um, you could imagine what that was like on a Monday morning, it was gross.

So I think that might have put me off a bit on hospitality. I found out how hard it is to work. You know, the work is and, and made work is backbreaking. It really is but it means so much to the business so that kind of think put me off and my draw was more visual, creative. So I went into after school, I went to college university and did, graphic design and marketing, and those creative arts

fast forward quite a few years later, and we were wanting to rent out an apartment we had in the French Alps. Airbnb was quite new. We thought this is gonna be quite fun. Let's [00:03:00] try it. so we spent a morning, putting the pictures and the listing on Airbnb and that afternoon, while on the ski slopes, my phone was going crazy with bookings and we thought, Hey, there's, there's something into this. You know, this could be quite lucrative. Let's let's, let's do it. So we did it for a while there and then

fast forward again, we were living in the Netherlands and we, Sold the apartment and, some other properties and. Bought a chalet in the Austrian Alps. So we went from a small two bed apartment, in a ski village to a large, really luxury five bed chalet in another ski village, in a different part of the Alps.

But you could basically ski and ski out and there was a sauna downstairs and a games room and it really was amazing. And we used to spend months and months there and I would work from there. I was a digital nomad before that term became popular. [00:04:00] I turned one of the thank goodness for Ikea.

I went and turned one of the bedrooms into an office while I was there and then I would pack up my things when, um, when we had it rented out. But what we figured out really quickly when we got there was that every during the, the ski season in particular, every, property was rented out. So B and B short term rentals, hotels, all this, and it was really hard to stand out on Airbnb.

Here we are thinking that this is an easy thing to do, and we're the bookings are just gonna come through because we've done it before. It's so easy to do.

And the penny started to drop when, well, when the bookings first didn't come through but also when we had previous guests from the other, from the last owner, they started to ring us up and say, Hey, we'd like to come back and this is really when the penny dropped and we realised, okay, there's something in this. People want to come back and they wanna book direct with us. [00:05:00]

So we said, of course, yes and, I then started to put my marketing background into use and built ourselves a website and a social media presence and we started marketing ourselves for direct bookings. This was before I knew this was a thing. This was just what we wanted to do to stand out. We contacted previous guests and they came, we got great reviews. It really worked well.

Now personally, , I had, it was a time where I had my daughter and she came very prematurely. I was really sick in hospital and she came, at 30 weeks and we decided to leave the Netherlands where we had no family and moved to Northern Ireland, where we did have family in this move it made be very difficult to manage a business in [00:06:00] Austria. It was just too far away and when our housekeeper and caretaker are wonderful couple, when they retired, then we realised that was it.

We could not sustain that business any longer. We needed a team on the property or close to the property and we just couldn't find anyone. We limped along for a while, but we just couldn't do it. So we ended up having to sell it.

Again, fast forward and we built a business in Liverpool, which is going strong today, which is the Liverpool boat decided to do something unique and at the time there was only, I think a couple of other boats there's more now that are being rented out, but it is a wide beam canal boat, which is permanently moored at the Liverpool Marina it's right in the middle of the historic Liverpool docs, which is brilliant. It's perfect for families and we are 90%, book [00:07:00] direct.

So it is great. We do use the channels when needed, because why not? But it is a great business and, enjoy doing it. So I learned from my mistakes as I went along, you know, nothing came easy.

The only thing that was probably the easiest was when those bookings first came on Airbnb of that first apartment, but air Airbnb was new. You know, it, it's not like today where it is so full of properties.

So a lot of mistakes here and there and, but a lot of learning. But today, I wanna tell you what I wish I had known. Okay. And one of them was to make sure you have a good team close to the property. If you can't be there. Say within 30 minutes, we found this out the hard way when our, um, caretaker and housekeeper, when they retired and we couldn't replace them, need [00:08:00] to have a backup.

You need to have people there because they're the ones that you have to turn to in a crisis when something's wrong. Or maybe something it's just something very small, but you can't be there. So having that good team, close to the property is imperative to your success. Another thing I wish I had known in the very beginning was to build a brand rather than a more heads on bed strategy and this came to light in, um, with the property in Austria when I ended up creating a brand and that's where it started to work for us in bringing in those direct bookings and also past guests, but the more heads on bed strategy of, using the OTAs like Airbnb, just wasn't working for us and not something I wanted to, , to look at any longer.

Something else I wish I had known is to learn, to shut out the noise from everyone else [00:09:00] and keep my eyes on my own business. , you know, in the online space, you see people that are doing this and doing that and you're like, oh, I've gotta do that. Or you hear an expert say, this is the new thing.

You've gotta do this. And this is what's gonna work. And you're jumping around all the time and it has taken a while, but I've really learned to shut out that noise from everyone else and do what I know works, but also to realise when I need help that I don't have to do everything yourself and you don't have to do everything yourself.

You know, there is help available out there when it becomes too much or when you're not sure what the next step will be. So those are two things there. The other thing that I wish I had known is that my vision of direct booking success might not be the same as someone else's, but that is okay because I am building my own business, not someone else's and same goes for you. [00:10:00] Your vision of direct booking success is what matters for you, your family and your business.

In the next episode, I'll be talking about the direct booking success summit, which is coming up, in September the 27th to the 29th of September.

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