Mark: [00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome everybody. Wherever you're tuning in from in the world. Welcome to a new platform that we're using called Crowdcast. I absolutely love this. It's better than Zoom. And again, for, for things like what we're gonna discuss today, uh, really, really good. So what I can see, everybody that's in here, it is gonna be recorded as well.
So we will put the replay out on all of the LY socials. Um, but this is one that. I'm being excited about because I've known this chap now for coming on three years now. Right. And every single time that I chat to Francois, I'm always impressed. Um, I learn a lot, and this is a, a young chap that you need to be, make sure that is.
You are aware of whether you're following him on LinkedIn or wherever. The YouTube channel for Enzo Connect is very, very good. So I recommend that you drop a little subscription on there. Um, but today we're gonna talk about how you can make more by doing less, which is what everybody loves. How can you make more money by doing less work?
Which is, uh, which is fantastic. So, [00:01:00] um. Francois, for anybody who is not aware of your good self, can you just give us a super quick background on Enzo, when you decided to co-found it, and just sort of where you are now, sort of 2025, where you stand with everything?
Francois: Yeah, so, um, name's Francois, co-founder of Enzo Connect started this out of university.
So I was never supposed to, uh, actually build a, a business. I was supposed to make the family proud and get a job that pays and then. It was COVID and I decided, well, let me get into the travel space. Um, so you could imagine how happy my family was when I decided to get into a, uh, this kind of industry in the peak of not this industry.
Mm-hmm. Um, I, I studied computer science, cognitive science focused in computational linguistics. My co-founder and I had read some papers around, uh, what is now known as chat, GPT. We were excited about the, the world of communication and guest experience. Um, and then I did a, a Master's of Entrepreneurship in the UK in near Neck of the Woods, um, but uh, [00:02:00] and then came back to Toronto.
So we, we started this company and a couple years ago. And really our mission is simple, uh, to digitize and monetize the guest experience at scale. Um, so how do you make the entire guest journey a digital one without really losing that personal touch? And how do you find ways along that journey, uh, to generate more revenue?
Um, 'cause at the end of the day what I've learned is it's so much easier selling money than it is selling time, um, especially to busy property managers. So that's gonna be a bit about what we're talking about today, making more with less in vacation rentals.
Mark: Fantastic. So, uh, we are gonna dig into the session and those of you that, uh, look you, that you are tuning in live with us, whether you're watching Live Now on the Crowdcast, or if you're watching it live on one of the streaming platforms that we are on, please do drop the, the questions in here.
Um. Collect them all. And then at the end what I'll do is we'll go down and just, uh, chat with Francois over 'em. But, uh, the floor is your, my friend. I'm gonna mute my microphone. Uh, I'm excited to dig in and, and see what you're gonna be talking about today. [00:03:00]
Francois: A hundred percent. So, um, I mean, I'm gonna be talking about a few things.
I'll share a bit more about what Enzo Connect does for this, but really talk about some of the strategies and the unique tip tips and tricks around, uh, upsells. I hear the same, uh, sort of objections from property managers at all times. Well, I can't offer an early check in. I have. Busy schedules and too many guests checking in.
It's impossible for me to service this. And there's actually really unique ways of always being able to maximize revenue. I gave the early check-in as an example, but there's all sorts of new revenue streams that you guys can look into. Um, so I'm gonna go through it. Thank you so much, mark, for, for having me on this, uh, on this webinar today, on this Crowdcast and other live platforms.
Um, and I see we both have our. Uh, X or Twitter or whatever you wanna call it. So that's awesome. Um, so as I mentioned, really simple mission, streamline and monetize your guest experience, your guest management and your guest communication. And I'm gonna share a bit more about how we do this in a minute, but I'm gonna also give you guys examples [00:04:00] of, uh, this digital experience.
So when we started this business, we picked on three main problems to solve, which is how do we increase the revenue per guest that you were generating? How do we save you time in your operations as you try and generate these new revenue streams? And then how do you actually get more five star bookings from the existing data and the existing guests that have gone through, uh, your, your property management business?
There's a lot of interesting things in, uh, vacation rentals of how property managers kind of, and, and this really ties to the, to the brand and, and the business that Boly is all about, which is, you know, you drink the Kool-Aid in the sense that you get your leads and you get your deals. Kind of instantly from the OTAs.
There's no really hard work. It's like, um, a magic pill to get abs. You don't really have to work out. It's there, is it the healthiest option? Not necessarily, but it's working. And so, you know, being able to start collecting some of this information to truly understand your guests, to sell them more things, to save [00:05:00] time for your, for your VAs, your teams, but then also to treat it as a sales funnel and try to win back some of these guests.
Um, so I'll share more about that. Why do we exist? Why is this a problem? Well, running a vacation rental business is quite hard. There's growing guest expectations. There's really tough competition. I mean, at the end of the day, you're, you're selling a service that maybe 3, 4, 5 property managers in the area are also selling the exact same service.
For both of you're gonna say you have top-notch guest experience. Both of you're gonna say, you're gonna make sure the property's safe. Um, and your business model is probably very much the same in the sense you take a certain percentage of the rental, uh, rising costs, whether you're in the US or Canada.
I think we've seen this right now, but I'm sure in other countries as well. It's getting more expensive to run a vacation rental business. And Canada, they removed certain tax, uh, exemptions and, and, and things that you could claim on your taxes, which suddenly made the cost of running this business very expensive.
It and then labor shortage. It's hard to [00:06:00] find good people, uh, who wanna deal with the mess that is managing all of these vacation rentals. So, um, hospitality in 2025 for us is about, yes, more pressure. Yes, less bandwidth, but. How do you team up with text so that you don't work as much? Um, and we're gonna be talking about ai.
We're gonna be talking about a brand new release that we just sent out, uh, yesterday. Um, and then we're gonna be talking about some tactics on upsells. So, AI and automation is a teammate, digital guest experience, unlocking new revenue, and, uh, a special offer, although not for Avani users, I think it's for Avanto users.
We still have one up and running. We may have a few other, uh, special offers up and running. So AI as a teammate, um, there's a PNG study that has come out that clearly states performance. So one is the key area that, uh, AI can help, which is individuals plus AI is a better than a team. Without ai, uh, teams in AI are three times more likely to make the top 10% of ideas.
Speed [00:07:00] increases with AI for individuals. Um, and then users with AI reported more excitement, energy, and less frustration. And I think that's because you get to work on the things that matter and not necessarily, uh, sort of your day-to-day. Tasks that are ki kind of frustrating. And I'll give you examples around sharing wifi passwords and how you've already sent it four times to the guests, but they still ask you what is the wifi password?
Uh, so these are the kinds of things that we want to remove from your brain. Remove from your day-to-day tasks so that you can focus more on selling things to your. So what a hospitality team can achieve with AI and automation is they can convert more bookings with faster responses. You can increase guest satisfaction and five star reviews, and of course, drive revenue and hit some key business goals.
So. We've got a few examples. One in particular, Scott Grayden, founder of Goodnight Premium stays had mentioned AI is now doing the work of several employees, saving us time and costs. Um, [00:08:00] another one is here, uh, Kevin Albert, and the same company. It's Global Expansion without hiring multilingual staff. If you're based in Europe, who started working with a company called Jovi.
They've got quite a few thousands of units across all of Europe. Every single one of these properties have different rules, different settings, um, and, and just different ways of being managed. I mean, the, in Spain you have to send IDs to local authorities, the Guad, national or municipality. In Italy, you have to send it to every county or is stat, I forget the exact details.
So every property is different. And property managers are trying to standardize an inventory that is different across different locations, and this is where AI can really help that global expansion, if that is something on your roadmap. So one of the key things I wanna mention is we've just launched the Enzo Inbox 3.0.
Um, it's a much faster, cleaner and collaborative inbox. Uh, it's, you know, we started as a messaging platform expanded to what we call the boarding pass. And so we focused on launching this new inbox, which [00:09:00] includes the concept of inbox zero. Um, I don't know if you've, uh, mark, have you ever heard, uh, inbox zero?
Do you use anything like superhuman?
Mark: I, uh, I do not because I've got, um. My own filters in place. I feel I've, I've done my, my filter Gmail superhuman myself. But I have been, uh, dabbling a little bit with, with, uh, superhuman, impressed with, with, uh, with the tools and, and I, I'm a massive fan of Inbox Zero.
Francois: Yeah. And so the concept guys is, it's really simple. It's, at the end of the day, you should have zero messages. Now, I'm sure most of you're gonna laugh to this statement and say, that's impossible, Francois. I get messages every single day from guests. How am I supposed to do this? And that's the concept of to do follow up or resolve.
So just moving guests through different buckets based on what you actually have to do that day versus things you'll do later. Um, we've launched a new model for drafting responses and we are gonna be launching Enzo autopilot very soon. So anyone who signs up right now actually gets it, uh, [00:10:00] for free for the time being.
Um, and last but not least, AI sentiment analysis. That's something we've always kind of been keen on is how can you be proactive in your guest conversations? To really look at the sentiment of the conversation before it's too late. Um, multiple views so that you can see exactly what you need to see.
Depends on every property management business. So basically building a framework for, um, everything to be. The same across every property manager, regardless of the PMS that you use, but configurable to meet your unique property management needs. Um, and with an AI unified inbox, you can streamline and automate up to 80% of your guest communication.
But I always get the same question, which is answering, um, with AI is losing the personal touch. And my take to that is answering your guest messages is not the human touch that they're looking for. They're looking for a response to their question. The human touch is the personalization that you can drive throughout the guest experience.
And [00:11:00] I'll share with you guys a few examples. So a famous quote from the Ritz Colton, and mind you, the Ritz Colton has a $2,000 budget per employee to resolve any issue at any point without having to go through supervisor uh, approval. I'm sure you guys don't have that same budget approval, although maybe if you're in the luxury, uh, settings, maybe you do.
But the point is, anticipatory service is the essence of hospitality, where the genuine desire to understand, fulfill a guest's needs, proceeds, even their own awareness of those needs. So it's about being proactive and it's about kind of anticipating what that guest wants, uh, at the right time for the right price, uh, and for the right person.
So AI can handle the mundane and can flag when human intervention is required, but let's look at a few cases where human intervention can be. Required. So we built this boarding pass. We call it a boarding pass, just like a boarding pass for your flight, but a boarding pass for your vacation rental, fully configurable and goes through [00:12:00] the entire flow from check-in to checkout and upsells and so on.
And one of the first things that I always get from, oops, I'm gonna skip a flu slides here, uh, from, from guests or from, sorry. Property managers is, well, I can't offer these upsells because I can't operationalize them. I need to know when my cleaners are ready. I need to know when my, uh, staff is ready and so on.
And one of the first things we tell you is, think back at airlines. Airlines when they get an early, or, sorry, there's no early check-ins in airlines when you get a, um, upgrade request. Um, although I guess you know what, there kind of is an early check-in if you think about it. 'cause there's priority security and all of these different items to it.
Well, when you pay your ticket, you might. Be rich enough to pay for the business class ticket and call it a day. Or if you're like me, you accumulate all these little points called E upgrade points, and eventually you get to claim a seat in business class where you have to pay an extra 200 and you have to wait on the wait list.
Now what happens is maybe day of the flight, I decide, you know what? I spent way too [00:13:00] much money on this trip. I probably don't need this little upgrade. Let me cancel it. Well, guess what? You can't cancel it. You've already asked for the upgrade. You've given your credit card. You've approved if it's available, that you are going to take this additional or this new seat, and the airline now decides whether or not they can offer.
It's the same concept for early check-ins and late checkouts. Yes, I understand you might not be able to offer it day of because you might have overlapping pleadings and you might not be able to offer it at the same time, but. By getting the credit card of the guest ahead of time. And by receiving verbal confirmation via a guest app or any other format that they're requesting for an early check-in, even months in advance, you do not need to approve it until day of, whether that's automatically or manually by pressing a button.
And what that does is that increases the conversion rate of how much revenue you're generating on these early check-ins. Um, and once you give it to your cleaning teams [00:14:00] to basically say, when you are done, press approve. If it's ready. Guests will purchase and guests will get charged. And that's extra money for your bottom line.
Now I know it's 50 bucks, I know it's $20 here, $50 here. It doesn't feel like a lot of money, but one metric that a lot of property managers tend to forget is their gross margins. There's a big difference, and I see this all the time with the, I'm gonna be a bit, um, mean here, but the Dubai style property managers, uh, the ones who are like, I just made $5 million in three months for my Airbnb portfolio, and it's like, that's revenue.
You take a commission from that, you've actually only made $300,000 from that, which is already impressive by the way. But, um, that's the kind of, uh, revenue impact you're having. Grabbing $50 extra on every single reservation can represent for certain property managers an increase of 30 to 40% in gross margins.
Because if you think about it from what you are netting, at the end of the day, that money goes straight in your pocket and there's, it's a hundred percent gross margins. I mean, [00:15:00] it's a service you're offering. Early check-in or tip the staff, whatever that might be. But you get to keep the revenue. So start thinking about upsells.
If you're drying up a bit on, uh, on bookings or things aren't looking as good with your ADRs, this is a great chance to start unlocking these new revenue streams that will increase your gross margin profile. Um, I like to talk about the operational ones specifically, but there's also experiential ones.
So I'll just go back here for a second. Things like early check-in, late checkout, mid-state cleaning. Um, and we had check-in Hero here, which was a, a product from Truvia, but really any sort of insurance damage waivers and so on. Experiential upsells. So local attractions, uh, local experiences. Is there anything that you can offer that you are uniquely positioned, uh, to upsell?
And we've got a whole calculator on our website, by the way, so that you guys can play around to see. Okay, if I converted this much in this market and what's my a DR and how many guests do I get? 'cause really it's just a math exercise. You put it on a spreadsheet and I guarantee you that with like 50 listings, if you don't make at least [00:16:00] three, four grand a month, you're doing something wrong.
Um, so there's a lot of money to be made on upsells. And if you haven't seen the new update from Airbnb that just came out today. Which I'm sure is gonna be big hot press for everyone to start sharing. It's all about upsells, it's all about experiences. They are tapping into this revenue for you. Um, so it might be worth starting to think about these additional experiences that you could offer your guests.
The big update just got released this morning. It's May 13th. So have a look at it. It's, uh, I'm sure Mark will do, uh. A post about it. I don't wanna steal the thunder on this one, but, um, so we've just launched a product as well for this a couple months ago called Enzo Experiences. You name a place, I'll tell you how many experiences we have, but over 300,000 prebuilt experiences directly built in your boarding pass.
We split the commission 50 50, 50% because you're selling it 50% 'cause I built it. Um, but it's uh, anywhere between five to 12% if I'm not mistaken. And, uh, you know, it could be anything from like [00:17:00] a Vatican Museum. Uh, tour to, you know, we've, we've got some really unique experiences that people are offering and hopefully we'll get involved with Airbnb as one of their partners to start pulling some of that inventory as well.
Um, transportation. I've got a great example here. If you, if you think back at some of the earlier slides, I know I skipped the AI guidebooks one, but. About collecting data and we do upgrades and you know, we do check-in and all of these different systems as part of your digital guest experience, one of the key parts that we noticed when we were collecting all of this guest data, and I'll give the example, is one of the most requested experiential upsells, I'll call them, was transportation.
To and from the airport. And I wasn't sure about this because I'd never booked anything like this. So I booked a trip, um, to, uh, to Aruba at one point for a little vacation, and I decided to book a, a, a, uh, taxi to pick me up and so on ahead of time. And I gotta say it is night and day. The experience and the cost is exactly the same as you waiting for 15 minutes for your Uber at the [00:18:00] airport.
It's exactly the same. I mean, there's no difference. You pre-booked it and that's it. Um, and it just makes the getting outta the airport. Uh, much smoother. Now, that is a luxury, not, not everyone can have, some people must take public transportation. That's totally fine. But I will give you an example once again about collecting data, understanding your guests, uh, which is one of the five pillars, if I'm not mistaken, or one of the six pillars that Mark shared in the previous, uh, uh, webinar that we did together.
So, knowing your guests, if you have a property in Revic, um, Iceland, and you know that this guest is, uh, an American guest. I guarantee you they didn't train to Iceland. They plane. They took a plane and by taking a plane, they land in the morning. American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, air Canada, all of those flights land in the morning because they're all layover flights for other destinations in Europe.
So what does that mean? Well, your check-ins at four, your guests arrived at. They want quick transportation. They're jet lacked. They might [00:19:00] want luggage storage, they might wanna be able to check in early. And if you start understanding this data and you start knowing who is who and what is what and so on, that early check-in is no longer a $50 early check-in.
It's an $85 early check-in, and that guest will pay it. Now imagine it is a business traveler. I can guarantee you that early check-in and that air airport transport transportation option. Expensed so you can sell it now for 110 because they don't care. They're not the ones paying for it. It's part of their budgets.
So again, understanding your guests allows you to sell these different incremental products. And it's not nickel and dimming your guests. It's providing services at the right price, uh, and and for the right person. And that margin improvement is. Is beyond impressive. I think our most, uh, our highest revenue per listing customer today generates $297 per listing per month in additional revenue.
I mean, that's, you know, an extra night. You could see it that way, but again, you don't take 20% of [00:20:00] that. You keep a hundred percent of it. So it's an extra direct booking night, if you will, or it's your entire tech stack, your PMS and more that is covered through that. So again, um. There's a lot of money to be made through this, and the tie of all of these different upsells and sorry for the, uh, back and forth here is guidebooks and guidebooks.
There's plenty of amazing companies out there. Um, you know, touch stay builds really nice guidebooks with maps and everything, and I'd say they're experts at that. Um, we've built guidebooks as well, but we've actually used the concept of Google places and, um, what you call it, uh, well chat gt I guess, but a different model to pre-build a lot of these guidebooks and then re tie them back to those upsell.
So instead of just having a static, here's the best restaurant. Let's tie it back to a reservation, uh, link. If you have the best bar hopping guidebook and you have a partnership with that barhop, let's tie it back to their sort of group events, booking channel and so on. So we're trying to tie the content that we're sharing with our guests, with [00:21:00] the opportunities that we can sell them in addition to the room rent.
Or the, the booking itself. Um, so here's a cool customer. They made over a quarter million dollars in upsells in six months. Um, this is Damian glance. They now net about $120,000 per month, uh, in upsells. Now they do have 500, 600 units, so it's quite a bit. Um, and I had another quote. I think it disappeared.
It did. Uh, so I'll just point it out. His name was, uh, Jordan from Keto Co. French company. And, you know, I'm French so I can say this, but French people, they're not so much usually about making more money. They're usually about saving money. So when they buy software, they want the best software, the cheapest deal, and the one that, um, will save them money, not necessarily the one that makes the money.
Jordan made the leap of faith, um, in his first month. He's making 1500 euros per month. Uh, so that covers the cost of Enzo, but it also adds more revenue to the bottom line. Um, so again, treat this just like airlines do. Um, I'm not saying treat it like Ryanair, where they sell you the, the seat belt and the uh, the parachute and [00:22:00] the extra engine and you pay for the fuel on the flight and so on.
But there's an intermediary between Air France business class and Ryan Air's cheapest $20 ticket. Um, apparently it's not Malta Air. Uh, booked a flight with Malta, and that is beyond worse than Rhine Air. They literally sell you everything. Um, but, uh, that's a different story. So, um, try to be in that middle ground where you offer services at the right price for the right people.
And again, that comes with collecting guest data. So it's not just about first name, last name, and emails. It's also travel reasons, estimated time of arrival. Um, you know, what, uh, what, what reason are they here for, are they here for a bachelor party? Because if they're here for a bachelor party, selling them a, uh, you know, ticket of family event at the, uh, at the Disney World package is not gonna work.
But maybe that's better for the family guests that are staying at your property. So. Understanding your guests is, you know, one way of being able to remarket to them, but it's also one way of being able to make their experience better [00:23:00] throughout. Um, I do share on LinkedIn quite a few of these stories from time to time.
Uh, we've generated, over the past two months now, we've generated about two and a half, $3 million. But, uh, last month we had generated our first million dollar month. Um, we've done over $10 million for our customers into upsells, and we should be hitting, I said, $50 million to my team. They put $30 million on this slide, so you can see that they're being a bit more conservative than me, but I genuinely think we can hit $50 million by the end of the year.
Uh, because of you guys, because of you, the property managers who are realizing that, you know what, there is money to be made beyond the rental. Uh, once I know who my guests are. So this is something Mark speaks about, knowing your guests. And it plays not just in the world of direct bookings, it plays in the world of your existing bookings, um, to make that experience better.
So do follow me on, on LinkedIn, Twitter, uh, or wherever if you want to hear some of these success stories. Um, I kept it really short, mark, so I, I'm sure I'll have quite a few questions, [00:24:00] but I'm about all about buying back your time, if anything. Um, oh, amazing.
Mark: Really, really good. And, um, so yeah, you mentioned about the, the Airbnb update, obviously the, the route that they're going down and, you know, they don't make decisions lightly over there, obviously, if they're going into experiences for a reason.
What, what is your take on that and how would you sort of review what they're doing and, and sort of the next sort of steps.
Francois: So I read it this morning while on, uh, my motorcycle. So I don't know if it was very safe for me to read. I got an update from Lee on my team and she's like, these are the six things they launched.
This is, and so I was just reading while at a, a red light. So part of me, if I'm not fully refreshed on, on what they've launched, but from what I've seen. Um, they've launched very specific categories, uh, which for, for upsells, I'm actually gonna open it up 'cause I had it right on the side. So there's a bunch of things that they always do, which is simplifying the actual listing creation and so on.
And I think one of the key parts, at least my interpretation of this, [00:25:00] is they're moving more and more and more into the actual management of your property without actually becoming a property manager. They're, they're really on that fine line, um, and. In doing so, you know, we're talking about Airbnb setup and the calendar view and how you set up your properties and so on.
It's still a fine line enough. And I think it's, it's compensated with everything they're doing and becoming, not just a travel OTA, but a marketplace, A place where people, when they wanna book travel, they don't go Google, they don't go chat GPT, they go Airbnb first and then they figure out what they wanna book.
And that is a very big behavioral change. Um, so. And that behavioral change, you know, I kind of assess it amongst different generations. Like people my age will go directly on an Airbnb website or will be savvy enough to find that name, reverse engineer it on Google and so on. But what I'm seeing as a trend right now is people are looking on open ai, are searching their, their travel itineraries.
And I did this because I'm doing a full trip across Turkey and Malta and France [00:26:00] and all of this travel, and I was like, okay, this is impossible for me to book without designing a spreadsheet and building a system. Using chat GBT to just build that, that itinerary for me. 'cause I want direct flights and I want this and I want that.
So. The concept of search is changing. Airbnb does not wanna position itself with the Googles of the world, want to be a big enough brand that people, when they think travel, they don't search OpenAI, they search Airbnb. And I think this move towards marketplace items, across different upsells is a, is a retry of what they've done before in the past, but a, a, a simplified to retry.
So they did new Airbnb services. And they're specific. It's chefs, photography, massage spa treatments, like it is very specific and categorized. And then they still have this experience bucket, right, where it's kind of, you don't know what to expect. It might be a, a food tour, a cooking class. It's more of a unique, very branded experience.
I think Brian Chesky has this. Beautiful design essence to, to how to build a trip. [00:27:00] And he's realized that that doesn't work for everyone. And he's starting to categorize, to cry, try and, uh, hit everyone. I am surprised though that they have still not gone down the path of operational upsells. Um, I'm very much surprised.
Maybe the new policy move was a, a, a small move towards that, but really it isn't. Um. I don't know. What are your thoughts, mark? So,
Mark: so, so here's a question. So would you not class the, the, the chef of a clean as an operational one? Are you sort of, and it's not expert, it's not an experience, are you sort of put in that in a different category?
Francois: It's a good question. I guess it depends if you're the one I, I see the one, the operational one specific for property managers as the one that are gonna touch your operations as in cleaning, scheduling and so on. Chefs photography, massage and so on. For me is, is still experiential. I mean, we'll probably have to recategorize to be honest and, and follow Airbnb's pattern here.
Um, as I'm sure they've spent quite a few millions of dollars figuring this out. Um, but the reason I'd always put it in the category of experiences is because. It [00:28:00] involves you and someone else. And the someone else is the one who's offering that service. Um, so you are coordinating with someone else, but there is a someone else, whereas on early check-ins, it is you offering that service on midday cleaning.
That is you. I mean, arguably it's a cleaning team, but, um, that is part of your business. So,
Mark: um, the question that I wrote, I wrote down, and someone mentioned it on, on the stream as it was coming in, was about, um. It was a, it was a quite a good one. So I've like rephrased the question, but what is one of the sort of experiences, not operational, but experiences that you've seen Enzo customers offer that has surprised you and has, has any, like outliners is one that have worked really well, or ones that you're like, oh, I didn't think of that, but that's a really good one to add in.
Francois: Yeah. My favorite one is a partnership with restaurants. So everyone's got guidebooks, physical or digital, and you recommend your favorite place, but. You know, sometimes you have two or three places that you really like that might be a bit further off and so on. Well, you go to those restaurants and you [00:29:00] say, listen, I've got 40,000 guests that go through my doors every single year.
Pay me $500 a month and I'll put you as the top number one place brunch in my guidebooks. And here's a QR code, here's a tracking code. You know, it's all about selling that part. At that point, you need to, to sell the experience. Now, this is more valuable for smaller property managers 'cause if you have, you know.
I don't know, 500 homes. It's kind of difficult to go on and figure out all these restaurants. But if you have 10, 20 units, that is an easy uh, win. And when I saw a property manager do that, I was like, that's pretty cheeky. Um, he did not pick the best brunch place he picked, really the one who paid the most, which isn't always the best approach either.
Um, you wanna find, strike a balance. So that was one. Um, and the other one that struck me was, and I thought this was brilliant, was a telescope rental. But it wasn't any telescope rental. It was a telescope rental during the, um, uh, the, what's it called? Oh, I have it in French. The moon, sun. The eclipse. The eclipse.
Um, so [00:30:00] you could rent a four for $400 a day. You could rent a telescope to watch the eclipse. Well, guess what? All the bookings on in that region in the US and Canada, they were all for the eclipse. Everyone was booking a state to see the eclipse. So I thought that was a really unique upsell. Um, I think it depends, again, it depends on your business.
It depends on, on where you're located. Ski packages for desert destinations don't work very well, but for ski destinations they do. Um, so you really want to tailor it to your market, but then again to your audience as well. Uh, to the time of the, of, to the season, uh, to how much they've paid. You know, if they've paid $10,000 for a stay, I can guarantee you they can pay a bit more for certain things if they've paid $69 for a night, probably not.
Um, so. Yeah, I've seen some crazy, it
Mark: comes back to, it comes back to knowing your guests. Like the, the, the exact thing that you mentioned you spoke about is, you know, you've gotta, you, you based the upsell experience based on the, the, the clients that you are being put in front of, who did the ideal people that you wanna put in.
And, and [00:31:00] again, you could, you could put in front of your guests some of the most best experiential upsells that you could imagine, but at the end of the day, if the people walking through your door. It doesn't appeal to them. They'll never sell. So, uh, again, you match the experience to the person that's walking the, the, the walking through the door.
And, um, just on a, on an Enzo point of view, how are you getting on with the new policy updates on, on Airbnb? What have you been doing to, to pivot? Like how are you chatting to, to, to your clients to sort of say, Hey, we can still do all of this on platform, et cetera.
Francois: I mean, okay, so the new Airbnb policies, and I, I as a, we're an official partner of Airbnb, so we have direct integration, direct connections.
We have to be, um, I wanna say somewhat political about our, our public responses on, on some of these things. But, um, it's simple. Everyone keeps thinking that Airbnb is out to get them. And, and yes, there's a point of Airbnb is building a moat around their business, that's for sure. But it's in response to the SB 4 78 laws.
Um, this is a new law in California that states [00:32:00] that you need honest and fair pricing. What that means is no more hidden in junk fees. They've taken advantage of that to also change up a few of the policies around it, rewording the same things, which is try not to drive bookings off platform. The same kind of spiel we've heard over and over from, from Airbnb's core, core, uh, teams.
Um, but when you look at it specifically. They talk about using resolution centers and so on. But I think the, the Airbnb teams are very well aware that that is not efficient for larger property managers. Uh, so I state that the upsells, they are optional payments. These are not things that you are forcing guests to buy, uh, for Airbnb to force you to say they have to use the resolution center.
That's not gonna work. Um, in terms of payments, like mandatory fees, it's also a fine line. Uh, safety deposits. There's a specific area in their APIs that allows partners like us to, to do safety deposits. Um, it just means putting it at the bottom of the total price on Airbnb. Um, but it is, it is becoming a bit more restrictive now, these new [00:33:00] changes around experiences and upsells and how that impacts policy and how that might impact changes to how.
Now optional payments might be required to be on Airbnb and so on. I'm sure there's a a a point in time where that starts to go in that direction, enforcement of those rules without losing hosts. I think this is where, again, Airbnb has two customers. They have the property manager as a customer, and they have the guest.
And yes, property managers always think that the guest is being favored, and maybe that is the case. Um, but they will have to find the balance between the two if they don't wanna start losing all of their property managers. Um, so, and in hosts, or as, as they would call them, so. Um, I guess our interpretation is what Airbnb's told us, which is we can keep running and we're, we're good and we're delivering value to their customers, uh, night and day.
So there's no issues there, but certain restrictions of course on, uh, collecting certain fees off platform and uh, and trying to re-market to guests [00:34:00] is the other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Other big one, right? So.
Mark: Good. Well, you talk about bringing value to the, to the client. So, um, with Enzo, what is like the plan for the, the next sort of three months, so of, of 2025 and, and who are you looking to speak to and, and like how can people get in contact with you if they want to find out more about all the work that you're doing behind the scenes?
Francois: We're, we're positioning ourselves as the guest experience platform and what that means. If you know Intercom, Zendesk, and platforms like that, that means really Zendesk of hospitality, multi-channel inbox, regardless of the PMS that you have, that automates all of the responses, um, and upsells for you. Um, the upsell medium is through the boarding pass, but also via messages.
So really trying to, to break through the, uh, the mold with every property manager out there. Although limited by the integrations that we have, um, in terms of getting in touch with me, pretty simple. LinkedIn, I'm pretty responsive there. Um, my email, first name dot, last name@enzoconnect.com. Pretty unresponsive there.
Um, but uh, you can still try and send me [00:35:00] an email and, uh. And then just reach out on our website. We always have teams that, you know, answer and can help answer any questions. Big, um, update just came out yesterday with the inbox that I've been talking about for a couple weeks now and uh, I'm excited 'cause we have a new website that we're gonna be building very soon as well to share about all this, so I can't wait.
Nice. And
Mark: what is the domain? What is the url? Enzo Connect dot.
Francois: Enzo connect.com. Now it is with an S-E-N-S-O. It is not Enzo like the Ferrari with a z. We do move that fast. Uh, but we're Enzo with an S, so enzo connect.com. Um, and yeah, that's a Japanese symbol of Zen because we are gonna bring that zen to your guest experience.
So there you go.
Mark: Love it. Love it, love it. Well, hey Francois, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Every, everybody that's tuned is in the Crowdcast room and everybody that's streamed, like I say, this is gonna get recorded. We're going to, uh, put it on the YouTubes and, and do it on the podcast as well, which is, which is Epic.
So it'll be on Spotify and everywhere you love to get your, your replays from. But uh, yeah, [00:36:00] please do reach out, go and follow Francois on on LinkedIn and Twitter. A really good follow and yeah, go and follow everything. Uh, Enzo Connect. Alright, everybody. Have a good one. Francois, any final words you'd like to leave before we let you go on this lovely Tuesday?
Francois: My mantra, my, my personal mantra, every problem has a solution.
Mark: There you go. With that being said, fantastic way to end the show. Thank you very much and we'll see you all very soon. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee. Like Bruce Lee. 'cause it's so hard on the tea is loosely making up those rhymes.
Don't write it, just do it loosely.
