[00:00:00] Mark: Morning. Good afternoon, good evening. Welcome everybody for those who are tuning live and for those who are watching back on our replay as well. Please do let us know when you're watching this, whether you're live with us in the audience, watching it on the stream, or watching on the playback in the comments where you are tuning in from around the world.
[00:00:16] Mark: I do love to see. Where we have people tuning in from. My name is Mark Simpson, as you can tell from my English. I'm from England. I've discovered Boostly 10 years ago, and over the last 10 years I've been wanting to give hosts all over the world, the tools, the tactics to train them, but most of partly the confidence on how to generate more bookings where you're not having to rely on D OTAs to do it.
[00:00:38] Mark: And um, I wanted to run this session for a while. Me and Christina have been talking about running this session for a long time now. And what we're gonna do today is we're gonna show you, as you can see from the screen in front of you, from first click to final, clean, the new guest experience in 2025.
[00:00:54] Mark: 'cause as you, we all know, wherever you are, the guest demands changed. The guest, what they want is different from what it was five years ago, even last year. And that's why I wanted Christina from Turno to come in and do this. A little bit of housekeeping. Um, as you can see, for those of you who are watching live.
[00:01:11] Mark: On the right, there are a couple of little tabs, a couple of little buttons. One of them is chat. So as we are going through this, to reward those that are tuning in with us live, if you've got any questions as we are going through this. You get to ask your questions to me and Christina, if you're watching on the replay, you are more than welcome to ask your questions, but we may not get to 'em straight away.
[00:01:34] Mark: This does reward you for obviously tuning in live when we do these sessions, and if you wanna find out more, just hit the subscribe button and we're gonna do more of these. So without more being said, Christina, could you just give a super quick introduction to you and what Turno does, and then we might as well get these, uh, get this show on the road.
[00:01:49] Christina: Yeah, good morning. Thanks for having me. Uh, my name's Christina Vassel. I am the Director of Partnerships for Turno. And for those of you who don't know what Turno is, what we do, we are a cleaning automations platform that helps both hosts as well as cleaners, automate turnovers, schedule payments, and find new, vetted and experienced cleaners within the Turno platform.
[00:02:12] Mark: Amazing. All right, let's get on.
[00:02:16] Christina: All right, so, perfect. All right, well, we'll start with kind of the, the start of everything, right? Like, what is the guest journey looking like today? And it really is an opportunity to impress 'em at every single phase of, of the stay. Um, every phase truly does offer that opportunity to either wow 'em or completely lose them and not have 'em come back.
[00:02:45] Christina: So starting from that first click, which mark you'll talk about here in a little bit, to the actual booking itself, the pre-stay. As well as check in the stay and post checkout. So as we're going through everything today, I'll kind of touch about those different areas and things that you need to be looking into, data points to kind of consider and things you should be tracking.
[00:03:11] Christina: Go to the next slide.
[00:03:16] Christina: There. All right, so we'll start with the foundation. Um, this really is a great opportunity to focus on data, um, in the hospitality section that wins. And what you're seeing on the screen here is actually called our quality center, which I'll go into a little bit here in a second, but. What, what we're kind of seeing today is there is a problem with hosts that are.
[00:03:45] Christina: Guessing rather than using data as guidance to improve the guest experience. So by using guest feedback, operational insights, and reviewing your booking trends, this is really allowing you to be a little bit more proactive. Um, and this can be accomplished by reviewing reviews that come in via different channels.
[00:04:07] Christina: Google your website and one that I really like to encourage is actually post checkout surveys. Um, sending something a little bit more private to collect a ton of data or specific questions that you're wanting to focus on on your property. Um, especially like sending those during your peak season to.
[00:04:27] Christina: Collect a higher volume of data is really beneficial. Um, but this just kind of gives you guys a good opportunity to see like things that are coming in, what guests are actually experienced during those days. So another great tactic with those reviews is, is if you have an opportunity to actually write those guests are review back.
[00:04:47] Christina: This can actually support your rating on the channels as well. If it's something a little bit more sensitive, again, just send a private note. Uh, so in 2023, we actually announced our official partnership with Airbnb and we built what is called the quality Center. So this is just a really great ability to see not only like your guest cleanliness ratings that are coming in, but different tags, comments for every air Airbnb listing to your individual cleaners who service that property.
[00:05:16] Christina: Every turnover review that comes in, hosts now have data to see the performance cleanliness trends, not just for the property, but for the cleaner that is servicing the unit itself. So this is allowing host you to resolve property specific cleanliness concerns and operational management issues. A couple of examples of.
[00:05:40] Christina: Cleanliness concerns or things that are kind of popping up that we're seeing is a, a clean was missed or a certain area of the vacation rental was missed. From a previous guest, forgetting to restock towels, toiletries, cleaning the bathrooms is actually a really big one when it comes to cleanliness ratings.
[00:06:00] Christina: Um, not locating TV remotes, uh, checking that the TV or fireplace actually works. A couple of these things kind of sound a little silly. Um, but these have actually been insights that have come back that have actually helped host actually improve, um, to their. To their actual property itself. So this has helped them boost property cleanliness.
[00:06:21] Christina: This has helped them with ensuring turnovers are ready to go, and this ultimately has actually helped them enhance the guest experience and satisfaction, which is what we're all trying to do at the end of the day. So even if you're not UA Turno user today, that's totally fine. This is something you can do a little bit more manual.
[00:06:40] Christina: By looking at those reviews, looking back to what cleaners did what, and kind of piecing the puzzle together. But it's things that you should really be tracking. So much so that when we did a cleanliness score study with Airbnb, we actually saw that. Average users, um, on Airbnb who aren't using turnover a day, the average cleanliness score is about a 4.6899999999999995%, which is what you're seeing on the right hand side.
[00:07:10] Christina: Active Turno, turnover, Turno users, that's a tongue twister. On a Monday morning mark are actually seeing about a 4.83%. Either way, it's still a great cleanliness score, but why you want to be over a 4.8 is um. Users actually see a 20% increase in reservations on the channels when their cleanliness score is that high.
[00:07:37] Christina: So why does a cleanliness score matter so much? It's 'cause it can significantly not over, not so much boost your overall rating of course, but those poor cleanliness scores can actually deter future bookings. They can impact your income and your reputation. And we know that once your reputation's kind of hurt, it's hard to build that back up.
[00:07:57] Christina: Um. So these are all things to kind of consider, but you should start to be a little worried, um, once your score starts to creep down towards that three, three mark.
[00:08:16] Christina: There's a couple of other things, um, that you should consider in terms of tracking from a data standpoint, and that is your turnover time, your pre pros, clean photos, as well as job ratings if possible. Um. You should try to understand what your turnover time for your home is. When we're thinking turnover time, there's typically a time that we believe it takes to clean a property versus what a cleaner thinks it should take.
[00:08:45] Christina: If you know your home should take no more than three hours, yet your cleaner is taking four, kind of peaking that five mark, that's an indication that you should probably sit down with your cleaners, understand and review, like why is there such a significant difference? It's helpful to do this for a couple of reasons.
[00:09:03] Christina: Um, it's the ability to offer early check-ins as well as late checkouts. Um, that can really help. I know for me personally, that makes me happy if I can check out late. Um, but it's also a great avenue for additional revenue for your business. Also, expectation setting with your cleaning team. That's important to have in place, especially during peak season if you have a smaller team that you need to have for more turnovers.
[00:09:31] Christina: Um, and then ultimately better understanding of your turnover cost. This is more so applicable for a host who does hourly rates versus a flat rate, but still just as important. The next point is pre and post clean photos. So this is really important in terms of your guests are expecting to walk into a rental that they saw on the original listing from when they made that reservation, right?
[00:10:02] Christina: We wanna make sure that those photos that are coming in from the cleaners look like the listing images, whether it was on Airbnb, whether that was on your website. Um, that really helps set the standard of a great first impression, and it also really helps ensure accountability with your cleaners. So try and track that as best as you can.
[00:10:23] Christina: And then finally the last point kind of ties into the previous slides of job ratings. Um, seeing ultimately how your cleaners are doing and performing is really crucial, not only for your cleanliness score, but it gives you a great opportunity to say, okay, is this clean or improving? Are they taking feedback well?
[00:10:41] Christina: And if not. Maybe it's time for me to find a replacement or work on them to improve that ultimately. Um, and if you are a Turno user, all of these things are actually something that we provide data wise for you when finding a new cleaner or even managing your own cleaners today. And from here, I'll, uh, send it over to you, mark.
[00:11:03] Mark: Thank you very much. Okay. So thank you, uh, very much for all of that. We are gonna come back to it. If you do have any questions, then please make sure that you do put it in the chat. And obviously now we're getting more people coming in from Georgia to Sabrina, to Justin, to Trish, Jenny Wesley, Tamara Bryce.
[00:11:19] Mark: Please let us know where you are tuning in from around the world. Are you in the uk? Are you in the us? Further afield. We always love to know where, where you are watching us from. So what I wanted to talk about is the pre and post booking. So this is how, first and foremost, with pre-booking, how can you turn.
[00:11:37] Mark: A looker into a booker based on the guest demands of 2025. Right? And there's a couple of three key places that we are noticing, and this is based off a ton of research that we did at the back end of 2024, and the research and the predictions that we made, they are coming to fruition as we are now six, nearly seven months into 2025, right?
[00:11:59] Mark: So first and foremost, your guest, your future potential guest, your prospect, whatever you want to call it, they. Are willing now to click around. They are looking to do a little bit of research. I feel one of the reasons why is that last year there was a viral TikTok trend going around that spread around to Instagram, to YouTube social media fervor field of where big travel content creators were showing.
[00:12:28] Mark: Their followers and these content creators had anywhere from a thousand followers to millions of followers how to use Airbnb, how to reverse engineer it to where they can find the best rate online. And I started to pop this up, Kristin, I dunno if you noticed this, and definitely those in the audience. I dunno if you started to notice this, but this started to come onto my radar round about this time last year.
[00:12:49] Mark: And I just naturally got them sent to me. 'cause obviously what I talk about. And so I delved into this niche a little bit more of this content and it was really clever 'cause what they were showing how to do is how to find a listing on Airbnb. You take a a screenshot or you save the image, you put it into Google and you ask for it to find it, which is really cool because then what Google would do is it would go and run a search and it would find the actual listing picture and then bring up not only their Airbnb listing, but their direct booking, their vr, and obviously their Google vacation rental if they had it.
[00:13:22] Mark: And then from there, if the host had been clever and smart and they had priced their property correctly. They would be going to the direct booking, uh, site and then booking from there. But that all began because they were billboarding their details on the business. Now, one thing that I speak about a lot to our members is that you have to billboard.
[00:13:43] Mark: So what does billboard mean? Billboard basically means that you are putting your business name in as many positions as possible on your online travel agent listings. So for example, Airbnb. Let's talk about that because it's the simplest one. On your Airbnb listing, you have the images, you have your description, and you've got your profile page as well.
[00:14:06] Mark: So first and foremost, in the images, without putting watermarks in or without dropping your logo in on the image, 'cause the Airbnb AI will spot this, flag this, remove this. But how can you in your image, get in your business name? Okay. If, uh, if you've got a photo shoot coming up, super simple, you can gently add, you know, your branding in and around your photo shoots.
[00:14:28] Mark: Uh, there are loads of many ways to do this. I won't bore you in here in the description. One of the easiest things that you can do, and you can all go and do this now. Um, and I speak about this a lot on the YouTube channel when we do roasts marketing roasts of people's listings, is you wanna start off your first bit of your description by saying the property name and then the business brand.
[00:14:51] Mark: So if, for example, you've got like four listings and you want to be naming each individual one of your listings, I've just been doing a review of a tree house and it was called tree Topia. And they've got tree topia. They've got the slide away and they've got another property. And then the overall company name is Okey-dokey cabins.
[00:15:12] Mark: Now, the listings mention the individual property names really well. So if you were to Google Tree Topia, you would go and find that listing, but you couldn't find the overall company name because they weren't talking about it. So a super simple hack for them was to change the Airbnb listing. Description to say introducing, or this is tree Topia Tree house brought to you by Okey dokey cabins.
[00:15:39] Mark: 'cause what that then is implenting into the customer's mind or the prospect's mind, or the future potential guest mind, is that they're gonna run a Google search of that tree, topia tree house by Okie Doki cabins. And then you can imagine what comes up at the top of Google isn't their Airbnb listing?
[00:15:55] Mark: Isn't their VRBO listing? Isn't their booking.com listing, it's their website? So again, by billboarding things in the right way, then you can drive your future potential guest from an Airbnb listing to your direct booking. Website and the final place of billboard is your Airbnb profile page. So I dunno where the last time you logged in on your Airbnb profile page, but you've got some great real estate in there.
[00:16:18] Mark: Again, you can add a bio, you can say, Hey, my name is Christina. I'm the owner of the blah, blah, blah, blah, your business brand name. Check out our online reviews. They're really good. Again, you're encouraging the guest, the future potential guest to go and search for you without directly putting in your URL.
[00:16:33] Mark: 'cause again, if you put in your URL or your Instagram link. Airbnb will flag this, remove this, and, and suspend this because I've seen it happen. So you have to be smart about this. But the main thing is that when you do. Do this, you've got to make sure that the rates that are on your website are more competitive than what they are on your Airbnb listings, your VRBO listings, et cetera.
[00:16:59] Mark: Now, there is a really cool tool that's getting a lot of traction at the moment, and it's called Direct, O-D-I-R-E-C-T-O. It's a Google Chrome plugin extension, and a lot of people are using this. Hundreds of thousands of people are using this free Google Chrome extension, and what it means is that. When it's installed on your Google Chrome, and I do a lot of searching on Google Chrome.
[00:17:22] Mark: When I'm on Airbnb, booking.com, vrbo, if I have my business on direct to it will flag up on the screen that this price for this property is cheaper. Here direct. When you tap on the direct on the Chrome extension, it takes 'em to the website. It's a very cool tool again. They are doing a lot of work with these travel content creators to spread the words.
[00:17:47] Mark: Millions of times I've seen these impressions of directors. So again, for you as a business owner, you're getting a bit of a sneak peek here of the 11 people at Rivers right now, is that you can go onto director and list your business. It's either free or a very low annual subscription to be on there.
[00:18:03] Mark: And again, it's a great way. The other thing to really know on this. Is Google is your homepage. So Google is your homepage, is very, very important. When you run a search for your business brand and name, you wanna make sure that your details are coming up as accurately as possible. So not only does that mean your website is ranking when they search for your business name, which it should do, but you wanna make sure that the OTAs aren't bidding on your brand name as well.
[00:18:30] Mark: And you also wanna make sure your Google Business listing for your brand name is visible and usable. As well. You've got a lot of real estate on there and you want to take advantage of it. Now, if you notice that the online travel agents are bidding on your brand name and in the sponsored section at the top of Google, you see that, say Airbnb are doing that, but that's when you need to fight.
[00:18:51] Mark: Fire with fire, and you bid on your own brand name. It's super cheap. It's super simple. It's super straightforward. I can see there questions coming in. We'll promise to answer 'em at the end. But the final thing is your website. Okay. When your website loads up, it needs to be set up and it needs to be created to turn a looker into a booker.
[00:19:10] Mark: I, for what I do, look at thousands of websites a year. I instantly can tell if that website is set up to convert and which ones are just gonna lose the booking. The most important thing, and we can't go into too much detail, is that when you do this, you've got to make sure you answer these three questions or these three things as soon as your website page loads up, who you are, what you do, how I come by.
[00:19:36] Mark: There are so many websites that I load up and the pitch is not the right one, or the wording isn't speaking to my ideal guest, and it's not clear at all how I can book a stay. You try and con confuse a direct booking site with a property management portfolio. You wanna make sure that when your future potential guests, oh, you've done all the hard work, you've bill boarded your listing, your Google is un unbelievably on point.
[00:20:00] Mark: When they click on your website to go and book, it all falls down because it's not set up in the right way. Again, disclaimer, if you want a website that is set up correctly, come to Boost Lead. This is what we do. Go to booster.co uk. Okay? Right, that's pre-booking. We will want to get on with questions, but let's just talk about the post booking.
[00:20:19] Mark: So how can you make sure that a guest doesn't cancel your stay? Their stay. Now, what's really important in 2025, the way that your guests are booking is very unique. Because of the rise of flexible cancellation policies, because Airbnb are pushing everybody towards flexible and getting rid of strict, this is mean that now your guests are booking two or three places to stay at once.
[00:20:46] Mark: Yours might be one of two, or might be one of three, or even might be one of four that the guest has gone and booked. And what they're going to do is they're going to just cancel three of them and keep one, or cancel two of them and keep one, or cancel one of 'em, you know, whatever, right? This is nothing you can do about it, but there's definitely something you can do to prevent them from canceling you, and this is something that is so easy.
[00:21:10] Mark: You'll kick yourself. If you don't do it, it's free and it just costs a couple of minutes of your time, and that's pick up the phone and call your guest. Now, whether that is you that's going to do this, or a member of your team who's going to do this, you're gonna pick up the phone and call your guest.
[00:21:25] Mark: Now what this achieves is instantly it separates you from the rest of everybody else who's not doing this. By picking up the phone and having a conversation with them, you'd no longer just become an Airbnb listing. You become a name. You become a number and you become a business and a property because you've spoken to 'em.
[00:21:44] Mark: And again, there's three scenarios. Number one, call your guest. Number two, gather data. Number three, get 'em to book a service or an experience to solidify their stay. I am yet to come across a stat on this, but it's something that I am noticing is that when a guest books a stay with you. If they can commit to an upsell, whether it's early check-in, late checkout, private chef, masseuse, whatever, if they can commit to it and book it after they've booked with you, then the likelihood of them actually turning up and not canceling gets higher and higher and higher.
[00:22:18] Mark: Because if you think about it, if you're gonna commit more to the stay, if you're gonna commit more to the experience, and you're actually gonna go through with it. So how can you get them to do so? Pick up the call, pick up the phone, and give 'em a call. You can talk about, okay, so what are you coming to the area for?
[00:22:34] Mark: You know, what are you looking to do here? Is it an event? Is it a birthday, is it a whatever? How can I help you? You sort of become a concierge of sorts. But the more that you can do that, you stand out from everybody else. And again, I can't go into too much detail because we wanna have a good five minutes for q and a and some takeaways from this.
[00:22:52] Mark: But what I will say is that I put together a book called The Book Diet Playbook. Lemme go. It looks like this. You can go and grab it on Amazon. There's 101 tips in there, which talks about the pre and the post booking. Go and pick it up. The pre the book direct playbook do go and pick that up. But this is really, really key.
[00:23:12] Mark: The, the, the guest in 2025 is so much different to what it was a few years ago. They are demanding more and you have got to offer more. And if you are not offering these things, then you've got to start to look to create 'em as soon as possible. Okay. Let's move on to our final slide, which is takeaways and questions.
[00:23:33] Mark: So, Christina, before we go to questions, what's your takeaways that you've got down here in the bullet points?
[00:23:42] Christina: Um, I would definitely say, I mean, obviously cleaning protocols, again, it's, it's huge. Your reviews are everything. That way you have repeat guests coming back in as well as new potential guests coming in.
[00:23:56] Christina: A stat that I love to mention that a lot of people actually don't know is 36% of travelers are influenced by the reviews that previous guests have, state have left. So it's so important to try and get those as as many as you can. So that's what I'll leave you guys with.
[00:24:16] Mark: No, that that is good. So there's another cool stat is that 93% of all purchases online, not just hospitality, but 93% of purchases, all purchases are on the back of social proof.
[00:24:25] Mark: And you can see that number 36% of leisure travelers are influenced by reviews. They do a hundred percent count. One that I forgot to add in on my slide, but I'll give you now, is that a lot of people. When I talk about the Billboarding effect, they go, but Matt, what sort of I, what actually people are doing that?
[00:24:41] Mark: I dunno, anybody that's doing that, 56% of people who book direct have done it on the back of an OTA search. So that's a lot. That's nearly six of every 10 bookings that are booking direct that have come on the back of doing that. So that number is rising. That number is growing. And I truly, because I truly, truly feel that this is because the perception from the general public on Airbnb now isn't where it's just a, you know, air bedroom, air, uh, air mattresses on the floor.
[00:25:15] Mark: It's not just that cheap alternative to a hotel. That is now got that, that vibe about it, that the, where they may be overpaying, if I'm booking on this platform, they are becoming more aware that the place that I'm about to book could be elsewhere online and I need to have a little look. They are more price conscious.
[00:25:35] Mark: They're not just throwing money around anymore. They are definitely more price conscious, so they will click around 'cause they know there's more than one place. There's more than just an Airbnb anymore. There's obviously booking.com. Throwing out a lot of ads in America and elsewhere around the world. Uh, vrbo, the Expedia group, they are obviously doing their advertising around the world so that people know that there's more than not one.
[00:25:58] Mark: And they will go and do a search. And if you are just fine tuned and fine place to have a good website that converts, you are fine tune to make sure you can take advantage of it. Then they will come and book with you, uh, direct. Now there's a, there's a QR code that is on here if you want to go find out more.
[00:26:16] Mark: About Turno. Please, please, please, if you're not already, go and check 'em out. They had market leaders in, in what they do. Uh, Christina, what, what have you been working on from, from a Turno point of view for 2025? If anybody's checked you out before but never really taken the plunge? What, what, what have you guys been working on and, and what's coming up over the course of the next couple of months?
[00:26:34] Christina: A couple of new features that we're pretty excited about that has been being requested for a while is more maintenance features. So there are maintenance functionality that's coming out. Um, you can actually find cleaners who are both handy on the cleaning side as well as the maintenance side, so that's super beneficial.
[00:26:54] Christina: Um, especially if you're trying to just do everything on your own. And then a couple of other maintenance features that are gonna be coming out later this year that I can't talk too much about.
[00:27:04] Mark: Cool. So lots, uh, a lot is happening behind the scenes at 10 O hq. Please go ahead and, and scan that if you are watching back on the replay.
[00:27:12] Mark: Uh, and if you've got any questions, again, I know that we, we sort of fired for a couple of these slides. Please do pop it in the comment section and, and I'll try and get to it as best as I can. And if I can't answer it, I'll reach out to Christina and the team and they will come and drop in the comments as well.
[00:27:26] Mark: But thank you very, very much, Christina for joining me today, and thank you everybody that's joined in live and we'll be back again, uh, very, very soon. If you need to catch the replay, it'll be on this link and if you're watching on YouTube and the podcast will be there as well. Take care everybody. Thank you.
[00:27:42] Mark: Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Boostly podcast. Bruce Lee. Let Bruce Lee 'cause it's so hard on the teas loose leaf. Looking up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
