Welcome to our latest blog post!
We've recently had the pleasure of interviewing Luca Zambello, the dynamic CEO of Jurny, a trailblazer in the hospitality industry.
We discussed how artificial intelligence is transforming the way Airbnb hosts operate and skyrocket their success.
Dive into this insightful conversation to discover innovative ideas and strategies.
You can learn more about Luca and his revolutionary work at Jurny.com.
You can also connect with him on LinkedIn for more in-depth discussions and updates.
Here's the video for this episode:
Timestamps (audio)
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Transcript from the Episode
Intro
[00:00:00] Mark: All right, Luca, if you could do me a massive favor, just tell everybody, tell all the viewers, all the listeners, all the watchers, a little bit about Jurny, uh, a little bit about you and how you got this job.
About Luca and Jurny
[00:00:10] Luca: Yeah. Uh, thank you for, for having me. Yes. Like I'm, uh, co-founder in the c e o of Jurny. I, I was born and raised in Italy.
[00:00:20] To just give you a little bit background about myself, moved to, to us specifically la. Um, this is about 2008, a couple of years after I moved there. Um, this is, was like early Airbnb and, uh, um, there was not much done online, uh, uh, in terms of shortterm rentals. And one of the things I realized is that shortterm rentals, especially for luxury villas, was done all through brokers.
[00:00:46] Um, and if you will, search for luxury villas, Online you couldn't find really anything. So I launched the, uh, that's, that's how I got involved in the industry is by, uh, seeing this problem launching a landing page. And literally, this is one of the first company doing Google ads, uh, for, for luxury villas in la.
[00:01:07] That landing page did over 1.2 million in revenue, uh, not to us, uh, on, on the first year. And, um, Yeah, that, that was, uh, in the very, very beginning of the industry. Obviously short leave, like within, uh, within a thousand of 12 months we had some, something like maybe 15 competitors including like one fine state luxury retreat and bunch of other companies.
[00:01:32] But that really hooked me into the industry. And from there, obviously since, since, uh, they became a pretty crowded, pretty quickly I spin off a management company. The idea of, uh, utilizing technology to make that business as scalable as possible. A company with the time was called Gas Wiser, grew that company to 300 units across, uh, six different cities in us.
[00:01:57] And, uh, in the process of doing that, I built a massive amount of frustration in trying to make different technologies working together. Uh, I've been. I've been, uh, a customer of many pmms companies, uh, and, uh, I've been trying to, to make him work, you know, things like access control system alongside with the gas verification system, pricing, uh, um, different type of IOTs and, uh, different type of OTAs or, or work as a, as a single system.
What’s your elevator pitch.
[00:02:29] Mark: What is your, like USP what's your elevator pitch? Because, you know, as we, as we all know, In this game, there's a lot of choice. I mean, there is a, a, a lot of choice out there. So how does Jurny separate itself from everybody else? What's your like, sort of unique selling point? Your, your, you know, your taxi pitch, your elevator pitch?
[00:02:48] Luca: Yeah. I can give you the elevator pitch, but I wanna say something to answer your first question. How we separate ourself from, from, from everybody. And that's why creating an alternative to this, uh, um, very messy, fragmented environment. So, uh, we wanna create a finite environment. We want to create a, a, a full alternative to, to everything else.
[00:03:09] So we say, Hey, instead of you trying to figure out all on your own, we have done that for you. So we took a completely different concept than idea of what, how, how things have been done, right? Like if you go to a pmms, the ID General p m s, the idea is that they connect with as many service providers as possible.
[00:03:30] We want to have as many verticals as possible, but we want to have maximum one or two providers per vertical. And the reason being is because if you have. Pricing. If you have a channel manager and if you have, um, a guest notification system, access control system, IOTs like all these different verticals, and you choose multiple providers per vertical, this system are not gonna work well with one another because the combinations are almost infinite.
[00:04:02] A very technical problem with a very, um, user. And problem, the technicality is that you only understand that when you've tried to build different systems on top of, uh, typical PMSs and you understand that that's not gonna work. And, and it, it will work for, for a percentage of the industry. But I think it's the minority, but it's very much like, um, full customizations.
[00:04:28] But then you have to have very high technical knowledge. Or have a finite product. Uh, a perfect example is a Apple product, right? Uh, apple, that's exactly what they do. And, and that's the reason why a lot of people have iPhones is because it's a finite amount of solutions that you can have. By doing that, those solutions are built specifically for that platform, number one.
[00:04:55] Those solutions work well together. You don't get viruses, you don't get bugs or limited amount of bugs. And so all of those things comes as, as a big advantage. That's exactly what we did. We chose one vendor per category, usually sometimes two. Uh, and we go as deep as possible with those vendors. So for, for instance, for pricing, we chose Wheelhouse, and you'll have a hundred percent of wheelhouse functionality embedded inside of our system.
[00:05:19] Right. Um, and then, uh, we did the same thing with how to host out. Host is fully embedded inside the power system. Now, back in general, we already did, um, we've, uh, charge pt, um, we created our own ai, which we, we'll probably get more, more details on, on the AI side, but that's fully embedded into the system.
[00:05:41] And so as a user, you really need to learn one system, not multiple, and you can upgrade, downgrade, whatever service you want. The frustrating part of what's happening in our industry is, is if you are users today, you wanna come in industry or even if you're a large user. But let's take the example of somebody that just started.
[00:05:58] They have to do weeks, longs of months long of research, research of who they want to use. Once they choose who to use. It's weeks longs of onboarding for your pmms, weeks long of onboarding for any service that you want to use, making sure that it's integrated with pmms, we just removed entirely. All of that for our system is a one click process.
[00:06:20] Uh, we what we are launching on the 16, um, off, uh, off May. It's actually. Of potential when this goes live. Uh, half launched on the 16th is what we call Jurny 2.0. We are making it a one click process. So as long as you have an Airbnb account, you log in on your Airbnb account within our platform. All your information, all your setting, Everything, it gets important inside, inside of our system.
[00:06:47] And upgrading to wheelhouse, auto host, or uh, access control system is as easy as one click on bottom. That's it.
How are you making the decisions?
[00:06:54] Mark: All, or hosts wheelhouse. Fantastic companies, how are you making this decision to go with them? Because obviously in the dynamic pricing world, you've got many partners, obviously auto hosts, many different partners.
[00:07:06] What's the reason for going with, with them? And why not? I guess if you're looking at the elephant in the room, why not open your services up to multiple? Because technically you could be missing out on potential customers there. Yes.
[00:07:19] Luca: Um, I mean, it's, it's true, but we say, Hey, the people that want to have that full level of customization, let them all be in a bucket.
[00:07:29] But it's a small bucket. That's the miss, miss. Um. I guess like misunderstanding that there's, like in the industry, they think that everybody wants this high level of customization when in reality people want simplifications. And if you look at every industry, whoever comes in and simplify things without a compromise on the end product.
[00:07:52] And that's really the challenge comes out as a winner. So, so that's what, that's what our mission is. And, and we say, Hey, listen, the end of the day, is there real, this big of a difference between pricings, pricing softwares, and a little bit there is. And number one, we chose wheelhouses, uh, um, sounds like a pay advertising for wheelhouse.
[00:08:13] But we, we as split tested basically every pricing tool that there is on the market and Wheelhouse came out on top. That's just as simple as that. And so we chose them. We did the addition of, Hey, you know, you have to build customer API to work with us.
Outro
[00:08:30] Mark: Luca, appreciate it. Uh, I really look forward to, to tapping into more of AI with you.
[00:08:35] Uh, I'll send you a message out of this cause I've got a WhatsApp group just for AI chat and so love it. I'd love to have you part of it. But for everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in as. Always. This is the podcast that brings you the tools, the tactics, the training, and the confidence to increase your diary bookings and cut down on your Lia on Airbnb and the OTAs.
[00:08:53] We are here three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Doesn't matter whether you listen on Spotify, on Apple, Android, or you like to watch the videos on YouTube or LinkedIn, or any of the social medias, we are here for you. All you need to do is Google Bruce Lee. Go from there and choose your podcast listening of your choice.
[00:09:12] With that being said, we're gonna stop today's recording, Luca. Thank you. Thank you everybody for tuning in. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce
[00:09:18] Luca: Lee podcast. Bruce Lee. Let Bruce Lee cuz it's so hard on the teas loose leaf. Looking up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
Before you leave
Please go and rate, review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify Google Play or Anchor or visit Boostly Hospitality Podcast for the full list of episodes!
Transcript from the Episode
Intro
[00:00:00] Mark: All right, Luca, if you could do me a massive favor, just tell everybody, tell all the viewers, all the listeners, all the watchers, a little bit about Jurny, uh, a little bit about you and how you got this job.
About Luca and Jurny
[00:00:10] Luca: Yeah. Uh, thank you for, for having me. Yes. Like I'm, uh, co-founder in the c e o of Jurny. I, I was born and raised in Italy.
[00:00:20] To just give you a little bit background about myself, moved to, to us specifically la. Um, this is about 2008, a couple of years after I moved there. Um, this is, was like early Airbnb and, uh, um, there was not much done online, uh, uh, in terms of shortterm rentals. And one of the things I realized is that shortterm rentals, especially for luxury villas, was done all through brokers.
[00:00:46] Um, and if you will, search for luxury villas, Online you couldn't find really anything. So I launched the, uh, that's, that's how I got involved in the industry is by, uh, seeing this problem launching a landing page. And literally, this is one of the first company doing Google ads, uh, for, for luxury villas in la.
[00:01:07] That landing page did over 1.2 million in revenue, uh, not to us, uh, on, on the first year. And, um, Yeah, that, that was, uh, in the very, very beginning of the industry. Obviously short leave, like within, uh, within a thousand of 12 months we had some, something like maybe 15 competitors including like one fine state luxury retreat and bunch of other companies.
[00:01:32] But that really hooked me into the industry. And from there, obviously since, since, uh, they became a pretty crowded, pretty quickly I spin off a management company. The idea of, uh, utilizing technology to make that business as scalable as possible. A company with the time was called Gas Wiser, grew that company to 300 units across, uh, six different cities in us.
[00:01:57] And, uh, in the process of doing that, I built a massive amount of frustration in trying to make different technologies working together. Uh, I've been. I've been, uh, a customer of many pmms companies, uh, and, uh, I've been trying to, to make him work, you know, things like access control system alongside with the gas verification system, pricing, uh, um, different type of IOTs and, uh, different type of OTAs or, or work as a, as a single system.
What’s your elevator pitch.
[00:02:29] Mark: What is your, like USP what's your elevator pitch? Because, you know, as we, as we all know, In this game, there's a lot of choice. I mean, there is a, a, a lot of choice out there. So how does Jurny separate itself from everybody else? What's your like, sort of unique selling point? Your, your, you know, your taxi pitch, your elevator pitch?
[00:02:48] Luca: Yeah. I can give you the elevator pitch, but I wanna say something to answer your first question. How we separate ourself from, from, from everybody. And that's why creating an alternative to this, uh, um, very messy, fragmented environment. So, uh, we wanna create a finite environment. We want to create a, a, a full alternative to, to everything else.
[00:03:09] So we say, Hey, instead of you trying to figure out all on your own, we have done that for you. So we took a completely different concept than idea of what, how, how things have been done, right? Like if you go to a pmms, the ID General p m s, the idea is that they connect with as many service providers as possible.
[00:03:30] We want to have as many verticals as possible, but we want to have maximum one or two providers per vertical. And the reason being is because if you have. Pricing. If you have a channel manager and if you have, um, a guest notification system, access control system, IOTs like all these different verticals, and you choose multiple providers per vertical, this system are not gonna work well with one another because the combinations are almost infinite.
[00:04:02] A very technical problem with a very, um, user. And problem, the technicality is that you only understand that when you've tried to build different systems on top of, uh, typical PMSs and you understand that that's not gonna work. And, and it, it will work for, for a percentage of the industry. But I think it's the minority, but it's very much like, um, full customizations.
[00:04:28] But then you have to have very high technical knowledge. Or have a finite product. Uh, a perfect example is a Apple product, right? Uh, apple, that's exactly what they do. And, and that's the reason why a lot of people have iPhones is because it's a finite amount of solutions that you can have. By doing that, those solutions are built specifically for that platform, number one.
[00:04:55] Those solutions work well together. You don't get viruses, you don't get bugs or limited amount of bugs. And so all of those things comes as, as a big advantage. That's exactly what we did. We chose one vendor per category, usually sometimes two. Uh, and we go as deep as possible with those vendors. So for, for instance, for pricing, we chose Wheelhouse, and you'll have a hundred percent of wheelhouse functionality embedded inside of our system.
[00:05:19] Right. Um, and then, uh, we did the same thing with how to host out. Host is fully embedded inside the power system. Now, back in general, we already did, um, we've, uh, charge pt, um, we created our own ai, which we, we'll probably get more, more details on, on the AI side, but that's fully embedded into the system.
[00:05:41] And so as a user, you really need to learn one system, not multiple, and you can upgrade, downgrade, whatever service you want. The frustrating part of what's happening in our industry is, is if you are users today, you wanna come in industry or even if you're a large user. But let's take the example of somebody that just started.
[00:05:58] They have to do weeks, longs of months long of research, research of who they want to use. Once they choose who to use. It's weeks longs of onboarding for your pmms, weeks long of onboarding for any service that you want to use, making sure that it's integrated with pmms, we just removed entirely. All of that for our system is a one click process.
[00:06:20] Uh, we what we are launching on the 16, um, off, uh, off May. It's actually. Of potential when this goes live. Uh, half launched on the 16th is what we call Jurny 2.0. We are making it a one click process. So as long as you have an Airbnb account, you log in on your Airbnb account within our platform. All your information, all your setting, Everything, it gets important inside, inside of our system.
[00:06:47] And upgrading to wheelhouse, auto host, or uh, access control system is as easy as one click on bottom. That's it.
How are you making the decisions?
[00:06:54] Mark: All, or hosts wheelhouse. Fantastic companies, how are you making this decision to go with them? Because obviously in the dynamic pricing world, you've got many partners, obviously auto hosts, many different partners.
[00:07:06] What's the reason for going with, with them? And why not? I guess if you're looking at the elephant in the room, why not open your services up to multiple? Because technically you could be missing out on potential customers there. Yes.
[00:07:19] Luca: Um, I mean, it's, it's true, but we say, Hey, the people that want to have that full level of customization, let them all be in a bucket.
[00:07:29] But it's a small bucket. That's the miss, miss. Um. I guess like misunderstanding that there's, like in the industry, they think that everybody wants this high level of customization when in reality people want simplifications. And if you look at every industry, whoever comes in and simplify things without a compromise on the end product.
[00:07:52] And that's really the challenge comes out as a winner. So, so that's what, that's what our mission is. And, and we say, Hey, listen, the end of the day, is there real, this big of a difference between pricings, pricing softwares, and a little bit there is. And number one, we chose wheelhouses, uh, um, sounds like a pay advertising for wheelhouse.
[00:08:13] But we, we as split tested basically every pricing tool that there is on the market and Wheelhouse came out on top. That's just as simple as that. And so we chose them. We did the addition of, Hey, you know, you have to build customer API to work with us.
Outro
[00:08:30] Mark: Luca, appreciate it. Uh, I really look forward to, to tapping into more of AI with you.
[00:08:35] Uh, I'll send you a message out of this cause I've got a WhatsApp group just for AI chat and so love it. I'd love to have you part of it. But for everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in as. Always. This is the podcast that brings you the tools, the tactics, the training, and the confidence to increase your diary bookings and cut down on your Lia on Airbnb and the OTAs.
[00:08:53] We are here three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Doesn't matter whether you listen on Spotify, on Apple, Android, or you like to watch the videos on YouTube or LinkedIn, or any of the social medias, we are here for you. All you need to do is Google Bruce Lee. Go from there and choose your podcast listening of your choice.
[00:09:12] With that being said, we're gonna stop today's recording, Luca. Thank you. Thank you everybody for tuning in. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce
[00:09:18] Luca: Lee podcast. Bruce Lee. Let Bruce Lee cuz it's so hard on the teas loose leaf. Looking up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
Before you leave
Please go and rate, review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify Google Play or Anchor or visit Boostly Hospitality Podcast for the full list of episodes!