Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to the new episode of the Boothley podcast today. I am really excited because we've got a very special guest.

And often I see the question in Facebook groups all the time of what PMS should I go for or is there software that can help me automate and help me with guest communication when I'm taking direct bookings and today we're going to dive into that subject.

So settle in for next 20 or 30 minutes and and enjoy this one. So if this is your first time here, you're listening to the Boothley podcast, the podcast that gives host the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly, the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings today.

I've got Andrew Shaw. He's the director of product there and I'm excited to to dive in today. So Andrew, take it away. Please introduce what is hospitable and what does it do?

So we're basically, I mean, we don't even like to call ourselves a PMS really were I guess the channel manager PMS sure we started out mainly focused on messaging. So I think that's what people know us for best is the automated messaging. So we're pretty good at that.

And then we do kind of everything else in that space. So operations smart lock automation. We say our mission is to gift host their time back. So basically that is our our founding ethos is to do everything we can to give host our time back.

And then yeah, I've been focused mainly on on the direct booking side like you mentioned. So we've got kind of unique offering there. And then we've got some kind of secret projects cooking in the works as well.

That's cool. That's cool. And just to give people an idea of what those services are as I know so many people listening understand, you know what a PMS is and how it works. But there's so many people again who just don't understand that. So how does it really help the host what kind of aspects does hospitable cover.

Yeah. So I'm like the channel management side. We're working with Airbnb booking.com VRBO. So we kind of help you just, you know, maintain your operations across different platforms. So that's, you know, it's some of it is content management. Some of it is, you know, I want to have the same, you know, set up my greetings, my, my answers to frequently asked questions all in one place and not repeat those across, you know, every, every different platform.

Yeah, I think I think where we get unique in that aspect is we're targeted at this smaller scale host generally and we have hosts with over 1000 properties.

But our secret sauce is mainly focusing on host that are just getting started out on their journey. They may never become a property manager. I think our average host size like to go and have free properties.

Most of them are owners, not operators in that sense. And so we make different decisions. We try and be unique. We try and do things just a little bit differently in the industry, which I think generally focuses on the property manager side.

So we do, yeah, little touches. I think we're very easy to use and we have to be affordable at that range. So I think a lot of a lot of host appreciate that we, we start out pretty affordable.

And often when I see people in groups, their question is, what is the best PMS and they're always a question that worries me because everyone just puts down what they use and of course some of these people might be property managers of hundreds of properties, which, you know, they've got some of the software's which cost a lot, whereas if you're a host and you just think about diving into software or you've got a few properties.

Then this is a great way to get started, isn't it? And boostly of partnered with you guys for the website side of things, which works really well, doesn't it? With you guys having the all the guest messaging, the kind of managing the book inside and then the website, which can come through the boostly website, which is cool.

What would you say has been the biggest win so far for hospitable for hospitable as a company?

Well, we've had a pretty long history. I've only been here for just actually just coming up a few days away from from a year with hospitable myself.

And yeah, thinking back through the history of it, one of the recent ones, I don't know if I can speak for the entire history.

We did, despite what you might see on LinkedIn from other people, we have the first chat GPT implementation in the industry.

So that is something where I think we were early on AI even before the chat GPT wave and did a really good job automating messaging.

And now we have something that was just wildly popular with with our host is you can just reply in the inbox on any channel and we'll generate it.

And I think over 50% of those messages gets sent without any editing. And that was just like the V1 for us of AI in the inbox.

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