Simpson, the wonderful Mr. Boostley UK, man, we appreciate you taking time to come and talk to the students at Alpha Host Academy.

For those that don't know you, Mark, give us a quick backstory. Who are you? What are you about?

Yeah, what this tell us was going on.

Yeah, and now thank you very much for having me. So as you can tell, my accent is a little bit different. I'm from United Kingdom.

I grew up in in hospitality, a class all of us as hospitality. In the age of four, my parents who've got a 200 acre farmstay property.

They transformed the bar knocked it down, put four bedrooms in and they created one of the first farmstay bed and breakfast in our area.

Definitely first mover syndrome. It was amazing. This is like in the 90s. This is before the internet, social media, Airbnb.

So they had to really rely on word of mouth, and they had to rely on newspaper ads, but it was really popular because it was in the middle of nowhere, lovely views, ideal for families.

And I was just so used to every single day, growing up and having strangers in my kitchen.

And what does the hairs get serial? They'll be strangers there and it's like, okay, this is crazy. But you know, growing up four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, I would just be just helping where I can change beds, make breakfast before going off to school and all that jazz.

And in my teenage years, I would work at weekends in a pocket money. And then in very early 2000s, I really wanted to be a soccer player. I'm a big Liverpool fan book. The problem is I'm crapper playing football.

So I very quickly didn't work out. So I fell into soccer coaching and then that's where I got an amazing opportunity to travel around the States. So for six years, I would come to America for six months, coach soccer, go back to the UK for six months and doing that on a loop eventually ended up settling back into the family business, me and my wife.

We moved back to help my family retire. We wanted to get out the game. They've been doing it for 25 years at this point. And we wanted to help them retire. We want to get it all online. And I was so used to social media by then. I was so used to like the world of the internet and whatnot.

So I just put all of that practice into this business. And it was, it was 80% bookings were direct. So it was like really direct book and heavy, not very much OTA lead.

And for the sort of five, six years before we retired and we were just so used to doing it. Our Facebook page was popping. We were top free ranked on TripAdvisor.

I was like, this is amazing. And what I didn't, I was so stuck in my bubble. I wasn't speaking to other hosts. And I didn't really realize in 2016 that what we were doing, no one else was doing.

Because they didn't really know about social media. They didn't know about websites or SEO or anything that jazz. So I started a little Facebook group called the hospitality community. And it's still around to this day. And that group was all about showing up every day, showing hosts how to do social media, how to do email website design and all of that jazz. And it got really popular.

I started as my little town in the, in the UK. And before I knew it, we'd people from America joining people from Germany, joining Australia. And it grew and grew and grew to a point where my wife was saying to me, this in your answering questions every day, you should really like think about turning this into a business. And that's where Boothley was born. It shot for boost hospitality.

And in the last six years, it's, it's grown to be this, this huge guy of other of a business. It's a worldwide brand. We've got 2400 clients website design. We do diary book in training. I wrote a book, which is which is the book that I play book. And yeah, it's, it's amazing. I love it. I got to speak to people every single day about diary bookings and showing people how to not have to rely on Airbnb or verbal to bring in bringing their revenue.

So Mark, can we touch on that a little bit? So you talk about relying on Airbnb and burbo for all of your revenue, which before we met you as was the situation that we're in, obviously, we just finished off our direct booking website with you. I think we'll share a little bit later. But what, what are some of the

disadvantages or risks that you see with not having a direct booking website built out for your business?

Yeah, no, it's, it's a great question. And I think the more that I speak to more people in America and Canada, it's the more the conversations, the first questions that we have is about OTA reliance in the UK and Europe.

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