Mike Bayer
Welcome to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast produced by the Vacation rental formula Business School and the creators of the THRIVE Training System. THRIVE is the key to harnessing the power of your property management team by creating a culture based on trust, hospitality and responsibility, all while fostering a vibrant work environment. If you want to find out how you can have your team powered by hot dogs - yes, I said hot dogs - then click on the link in the description of this episode to attend one of our weekly live information sessions. You have just found the way to make your business THRIVE.

Mike Bayer
This episode is brought to you by the kind sponsorship from Lodgify. Lodgify is your all-in-one platform for effortlessly managing and scaling your short-term rental business. From easily publishing your own bookable website to managing all your day-to-day tasks in one place. Whether you're a seasoned host or just starting out, Lodgify simplifies your journey to building a thriving vacation rental business. With Lodgify, not only can you design a stunning website in minutes, but you can accept direct bookings and payments, sync your reservations across all major booking sites, and automate your workflows with tech driven tools that help you save time while increasing your revenue. It's the smart way to grow your business, keep your guests satisfied and enjoy what you do. So don't wait to elevate your vacation rental business. Click on the link in the description of this episode and visit Lodgify.com today to start your free trial.

Mike Bayer
Now let's not delay, lets get started. Heres your host Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
Today's guest is on a mission to solve industry-wide problems that few others are prepared to trial. She says it's for good reason, because they aren't easy. Undeterred, or just belligerent, Rachel rolls her sleeves up, weighs stinky bins, asks a lot of questions, raises funds and collaborates across the industry to create change. It's a great story.

Heather Bayer
This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business a success.

Heather Bayer
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, this is your host Heather Bayer and as ever, I am super delighted to be back with you once again. And if you are listening to this on the day of publication, I'm packing my bags and heading to Banff, Alberta for the CanStays Rental Alliance Summit. It's going to be the most unique conference I've ever attended, firstly because it's the first to showcase Canadian content with a lot of Canadian speakers, and secondly because of the number of politicians and decision makers who are attending.

Heather Bayer
If you've been around at events over the last six months, you will have come across Catherine Ratcliffe, the mind behind the CanStays Alliance. She's a networking powerhouse and I would like to bet that anyone who's attended a conference, summit or spends any time on LinkedIn has come across her. I'll be meeting up with her and others at the forefront of our industry, including Justin Ford, Steve Trover, Jen Boyles, Ashley Ching, Bart Sobies and so many others. Fortunately, there will be a podcasting booth where I'll be recording next week's episode and hopefully a few more.

Heather Bayer
So for today, I'm speaking with someone else at the forefront of our business in the area of sustainability, although we're encouraged not to use that word. And as you'll listen, you'll hear more and understand why.

Heather Bayer
In 2011, with a very small baby in tow, Rachel Parsons started renting her cottage. She ran it for four years before she set up New Forest Escapes, partly with the goal of encouraging more people to holiday in the UK, thus reducing travel emissions and making UK holidays an alternative to overseas family travel. She has an ongoing love affair with trees, horses and bicycles, and loves to develop the company brand and generally help steer the tiller. So let's go on over to this great conversation with Rachel Parsons of New Forest Escapes.

Heather Bayer
So I am so delighted to have with me today Rachel Parsons from New Forest Escapes in England. It's always lovely to hear that English accent again when I get onto a recording session. So welcome. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me.

Rachel Parsons
Oh, you're so welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to hear about the project.

Heather Bayer
So I heard about you through some friends of mine, through Vanessa de Sousa Lage, through Bob Garner, and they both said I needed to check your website out and to do a bit of research, which I did through LinkedIn and found a lot of information about you, spent loads of time on your website and really enjoyed reading about you. And I thought all my audience needs to learn more about what you're doing, particularly with sustainability and making this more open to your owners, to your guests, and how it's impacting your community as well. So let's kick off with just asking you to tell us how you found your way into this business. I ask this question of everybody I interview. I always love the stories and I'm suren yours is going to be super interesting, too.

Rachel Parsons
Well, okay. I've tried to make this reasonably quick. I'm the third generation to do tourism, and I remember milking our cow for guests to make tea at about, probably, four years old. Yeah, Lucy the cow and yeah, absolutely, it was slave labor. My parents thoroughly believed in slave labor and they were very capable of making that happen. And so service for us was a real way of enjoying time with people and forming connections. And I think when that's a part of the DNA of your childhood, that idea of supporting people and sometimes allowing them to come and help milk the cow as well, that nature connection was very profoundly obvious to me.

Rachel Parsons
I don't remember when, as a very small child, but I do remember having children come down from London from disadvantaged backgrounds and living with us over the summer and sharing everything that we had and feeling so lucky that we had what we had, but never really realizing it until that experience. And that was a definite motivator for me. So that when I went into my career choices, I chose costume design, actually, and fine art, but hated it within about six months and ended up leaving and going to Australia and working on a farm and in a horse adventure tourism safari place, up in the mountains and farming all winter and then looking after guests all summer in very, very remote, wild mountain environments.

Rachel Parsons
And that connection piece, the trust when people are out of their comfort zone and they need to trust others who are leaders in that position. And the reinforcing nature of the wilds of a remote environment is actually very trusting and it's a really special relationship, like a really good guide. You know what you have, you trust them, you need them there. And that was another profound experience for me because as we were traveling through some of those remote and fragile environments, there were wildfires, there was flooding, there was mass drought. And the climate story for me began to be very real and obvious. And I helped build the brand. I then worked. I split up with my boyfriend at the time there after about five years. And that brand had become quite significant in Australia. We did a lot of film work, all sorts of work into supporting media and film industries within the tourism side of the business, including hosting randomly, you know, sort of 'I'm a celebrity, get me out of here' type stuff over there in Australia, up in the bush. It was quite weird. It wasn't that TV show, but it was one very similar.

Rachel Parsons
Anyway, after that, I split up with my partner at the time and I moved to New Zealand and spent quite a bit of time traveling New Zealand and working as a travel writer over there in first New Zealand, then back to Australia and then to South Africa. And traveling around I think I saw about four places a day, stayed in the fifth and often they were really quite remote and extraordinary. Diamond mines on the west coast of the Namibian/South African border, way out in the desert in some of these places, or coastal rainforests tucked away in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand. Amazing experiences. And because they were all quite remote and quite special and usually hosted by people who really knew what they were doing, this wasn't just city tourism where you can just go, oh, we'll just buy energy off the grid. Every single property was, I was like, Wow. Oh my. Wow, that's amazing. What are you doing here? This is incredible. So I just had this library of information soaking into my brain.

Heather Bayer
That's an amazing story.

Rachel Parsons
It was. It was a jobless job, properly, I call it a jobless job. Yeah, yeah, it was amazing. I think I was paid 700 pounds a month or something like that. And I was so happy, poor and happy. Oh my God, I couldn't believe I was being paid to do all those jobs out on game ranches, all sorts of things. So I built this library of information and visions and experiences and feelings in my head as I was traveling around.

Rachel Parsons
When I came back to the UK, I got a job. I didn't have a job. You know, you can't be a travel writer in the UK unless you want to commit to living in London. That wasn't my thing. So I started volunteering for a charity in London who were educating children on climate change. And it was a highly proactive, brilliant polymath guy called Dr Hugh Montgomery, who wrote a children's book about an allegory of a planet that was dying and how people saved the current planet we were on because they had this previous warning experience and we were putting this into schools and it was very successful.

Rachel Parsons
He was a London leader, pre-London Olympic Games, very, very well connected. And I enabled the project, through my volunteering, to become financially viable and learned a lot about the climate on the way and the severity of the situation, I got pretty severe climate anxiety myself, or eco-anxiety, feelings of chronic depression, overwhelm, guilt, anger, frustration, all of those things. And this was back in 2004/5, 2004 probably, so quite a while. 20 years ago, in terms of climate is a long time. Not a lot was going on, there was a lot of bad behavior from the fossil fuel companies, who were really preventing sensible technology from taking off. The kind of tech that we now see as normal, like, renewable energy as it is now. And so I was in a pretty bad place, but doing this amazing project.

Rachel Parsons
And then, bizarrely, I got a phone call and someone said, Prince Charles is doing this project on rainforest awareness before the next COP Conference [COP stands for Convention of the Parties and it refers to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference]. This was COP15 [in Copenhagen], and will you come and run the project? I was like, Oh my God. Hang on, let me just think. Hang on. Let me consult my people. Yes, I'll do it. I seem to have a clear diary all of a sudden.

Rachel Parsons
So I said yes, and then embarked on this crazy experience of this basically kind of country girl let loose on taking action on my eco-anxiety. I used to pick up the phone and say, Hello, it's Rachel Parsons calling from Prince Charles's office. It's the Rainforest SOS Project. Please, could we.... And the next thing that I added in would be answered, Yes, absolutely. Guaranteed. And it was amazing. It was an amazing project. We engaged with something like 620,000 young people and families and schools, much of that global. And it ran alongside a very large brand activation, which actually The Queen got involved with on an animated frog that was sitting on her shoulder. And a lot of people, you know, Daniel Craig and the who's who of celebrities, some of which I was involved in, a lot of which I wasn't; very highly creative. You know, frogs on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, and all sorts of frogs in schools. Frogs everywhere. Really interesting. Anyway, that finished. I got pregnant. The campaign was shut down, and I thought, God, what am I going to do now?

Rachel Parsons
So I did a little bit more work on social innovation and sustainability, engaging people on ethical issues, justice, environment, history, human rights, diversity, equality across Europe, the north/south divide in the European states. I did some work from the European Union. Then I got pregnant. Then I moved out of London and I went, oh, God, what am I going to do now? And I thought, oh, you know, we've got this house, well, let's rent it out.

Rachel Parsons
And I just had a library of stuff in my head. And because I'd had this highly empowering five years working, four years working in environment, I just went, right, I don't care that no one else is doing this stuff, I am bloody well going to do it. I am sure that there's a market, because I know I'm not the only person feeling eco-anxiety. And I'm going to set it up in such a way that it's so much fun to live a good environmental life that people aren't even going to know sometimes that it's happening. And if they do want to know, and where it's obvious, it will be so joyful that they will have a glorious experience.

Rachel Parsons
So I set this house up and started renting it. I had the first three bookings in something like 24 hours, and I didn't even have a bank account. I had to literally panic and run. They were trying to pay me. I was like, hang on a second. Can you just call back in an hour's time? Because I don't have a.... Yeah, I'm just gonna go to the bank. So I went and got a bank account, and that was it. And the business was turning over the same on the first year that it did, I think, six years later, it was absolutely all give or take. It was absolutely a hit right from day one.

Rachel Parsons
It was really interesting. And we were charging people for utilities. Like, this wasn't just fluffy, this was like, okay, put your money where your mouth is people. This is what it means to come and stay in this house. Really open, really honest, really credible. And the joyful stuff was everything from providing the basics, like a cot and a high chair, but also providing the fun stuff, like a full fancy dress kit for most ages, actually, hanging up when people arrive.

Rachel Parsons
And including that in the marketing, vegetables and herbs, etc, that you could pick in the garden. A bird table that was so close to the kitchen window that the birds got totally desensitized to people. So it was like looking out into a British David Attenborough documentary every time you boiled the kettle. It was amazing. Just really simple. So it didn't cost any more money to change the place of the bird table, but the interaction that the people had was fundamentally extraordinary compared to, oh, there's a bird table over there. That's it. Because they were interacting.

Heather Bayer
I love, just love that. Yeah. Trying to get it across. This is a conversation I've had with Vanessa de Sousa Lage about things that people can do, because people often think, well, this means solar panels, and it means changing this. That's going to cost so much money. And we say, you can do things that don't cost you anything, and that is a perfect example.

Rachel Parsons
Oh, there's so many things that we did like that. And essentially, over the last eleven years, I've experimented on people to see what works and what didn't work in that house, because some of things didn't work. They were totally useless. And other things were brilliant and free and lasted the duration. And so that journey was extremely valuable for setting up the approach of the business. And I think if I wasn't quite as gung-ho and, you know, the innovation side of me, having worked in such a big media agency and being absolutely given the keys to the cabinet and just gone, right, do what you like, I think I probably wouldn't have been so confident. But looking back now, all of those things are so replicable by other people, and I really hope that there's quite a lot of the projects I'm doing now are really just open source sharing projects that say, Yeah, here, this is what we learned. Take it, run with it, please, please copy it. We want to turn the entire world into bird watchers. Go for it. Like, you cannot, you know, you can't lose out with that approach.

Heather Bayer
And $18.1 billion is the market for bird watching....

Rachel Parsons
Is it!?

Heather Bayer
....in the world? It's an $18.1 billion market.

Rachel Parsons
Yeah, they're pretty cool creatures. They're extraordinary.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I've been talking about niche marketing for a while and picked up on bird watching because after COVID, it became so, so much more popular during COVID and then a lot of people just didn't stop after it finished. So we've often said, you know, you just make your property a haven for birds and for people who want to watch them.

Rachel Parsons
Yep, and it's so true.

Heather Bayer
It will boost your business.

Rachel Parsons
Yeah, absolutely. Do you have the Merlin Bird app?

Heather Bayer
No, I don't.

Rachel Parsons
It's totally joyful and brilliant. It's free. Download it to your phone, preferably before you go out on a walk, and then as you walk around you press the record button. And by sound, not by visuals, it records what's around you and it flashes up on your screen to say, this bird is near you and it looks like this. It's so beautiful.

Rachel Parsons
So recently, a couple of the houses that we've got, I've been trying to encourage the girls, I'm not sure if they've done it quite yet, but hopefully they will have done by the end of the week, to market a birdsong bath, literally a bath in birdsong, because the dawn chorus and the evening chorus is so extraordinary and at such a high decibel pitch. They're loud when you're really quiet. And if you've got nothing else, there are no other noises going on, you can really listen in. And having this app, technology bridges so many barriers for people, because it makes it personal and relevant to them now. And having those experiences, to know that there's a firecrest or a Jenny Wren, or even the most basic of birds, because they can actually identify them then.

Rachel Parsons
So we really encourage people to have this deep time in nature, to really take time to slow down and stop, to let themselves be filled up. You know, social prescribing in Britain now, certainly in Japan, Shinrin Yoku is serious and effective. And we have to, all of us, manage our stress and manage our work life balances. And these three things are absolutely the right way to do it. We don't need to spend more money, we just need to stop and take time. And for me, that's what holiday is about.

Heather Bayer
I love that you say that because it really shows that, you know, sustainability is not about all those things I mentioned. It's not just about recycling. And I think it's getting across and that there's so many different things that are involved that come under that big umbrella. I was talking to somebody recently just about that term sustainability, which can be a bit scary and off putting and coming up with different names for it.

Rachel Parsons
It's not a friendly word. I try and break it down. So a brilliant man called Xavier Font, who teaches at Surrey University, is head of authentic marketing communications there. He did a competitor-wide training that I organized the year before last in New Forest Escapes. And we pulled together 30 people from directly competing businesses across the nation to say, right, we've all got the same problem, let's work together on this. And he did this wonderful talk for us, which he delivers quite regularly. And you can find him on YouTube if you dig a bit. And he says, don't mention the 'S' word. Right. Don't mention sustainability to your guests. Specifically to suppliers or compliance or a page on your website, yeah, absolutely critical. And working with people like Vanessa to get certification that fast tracks that trust point for people, 100% do it because, partly because imagery in our industry around sustainability is fiendishly tricky.  If you look on Instagram - it's quite an interesting little test this - Google..... sorry, put on Instagram eco-kitchens and then just put in luxury kitchens. Right. The only difference that you will get is pot plants. It's depressing, right?

Rachel Parsons
Pot plants. It's hilarious because what else are you supposed to take photos of? How can you communicate apart from a little bit more wood? But actually, wood's not necessarily eco-friendly or relevant to some circular product uses at times. It's just not. It could be that what they had is actually better then they should keep it. Anyway, so imagery is an issue. So don't mention the 'S' word is a really useful framework to say, okay, do not mention sustainability. Talk about pristine environments, clean air, clean water, access to nature, connection with nature. Talk about diversity, inclusion, communities, good tasty food, local food. No one is going to complain about any of that list. Literally nobody, even the most hardcore redneck, you know, whatever, they're still going to want clean air and beautiful places. You're just not going to fall out with people on that. So when you're communicating this stuff, break it down into those things.

Heather Bayer
Such a great message. Such a great message. Rachel, how many properties do you have under management?

Rachel Parsons
Right now there are 50 plus. So we have some interesting challenges here because we're in a National Park, we're a very, very small company. We boundaried ourselves with our name, possibly not the smartest thing to do. And so we're a very small area, and because we offer such a high-end luxury service, we don't want to grow out of that boundary. And that's very much a decision from the team and from Jane, who is my business partner. And really, she runs the company now. It's a lifestyle business in the sense that we are growing very organically. We're not looking for investment. It does okay and we do okay by people, and that's fine. So growth outcomes are really around sharing IP [IntellectualProperty] rather than taking over the world in terms of more income. Yeah.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. I wanted to talk about your B Corp Registration Certification, because I didn't. I'd never. I'd not heard of B Corp.

Rachel Parsons
Okay.

Heather Bayer
Until I began looking into what you were doing. So I'm sure that's a really interesting thing to know. So could you just briefly tell us what a B Corp company actually is, what it means, and what you had to do to get that certification? Because I understand it doesn't come easy.

Rachel Parsons
Yeah, it doesn't. Well, you say that, but it's tricky, but it's not impossible. Not at all. It's not impossible. And increasingly more and more property management companies are certifying. But it does take a little time because it is granular and it is. It's credible because it's granular and it's rigorous. B Corp stands for B Corporation. Corporations that stand for business for good, essentially. So they are certified across areas of their business that are, in their simplest form, environmental, social, and governance (ESG), which is a phrase that people will probably hear of more often. What they do is they break those down further into five sections currently, it's going to change in a couple of years time to be more rigorous that they absolutely stand out with their stall there to say as things get more progressive in this industry, we will make the certification tougher to help people do better. And so the current sections at the moment are environment, workers or team, community, customers, and .......... governance! Of course. How could I forget governance?

Rachel Parsons
So it's everything from how the business is organized, set up and run, including its legal structure. So as a B Corp, you have to change your legal structure to say that you will be mindful and make business decisions based on the consequences of your actions for environment and social, not just for profit.

Rachel Parsons
So it goes from being shareholder primacy - we're just here to make money, to stakeholder for the entire stakeholder group of the company, which might be what will definitely be customers, suppliers, team, but also the silent stakeholders, which would be nature, water, air. And so all of those are included and considered within the business decision making outcomes. And you have some companies who go even so far as actually putting in, on the board, a representative of nature. That's only just starting to happen. But that's for companies who are already really tapping into an ethical marketplace and want to basically gain more competitive awareness, more moral integrity. Yeah, it's good. It's really good. And it's incredibly powerful network of businesses. These businesses essentially unite to fight climate change first and make a profit second, because they inherently recognize that if they do not exist, they cannot make a profit. It's not rocket science that. Right? They have to change. And the brand has become more and more and more recognized, more so in developed countries, but absolutely. Ben and Jerry's, Patagonia, parts of some larger organizations. I think Fever Tree is, lots of FMCG [Fast-Moving Consumer Goods], food based companies. Increasingly in tourism you'll have organizations like Intrepid Travel, Exodus [Travels], there's so many, Pura Aventura, Much Better Adventures, Sawday's in the UK. I can't actually name so many of your American ones, but actually you do have the bigger chunk of B Corps over there in travel than we do here.

Heather Bayer
I'll be putting links to all of this on the Show Notes. So if anybody wants to go find out more, go to the Show Notes and you'll be able to see and learn a little more about this.

Heather Bayer
Your commitment to your certification means writing an impact report each year. I read one of the impact reports that's on your website. It's really interesting. What does it actually mean for your company to do that each year? Because it shows you're being held accountable.

Rachel Parsons
Yeah, totally. Yeah. We're really setting our stall out. We're basically saying, this is what we said we would do, and this is how we did. And it's not always great. You know, sometimes we fail. Absolutely. And that failure means, you know, we didn't achieve whatever it was we were trying to aim for, and that's okay. We tried. Sometimes there are really good reasons for why we didn't get something or any company wouldn't achieve something. For example, it was made normalized by the entire industry through regulation or the problem went away because the suppliers changed track or the millions of reasons for us. We tried. What was the one thing we tried to do that we've actually given up on? We tried to run an ecotourism program in a National Park in Britain. I can tell you it was a total waste of time. I gave up because it just wasn't possible. There was so much red tape around protection of the National Park. They do not want people coming in here and trying to do anything useful, because it totally goes against their management policies. So I U-turned and we actually ditched that. And that's fine. That is a sensible thing for us to do as a business.

Rachel Parsons
Instead, we try and provide free litter picking stuff for every house. And if people want to go and make a difference, they can do it themselves in a really passive but positive volunteering, intergenerational family role-modeling way. You know, this is what you do, kids. If you want to put something back, you want to feel better about the community, here it is. It's all free. It's for you. We don't ask people to do it, we just give it to them.

Rachel Parsons
Yeah, so impact report wise that would have gone in there as, this is what we tried to do, this is what we didn't do, this is what we did instead. And we're parking that and we're not moving on. Across the rest of the projects that we run, including the impact reports for B Corp, are quite specific in that they have to follow the structure of, this is what we did for governance and workers and community, etc etc. All of those different, not silos but sections. And then we are accountable to that. We then look at what we're going to do next year and how we're going to do it.

Rachel Parsons
And so those are again accountable, so it's almost like a two-year living strategy. Actually, I find that quite limiting. We need a much longer-term strategy for what we're doing in terms of our positive impact and our negative impact action plans. So we actually have a Net Zero 2045 and 2035 strategy. Those two are different because we have the impacts that we can control directly within our business and we have the impacts that we can't control directly but we can influence. And that's a longer timeframe because you can't force people to do it.

Heather Bayer
Talking about forcing people, how do you get your owners on board with helping you meet goals and commitments? I mean, I, from my property manager perspective, I would have thought that it all comes down in fact, to how you select your owners in the first place. And I'm assuming you're not going to select owners who have no interest in what you're doing.

Rachel Parsons
That's a really good question. We don't actually do that at all. Even if they had no interest at all. I think we see it as an opportunity, not an avoidance. Yeah, that's a really good question. Okay, so what do we do? We take responsibility for educating, so we recognize that we are super influencers and that is part of our job. You know, when you work in tourism, your job is to create happiness for people. I always consider myself a happiness coach, I suppose in my heart of hearts, and tourism for me is just a method of doing that. And in creating happiness, you also have to create the absence of unhappiness. You don't want unconvenient holidays or uneasy holidays or unsafe holidays or uncalm holidays or unrelaxed holidays. And so why would we have unsustainable holidays? Because, and there's a very specific reason that I link that, is because in the UK in the census of November 2022, that every house has to by law answer this. And if you don't, they send a bloke round to your house to go, here's a clipboard. What do you want to say about this, that and the other.

Rachel Parsons
It's like, seriously, you have to answer it, otherwise you're going to get a slap. And a fine. 75% of people in Britain, adults and 83% of young people, have medium to severe concerns about the environment. So actually dealing with this issue at the holiday level, where people are supposed to be most happy, is a severe and critical need for our company to do that. We absolutely have to do that. Otherwise we will not get, and you, mister owner, misses owner, you will not get good customer satisfaction or customer loyalty. They might stay with you once, but they probably won't stay again because if they get there and they see masses of plastic everywhere, tiny little plastic bottles in the bathroom. 100% they're going to be triggered and they're going to go, Well, these people obviously don't care. We're not coming back here. It's going to have to be so cheap and so extraordinary for them to come back. The owner's probably not going to be making any money in the first place. So sustainability is just good business. It's nothing different. It's just good business. And our job is to explain that to the owners in the way that they can do the free things, do the cheaper things that make a big impact.

Rachel Parsons
Avoid the dramas like chemical firelighters, toilet roll that hasn't got the right logos on it. And I don't just mean logos, I mean FSC (Forestry Stewardship Commission [actually Council]). I think that's right. The FSC logo that we have here in Europe, you'll have your own over there. There are some things that we really would say, like, you absolutely do not do that. That's a disaster. And then there are the more expensive there in the medium and the expensive categories, which would be renewable energy on your house, micro-generation. But the good thing to do would be the medium, or probably not even medium. The slightly more expensive thing to do would be to use renewable energy tariffs. So we try and break those things down for people and make them really easy. And there's quite a lot of nuance in that. So you could just go, Go to the whatever website and find all the information out yourself, owner and that's our super influencing. And we're leaving you at that, like it's all your problem, go and do it. I don't mean that. I don't mean that. I mean everything from.....

Rachel Parsons
So we run..... After we certified B Corp, I created 13 projects that were quite chewy to create. It took me about 18 months, I suppose, to really create them. And some of them are not finished yet. And some of them are actually still kind of getting up and running because they're quite big. But it took us that time, and there's 13 of them and we're looking at everything from cleaner cleaning. Right. Why is cleaner cleaning important? Because it's cheaper for the owner. Buy in bulk, change your cleaning materials, it's less toxic. So it's not going to damage your local stream that's running out of the back of your house. If you're on a main system that goes to a mains waste handling facility, it's not going to create so much waste there. It's better for your cleaners? Who has a high turnover on cleaners when they're. Yeah, everyone's putting their hand up. Who's listening? Everyone. It's hard work. Cleaners can come and go. One of the reasons is because, guess what? At the end of the day they've got a really bad headache and they don't like that. And they have a headache frequently. They've got headaches because of the endocrine disrupting chemicals that are in the cleaning products. These things are disgusting.

Rachel Parsons
They are absolutely horrific. Would you want to be a full time cleaner in a small environment like a shower or a bathroom? Often they're not very well ventilated or they, or they can't be because you're going to let all the heat out of the house and in the winter periods, like, it's not. It's not good for houses to do that. And it puts owners energy bills up so they don't want the house always completely opened up when they're cleaning. So these poor people have got eczema on their hands and headaches. That's a horrible thing to ask someone to do. So on the basis of cost, environment, health. Health to the cleaner, health to the guests. House doesn't stink when they walk in of chemicals. I think that's enough. I thought there was another one. All of those things are really important to address and the only downside is you have to buy them in bulk and you have to store them somewhere a little bit more considered. That's it. There's no other downside. They're just as effective.

Rachel Parsons
So one of the project that we did to show you the depth of the project was that we interviewed all the cleaners. We tested about 25 products over a three month period. We tested them on our staff, we then tested them in the houses on cleaning days. We then videoed the cleaners talking about what worked for them and what didn't. We then created a PDF for the owners. We also did a whole load of pricing relevancies and comparisons and we also counted the number of plastic bottles that were being thrown out in a year. It was just one product, could be 30 of one bottle. One bottle was disgusting across 50 houses. I just was. I felt. I felt sick. And a huge amount of people coming back to that eco-anxiety statistic of 73% and 83%, adults and children, adults and young people, we're triggering that every single time we're asking people to clean or throw the rubbish away or the guests opening the cupboard and going, oh my God, they use that stuff, that's gross. Look, what's so much better in the supermarkets? Why are these people such cheapskates? Like, why are they looking after us? Why aren't they looking after the house? What's wrong with them? Why? They hate the planet. Not coming back here again.

Heather Bayer
I always remember talking to an owner once and because I'd walked into their property to go and assess it and I was hit by the smell of disinfectant.

Rachel Parsons
Yeah, yeah.

Heather Bayer
And, you know, a nasty, nasty smell.

Rachel Parsons
It just stinks.

Heather Bayer
I just said, We need to change that. And she said, oh, no, I like it when my guests walk in because they know it's just been cleaned.

Rachel Parsons
Wow. Yeah. There's modern ways of doing that. You can say to them, it's just been cleaned.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. I'm going to take a short break just now to hear about our sponsor. We're going to be right back with more from this great interview in just a few moments.

Heather Bayer
So it's great to welcome back Dennis Klett from Lodgify once again. And today he's going to tell you how you can set up a property on Lodgify. Over to you, Dennis.

Dennis Klett
Yeah, it's super easy to create a rental in Lodgify, either if you're already on Airbnb, you can just import it with a click of a button. We retrieve all the data from Airbnb directly into Lodgify to set up your rental. If you don't have that yet, you can just create a rental from scratch using our step-by-step guided process, which is very similar to creating a listing on any other booking platform. Once you have done that, we automatically generate a website for you. So you have an up and running website right after you created those listings and you can customize your websites and then proceed to publishing it.

Dennis Klett
The last thing you need is to select the payment gateway, which is very easy to sign up with, companies like Stripe or PayPal that you can easily connect to Lodgify. And the last step would be to get you connected to your booking platforms. And there we have a free onboarding service where one of our customer agents will handhold you to get you connected and ensure that everything is up and running and meets your expectations.

Heather Bayer
That sounds super easy, Dennis. Thank you so much for that.

Heather Bayer
So let's just move the conversation over to guests then. You know, how do you educate guests on becoming greener on vacation? Being a little greener? What do you educate them with?

Rachel Parsons
Yeah, good communication and good design. So my belief, and I would say the belief of the 30 or so companies that are united in the Travel by B Corp Group that I'm quite involved in, that you have to design it in for them. So you design the solution so that it doesn't make them feel upset, bad, negative, unhappy in any way. You really try and design in the solution, whether it be green energy or solar panels or food they can pick at the back door or the birds. Right? The bird idea with it right up by the window. Or eco firelighters, or eco cleaning products, or smart meters in homes or EV chargers. You know, the list goes on forever. Or funny signage, for example. Stuff that makes them feel joyful. All of those things are design issues and the owner and the agency need to take responsibility for them. That is not the guests remit, they are buying, at lot of money, your experience, you have needed to have done this. Okay?

Rachel Parsons
The guests job is to do the thing that you're asking them to do, that your design is so set up to do. It's easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing. Yeah? So guests are on holiday. I know that when I am at the weekend, I will have a slightly larger glass of wine and I eat more chocolate and more cake at the weekends. Right? I am a human being and I work in sustainability and I still will treat myself at the weekends. We are naturally selfish beings. That's how we've got to where we've got. That's why we're the primary being in the world right now. We will behave in such a way that we look after ourselves first and our children and our families. There's nothing wrong with that. But we need to accept that in tourism, we cannot blame the guest for doing the wrong thing because 99% of the time the owner has not set the system up and therefore the guest has got enough choice that they've made the wrong choice. If you only provide eco firelighters, they cannot get it wrong. If you only provide eco cleaning products, or frankly no car parking space and bicycles, what are they going to use? So that's a tough one because no one's actually going to do that.

Rachel Parsons
No one would actually do that unless you're in a city. Right. But it's a really obvious example of choice editing. Yeah. So if your place is near a train station, you give a discount for people to arrive by train; only slightly. Guess what? You're not having to pay for a car parking space. Your house is probably cheaper in the first place. So you can actually extend that courtesy, that reciprocity you can give before you ask and say, we're going to give you a discount for arriving by train. Guess what? We're only three minutes walk from the train station. And when you get here, you're going to get a free bike. Yeah. For the time that you're staying, or a discount at the bike hire place. What are they going to do? They're going to behave in the right way. Yeah. And you're going to get the right kind of people who respect that in that ethos and then aren't going to probably, in my experience, trash your house, because usually eco-educated guests are a little bit more careful about how they stay. Not always, but usually. So design it in for them first and then ask them to do the last ten or 5%.

Rachel Parsons
That will make them feel good, but try and create it in such a way that they can't get it wrong. I actually used an example of waste bins is really effective. I spent one summer, I spent three months weighing waste, actually looking in the rubbish bins and really wondering how the hell we were going to change the situation. Because here they don't take away food waste, which is a major issue, because food waste. Not only does food waste create loads of carbon emissions when it biodegrades into methane and isn't captured, but the smell, nobody needs to be reminded about that on a summer's day. And you've got people there for a week and they've put dog poo in plastic bags and nappies in the bin and there are flies and it's really nice. And then the next guests, perhaps check in before the bins are taken away, like one of those fun dramas that everyone, as a property manager will go, oh, my God, I know exactly what you're talking about. And so in that scenario, the need for. Yeah, right. It's disgusting. The need for. I mean, like, so disgusting. Like, you know when those bins are really tall and you've got to clean the bottom of the bin and you're kind of getting in the bin and it's like I can see the maggots at the bottom and this is not good.

Rachel Parsons
I always put. I always put rocks in the bottom of my rubbish bin and then swing the bin around so it loosens up all the rubbish and then tip everything back on the garden, then I don't have to get in there myself. That's my tip for life, by the way.

Heather Bayer
Question here. If they don't take away the food garbage, what do people do with it?

Rachel Parsons
They throw it in the bin. It sits in the rubbish, in the plastic and everything else. It's extraordinary. We're the fourth worst council in Britain for our recycling. They are changing it, but only because the European law and Britain's net zero goals are forcing them to. But it's very bad. Anyway, I know across Britain there's quite a lot of places that have this issue, and composting is, certainly in rural areas, the guests would be like, well, why aren't you composting? And the owners are like, well, because there isn't another choice. And composting is slightly more annoying. It does go wrong sometimes. Rats do get in sometimes if it's too dry, you know, it can be a bit buggy sometimes. But hopefully your place has got a spot where you can move that away from the guests. And most people, if you communicate well with them, this is what's going on in this bin. You know, here's a little YouTube video for how composting works. Don't be worried about the bugs. Blah, blah, blah.

Rachel Parsons
Most people are totally fine with it. So the way that we dealt with the waste issue is that we put food caddies on top of the kitchen surface so the food goes in, clearly labeled, This is for our worms. They eat x, y and z. They don't like x, y and z. Put that in the bin still. Okay? And then that we moved the rubbish bins so that all of the rubbish bins were extremely close to the food prep area. And we made the plastics bin, the black bins, smaller than the recycling bin. So we can't recycle a lot of plastics where we are. So the large bin was the recycling bin, and the small bin was the black bin. Nearly always, it's the other way around. And I would strongly counsel people to swap that immediately to reflect modern changes in waste behavior for your guests. So add your food caddy for your food waste. Label it that it's going to the worms. That is sentient beings. They're possibly not. Who knows? But, you know, I believe in reincarnation.

Heather Bayer
Don't say that. I've just been gardening and I cut a few in half the other day.

Rachel Parsons
Yeah, but it's interesting because as soon as you personalize where the food is going, people behave totally differently. So you've got your big bin is your recycling, your small bin is your non recyclables. You've got a battery bin, you've got a glass bin, you've got a cardboard area, and then you've got this food bin. Okay? So then in your house booklet, you give a little map for where the rubbish is going or the food waste is going to. Ideally, if you've got chickens, it will go down the chickens as well, or you split out even further for chickens. And that, I know, works even better. We had an improvement of 99% immediately, immediately, just by making those changes in a couple of houses. And then it was even more successful in one house. Can't be more successful than 99%. But this went for quite a long period of time. We put a really silly sign on top. It was actually on a clipboard and it said, name your worm. Worms are sentient beings, but ours don't have names. They are reproducing at such a rate, we can't keep up with the naming.

Rachel Parsons
Please suggest names for worms. And so we had three columns on this clipboard. One, name, two, favorite food. Three, favorite music. Okay. And so I started them off like, you know, Oprah Wormfree, and favorite food, you know, moldy chocolate cake and favorite tunes. You know, I'm a Survivor by Beyonce or whatever it was. Anyway, people got into it and they were absolutely hilarious. And you could see that they'd been passing it around the dinner table, having a laugh with this stuff. Well, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise. They put food in the composting. It doesn't cost any money. One of my favorite phrases is, creativity is the solution, what's your problem? And sustainability really is that application, creativity is the solution, what's your problem? So if you've got people who aren't behaving in the way that you want, you need to think really creatively about how to get them to do that thing. So design is the first one. Reciprocity. Do it first and then ask them for something later. And then three, use humor. It's really powerful. And those are really the three things I would say as a takeaway, is design it for them first. Do it first and then ask them for something. And then the third one is humor.

Heather Bayer
Rachel, I absolutely love this and I think everybody listening is going to be really enjoying this. Unfortunately, we're coming up to the end of our time and I wish we had so much more. There's so much more I'd like to learn from you. I was talking to a very new property manager up here in Ontario the other day, and she is starting up a new property management company and she is basing it on sustainable principles. It's not something that's out there in any of the other companies. Nobody mentions it, but she is very like minded with you and she's starting from the very beginning. She's the first one I'm going to send out the link to this episode.

Rachel Parsons
Yeah. And if anyone wants a bit of a hand or wants to have a chat, you know, I'm really, really happy to do that. You know, email me and if I can, I'll do it. If there are enough people, I'll run a couple of webinars or something for it. I'm really happy to do that because a lot of this stuff takes a little bit of thinking about. And if you're running your day-to-day business and it's an extra thing, I do understand that it can be limiting for people. The way that we've run the New Forest Escapes website is all of the projects that are up and running and live and that you can see are all free. They're all open source. Take them, improve them, let me know how you improve them and we might be able to improve ours. 100%, steal everything off our website. Please do it. No problem. Right? That's one of our outcomes of business, that we want to pay it forward to other people. We want them to learn from our mistakes. And the second one is, I'm running a project with Luxury Cottages, a guy called Alistair Malins who's based here in the UK.

Rachel Parsons
They've got about 350 properties and we've worked with, they're a B Corp as well, we've worked with currently for version two of a sustainable practice guide where we've actually taken the best ideas out of the short-term vacation rental area. Tourism businesses across our B Corp, which means they're already well and truly innovative and leading in problem solving in terms of sustainability and tourism. But I think there's about nine companies that have inputted. We've got 36 projects. Bob is on there, Bob Garner. Vanessa's in there as well. It's quite European specific, but the principles and the creativity is 100% open source for anybody. You could just take the ideas and run with them. And that project, those 36 projects will be sustainability gold for anybody in this industry. Anyone at all. And I'll message you when the project is live. It was probably three or four weeks off actually being live and you can add it to the Show Notes.

Heather Bayer
That would be excellent. Thank you. Rachel, it's been an absolute, absolute pleasure to talk to you.

Rachel Parsons
I would love to have more time with you, but yeah, I hope I've inspired people a little bit because this stuff isn't rocket science, but it just needs a little bit of creativity. And be brave about the creativity and be brave about the fact that you're on a journey; none of us are perfect.

Heather Bayer
Well, you've certainly inspired me and you know, I'm buzzing with ideas at the moment. You know, we're creating this training system for property managers right now, the THRIVE Training System. And I'm already thinking about how I can incorporate some of these things into that. So thank you.

Rachel Parsons
Yeah, I'll have to give you my smile tools list. I call them my smile tools, you know, tools of sustainability that you can use. Yeah. Really? I've actually got to write them up and I'm going to put them on my website as a freebie giveaway. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Heather Bayer
Okay, well, we will be in touch. So don't go away when I stop recording because I want to carry on talking to you for a few more moments. But for now, just such a pleasure to meet you and I'm sure we will be talking again soon.

Rachel Parsons
Oh, thank you so much, Heather. And thank you everyone listening. Have an interesting and creative green journey. It's lovely.

Heather Bayer
Thank you, Rachel, for that interesting and inspiring conversation. After we spoke, I downloaded the Merlin app and it's great. I can hear how that little touch of suggesting this to guests who enjoy bird watching would go down really well. It's motivated me to add that to my course on niche marketing, which is still a work in progress. The whole conversation about sustainability, if I can still say the 'S' word, is so relevant to the work we're doing on our THRIVE Training System. In the module on responsibility, there's a lesson on environmental responsibilities. And now I can put the New Forest Escapes website into the resources section and include information on B Corp Certification along with a link to this podcast episode. This is the joy of continuous learning, that it never stops evolving as we come across new things to share.

Heather Bayer
If you're interested in finding out more about THRIVE, just check out the show notes for more information. And that's it for this week. It's been so enjoyable to listen to Rachel and I hope you got some great ideas from this episode.

Mike Bayer
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember, if you want more information about the THRIVE training system, you need to attend one of our weekly live information sessions. Click on the link in the description to secure your spot. THRIVE is the perfect training to supercharge your existing property management team and onboard your employees in the best way possible.

Mike Bayer
This episode was brought to you by Lodgify, the all-in-one solution that will help you start, manage and grow your short-term rental business. Click the link in the episode description or visit Lodgify.com today to start your free trial.

Heather Bayer
It's been a pleasure as ever, being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the Show Notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to being with you again next week.

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