Mike Bayer
You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. With over 1.5 million downloads, this is the place to be for all your short-term rental knowledge as part of the Vacation Rental Formula Business School.

Mike Bayer
This episode is brought to you by the kind sponsorship of PriceLabs, who will help Increase your revenue and occupancy with their dynamic pricing and revenue management tools. PriceLabs have just launched their 2023 breakthrough release of the next generation of revenue management. This brand new cutting edge solution leverages hyperlocal data to optimize rates and increase your revenue like never before. Visit the link in the description of this episode for more information.

Mike Bayer
Without further delay, here's your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
I was privileged to present at the Direct Booking Success Summit this week. In one of the networking events, I met Derry Green of Secret Garden Glamping, and I was completely blown away by his story of a simple COVID idea that not only went viral but spawned a completely new business in the short-term rental world. You will love this.

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 as winter starts coming into Ontario. It really is time to head south, because we had crazy, ridiculous heat at the end of September and the early part of October. In fact, three days before our Thanksgiving weekend, temperatures hit the mid to high 80s. Three days after that, it snowed. So that's it. It's that roller coaster of full winter temperatures coming. So yes, this little snowbird is packing up and ready to head south. Can't wait to get down to Gulf Shores in a couple of weeks time and enjoy my winter.

Heather Bayer
A few conferences coming up as well, of course. There's the VRMA Conference in Orlando, where I am giving a presentation called 'How to Become an Owner Magnet', which I'm really looking forward to. I'm also on a panel with Brooke Pfautz of Vintory and three other amazing panelists to talk about the mistakes we all made in our property management businesses and how we overcame them. That's all a part of the Vacation Rental Secrets book that Brooke put together. If you want to know more about that, then just head to the link on the Show Notes and that will talk about Vacation Rental Secrets, and how you can get a copy of the book; it really is great. If you're thinking about going into property management, then you need to read this book.

Heather Bayer
Anyhow, what's on today? I always start by asking my guests how they started their businesses, and the answers are usually pretty similar. They started with one property and then that grew to a couple more, and then their friends and neighbors asked them to rent out their places, or they had parents who had a property that they'd rented out sporadically and they took it on and grew the business from there. Mostly everybody in the business has had experience of hospitality of some sort. But as we know, COVID changed just about everything. I don't want to spoil this great story that's coming, so I'm going to leave today's guest to tell it. But I've not met anybody directly before who has had an idea go so viral across social media that it spawned a completely new business. I was fascinated to hear where it led.  Without further ado, let's go on over to my interview with Derry Green of Secret Garden Glamping.

Heather Bayer
Well, I am so pleased to have with me today Derry Green from Secret Garden Glamping. I met Derry just a couple of weeks ago at Jen Boyle's Direct Booking Success Summit, which was an online event.  It was absolutely amazing. Something that Jen did that I haven't seen before in many online summits, is that she got people networking with each other. In between sessions, there were some opportunities to talk to some of the other presenters and some of the attendees. That's where I came across Derry, who was at his, I guess, son's or daughter's soccer game. I just got this story of what he did and I had to bring it to you.

Heather Bayer
But I'm just going to start, Derry, before I introduce you formally, is I want to start with a quote because I want you to comment on it at some point. It's actually from the movie Inception. Did you ever see Inception?

Derry Green
I did see Inception, yes. It's been a while since I've seen it.  But yeah, I've seen it.

Heather Bayer
I was the only one in my family who understood Inception. Anyway, the quote was, "A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules." This is what I believe you have done. Welcome, Derry Green. Thank you so much for joining me.

Derry Green
No problem. You're more than welcome. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to have a chat with you today.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. I've been in this business for 25 years. I've, over the course of the 10 years doing this podcast now...., nearly 10 years...., and 540-odd episodes. I've interviewed just about everybody in the industry and I thought I'd heard it all, but now I heard something new. I alluded to it in the introduction that I wasn't going to tell the story, I was going to leave it to you to do. Can you tell us, Derry, what it is and where it all began.

Derry Green
Yes. It all begins in the first [COVID] lockdown, so March of 2020. Here in the UK, we had quite a large lockdown. Previous to COVID, I had a European transport business. I used to spend a week in Spain and a week in the UK.  We used to do shipping back and forth. In that first lockdown, I came back on, it was about the 10th of March, fully expecting to go back 10 days later, which never happened. We went into lockdown, we couldn't travel, and that was it. I was stuck at home. I've got two young children. My son, Noah, and my daughter, Sophia. They were six and eight at the time, and we had nothing to do. But in that first lockdown in the UK, we had this unbelievable weather. It was like it was summer every single day, so it was ace and we couldn't go out of our homes as such. But we were in the lucky situation where we live, we're out of the way sort of things. We're on our own on a piece of land. We just spent our time outdoors. It started as a camping trip in the garden.

Derry Green
Me, my son, and daughter set up a little tent at the side of the house and camped in it that first night. When we woke up the next morning, the grass was wet and it wasn't very exciting for them to wake up like that. That first day, I built a little deck to put the tent on for the next day. Then the next day, I built a bit more and a bit more and a bit more. I got the kids involved and it distracted us from what was going on in that first lockdown.

Derry Green
In that first bit of COVID, nobody knew what was happening. All my transport work into Europe had gone. I had lost all my customers in the space of about three or four days. It was to distract me from what reality was at the time and also keep the kids entertained while they were off school. By the end of the first lockdown, I'd gone overboard, as I do with most things. I built this whole outdoor garden area with a hot tub and a sauna, and a fire pit and a full-on pod at this point.

Derry Green
I didn't know it was a glamping pod.  I didn't really have a foot in the market of glamping at the time. And that was that. Now, a company in the UK called Unilad contacted me and said, Can we do a story on you on what a dad had built in lockdown for his kids. In the UK, people were building home bars and gyms and things like that. They did this story on me and it was me and my son and my daughter sat in this part and it was what a dad had built in lockdown. I never thought anything more of it. But the next day and their sister company, LADbible, reshared the post and it got 10 million views. I was like, wow. And then because my name is unusual, people started messaging me through social media saying, Can we book it for a holiday? And I was like, This is crazy. Why would you want to come and stay in my garden for a holiday? It's weird. But I kept getting messages and I thought, you know what? Why not? So I set up an account on Airbnb and I put it on that first night and went to bed and thought nothing much of it.

Derry Green
Next day I woke up and over that first night, I had about 300-400 bookings that first night. Airbnb had taken it and put it on their homepage. And within two days it was fully booked for two and a half years in advance. It just went ballistic. I was like, What do I do now? I've got to run a glamping business. I had no idea what to do, but I kind of set about it.

Derry Green
From that first initial unit, which again, even when I got all those bookings, I thought, Well, this will be it. It'll just be like a little sideline. It's a great little thing. We've got the side of the house, but I wanted to explore it more. I went through the planning process and thought, You know what? This has got legs. I want to do more of this. I enjoy doing it. I love being outside. I love building things. Why not do it more? If I can make a business out of it, it'd be great. Then from there, I launched The Secret Garden Glamping in February of 2021, so almost 12 months later. That's where the story started then. Since then, I've now got 11 units.

Derry Green
We're building two more for the end of this year, which will take it to 13. We've just purchased a new site that's going to open for summer next year. We're now currently fully booked on all of the units that we have. So all 11, the the earliest available date we've got at the minute around midweek is around the end of 2024 on all of the units. Weekends are now the end of 2025. With some of the units, for example, The Tree Tops, The Oasis, they're fully booked all the way through now until 2026, which we haven't even put the dates on for yet.

Derry Green
So we're now the most viewed, the most booked, and the most followed glamping site in the UK. We've got over three quarters of a million followers across social media. Our average monthly reach on social media about 4.2 million now, and we're turning away around 1,000 bookings a week currently. It's phenomenal. It's been a crazy two years of building it up to where we are now, where we're looking at opening multiple locations and multiple countries as well as we go forward. That's the shorter version of that two-year story, but that's where we're at.

Heather Bayer
Most people take years thinking about a career change. I'm assuming you're not still in the transport business?

Derry Green
No, I'm not. Although it was funny, in that little period, when I had the one unit, so around after COVID, after summer, in the UK, we had a bit of a 'come out of lockdown', and then we went back in again. In that little brief period, September to December of 2020, I actually went back to work a little bit. Because again, at that point, I still thought it was going to be a sideline. We had Brexit in the UK, so we left Europe. I'd always planned to stop things until everything was sorted. The plan was to go back in February, but I thought, Do you know what? I don't want to. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Let's just do that more. I never went back in February and started The Secret Garden.

Heather Bayer
Had you ever been in the hospitality business at all before? You know, have you served behind a bar or waited on tables, anything like that?

Derry Green
Years ago I used to work in bars and nightclubs. That was my dad. I remember I wanted to go on holiday with my friends and he said I could go, but I had to pay for it. I got a job as a glass collector and serving on a bar and things like that. But as far as hotel accommodation, that stuff, it's never even occurred to me to be doing it. I'm quite a people person. I get with everybody. I like meeting new people, so it does fit really well. But it was not something that I ever thought I'd be doing.

Heather Bayer
So tell me when you wake up in the morning, you've got 300+ bookings. What do you think? What do you think? Did you have a plan or........?

Derry Green
I genuinely had no idea. I remember that first day when I woke up and I had, although we had about 300 bookings, I had somewhere in the region of 10,000 messages. I distinctly remember for nearly 48 hours I didn't sleep. I sat on my phone and I was replying to messages. And as quickly as I was replying to messages, people were sending me more. And honestly, because I didn't know what to do. I was like, I can't not reply to anybody. I can't just leave people off and go, You know what? I'm just going to stuff this off. I sat there for literally days, just replying and replying until I got on top of it. And then I quickly realized, right, how am I going to do this? What do I need to do to get it sorted?

Derry Green
And I think that first jump into the deep-end, kept my eyes open throughout all of this, the past two, three years. Because it was a shock to me, I quickly worked out there's a lot to do. I had to come up with ways and different things that I could do here to make sure my journey was easy and we could facilitate it and expand more and all those sorts of things.

Derry Green
That's the principles that I've used since I've opened. The reason as well behind what I think is the success of here is in the UK, we don't have multiple location units. There isn't a chain of glamping sites like you have in the US a little bit. Everybody is an owner occupier because they quickly work out there's too much work for them to do at that one site. I took the principle, which I did in my previous business, which was I take a step away from the business and try and work on my business rather than in my business. Now the site here, for example, that's fully self-sufficient. I don't have anything to do with the day-to-day running. I can sit and think about what I want to create, what people are looking for, what direction the market's going in, rather than being, I've got to change a toilet seat or swap some bedding over or whatever else it might be. I think that's really carried me through. That was from the initial start thinking, Right, I can't deal with this on my own. There's no way I can do it. I've got to get more people with me.

Heather Bayer
I'm looking at you now. You're sitting there. You look nice and calm, but not too far from you, you've got 11 units that are occupied right now and people are out there running it and you don't even have to be concerned.

Derry Green
No. That's it. I'm here. It's obviously at my home. There's been a big learning curve and a lot of infrastructure gone in here now to separate my home from the business, which it is now. But yeah, today, just before I came and did this, I'm just doing a new tile floor in one of the units. We've decided to install some more underfloor heating and I'm doing that today, so I'm going to go back to that this afternoon. Yeah, it works really well because I can be here. If anybody needs me, I'm only a phone call away, I always am. It keeps my foot in it enough to be able to keep on top of it.

Heather Bayer
Well, I've read through dozens and dozens of your reviews, and so many of them mention you. They say they've met you, you're so friendly, they see you as the head of all this. Because that's one reason I wanted to get this question out there. Are you fully involved? Because it sounds like from their reviews that they feel that you are. I know that that is the perfect way of working on a business, to have your clients feel that you're working in it.

Derry Green
Yeah, do you know what? That has been one point that I've toiled with over the past, I think it's really come to a head in the past 6-8 months. For the first year, two years, I was on site every day building something. The guests, although they might be staying in one unit, they'd always come down and see me and I'd be walking around. I could chat to [them] and things like that. As we've grown now, we've got 11 units. At any one point we can have around 50 guests a day here, and that would literally take up my whole day  just chatting to people and saying hello, because I do. I'll chat forever. I'll sit and talk to a customer for two or three hours about all sorts of stuff. There just isn't enough time in the day for it. And I realized people do love to come and see me. They love hearing about the story. They've followed us from the start when it was just me on my own messing around in the woods, all the way to where we are now.

Derry Green
So then it's taking on again key people. I've got Andy now who's head of our customer service.  We jokingly say he's Mr. Secret Garden now. He's now replaced my role of welcoming every single guest. Because it is a full-time job to welcome guests, invite them in, show them around, that stuff. Then I get involved in all of that. Then I can still be the face of the business. But then the stuff...., if they need to know how to use the griddles or how to use the hot tub or the underfloor heating and we can deal with that then.

Heather Bayer
Well, I think you said enough about hot tub, saunas, underfloor heating. We need to talk about these units themselves. Now I know they're set in woodland. You've got acreage of woodland. In the reviews, people said they couldn't believe how private each of these units were. But camping/glamping.... I thought I was glamping when we went from a tent to a trailer tent. I'm not sure, those in the US probably don't know what I mean by a trailer tent. It's a pop-up. They call it a pop-up camper, the old Conway Camargue. That to me was absolute luxury because it took my bed off the ground and that was all I needed.  But you still went to the public washrooms. I think a couple of sites....., I mean, this is going back a long way, you understand, Derry, it's been a few years, but some sites were getting power and you got little power bars and I could boil a kettle and it was the absolute height of luxury. Tell me about glamping as you created it. Let's talk about these...., you call them units, pods, but they're all different.

Derry Green
Yeah. So as I said earlier, what I'm doing now within glamping is pretty much the very extremes of what you can still class as glamping without being a hotel, basically. What we're creating here is a hotel in a woodland. Each unit I do is different from the next one. I'm not replicating the same thing over and over again. I like a challenge. I like figuring out new things. And as I do each pod, if you look at the first pod that I built, The Hideout, compared to some of the newer ones, The Tree House that we've done, or The Wilderness Spa and The Look Out, it's like night and day, because I'm learning on my adventure as I'm going through just like any business. So now we have, as standard, every unit has your full en-suite, underfloor heating, high-speed Internet, Smart TVs, hot-tubs, saunas, outdoor covered areas, different things. Some have pool tables, some have cinemas. The new one that we're just doing now, I've got a retro foosball table and gaming table and stuff.

Derry Green
All of these ideas stem from what I like to do. So when I built that first one, and I think again, this is one of the key differences.  When I built that first one, I did it over...., it was about three months. And it was basically me walking into the house, we sat out there with me and the kids. We spent every day out there, every day, every night out there. It was perfect. But every time I didn't have something, I'd walk back to the house, pick it up, and I'd take it with us. So it started off with I needed some more pillows, so I put some extra pillows there. Then I fancied watching something on TV, so I took the TV out of the living room and put it out there. I did all these things and I ended up basically moving my house outside. So then all these things, it starts again, if it's a single night or maybe even two nights or three nights, you can get away with a lot of stuff. But if you want to extend that and extend the seasons as well...., glamping has been very seasonal within the UK, where we're open... I'm fully booked 365 days a year, seven days a week. And it's because in that autumn/winter season, glamping can be, I won't say miserable, but certainly, uneventful maybe is probably a good way of putting it.

Derry Green
If you're not giving somebody something to do, they could quite easily get bored. Anything that I'm doing is always focused on the outdoor area. It's always focused on getting them out of that unit, because the units, in theory, haven't really changed. That first one I did had underfloor heating, internet, bed, TV, en-suite, they've all still got the same. I haven't really done anything....., it might be a different style or different lighting or things like that, but the interiors really haven't changed that much. Where I have gone in a different direction is the outdoor space. That's where I focused all my energy, all my inspiration has been out there, and each outdoor unit has got bigger and more elaborate and has more things to do, because it's in the name. If you're going glamping, you're not going to sit in a pod, in a bed for two days in a field doing nothing. You want to spend time outdoors, else you'll could just sit in your house. You could just stay at home; it's fine.

Derry Green
So focusing on that and getting people to spend time outdoors, whether it be a rainy day like it is today or the middle of summer, it's finding those different things that you can do to encourage them to be outside, that's what's going to create memories, that's what creates experiences for them, that's what gets them to share their content on social media of how good a time they're having.  And that's the key point that we've done over other people.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Again, looking at the reviews, one of the things that a lot of people said was the attention to detail. From start to finish, the attention to detail is second to none. There was nothing we had to look for. Everything was there. I just only found five out of the thousands probably that you've got, but they were all very similar. They got a bit same'y actually, Derry. Everybody loves it.

Derry Green
You see, this is why, because I build all my own units here, and this is where my problems come from a business point of view, is scaling it because it's me. A great example of it, when I built The Tree House, I built all the outdoor area where everything was going. And the last thing to go in was the hot-tub. And we got it into place, put it there, and I stood back and it just didn't look right. It didn't work right. In my head it did, and on a piece of paper it did. But when it came to using it, from sitting in the hot tub, the bar wasn't in quite the right place. The TV wasn't quite in the right place. The ceiling was a bit low, and I didn't like it. Where most other people would be happy with, It looks okay. Yeah, it's fine. I wasn't. I then embarked on building a huge extension to the unit that took us another month to do to move the hot tub to a new location which fitted better and worked better. If there is, as we go through the build, something that doesn't work, we change it.

Derry Green
We don't just go, Oh, well, it'll be okay. Because it would have been 'OK', but we're not 'OK'. We're amazing. We're great. We're phenomenal. That's what we want to be.

Heather Bayer
Just coming back onto the building, were you 'DIY Derry' before this all started?

Derry Green
Not to this degree. Not in a million years. I've done stuff...., hanging shelves, building IKEA wardrobes, painting and decorating, that stuff, but nothing to this extent. I think the biggest thing I've built before that was probably a little playhouse for the kids, you know, the size of this desk sort of thing. It was never anything like that. But learning, again like I said earlier on, if you look at the difference between the first one I did and the ones I'm doing now, it's like night and day. I've learned a million things since then, but I love it. It's a challenge to me all the time, is figuring stuff out. That's how my brain takes it. I look at something and I want to know how that's done. If I don't know how it's done, I'll have to learn how it's done. I enjoy that part of it.

Heather Bayer
Going back to the attention to detail, that requires all your staff being on-site, knowing what your standard operating procedures are, your journey to excellence, if you like. How many staff do you have?

Derry Green
I've got 14 here now.

Heather Bayer
What do they do?

Derry Green
We've got maintenance, we've got a site manager, we've got cleaners, we've got customer service, we've got social media, and myself as well. Obviously, the main bulk of it is the cleaners. That's been something that's been really a big learning curve, is figuring out those processes. And that's learning from our mistakes is the top and bottom. That first year was all learning about how do we make sure this is done right? You give this to one person, they do it, but then you need to check stuff, you need lists, all these sorts of things, which we've built up over a three-year period now to hopefully have a well-oiled machine. Still, things go sideways every so often, but we're pretty much there with it now.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, and not every guest is going to be happy. There's always going… I did read a couple of reviews. I ran a property management company for 20 years and there's always those who you're never going to make happy. They're coming to an outside place and complain about leaves on the deck.

Derry Green
Don't even start me on that one. I mean, I kind of laugh about it now. When I was young, me and my brother would be playing out in the woods and building dens and all sorts of stuff like that. But a lot of people have been brought up in cities and towns and things and they never experienced woodland or outdoor areas, or not for any period of time. And to to be distracted by leaves falling in a woodland at the start of autumn. To me, it just is common sense. But I guess from an outside point of view, if I'd lived in a city for my entire life and not really seen a tree, then I would be confused why leaves are falling on the deck in the middle of autumn. But we try and keep on top of everything. We have over 1,000 visitors a month now, so it's geared up massively from the start. But yet our ratings on everything, our reviews, the messages that we get off customers are always phenomenal. We try and make sure we keep on top of that.

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

JP Purestay
I've been in property all my life. We do a lease on some properties. We own some of the other properties, and now we manage and we're open to, in the UK, to any other owners coming to us for management of their property. Before PriceLabs, how I was setting the rates, I wasn't so sure, if I'm honest. I had a feel for the price that worked, and I had a feel for the price that didn't work. And then some days would book up really quickly and I'd think, Oh, wow, that's cool. And then I'd realize that there was an event on locally and I'd missed it. So no wonder it was booking up quite well. I'm still learning about PriceLabs. The grouping of properties is a big feature that we use. We've often got multiple properties in either one block or in one street or something like that. They're all identical. So therefore we just price them together. Another one is the orphan stays is really cool. So if we've obviously got a gap and a one night stay, let's say for example, it's in a very touristy area like Bath or Edinburgh, and I've missed the opportunity to offer a weekend, one night gap as a one night stay because I've got a two night minimum, I'd really kick myself that I'd not done that.  So that's really beneficial.

JP Purestay
So we're an affordable premium brand. And we can put a blanket price increase on all of our properties or any selected properties versus the market. When you own the business, which all business owners will know, you've got a pipeline of things you want to implement that generally save you time or make you money. And the big thing for me is how do we save time? Overall, it [PriceLabs] is really helping us be efficient. And I think that was the key thing.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much for that testimonial. It was great to hear how PriceLabs is working so practically with their clients to help them achieve success. Let's go on right back now to our interview.

Heather Bayer
So setting expectations clearly is something that you pay a great deal of attention to, because once again, going back to the reviews, a lot of people talked about the check-in process, photographic instructions were great, there was nothing we had to query, the pre-arrival info was brilliant and so well explained. Can you just go there for a moment and talk about how you prepare your guests for the experience they're going to have?

Derry Green
Yeah. From booking until when the customer leaves, we have 12 different points of contact. Throughout the process, again this is from a trial and error thing, at first I just used to send them a message on Airbnb, when I used to use Airbnb, and that was it. Then I quickly realized, actually, they're going to have questions about whatever it be, the hot tubs or the bedding or the outdoor areas, whatever it might be. In that first bit of COVID, Airbnb did the seven-step automated check-in thing to comply with COVID regulations, which was a great idea. I thought it was a really good idea. I just expanded on it. So I did a check-in process. I made the full experience automated from a guest point-of-view. That was down to COVID from an interaction point-of-view. But actually, the time that it saved me from having to do all these mundane things over and over again worked really well, and customers really appreciated it. Then I could focus on the specific needs of certain guests. That could be accessibility issues, it could be things that are out of order, and whether it's your birthday and anniversaries and things like that.

Derry Green
90% of the general questions that we get are covered for by our app. We use a company called Touch Stay in the UK. We have an app for every unit. On there, when they book the unit, it gets automatically sent to them so they can see all the details of the unit, all the photos, how to use everything, what we provide, all these sorts of details. And people love reading it. It's great because it's an app on your phone. They can sit and flip through it, which is awesome. Then throughout the process, again, from a business point of view, we can use all these different points of contact to upsell. We do that quite regularly. Then on that point of upselling, although the customers are paying for it, it actually increases the benefits that they have when they're on-site, when they add these extras on, because the experience all ends up being phenomenal then. We've got all these different ways of doing it. That's what I found. Again, my time was being taken up early on with, where do you keep pots and pans, or is there any spare toilet roll? It all takes time.

Derry Green
That was with one unit. Now we're at 11 and going to 13, I could spend my whole day doing that. Just replying about different things. We try to focus on getting it all together in a coherent place, and then it takes 90% out of it for us.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, exactly. I'm glad you're using Touch Stay. I've been involved with Touch Stay for many, many years since its inception, really. I know Andy McNulty extremely well. So you must have come across Tyann.

Derry Green
Yeah. So we do quite a bit with Touch Stay and they use a lot of our content with our welcome guides as well for when they're doing different social media campaigns and things. I love what they're doing. It's a brilliant piece of technology. Although it's never going to capture everything, that's not what it's for. It captures 90% of the stuff and that is a massive amount of work.

Derry Green
Yeah, well, we used it with our property management company with upwards of 200 properties and just so easy to take a new property on and to onboard that through Touch Stay was just so simple. You mentioned upselling. So what is it? What do you upsell?

Derry Green
For example, last year, our average nightly rate was £220 a night. That was our average nightly rate across all the units for last year. But our average booking value for each of those nights was £268. Our average upsell was £48 per night per booking. The main ones for us are things like pre-lighting services. We have wood burning hot tubs, so we can get the hot tubs up and going and ready for when the customers arrive rather than them doing it themselves. Simple things: selling logs, marshmallows, chocolate fondues. But then we do like Happy Birthday neon signs, which we can rent out if it's somebody's birthday. We do luxury packages, we do champagne, we do breakfast, we do charcuterie boards, we do dessert boards. All these little things. I mean, it helps because we're booked so far in advance. When somebody initially places a booking, they're booking for 2024, 2025, 2026. We take a 30% deposit when they book. If they're adding, let's say £20 or £30 worth of extras, it's only £2 extra when they book and they pay the rest in a year, two years', three years' time. It encourages them, again, on our checkout page to do it.

Derry Green
But then throughout the process, over the period of time that we're speaking to them, whether they booked for a month in advance or two years in advance, we're constantly talking to them about what do they expect from the stay? Is there anything they want to do? Is there any special occasions they're coming for? All these different things where you've got opportunity to upsell to them then. Because when they come here, we've got a captive audience. They come, we're in the middle of nowhere. They come in here for two or three or four nights and our guests rarely leave, 98% of guests don't leave the site once they get here. When they get here, they park up, check-in, and that is it. They don't leave again until they go. You've got a captive audience. It's not like I say, the Disney model of upselling where you've got no choice, so they will charge you whatever, eight dollars for a Coke because you've got no choice and you've got to buy it from there. I work on the other method, which is actually if you give something of value to somebody, they see it as a benefit.

Derry Green
We're not overly priced on certain things, but we just want them to... If they buy some marshmallows, I think we make a pound on some marshmallows. But that memory of roasting marshmallows on a fire with the kids, that is more important, because that to me is part of my marketing budget. If they're going to then share that content to their friends and tell everybody how amazing it is, that's going to bring me more bookings. I might only make a pound or two off some marshmallows. But actually, the future bookings, because 70 or 80 or 90 of their friends now want to come, is far more important. There's all these different aspects to it. It's not just as simple as profit margins of what we make on what. Because we could, again, as I said, we've got a captive audience, we could charge 10 pounds for marshmallows or 15 pounds for marshmallows. We can't get them unless I've got them and they can't get them. But it's not about that, it's getting that balance.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I love that. Just coming back to something you were saying previously, was about making their stays as personal as possible. So you've got to keep that information somewhere. So that leads me on to asking about what your tech stack is, because you must have quite a phenomenal tech stack. But firstly, you also said When I used to use Airbnb...., are you not using.... I see that you've still got properties on Airbnb.

Derry Green
Technically, yes. Technically, some of the units are on Airbnb, although you can't book them because my settings on Airbnb are a year in advance and we're booked further than that. I need to take them down. In all fairness, it's free advertising. I haven't had a message off Airbnb for a long, long time now, because everybody just comes to us. When I first started, I needed a  payment gateway, basically.

Derry Green
I wasn't taking the bait. I was directing my followers to Airbnb to be able to book, because at the time I was so busy trying to do everything else. It was something I didn't want to deal with. But then once I opened The Secret Garden in the February, I then invested in, you know, booking platforms, a website, that stuff to take my own bookings. So, yeah, everything we do now is 100% direct. We don't use any third-party OTAs, anything like that. Although, like I said, technically we are still on Airbnb, or some of them are.

Heather Bayer
But yet you can't book them on there. What is in your tech stack? What are you using for your platforms?

Derry Green
We use Bedful for our booking system. Most of our technology is through our website. We have a web designer, Dylan, who sorts out all the back end stuff. Things like our email messaging systems, our text messaging systems, obviously our Bedful bookings and then our Touch Stay as well. It's all integrated on our website side, rather than using too many other things. But then for email campaigns, again, that's done through... We were using an outside third-party, Mailchimp, at the time, but we now do it again in-house now through our own web designer.

Heather Bayer
So where do you collect the information on guests? Where do you keep that? I know people often ask What is the best customer relations management system out there? And I'm wondering what you use.

Derry Green
Again, we don't actually have a separate one as such. So we have obviously all our bookings through Bedful. That then translates across into our website and our emailing list. So on the back end of our website, where not only our inquiries come through, everything gets collated into... Well, it's actually split into several different lists. We've had ones that are from bookings, ones that are from inquiries, ones that are from social media or websites, but they actually culminate into one giant list, if I want to have it all as just a section of email addresses, phone numbers, contacts, why have they stayed? When did they stay? What occasion did they stay for? Because we asked certain questions as well within the booking platform to try and get an idea of, again, where the bookings are coming from: your Facebook, Instagram, website, if it was coming from an OTA, all that information is all collected on our back end on our website.

Heather Bayer
I have to ask, what were you doing at the Direct Booking Summit? You seem to have it all wrapped up!

Derry Green
I love the industry. I love glamping. I love short-term accommodation. I just like being around other people who have the same passion as me. Because it's like, there's that saying, isn't there? If you do your hobby, you're never going to work a day in your life. And that's genuinely how it seems. I don't go to work every day. I'm getting to do my hobby every day. And it's hard for some people to understand. Friends of mine are like, Oh, you're working too much. I haven't worked a day in my life. I get to go and play in the woods and mess about and talk to other people that like doing what I do.

Derry Green
Something like that, the direct booking summit, it's just nice hearing what other people are doing and I can relate it back to me. What I find is a lot of the stuff I do day-to-day, whether it be the way I build units, the way I reply on messages, the way I do my social media, because we do all our own social media, that's where it all came down to. That's what my main focus was at the start and what's made us stand out from everybody else.

Heather Bayer
But I do it on autopilot most of the time. The only way I realize what I'm doing and tie down into focus on what I'm doing, is by listening to other people and going, Oh, yeah, I do that because of this. Somebody might say something and I'll start talking about it and then it brings it to the forefront of my mind. It's like with me and you talking now, I'm thinking about why I do something. I'll go, Oh, I've never really thought about that. I've just done it. But then that gives me a reason to look into that part a little bit more and expand on it more. Although at the minute, we're a huge presence. In the UK, by a country mile, we're bigger than everybody else. But I don't want to be the person sat here, sit back on my laurels now, and in 10 years' time, I'll be the one sat here whinging, I don't know why I've got no bookings, or nobody's coming anymore because the market's changed and the market's evolving and what people are doing is different. I want to be involved. I want to be part of it for now and for the future.

Heather Bayer
That's a great way of looking at it. That's probably the reason why I sold my business 15 months ago, and I'm still just as involved in it as I was then, just in a different way. I don't want to leave.

Derry Green
Every day is a school day.

Heather Bayer
Absolutely it is. Every day is a school day.

Derry Green
There's no way I can't sit here and say I know every single thing about glamping or the hospitality industry or anything. If I did, I'd be a moron. It's not something that I can say. I've got to be learning all the time. Again, I've only done it now for three years. People have been doing it for 10, 20, 30 years. I'm sure there's knowledge to be learned out there to improve on things that I'm doing. Anything that I can do, I will do.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. I still learn something new every single day. You said it, it's taking that passion, and you've got to be passionate about it to do it without thinking that you're doing the job.

Heather Bayer
I just want to touch on accessibility and sustainability before we move on to see what the future is for The Secret Garden Glamping. I do notice that sustainability in particular is, and I'm very pleased to see this, is moving not quite to the forefront of people's minds, but it's getting there. How do you adapt to sustainability and ensure that you're operating as many sustainability practices as you can?

Derry Green
We're in quite a unique position, because our bookings are so far in advance, a year, two years, three years in some cases. We know our projected revenue for 2023, 2024, 2025, so we can plan way further ahead and invest far more than general glamping businesses as such, because we know what we're going to be doing. Now, recently, February of last year, we just installed £60,000 worth of battery storage. We had a full site survey done, giving us our carbon footprint and everything else. We're trying to find ways to bring that down.

Derry Green
Battery storage was the first installation. We've got our new set of batteries. We're doubling that this year. That's going to be installed in December. We're going from 50kva of battery storage up to 100kva of battery storage and tying that into our solar that we've had installed on the main building to try and go as much upgrade as possible. Then try we can, again, the unique position that we're in, we can try things that if they don't work, at least we tried.

Derry Green
There's a company called Solaris and they create an off-grid, hot tub heating solution. They look like mini pyramids, they're really clever little things, and they're like little green houses.  And  the water passes from the hot tub through each one and by the time it comes out the other end, it's heated. You don't need blazing sunshine because obviously the UK is not like that. But it brings the cost down of heating that hot tub, which then saves us on electricity and everything else. We can implement these things. We didn't know it was going to work in the first place, but now we know it works. If it didn't work, yes, we might have wasted a few thousand pound trying it, but at least we tried it.

Derry Green
We're in that position where we've got enough capital behind us now to try and move a bit further than where the flag's set at the minute and we can try and do more. That's certainly. As we move forward again into the new side, we want to be a bit more ambitious. There's lots of different new projects coming: solar, thermal heating, ground source heating, air source heating, all these sorts of things. We've just swapped, again, all our laundry side of things to air source from electricity. Although it's a big change because it works in a totally different way in a totally different amount of time.

Derry Green
But the power that it's saving is reduced, again, our carbon footprint down massively. But then as a business, it reduces our cost now as well. Because in the UK, electricity prices are really high. It's now got to the point where it's advantageous for businesses to actually start installing these practices going forward. I think the needle's shifted past the tipping point now, and I think it's going to be a short-term before everybody's on board.

Heather Bayer
That's great. People like Bob Garner, Vanessa de Souza Lage from Sustonica, they're going to be so pleased to hear this.

Heather Bayer
OK, what's in the future? What's ahead? You touched on it right at the very beginning, but I'd love to hear more.

Derry Green
We've got a new site that's going to open for next year. That's going to be, in my head, like my masterpiece of what we're doing here, it's going to be a huge site with lots of different facilities. It's still under wraps a little bit. Nobody really knows about it yet. But then as well, I can't talk too much about it yet, but we've got something big that's going to be coming out in February next year. From that, we want to be opening multiple sites across the UK. We've launched the franchise model to be able to open and increase our presence quicker across the UK, then Europe, and a lot of interest in the US as well. Hopefully, we'll be going national. Our audience now is growing day on day and is only limited by the amount of content that we produce.

Derry Green
I say we've got two sides to the business. We've got a glamping site, which is where we generate our revenue, but we've also got a social media business. That side of the business is huge and our following and our audience that we've created is bigger than any other holiday brand in the UK.  We're bigger than Butlins, bigger than Hoseasons. The only one that's bigger than us in the UK is Center Parcs, and only by 10,000 followers now. We're going to overtake them next month to be the biggest one, and we've got one site with 11 units and me just messing around in the woods.

Derry Green
As we go forward now....,

Heather Bayer
Messing around in the woods!

Derry Green
.... That's what it is.  When guests come and they're so happy to see it and so happy to speak to me about different things, genuinely, you get that imposter syndrome. It's like, I'd do it for free, but they're paying me to do it. I just won't say anything and hope nobody notices because it is. I just feel like I'm playing around in the woods every day and people pay me to do it, which is just incredible. So yes we've got lots more to come for next year. We've got a couple of big TV shows coming out next year as well. It's going to be a great year; 2024 then, isn't it?

Heather Bayer
Are your kids still involved?

Derry Green
Yeah, actually, me and my son went down last night because one of the guests wanted to meet me because she'd seen us on 'Four in a Bed' [UK reality TV show] and a couple of other TV shows. So I wandered down because I was with my son, and me and my son wouldn't stop chatting to her and her husband for about, I don't know, for about 45 minutes or so, just about everything. They loved it. They'd seen it on TV. The kids love being down there. My daughter, she just wants to spend time in the units. She's very girly. She wants to sit in the hot-tub with her friends and stuff like that. Where my son, it's like a paradise for him. He's nine years old and I let him play with nail guns and chainsaws in the woods, something my dad had never let me do and if his mom ever found out, I'm sure she won't be happy about it. But yeah, if it's me and him down there, we can do what we want. It's like I'm his age and he's my age, we swap roles around then.

Heather Bayer
Well, that's fantastic. Derry, it's been just amazing talking to you. I expect to see you presenting on the Direct Booking Success Summit next year. I think you've got so much to share.

Derry Green
I like doing these things. I'm doing a couple of different events next year. Because again, as I alluded to before, social media is the thing that I've concentrated on, and that's been my main focus is building up social media platforms, building up followers, building up audiences, content creation, figuring out what drives bookings to sites. And that's what I do really well. But I love talking to people about it. If anybody wants to have a chat with me ever, I say all the time, just give me a ring [phone call]. My phone number is on the website. It's me you come through to. It's not like an automated office somewhere. Just give me a ring, send me a message, send me an email, whatever it might be.

Heather Bayer
I probably will. And we will definitely be back in touch next year, because I want to see what's happening then. So many congratulations on what you've achieved. I think for many people listening, the jaws are probably dropping at what you've achieved in such a short time. But just going back to that quote, A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules. Well, I think you're rewriting a lot of rules in this short-term rental industry, and I applaud you for it. Thank you so much for joining me.

Derry Green
You're more than welcome. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Heather Bayer
That was awesome. That was a really awesome conversation. Derry and I ended up talking for another 15 minutes after we'd stopped recording that. I wish I'd still had that record button going, because there was so much more. Goodness, he was talking about having two businesses. One business is the glamping side, but the other side is social media and he treats the social media side of his business as a completely separate one and spends an inordinate amount of time on social media. But when you've got three quarters of a million followers on a platform, then I guess you have to. So all his platforms are going to be on the Show Notes. I really encourage you to go and have a look at those. Go and have a look at The Secret Garden Glamping website where you'll see a lot of these exterior spaces.

Heather Bayer
It was really interesting in this post-recording conversation, we were talking about the fact that people don't go on vacation to sit inside the property in general. They're using it for accommodation. If they're staying longer, if they're staying a week or more, then yes, they're probably going to be eating in and dining in.  But if they're just there for a short space of time, they're probably going to spend most of their time outside, whether they're going outside to visit attractions or go to an event, or as with Secret Garden Glamping, they are just arriving and spending their two days, one day, two days, three days maybe, outside. He's created these amazing outdoor spaces. If I were still running my company now, that conversation alone would have got me really focusing way way more on looking at the outside of every property we had and trying to figure out how we could boost that outside experience even more. Because even though it wasn't glamping, it was cottages, but it was only a little bit of a step up from… In fact, I'm not even sure it's a step up, it's a step aside to go from what Derry is producing in his glamping world to what we had in our lakefront cottages.

Heather Bayer
That was great conversation. I hope you got a lot from it. If you've got any questions, Derry says his telephone number's on his website, any one of the thousands of people who go to the website every day can pick up the phone and call him.  So if you've got a question, you could call him directly. Probably better to send him a message on one of his social media platforms and all that information will be on the Show Notes. You know me, when I get super excited about something, I talk about it a lot. Ever since I met Derry, I have been looking forward to this conversation so much and I think it really delivered. I hope you enjoyed it.

Heather Bayer
Okay, that's it from me for another week. If you are listening on the day of publication, I'll be heading out to Orlando this upcoming weekend to the VRMA Conference; really looking forward to that. Then, of course, there is the Women's Summit and the DARM Conference coming up in December. And I know, because working with Amy and there's other amazing people organizing this thing, and I'm sort of getting a little bit of a background peek at what's going on.  There are some amazing speakers, amazing topics that you won't find at VRMA that you're going to find at the Women's Summit. The keynote speakers are outstanding as well. One of them, Cheryl Strayed who wrote Wild, she's my heroine. From reading Wild, it really got me thinking about doing more hiking, getting out and about in nature, which is something that I absolutely love to do.  I'm looking forward to meeting her. I'm looking forward to meeting Will Guidara, the author of Unreasonable Hospitality, who will be keynoting at the DARM Conference.

Heather Bayer
So lots of great things out there to be happening. If you are going to Orlando, you see me anywhere, please come and say hello. I have to tell you that I am a real introvert and I do find these conferences really daunting with so many people, and I just love it when somebody will come up and say hello to me and I can get chatting, because I'm not totally comfortable with approaching people and approaching groups. So if you see me there, come say hello. I'd love it.

Heather Bayer
Okay, so I will leave you to the rest of your day.

Mike Bayer
We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. Don't forget to check out our sponsor, PriceLabs, and their dynamic pricing and revenue management tools. Click the link in the description of this episode for more information.

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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