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
Back in the summer, the Digital Guide platform, Touch Stay, commissioned a survey to ask guests about their communication preferences. Some of the results were surprising and may have you rethinking your workflow to improve your guest experience strategies. In today's episode, I'm joined by Touch Stay's founder, Andy McNulty, to talk about the survey. So stay tuned for this great discussion.

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. As ever, I'm super excited to be back with you once again from a less than sunny Gulf Shores today - I'll be touching on that in a few moments. You know how I love talking about the weather and I get to actually talk about it in my introduction to this podcast.

Heather Bayer
I've talked in previous podcasts about being really frustrated by a lack of communication from both hosts and managers in the period between booking and stay. I've experienced this many times, certainly over the last year when I stayed in multiple vacation rentals and just not got information that I was expecting or had hoped for. Years ago when I was writing regular posts on Cottage Blogger, I was talking mainly about our local business in Ontario. I made a suggestion on a post that owners should provide more information for guests before they stayed.

Heather Bayer
I made a few suggestions. For example, creating a list of things to do and places to go on a rainy day. I got really enthusiastic about this, because it would be something I would like if I was heading out on a vacation with my family and the forecast wasn't good.

Heather Bayer
In fact, as I write this, the forecast for the next few days in Gulf Shores is for cloud and rain. It may not happen, but it's prompted messages on local Facebook groups that are focusing on what families can do on a rainy weekend when they'd only planned for beach time.

Heather Bayer
When I wrote that post, I got a response from an owner sharing her displeasure - and I do remember this well - that I'd suggest such a thing. Why should I be responsible for finding things for my renters to do? They can easily source that for themselves if they need ideas. That was 12 years ago, and you can tell that because she used the word 'renters', and I don't think anybody uses that word now, we're all using 'guests' as we should, but it was her attitude that really got me and I just hope that attitude is no longer prevalent.

Heather Bayer
But in the results from the 2023 Guest Communication Study that's just been published by Touch Stay, it seems there's still a lot of work to do to get owners and managers increasing their communication with guests. This study shows that guests want to get more information.

Heather Bayer
Today I'm joined by Andy McNulty, the founder of Touch Stay, to talk about all the survey results and what they mean for those who want to make the experience for their guests even better. Let's go straight on over to the interview with Andy to hear all about it.

Heather Bayer
I'm super happy to have with me once again Andy McNulty from Touch Stay. It's always a pleasure to talk to Andy. When I think back to all the years I've been in this business, I think Andy's been there forever. When did you start Getaway Earth, Andy? Can you remember?

Andy McNulty
Oh, Heather, you always test me this question. I want to say 2008.

Heather Bayer
Wow. Yes. Yeah, I think it's way back then because we were all on the Lay My Hat forum at that time.

Andy McNulty
That's right.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, from about...

Andy McNulty
I'd forgotten about Lay My Hat.  That was the original....

Heather Bayer
Yes.  That was right. It was sort of the original owners place to hang out, and particularly for the UK and European owners. I think that's where we first met. Then you started Getaway Earth and then there was Guest Hook and then there was Touch Stay and we've remained friends since. So you are my stabling influence, I think, in this industry. Andy's always there.

Andy McNulty
That's good. I'll take stabling influence. There's some other phrases I could come up with, so I'll take that one. Thank you.

Heather Bayer
So yes, we've been around a while, and I've loved, as everybody who listens to this knows, I love what you guys do with Touch Stay because I mention it all the time. This is why those of you listening out there, you'll probably never see or hear Touch Stay being a sponsor for this podcast because it doesn't need to, really.

Andy McNulty
You're not giving us an incentive, are you?

Heather Bayer
Not really. But I love the product. Just recently, Touch Stay published their 2023, and the first, Guest Communication Study. The study was about what influences guest satisfaction, reviews, and spend. I was fascinated to read all this and wanted to talk to you, Andy, about how this survey came about, what was the reason for it, and of course, to talk about the results. Thanks so much for joining me yet again.

Andy McNulty
I love being here. Of course, I wouldn't miss it for the world. I need any opportunity to come and chat. I like to talk. Anyway, you need to keep me focused, so yeah, ask me questions.

Heather Bayer
Okay, so what inspired you? What inspired Touch Stay to commission this survey? Because I know doing a survey like this is no mean feat. It takes a lot to get it set up, to get it organized, to get all the results in, and then even more to actually analyze the results. So what made you do it?

Andy McNulty
Two reasons. The first is because I think we all use guest experience, that phrase, very casually now to describe what is really quite a complicated thing. And that's why we use that simple phrase, because nobody really actually knows what guest experience is. I have always, always, wanted to know what a guest thinks and not just an isolated guest, but what a guest thinks and then aggregate that, so that then you have an understanding of what guests, plural, in their thousands think, so that we can all stop assuming that we know what guest experience is and talking about it, and it's basically just opinions. So can we make it more objective? That was the first reason. The other one was just something really simple. At last year's Vacation Rental World Summit, so 2022's, in Porto, there was a keynote. It was either an AirDNA or Key Data, I can't remember, I think it was AirDNA. It was the first session and they stood up and they talked about RevPAR and occupancy and all of that good pricing data stuff. Antonio had a Slido poll, which he encouraged the audience to submit questions on and upvote those questions, so that at the end of the presentation, he could pick the two or three most popular questions and ask the presenter what the answer was.

Andy McNulty
Well, the top upvoted question was, Can you tell me whether my guests want meeting on arrival or whether they would like self check-in? I thought to myself, Wow, we've just listened to pricing and RevPAR and occupancy. Actually, what you really want to know is what do my guests think of what I'm doing? I was on one table in the audience and Tyann was on another table. I picked my phone up and I sent her a WhatsApp and I said, Tyann, we need to be on that stage next year answering that question. That was really the catalyst for it. I wanted to find out what guest experience meant, and then this was the nudge to say, Well, let's go and do it. We basically said, Well, how are we going to do it? And should we ask our audience? Should we ask our audience to ask their guests? Should we just ask our audience what they think? We realized pretty quickly that that was going to have a certain bias to it, because if we ask industry people, then they're going to give industry answers, and if we ask our friends, they're going to give.… so basically, we had to get an independent survey organizer, which we picked YouGov, to run this survey and to go out there without bias and to ask vacation rental guests in the US those specific questions.

Andy McNulty
We picked the US, honestly, because it was a money factor, it was expensive... It was an expensive survey to generate. We decided we would be better focusing on one region rather than trying to pick a global audience. We might tackle that audience a bit differently going forward and try to see if there's some correlation across different geographies. So we surveyed those 2,024 guests through YouGov in the US. No surprise that 41% of those guests were 55+. That tends to be the demographic of the vacation rental guest. But nonetheless, there were 63% that were 35 and over, and there were a smattering of younger audience too. But really those are not the ones that are necessarily buying yet. It's their parents or their grandparents that are paying the trip and they're going along. So that was the reason and that's how we started it.

Heather Bayer
You mentioned vacation rental guests. Were they picked for destinations, vacation rental destinations? Were there any urban markets in there?

Andy McNulty
No, we didn't put any filters like that on. We just wanted to know, are you a vacation rental guest? That was a qualifier in it. I don't quite know how you got asked that, but that was a requirement for us only to ask vacation rental guests. But we didn't worry about the different market they were in or the different geography yet.

Heather Bayer
Okay, so you got these 2,024 responses. When you went to do the analysis, what were the key findings? Let's just have an overview of the main findings and then we're going to drill down a little bit more into some of them.

Andy McNulty
Yeah, so we asked about 15-20 questions. The nice thing about doing it through a professional organization like YouGov is that you can map the answers. You don't have to look at just the answer to that question. You could say, Well, those people that answered that question, how did they respond to a linked question further on? You could really build a story. That was deliberate. We wanted to be able to correlate the data. But the key findings, and if anyone wants to download this, they can go ahead and download it from our website and, hopefully, Heather, you could pop a link in the chat. But when you go and do that, there is a summary page. There's a lot of information, but we've tried to synthesize it and tell a story and do some summary. Just to give you some highlights, two-thirds of those guests surveyed received only one to two communications or no communications at all. This kind of made me stop, but at the same time, I didn't think it was that surprising, because I think when we come to think about communicating to guests, we tend to take the opinion that maybe they don't read or that there's no value in communicating more.

Andy McNulty
Let's just give them in one or two communications, or worse, not at all, the information they need. That's two-thirds of guests, 69%, interestingly, said that communication influenced their likelihood to leave a positive review. That's something we've always intuitively thought, but it's nice to see borne out in the data. So basically, 7 out of 10 guests do really value communication and good communication could result in them leaving a positive review.

Andy McNulty
Interestingly, that question we answered, that one that I mentioned was on the Vacation Rental World Summit last year, 67% of guests wanted self check-in. 44% of them said they wanted to be communicated during their mid-stay process by text. When we talk about mid-stay, we segmented it between post-booking/pre-arrival, then whilst you're staying, and then after-stay. We wanted to know what methods of communication the guest preferred. 44% wanted text mid-stay; that was the largest proportion. It flipped completely. So before stay/post-booking, most people wanted email. So it flips. Before you arrive, you want email, then during your stay, you want to text, and then it flips back to email again post-stay.  So again, we thought that was helpful because there's often a thing where it must be text all the time now.  Well, no, people are going to ignore texts that have important stuff after they've booked/before they arrive, but they're much more likely to consume it while they're there. That then tells you, Well, okay, let's flip to text communication during their stay, which makes sense.

Andy McNulty
But the one thing that really stood out for me in all this was that less than half of guests felt what we termed 'very well looked after'. And very well looked after was a phrase that I was keen to use, because it's a signal for me of good hospitality. Nobody wants their guests to feel that they've had an 'okay stay'. What's that? That's a Hilton. That's a Marr... Well, maybe it's not a Marriott, I should take that back. But maybe it's a Premier [Inn] in the UK or it's a La Quinta [Inns & Suites] in the US, I don't know. But you don't want in the vacation rental industry for less than half of guests to feel very well looked after. That was a pretty shocking one for me. Those are some of the highlights.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, really interesting. I want to go back on this one to two or no communications at all from the host, and I know that you use vacation rentals a lot, and you always have. This is where your foundation in this business came from, was your experience of being a guest. I'm a guest at a lot of vacation rentals too. I would go along with this. Certainly for the last 8 or 10 stays I've had, I've had no more than one or two communications. On many of the occasions I've felt that, No I've not been well looked after, because I've given all sorts of breadcrumbs along the way about the reason for my trip and the fact that perhaps I was traveling alone. I remember going to Barcelona a year or so back, traveling alone, and I mentioned this. I think that would have been such a great opportunity for more information to come about being a single traveler and safety and all sorts of things that came to mind as a traveler, but were completely ignored by the host or manager. What's your experience?

Andy McNulty
Yeah, I think that, like you said, I've always been a guest. I've always taken a view on whenever I approach anything in this industry, whether it's Touch Stay or anything that I speak about, is from the guest perspective, because I think it's important in the world where we're all surrounded by how we make our properties operationally efficient and our businesses operationally efficient and the dynamic pricing tools and making more money. We don't talk as much about what it really means to the guest. I think when you communicate only a couple of times, you end up communicating the bare essentials because what more can you communicate in one or two messages? You can't. What do you do if you're only going to communicate one or two times to the guests? Just the bare essentials. A lot of the really good stuff and the really important stuff can get overlooked because you're communicating like, I'm only sending one or two, so I've got to get everything that I really.... it doesn't make for a great experience.

Andy McNulty
I'll just do a slight aside. Hilary and I, my wife Hilary, for those of you who don't know, Hilary and I, it's our 25th wedding anniversary this year, in fact, it was on Tuesday night.  But we decided to take a trip to Greece a few weeks ago to celebrate the 25th, but mainly because we still wanted some sun. We didn't want to leave it until November, so we wanted some sunshine. But we stayed, Heather, not in vacation rentals on our 25th wedding anniversary, but at a nice hotel, a nice resort in Greece. I came back from that with, dare I say, a slightly different view on hotels. They did it so exceptionally well.

Andy McNulty
The stuff they did wasn't rocket science. The stuff they did was about connecting with us as humans. When we arrived.... of course, a hotel can do things differently, but my point is going to be that you can also do this yourself, if you think a bit more about it as a vacation rental professional. But they knew us, so they greeted us personally when we arrived. They knew who we were. They gave us an orientation when we arrived. They made us feel comfortable. They knew it was our 25th wedding anniversary, so they gave a few surprises during this day. Again, not hard necessarily to do and glean that information. We did come away with it feeling like we were treated really really well.

Andy McNulty
That's what I meant earlier about we felt very well looked after. I think that our industry is uniquely positioned to make that something that every guest can feel. Let's aspire to that. I mean, we're not going to achieve every guest, but we should aspire to it. I mean, if a hotel can do it, a hotel we stayed at, the one we stayed at had 1,000 guests while we were there, and they managed to do it. There are ways that this can be done electronically, but we're not trying hard enough with one or two communications, we're never going to get that very well looked after feeling.

Heather Bayer
First of all, happy anniversary.

Andy McNulty
Thank you.

Heather Bayer
Glad you had a good vacation, and congratulations for achieving that milestone. This whole thing about the hotel looking after you when they've got a thousand guests really comes back on this argument that I hear a lot from people. Well, we've got 50 properties, we've got 100 properties. It's really difficult to scale this. I just do not think it is anymore. Certainly now, with so much AI available, I think it's so much easier.

Heather Bayer
I'm just going to give you just another story of mine. Going back to another conference, went to VRWS in Como [Italy] a couple of years ago. Do you remember that one? Great conference. As a child, I used to go to a small campsite, no more than 10 miles from Como. When I had my own children, I took them back to that same campsite. Over the years, the two generations went to this same tiny, tiny little campground on a tiny, tiny lake. When I booked my accommodation, this was 20 years on, 30 years on from the last time I'd been there, and I wanted to go revisit and I'd mentioned it to the manager.  I had no idea whether it had been developed or what it was going to be like. I heard absolutely nothing.

Heather Bayer
We did all the organization to go back to find this place and found it really was.... You should never go revisit these places because it's never as good as it was. But I think they missed a real opportunity there. As I was saying of dropping breadcrumbs, your guests drop breadcrumbs all the time about their reasons for going places and their reasons for a trip. If you've listened to those breadcrumbs and used them to create those experiences, then you've just got so many more opportunities and you just said it, all about that, your trip on your anniversary and being recognized and having that really human connection.

Andy McNulty
Yeah, and it really comes down to that human connection is a phrase, but what's that? That's communication. That's what it comes down to. Just to pull out a stat from the report, which illustrates this perfectly, the level of satisfaction, in other words, satisfaction is a bad phrase, let's call it what it is, which is the number of people who felt very well looked after was only 40% when you're 1-2 communications. As soon as you go up to 3-5 communications, you're at 60% of people feel very well looked after. That is not a stretch for anybody to move from 1-2 to 3-5. If it is a stretch, go take a long hard look at yourself and figure out whether or not you should be in the hospitality business, because it's not hard to communicate 3-5 times to a guest. And what a surprise that resulted in that group feeling very well looked after. So small iterations, small change to the process, which is all about the number of times you communicate, fosters that feeling of being very well looked after. So it is simply about communication.

Andy McNulty
When I was at VRMA two weeks ago and I sat on a panel and we were talking about what's new in guest experience, which we did in Kansas City as well in the session before.  I had next to me a property manager from Anna Maria [Island], a guy called Adrian Johnson of SeaBreeze Vacations. And he didn't know anything about this communication study we'd done, and we hadn't released the results at all. But he talked about the number of times he communicates with guests. As he spoke about it, he said, We do some emailing and then we sometimes call them when they arrive. Anyway, all these different points he talked about, they added up to six. I said to him, It's interesting, Adrian, that you have guests who leave the most amazing reviews and guests who are very, very quiet on bothering you during the vacation. They're not needy at all, and you've done that because you've communicated six times, which is not far off the three to five I mentioned. By the way, if you go to six or more communications, the satisfaction increases a little bit, but not markedly beyond the three to five. You can communicate more and get a little bit out of it. He didn't know anything about the study, but he clearly touched that guest six times and he's now got very satisfied guests who leave great reviews who do not bother him at all during their stay.

Andy McNulty
I thought that was a great endorsement of how somebody of his size, he's got a lot of properties. He's a big property manager and he can do that. He can do that at scale.

Heather Bayer
Let's talk about the 3-5 times. I know people are probably out there thinking, Well, what am I going to say to them? What's in this communication? What can they do to increase the quality of information they're providing? If in those one to two times they're thanking them for booking and sending them their information prior to the stay, what goes in the middle?

Andy McNulty
It very much depends on your business. But inside the report, there's some signposting and there's some clues. Particularly, there's a great section on what guests want to hear from hosts. We looked at arrival info, restaurants, activities and attractions, grocery deliveries, access info, upselling stuff. If when you look through that section, you are still stuck, then there's a problem. Very clear things the guests have signposted they want to hear.

Andy McNulty
Let's start with what do you communicate right afterwards? Feel free to keep that factual. Feel free to make that the time where you introduce yourself and thanks for your booking, all that stuff. That's the one communication. Then you've got the latter communications right up close to their stay, which is always about the arrival and the access information. There's some good data inside the report which shows that. There's another one of your communications. Maybe you want to do that twice because that's so important, that access and pre-arrival stage that may be closer to their stay, and maybe even on the day of the start date as well, you want to communicate something. Let's call that two times you communicate access instructions and one after booking.  There's three.

Andy McNulty
You've got 2-3 other moments during there in order to get to up to that 5 or 6 communications level where you can start talking about things that are really going to be valuable to the guest and valuable to you too. If you're communicating just one or two times and you're only including those essential information, you're missing out on those opportunities to wow the guest with things that will get you more money. What other things can you talk to them about that you could upsell them? What other things can you talk to them about that are really unique in your area that will give them that really, really great feeling that they are being very well looked after? It's not hard. Two or three extra times. What else could you include? Maybe you're in a destination where there are great restaurants and you know those restaurants get booked up in advance. Well, there you go. Maybe two or three weeks prior to arrive, maybe even a month prior, you send that message which says, restaurants get booked up. We've got some great recommendations. These are the ones you should go to, but you do need to book them now.

Andy McNulty
Guests will be receptive to that if you've set that scene on that post-booking email, which is a nice introductory, and maybe even suggest to them in that introductory email after booking that they will hear from you a few more times before their stay with really valuable information. You'd be surprised, the data says it, how much the guest appreciates that. Those are some of the things. I won't go into all the details, but there's a lot in the report with specifically when guests want to hear from host and what they want to hear.

Heather Bayer
I know when I've been to places, we went to Costa Rica, my sister and I, a couple of years ago, and we wanted to do trips. We wanted to do some whale watching and we wanted to do some zip-lining. All these things did have to be booked in advance, because I'd experienced this on a previous occasion when we'd arrived and wanted to do some trips and we couldn't, because they were all booked up and we hadn't got that information prior. It's things like that. It's only the people that are you, the owners, the managers, who are in that location that absolutely know if a restaurant is going to be booked up or if-

Andy McNulty
Exactly.

Heather Bayer
-or if activities need to be booked in advance. So, yes, I can see where that really comes in handy. I've got to mention, I remember Tyann standing up, and I think it was at the Book Direct Show in Miami last year, and she was talking about communication and talking about communicating over 20 times with a guest group. However, I should add a caveat to that, that in that location, in Branson, these are massive family reunion groups that come, and Tyann is very much aware that the person organizing these events needs help in that organization. That's where the multiple communications come in because she's helping them organize meals for 36 people and things like that. It really does depend. It's only you, the operator, that knows your guests and what their needs are.

Andy McNulty
Exactly. I think her flow also includes some things afterwards as well, which I'd really focus there on the pre-stay. But you're right, but you can elaborate. Once you've got the guest happy and satisfied and they feel with a good relationship with you, you're communicating really well, you're doing the equivalent of our experience when we got to the hotel, you're doing all of that in front, then you can focus maybe during that stay on when does the trash need to go out? But because the guests are receptive to you by then, they're going to listen to that sort of stuff.

Andy McNulty
Then, of course, after they've left, you want to talk about reviews and maybe staying in touch with them and all that kind of stuff as well. So, Tyann has a few more because of that. The one thing I would say is don't avoid the phone either. Adrian Johnson, the SeaBreeze Property Manager that I mentioned, they do call and they do it at scale. They've got a lot of properties, so it's also possible to do that.

Andy McNulty
This talks a little bit to stuff that we've spoken about before in terms of guest communication that each guest is different.  So not everybody wants to have a text or an email or a phone call, but there are some that do. Smattering in different forms of communication during that guest communication flow is important, so that you do hit all those types. Just as an example, I did talk about the type of communication that people wanted in advance, but we also segment the types of communication that people want by age group too. It's quite interesting to see that too. If you look at the report, you could possibly glean some things about the kind of profile that comes to stay with you and the way that they would prefer to receive communications. It's not just about text or email, but people like a phone call sometimes and there's the OTA app as well. The younger generation were keen on the OTA app, that's why I say that.

Andy McNulty
Tyann does have quite an elaborate communication flow. But the good news is the data says you don't have to go for 20 times or 10 times. If you can just get to three to five, you're going to have a marked difference in the result.

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.

John Farber
I got into real estate through a strategy called house hacking, where I lived in a property and I rented out the other rooms to live for a free. That was my first exposure to real estate. So now I have eight short-term rentals, and we also have an in-house property management team. We didn't have any sophistication around changing pricing for weekdays and weekends and different bundles and high season and low season. We were just guessing.

John Farber
We're in an area that had a lot of events going on from time to time. And we realized quickly that using just Airbnb for pricing or Vrbo for pricing, it wasn't accurate. We were losing money by not being able to have a calendar that would update without us thinking about it. So we were just looking into different options, different ways that we could have better pricing. And we just did a demo with PriceLabs. And PriceLabs became easy for us. We learned better ways to use it. I think the setup at the beginning is the most probably important part, because once you set it up properly at the beginning, it can really run pretty much without too much manual input.

John Farber
And in some areas, if you set it up properly at the beginning, it doesn't require much manual input at all after that. So I would say at the beginning, we were doing multiple trainings. I think we even reached out to PriceLabs support and we were doing demos just to make sure that each property was set up the right way. Because for the most part then after it's set up properly, you don't have to tinker with it that much. I also felt like we were leaving money on the table. In general, things just became way more organized and I felt like we had a better handle. I also just don't like the feeling of losing money, even if I don't know how much it is. And I felt like that's significantly gone away.

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. So let's go on right back now to our interview.

Heather Bayer
I found it interesting that the report uncovered that communication influences positive reviews, because I've been working on a course on getting better reviews, and so I've been looking at a lot of them. It's so interesting how many mentioned in the very first sentence, communication. 'The host/the manager had great communication prior to the stay', and that really contributed to how they felt about it overall.

Andy McNulty
Yeah. I mean, it's the bedrock of life, isn't it? Really. Communication can result in so much trouble as well as so many good experiences, depending on how good or bad you are at it. We all know that. We've all been in business, we've all interacted with people, and we know that very often misunderstandings come because we haven't communicated it clearly enough. The vacation rental industry is no different, is it? So to your point, 69% of them said that communications influenced their likelihood to leave a positive review. That's just a nice way of us getting that intuitive backing with the objective data. But not a surprise, because of what I said. If we get communication right, we are going to inherently result in more guests who are more likely to leave that positive review.

Heather Bayer
You mentioned about how some guests like to be texted, some would like a phone call, some would like an email. But what about the general information that's been conveyed during the trip cycle, from booking to post-stay? And you've touched on this briefly, how does it change at different times during the trip cycle? And how should operators take that into account when they're looking at their communication flow?

Andy McNulty
Yeah, so we've got good data in the report. For example, things like activities and attractions, there's 3 in 10 people want to actually hear about that stuff straight away. They're probably talking about the planners. Not every guest is a planner, but those are the planners. But a further 25% want to receive information about activities and attractions at intervals during that post-booking to arrival stage. Between those two groups, you've got more than 50% of people who don't want to hear about activities and attractions late on in the day. They want to have it early and that makes sense. But then you can flip to grocery delivery and the data is far less clear on that. You've got segments wanting it at all times. In fact, you've got 3 in 10 people never wanting to have grocery delivery information. What does that say? Maybe that says that they've never actually experienced that, or maybe they've never had an experience where somebody has actually done a grocery delivery for them, and therefore they want it in the future. Things like access information, 3 in 10 guests want it 1-2 days before, 12% want it on arrival, 16% want it one week before.

Andy McNulty
Within that whole segment, you've got over 50% of guests who want their access information no later than one week before their stay. Those are the things that the report also gives you, not just how often to communicate and what method to communicate, but what to communicate at the different times. It's quite useful if you're sitting there and wondering, Gee, you know what? I wonder when I should be doing all of this stuff, is take a look at that and it will give you some pointers.

Heather Bayer
I stayed somewhere recently where the access information came 12 hours before and I was panicking because I was traveling and I was going to arrive in a strange country, head to this place, and I had no arrival information because I couldn't access it during that period. I arrived and there was the information for me, but I was already - and this is a term that used to be used in our company - pre-soured. Because I'd had this minor stressful and anxious period before the travel, because I didn't have this information to make me feel more comfortable about arriving and getting it. All the way through the flight I was thinking, Am I going to get this when I arrive? Is it going to be there? Am I going to get there and find that my phone's not working? Yeah, that pre-souring is a real thing. We knew it for 20 years as we ran our property management company. We endeavored all the time to remember that people, travelers, could be pre-soured just by the omission of something.

Andy McNulty
It's interesting. I do actually interact with a lot of Touch Stay customers that want their access code hidden until the day of the stay. Their logic is very clear. They don't want those bad actor guests trying to get into the home at 10 AM when they really shouldn't be in there until 3 or 4 o'clock. That makes sense. But the data is saying 12% want it on arrival, which means that 88% want it before arrival. So who are you going to devise your processes for? The 12% or the 88%. You're going to devise for the 88%, so give it to them in advance. But you can still get over that. It's about setting the expectation, isn't it?

Andy McNulty
That's the other part of communication, is setting the expectation. There's nothing wrong with saying your access code is going to be on arrival. But to your point, if you tell me that and also then give me the instructions on how I use that code in advance, so that when the code drops on the day, I know what to do with it. I've seen the video on how to operate the keypad or I know where the lockbox is, or whatever, then you're probably not... Well, I certainly wouldn't stress as much because I know that that host, that has bothered to communicate to me in advance, will follow through and I can trust them to deliver me the information at the right time when I arrive. I'll have that sense of feeling they are trustworthy, and I'll relax. I think that's what it's about. It's about listening to the survey. 88% want it before, but then if you do want to hide it until that day, then what's going to happen? Tell them how to use the code when they arrive.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, and I think you make a very good point. It's not exactly the code, but it's how you do that access. I always remember your story about arriving at a place in London, was it? In the blue box on the wall? And arriving at night?

Andy McNulty
Yeah, Tyann and I arrived into a residential London, old mews, cobbled street, very quintessential London. But we arrived there at gone midnight, I think it was like half twelve in the evening or something. We had no clue where this key was. It was supposed to be in a lockbox to the right of the door. Well, there was no lockbox to the right of the door. We were maneuvering the car to shine the lights on the front door. Of course, we had the engine running. I think I was driving a mini at that stage, and minis had quite a growly sound to them. So all these neighbors who were trying to sleep must have been like, What? That's probably not the first time they've heard that. But anyway, it wasn't in a lockbox there. The lockbox was tucked away under a hatch to the right of the door, which, to be fair to the property manager they did have a 24-hour service, so when we called them and we asked them, they told us exactly what to do, but that should have been a far easier experience.

Heather Bayer
Yes, that's the one I remember, yours. I certainly remember my feeling. That's definitely something for people to take on board. I just want to come back to the question that started all this in the first place about being met, because I know there are still owners who are determined that their guests must be met and shown around. But your results are saying this is not the case.

Andy McNulty
Well, yes and no. I think what it says is that the majority of people are wanting that self check-in.  In other words, leave me to get on with my vacation. But it does leave 3 in 10 people who don't necessarily want that. I think there is still some ambiguity, and that's natural. You are going to have certain parts of your guest demographic wanting to be met rather than the self check-in. But I think if you're in any doubt, you want to construct a communication flow and you want to keep it consistent, then self check-in is probably the way to go. But maybe what you want to do is seed in there that you are available should they need, so put it on the guest or apply to you and go, Do you know what? I would like you to meet and greet me. So you don't have to make your process only this way, but you can probably lead them more to that knowing that they could turn around and ask you if they need to.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, exactly. Okay, there's a lot of information in this report, and I do encourage everybody to go to the link on the website and take a look at the report. Take some time, sit and read it through. I have to say, Andy, the commentary that went with the report is very engaging and it kept me reading. Sometimes you can go through these things and they're just so turgid and you think, Who did the writing of this? But this report I found so interesting and the commentary was just as interesting.

Andy McNulty
Well, big shout out to Kate there because Kate was the one that wrote all those really great interpretive words. Data is one thing and I love data, but if you're not great at looking at numbers and deducing things, the report gives you that in buckets. You can literally get Kate guiding you through what it all means. The link, by the way, touchstay.com/guest-communication-study. So guest-communication-study with a dash between three words.

Heather Bayer
Perfect. As I say, it will be in the Show Notes as well. So having got this report, can you put in a nutshell what owners and managers could actually put into practical action straight away?

Andy McNulty
I think the overriding one, the most compelling one for me is just to go.... If you are one of those that's only communicating a couple of times, move up. Move up to 3-5 communications. If you're already at 3-5 communications and you're looking for marginal gains, head up. Keep going, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I'm not saying they don't improve, they do. But it's just not as noticeable as going from 1-2 to 3-5. I'd absolutely communicate more. We've been saying it for ages, but the guest data now says it, so it's not just us. Communicate more. I would say do the right communication at the right time. If you're going to communicate more, just think about some of those data results about when people want information, particularly that access information. Make sure you get that to them later in their stay, but not so late that they're panicking. And look for those upsell opportunities as well. We haven't really covered that too much, but the report does talk about the money being left on the table by people who are not communicating the opportunity for guests to buy stuff. So check that out too.

Heather Bayer
I talked to Derry Green recently from The Secret Garden Glamping, and we had a little discussion on there about communication and about upselling. He was talking about his upsells. One of them, he has wood-fired hot tubs for each of his glamping pods. He charges extra for getting them all ready for the guest as they arrive. He sells Marshmallow kits, S'mores kits, and there are other upsells. He said without continuous communication with his guests, he wouldn't get this across what their options are. And people want to plan ahead. You don't want to go for the morning of your vacation at The Secret Garden Glamping and think, Oh, we'd really like a hot tub tonight.

Andy McNulty
That would be a big shame, wouldn't it?

Heather Bayer
Too late. Particularly when he's got a waiting list. He's now booked out until 2025. He's got that upselling really nailed and people are happy to pay extra for the things they want. If they don't want them, they don't need to have them charged. It's definitely a good area to be thinking about.

Heather Bayer
What other practical actions increase the amount of communications? What else can they do right now?

Andy McNulty
What else can they do right now? Maybe pay attention to the mode of communication. We have spoken a little bit about SMS and email there, but there are some other methods of communication in the survey. There are also analysis of the age group and their desire to be communicated in different ways. So if you know what your guest demographic is, you can pretty quickly zoom in on the report and see not just how many more times to communicate and what to communicate, but also maybe the communication methods to use based on the demographic of your guests. Those are probably the three most important things I would say. It's the amount of times you communicate, i.e., more than what you communicate, when and how you communicate it to them, and those things will be answered. There's lots of that deduction stuff in the words too. You were talking about those summary words. Later on in the report, where Kate spends quite a few pages on interpreting, there's lots of these nuggets about some of what I said, but more besides too.

Heather Bayer
Yes. As you're talking, I've just been scrolling through it, because I'm just coming up to my last question, which is on the last page of the report, which is about the opportunity.... you call it the opportunity cost of not communicating. I think this is really important. Do you want to just talk us through that one?

Andy McNulty
Yeah. I mean, it's like everything in life, isn't it? If you don't tell people stuff, then they're not going to know, are they? If you've only got one or two communications, you're going to end up communicating the wrong stuff. When you've got more opportunities to communicate, then you've got more things that you can tell them. If you're not utilizing that, then you're leaving money on the table in the sense of, well, nobody associates communication or good communication with your brand. They don't perceive you as necessarily a passionate host. You're not showing that you could potentially book extra nights because you have availability and all these great things to see and do in the area. You're therefore not leaving that guest with a feeling that they could go and talk to their friends about this amazing stuff. You talk about Derry at The Secret Garden Glamping. I mean, talk about a guy that epitomizes the value of communication. If anyone wants to check him out? Go to The Secret Garden Glamping. It's a UK business, and you'll instantly get a sense of it. Have a look at his social media. Have a look at his website. Have a look at his reviews.

Andy McNulty
The guy does one heck of a job at being personal and communicating, and that comes back. It comes back in reward.... people talk about it. He gets nominated for being the best place to stay. And so therein lies the cost of not communicating, that you miss all these opportunities to strengthen your business and to build a better future business too.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, so thank you. I encourage everybody to go and take a look at this report. I want to see how many people download the report after this conversation, Andy.

Andy McNulty
Yeah, me too.  I hope it's useful because we're going to do it again. Also, if people want to see different things, tell us, because we're not writing this just for our own benefit. We're writing this to try and be valuable. That was the point of writing it in the first place. If you remember to try and define really what guest experience is and what guests want to enable meaningful change. If there are things that you'd like to know, please do tell us because we want to iterate the report to be more valuable.

Heather Bayer
Well, certainly I can see the value in it. Throughout it all, we haven't talked about digital guides. We haven't talked about Touch Stay, so I want to give you the opportunity now to share with whoever might be out there who's not heard of Touch Stay, but to learn a little bit more about you.

Andy McNulty
Yeah. I'm humble enough to know that we're still a little business, so there are still going to be loads of people who haven't heard about us. But to those of you who don't know, it's just a way for you to document all the things that you want your guests to know. If you still have a paper binder on the coffee table or you've got page six missing because the guest walked out, stop doing that. I'm hoping I don't really have to say that too often, but I still do say it, because I think there's some people that still do have it. But it's a digital version of that. But it's so much more than that. When you've got a digital product, some of these things about communicating you can do and you can sequence your communications so that when the guest gets your text, it has a link to the guidebook where you're asking them or you're telling them that particular thing you want to tell them.  Like the access instructions maybe has a link to the guidebook where there's a video on how to operate the keypad; those kinds of things.

Andy McNulty
We've done some cool extra stuff now, so you can get your guests to leave you a first impression when they arrive.  Brian Chesky put out a Tweet, I think yesterday, or the day before, talking about that gap that happens, that expectation gap between what happens when I arrive in an Airbnb. Is it going to be quite what I expect? We're not solving that, but we're certainly enabling the guest to tell you straight away if there's a problem through a first impressions rating, which enables you then to act on it and get in front of it. Again, it's all about communication. I could witter on all day about Touch Stay, but I won't. It gets a bit boring. But go to touchstay.com and have a look and try us out if you haven't yet already.

Heather Bayer
I will put the link to touchstay.com on the Show Notes as well. Easy enough to remember, though. Much better than vacationrentalformula.com, I have to say.

Heather Bayer
Anyhow, Andy, it's been an absolute pleasure as ever talking to you. I look forward to seeing you at a conference at some time in the future. Yes, that seems to be the times that we're able to get together, [we] very briefly crossed paths in Orlando. Didn't have anywhere near enough time.

Andy McNulty
Yeah, it's always the way, isn't it? But yes, I love being on these [podcasts], Heather. I can't remember how many I've been on over the years, but yeah, I just love being on and having a good chat and hopefully in the process imparting some perspective and some wise or not, depending on how you take it.

Heather Bayer
I think there's a lot of wisdom in there. Thank you to you and to the Touch Stay team for the amount of work you put into this. It's going to be of huge value to people, so I hope you will all go check it out. So thank you, Andy.

Andy McNulty
Thank you, Heather. Thanks. See you.

Heather Bayer
Well, thank you so much, Andy McNulty. Always an absolute pleasure to get together and have a good chat. It seems that I may have been way ahead of the times all those years ago, but I didn't quite have the following then that I do now, because I clearly wasn't getting my message across then. Back then, I guess, most guests simply wanted just to have a place to stay. Anyway, they weren't expecting hosts to help them have a great experience outside of the accommodation. But now it's a piece of the hospitality framework. The really successful operators know that to get ahead of their competition, they need to deliver more in the way of help to their guests. They need to be perceptive to their needs, read between the lines in communication, and jump in where they're most needed.

Heather Bayer
So the results of the survey are interesting and above all else, it makes for a really good read. Go to the address in the Show Notes and download the report. Touch Stay have done a really good job at collecting the data, analyzing it, and I know that was quite a task, and then providing plenty of suggestions for what you can do to up your game when communicating with your guests.

Heather Bayer
I'd love to hear if you're already doing this and if it's working for you. I'm going to post in the Facebook group, so if you wish, join in the discussion there. And if you haven't come across the Facebook group yet, it's The Business of Short-term Rental and Property Management. And if you haven't brought your tickets to the Vacation Rental Women's Summit and the DARM conference in Nashville in December, go check them out too in the links that I've put on the Show Notes. Both conferences are going to be stellar. The speakers are amazing, the educational content is going to be super interesting, and I'd love to meet you there.

Heather Bayer
That's it for another week. It's been an absolute pleasure to be with you. It was a great pleasure to talk to Andy, and I really hope you enjoyed that conversation.

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.