Heather Bayer
We are kicking off the 12th year of this podcast in this special New Year episode with some winning strategies for 2025. My special guest is David Angotti, someone I've known and respected for many years. And we have a discussion to share that is packed with actionable advice and predictions to help you thrive in the year ahead.

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'm super delighted to be back with you. And it's 2025 and I'm pleased to have made it this far. This is the 12th year of the podcast. We have been going since 2013, I can't believe we have got this far. If I look back in 2013, I think I posted seven episodes, I still include that because it were seven episodes in there. But then when we got 2014, then we were into a podcast every single week. And I am proud to say that we have not missed a single week's episode in the past 11 years. And thank you to all my listeners who have stayed loyal to me for all these years. And for those of you who have joined us more recently, and I'm not going to suggest you go all the way back to 2013 or 2014 to check out those early episodes. They're probably not really worth listening to now, particularly the one where I sat down with Matt Landau, and between us, we decided that this little company called Airbnb was not going anywhere. You can go search that one out if you like, but that was not my proudest moment. I wanted to share that.

Heather Bayer
In previous years, we've always kicked off the New Year with Andrew McConnell. And if you've been a listener for some time, you will know Andrew McConnell as the founder of rented.com. And then after rented.com was acquired by Track, he moved on to TravelNet Solutions and Track and he is still advising them right now. But he's pretty much transitioned into a new role as the co-founder and CEO of Alively, which is focusing on wellness products. And I'll put a link to the show notes, you can go and check out and see what Andrew is doing now. And we wish Andrew all the best for this new venture, and check out his website at alively.com.

Heather Bayer
So this year, I wanted to find the perfect successor to Andrew, someone who is both a seasoned entrepreneur and industry expert with a proven track record of successful ventures, and it was an easy pick. David Angotti co-founded and exited multiple technology startups before co-founding smokeymountains.com, which was a property management company in the Smoky Mountains region in 2013, which was subsequently acquired by VTtrips. In 2023, his next company, StaySense, was acquired by Guesty, where he now serves as Chief Evangelist, bringing a wealth of experience to the table. David was a keynote speaker at the VRNation Conference in Boise, Idaho, earlier this year, and he kept the audience spellbound with one of the best presentations I've seen in a long time. He such a great storyteller. So it was a real no-brainer to ask him to come and join us here.

Heather Bayer
So in this episode, we reflect on the key trends that shaped 2024, from evolving guest behaviors and expectations, to regulatory challenges and technological advancements. We also explore actionable strategies to help you thrive in 2025. So wherever you are in this industry, whether you're a property manager, or a host, or someone just keen to stay ahead in the short-term rental market, this conversation promises to be both inspiring and insightful.

Heather Bayer
So, in the ChatGPT phrase of 2024, let's dive into From Trends to Tactics with David Angotti, Uncover How to Set Yourself Up for Success in 2025. David Angotti is the Chief Evangelist at Guesty. We're going to start off by asking what the heck a chief evangelist is. But thank you so much for joining me on this New Year's Day episode. Is it New Year's Day or is it coming out on the... No, it's actually a New Year's Eve episode. So Happy New Year for tomorrow, if you're listening to it on the day of publication. Welcome, David.

David Angotti
Happy New Year to you, Heather, even if it's a day early. Great to be talking with you.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, you've been on the show a number of times, and it's always a pleasure for me to get you on here and to actually share some of your wisdom with everybody. And today we've called this episode From Trends to Tactics: What 2024 taught us about Short-Term Rentals and How to Win in 2025. So you've got a big remit for this episode, David.

David Angotti
Thanks for setting the bar so low for me, Heather. This ought to be easy.

Heather Bayer
Not at all. For anybody who doesn't know David Angotti, would you just introduce yourself, give us a very brief background summary of what got you to where you are now and what a chief evangelist actually means?

David Angotti
Yeah. So what got me to where I am now, my wife and I exited a company. We bought a vacation rental out in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. We put it with a few property managers, and we were like, Oh man, this isn't going great. We can do a better job. We started managing our own property. Next thing, we've grown that into a property management business. We had well over 100 properties, and life wasn't so much fun anymore for a couple of tech guys, my co-founder and I at that point, running property management. We found ourselves doing things that weren't necessarily perfectly matched to our skillset, and not just super happy dealing with owners and guests and all the things that come with that. So we divested that business. We retained back the technology that we'd built. Among that technology was the smokymountains.com OTA. It was basically a direct booking brand that had done so good, it turned into the big bad OTA. Then from there, we grew a few more OTAs out of that and sold that off to Guesty, which is how I joined the executive team here as Chief Evangelist. Along the way, too, there were some other things, I did develop a purpose-built neighborhood and these other things in short-term rentals. But all along the way, everything plugged into this in one way or another. This has just been a passion of mine since I was really 29 at the exit from that first business all the way till now. It's been fun growing up with this industry.

David Angotti
Then to answer your question around what a chief evangelist does, outside of our company, people might think a chief evangelist just speaks at a few conferences and gets off the rest of the year. That would be a great gig if that was true. But really, my favorite part of the job, and the part of the job that delivers the value to both our customers as well as our company, is listening to prospective customers, listening to current customers, and just listening to the market on the whole, distilling all of that information and bringing that back to the team of, Hey, here's something we can do on the product side. Here's something we can do on the education side. Here's how we can deliver more value to all of our stakeholders, internal and external. And so that's really my job at the core is doing that. And of course, that comes with speaking at conferences and taking people out to dinner and all those other fun things.

Heather Bayer
And I've got to focus on you speaking at conferences, because you spoke, I think, twice at the Vacation Rental Success Summit when we were holding our conferences in Toronto and San Antonio. I was always transfixed with your presentations, just story-filled and everything relevant. I still tell people the story about Netflix and... what's that video store?.... Blockbusters. I'd heard that story first coming from you, and it really resonated with me. Just to let you know that you're telling stories that have made a difference in my life. Multiply that by the gazillion people who have also listened to you and you do make differences. There's a few things that you also do. You're an ultra-marathoner. We talked about that last time we chatted. Have you done any more ultra-marathons this year?

David Angotti
Yeah. So I've done right at a dozen in the last year. So since the last time, we talked quite a few of them, and then actually just got accepted into what's the grand slam of Ultra Running for next year, which is four 100-mile races that will happen throughout next summer. It's a pretty big goal of mine to complete that and looking forward to doing that. So ultra marathoning is one of those things where it has so many parallels to business that it's really unique in that sense. Every race has parallels to every business I've built, and you just find yourself realizing, Oh, wow. In the same way, I have to grit and grind through this thing, this hill, this challenge over here on a race, I've had to do that in business as well. That's one of the things I think that makes it appeal to me.

Heather Bayer
I've always been very curious when you've talked about this, what do you think about? What do you think about when you're running like that? I've done a half marathon. That was enough for me. And I did a bit of business planning while I was doing that running, as well as worrying about whether I was going to make the next mile. But what do you think about on a 100-mile run? Just curious.

David Angotti
You're really going to think about a wide spectrum of topics from start to finish. On one of these, say, a Keys100 or Leadville [Trail] 100, there's all this anticipation and build up to the event. You may be there in town a week before it and hanging out with all your friends, and you're at the start line, the shotgun goes off. It's still dark outside. And so that's going, just the excitement of the moment is going to take up the first few miles, really. But then all of a sudden, you do have to start grinning and grinding through the next 97.

Heather Bayer
I've got 97 miles to go.

David Angotti
You're going to find yourself listening to some podcasts, but you're also going to hit points where there's no ability to listen to a podcast or an audiobook or anything, maybe not even music, and you're just miserable. At that point, you may be thinking about, how do I make it to the next aid station or one more mile or even one more step at certain points? So it's a combination of this, how do I get through this moment over and over again? Not so much, how do I get through 100 miles? If you don't segment it down, then it's just an impossible feat, even if you've done it before. It's just so long.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Makes 'It's one step at a time' mean a lot, doesn't it?

David Angotti
Yeah. It's one of those things actually on this bracelet. It says, Can you go one more step? And that's a quote from the founder of the Leadville 100 Race, Ken Klober. And he said, Basically, that's the question to ask yourself if you're contemplating quitting. Because if you can't take one more step forward and you have to quit, you're going to be okay. You're going to be fine with that decision tomorrow. But if you had one more step left in you and you don't take it, you're going to always wonder what if.

Heather Bayer
Oh, that's interesting. That's a great one to contemplate.

David Angotti
Yeah.

Heather Bayer
So thank you for joining me on this episode. Always a very special one of the year. We were honored with Andrew McConnell doing this episode for about five or six years. And now Andrew has moved on to Alively and is well into his wellness period, which is very interesting to follow. I needed to find somebody that would fill those shoes and just take the... This is the 11th year of the... 12th year of the podcast this year. I wanted somebody that was really special to come and take this forward, and I'm glad you are filling those shoes. I hope that you will come along and do this again next year as well. But we will talk about that, one step at a time, right?

David Angotti
That's right.

Heather Bayer
So in these episodes, we've always taken a look back on the year that's just gone and figured out what we're going to do with what we've learned and take it forward to 2025. So you've been around the conferences. You're working within a really powerful platform and Guesty at the moment. You're seeing trends and patterns. What were the defining trends for you of 2024? And which of those do you think were most transformative for hosts/property managers?

David Angotti
Yes. I think when we look at the trends, there are a few that really jump out to me. The first would be we saw this trend towards the continued normalization of the post-COVID era, if we want to call it that. That's a fancy way to say we still had declining ADRs in a lot of markets. Occupancy is still a challenge for a lot of people. We had this peak, and then now this post-COVID shakeout that's happened. Those really great times of those initial post-COVID years have been a challenge for a lot of property managers. I think that's one of the defining trends when we look back at 2024. It's just that trend of how people travel, what people are willing to pay for rentals, what occupancy looks like in the new oversupply era a little bit, and how we're dealing with homeowners, or our own problems if we have a mortgage on the property and we bought the property based on thinking it was going to do a higher revenue. That's one of the big defining things, I would say, as we look back at 2024.

David Angotti
Another thing would be technology has continued to emerge as a bigger and bigger cornerstone, if you will, of operations. And technology is not going away. We can see it is accelerating rather than becoming a more static thing. It's not, Oh, we figured out this tech thing, and we're good; we can move on now to whatever else. It's more complicated now in ways than ever before, but also, broadly, more simple too, with tools like ChatGPT, Google Claude. We were talking about Google LM before we went on air here. All of those things can actually make our life higher quality, easier, free up time. How we use those is definitely starting to take shape. I think when we look back at 2024, that's going to be the year that these tools became fairly popularized and started to gain traction within our businesses.

David Angotti
On 2024, we had continued problems with regulations and markets, and we also had the continued emergence of the mid-term rentals and also those continued problems around loyalty. How we garner loyalty as a mom and pop brand or a mainstream brand in whatever market we may operate in. So I think if we were to talk about it at the 30,000-foot level, those would be some of the things that have seemed like defining moments for 2024.

Heather Bayer
I talked a couple of times to people, Thibault Masson, I talked to Simon Lehmann in the last year about the Airbnb co-hosting network and what was happening with that development by Airbnb of this broader nature of bringing people in to almost professionalize them within the Airbnb framework. And that's something when I think that as we go into next year, we're going to see that happening more. I'm seeing these Airbnb co-hosts now out there with their 100 properties, 150 properties, and marshaling just armies of virtual assistants to help them out. And that's why I talked to Thibault and to Simon, what did they think where this was going? There's a lot of eggs in one basket there. That always comes back to me. If you're putting your eggs just in the Airbnb basket, what happens when that implodes?

David Angotti
Yeah. So I think you said a word there that really highlights the challenges with this. You said 'almost professionalized'. It's almost professionalization. It's not quite there. And so that's my concern with the movement. I do think that there are a lot of great people and great ideas within that movement. The STR Wealth Conference, which really caters to that co-host persona is right here in Nashville every year. So I've had the chance to go to it for three years and see the momentum of that whole market, and Bill Faeth and his team have done a good job with that conference. And so I've had the chance to get to know him. He lives here in Nashville as well and talk with a lot of these individuals.

David Angotti
And so I think that what we are seeing is rather than this opposition, which is what most people think of co-hosts as that are professionalized today and professionalized property managers, there's a lot of actual parallels between the two groups. And I think what's going to happen is we're going to see a continued merging of these two groups rather than a divergence. All of a sudden, we're seeing co-hosts start to care about regulations. We're seeing property managers start to care about regulations. We're seeing co-hosts try to help implement revenue management for somebody. That's one of the main things they're saying they do. There's all of these differences for sure, but we're seeing more and more similarities between the two groups.

David Angotti
I do believe that sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes on a problem to reach a solution. I do believe there are going to be great solutions that come out of those few thousand people that descend on Nashville every year for that conference. I've had enough conversations with them. In ways, it almost reminds me of when I'd go to VRSS up in Toronto or out in San Antonio as a property manager, and then I'd be able to talk with owners or people that manage three or four properties instead of people that manage 100 plus and get a fresh perspective. There's great ideas in a room of owners. There's great ideas in a room of co-hosts or a room of property managers. I think we need to take the best from each of those without pride and move forward in humility on what's best for the industry. Yes, there are challenges with each group for sure, but I think that there's also great ideas there.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. I know there's been rumblings over the year and going back before that, talking about VRMA versus Bill's conference, and is there a possibility..., could you merge those two? Could you bring those two groups together? Do you see that ever happening?

David Angotti
Yeah. You always run into challenges when you try to merge multiple organizations and personalities. I don't think that we're ever going to see STR Wealth meets VRMA, and then we have a one co-conference and sing Kumbaya around a campfire. That's not what's going to happen in my mind. I do see and have seen more and more property managers actually coming here to Nashville for Bill's conference. I've seen Bill at VRMA and other people from his group and co-hosts coming to VRMA. I think there's this cross-pollination that's starting to happen, which is healthy. I think that's really where you get ideas shared at a more scalable way once it starts happening organically like that. I love that this is happening.

David Angotti
I think that there are huge challenges in traditional co-hosting, especially around distribution, branding, trust accounting. Some of these things have to be solved for it to be a sustainable, full-scale movement in my mind, because you aren't going to hit maximum revenue on properties just on Airbnb. It's just not possible. You have to have a full distribution strategy, married with a brand strategy to hit full revenue. And so I think we're leaving a lot on the table if we don't move towards that, whether we're talking co-host or professionalize that distribution strategy, that marketing strategy that's critical to produce maximum revenue for ourselves or our owners.

Heather Bayer
Can we just explore the word fragmentation for a second?

David Angotti
Yeah, I like that one.

Heather Bayer
That word fragmentation was out there, and I'm going back to 2010/11, nearly 15 years ago, this business is fragmented. We need to bring it together. Is it still as fragmented now?

David Angotti
It's funny you mentioned 2011. So since 2011, the industry has grown by 20 times. And so is it fragmented the same percentage-wise or unit-count-wise? There's different ways to look at this. There's definitely been consolidation, and there's large-scale property managers that weren't around in 2011, whether we're talking Vacasa or franchises like CasaGo or rollups like Awayday, all large-scale consolidations have happened. But if we look at the industry on the whole, yeah, it's just as fragmented, probably as back in 2011, whether we're talking on the tech side, because now all of a sudden in 2011, Guesty wasn't around. And so you've had new players come on. And so, yes, there's been consolidation, but you've also had all these new powerful players come onto the scene that were the ones trying to do the consolidation that weren't even around in 2011. I think fragmentation is definitely still in play. It will be for a while.

Heather Bayer
It just struck me that we should have a little brief conversation on that, because it's just that one word that has never got out of the VR vocabulary.

Heather Bayer
Let's move on to guest expectations. I've been talking about this industry since I started my blog in 2006, and I was talking about guest expectations. I remember saying that people seem to want more now than the little TV in the corner with the rabbit ears. Aren't they just pleased enough to have a TV? It used to be that they were happy just to have a roof over their heads, and they didn't have to be any camping anymore. Then year by year, these guest expectations just kept rising and rising. I remember when we had our first cottage that had a dishwasher, and that was regarded as a luxury property.

David Angotti
As it should have been.

Heather Bayer
As it should have. It was luxury, and it had a TV without rabbit ears.

David Angotti
That's nice.

Heather Bayer
Every year, we seem to see the guest expectations. Everybody wanted more internet, then it had to be high-speed internet, then it had to be flawless internet. Well, what changes have you seen in this past year in terms of guest expectations? And are managers moving now to meet those expectations? And I know I see LinkedIn is forever showing me these amazing backyards with the pickleball court, the little pitch and putt, gardens and other outdoor amenities. So I know people are being creative, but what about meeting those other expectations that guests have?

David Angotti
So I think we need to rewind. Okay, in 2024, what happened that increased the guest expectations even further? We can look at something like the internet speed and stability. What drove that? Okay, that was probably all the way back to post-COVID, early COVID days, needing the Zoom connections that were reliable. And so now people are super sensitive on that. We see listing sites like Airbnb now put the actual upload and download speeds on listings, all of that to satisfy those requirements.

David Angotti
And now we fast forward, and now there's in 2024, this desire for these crazy, luxurious properties that are Instagram-worthy, that people want to share on TikTok and these different platforms. If we look at 2024, there was something that happened in 2024 that I believe drove this more than anything else, and that's the Icon Properties by Airbnb. Icon Properties started to get a lot more traction from a marketing standpoint. They were announced on earnings calls as driving revenue for Airbnb. They were talked about. They were in the release to the hosts on Airbnb.

David Angotti
These icon properties are really interesting when you look at them because they're bookable for $0 most of the time. There's a very limited supply of them, and you have to apply for them. They're things like this Up-and-Away house, where it's 9,000 balloons or something, a house that's actually lifted by a crane, but it looks like it's lifted by all these balloons. You can apply for this, and then maybe you get to take your children there and they feel like they're actually in the movie for a minute, or it's the Home Alone house, or these other things. Clearly, this is not about driving revenue from those couple of reservations, they'd be upside down to a huge level. This is about elevating the Airbnb brand and the expectations of what the Airbnb brand delivers. And so, Airbnb makes their money the day the transaction happens. They get to recognize that revenue. They have a service fee, they have a charge on the property manager, and life is good if you're Airbnb, because they don't actually have to go out and fulfill those expectations. That's our job to do as property managers and owners.

David Angotti
What ends up happening is these things become extremely viral, like the Up house. It becomes extremely viral, drives all this positive PR for a brand like Airbnb, and then puts these ideas in people's heads of, Hey, I want this just phenomenal experience. It's the next iteration of the tree houses. We're then needing to actually deliver on that experience that they have in their mind. Otherwise, we've fallen short as far as the consumer is concerned. I would say this is simultaneously really a liability and an opportunity for us. It's an opportunity for us to do the same thing as Airbnb, but do it better and do it at a hyperlocal level based on the knowledge we have of our own market. And it's simultaneously this liability, because we have guests coming in that have these sky high expectations, and how do we deliver on this in a way that doesn't disappoint?

Heather Bayer
Yeah, where do we go with expectations? I've been to numerous vacation rentals in this past year, and very few of them met my expectations because I see a lot of this 'luxury' stuff online, and not that I'm going to those luxury properties, but I'm expecting that cleanliness will be It's better, and it's not really happening. I think this comes back again to this fragmentation thing. Are my expectations higher because I'm in the industry and because I see better properties out there and the fact that I'm going to Spain or Barcelona?

David Angotti
I don't think so. I don't think that's what it is. I can illustrate that with a story. I have a good friend Will. Will and I are out on a run recently, and he is a very affluent owner of a large marketing agency. What Will conveyed to me is he is no longer comfortable booking vacation rentals. He was talking about it, giving me a little bit of a hard time as we're running, because he knows I'm tied to this industry, and it's my friends that run these properties that he's had bad experiences at. Those bad experiences primarily look like he shows up expecting one thing and receives something else. The formula for disappointment is to underdeliver on expectations. The formula for a happy customer, a fanatic customer, is to overdeliver on expectations. It's really as simple as that. Like, happiness boils down to what we perceive to be the expected reality and the delta that occurs one way or the other from that expected reality.

David Angotti
So he would show up and these properties would be tired. These properties would not look the same as they had in the photos. He's at a point now he's given up on booking through both OTAs as well as direct brands. He's tried it all and it didn't work. Now, he's, Hey, what's the solution to this? The solution to this could be a lot of things, but one things for certain, it's not the path we're taking now, which is represent a tired property as this fresh brand new property, because that's going to let people down. Over time, that's going to catch up with us, and we're going to have affluent travelers leaving our customer sets. When I think about the solutions, it may be something like The 100 Collection, with Travis's collection of all these property managers that do an exceptional job. I think it could be something like that, especially as that grows over time. But we haven't solved this as an industry, we're disappointing end users.

Heather Bayer
I remember traveling up an escalator. Oh, gosh, I don't know where we were, and I was behind you, and I can't remember who you were talking to, but you were talking about standards, and.... It was Get Properly.... Alex, you and Alex Nigg we're talking about, or having a minor disagreement about whether it was possible to introduce standards into this industry, real standards, whilst not taking away the individuality and uniqueness out of it. And that was... you probably won't remember that. You probably had many conversations like that, but that was four or five years ago. But that really stuck in my head, every time we get into this conversation about standards and the fact that how does anybody know that when they pick a property, they're going to go to it and find that it actually appears to be what they expected it to be from those photographs? How do you do that?

David Angotti
It's tough. I would say we always need to study the hotels, and the hotels are ahead of us. Granted, it's a much more simple operation. It's a more standardized product. There's a lot of reasons it's easier to get hotels right than vacation rentals. But I do think that there's an important lesson. The lesson is that if you book certain collections of properties, say like Curio Collection at Hilton. The point of these collections are a combination of maintaining the the local ambiance, the local appeal, the thing that ties you back to something there in that location. It could be an old factory or a train station that's been transformed. It's going to have pieces of information that tie you back to that moment in time that this building was used as something else, but you combine that within a set of standards.

David Angotti
The hotel industry has been able to do this at scale. Now, we can argue it's like a Curio by Hilton, like an awesome experience like what we're trying to deliver, maybe not. But what I'm saying here is we can have a local experience that's unique to this one property, or this one locale that also adheres to a certain standard and a certain appeal to a loyal group. If we fail to do that, then we're hurting ourselves over the long haul here. By doing this appropriately, we will grow our industry, we will grow our customer sets, and we will collectively all benefit from these standards.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Let's talk about other trends and disruptions as we're going into 2025, because I don't want to come out of this conversation without talking about AI.

David Angotti
AI. Okay, so I'm dealing with something easy now.

Heather Bayer
Yes. AI. I'm obsessed with everything AI. I get up at 4:30 in the morning, and it's just so I can read all the newsletters, the daily newsletters.

David Angotti
Pretty soon you're going to have to get up at 4:00 if you subscribe to a few more.

Heather Bayer
I know. I know indeed, and I probably will. I think this is just taking on this discussion that what we've been talking about and just patterns and trends and change and how we keep up with that change. How do you see AI impacting property managers as we go into next year? When you think about the speed, the absolute speed of change that we're experiencing right now. I won't look at an article that is older than September about AI. What's the point? Because it's going to tell me something that has probably been superseded by now.

David Angotti
Yeah. I'm almost afraid to even talk about AI on a podcast, knowing this is going to get downloaded in April of '25, and everything we say is going to be completely different by then. Even by the time this is published, there's going to be significant changes. We were talking about 12 days of AI from both Google as well as from ChatGPT earlier today or OpenAI and all of the changes that have been rolling out. Who knows what's even out by the time this is published, it's moving so fast. But I am 100% confident that investing time in learning AI. When I say learning AI, I don't mean just reading industry publications on AI or looking at what tools a PMS is.... Great, whatever. We're all going to put out great AI tools, we have to. That's table stakes moving forward. I'm biased towards our tools, we have great ones. That's not what I'm talking about, though. We have to figure out as property managers, as individuals, how we leverage this AI to make our businesses run more effectively, how we leverage this AI to exceed guest expectations, how are we leveraging it in our personal life, how are we leveraging this in all these different ways that are available to us?

David Angotti
It's absolutely incredible, the opportunity that's out there right now. I had the chance to speak at a conference recently on this, and I talked on basically generative engine optimization or GEO, and it's going to be the next version of SEO. It doesn't mean SEO is dead. People love to make predictions, Oh, SEO is dead. But I do for the first time in my career, and I've been in SEO since 2004, 2003, I was there at the beginning, one of the OGs on that, and got to speak on that at marketing conferences and all that, and write for Search Engine Journal and see the explosion that happened from SEO. And all the money, I joked that there were gold bars sitting on the ground that you could just reach down and pick up in the early days of SEO. I think it's going to be more so in GEO days, and more so if we can learn AI. I think one of the main things that people that are property managers need to figure out and be experimenting with and really working to learn is how do you rank in all of the generative engines?

David Angotti
The reason for that is each of these generative engines could emerge as the winner. Is it going to be Claude? Is it going to be ChatGPT or something else? It could be any of these generative engines. We all have our opinions on which one will win. In addition to that, look at Google Search. Google Search is already being impacted in monumental ways today from AI. We would be fooling ourselves to think that links and PR and these tactics we've used for years to rank a website over there is going to be how it's ranked five years from now or even a year from now. We have this opportunity around direct bookings if we figure out how to optimize for generative engines. The way we optimize for generative engines is we expose the information that actual people care about. It's what I've been saying for a long time. Any SEO strategy needs to make sense if there was no Google. How much more so now that a generative engine is going to be processing your site much how a real person does, and then deciding, does it show it to the real person? I think it's everything coming to a head that we've been talking about, really, for 5-10 years now, that we need to be optimizing sites for people.

David Angotti
We need to be optimizing sites in ways that answer people's questions, in ways that help it, that remove friction on a booking process. All of those things will ultimately drive value for our brands if we can do that in a way that will help the end user, because now we're going to rank on the generative engines. On that thought, people, early days of SEO, it was like, How do I do this? You'd read all these different articles, and the articles were really confusing.

David Angotti
The beautiful thing about generative engine optimization, we can have a conversation with the generative engine that we're trying to optimize for. Then we can actually even put in a link to the page and be like, Hey, okay, you just told me these four areas were the important areas. Grade my page, letter A through F, on each of those four areas. Great. Okay, I got a D minus on this. How do I improve that to an A? In your mind, since you're the generative engine, what do I need to do? It's like this inception where now we have access to the very 'individual', air quotes, if you're listening to this, because it's not an individual, it's just math behind the scenes. It's vector math. But we have access to that vector math to expose itself to us on what we need to do to actually rank on it. I think it's a really fantastic opportunity on the AI side that a lot of people are leaving on the table.

Heather Bayer
So when you say people have got to learn AI, give us three ways, three things that they can do, tactics to actually get ahead as we start the year.

David Angotti
Okay, The first is super, super easy. When you're conversing with any of the generative engines, there's something called a prompt. That's what you're putting in. If it was Google, it'd be the search query. But the prompt is the language that these generative engines actually speak. The more clear your prompt is, the more useful the output is. One of the things that's the easiest hack in the world to do is when you're putting in a prompt, end that prompt with, If you have any questions for me that would make your answer better, feel free to ask me them. It's going to ask you all kinds of questions back to refine your own prompt. Over time, what's going to happen is you're going to start to realize, Oh, it always asks me this thing or that thing. You're going to make your prompts better and better, and it's still going to have up to three questions. You find yourself actually learning to speak the language of the prompt, which that's just very important to actually grasp, I think. Most people do not understand prompting. That would be thing one.

David Angotti
Thing two is, there's so much information out there right now readily available to us in ways that has never been out there before. An example of this would be earnings calls. We have Booking.com, we have Expedia, which means Vrbo, we have Airbnb, we have all these sites that are around travel, then we have all the hotel brands, everything. We can actually go to their investor portals, download those earning calls, upload them to the generative engine, and basically say something along the lines of, Hey, what are the 10 biggest takeaways from these three earnings calls, and I want them from the perspective of a property manager. Then it gives you these takeaways. Maybe one of them is around occupancy decline this year. Then you could say, Okay, I want to dig further into this. Please cite your sources. It's going to start to give you sources, because it's using its brain to basically process this information in light of everything else it knows. It's going to give you sources beyond the things you just uploaded.

David Angotti
From there, you can then say something along the lines of, Hey, I manage multimillion dollar properties in Rosemary Beach, Florida. The owners of these properties have huge mortgages, because they bought these properties maybe at the peak, and they need a certain amount of revenue to just survive really, and to pay their mortgage payments. I want to write an empathetic newsletter, based on these facts that you just gave me, that's proactive communication around, basically, what's happening with occupancy so they understand this is a macroeconomic issue, not an issue with me.

David Angotti
Then I also want to say, Hey, here's the person that's over distribution and the person in owner services, and bring their phone numbers into this newsletter. Then I also want it to be highly personalized and empathetic towards them. Now you have this proactive communication. I can tell you, having had a property, had a lot of different property managers, I've owned a decent amount of rentals, you never receive great proactive comms from property managers like, Hey, your bookings are down this year, and here's why. Rather, we see great reactive. I can call them and be like, Hey, what's happening? They know the market inside and out, but they're so busy, they don't take the time to put that newsletter together around what's happening in the market.

David Angotti
Now, there's a hack. You can do it once a quarter. You can cite these earnings calls, you can cite studies, you can point out with key data that you're actually outperforming the market there. Much in the same way an investment bank will tell you, Hey, yeah, the stock market's down a little bit this month, but you're actually outperforming these indexes. You can communicate, Hey, here's the macroeconomic messaging coming back from these publicly traded companies. But here's the micro data set that shows we're actually outperforming these macroeconomics, even though maybe it doesn't feel great. Now you're proactively communicating that, which is a whole lot easier conversation to have than a reactive one when your phone rings at seven o'clock at night and they're like, Why is my property down? And they're already escalated to a point it's hard to peel back the layers and get to the core of when this started and how this started and all that.

David Angotti
And then the third one would just be generative engine optimization. It's a worthwhile investment. Those would be the three areas, I think.

Heather Bayer
Brilliant. I love thing two. I will relook at that one when we've got the transcript and relisten to that. Maybe I'll put it into Notebook LM and get them to talk about it.

David Angotti
Yeah, definitely. So it's not difficult to do. And you can expand outside of even just those three publicly traded companies and upload all the publicly traded hotel companies. If you have questions maybe around international tourism, because they're going to be citing the same facts around international and who's flying to Europe, who's coming back to here, how's that impacting their stock performance if it's a brand like Intercontinental Hotels or Hilton or Marriott? So you get all of that data. And basically from that data set, you can now query back and forth as a property manager, as a homeowner, as a financial analyst, and you can tell it to answer these questions from different perspectives, which is super fascinating.

Heather Bayer
You are really delivering today. So finally, if you had to distill all of 2024's lessons into one single takeaway for property managers to carry into 2025, what is that going to be?

David Angotti
Oh, man. Ending on an easy one. Is it okay if I tell a story on this?

Heather Bayer
It is, of course. I love your stories.

David Angotti
In the 1830s, there's a painter, and he's out of town, and he's been commissioned to paint some artwork. He gets news that his wife is sick, and he decides to travel home after he finishes the painting, and he gets home, and while he was gone, the unthinkable happened. His wife actually passed away, and they buried her. He gets home, the funeral's done. It's over. He's wrecked. His whole life has changed forever. This man, Mr. Morse, lived in the 1830s and felt that there was a need for an instant communication methodology because he had been the victim of no instant communication over a long distance.

David Angotti
Back then, they would try to communicate over these long distances using smoke signals, some light signals, even a bell system, but there were geographical constraints on that. And so he, at that point, decides to dedicate his life to solving this issue. So he invents Morse Code, an electromagnetic way of sending dots and dashes, and basically petitions Congress. And when he petitions Congress, they connect Washington, DC, to Baltimore using telegraph lines, and the first near instant communication over long distance occurs while he's still alive. And so he solves this long distance communication problem.

David Angotti
Now, fast forward, and there's a guy named to Ezra Cornell, and he and a few buddies decide to start a company that does this, and they're going to connect more cities together and professionalize this. And Cornell is such a bright individual. He also goes on to found Cornell University, so he's not exactly an underachiever, that's still around to this day. And now he's over here building out Western Union. And so Western Union takes off. So Western Union ends up developing the first Coast to Coast telegraph network. And this telegraph network allows Washington DC, Wall Street, wherever to send a message all the way to the West Coast. And when we think about the mid-1800s, everybody's moving West. We had the gold rush going on. Opportunity was all West. And so families are now able to communicate with each other. The government's able to communicate, and it's just really solved this huge friction. And as time goes on, what happens is Western Union becomes right at the center of all the communications in the world. They connect us Europe. They connect almost every city. They actually own nearly every single mile of telegraph line in the whole United States.

David Angotti
So every time a new company pops up, they just gobble them up. And they had this mission of communication needs to be instant, reliable, and accessible. And so they deliver on it. The predecessor of PayPal, Venmo Cash App, that's Western Union. They make it to where you can send money over these telegraph lines. The original stock ticker symbol, it uses Western Union. It's all these other things. But this is how the world communicates. There's just this monopoly and hugely valuable and strategic company.

David Angotti
There's this guy named William Orton that the CEO of Western Union, and this other guy comes to him and it's like, Hey, I have this patent that I think you guys would be interested in purchasing, because you already have the infrastructure for what we've invented. And so this is Alexander Graham Bell. He's bringing him the telephone patent. And so he's, I will sell it to you for $100,000. Now, think about it like this. $100,000 corrective for inflation is about $3 million or so today. And imagine somebody goes to Jeff Bezos at Amazon and says, Hey, do you have $3 million? I want to sell you this great idea.

David Angotti
Unfortunately, William Orton hears this, and he's like, This is science fiction. There's no way people are going to want to talk to each other over a device with a telephone. That would remove the professionalized operators in between. But he misjudges the market. He has this chance, and he misses it. He already had the infrastructure. It was going to just transmit these voice messages across the telegraph lines. And so he misses this opportunity.

David Angotti
You fast forward from here, and what starts to happen is AT&T basically forms, which stands for American Telegraph and Telephoning Company. And they build this huge network. They connect all of the homes and in urban markets, and they connect those markets to each other, and they patent more things around the telephone over and over again, and they solidify their legal protections to the point when Western Union say, Hey, we're getting into telephones. It's too late. They've missed the boat. Western Union ends up going out of business, and AT&T is still around to this day. They're one of the main communication companies right now in 2024, going into '25. So that's a story that I think illustrates what the word would be or the idea would be, and it's adaptability.

David Angotti
If we can't be adaptable, then we're going to be obliterated over the long haul. That adaptability, I think, has been a constant word for me from year to year in this industry because we're evolving so fast as an industry that if we lose that adaptability, then what happens is this new thing is going to pop up and we're going to miss it. Little by little, it's going to erode whatever advantages we have in that market to where whatever the thing is, Maybe it's AI, maybe it's co-host, maybe it's regulations, maybe it's this thing or that thing. If we do not adapt and react appropriately, then our businesses are going to be hurt in the long run. So I think as we go into '25, figure out how can we be adaptable, and that applies to everything we've been talking about today.

Heather Bayer
And that is a fabulous point to end on, because we all need a word for each year that we go into, and I love the word adaptable. So we shall take that. David, it's been absolutely fantastic having you here to bring in the New Year, bring in 2025 for us. I can't believe we've gone through 25 years since I sat on London Bridge in the year 2000 and saw the new millennial in. That's still...

David Angotti
Wow, it's wild. I think 2025 is going to be a fantastic year. We're going to see AI roll out in new ways that we can't even begin to imagine right now. And I think our businesses all are going to be presented with huge opportunities this year. And it's been fun talking through this with you.

Heather Bayer
As ever. And we'll talk again, I'm quite sure, in the year.

David Angotti
I'm sure of that. Thank you for having me on, Heather. It's been a pleasure.

Heather Bayer
Well, thank you, David. That was an amazing start to the New Year, and I really appreciate you taking the time to share your insights and tactics and strategies and all these good things to help us achieve more in 2025. We'll be sure to be having you back, hopefully at the end of 2025 as we lead into 2026 and see how we've been doing.

Heather Bayer
So for all of those still listening, as we run into January and then into February, we'll be talking about SSTIR Crazy Month, it's going to be a blast so watch out for it. It's a whole month of very focused podcasts, blog posts, live events, webinars, etc, on the pillars of our industry. If you go back to February of 2024, we did a similar thing. We talked about sustainability, safety, trust, insurance, and regulations. That's the SSTIR in SSTIR Crazy. And each week we focused on each of those pillars. We're taking it a step further this year and gamifying it. So there'll be contests and prizes and leaderboards, and we want you to take part. So if you are interested in hearing about more of this, follow me on LinkedIn. I'll be talking about it just about every day through the whole month of January as we lead into SSTIR Crazy Month that starts on the 27th of the month.

Heather Bayer
So stay tuned, we'll be bringing you more information very soon. And I look forward to meeting some of you along this SSTIR Crazy journey as we meet our fictional property management company, Stay Wise Rentals, and hear what's been happening to them and how our experts are going to help them to resolve some of their really sticky problems.

Heather Bayer
So that's a wrap for this week, and until next time, keep striving, keep thriving, and let's make this the best year yet. See you soon.

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.

‍