[Mike Bayer]

You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, the longest running podcast in the short-term rental industry with over 1.5 million downloads, and your source for all the information you need to master your rental business. Over the next few episodes in March, we are discussing the topic of artificial intelligence and its advantages and disadvantages for you and your business. But we need to recognize and thank our sponsor for this episode, Guesty.

Guesty is a game-changing property management system, giving hosts and managers the tools that they need to streamline operations, optimize bookings, and scale their business with confidence. Guesty is also leading the way with some of the most advanced AI tools to support your Guesty account that are evolving every day to help take the work out of your workflow. Listen into the mid-episode break for another frequently asked question answered about the Guesty platform and check out the link in the description of this episode for a code to give you 50% off your first year with Guesty.

And don't stress about the PMS switch. Guesty will handle all that by working with you to make the transition seamless. 

Now, let's get this AI-focused episode started. Here's your host, Heather Bayer.

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[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.

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[Heather Bayer]

And welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and as always, I'm delighted to be back with you once again. 

This episode is part of our special series on AI in short-term rentals, where we're speaking with industry experts about how they're using artificial intelligence to build more efficient, more guest-focused and impactful businesses.

We know how much AI is shaking things up in our vacation rental space, helping hosts and managers streamline their operations, helping improve marketing and, of course, enhancing the guest experience. So today, I am thrilled to welcome back Nihal Salah, a marketing expert who brings a wealth of knowledge on using AI to power up vacation rental marketing. We're going to go deep into practical use cases, how AI can help with everything from crafting a compelling property description, to optimizing SEO, to creating engaging content and personalizing guest communication, and so much more. So if you've been wondering how AI can give your marketing strategy a boost, this is the episode for you. 

And without further ado, we'll jump right on in to my conversation with Nihal Salah.

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[Heather Bayer]

Back with me today is the wonderful Nihal Salah. So lovely to have you back, Nihal. We haven't talked for ages.

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[Nihal Salah]

I know. It's great to be back. Thank you for having me again.

And yes, we have not spoken for ages. I've missed you.

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, we did have some attempts, didn't we? You know, we tried this and we had some real recording issues. So this episode that should have gone out weeks ago is a little bit delayed, but in fact, it fits in so well with our AI-themed month that it's perfect, that it's going in where it is.

So, you know, things happen, circumstances happen, and I don't think there's any such thing as coincidence. So let's say that all that recording rubbish that we went through was all for a purpose. Yes, absolutely agree with you.

OK, so on our AI theme, we are talking about AI in the short-term rental business, but because you are a marketing expert, we are going to really focus down on marketing and how AI supports different marketing disciplines and, you know, take it away. Let's start with what do you think short-term rental leaders are perhaps missing out at the moment if they're not using AI across their marketing strategy and execution?

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[Nihal Salah]

Well, I think they're just leaving money on the table for the simple reason that using AI effectively, and we'll talk about what effectively actually means, enables you to do two really important things. Number one, improve the quality of your marketing and the quantity of your marketing, but also to become a lot more efficient and to tap into expertise and knowledge that you might not necessarily have in-house, right? So when you start thinking about your average short-term vacation rental business, a small business that might have one person, if that doing marketing, you might have one person who's wearing many hats, one of which might be marketing.

They suddenly have access to a number of tools which we'll talk about that can help them massively improve everything from how they position and create their marketing messaging to the content that they're putting out on social media and to do that in minutes rather than hours or days or even weeks like we used to. So I think every short-term vacation rental business should be using AI for their marketing. I think they need to be very thoughtful about how and what AI they start using as well.

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[Heather Bayer]

I think I've been using the word intentional a lot while we've been doing these episodes. And I think everything we do with AI has to be intentional. And I say that because I have not been intentional.

And a bit later on in our discussion, we're going to be talking about AI bloat. And I was having a discussion with somebody yesterday and I said, you know, I'm a flip-flopper. I will flip-flop from one platform to another platform without any real strategy for doing it.

So I'm hoping that by the end of this discussion, my flip-flop nature will perhaps be brought in a little bit and I can be a bit more focused. But I think that's, you know, don't you think that's what a lot of people are experiencing right now? Because there's so much out there.

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[Nihal Salah]

Absolutely. I mean, I think it's the landscape is incredibly overwhelming. And if you just, you know, go on to Google or maybe perplexity and and just type in the AI landscape or just like you'd send me, I think, a landscape map of just AI agents.

And I looked at it and I was like, I don't even know where to start with this. It's so overwhelming. I do think that, so the way I think about how to get started with any, if you're not using any AI, right?

I think there is an element of just start. Just try it out. Pick one tool like ChatGPT, Open AI's ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity and just start using it.

I think it's fine to flip-flop. And my strategy is always like 20 to 30% I flip-flop and then, you know, around 70% I'm like, no, I'm really clear on number one, what is the business problem that I'm trying to solve with this? Like where is where are the biggest pain points in my business that I need to fix with something, right?

And then you start looking at what are the specific use cases. So the pain point might be that you're just not get able to get your property in front of enough eyeballs online, right? Because you do not have the marketing resource to do that.

That is a genuine business problem, right? And then you start thinking about, okay, what are the most effective marketing channels or activities that I found most effective in my business in the past? And then you narrow down anything actually social media worked really, really well for me.

Then maybe let's focus on social media first and then you have really specific use cases for the AI tools rather than just feeling lost and overworld and not sure where to start. And I think some people need that structure and framework and actually the flip-flopping is not helpful for them. And I think other people like you and I, I think, you know, we're designed to flip-flop.

We'll always be flip-floppers. And that's fine. Because we're happy to experiment and just try stuff, right?

So I think also quite early adopters of technology in general, right? So I think it really depends on the person. And some people are totally comfortable just diving in and trying different things.

Seeing what works for them.

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[Heather Bayer]

Oh, you're already making me feel better about this. But she said, as I jumped into perplexity this morning, looking for deciding I was going to use that for one purpose and then came back into ChatGPT. And then I was out into Cassidy.AI, which is one of my new favorite platforms, which I will talk about a little bit later on.

You know, we're talking about AI agents or AI assistants. And we'll, we'll come to that a bit later. But you just made a really good point about jumping, you know, people jump into tools without identifying the key business challenges and use cases.

So let me ask you about the different marketing disciplines. There are let's let's break that out and talk about how AI supports those. So really going over to you to go through these different parts of the marketing landscape.

Okay, great.

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[Nihal Salah]

So I think like any function within any business, you have strategy and you have tactics and execution. And I think that's a really helpful way of kind of thinking about the different disciplines or the different ways you could be using AI across marketing. So you can use AI to help you come up with your brand strategy and your unique value proposition, which we talked about in a previous episode, we went into that into detail.

But we also got into the specifics of how to use AI to come up with your unique value, proper UVP. AI is incredible as a strategic thought partner. I use it for this all the time.

I use the voice mode. Remember, AI is multimodal, so use the mode that you want to type.

If you want to, you know, use the voice mode, use the voice mode, you can either even ChatGPT BT on a paid version on the app you can use the camera, right? And use video.

It's incredible. So using it for strategy is fantastic. Link to that, you can you can use it for tossing and segmentation.

And we did an episode on niche marketing and how do you start figuring out what niche to focus on, what guest profiles are best suited to your particular properties or property. So it's fantastic for taking data and analyzing that to help, like, for example, previous bookings, reviews and so forth to give you some insights into who are your happiest guests and what do they love most about your property and to help you figure out where you should focus. So you can give it a lot of data.

We could talk about that. Like most businesses are sitting on way more data than they realize and don't understand how valuable it is. But when you're combining AI and giving you all this data, magic happens.

And we could talk about that. And then you've also got your positioning and messaging, which is, again, it kind of links to the tossing and segmentation piece. How do you want to position yourself to the target audience or the target niche that you're focused on?

And then you go into the execution or the tactical side of things in terms of guest communication, content marketing and social media, even your SEO and website optimization to encourage more people to be booking or your email marketing if you want to be coming up with automated email flows and so forth. So we can be using AI across every single one of those areas in the business. But again, it's about taking a step back and thinking, if I don't have a strategy at all, that's probably a good starting point because you need a marketing strategy.

So don't start going into the detail of website optimization when you don't have a strategy because a strategy will help you determine where you should focus. And if you're a small business and you don't have a lot of resource, you should not be trying to master every discipline and marketing. You really need to focus on what works best for your business and do that one thing really, really well and then expand from there.

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[Heather Bayer]

OK, well, I want to take this home down a little bit into some different areas and get some really practical use cases that people can use it for because I know we and I listened to a lot of podcasts on AI and people talk about generalist stuff and I come away thinking, just this was really great conversation, but I haven't got anything I can just go back and actually do. So I want to make sure that those listeners who are with us at the moment are going to go away with something really practical that they can take away. So let's go through some of these like content creation.

That's what everybody thinks about when they think about marketing. You've got to create content. You've got to create blog posts, social media content, and then there's perhaps guest guides and writing property descriptions.

Let's go through what those use cases are. We'll have all these in the Show Notes so you don't have to take notes. You can go to the Show Notes and check these out, but I'm going to hand this over to Nihal to talk through the use cases for content creation and SEO.

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[Nihal Salah]

OK, I'll take maybe a couple from here because we've got six disciplines and we want to give practical examples across all of them and then maybe we can include the detail that we don't cover in the Show Notes as well. OK, right. So let's actually start with property descriptions and titles because in a way that is content, right?

The simplest thing you can do is go to let's just keep let's refer to ChatGPT because I think that's the tool that most people are familiar with. But you can also use Claude. You can use different chat bots or LLMs [Large Language Models] for for any of these tasks, but we'll just talk about ChatGPT for the time being.

You can simply take photos of the photos of your property or properties and upload them to ChatGPT and give it a prompt and tell it what tone of voice you tend to use. If you don't know what tone of voice to use, you can also ask it to help you come up with a tone of voice. But you can upload those photos and you can ask it to come up with a property title and a description for your property.

You can just give it a really basic prompt like that. But the more thought you give in to give to a prompt, the better output. So like good input, good output, lazy input, average output.

There are tools that you can use to actually help you write the prompts as well.

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[Heather Bayer]

Exactly. And I've been doing that of late. I know that a prompt now, whereas a year ago, you just put in a sentence, help me write this job description.

Honestly, I'm not out there looking for a job, but help me write this property description and then you'd leave it at that and expect that the model was going to come in and just do it for you. But you've got to give it more information. But something I've been doing more and more and Brooke Fouts talked about this in last week's episode.

He said, ask, you know, ask the model to ask you questions if it doesn't have enough information from you to create a full response. Absolutely.

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[Nihal Salah]

I think if you give it if you give it a detailed prompt and you ask it to. So what you could do is you could give it some insight around where your property is. You could tell it the type of people that you're trying to attract.

So, for example, if you're trying to attract multi-generational families because you've got you've got large properties where you've got lots of bedrooms and lots of bathrooms and it's, you know, it's accessible, but also child friendly. That's a great audience. So give it that context.

You could also upload, like export all your reviews, upload them to chat to BT and say, I want you to take into account all the great things that previous guests have said about the property. So there's so much you could input into chat to BT rather than give me a title and a description. You can tell them who your competitors are.

And you could just copy and paste a description from your compasses website or an OTA feed that in and say, I want you to make sure that this title and description really differentiates my proxy from the competition around me. So the more you give, the more context you give it, the better. And as you said, asking it to ask you questions is a really effective way of actually refining and getting more out of it.

But also saying, take your time to think about this is interesting. This research has been done. And when you when you actually tell it to take its time, the model actually gives you a better output.

So I think that's just one really simple example. In terms of blog posts, if you if you have a blog and you find that is one of the effective ways of attracting traffic to your website, you could prompt it to give you again. Now it has the context from the property description and title that it's created.

You could then also give it your website content and you could give it your blog content and you could give it the analytics of your blog content because the data is really important. And you could say, I want you to analyze the blogs that performed best. And I want you to come up with ideas for, you know, for 10 blogs that I could be writing to attract this target audience because you fed it.

That's why all the context is really important. And all this context is actually sitting in your marketing strategy, giving it all this context, asking it to come up with ideas for blogs. And then you can ask it to come up with an outline and then you can ask it to actually write the blog posts and make sure that they are SEO optimized.

So optimized for keywords people would be searching for. You could even input, ideally you also give it some kind of export from a keyword research tool that will give it the keywords with the search volume. I mean, this is so much.

You could spend ages just on the SEO driven blog posts, right? One key thing though, just I think is worth mentioning, especially when it comes to creating content like blog posts is I wouldn't ask it just to go ahead and write 10 blog posts. I think it's really important to do it step by step and say, come up with the title.

So it has 10 titles and then you look through those, you know your property, you know your audience, you know what works, what doesn't. And then you say, right, we're going to write focus on one, five, seven and eight, for example. And I want you to add in to more about whatever topics.

And then you ask it to do the outline, you assess the outline once you've given it feedback and you've done that back and forth, just like you would with, you know, so you had a marketing assistant. And then you ask it to write the blog post for you. And that will ensure that the quality of what you get at the end of that process is up to your standards, basically, rather than just asking it to go ahead and write the blogs.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, I think when I listened to you talking about this, it really comes home that you do have to put work into this. It's not a matter of just a throwaway prompt, you know, quick line and expecting it to come back with something amazing. It is, you know, going back to that that time old phrase garbage in garbage out.

If you don't give it quality information, if you don't train it well. And I think this is this is coming out of all these other episodes that we've had is that you have the models are already trained. They've already got all this information, worldwide information from all these different sources, but you as a user also have to train it to make sure that the response you get is is fit for your purposes.

That's your purposes and not somebody else's purposes. So a prompt now could be 40, 50 words. It could be 100 words.

It could be 750 words. Just get everything into that prompt and then just let it run with it. I tend to do it now like it's a draft.

You know, I'm just writing a draft post as I would write it and then just leave it to fill in the blanks and then it comes back to me and then I do more editing. So, you know, that that's the way I'm using it. But anyway, okay, so we've talked about writing property descriptions and titles.

We've talked about blog posts. I want to go. We're only on the first of the first of our six key areas and we've got more to talk about beyond that.

So let's talk about data and analytics. How would you use AI to make some data driven decisions in marketing terms?

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[Nihal Salah]

So actually one quick thing worth mentioning on content before we move on Heather is one of the most powerful use cases of using AI is to repurpose content. So no one has enough time or enough people in their marketing team or even a marketing person. So if you have one blog post, you can give it a prompt to repurpose that into social media snippets, into website copy, into downloadable resources.

There's all sorts of things that you could be doing. So when you have one piece of content, always ask AI, what else could we repurpose this into? Because it might not be obvious to you.

So just ask it the question. So I just wanted to mention that because I think that's a really powerful use case that a lot of people don't always think of and could save tons of time and give you much more quality out and quantity of output.

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[Heather Bayer]

Oh, and I'm going to add in something else that we all know the response is where people take a response from AI and put it straight into LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever and you think your ChatGPT is showing. Well, we learned this from Amber Hurdle and it's just a timely reminder that when you're writing your prompt, you put in your prompt. Do not use multiple emojis.

Do not use the words dive or delve or evolve and don't use or limit your use of compound sentences and limit your use of triples. And when I say triples, I mean, for me as a presenter, it was always the power of three. You use the power of three.

You talk about three things. And if you look at most blog posts, you'll see they say, you know, I can't come up with an example. It could be turning blog posts into social media snippets, guest reviews or other copy.

So it's three things that you can do. Limit that. So that's my suggestion for the content part is to tell you what you don't want as well as what you do want.

Absolutely.

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[Nihal Salah]

A hundred percent agree with you on that one. OK, so we take one example from AI for data and analytics. So we hopefully get through all six disciplines.

So one of the areas that I just absolutely love using AI for in terms like data and analytics is actually sentiment analysis. So what I mean by that, just taking a step back, is identifying the key areas where people your previous guests have felt very positive about their stay or potentially neutral or negative. So if you, again, export all of your reviews from whether they're on your website, on Google, on OTAs, gather them all into a spreadsheet or whatever.

I mean, it's something you can just paste them directly in there depending on how many you have and ask it to do a sentiment analysis on your reviews. You can ask it to come up with, you know, what are the key areas that guests love? What are key things of features of your property that guests love most?

What do they love least? What did they really just like? And what are they neutral about?

Because that's an important one. And people don't talk about the neutral piece because you could. So the reason I mention it, Heather, is because you can be spending a lot of time and money on trying to improve a particular area of your business that your guests actually don't really care about.

So I think that's why it's actually quite important to look at the positive, the neutral and the negative and then figure out from there where you actually should be investing your time and what you need to be improving. But also you could then say to it, right, help me analyze the profile of the guests who are giving me the positive, the neutral and the negative reviews. So you can feed it more information from your previous bookings and then hopefully the timings then will overlap and it will figure out what reviews link to which booking.

And it can then give you some insights into where this is the profile of guests that are actually best suited to your property. And this is the profile of guests that tend to leave the negative reviews or are not so happy with their stays. So that's just a really simple way of using AI from a data and analytics standpoint.

And of course, the outputs of all of that will inform not just your marketing strategy, but your overall business strategy as well.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, I'd want to jump in there because Mike and his family are down here with us in Alabama this week and they've got a condo on the beach and a shout out to beach getaways for providing us with this fabulous, really lovely condo overlooking the ocean. And we were down on the beach and they've got a cart, you know, a little wagon that they were able to that's up in the condo. It's got chairs in it.

It's got beach toys. It's they can load their towels in it and just take it down the elevator and onto the beach and haul it across the sand. Just one trip out.

That's all they need to take themselves and their two kids down to the beach. It's very it's not a huge thing in terms of investment yet the reviews or show how people love that particular part. You know, it's not other bells and whistles.

People love this beach cart because it makes their lives easier while they're on vacation with a bunch of kids. So that's where sentiment analysis would come in. If you're not absolutely as you have just said, you know, what is it that people love about the place?

That little line in a review that just said, oh, we love the beach car. You probably might miss out or ignore that or pick up on something else they'd said. But if you did this sentiment analysis and it came up with actually everybody's saying that this beach car is the best thing ever.

And then maybe you would concentrate a little bit more and maybe think, oh, what can I add to my beach cart to make that experience even better? So, yeah, I love that idea of being able to take all those reviews and find out what everybody is looking for and what are the types of people who are enjoying the property the most and enjoying the facilities and the features the most.

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[Nihal Salah]

Yeah, and I love the idea of that beach cart, but I think that's something that's actually worth highlighting in the listing, right? Because it's actually saying our guests all love our beach cart because it just means, and it's also really fun for kids, right? I bet the kids absolutely love it.

So it enables you to then also think about what do I need to highlight in my marketing like you were saying.

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[Heather Bayer]

I mean, it would be a picture, you know, it got me when I was thinking, I wonder if there's a picture on the listing that shows all this, all this stuff piled up in this beach wagon. Yeah, I love it.

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[Mike Bayer]

We're going to take a short break to hear from David Angotti at Guesty to share how Guesty might be the solution to your property management system challenges.

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[Heather Bayer]

So I'm back with David Angotti at Guesty. David, how can property managers seamlessly integrate tech solutions like smart locks or dynamic pricing into their operations?

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[David Angotti]

You know, you want to deal with a property management software like Guesty that does a couple of things. One, we have those native tools. We have Guesty locks.

We have Guesty price optimizer. We do technology really, really well. We're the biggest property management software in the world with almost a thousand employees.

So of course we have that stuff figured out. However, there's always a new technology that's appearing almost every single day, and that's where the marketplace comes in. And so you want to look at not just the native options that a property management software offers, but the marketplace, almost like the app store is with iOS.

Because Apple, as big as they are, still recognizes the need for these additional apps out there that can do one little facet of something better. And we're no better than Apple in that sense. So you really want the company that has the power to develop innovative core solutions, but also has the relationships that they can leverage on your behalf.

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[Heather Bayer]

Okay, we've got to move on. The third one's visual marketing. Tell us about how AI can enhance visual storytelling, because that is just so important.

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[Nihal Salah]

Well, I mean, yeah, for this industry, you know, the images and the videos are everything, because if they don't look good, then forget that booking coming in. One really simple way to use AI for this, and you don't necessarily, I mean, there are general tools which we can talk about, like ChatGPT, but then there are very specific tools that you can use for things like virtual staging. So say that your property is still, you know, not necessarily being built, but you've got work in progress.

You can use certain AI tools just to stage the property the way you would like it to be staged, and then you have different sorts of photos that you could be uploading to your listings. But a really simple thing to do if you don't want to be spending money on any of the specialist tools is to simply take your existing listing images, upload those to ChatGPT or whatever tool, and ask it how you can improve them. I would also ask it to give me descriptions for those images as well.

One of the things I always notice when I'm looking to book a short term vacation rental, it's very few actually give thought to what they're calling the photo, it would be like living room, bedroom, kitchen, I can see it's a kitchen, I can see that. But actually getting AI to give you descriptions for each photo is incredibly powerful because don't forget that that can also be used in the alt text for the image, which is great for SEO purposes as well because you'll have, you know, you always want to make sure that whenever you're writing any captions or titles for images or alt text that you are making sure you've got the relevant keywords in there.

So those are just some really simple ways of using AI for visual marketing. You could also really simply just ask it to come up with captions for social media posts, for example.

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[Heather Bayer]

So if you've got a post and it's a carousel post on Instagram, you could upload those images and ask it to come up with a caption for those images that would describe it in a way that's appropriate for those social media platforms, because it's not necessarily going to be the same as what you would have on your website or OTA listing. So let's talk about how AI can be used to enhance guest experience.

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[Nihal Salah]

Sure. So there's a number of different use cases here. So everything from automation, the guest communication via chatbots, I'll come back to that in a moment, coming up with those personalized email sequences based on guest data.

So if they've stayed with you before, their interests and so forth, welcome messages, checking and property guide automation, post day follow ups, which too many businesses in this industry do not do. And again, you're leaving money on the table and even looking at how you can automate loyalty program communications and so forth. But taking a step back, I think it's important to think about this in terms of when it comes to guest communication, you have the messaging or copywriting side of things, which obviously AI is immensely helpful for, and then you have the process and system side of things.

So depending on what technology you already have, you might be able to get those email sequences, automated email sequences that are triggered based on how you program the triggers that might already exist in the property management system that you're using. And if you're not, and you're using an email marketing tool, those will probably be all quite easy to build out. But let's just take one of these at a time.

So we think about automated guest communications and chatbots. It's no longer now just chatbots that you can type, you know, type your question and it types the answer. You can use tools like Hagen, which we've talked about before, where you can actually create a video avatar, and that avatar could be either you if you wanted it to be you, or it could you just choose one of their existing avatars.

And you can come up with, you can train the chatbot, and instead of it being all text based messaging, like most chatbots are, a video pops up of a person, an AI person, who will respond to all of your questions and you obviously have to build in, you know, you have to program it to give the right responses and so forth. But I think you're right, we're way past the point of those terrible chatbots that can't do anything. And you just get frustrated and say, I want to speak to an agent.

I think we're past that. And now we're at the point where I work with clients that are using tools like Hagen, using the video, and it's incredible what you can do with it. Because like I said, you can even create video of yourself.

And that becomes even more personalized. So that's one great way of coming up with a more personalized way of communicating. With clients, if you're thinking about or with guests, rather, if you think about how do I actually program it?

Well, you can always prompt ChatGPT to help you come up with how to program it. And it will give you the script because what you want is to train it on specific questions and answers that are relevant to your specific properties. So you need to make sure that you are training it properly, because the last thing you want is using a chatbot and it spits out the wrong answers to potential guests and you lose bookings as a result.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

And yes, I would just add to that that when you're training it, make sure you are you are very specific about what you're training it on. And you're not asking it to go out to the web to find information that's relevant, that would be irrelevant, perhaps to your particular situation. So it's very important to say, you know, you're trained on just this knowledge base that I am giving you that would perhaps be your FAQs or, you know, information on the property and information on your company processes rather than have it go out there.

And maybe I could go out to Reddit. You never know where it's going to get get information from. Not saying that that Reddit doesn't produce some some good information sometimes, but it's pretty random.

And, you know, in terms of the quality that you're going to get back. So just just be specific about what you're training it on.

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[Nihal Salah]

Absolutely. And I think back to the point that you brought up earlier, I don't think we can emphasize this enough. You have to check the outputs of these tools because they do still hallucinate and come up with the most random answers that are completely irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate.

So it's really important just to make sure that you're looking at the outputs and you are testing any chatbots rigorously to make sure that they are not going to give any answers that don't make sense. But one thing you can do is use go back and look at all of the questions you've ever received from prospective and previous guests and use those as input to training it, you know. So like you were saying, FAQ is every single question you've ever been asked by guests and even pulling up things that people have mentioned in reviews where they were confused about something.

It could be something as simple as I couldn't access the parking lot. Things like that is that the detail here really matters. But what you can do is you can even use a tool like this across the journey of the guests because you can be using something, you know, using it on your website to answer questions that prospective or potential guests have and encourage them to book.

You can be using it for existing guests if they have, you know, they don't know where the ironing board is. It's a really simple thing. They get an immediate answer instead of having to email you or message you and wait until you read that and have time to respond to them.

And then you can also use it to make sure that they have a smooth checkout experience. So you can think about using it across the life cycle of your guests potentially. So, yeah, I mean, there's tons we can talk about under guest communication.

I'm just really conscious of time. So you want to go into another one or move on?

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[Heather Bayer]

No, I'm enjoying this. We're going to cut this one. We're going to talk about SEO website optimization next.

But we're going to come back on another episode and talking to talk about the right tools because I think I think there's so much that we sort of discussed that we were going to include in this episode. And I think I don't want to have limited time for talking about the tools. So if that's all right with you, we'll go into a bit of a part two on this one and come back and do a separate episode on all the all the tools we can use because I think I think we both want to be really comprehensive on that.

So unless you've got anything more to say about guest communication and personalization, let's move on to SEO and website optimization.

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[Nihal Salah]

OK, one last thing I would say on guest communication is this looping back to the point I made about post-day follow up. Again, I think you're leaving money on the table if you have not thought through a campaign for post-stay. The relationship with the guests should not end there.

You should be sending them and you can again, you can get AI to come up with a sequence. You can actually just ask it to come up with a sequence of emails that would be sent out to guests or messages, you know, what's that, whatever means you use to communicate with guests after the stay to come up with several emails. But then it also should have from the booking data, all of the key dates they've come and it's wedding anniversary.

Then you know next year when their wedding anniversary is going to be. So it's post-stay isn't just two emails saying thank you. And, you know, here's a nice discount for if you decide to stay with us again.

No, you need to stay top of mind and keep that communication on going with them. So use those key dates. Use any data that you've collected to inform that post-day follow up strategy, essentially.

It should not be one or two emails. It should be more comprehensive than that.

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[Heather Bayer]

That's really important. So thank you for adding that in. So just give us a few minutes on SEO and website optimization and then we will have to wrap this one up.

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[Nihal Salah]

Sure. So where do we start? Right.

Which one should we focus on? There's so much to cover. You could talk about this for hours and hours.

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[Heather Bayer]

Let's talk about keyword research because, you know, it's something I go back 20 years with this. And the whole go back to the time of keyword stuffing, you know, when when you'd have those web pages that had we used to talk about Ontario Cottage Rentals. So you need to come and visit us for your Ontario Cottage Rentals because while you're staying in our Ontario Cottage Rental location, I remember doing that.

And just say, you know, how many times can I put Ontario Cottage Rentals because that was my keyword phrase, my key keyword phrase. How many times can I get that into a page? Thankfully, those days are long gone.

But let's talk about, you know, how we use AI for keyword research now.

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[Nihal Salah]

There's a lot that you can be doing. And I'm not an SEO specialist, but I think there is because you do hours and hours just on this topic. So the way search is evolving is really interesting.

Like when we just take a step back and think about what the point of keyword research and search engine optimization is. It's that when people search for keywords that are relevant to your business or properties, that your, you know, your listings, your properties are what come up. And when you think about Google now and you go on Google to search for anything, I don't know if listeners have noticed, but often you get that AI summary at the top. So a lot of people are also now using AI like tools like perplexity instead of Google. I use perplexity probably 70 percent of the time now. Me too.

Yeah, unless I want to buy a product, which by the way, you can still search for products via perplexity, but I use perplexity to search. But yeah, 70 percent of my searches I do by perplexity and I think more and more people are headed that way. So I think there's two sides to this.

There's optimizing for, you know, the traditional SEO. Right. So you're thinking about what are the keywords I'm not thinking about.

You're looking at your hopefully Google Analytics or some kind of analytics where you can actually look at what are the organic keywords that you need to be focusing on. And you're doing your keyword research through, you know, whether it's Google or other specialist tools that you're using and making sure that you have those keywords in your website. Copy if you've got a blog post and obviously, like we talked about previously, making sure that you've got those relevant keywords in your in your blog titles and sub headers and so forth.

Again, no keyword stuffing. Google punishes you for that now, obviously, those days along God. But then there's also the other side of making sure that you are staying up to date with the changes because the space is evolving so quickly.

So that you're future proof in yourself as well. So I think it's keeping an eye out for both of those both of those key areas, really, when it comes to keyword research and SEO optimization. But a really simple thing you can do once you know the keywords that you want to you've done the keyword research or you've even asked to help you do the keyword research.

If you haven't already done it and then you can just simply opt to upload your website copy and you can literally just copy paste it if you really want to be lazy about it. And just say I want you to edit this copy to make sure that it's keyword, you know, optimize for these specific keywords and obviously do it in a way that adheres to the Google policies and so forth. So you're not getting penalized.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, that's so much better than where we were all those years ago. The other thing is to do some research on your competitors in an area. You know, ask the platform, ask the model to research other companies in the area.

What are they using? What is successful for them? You're only restricted by your imagination on the sort of questions you can ask.

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[Nihal Salah]

And you can even ask it what questions you should ask it if you wanted to get super meta about it.

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, yes, yes, I want to research the keywords that are going to be most impactful for my target audience, which is X. And I need to know what I should be looking for. And then, you know, ask me questions.

And I'm using that more and more these days. Ask me questions so that you can get enough information to give me a really good response. And yes, I mean, you might get you might get 10 questions, you might get 20 questions.

And then you sit there, you copy and you copy those questions, you paste them back into the chat and then you just go through and answer them one by one and then input it and see what it comes up with next. And what you're doing there is just refining and refining and refining.

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[Nihal Salah]

Yeah, yeah, 100 percent. I think I think that's a really good approach. And I think it's also important to experiment with different ways of prompting and asking it to ask you questions and asking it to teach you stuff sometimes.

And also, when you're stuck, AI is a great way of getting unstuck. Like sometimes when I've just I have a problem, I do not know where to start with this. And that could be anything from like a sticky business problem to a very specific thing like I've had a horrible review and I don't know how to respond to this, you know, help me figure out a good response.

I think you need to think of it as a really clever assistant that you need to make sure that you onboard them properly, i.e. train them properly and that you are communicating back and forth. It's not a one way street, just telling them what to do. You need to make sure they understand the brief that you're giving them.

And I think thinking of it that way is really helpful for people. So, yeah, I mean, there's lots, lots more we can we can talk about. Do you want to give a little teaser about the AI tools that we'll talk about in the next episode?

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, I think, you know, you just you just mentioned it this segue into what we'll talk about in the next episode, which will be about choosing the right AI tools and avoid getting yourself spread all over the place and flip-flopping like I tend to do. Then we're going to talk about what AI tools are actually worth paying for, because if you're not careful, you can spend a lot of money every month if you start subscribing to all these different paid platforms because you just think, oh, I'm going to get a little bit extra if I pay for it. Well, there are some platforms out there that will aggregate everything and quite a low price point.

So we're going to be talking about those free models, paid models, and we're also going to be talking about AI assistance. And just as you said, you know, think about the person or the person, think about the model as being a very educated assistant and how you go about creating different assistants for different purposes. So that will be in our part two.

Can you think of anything else we're going to be adding to that, or should we just leave it as a big surprise for next time? Let's leave it as a big surprise for next time. Nihal, as ever, you have you have been so generous with your time, your knowledge, your expertise.

Thank you so much. Can't wait for next time. We shall make that very, very soon.

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[Nihal Salah]

Thank you, Heather. Always a pleasure chatting with you.

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, that was an absolutely fantastic conversation with Nihal. Huge thanks to her for sharing so many actionable insights on how AI can transform your vacation rental marketing. I loved her point about being intentional with AI, using it as a strategic partner, rather than just throwing prompts into chat GPT and hoping for the best. And then there's the sentiment analysis idea. Brilliant. Because if you're not using AI to analyze guest reviews and uncover some hidden trends, you are leaving valuable insights and potentially bookings on the table. I always remember over the years, Andrew McConnell from when he was with wentrented.com telling me this so many times, really look at what you're leaving on the table. Because if you don't examine all the things that you might be missing out on in terms of your operational management of your business or your marketing, your bottom line will be impacted. 

So this is just the beginning of our AI and short term rental series. Over the next few episodes, we're going to be speaking with more industry experts to uncover the best AI tools and strategies, recommendations for hosts and managers.

And great news, Nihal will be back with us very soon for a follow up episode where we're going to dive into the AI platforms that are actually worth using. You know, I just realized I used the word dive. Apparently we're not meant to be using dive anymore because that's what chat GPT uses all the time.

But hey, you know, I've been using that for a long time. So anyhow, we're going to be diving in to a bunch of AI platforms, because with so many tools out there, it's so easy to feel overwhelmed. And we'll be breaking down the best free and paid options to help you choose the right ones for your business.

So you won't want to miss that one. Of course, if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to check out the show notes for key takeaways and additional resources and anything else that we talked about. And as always, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Join us at vacationrentalformula.com connect with us on social media and let us know what you think. And of course, subscribe and leave us a great review. That would be really nice of you.

So thanks for tuning in. I'll catch you next time for more insights on building a thriving guest focused short term rental business.

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[Mike Bayer]

Before you go, don't forget to visit our sponsor, Guesty. They've been helping vacation rental managers stay ahead of the curve. And if you're looking for the right tech to streamline your operations, you know where to go.

Check out the link in the description of this episode for a code to get 50% off your first year with Guesty. And don't stress about the PMS switch. Guesty will handle all that by working with you to make the transition seamless.

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[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 vacationrentalformiller.com. We'd love to hear from you.

And I look forward to being with you again next week.

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