[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/April, 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.

[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.

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and as ever, I'm super delighted to be back with you once again. So before we dive into Part 2 of my conversation with the ever brilliant Nihal Salah, I wanted to share something that's come out of all the amazing feedback from our last episode.

We had quite a few listeners reach out and say, Heather, I love hearing about these AI tools. But I need help actually using them in my business. And I do this. I get it. I listen to podcasts all the time. I'm out on a walk with a dog. I get so excited about something I'm listening to. But I never quite get enough information to allow me to actually apply it when I get back. It can feel really overwhelming knowing where to start or how to figure out which tools are right for you.

So Nihal and I have decided to offer a limited number of hands-on consulting sessions. In these one on one sessions, we're going to take a close look at your short-term rental business and guide you through setting up and using the AI tools that make the most sense for your specific needs. Think of it as personal AI training, but with a vacation rental lens. We're going to keep this small and focused so we can really go deep with each person that we talk with. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, just shoot me an email at heather@vacationrentalformular.com and we'll send over the details. Now on to the episode.

In this second part of our conversation, Nihal and I dig into some of the more advanced questions we've been getting around AI. We talk about the paradox of choice when it comes to the thousands of tools out there. We talk about how to avoid AI bloat and how to be intentional in choosing the right platforms. And you're going to hear that word intentional coming up over and over.

We also break down the difference between the large language models, the LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude, and the rising trend of aggregate platforms like Abacus and Poe. You may never have heard of those, but we're going to tell you about them because these give you access to multiple models in one place. Plus, there's a little sidetrack about diet plans for dogs; yes really! But it all ties back to the creative practical ways that these tools can support us in both our work and in life. So if you've been wondering which tools are worth paying for, what's changing in AI interfaces and whether platforms like Cassidy, Poe or Abacus are worth exploring for your short-term rental business, this episode is definitely for you.

Let's jump in.

Well, hello and welcome back to Nihal Salah, who is joining me for Part 2 of this amazing conversation that we were having last week about using AI in marketing. And of course, as ever, whenever I talked to Nihal, we got to our 45 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever it was, and we still had so much to say. So this is Part 2.

Welcome back, Nihal. Thank you for coming back, joining us again.

[Nihal Salah]
Oh, always a pleasure, Heather, looking forward to this chat. And yes, you're right, every chat. I think if we even had a three-hour episode, we would still manage to fill the time chatting about all this stuff, particularly when it comes to AI, but yeah, let's see how official we can be today.

[Heather Bayer]
All right. So the point we got to after last week's episode was choosing the right AI tools without becoming overwhelmed. Interesting.

I talked to Mark Simpson from Boostly the other day. He's coming onto the podcast in a week or so, and he introduced me to something else called, I think it's T-A-A-F-T or T-A-F-T, There's An AI For That. And when I went on to, there's an AI for that.

I know that you're looking that up right now.

[Nihal Salah]
Of course I am.

[Heather Bayer]
Now I'm trying to find it again. Is it? There's an AI for that.com.

theresanaiforthat.com, but you have a look at the top of that page, which says how many, you know, how many platforms there now are.

[Nihal Salah]
32,482. Wait, hold on. For 19,000, sorry, for 13,966 tasks.

Yeah. So I don't know about you, but I mean, this comes down to the paradox of choice. If I generally in life, I need a short list of three things.

Yes. If I go into a supermarket, I don't find it enjoyable if I've got tons of choice. I want three things to choose from for each product category I'm looking at.

And I feel the same about AI, but we're just at that stage in AI's lifecycle where there's just heaps out there.

[Heather Bayer]
I know I'm absolutely with you. I hate having lots of choice. You know, just that three is great.

And I'm with, there's an AI for that. I could definitely just head down that rabbit hole. And I think you can set it up so it will send you every day or every week or however, whatever interval time of time you want.

It will send you a list of all the new platforms that have just arrived.

[Nihal Salah]
Wow. I'm not sure if I want that though, because I'm like, do I want to sign up for this or not? I'm not sure I want to feel any more overwhelmed than I currently do with all the AI out there at the moment.

[Heather Bayer]
Well, this is what we're here for today is to, you know, help you avoid spreading yourself too thin with what somebody else said to me the other day is these all these small AI startups that may just not last. Everybody's jumping on the bandwagon. Let's do this.

We've found a use case. We're going to, because it's so easy to create stuff now, it's easy to create apps. You don't need to code.

I'm sure you do need to code to create something that is going to be really good and robust, but they're telling you, you know, you don't need to code to create this product that's going to make you millions. It's a bit like, you know, it's a bit like the startup of Airbnb. You know, you just have to have a property.

It doesn't matter what it's like. You just put it on the platform and somebody will buy it. Somebody will buy a night in it.

And then over time, we've got to the stage where, no, that's not enough. You've got to have the fantastic photographs. You've got to have a good location and an amazing description.

And you've got to have so much more, but I'm, I guess it's like any massive startup in an area that it will always start out with everyone can get into this and it ends up with, you know, a few of the best. And I think that's what we're going to get to, right?

[Nihal Salah]
Yeah, absolutely. And everyone, I think everyone will and needs to get into it, but not in the way that lots of people are talking about. Like you said, in terms of like make your millions, you know, there are no quick wins like that that are sustainable, but I think everyone will get into it in the sense that AI will be part of any technology that any business will use and that businesses need to be leveraging it.

Now we're talking about short term rentals, but across different industries to increase their, you know, improve their efficiencies and also, you know, improve their margin. So it definitely will just become just like a PMS is now is taken for granted for a short term rental business. AI will just be part of your tech stack, right?

It will just be an integrated part of it.

[Heather Bayer]
But, you know, in all these conversations I've been having over all these weeks, the word intentional comes out over and over again. You have to be intentional. You have to decide first of all, and this is what we're going to be talking about this, you have to decide what you want to use it for, not just dive in and say, Oh, this is a, this notebook LM, it's going to create all these wonderful podcast episodes for me.

And you don't have a podcast. So, okay, let's, let's just start with, we're just going to really, really recap what we, uh, we finished with last week on choosing the right AI tools without overwhelm, just come up with the, you know, the, the, the top four or five, or maybe they're just a top three, since we're talking about paradox of choice.

[Nihal Salah]
Well, okay. Let's, let's do, let's do top three. So I would say just as a, as an overarching comment, I like just, you know, touching back on what you were saying about many of these startups won't be around probably more than 90% of them will not be around in a couple of years.

So I would always recommend go with a big, well-funded established platform. So, Open.AI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's NotebookLM. Those are generally my top three. I know Gemini has had a lot of improvements recently; that's also part of Google. And one of my go-tos often I use now, just instead of Google search really is Perplexity.

And I know that was not three, but if I have to pick the three that I use on a daily basis, I use ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. But again, it depends on the individual use case, but there's a lot of overlap. I think the reason I use the three of them, or particularly ChatGPT and Claude is because some of these models are better at certain tasks than others.

So I will often copy and paste the same prompt and stick it in both tools and see which starts off giving me a better response. And then I'll just continue with that tool. But also people have UI preferences, like how you navigate within the platform.

They have different limits in terms of the context window, which is how much input you can take in terms of the prompt length itself, but also the size of documents and images and so forth that you can upload.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. And in terms of what I'm using, yeah, ChatGPT comes out on top. It is the one that's my go to, I've been using CustomGPTs and creating CustomGPTs, but we're going to go on a little bit later on to talk about a higher paid model that might give a little bit more complexity if you need that in what you're doing.

But there's one thing I wanted to just discuss before we move on to anything else. I'll say, yeah, ChatGPT is what I use most. I was using Gemini for deep research and now actually using ChatGPT because their deep research is just as good, if not better.

And I do use Perplexity because you talked about UI, user interface. It's just easy, really easy to use. And I use it instead of Google now, I'm barely using Google.

[Nihal Salah]
Yeah, same.

[Heather Bayer]
I'm now going into Perplexity. If I've got a question, I'll give you an example. My sister and her husband right next door to me in their RV and we're talking about our winter plans for next year. We may not come back to the US next year. And we're thinking, Okay, where do we want to go spend our winters? And she'd seen an article on retiring to Thailand. This is completely off the wall, you know, these are not people that travel a huge amount. And now, they're now researching retiring to Thailand because it's cheap to live. It's cheap to eat. And the healthcare is pretty good as well.

So I got her onto Perplexity and said, you know, go to Perplexity and ask the questions about retiring to Thailand. And she was just like, Oh my gosh, look at what it's come up with. She said, because she would have gone to Google and she would have typed in her question and then she would have gone to each of the different websites to have a look and then make notes. And now she's in Perplexity and it's sort of collaboration of all the different websites and gives a summary of what it has found from all this different research. And I guess you could do it on ChatGPT with deep research as well. But I just like the UI of Perplexity. So watch this space. I may be, I mean, we tend to sort of do the same things. You may be talking to me in Thailand next year.

So, yes, that's what I'm using, but I wanted to just ask or just talk about the different models of each one, because this throws me totally when I'm looking at say ChatGPT and it comes up with all these different GPT 4.0 and GPT 3.5 and 01. And nowhere does it really tell you what this is for. What version should you be using? Because common sense says you just use the latest one.

[Nihal Salah]
I just use the latest one to be honest. To be completely honest with you and your listeners, Heather, I struggle to find the time sometimes to go to read all the release notes as to what's new and also I do think with some of the very latest models, a lot of the changes have been made for those who are using it for coding and really technical tasks. So I think sometimes some of those updates are not necessarily as relevant for people like you and I who might be using it for content creation and task automation. But I think, I mean, I think we could probably do a full episode on that where I go off and do my homework, come back and share all the detail.

But I tend to use, I just tend to use the latest, depending on the platform I'm using, I might not even, if I'm not paying for it, I might not have access to the latest model.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah.

[Nihal Salah]
But I just tend to use the latest release to be fair. Yeah. And then sometimes when you reach your limit, like in Claude, it will just default you back to the old model.

Right.

[Heather Bayer]
And does it make much difference when it does?

[Nihal Salah]
Yes. Because sometimes it depends on what you're using it for. So for example, in Claude I use Architect quite a bit. So I'll get it to build out a little..... For example, I'll give you an example, nothing work related, but my dog has gained..., she's a bit overweight now. So I built this morning on an app in Claude Architect, like a tracker, basically.

So I've given it Rosa's weight and I've said, now let's come up with a diet plan and the calorie intake, spread that across her two meals and snacks. And then I'm going to tell you what I fed her and just let me know if I'm above or under and how much she has left per day and how much she has like over the course of a week so we can track things. So it's created a really nice doggy diet planner for me.

And it's a beautiful interface. It looks gorgeous. Looks like someone professional actually built it for me.

[Heather Bayer]
Now you've got me down the rabbit hole again.

[Nihal Salah]
Oh, I know her there. That's what rabbit holes are there for, to go down.

[Heather Bayer]
Oh, I know. I know. Dog chasing you down it.

Oh, that's really interesting. I'd love to see that. You know, after this, you need to send me that so I can take a look at it.

Okay. Well, that was a good segue into the different models of AI. And just, I think we could wrap that up because really for our purposes, unless, you know, you're going to go really...., and here's a ChatGPT word 'deep diving' into coding and other things, then stick with what it gives you. Right? So whether it's GPT 4.0 or Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 2.0, whatever comes up I'm using and it doesn't seem to make a huge amount of difference.

[Nihal Salah]
No, like I said, I don't think for non-technical tasks, it will at this stage.

[Heather Bayer]
Okay. This is great. So now we're going to move into what, I mean, these are, we've talked about most of these are free.

You can go do free stuff. And in fact, can you create CustomGPTs now on the free ChatGPT model?

[Nihal Salah]
You do have access to them, but I don't think it's as extensive as access that you would get with the paid account.

[Heather Bayer]
All right. So, so basically, you know, what we're talking here is we are suggesting that for those, those bigger platforms that you go for the paid model, if you're really serious about this.

[Nihal Salah]
I would say like, if you, yeah, yes, I think if you're someone who's been playing around now for a while, and maybe you've been listening to some of the previous episodes on, on this podcast, I'd be like, okay, now I'm really clear about my use cases and how I want to be using these tools. And you feel like you've reached the limit of what you can get from the paid. I mean, it's definitely worth upgrading.

I guess then the question, and maybe it's a good segue is, do you go for the individual LLMs or do you go for the aggregate platforms like Abacus and Poe, for example?

[Heather Bayer]
Okay, let's talk about those because we've now got people scratching their heads and going, oh, no, no, no.

[Nihal Salah]
What is an Abacus and what is a Poe?

[Heather Bayer]
And I think, I think it was Brooke Pfautz in one of the earlier episodes talked about ChatLLM by Abacus, and he uses that a lot. So just tell me what an aggregate platform actually is.

[Nihal Salah]
So basically pulls together a bunch, so you have a single interface where you can access a bunch of different models. So you can access Claude, ChatGPT, image generation, AIs, all of them from a single platform. You pay one subscription to that platform rather than paying, you know, and dropping open AI, Google, whatever.

But you obviously don't get access to all of the models, but I think you get access to the main ones that you need on anyway. I don't think they give you access to any of the Google stuff, but that mostly is like, I know you can pay for the Gemini and so forth, a lot of the Google tools are actually free.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. Oh, okay. So, so if you use chat to ChatGPT, if you use, let's say for some general purpose stuff, and then you use Claude for writing, because it's, it's, most people would say that, that Claude is better for content creation than ChatGPT.

And maybe if you use, I don't know what, what other model might, maybe not Gemini, but maybe with perplexities included, deep sea.

[Nihal Salah]
I don't know. I don't think, so I've not played around with Abacus. I've played around with Poe, but I think you're the one who told me about Poe.

So I think that you actually get access to, you get access to Grok, you get the Poe Assistant, you get flux, you get Eleven Labs. Oh, actually you do get Gemini. I was wrong.

Claude, GPT 4.5, Deep Seek is in there as well. Mistral. Yeah.

So you get access to most like the big ones and Perplexity.

[Heather Bayer]
Okay. So you're paying one subscription. So instead of paying $20 a month for ChatGPT and $20 a month for Perplexity and $20 a month for Claude, which really begins to add up.

I know that. And then that's when you get into AI bloat, when you're spending hundreds a month on all these different platforms, whereas an aggregate platform brings them all into one and charges you just want much smaller subscription fee. I don't quite understand.

And we had this chat beforehand, you know, not quite understanding how they do this.

[Nihal Salah]
I'm going to go down that rabbit hole after we finished recording because I don't understand it either. Yeah, because I mean, what you're getting access to essentially through per wall Abacus is you're getting a lot more value for money than if you were paying for each of the subscriptions individually. Because I think I would pay around $20 for each platforms for the pro version at the moment.

I think it's a bit more expensive. Okay.

[Heather Bayer]
So I went to ChatGPT and I asked it about, oh, no, I went to Perplexity, actually, I asked Perplexity to compare Abacus and Poe. And I asked the question, what was the most useful for a short term rental property manager looking to leverage AI for marketing operational tasks and creating AI assistance. And it actually came out with ChatLLM by Abacus would be the most useful option.

So since you've looked at Poe, I've been looking at Abacus. I'll just talk Abacus, and then you can go to Poe. So, and I'm just coming at this from what perplexity has said.

So Abacus is offering comprehensive AI tools, which is just what we've been talking about, access to the large language models, the LLMs, including ChatGPT 4.0, which, you know, is perfectly adequate for anything you want to use. Claude Sonnet 3.5, Gemini 2.0, which it said well suited for various property management tasks. Now ChatLLM, I didn't know this, it allows you to create custom AI assistants to create custom chat bots and AI agents tailored to specific business needs.

So I'm going to go on and talk in a minute about Cassidy.AI, which is a much higher paid model. And I'm now thinking, maybe I don't need to pay that and I'll come back to Abacus. But that's for a later time.

Marketing support platform can assist in content creation for property descriptions, guidebooks, website content and social media updates, operational efficiency, streamlining operational tasks, such as providing checking instructions, business intelligence, it can analyze pricing trends, occupancy rates and market data, enterprise grade security, and it's cost effective. At $10 per user per month, it says it's more affordable than alternatives like Poe, which you're going to talk about while offering enterprise level features and integration capabilities. And that's something else I've been talking about with Cassidy.

ChatLLM can integrate with Google Drive, Slack and Confluence, which is beneficial for managing property related documents and team communication. And I'm using Cassidy to connect with my Google Drive for that. So okay, that was the very quick summary of Abacus.

Tell me about Poe.

[Nihal Salah]
So Poe does more or less the same thing. And I think just from a feature standpoint, most of these tools and aggregate, like whether they're individual tools or the aggregators, will be on par in terms of functionality and features. I think it's just, you know, who's ahead of who slightly.

So there's two reasons I like Poe. One is that you can actually use it for free so you can have a play around with it. Whereas with Abacus, I don't think you can use it for free.

I tried earlier today and I couldn't get into it. So for me personally, I want to be able to try the tool before I buy basically. The one thing that I'm finding really confusing about Poe, which just needs a bit more research, is their pricing. So it's actually not straightforward because they basically price it based on points. So if you use 10,000 points per day, it's €5.74, I mean, it's paid at the moment. So euros.

I mean, that's quite... assuming similar five bucks or so a month. And then if you're using one million points per month, then that goes up to about $20. So that's in Power ChatGPT.

And it basically goes up to €287 for 12.5 million points. But what's not clear is what's a point? So if you're not technical, and I'm not super technical, you need to do some digging to understand how many points you'd use, essentially.

I'm a very heavy AI user. I use it every single day throughout my day. I use it for personal and business tasks. So I talk to every, I use it heavily. I'm always importing documents and links to things and uploading images. I'm a very heavy user. So I just need to work out. I probably would just need to experiment. Maybe start with the basic plan of 10,000 points a day and see how I get on. But I think the pricing is just, it's not clear to someone who's not technical.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, that's a really good point. And I've done that. You know, what is a point? What is a token? I've been exploring this and I thought, well, hey, I don't think I'm using that much. But it's not until you get into one of these platforms where you are paying by your usage that you really see that. Yeah, it's the $10 per person per month may not be sufficient for what you want to use it for.

[Nihal Salah]
Yes, and I think that there are some obvious things like if you're asking it to create a lot of graphics and videos, then obviously, then that will be considered much heavier use of the tool. But if you're doing, if you're basically asking it to create content or strategy, like it's a lot of text-based prompting and it's coming back with text-based responses, I don't think it would be taking as much of it. I also don't know because with Claude, for example, there's a limit on the conversation length and I often have very long conversations in Claude, especially when I'm doing strategy-related work.

And it's the most frustrating thing when you get to the end of the, you know, suddenly it tells you you've reached your limit and I'm on the paid version. So there must be another tier on top of what I've already got. So, yes, just understanding that.

Unfortunately, some of these things you'll only understand once you've actually played around with the tools.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, exactly. And this is what we're suggesting. We're not coming at you and saying, go out and use these things and buy into them.

It's simply go try them out and the majority of them do have a free version or they allow you to use it free for seven days or 14 days or whatever and before you get into the paid stuff. So it's really worthwhile taking a trip into one of these and seeing if it's going to work for you. But before you do it, be intentional.

Go back to that word, intentional. You know, don't just say, oh, I'm going to sign into this without knowing what you're going to use it for because you could completely waste your free time in it. So decide what you're going to create or what you want, what results you want before you sign up.

[Nihal Salah]
100 percent. And I've just thought of, I know this sounds really random, but it just popped up to my head because I meant to mention this on the last episode we did and I forgot. Now with ChatGPT and I think this might just be on the paid version, but I think for STR businesses, it's actually really worth playing around with.

You know, when you go into the voice mode, which I use quite a lot when I'm just walking and I start thinking of an idea or I'm like trying to work through a strategy and I actually want to have a conversation. But now in voice mode, you can actually activate the video and you can show on your, you have to have the app. So you can actually use it and show a room, for example, and ask ChatGPT what improvements you could make to the layout, to the decor, to, you know, if it's been cleaned well, you can ask all sorts of questions and it will be able to analyze what is in the video and give you a response.

And I think that's a tool that could be really invaluable for short term mental businesses. People use it for silly things like showing the outfit they're wearing through the mirror, asking how they can improve the outfit. But I've done, for example, I had a client and we did like a whiteboarding session.

We're doing some strategy work and my biggest nightmare is taking what I've, you know, drawn on a whiteboard is really messy and needing to type that up. So I thought I could take an image and upload it but then I'm like, it's not going to understand the context. So I switched on the video mode and I took a video and I talked it through each step and it in seconds created this beautiful document and it needed very little editing.

So anything internal like that that you're doing or, you know, if I like to think on paper or my thinking can be really messy, the game changer for that sort of thing is, you know, being able to organize and structure your thoughts, being able to show it something, you know, a room, like I said, or whatever. So that was just something that I randomly remembered right now.

[Heather Bayer]
I'm glad you did because that, yeah, that's, you know, I've used that term game changer a lot but that is, that is absolutely a game changer. Particularly if you're, you know, setting up a new property and you want somebody, you don't have somebody with you, you want someone who understands design and aesthetics and to come along and say, you know, I move that out or I'd move that to the right a bit or those of ours, you should have some flowers in it. Just to, or for me, it would be, there's a dog bowl on the floor you probably need to move.

[Nihal Salah]
But you could, for example, if someone that you were saying is just setting up a proxy that, you know, they're early in the business and you know, just taking, doing a video of the room and saying, what could I, what could I add to bring warmth to the guest experience? Because there's sometimes like you say things that are really obvious, but not obvious, you know, because you're not necessarily, you wear a different hat when you go into the operator mode, right?

[Heather Bayer]
Oh, absolutely.

[Nihal Salah]
You all live in a home, but we, for some reason, when you're in operator mode, it's like, it's like your home owner or hat goes off for some reason.

[Heather Bayer]
Yes, you've got to get into guest mode. So you could, you could ask, you could ask chat GPT, you're, you're in guest mode. You've just walked into this, this property.

What are your first impressions? Oh, I love that. I love that.

We went a little out of topic, but thank you for bringing that in.

[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.

[Heather Bayer]
So it's great to have David back to talk more about Guesty and their property management software. So David, how do experienced property managers make updating their listings as seamless as possible?

[David Angotti]
So in Guesty, which is the property management software that I represent or in your property management software, there should be a place to go and update a listing. Now, when you update that listing, you want to hit save on that and distribute it to as many channels as possible. Now, this is where your property management software can either really, really help you or put you behind the curve a bit.

How many native integrations do they have out to third-party channels? So you want to make sure they have at a bare minimum, the big three; Booking.com, Vrbo, Airbnb, but a lot more channels as well. So the more channels, the better here, because if it's no work to distribute out to all of those and it's a seamless distribution process, you're just talking about more and more revenue, the more you can distribute to.

And so really, you want that one click solution that distributes out to tons and tons of channels to deliver tons of revenue to you. And if you're if you're dealing with the right software, that should be seamless.

[Heather Bayer]
Let's get back to these paid platforms because I want to talk about one that I'm using. I've mentioned it before, I'm a little bit on the fence at the moment, but I'm currently paying $77 a month for it. It's called Cassidy.AI, and it's a platform that allows you to create AI assistants, and these can perform different tasks. And I've got my Cassidy acting as....... Well, the very first one, and this came from a friend of mine who uses it a lot, uses Cassidy AI just completely to run his business, and he has a prompt assistant. So he has built this assistant that creates perfect prompts that he then takes into ChatGPT because that's free. And I better I better clarify that because, you know, somebody might be saying, well, you're paying $77 a month by using ChatGPT. Well, with all these paid models, there are limits. There are limits on how you use it. We'll go back to these, you know, tokens versus points or whatever they like to call them. But those add up over time.

And in most of these platforms, you can see a little counter at the bottom that tells you how many points you have left. And you have no idea how you just use five and a half thousand of them, but somehow you did. And and you can see your you can see your three points beginning to go down.

So my prompt assistant has a really long prompt to help it deliver better prompts for me. So in my prompt assistant, I have a couple of things I say when you're writing a prompt, make sure you include do not use too many compound sentences. Do do not use emojis.

So these are the things that would go into a prompt before you put it into ChatGPT. So I have this prompt assistant. The prompt for it is very long, but it's really, really helpful. So when I want to create something in ChatGPT, I can go to my prompt assistant, create prompt and then use it. I do course writing and I'll tell you what I'll tell you what has been helpful for me presentations. So I'm doing a presentation and and I want an outline for a presentation.

So I have an a presentation outline assistant in Cassidy and that has the prompt that tells it the type of presentation is going that I'm going to be doing the type of audience, the length. And I have all that and it will come up with a perfect outline for a presentation. And that would be the same for a webinar or anything else I'm doing.

So that's basically what it can do. You can build these assistants. You can also connect them to other tools like you can connect them to your email. You can connect it to your PMS. You can connect it to spreadsheets and any CRM you might have to automate processes. So simple example would be I still use spreadsheets. So if I'm creating an outline or creating a course and I have learning outcomes because I have a learning outcomes assistant that helps me create perfect learning outcomes based on Bloom's taxonomy, which if anybody knows about learning outcomes, you know that you go back to Bloom's taxonomy to give you the words like explain and persuade.

So yes, so we could automate the process so that when I've created the learning outcomes, those learning outcomes go directly to my spreadsheet and they arrive on my spreadsheet and I'll use Zapier to help me do that transfer process. But it's all it's all built into Cassidy. So that's probably made zero sense.

So, you know, I'm rabbiting away about because I really like to use it but okay, how can we use it in short-term rentals. Here's a few examples and one of them is, I think is really helpful as a property manager, and I was one for 20 years, and I've talked to hundreds and hundreds of property managers, the people who've built their businesses from the ground up. We keep a lot of the processes in our heads. We know it, we created them, we know exactly how they work. They may have gone down on paper at some point. But in general, they're still in your head. And if you get somebody new join your company, then you will explain to them how to do this and how to do that. These are the things, these are the way I like them done.

But over time, as your business grows, and you get more and more people in, it's just not time effective to be doing all that explanation. So you want standard operating procedures. And I've created a ton of SOPs over the years, which have gone into Google Drive.

So I know when I was running my company, we had all these SOPs and if anybody had a question, they would go into Google Drive, they would search through all the different SOPs and look for an answer. But with Cassidy, you can turn your SOPs into a step by step assistant that will help anybody on your team follow a policy. You know, what happens if somebody reports a bed bug?

And you could go into Cassidy and just ask that question, a guest has just reported a bed bug, what do I do? And then the assistant will give you the exact steps that you should follow. And that to me is one of the one of the major benefits of using something like Cassidy to create these SOPs and SOP executions.

So you've got somebody new started out, they're dealing with guests, they're not going to need to go searching for answers. The answers are already there. And do you have any questions yet, Nihal?

Am I explaining this right?

[Nihal Salah]
I have a question for you, which is, could you do that by creating a CustomGPT and training it on that knowledge base or a Claude Project?

[Heather Bayer]
You absolutely could, yes. Yes, you could create a custom GPT for exactly the same thing. One of the benefits of this is that as you're going through a process, you can use different assistants.

So let's come back to our bed bug example. So somebody's looked through, has got a response and they need to know what to do next. And they need an email to send to this guest to reassure them.

So they can go into their email assistant and ask it to write an email. So it's all in the same chat or the same process. So they send the email and then they can pop back into the SOP and find out some more information.

And maybe that says, OK, now you have to connect with a pest controller. So I'm doing this on the fly now. Yeah, you can tell.

[Nihal Salah]
It's going really well, though.

[Heather Bayer]
So now now I'm going to my problem assistant. You know, maybe I have an assistant that just deals with these major issues and that help helps an operator go through all these different stages and gives advice on how to handle it, how to handle the fact that, you know, you're going to get a pest controller in. And now you've got to tell the guest that that somebody's come in and I know this from experience when you have a bed bug problem, your guests have got to isolate all their luggage.

They're not to move things from room to room. If the infestation is in one room, it's really tough to deal with. So you can have other assistants that come along and help you with that.

So I'm in the early days of using Cassidy. But I can see other ways of of using it. You could build an assistant to generate and send out monthly reports.

You could use an assistant to notify owners of bookings. Now, if you're using a PMS, you've got all that already. But for smaller operators who are perhaps not into spending a lot of money on property management software just yet at seventy seven dollars a month.

This is a lot cheaper than using much more highly priced PMS. So it's a it's a start. Yeah, I like the idea of training and onboarding and creating a training agent that actually walks staff through tools and policies and job tasks with some interactive guidance so they can then ask questions about different parts of the job.

[Nihal Salah]
And just listening to you talk through those different use cases, I can see now the benefit of them being all connected because if you create a custom GPT or a Claude Project, they're discrete projects.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, this is what I'm trying to get out. I think, you know, yes, it's all in one place and you can keep it in one thread almost.

[Nihal Salah]
Yes, yeah, it's almost like having the way I like to think of it is it's the difference between having different assistants who don't know each other doing different pieces of work for you versus having say three assistants who sit in the same office who understand each other's context so they can therefore link their work tasks together a lot more efficiently. But again, as listening to you speak, I'm like, Oh, my God, there's I mean, we could talk about this stuff for hours on end. And I think it goes back to you.

But again, it goes back to your point about being really intentional and thinking through what is the use case? Like what are the like the starting point I would recommend for any businesses think about, you know, whether it's marketing or another area of your business, what are your biggest pain points? Mm hmm.

Where are the where are the problem areas of your business? Where is your marketing funnel or sales funnel leaking? Like start with, you know, where are your costs really high?

What are the tasks that are just a complete pain in the butt for you to do and start mapping those out before you start fiddling around with the tools so that you have that really clear intention.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, you explained it way better than I did. Yeah, I get excited about stuff. And I just, you know, I think all this stuff sort of boils up in my head and I and I just can't get it out of my mouth.

[Nihal Salah]
Oh, it all made sense. It all makes sense, I think, because I've not used Cassidy and you have. So I was trying to wrap my head around.

There's an issue of like, what's the difference between using Cassidy versus just using ChatGPT or Claude, I understand in terms of like workflow automation, there is a difference, obviously, because it can actually go in, you can, like you said, integrate with your email and it can write and send the emails all you're presuming. Yeah, whereas you can't. Well, you could connect ChatGPT in ways that you could do that.

But this just makes it a lot cleaner and easier because it is in one tool. But the most important thing, my understanding based on what you've said is it understands the context of the different assistants and that's crucial.

[Heather Bayer]
Yes, yeah, exactly. And I'm enjoying it now. I'll probably come and give a review, a fuller review of it when I've had more time to spend on it, but I'm enjoying it at the moment.

So, you know, there's two parts to it. One is the creating assistants, and I keep creating assistants, different systems for different things. But then the other part of it is a workflow is actually and I'm trying to do one for the podcast at the moment.

So, for the podcast, we start with identifying a guest, and then we invite them and then we create the questions, you know, what are we going to talk about. And then we do the recording, and then we do the editing, and then there's all the stuff for the show notes and the social media outreach and letting the guests know that, you know, we've put the episode out, etc. And now that is perfect for Cassidy, because I can put all those things in there and it will connect with all the different parts so and I have a system building my assistants at the moment so I have a show notes assistant.

So I can put the text of the, the transcript of a podcast into the text assistant, and it will push out the exact show notes in the format that I want them. Now yes, I could use CustomGPT for that, of course, but with with Cassidy you know once those Show Notes have been done, then we want them pushed out to the website, and we can use via API we can take that those show notes and have them automatically go out and published on the website. Yeah, so yeah, lots, lots, lots to learn, lots to learn still.

So, yeah, for short term rental operators, you know, something like this saves time, reduces errors, offers scalability without needing to hire more staff and that's the big thing, you know, I was greatly into hiring all these virtual assistants, and now my virtual assistants are just in one platform. And it helps smaller property managers complete compete with the big players, you know, those are out there using the tracks and the streamlines and all the big expensive property management software, this enables much smaller operators to build up their business before they're able to afford the much more complex stuff. So we've done it again, Nihao, we've run out.

[Nihal Salah]
I don't know why people are trying to keep it short Heather, I think we should just accept we never will.

[Heather Bayer]
I know, I think Joe Rogan does three hour podcasts, I think we can do the same thing on much more friendly topics. Okay, so what should people be taking away from all this? I mean, the first one is, don't get into this without looking at what the use cases are.

Don't just dive into a platform without knowing what you want to get out of it. So the second would be sticking with the major platforms first, before experimenting with with the niche ones before experimenting with the 32,000 whatever tools there are out there. What else?

[Nihal Salah]
I would say once you're clear on the use cases and and just focus on a couple of tools is play around with those tools and just experiment and reach like reach out to people join communities. Ask Heather and I question what we're here for. We love talking about this stuff, but I think it is a learning process for everyone and I'm sure listeners have noticed that we don't even have the answers to all the questions that we've asked each other.

And it's just the nature of where AI is at the moment. So none of us know everything. It's, you know, we're learning together.

So join the communities, reach out, ask questions and just get curious, I would say.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, that's perfect. And then invest in premium AI tools strategically, they're not all worth paying for. And finally, think of AI as a strategic partner.

It's not just a set of tools, it's a partner that will work with you. And great discussion I was having yesterday with Shahar Goldboim from Boom. And that episode is coming up in in a week or so, when we were talking about the juncture of hospitality and automation and AI.

I'm basically saying, you know, AI is not going to take away from hospitality, it's giving more to hospitality, because it's freeing up your time to be better at the hospitality side and let AI take care of the administration side.

[Nihal Salah]
Absolutely. Yeah, I think definitely would just enable you to be more hospitable, which is the whole point of being in hospitality.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, this is something that's come to me over the last few months. You know, I was thinking, Oh, gosh, we're getting far too automated.

And we're giving too much away to AI. And we're losing sight of what we're here for. But in fact, after talking to Shahar, I thought, Oh, yeah, you're absolutely right.

We're just creating this enormous raft of time that we never had before, because we were spending it all on this stuff that AI can now do. Absolutely. I'm sure this is not the last time we are going to be discussing AI on this podcast.

It's always a pleasure to talk these things through with you. I've got I've got an idea now I've got another idea. Go on.

Now you talk about community. I'm not seeing any community out there for AI and short term rental. So maybe that's something we should be talking about.

[Nihal Salah]
I'm up for that chat.

[Heather Bayer]
Yes, we'll have that chat. You know, I could do it. I mean, there's a couple of WhatsApp groups out there and I am a member of them.

But I've got some ideas. I've got some ideas. I will share them with you.

So those of you listening, if you're interested in this sort of community where you can come along and ask people and get this this information, watch this space. It's only just come into my head.

[Nihal Salah]
So give me a few minutes.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, just just a few minutes to think about it. Yeah, with all the other stuff I've got on at the moment. Well, I hope I hope things improve in rainy Spain because the rain is pouring down in Spain right now.

[Nihal Salah]
Indeed. It's been a very wet March.

[Heather Bayer]
Yes. Yeah. And as I said, you know, when we were chatting beforehand, we had a frost this morning in Alabama, Southern Alabama.

And that is at the third week of March as we're recording this. So yeah, it's weather's all up the spout at the moment. Always a pleasure.

Nihal, we'll talk again soon.

Thank you so much, Nihal. Well, that was that was terrific.

We always have these discussions every time we get together. We could talk for hours for sure. And then we are talking about, you know, what we can do to take this forward, how we can help you out there to navigate through this AI world a little bit better.

We'd love to hear from you. Let me know if you'd be interested in having your operations, your marketing audited with an eye to AI, if you like. We'd be delighted to have a chat with you.

So you can reach us or you can reach me at heatheratvacationrentalformula.com. We will be putting something out on our Facebook group, which is the business of short term rental and property management very soon. And you'll be able to follow along from that, see where we're going with putting something together to help you to find out more and to answer the questions.

Because I know when I listen to podcast episodes about AI and I listen to a lot, I get super excited about what I can do. And then I just want to find out more, you know, how do I actually put this into practice? Because it's all very well listening to one person or two people just rattling on about how they're using AI, but to implement it yourself can be a little bit more challenging and a different matter.

So we'd love to hear from you. So with that, I want to close out this latest episode in our AI series. I hope you're enjoying this.

We have a few more to come and I hope you enjoy them as well. So for now, thanks and have a great day.

[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.‍

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

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