[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. 

This is your host Heather Bayer and as ever I'm super delighted to be back with you once again. So we are continuing our AI theme on the podcast. We've talked to some really great people, experts in the industry about AI so far and we're just continuing.

And today, joining me is none other than Mark Simpson, the founder of Boostly, and he's a passionate advocate for helping hosts and property managers take back control of their direct bookings. This is Mark's third time on the show, which means he's officially hit the VRS Podcast hat-trick and I should probably be handing out a badge for that. You know, next time you're at a conference, watch out for those VRS badges on the lanyards. Maybe I'll do that. 

Anyhow, Mark has been making waves in the vacation rental space for years and in this episode we're going to tackle the power of AI beyond the built-in automation tools offered by PMS platforms and explore how hosts and managers can use AI to work smarter and not harder. From content creation to guest communication, data analysis and even market research, we're going to break down practical ways you can start leveraging AI today. 

Mark also shares some insights into Boostly's latest developments, including Boostly Connect, and he talks about his recent shift back into the business after nearly selling it. I had no idea that had gone on.

Plus, he's got some strong opinions on AI-generated content, emoji overuse and why you really shouldn't just copy and paste your AI-generated posts. So if you're wondering how to navigate the AI revolution in vacation rentals without losing your personal touch, this episode is for you. 

Let's go straight on over to my chat with Mark Simpson of Boostly.

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So, I am super delighted to have back with me once again, Mark Simpson from Boostly. Absolutely great to have you back on the show, Mark.

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[Mark Simpson]

Thank you. This is - I was just working out in my head - the third time now, so that means I get the hat-trick ball.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yes, indeed. Yeah, I should have a badge, actually. Should have a badge to show…..

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[Mark Simpson]

Coming to a VRMA, near you, the badges, you know, like Tyann brings those Rockstar things that goes on to the bottom of your name tag, that would be cool.

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[Heather Bayer]

I have been a podcast guest. I often think you could sort of have these sort of lanyards with the badges, and then these little things that go on there reaching down to your knees. Yeah.

So Mark, what have you been up to recently? 

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[Mark Simpson]

Well, what have I been up to? So, we’re recording this in March 2025. So, for the first three months of this year, we've been rapidly building out what I believe will be the next few years of Boostly, our product launch called Boostly Connect. So, there's been a lot of work behind the scenes to get it ready for Q2. 

Actually, building the product is absolutely fine. It's the admin that we have to do for all of our other customers to get them into a position where they're all on the same page, like the upgrade. So, having to do every site one by one, which I wish it was as easy as clicking fingers and it's done, but it's painstakingly slow to do every one. And we've got a thousand clients.

So, the team is hard at work behind the scenes getting ready for that. And yeah, it's been good. It's good to have the team working together on it.

I'm a part of it now. I'm back in the business after doing my best to be, you know, I read too many books by Mike McCulloch. So, I was trying to clock-work myself and EOS and all of that, but now I'm firmly back in and it's been good being back into it day to day and speaking to the hosts and finding out the pain points and all that good stuff.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, I couldn't imagine doing that, you know, setting myself apart and just letting the integrator or whatever do the stuff; I'd be too much ‘hands in the pie.’

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[Mark Simpson]

I think it's the curse, isn't it? Where you want to build a business that is clock-workable and all the things that one day it could be buyable. And, you know, I definitely fell for that.

You know, went down that rabbit hole. And I think I just had the realization the very back end of last year. And I've been very transparent on this.

I've written about it a lot on LinkedIn and whatnot. And I got to a point where the business nearly was sold. And if that didn't happen for whatever reason, and I feel like I came out the other end going, I'm cool with this not selling. I'm cool with this being a lifestyle business. I'm cool with me being part of it, as long as it makes an impact. And so yeah, I've sort of gone a  proper 180 full circle back into it. And so I guess I'm in the branchesky founder mode stage of my career again.

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, that's great. You know, it makes me think back to when you first came on the podcast and you were just starting out. And it's been great to see where you've come from and how it's evolved over time. So glad to hear that all is still going well, and you're motoring forward. 

But you are here today to talk about AI and using AI as a tool in the workplace, not so much using the AI that comes with all the platforms that we currently use, because everybody seems to be piling in their AI into the platform. So if you're doing revenue management, or if you're doing guest communication, so much of the services and systems now have AI built into them. So we're not talking about that. It's more what we as people are using AI for, and perhaps what our teams are using it for. 

And I know you've been out there. I've seen you talking about the use of AI, particularly in content, and having a go at people who are using too many emojis. And just like Amber Hurdle said a couple of weeks ago, the compound sentences, what she calls parallel contrast. If you don't know what that is, you're going to have to go back and listen to Amber's episode.

But one great example is a tale of two cities. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. So two things in one sentence like that, we overuse it, not saying that that's a bad thing in itself, but it's overuse. And I think that's what you've been coming at. Right?

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah. Like I say, if you're, you've never posted content before, and you want to start posting content, and you feel like AI is a tool that can help you by all means go for it. But also as well, you've got to realize that we are dangerously going down a route of just a copy and paste world where everybody posts the same. 

So don't just blind copy and paste it in. That's what I'm saying. Like get it 80% of the way there, and then use 20% of it to put your stamp on it. Because otherwise, what will happen is, you know, when maybe it's this year or next year, anybody who's posting online, whether it's linked in Instagram, wherever, it'll all look the same, it'll become vanilla, and it'll become bland. And it won't have the impact that you wish or you hope that it has. And that's what I call out when I say just copy and paste.

And again, it's so easy to see loads of emojis, hyphens everywhere. Amber will obviously go into it in a lot more detail. But yeah, my sort of thing is, you know, unless you want me in your comments, calling it out, then get 80% of the way there. I do it, I’m as guilty as anybody, I see a post I think works well on LinkedIn or whatever, I will take that as the base, I will put it into ChatGPT, I will get it to 80% of the way there and then I use 20% to add my touch onto it. And so yeah, 100% utilize it, but just don't copy and paste and pray and spray and all that.

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[Heather Bayer]

So look, yeah, I know. And I think the way to look at it is when you've done something, just look at it. And with that phrase in your mind, is my ChatGPT showing?

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah, read it out. Just literally sit there and just read it out. You'll be amazed that by reading it out, how much you sound like a robot or not.

And you know, I've released and I've published two books, one of them was a co-authored one. And then one of them was my own with the playbook. I wish there was AI back in 2021, when I set out writing this book, it would have made it a whole lot easier.

But now my worry is everybody will just be releasing books, it's just literally 99% written by AI, which is what we don't want out of this. So, it's something to obviously highlight, I'm not disparaging anybody from putting out content, I feel like if you put out content, you'll be ahead of 99% of other businesses in your area, but just at the same time, let's not go down the route of copy and paste an old looking vanilla.

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, this is a good foundation for the discussion we're going to have, you know, how we should be how hosts in particular can be using AI today to work smarter, not harder, because I know now that you know, my workload has changed, it's not actually become less or to a degree, it's become easier. But I've got lots more output now, because I'm using AI. So I'm still working the same amount of time, but I'm doing more with it.

So just give me some examples of some real ways that somebody listening to this could go, Okay, I'm going to use it today.

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah, so we're specifically looking at hosts, and I was having a think about this, just before we came on, and there's about four ways that I see that hosts or business owners, people in real estate, management companies, vacation and those etc, you could use it right now. So first and foremost, and the easiest one, I think everybody should be doing this is email and message responses, the way that we're using it at Boostly. 

So obviously we've got 1000 customers, just around about 1000. And we get about 600 tickets come in every single week into our inbox. And we've got staff from the Philippines from Pakistan and all over the world where English isn't their first language. And this is ideal for you if you are based obviously in the US, UK, Canada, etc.

And if you've got staff that are VAs, the first thing that we're doing is we're utilizing ChatGPT to make sure that our responses are professional. They are written out in the right grammar, but most importantly, they make sense. And without sounding like a robot.

And so that's the first way that we're using it. So email and message responses, we're not having it automatically responding, but we are using it. So we're crafting our response, but then before we hit send, we put it into ChatGPT and we just ask for it to rate the response and then make it better. So every single response looks good, feels right and again, the cool thing is that once you start doing it, and we have a team account that's using it on ChatGPT, is that it's always learning. So it memorizes our response every single time. X

So that's the first thing. Obviously, depending on which PMS that you're using, they may have this service built-in. Every single day I see that a new PMS is, like you said, labeling on AI responses into itself.  So that's obviously going to make life a lot easier. 

Second one, again, we briefly put upon it is content creation. Again, it took me nine years, I've been doing Boostly for 10 years now, it took me nine years of saying to hosts and business owners, you've got to be creating content on a daily basis. Everybody was saying to me, I haven't got the time, I don't know what I'm doing. We even created a content creator part of the Boostly setup, where I had a copywriter to write out a year's worth of content, generic content, and all they had to do was add personalized little tags. Even then, still they weren't doing it.

So now, AI just eliminates that excuse. I hosted a two hour live podcast about a month ago for Book Direct Day and I showed people how to use our template, how to plug it into AI, and how you can literally create a year's worth of content within five minutes. AI massively helps with that. And again, going back to what I earlier said, you don't just copy and paste it, 80% of it AI, 20% you. 

The next two are ones that I feel like not a lot of people are doing, but they should start doing, is data analysis. So we've got tons of data that we're sat on, whether it's numbers, growth metrics, review scores, whatever, guest feedback, we've got tons of data. And for us to sift through that manually, we could be here for the rest of 2025. By utilizing these tools, it speeds it up and it can sometimes pinpoint where you need to improve, whether that's financially, whether that is something you've got to bring into the business operations, whatever. 

And then the final one is market research. Every single week now it seems like an AI tool is bringing out more data research. Obviously, OpenAI brought in their data research and then everybody seems to have followed suit. Even Grok is now doing it, which is obviously over at xAI, and this can be really powerful for real estate, if you're looking to invest, and all that sort of good stuff.

I feel like those are the four things that people can be doing right now. The first two, simple, you can start today. The other two may take a little bit more tweaking, but those are the four ways I can see hosts, business owners, investors, people in real estate management companies can be using AI right now.

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, I love all of these, but certainly the research one. And I spend a lot of time doing research, because of our role as a training company, I want to make sure that we're training in the most up-to-date ways. We're using the most up-to-date organizational learning features. So I'm out there looking all the time. Is there something out there new? And I will use AI research to do that, whether it's Gemini Deep Research or whether just using Perplexity.

I enjoy using Perplexity because it's more of my search engine….. Hey, talking about search engines, as I was prepping for this this morning, and I looked up your LinkedIn profile and thought, what's Mark been posting recently? And I saw something you posted yesterday and you said, I haven't used Google to search for an AI tool since discovering this website. So let's just segue a bit into that, because that's what took me down a rabbit hole when I should have been setting up my audio this morning. So as you know, when we started, my audio was rubbish. So we had to take five minutes to sort that out. So tell us about There's An AI For That.

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah. And it's funny because I discovered it through messing around on Perplexity. I should say Perplexity Pro, so everybody who hasn't yet heard of it, go and check it out. Perplexity Pro is my new tool that I probably use more than any other. Probably I’ve got the ChatGPT browser open and I've got the Perplexity and I've got the math caps as well now. And it was from messing around on there that I discovered this website called There’s An AI For That.

And literally any tool that you could possibly think of has been created. And the website is so simple to use. There’s An AI For That. So just go and search it and it will bring it up. But yeah, I firmly believe that the way the whole Google business model is pretty much on tenterhooks at the moment. They're going to have to retaliate in a big way shape or form because I used to Google search everything and anything. But now I haven't done a Google search for a long, long time, because Perplexity is my go-to. And if I want to do a bit more Deep Research, again, I go on to Perplexity and I can do Deep Research on anything.

But bringing back to this Deep Research, because this is another thing that's going to come up. And you are going to see a lot of LinkedIn posts, deep articles that are created solely on Deep Research. And I'm as guilty of that as anybody. But you've got to make sure that you source your sources. 

So when it does Deep Research, it goes out. And if you're going to ask for data trends, let's just say booking trends. So I was doing a talk in Dubai very recently, last six weeks ago. And in the taxi ride from the place that we were staying to where the venue was going to be at, in the taxi, I went on Perplexity Deep Research, and I asked for the latest booking trends for the Dubai market for the next three months. Obviously, it went out and did its sources and it did its searches. And it looks at specific websites like AirDNA, etc. We've got to make sure you check the sources because one of the sources that it went to was a Reddit forum.

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[Heather Bayer]

I was going to mention that was going to come up because yeah, with all the large language models, when the training data takes in absolutely everything. And it takes in all the Reddit forums and yes, everything. So yes, I'm glad you mentioned that.

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[Mark Simpson]

So make sure you always source your sources. But again, the cool thing about these tools is that you'll go, Alright, so this is what you've brought to me fantastic, please make sure that you run it again. But don't include these sources this time.

And again, the more that you talk to it, the more that you train it, the better it will become. And it will, it's starting to remember now, which is the main thing, it's starting to remember, remember you, remember your patterns, what you like, what you don't like, your preferences. And so if you keep doing it consistently, in a week's time or two weeks’ time, it will be giving you exactly what you need.

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[Heather Bayer]

I absolutely love that because you know, I've used ChatGPT since it came out. And the fact that now I have lots of CustomGPTs set up for, you know, my little assistants out there doing their own thing. But the fact that I could just open a general Chat now, and ask a question, it remembers me, it responds. If I'm writing content, it responds in Heather's voice, because it has been trained overall to write in Heather's voice. So yeah, glad you mentioned that one. 

Okay, so let's just stay with direct booking a little bit. Give me some ways that hosts can take back control, instead of relying on OTAs, using AI.

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah, so I think the biggest misconception with all of these new AI tools coming out there, especially with OpenAI, announcing and releasing Operator on their $200 a month plan. And I tried testing this. So people were thinking that AI in the future, and I've noticed a couple of people at Focusrite, and other places have been talking about this journalist on there about how AI agents will mean the downfall of Airbnb, Booking.com, etc. But there's not a chance on this planet that the OTAs, who invest millions and billions into this are going to let AI bypass them. So when a guest, your future potential guest runs a search that it's got with AI, it's going to bypass these massive platforms and go to a direct booking site, right? So I feel like when it comes to direct bookings, and the big misconception is that the OTAs are going to bypass it, they're going to let the AI operators bypass them and go to a direct booking website, that's not going to be the case. What I think hosts or management companies should be looking to do instead, tap into the ways that AI can help with operations.

So everything that I mentioned above, take the mundane tasks away from you, and from your team. So those mundane tasks, number one, guest communication, number two, filing claims with Airbnb, number three, anything that you can look at your time and go, I shouldn't be doing that. For example, I've been saying for a long time that we have to, as business owners, start to put a price on an hourly task that we do. So for example, let's just say $1,000. And let's just go high. So every single hour that you are working on a task that you are working on, you have got to go, is this worth $1,000 an hour, right?

Is this worth my time? And if the answer is no, then what I used to say in the past is you hire a VA, a virtual assistant, or whoever you go to, and get them to replace you doing it. But now it can be, I've got to find an AI for that, There’s An AI For That, right? And so where can you have AI replace you in the business? So that means that you can then work on your business and grow your business. And when it comes to direct bookings, how can you realistically increase your direct bookings?

Well, number one, it's sales, it's marketing, building relationships, building a network, becoming the go-to. And I've spoken about this on one of our previous episodes on becoming the go-to, increasing your direct bookings. But with AI, it's going to free up your time even more, so that you can then spend a solid hour every day working on new sales, new marketing, new business for your business and your company.

And that would be driving direct bookings. Or it could be that you can craft that email that's going to go to your database of 1000 people, 2000 people or whatever. That is where I feel like AI will help hosts increase their direct bookings, not relying on an AI agent.

If a guest comes and randomly puts in, give me a template or give me a place to stay in Myrtle Beach that’s ideal for my family, because the chances of them finding your direct booking website based on that is slim to none, unless the guest goes in and says, right, I want you to find me this place, but then I want for you to go and find its direct booking website, obviously it will do that. But the chances of that happening slim to none. Instead, what I want for people to do is to utilize AI that will free up their time that they can spend it on sales and marketing instead of being stuck in the business.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, that is a great way of looking at it. We've been talking about being smart. And I just want to sort of move on over to how do we use AI to help hosts tailor the experience and make guests feel really, really special without spending hours on manual work, because you mentioned the word robot, we can come off as being robotic.

I know that AI chat bots and automated messaging have changed dramatically over the past year or so. So I was mentioning this to Brooke Pfautz when I talked to him last week about the fact that a year ago, I would get really frustrated with chat bots and just immediately go in and say, I want to speak to a real person. And now it's a little bit more challenging to actually recognize that you are not talking to a real person. So talk to me about making guests feel special, but without spending the hours on manual work, can the AI actually do this?

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah, I feel that, again, we've got to bear in mind, the context is that we are so new on this. If you're going to put it in terms of iPhones, we're like iPhone 2. Right now we're at iPhone 16 in 2025. So we're still at the iPhone 2 stage of all of this where it is new and if there's one thing that our AI needs to succeed it’s data, right? The knowledge base that you feed it.

And all of these vendors that are popping up that are doing guest communications, you've got hostAI, you've got HostBuddy AI, Bestie, Hello, Hostie, Guest Guru, yada, you name it, right? They're all bringing it in. And the PMSs like Hospitable and Journey, Aviva, Guesty, Host, they're all going for it as well.

Hosts that I speak to that are using hostAI and these third-party vendors, they say that the responses can range from the sublime to the ridiculous, right? And that is because of the knowledge base that it has been given. And because it is so new, and it is fresh, you are going to get the sublime to the ridiculous in the responses.

But imagine this in a year's time, you know, imagine this in two years' time and the more data we feed it, the better it will become. One of the things that I get constantly in my inbox is for sales AI reps, right? Because obviously Boostly as a sales team, and we utilize, you know, humans on our sales team, I think the AI or the ads that I get put in front of me are for AI sales reps and I've done a few demos, right?

And the demos that they put on their website, it's so clearly….., it has a script to read from and the data is being fed from the prospect is what it's going off, right? It can't get creative in any way, shape or form. The better the data, the better it performs.

And bringing it back into the world of hosts is, if you are going to utilize AI for guest communications, you have got to make sure that you've got the correct SOPs and you've got the correct information written down. If you do, the responses are going to be better than if you just have a knowledge base of, if a guest says this, do that, like very basic stuff. And I feel like the hosts are succeeding at the moment. And I see a lot of people who are thriving with this right now, I see them in the Boostly community, we're chatting to them on a day-to-day basis, I've set up WhatsApp groups where I see hosts that are using this. Those are the ones that have got the correct SOPs, the correct standard operating procedures, how to respond to guests, the data that has been able to feed it. Those are the ones that are doing it well and right.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, I think I was discussing this last week, that very old adage applies, garbage in, garbage out. If you don't train it well, you're not going to get the output that makes the difference for you. So I've been talking about SOPs for years because as a property manager, I had those in…., they were all in my head.

And I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, that you keep all this information in your head and then you bring somebody else on to help you out and then you'll sit and explain it to them, sort of get it out of your head verbally. And that's the way we've been doing it for years. But now it's a matter of getting that information, those SOPs that sit in your head out and written down and documented.

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[Mark Simpson]

So if I was to add a fifth into the things that I had, the four things I said earlier with email, content, data, market research, I think the fifth one I would sneak in would be SOPs, because it is now never easier than to do SOPs. With Loom, use Loom.com, it's got an AI tool built in now where you can literally craft out your SOPs from just recording a Loom video. Really, really, really useful, really helpful. And like I say, last year I was very documented, I was very transparent that Boostly was going for a potential takeover. And we never had a data center before. I never even knew what a data center was, but part of it, we had to put all of our SOPs in there. And yes, we had SOPs, but they're massively out of date. And so we tapped into Loom and Loom AI to create our SOPs in about a week. We had a week to do it, which was a crazy timeline, but we would never have been able to get there without. And so now, like you say, you may be watching this, listening this going, I need SOPs. Again, never been easy to be able to do before. So you can get it done in a very short space of time compared to a couple of years ago.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah. Do you know, I take my dog out for a walk first thing every morning, and usually that's my time when I'm listening to an audio book, a novel, because I never sit down and read any book otherwise. I get halfway down the trail, which is an hour long trail, and something comes to mind and I really need to document it. So I use advanced voice mode on ChatGPT and I spend the rest of my walk just chatting with ChatGPT and telling it the steps. And I did that the other day and I thought, I really need to document this SOP, the steps to do this thing. And it was so much easier just to talk it out and say, okay, this is the way I'm doing it at the moment. Ask me any questions that will make your output better. And then it will come back and ask me some more questions. And I'm having this [conversation], people must think I'm nuts. I mean, we've been doing this for ages, you know, talking with earbuds in and people see you chatting, you're on the phone. 

So I guess I pass people, they think I'm on my phone, but I know I'm talking to ChatGPT. When I get home, I just download that whole conversation. And then I can start going through it. And that it's amazing what comes out of that. Because you can then say, okay, summarize it as an SOP as a procedure, step by step, and it will.

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[Mark Simpson]

Next book, you are literally one step away from that Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson movie “Her” where you are doing exactly that with air pods in. So we're very close to it, to having that AI agent, it will be in your ear, which is scary, exciting and all of the above.

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[Heather Bayer]

 Yeah, yeah, I'm getting up there Mark I used to say I want to live to be 103, but now I want to live to be 120, because there's just so much going on and I don't want to miss any of it.

So we've probably got people listening to us who are perhaps a little bit AI skeptical. Or as many people I've spoken to have said, they're overwhelmed. There is just so much out there they just do not know where to start.  First of all I'd like to….. I mean you've mentioned a couple of things you've mentioned Perplexity, you've mentioned ChatGPT.

We talked about There's An AI For That, let's just start with the platforms that you commonly use to make you work smarter not harder, and then we'll move on to a simple low risk way that anybody who's not really using it today can start out and see immediate benefits. So just let's start with what you're using.

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah, so what I would do, I have on my Mac app and on my phone app. I've got Perplexity and ChatGPT. That's pretty much my go-to between those two. I've dabbled as you know with a lot and I document a lot, but I would say those are the two that I use on a daily basis and I think anybody who is getting started can just go, on a daily basis, and use it. Don't just download it and go, I'll come back to it. Actually make a point of using it every single day and playing around with as much as you possibly can. 

The free version will get you by, but for those who want to get the true wealth of it, $20 a month upgrade to that Pro Plan and it's mad what you can do. For example, my little boy Alfie is 12 years old and he bought a 3D printing machine at the back end of last year and he's now turned it into a mini business.  He's selling things on Etsy and I have not got a clue about anything DIY,

I am truly awful. And this 3D printer broke. I didn't have a clue what to do, Alfie didn't have a clue what to do, so what I did is I opened up the GPT app and you've got a video call feature now where you can video call it. So I got my phone, I flipped the camera around, I pointed it at the printer, I didn't give it any of the context. I just said this is broken; what do I do? 

And it/she, literally the robot, spoke back to me and gave me a step-by-step on what we needed to do to fix it and it worked.  I literally showed the screen with the error code and it told us exactly what to do and we got it fixed. So for those that are skeptical just start doing that. Show it things and ask it for help and advice and da da da da and it's crazy what we can do now. And again, like you say, the things that are coming next are so exciting, because I still believe it's only really impacting business owners and geeks. That’s literally who it is impacting at the moment?

The day-to-day user hasn't got a clue. So many people don't realize that so many of these tools are already built into their day-to-day, right? At the moment if you write something on Google it'll use AI to try and finish the sentence for you. If you look at your replies, if you look at the bottom, it'll say do you want to reply like this or like this or like that? Like your iPhone has got it built into mail like we wanted to rewrite it and it's already there. And we're very close to what's going to happen next where I think everyday users are going to use it. 

So even if you are skeptical, if you start today, if you use this as that inspiration to download the app, you're ahead of 90% of other business owners in your area just by going today. You've not missed the boat on this in any way shape or form. It is literally just getting going 

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[Heather Bayer]

You're right I think, because you know for those of us and for certainly the people that I'm talking to throughout this series, we're all immersed in it day to day. You get up in the morning and the first thing, maybe it's just me, the first thing I do is probably have a discussion with ChatGPT on what my schedule is for the day and being immersed in it I think sometimes we can forget that there are probably the vast majority of people aren't that focused on it and still need some help to to get going.

So you're saying that the super simple low risk way they can start today and see immediate benefits is just with ChatGPT. I love that video Idea, I have not used that. My microwave door broke in the RV. In fact, it was last year when we were down here, and I scrolled through YouTube looking for a way to fix it. My husband is not DIY focused. He was an air-to-air refueling expert in the Royal Air Force for 35 years, so he could refuel a jet at 35,000 feet over a war zone but ask him to pick up a screwdriver. Nah, that wasn't gonna happen.

So I've always had to do those things myself, so yeah, I scrolled through YouTube, I found the YouTube video. I was able to fix my microwave door, but it took quite a long time and I think now, from what you said, I could have just shown it a video of what was broken. The fact that the door was open and wouldn't shut and it was a spring inside that just had to be reset. That would have reduced the time massively.  So any other use cases like this?

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[Mark Simpson]

So again, funny enough speaking about RVs and whatnot, last summer with me and the family we hired a camper van, an RV, and we drove around Europe. It was a Ford Zeiro model and again I've got no clue about cars or anything like that, or fixing it - no clue. But what I did was I took the manual that I could find online and I pasted it into ChatGPT. So we created a GPT which is obviously like everything about ChatGPT, is very generic. So when you create a GPT, it's trained on that specific thing that you are training it on. So we trained a specific GPT on this van that we hired for the whole summer and anything that went wrong I was asking it questions in there. And you know she was voicing it back to me about exactly what I could check and stuff like that. 

And I feel like just little things like this you can start to do, and for hosts this is something that you can do. So when you create a GPT it stores it obviously on your account, but you can create a public one that will go out to the wider world, and again, when you've got this GPT you can share it with anybody. So let's just say for example, you've got a property by the lake and you've just got the one property, well, why don't you create a GPT based around that and you can paste in your digital guidebook. You can paste in all of the fixes. Whatever washing machine you've got, paste those instructions in on how to fix it. Whatever appliances you've got you're pasting in all of the fixes on how to do that. And you can create your very own GPT for your property. Probably take you half an hour to an hour to do max, but then you've got it for the rest of the year and you can share that link with a guest and you can say listen if there's any problem, anything that you need, ask this. If you want to get tech savvy, you can video call it and it'll be able to help you fix it. So again, we're talking about time saving tools. That's one that you can do instantly.

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[Heather Bayer]

That is brilliant. That is brilliant. Okay, you're just going to have to go into this in a little more depth. Just a very quick tutorial on how you actually create a Custom GPT.

[Mark Simpson]

Yeah, so CustomGPT. And what I'll do as well, if you want to see the video tutorial on this I've got a Loom video. If you're listening to this or watching this and you want to go, I want to dive a little bit deeper on it. Just send me an email - mark@boostly.co.uk - and in the subject line just put Heather Bayer Podcast Tutorial and I'll send you the link back, so I know what it is.

What you do when you open up ChatGPT, on the left hand side you've got all of these tabs and those are all your previous conversations and then one section is called GPTs. Click on that and what will open up is all of the GPTs that are being created that have been put on their public store. But then in the top right hand corner it says Create a GPT so you can create your own. When that loads up you've got two sections. You've got Create and Configure, and so in that section is where you do the training. You basically paste in everything and anything you can find. If you've got it on a PDF you can actually upload the PDF as well, which saves a lot of time And you can start to customize your own GPT.

I Started with one and now I've got hundreds. So I've got my own Tony Robbins GPT. I went and found everything on Tony Robbins. I could find any book that he's ever done any videos ever done. I've got my own Alex Hormozi. You name it your business guru of choice and I've got a GPT around when I was looking at potentially exiting the business. I found every book I could possibly find or every video on selling a business and I've got that, so I've got all of those.

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[Heather Bayer]

Okay, let me just interrupt you for a moment. So if you're uploading, how do you upload books?

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[Mark Simpson]

So you convert it into a PDF. So obviously you will buy the version. You're not just going to find it online. But then you can convert it into a PDF and then you just basically turn it from say the Kindle version to a PDF and you can upload it there. Obviously on the free plan I believe you can do it to a certain amount and if you've got the Pro Plan you can do it a lot better. But I'm talking about ChatGPT. Claude has got its own version and all these have got their own versions, but I just use ChatGPT. So you get it, you convert it to a PDF.

What I did as well is I went onto YouTube and every single video on YouTube has a transcription So if you open up the ‘more information’. So I went and looked for videos with Mike Michalowicz. For example, there was a three-hour video of Mike Michalowicz. I grabbed that, got the transcription, copied that and pasted it into the GPT. I just found as much as I possibly could and once you've done that the more you train it the better it becomes. 

I've gone so far down the rabbit hole that we've got GPTs for every type of situation you could possibly imagine to the point now where I've also got one for YouTube titles and thumbnails. So one of the big things I'm doing this year is going all in on YouTube for our awareness of Boostly in the brand, and I'm working with a YouTube coach and he put me onto this YouTube title and thumbnail GPT. But I didn't create it, somebody's created it and put it on the ChatGPT store for free. And so again every single week I am utilizing these different ChatGPTs and GPTs that have been specifically trained on something to help me within the business.

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[Heather Bayer]

Okay, question for you. So you can create your CustomGPTs or, if you're using Gemini, Gems is another method, and Claude Projects. Each of the platforms has their own way of creating assistants. So these are… they're not agents, they're AI assistants. Now Mark there's platforms out there like Cassidy.ai. There's Sintra.ai, there's MindPal. These are separate platforms. They're much more expensive, but they create these assistants for you. How do you feel about them? You're creating your own CustomGPTs, which is obviously within your subscription to ChatGPT if you're not on the $200 a month plan, then I'm assuming you're on the $20 a month.

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah Yeah.

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[Heather Bayer]

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So what would you say about not using CustomGPTs or the other formats but using one of these platforms? I'm seeing them all the time.

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[Mark Simpson]

I feel like these third-party tools are going to be flash in the pans. Like Sintra is one at the moment. If you go on to the Sintra.ai website you are going to be bombarded with ads for the rest of time. I know I am, right? And I see it being mentioned more and more by people, but I believe the only reason they're being mentioned is because they're being bombarded with the ads. I know a few people that are testing it and I feel at Sintra for example, without me properly deep diving into it too much, it's just a fancier version of creating your own GPTs. Again, there are different robots that you can use, different assistants that you can use and they all talk to each other, which is cool. But I can get that for $20 a month, and since Sintra is just basically adding a mark-up on it and having cute robots that look like NFTs. Again, I haven't properly used it, it's a bit more expensive. I feel it starts at two hundred dollars a month. I know people that are testing it in the WhatsApp groups that I'm part of and so I'm waiting for them to provide me with any feedback, or where they go, Yeah, this is fantastic because X, Y and Z.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, interesting. I'm testing Cassidy.ai at the moment because it has a workflow feature so that you can create an entire workflow. Let's say I'm creating a podcast. So there's all these different steps, like yours when you upload your SOPs, and then it will do everything automatically for you, go out to Google Drive. You can use Zapier or Make to connect the APIs all the way through. But I haven't tested it to destruction so I haven't got a full workflow yet.

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[Mark Simpson]

I'm in this WhatsApp group and we've got a lot of very smart people in it. We've got people that are hosts. We've got people that are Vendors who have created Host.ai and we've got everybody in there and we've got people from outside the industry, in the industry, and every single day, I feel like there's a new tool being mentioned. But before I delve down the rabbit hole I just think, Well how long is it until my Mac can do that? How long is it until my phone will be able to do that? And it's just all built in. And so yeah, it is good to test it, but I always try, and before I get that shiny object syndrome, and go and delve into it for two or three hours I always go, Well is it really needed? Is it going to make an impact now? And out of all the tools that have been put in front of us, the ones that we use on a daily basis, like I said, it's Perplexity and ChatGPT. They're phenomenal. 

To go a step further. Obviously we produce podcasts and content and so we use Descript, Eleven Labs on a daily basis, but that's more my content team that are using it. We've used a program called Delphi.AI, which has turned me into a clone. So it's basically trained on every single podcast we've ever done, every book I've written And now people can call and video call me and text on a daily basis and I get reports on that which is really cool, because I can see what our community and the questions that they're asking on a daily basis. So it helps me on what to create in terms of podcasts and videos and then the big one that we use is Cody.

And those 600 tickets that we get coming in every week, what happens is there’s a bot that is learning from every ticket that comes in and whenever we solve the ticket it trains that bot on the response. And so we've got our own dedicated bot that is trained specifically on these tickets and we've been doing it for 18 months now. So what we do now is that when anybody messages in they get an auto response to say, Hey, we will get back to you. You know, we're not a 24/7 service, we'll look to get back to you within a day - two days max. But you may be able to get an instant answer with our AI bot. And that is saving so much time for our customer support team. The customer is getting a more instant reaction, which is fantastic. So that the level of satisfaction from our customers is at an all-time high and that has been massive.

Outside of those - Delphi, Cody, Eleven Labs, Descript - there's nothing that has come across my path, whether it's workflows or whatnot, that I think, Well it's good, it's shiny, but will it make an impact today? 

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, and I think that's important. I've always been the bright shiny thing person. I'm really trying to push back on that now because over the last year I have subscribed to things that are now Included in some of the other platforms. So they've been made obsolete almost as soon as they've come out. 

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah. I mean think of rev.com. Did you ever use rev.com? So basically it would transcribe stuff back in the day. So if you've got a video and if you wanted to have it as multilingual you would pay say five or ten dollars for it to happen. That just happens now automatically, right? And it comes for free.

So companies who are building on this technology, you've got to do something pretty special to feel that your business will be around in a few years, because again, the thing about AI is that everybody's got access to the same open source. Everybody is building on top of either OpenAI Anthropic or DeepSeek, you know what I mean? So it's like they've got to do something pretty special to stand out and obviously the PMSs of our world, so Guesty, Hostaway, have got a ton of money. If they're not going to acquire, they're going to build. And you know Hospitable have gone heavy on the building, and so you got to think, as a host, all of these things that you can hear about now. These shiny objects are around, do I go and find it or wait for it?

And that's what my main takeaway would be for this. I would definitely say start opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, using them daily, you'll be amazed and your learning curve is going to look like a hockey stick. It is going to be insane from where you are now a week down two months down a month down the line. This is why I love doing training on AI, because if you've come from here, so at the very bottom, and a week in you've just gone from so far up that you are so ecstatic. Even if I've just shown you how to write an email differently or create a post on Instagram. And then obviously it will just keep growing up and up. 

And you know, we're both down that rabbit hole firmly and my hope is that anybody's tuning into this, they're either on their way or they're looking to dabble. So my advice would be just get started.

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[Heather Bayer]

Mark, you've been super helpful and loads of information and recommendations and it's been an absolute pleasure to have you here.

How do people get hold of you if they would like to chat more about about Boostly and hear more about what you do?

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[Mark Simpson]

Yeah. So if you'd like to join the WhatsApp group, if you want to be part of the WhatsApp group that I mentioned, send me an email mark@boostly.co.uk, I do have a parameter for you to be involved in it because I can't just let in anybody, because we've got some of the brightest minds in the industry in there. Please let me know and then also as well if you would like those templates that I spoke about, or I've got loads of basically I've got a whole Google doc of cool AI stuff, if you want it just send me an email mark@boostly.co.uk, but in the subject heading make sure you put Heather Bayer's Podcast,  just put that in there in the subject. I'll know what it's talking about, because the thing about your podcast, which I love, is that it’s such an engaged community. I still get people message me from the last time I was on and they go, Oh, can you send me that template and it takes me a good day to go, What did I talk about? So you have to give me a bit of context and I'll know what you're talking about.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, I heard from somebody recently who said I've been trying to get hold of this person you had on the podcast and she was offering an Excel spreadsheet. That was nine years ago! I don't know where she is now. 

Anyway, we could talk forever. I want to join your WhatsApp group because I'm not in there. So send me a link to that so you'll find me in there too.

Mark it's been a pleasure. I can't say how much I appreciate the time that you've given us today.

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[Mark Simpson]

 My pleasure. Thanks for having me 

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, thank you so much Mark Simpson, it was an absolute pleasure talking with you as with all of these episodes in this series I could go on. W could just continue talking for hours I'm quite sure and I just have this great benefit of being able to talk to all these amazing people week after week, but I hope that what we're bringing you is something that you're finding really useful, tactical, strategic, that you're able to put into practice some of the things we're talking about and certainly from this one.

You know, I've got a task for you: Go on to ChatGPT. If you haven't done a CustomGPT, think about what you could use it for and after talking to Mark I love this idea of uploading a manual and it got me thinking while I was chatting to him that i'm going to go and do this and upload the manual for my RV, because we've got a few problems that are going to get fixed when we get back into Canada but I thought, Okay, if I uploaded the manual and then some other information on this particular model of RV, then I could perhaps troubleshoot like that instead of looking in cupboards and looking for the paper manual that we have, trying to find an index, which I know it doesn't have, and and looking for the answers. It could just be out there and just creating a CustomGPT for it. I could just use it whenever I needed to. So that's my task.

I am tasking you guys to do exactly that, go create a CustomGPT and let me know. You can share it with us on LinkedIn or on Facebook. If you're not in our Facebook group - The Business of Short-Term Rental and Property Management, please go there and sign up.

I think I'm going to start a thread on there about creating CustomGPTs, because I'd love to hear what people are doing. Anyway, as you can tell, once I get onto this topic I can't get off it. So I'm going to do a hard end now and say that is it for this week. We'll be back again next week with another take on AI.

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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 vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you and I look forward to being with you again next week

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