Mike Bayer
You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. With over 1.5 million downloads, this is the place to be for all your short-term rental knowledge as part of the Vacation Rental Formula Business School.

Mike Bayer
This episode is brought to you by the kind sponsorship of PriceLabs, who will help increase your revenue and occupancy with their dynamic pricing and revenue management tools. PriceLabs have just launched their 2023 breakthrough release of the next generation of revenue management. This brand new cutting edge solution leverages hyper local data to optimize rates and increase your revenue like never before. Visit the link in the description of this episode for more information.

Mike Bayer
Without further delay, here's your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
Today's guest is the founder of The Plum Guide, Doron Meyassed. We're going to be talking about the paradox of choice in travel, the science behind the perfect stay, and how AI is transforming the business.

Heather Bayer
This is The Vacation, Rental Success Podcast keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new and what will help make your business a success.

Heather Bayer
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer and as ever, I am super delighted to be back with you once again. You know, as a property manager for 20+ years, we started in the business by taking on pretty much anything with four walls, a ceiling, and some adequate plumbing. I mean, it really was a step up from camping. That was the nature of the cottage rental market in Ontario back in the early 2,000s. I know this will resonate with people in some areas of the US and in England for sure, because a lot of us were doing the same thing and finding our owners in the same ways. Quibbling on quality was a really sure-fire way of losing an owner, because they seemed to have a collective mantra, which was 'It's just a cottage, what do they expect?' Hospitality really didn't play much into it then. Actually back then, the guests, who were known then as just 'renters' didn't expect a lot anyway. They were pretty happy with four walls, a ceiling and adequate plumbing. Of course, and very happily, times have changed and expectations are different and managers accepting properties into their portfolios have much higher standards and criteria now.

Heather Bayer
But there's still wide, wide variability in the overall market. And I know from my travels and reservations in short-term rentals, as well as hearing from others that there's still many hosts who don't appear to think much about the guest experience at all. They don't pay a huge amount of attention to it. So when today's guest started his business, he was obsessed with defining the ideal criteria for a perfect stay, and thus The Plum Guide was born. This obsession involves sending testers to thousands of homes and putting them through a really rigorous evaluation that resulted in only a tiny percentage getting accepted into their portfolio. Now AI has become intrinsic to their business. It's an exciting field and an interesting way of cutting costs while still achieving the high level of curation that they're known for. So let's go right on over to my conversation with Doron Meyassed to find out more.

Heather Bayer
I'm super happy to have with me today, Doron Meyassed - I hope I got that right - from The Plum Guide. It's an absolute pleasure to meet you, Doron. I did see you a couple of years ago, at the HOST2019 Conference, but it was very, very brief, and I'm sure you will not remember it at all. A lot of things have happened since then.

Doron Meyassed
They have. Thanks for having me.

Heather Bayer
Yes, there's that little thing called coronavirus came in very shortly after that conference. I swear I got on that airplane after that conference and I came home and I had the most appalling virus for about three weeks, and I lost my sense of taste and smell. I actually think I was ground [patient] zero for Ontario.

Heather Bayer
But anyway, that was a lot of water under the bridge. We're going to talk today about your company that you founded, talking about founded and being a founder. Something you just told me about your name. Can you just share that?

Doron Meyassed
My family name, my surname, Meyassed, means founder in Hebrew. Israelis will often think it's a joke or a just thing that I write after my name. But Meyassed means a founder, and that's genuinely my family name.

Heather Bayer
I love that. So it's Doron the Founder, the founder.

Doron Meyassed
Yeah, exactly.

Heather Bayer
Tell us about the origin of The Plum Guide. How did you get into this business? Where did you start?

Doron Meyassed
So the origin of this business....., most origin ideas or most origin stories start with a negative experience; mine started with a particularly good one. I used to be a hardcore Airbnb user. For every occasion, I would stay in people's homes. We did a trip actually to Tel Aviv with some friends at the time. We booked a place. It was meant to be a casual trip. It was our third choice because the first two, they got rejected. Low expectations.

Doron Meyassed
We show up at this place and it is incredible, 10 times better than the pictures, overlooking the sea, made of all Jaffa stone. The owner would put fresh produce in the fridge every day, and I got talking to the owner. I'd worked with hoteliers before, and he was more inspiring than some of the best hoteliers I'd ever met. I'd say to him stuff like, In the evenings, we have great conversations in your living room. He'd go, Yeah, you know why? Because the secret to a good living room is cocooning. He's right. Seating environments that are cocooned are far more conducive to conversations. It's why people spend longer in restaurant booths than they do in chairs, as  it's a sort of cocooned environment.

Doron Meyassed
That got me thinking, What is this guy? Are there more of him laying in the depths of Airbnb and what was at the time HomeAway? If so, why can't I tell for them from the reviews? I'm an OCD researcher. I use spreadsheets to plan my holidays; I should be able to tell. Maybe a month after that, I took a week off and went to meet hosts in London, Berlin, and Paris, who I believed were these craftspeople. At the end of that week, I decided that my calling was to make Plum happen. I believe that in the depths of these platforms lie these incredible experience makers who cared about every piece of furniture, the art, the choice of bedding, and they were really hard to identify. That was the vision of the business and the mission changed over time, but that was the spark that got us excited about doing it.

Heather Bayer
I love that. In the introduction, I'd mentioned that when I started in the business back in the early 2000s, it was the nature of cottage rental here in Ontario that as long as it had four walls, a ceiling, and some indoor plumbing, it was going to be great. But then expectations were much lower then. People were actually happy to have four walls, a ceiling, and some indoor plumbing. If they got a TV with 'rabbit ears' [indoor antenna], then they were ecstatic. But we know how much expectations have changed.

Doron Meyassed
Yeah, and will continue to rise.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. I'm going to cover that in a minute. But there's a lot of people talking about luxury now. Everybody has a luxury rental site. What makes The Plum Guide different? But having said that, before that, can you just tell me why you called it The Plum Guide?

Doron Meyassed
Well, originally we wanted to call it Plum, and it has multiple connotations. A plum job is a way of saying that something is done very well. A plumb in, let's call it old-school architecture, is this piece of metal that you hang from a string and it's a way of telling you whether something is straight, a bit like an old-school spirit level. This idea of perfection and making sure that it makes sense and so on. But then we couldn't acquire plum.com, so we went for the guide of the best homes in any city. That was the idea.

Heather Bayer
I love that because I hadn't thought about plumb, P-L-U-M-B when I was thinking about that. I just wanted to make sure everybody knew what plumb actually meant in terms of a product. That's great. Let's get back to that question. What makes you different from other luxury rental sites? Because there's a lot of them appearing now.

Doron Meyassed
Yeah.  First of all, and before I answer your question, our 'North Star' is our guest. We think of our target market as the discerning traveler. We are very clear about who that is. They tend to be urban dwellers living in London, New York, LA, Rome, Milan, big into design, relatively well-off. Our obsession is to build the ultimate booking experience, stay experience for that group. At the core, that's what we're up to. On a very practical level today, there are really three things we obsess about for this group and I think what make Plum different. Really, they are the three pain points we see for that group, which is identifying the good quality stuff, consistent quality, service, and better matching with the right home.

Doron Meyassed
On the quality front, what makes us different is that we vet every home that comes on the Plum platform. They have to pass 150 criteria to get onto the site. If you book it, you know the beds will always be great. There will always be properly stocked kitchens. The rooms will be quiet; very obsessive criteria around that. The second thing that makes us different is you can reach a customer service help at the touch of a button.

Doron Meyassed
We have two teams: one that helps you to book a home/choose a home, and one that helps you if anything goes wrong during your stay and you can't get hold of someone from the homeowner or you're not happy with the results you're getting. These teams are all based in London, New York, and Hong Kong. We're all sat in the same space. They really care about the experience. And the third thing that makes Plum different is we obsess about managing expectations or being radically transparent. I'll give you one example. We have a section on our listings called The Home Truths, and we list everything that's bad about the home. So you will find a four million pound apartment or dollar apartment in Paris, and it will say, The floorboards are creaky, the fourth bedroom is windowless, and it's like a laundry list. People are often shocked when they look at that and they go, Gosh. We're always looking for ways of doing that.

Doron Meyassed
What really makes us different, the most important is that we vet every home. We reject 96% roughly of homes we look at. You know, as a customer, that if you book Plum, it's one of the best in the region and that it meets all the basic criteria.

Heather Bayer
Yeah.  A question, because you sort of fall between conventional property manager and listing site and you're sort of somewhere in the middle. Would you say that's about right?

Doron Meyassed
Yeah, definitely. I think the high-end property manager and us, we're trying to solve a very similar problem, which is high-quality experiences in a tricky space. The most traditional way of solving that problem is vertical integration: manage the home, welcome the guests, plump the sheets. Our view of it is we're taking a different approach. We believe we can deliver as good, sometimes substantially better experience by using curation, OCD curation, if you like, rather than vertical integration. By being exceptionally strict on what is in or out. By the way, we'll often work with some of our partners who are exceptional experience makers. Every home is amazing, but we'll still only take 40% of their homes, and we can afford to do that. It's our luxury. It's very tough if you're trying to have a collection in Milan to reject so many homes because you need density and so on and so forth. We're solving a similar challenge in a different way.

Heather Bayer
Yeah.  How do you resolve the human factor? That's definitely something that came to my mind when I was looking through The Plum Guide. Yes, you can curate the art, the comfort, the bedding. But what about the people, the ones that are delivering the hospitality, those owners? Because I know after  over 20 years, we probably managed 600 or 700 properties over that time and 600 or 700 different owners. There were times when we'd get the most amazing home, but the owner just did not match up to it. It wasn't until we'd had it for a short while that we realized that we hadn't evaluated that owner as best we could. How do you do that?

Doron Meyassed
Well, look, it's changed over time. In the early days, and it can still form a core part of it, a core element was someone walking into the house and two things. One is noticing, and we train our team in noticing the small details. This maybe sounds crazy, but a very niche example is, I think, that by looking at a bookshelf in a house, you have a pretty good stab at telling how thoughtful and considerate and attentive an owner or a welcomer might be. So training the team to notice these things, and also interviewing, asking the host in their case, Why do you do this? What do you enjoy the most? What do you find tricky? And looking for passion.

Doron Meyassed
Of course, having perfected that and spent so long on it, we still get it wrong. So if you look at our churn of supply, so the people who leave Plum every year, more than half of that is us letting go of people. If you have two scores on Plum on a customer feedback form that are six or under, the home gets removed, no ifs, no buts. We're often frustrated to remove a beautiful home; the reason why it happens is because it's not foolproof.  We still get it wrong and it's not a perfect thing.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. I appreciate your transparency on that because I always remember taking on this most beautiful architect-designed home, and it was the architects that owned it. It was their home. They were so proud of this home and it was just perfect in every way. It was our flagship property and they were the worst owners we ever had.

Doron Meyassed
Did they interact with the guests?

Heather Bayer
They interacted way too much with the guests, yes. They would drop in to fix a tap or fix something that they felt was not quite right and then stay for lunch. Then we'd get a call from the guest saying, They're still here. Should I be inviting them to dinner as well?

Doron Meyassed
I mean, look, it's a familiar problem, actually, because it's a fine line between being a great host and being someone who blurs that boundary. I think we've gotten a lot braver over the years to say it doesn't matter how much of a masterpiece it is. There's also something, if you read our listings, we produce the listing. When you read the home truths, it's a very powerful way for us to manage expectations. You'll read a home that'll say something like, We almost didn't accept this home because the design wasn't very soulful. But for this part of town, at this price is one of the best you will find. It's very hard to say, We almost didn't accept this home because the owner is very intrusive. You have to make a more difficult decision, I think.

Heather Bayer
Yes, it's a tough one. Let's go back to the experience that people are having across the board in the short-term rental industry, well in the short-term rental market. Because despite all the five stars that you see on Airbnb, the 4.8, 4.9, and five stars, people are still having disappointments. I know from personal experience that the last five properties I stayed in were disappointing. Why do you feel so many travelers are disappointed in their choice of accommodation?

Doron Meyassed
Let me tackle this from a couple of angles. First of all, the bit that we can't control. There's a great talk you've probably seen in a book by Alain de Botton on travel. He talks about this thing where we go on holiday, we idealize what's going to happen. We think of ourselves going away and suddenly everything disappears. We're spontaneous again, we're great lovers, we connect with our children, and then we're sat on the plane and we forget this very annoying fact that we are coming with us. So our neuroses and our madness is all showing up and that creates frustration. I think that happens in travel. I think you project so much fantasy into it, and there's the reality of frustrations of life. I think that's something that you can do some stuff about, but is always there. Expectations are high in travel.

Doron Meyassed
But on a very practical level, I see two big problems. I think the review system is broken. 95% of homes on Airbnb have four and a half stars or more. In my mind, reviews are very effective at getting rid of the bad, but terrible at surfacing the exceptional. In the early days of Plum, I went out and I tried the number one restaurant in, I can't remember now, seven or eight neighborhoods in London on Tripadvisor, and none of them was exceptional.  They were all incredible value. In all of them, when the food arrived, I was like, Wow, I get this much food for my money. But I don't think that the wisdom of crowds, the averages, surfaces the exceptional. If 95% have four and a half stars or more, where are you differentiating here? I don't think it works.

Doron Meyassed
The second thing is, I don't think the system for matching guests with the right home for them is very strong. In a typical marketplace, the owner writes the listing, the owner says this is great for families, for young people it's just great. The reality is that's not what it's like. I think that the effort into turning off people who won't have a good time there is poor. I'm a big believer. I think when we look at how customers used to be helped to make good decisions, it went from a complete deferral to authority. I mean, like what the old and what the church recommended, but then it was like the Michelin Guide, which are exceptional experts telling you what is a good restaurant and we went completely the other way. It's the wisdom of crowds, the authority knows nothing.

Doron Meyassed
I think there's a return somewhere in the middle where you use a mix of experts who vet the home, who are armed by consumer intelligence. That's what I see the future of that space.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, exactly. Let's continue on this guest review theme because you don't have any reviews on The Plum Guide, is that right?

Doron Meyassed
That's right. We don't have any public reviews. There's two reasons for that. The first and most important one is when we investigated why in all these platforms, 95% of homes, 90%, they all have a similar stat, of four and a half stars or more, one of the biggest reasons we got back is that there is a real sense of reciprocity from the reviewer. They're not reviewing a big corporate brand often, they are reviewing a small company. They meet the person who greets them. It's happened to me. It's happened to me in the earlier days where I booked a place. The person didn't show up for four hours and we waited around. Then she showed up and she had some issue with her child and it was like, I'm not going to give this person a bad review. We ask customers for feedback. We tell them that it won't be shared directly with the owner until it's with a bunch more. We ask them, Tell us three things you loved about the home, three things you didn't like about the home. Which customer would like staying here? Which customer would hate staying here? That gives us such powerful, rich data to be able to tell the other guests the home truths, put off people who might not like it, and also people are a lot more honest.

Doron Meyassed
That's really the main reason. The secondary reason is that we have this idea that people... It's an abusive relationship we have with reviews. People spend hours reading them, but no one enjoys it. You're like, Oh, maybe the next one will decipher something. If we could free people from that and say, Look, if it's got The Plum mark, you know it is one of the best you'll get for your money. Here's everything that's negative about the place. That's the vision. I don't think we've succeeded in that yet. I think that the use of reviews is so ingrained that every time we speak to customers, they ask for reviews. It's always a debate.

Heather Bayer
You see, I remember the time before reviews, before FlipKey developed this live review system. I remember us all going, Oh, my gosh, we can't have this. We can't have a live review, and then look at it today. But I love the idea of 'Home Truths'. If you don't have any negative reviews, but you're upfront with exactly what somebody might say if they passed a negative opinion.

Doron Meyassed
Yeah. Because one of my favorite places on Plum in London is in Shoreditch. It's down the road from our office. It's, in my eyes, one of the most incredible warehouses, a warehouse conversion. My parents would think it's abhorrent, and they are Plum customers as well. I think even if you select the best homes, helping people understand that and see that quickly, that this is not for you, is one of the keys to having a good experience.

Heather Bayer
You're talking about matchmaking and you've got the staff who actually match-make and you're wanting to speak with potential guests and find out what their expectations are, what their wants, needs, desires, dreams are, and you've got staff who actually do that. That's got to be time-consuming.

Doron Meyassed
Yeah, definitely. I mean, again, our 'North Star' is this audience. We keep hearing from them how nice it is to just download their needs onto someone, and let that someone do the heavy lifting. The origins of that is, when we started Plum, I was vehemently against doing this. We're a tech company. In the end, the economics are far better for a customer who speaks to us. Between three and four times our conversion rate, which means it cuts what we have to pay Google for a customer by $100-$150, and it costs us less than $100-$150 to service the guest. I think advertising on especially, which is only a slither of our revenue, but especially on performance marketing channels, has become so expensive that something like this is more cost effective and the customers like it more. It's a kind of win-win. If our price point, though, was the Vrbo/Airbnb price point, I don't know that we could do that. But we're also not our average…., we're very open with it, our average order value is four and a half thousand dollars, US dollars. So it's not some crazy amount that makes it work.

Heather Bayer
We've talked about rich data and collecting rich data and certainly data from reviews is very rich. I talk about this a lot when we're looking how to design a guest experience. How does AI play into all this? Let's move on over to this whole new world for many people of AI. How is it playing a role, not only in your home acquisition strategy, but also in developing the guest experience?

Doron Meyassed
Okay, so maybe I'll give you a little bit of background of how we started Plum and what happened. When we started the business, the way we'd select the home is by sending - we call them home critics - into the home. They are hospitality trained people. They tend to work for hotels. They show up at the home with an iPad app. They collect 500 data points about the home. They measure the decibel levels in every room. They measure the shower pressure, the Wi-Fi speed, they interview the host, and then they give it a pass or fail mark with commentary. We arrived, we got to six locations, incredible NPS [Net Promoter Score], super fans recommending us, about to go, Okay, now we want to scale this into every town, city or village, and realized just how prohibitively expensive it was going to be, even though we don't manage the home, even though just that building, the army of critics globally. We went on a mission of really automating as much of that process as possible. I want to say the initial ones, almost by coincidence, the things that made huge leaps in how fast we can automate had to do with using AI, either machine learning or generative AI in key parts of the process, and replacing what used to be a human element.

Doron Meyassed
I can give you a couple of examples. Design really matters to Plum. We have this design Bible, which is like an 100-page book on - and I can pop over and show you one - but what makes a Plum design home? Someone would manually go listing by listing digitally and say, This is Plum design, this is not, before we send a tester through. We built a model that is able to do that with a 97% match rate with our creative director. If you now gave 100 homes to our AI and 100 homes to our creative director, they would be 97% aligned on which homes are Plum quality and which aren't. The reason I like that is because in the typical view, this is a creative endeavor, the design element. I can only explain partially how it works. What happens is that we took a model, we fed it millions of homes that we have that we had manually vetted as pass or failed and said, Try to learn the patterns that you notice here, and now here's 100 homes, do the same again. We iterated over time until it got to that level. I can explain how. But we don't fully understand how it's doing it, by the way.  We don't understand that the machine is learning, that it's identified these patterns or those patterns. That's one example.

Heather Bayer
Yes, we'll have another one.

Doron Meyassed
Okay, great. I mean, I look at the other end of the spectrum. There's the AI on the quality element. Maybe I'll talk about the end of it and happy to talk about the middle as well. But at the end of that, as I was saying, our critics would write a critical assessment of the home. Today, we take all that data we ingested about the home and we've built a model that writes the listing for us, including if you go on our listings, you will see the home truths, you will see the description about the home, you will see the highlights where we say what we think is great about the home. It is built on ChatGPT and it ingests all the data that we have about the home to write it. Our copywriters still have a role, so they will spend 10 to 15 minutes per listing editing it. It's not strong enough to be allowed to just run, but the listings convert better and have higher NPS. The ones that have had AI produce the first draft of the listing.

Heather Bayer
Could you just explain NPS, please, for those who would be asking?

Doron Meyassed
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. It's a question which is where you ask customers how likely you are to recommend a brand on a 1-10 scale. I must confess that back in the day, I actually read the book of the guy who came up with it, which was pretty dull but useful. There's this guy called Frederick Reichheld, and he studied what questions you can ask a customer to correlate with future revenue growth. He identified that this question, how people answered that, correlated with how much the brand was going to grow three years after that. It became the accepted, most important question to ask about how satisfied they are.

Heather Bayer
That's great. I'm going to add NPS to my list of acronyms. It took me a long time to actually pluck up the courage to ask somebody what OTA meant years ago.

Doron Meyassed
We tried to have little acronyms at Plumb, and I end up telling people not to have them. So interestingly, I'm using them as well.

Heather Bayer
I'm going to take a short break just now to hear about our sponsor, PriceLabs, directly from one of their clients. We're going to be right back with more from this great interview in just a few moments.

Dolly Durant
I'm Dolly Durant, and I'm very much involved in the short-term rental space by being a community leader for Airbnb, as well as a superhost ambassador helping others. I did all my own research when it came to pricing. I also know that I was leaving money on the table, because I would pick one price and that was the price and that was it. And then, of course, Airbnb has their own tool. But I knew from the beginning that that was not very good, so I never relied on it so much.

Dolly Durant
PriceLabs has helped me. And one of the things I love about it, if you were to ask me, what do you like so much about PriceLabs? What is it? What is the T, if you will, is that the price is constantly fluctuating? It's like all of that research that I was doing to pick one price, it's on a daily basis. That price is always moving. It's always changing and I don't have to lift a finger. If someone is booking my place, any of my places three months out, well, they're blocking my calendar three months out, so they're going to pay a premium.

Dolly Durant
That's okay, because that's how you maximize revenue. But if my place is free now, there's no one there, there's no sense in me charging what's being charged three months from now. That traveler who's looking now, they're looking for the absolute best price. And that's what dynamic pricing has allowed, right? Because now I get a lot of last minute bookings. I used to never get last minute bookings. All of my bookings used to be at least a month out in advance. I never got anything within two weeks. And now I see that that has increased.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much for that testimonial. It was great to hear how PriceLabs is working so practically with their clients to help them achieve success. Let's go on right back now to our interview.

Heather Bayer
Going back to homeowners, because this was my thing, trying to get the homeowners that were going to be the best for our company. Are you able to use AI in evaluating the homeowners that come along with the properties?

Doron Meyassed
Yes, but indirectly. What happens in effect is, if you look at evaluating the quality of the home and the owner, the way that works is we've trained the model by going, Here's physical tests that we've done where we've gone into the home, we've interviewed the owner. Here's the data on those 50,000 homes, let's say. On those 50,000 homes, here's every digital signal we can find about those homes. All the photography, every review ever written, the number of Instagram followers, how quickly they respond to things. Now can you identify from all these digital points, markers that tell us how likely they are to pass the test? Then we do it on a new collection of homes to teach to see if they can identify those things. We occasionally send people into it to train the model to say, You were right here, you were wrong here. You were right here, you were wrong here. What the model is able to tell us today with pretty decent accuracy is, do we think the service standards are Plum quality? What it cannot tell us is, Yes, but, look out for one, two, three, or Yes, or, No, but.....

Doron Meyassed
If the owner is willing to get a management company to manage it, they are fantastic, which we used to have that nuance. But it amazes me that it's not quite fully there yet, but that the AI today that we build is almost as effective at telling the quality of a home as someone who has worked at the Four Seasons who shows up for three hours to vet a home. Almost. It's not there, but it's getting closer and closer and closer with time, and we're in the foothills of this journey. So I can only imagine where two, three years down the line we will be in terms of that accuracy.

Heather Bayer
I'm sure you have imagined where you're going to be two or three years down the line. What do you see as the future for this industry as a whole with AI?

Doron Meyassed
I don't know that I have the most original stuff to say, where the thing that I'm most excited about is obviously the level of curation being incredible and accurate and being able to tell very quickly whether a home is a good quality or not and surface what's not great about it. The second thing is matching people. The bits that we are really excited about, we're starting to play with, is the ability to have a conversation with a computer. I think this idea of saying, We will look back very soon and say, Oh, putting dates in and number of bedrooms will look so archaic.  Because really what you want to say is we're looking to go to Majorca. I want my own quiet space. The kids are going to leave home soon, so I want them to want to stay in the house. I don't want them to go partying all the time. I want it to be a fun place. They're going to bring their friends. We need entertainment. We want to host every people. We want to cook/a chef. Being able to write these long descriptions and being like, Yep, here's the three homes that you can do exactly that.

Doron Meyassed
Of course, if you have very good data about the homes, I think that's coming pretty soon, if the data is large and consistent between the homes. I'm very excited about being able to do that. Then those are the big ones. Then you see all sorts of fun stuff. There's the team at Google Labs just continuously releasing iterations. I'm happy to send it to you, these models where they're taking static images of a home and through AI pasting them together to create a fly-through of the home; it looks amazing. You get a real sense of a home very quickly as if you're in it, but you haven't had to send a drone into the home or an expensive device. There's lots of stuff around the edges like that. But what I'm really excited about is curation and better expectation management, better matching between guest and home.

Heather Bayer
Oh, yeah. Looking back on the times that I was going out and seeing 300 homes a year and taking a Matterport camera, and each one taking two hours to do all the staging and the photos right the way through the house, that sounds… I did sell my company last year, but part of me misses it. Not a lot, actually, but what I'm missing is what's to come and how much different it will be as we head into the not so distant future. You were talking about people writing down what they want, but they're going to be able to just speak it, aren't they? The voice desire for my next vacation.

Doron Meyassed
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's coming. For it to be as good as a local area expert is harder.  You can hear a matchmaker sometimes ask guests. They'll have two people in on a Zoom. They're partners or husband and wife or whatever, and they'll ask them, Okay, tell me about your dream day. What does that look like? And then the other one, tell me about your dream day. To get to a position where a machine is doing that as skillfully as another human and make you feel as good about it in the end as a human is still awhile away. But in some ways, the machine will do some of those things better pretty quickly.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, exactly. I want to step back once again to reviews, because I read a quote of yours when you said if reviews killed the terrible experience, AI will kill the mediocre one. Can you tell us a bit more about the power of AI to spot that mediocrity?

Doron Meyassed
It really comes from the observation that I mentioned before, which is, here we are almost to our surprise, having a machine ingesting a bunch of digital signals about a home, so the listing, the reviews, all of the photography, everything we can see about it, the response rate, and it is somehow able to do almost as accurate a decision as an expert in the home, almost. It does make you think, Gosh, it really is effective at spotting the exceptional. We've trained it to do that. Someone else would train it to do..... and don't forget, we have a very specific definition of exceptional, where the discerning, traveler, urban dweller, loves. Someone else could train it for something else. But if it can do that, then I suspect tools will develop across the board to help people do that, and they will really surface what's fantastic. I have no doubt that most marketplaces design the review system to put positive reviews because they want to help the whole market go up. But the flip side of that is they find it hard to help the customer decide. These tools will make it easier for people, I think, to help the customer decide.  So I think it will kill the mediocre experience.

Heather Bayer
Well, that is great. This has been a great conversation. I just want to finish off by voicing the question that I'm sure a lot of the listeners are thinking at the moment. I wonder if my home is eligible for The Plum Guide. We're going back a little bit and I'm going to ask you to explain some of the design standards and expectations that you have. I don't want them sitting there thinking, Oh, no, I'm not going to achieve this standard, but without knowing some of them, this might head them in your direction.

Doron Meyassed
I'll say a couple of things. First of all, just to be aware, when we open a market, our goal is to vet every home in that market and accept roughly the top 3-4% of homes at three price points at the medium, high, and luxury price point. We have a big collection that's at a more affordable scale because our customers book in these three price points. Not everything looks like an architectural masterpiece. It has to be the best in that category for sure, but I would mention on that. In terms of what the design specifics are, at what level do I answer that question? It can get very granular in terms of take the living room. For us, it's really important that if a home is for eight people, there's an eight-person social space where eight people can sit and connect. The furniture design, the lighting has to look like it all fits together and sits together. It gets very specific, but I would summarize it really by just saying it's thoughtful design. If you have spent time thinking, Oh, how do I want this to look? How do I want this to feel? If you found yourself opening and closing the front door and moving the vase a bit to the left because you feel like that makes a nicer experience, your home is probably Plum.

Doron Meyassed
If unsure, you go to plumguide.com, hit 'Become a Host' on the top right-hand corner, you can submit your house in 60 seconds or your collection of homes, depends if you're on a channel manager. Very quickly, we will come back with a confirmed yes, no, or yes, but just these homes. If in doubt, give it a go.

Heather Bayer
Well, I'll put a link to the Plum Guide on the Show Notes for anybody who wants to go take a look, and I think you should.

Heather Bayer
Doron, I see Canada is missing.

Doron Meyassed
Our COO is Canadian as well, who's not happy about it. Yes, I mean, we were expanding very slowly until we alighted on this AI thing. We're now really speeding that up. We're very focused on Europe, but we are not very far away from scaling North America. Canada is a big guest market for us. The US is our biggest guest market, but we're heading there.

Heather Bayer
Oh, for sure. Let me know when you do. I know a lot of properties.

Doron Meyassed
We have to speak to you, actually. Also for us, it's choosing the right neighborhoods to get homes in. We'll work with local experts, help us understand the market. So if you're happy to take our call, I'd love to give you a call when the time comes.

Heather Bayer
Well, I think that this part of the world is pretty much undiscovered, except by quite a large number of celebrities.

Doron Meyassed
In which case it's coming to the rest of us very soon.

Heather Bayer
Yes, indeed. Is there anything else you'd like to add? Anything you feel we haven't covered here?

Doron Meyassed
No, it's been an absolute pleasure. I don't think I've got anything else.

Heather Bayer
Well, it has. It has been a pleasure. It's not just The Plum Guide itself, but it's the way that you're integrating AI that I find particularly interesting because, as I said at the very outset, I'm still talking to people who say, Oh, yes, that ChatGPT thing, I really should take a look at it. Oh, my, you have not even looked at it yet. I've always considered myself an early adopter, and I was on it from day one. But there are those who perhaps are thinking it's a passing phase and won't be of any use to them. As your parting shot, what would you say to the people who are perhaps sitting on the fence about this new thing?

Doron Meyassed
Honestly, it really depends. What I'd say to everyone is have a play, because it's really easy and you can go on and you can have a play. If you're part of an organization and you've not done anything in it, and you have some engineering or data science resource, take any kid who's into it and say, Do you want to start playing for our company? You'll be amazed what they can do. If something starts to take off, you can then expand it. I just say have a play. But I would say as well, I think if you are in the craft of hospitality, I don't know that it's... What I mean by that is welcoming the guest, preparing the home, thinking about your standard operating procedures. I don't think that it's the thing that is going to make or break your business, actually, at all. I think tools will come that you can buy and plug in, and that's okay, you don't need to be the pioneer of it, because what's there is your craft, which is in the end, really the only thing that matters. We're the less important ones on the top. It's that you have a beautiful space and make people feel amazing in it.  That's not very much to do with AI, I would say.

Heather Bayer
Absolutely. That's a great point to end on. You have a beautiful space and it makes people feel amazing. That's what this business should always be about.

Doron Meyassed
Exactly.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you.

Doron Meyassed
Thanks for having me, Heather. I really appreciate it.

Heather Bayer
Thank you, Doron. That was such a great conversation. He has so much energy and enthusiasm for this business and enthusiasm for making the perfect stay for the guest as perfect as possible. I was pretty inspired by that. I hope you're inspired too to learn a little bit more about The Plumb Guide, to go to the website, and if you feel that your property matches up to their criteria and to some of their design standards, then why don't you go ahead and list with them? Or certainly, go ahead and submit your property for listing with them.

Heather Bayer
Go through the properties that are on The Plumb Guide website, because I've done that and there's some amazing, amazing places. But there are some that are still luxurious, but a little bit more modest, but they still meet all these criteria. I do love this section on everyone, which is called the Home Truths. If I was back in my company, I think we would be doing that as well, because there's such a transparency there. Rather than leaving it to a guest to post a review that says, This was a fantastic property and I'm giving it five stars, but..., as they sometimes do, but the road was very steep getting up to the house and we couldn't really do much walking because we had to navigate this road.

Heather Bayer
If you had that in the listing, then your guests aren't going to complain about it, because it's already there. Although some will, of course, because some don't read the listing, as we know. But anyway, it was just an idea. I thought that was a really great concept that they have engaged there.

Heather Bayer
That's it for another week. I am leaving for Alabama at the weekend, heading off.... It takes three, four days to travel down to Alabama, and I will then be in my winter home for the next five months, which I'm really looking forward to that. I always like being down there. I've got a lot of people I know in that area, so I want to catch up with them.

Heather Bayer
If you're listening, if you are in Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, around the Fort Morgan area and at any point you want to connect, get together, have a coffee, just let me know. I'm in a state park campground for five months. I'm always very happy to get out and meet people and spend some time immersed in what I love, which is this industry. Let me know, you can connect with me at heather@vacationrentalformula.com at any time.

Heather Bayer
Thank you as ever for listening. I will be with you again next week.

Mike Bayer
We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. Don't forget to check out our sponsor, PriceLabs, and their dynamic pricing and revenue management tools. Click the link in the description of this episode for more information.

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

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