Mike Bayer
You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, and this week's episode is brought to you by the kind sponsorship of Minut. Are you worried about noise complaints and unauthorized parties or smoking in your rentals? Meet Minut, your peace of mind solution. Minut sensors discreetly monitor noise levels, occupancy, and even detect cigarette smoke, all while respecting guest privacy. Easy to install and managed from anywhere. Minut integrates seamlessly with your smart home devices and enhancing the guest experience while ensuring a property's safety. Say goodbye to sleepless nights and hello to happy neighbors and guests. Protect your investment with Minut. Check the link in the description of this episode to find Minut in our virtual vendor showcase.

Mike Bayer
Without further ado, let's get this episode started. Here's your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
In today's episode, I'm joined by my former business partner and good friend, Craig White. You'll hear how I met up with the founder of Canada's first vacation rental listing site back in 1999 and started up a business that kept us in coffee and donuts for over two decades. There's a few stories along the way, some of them we've never shared before.

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. Happy New Year, it's 2024. Hard to believe it's nearly two years now since I sold the business. Well, it will be two years in June. It was around two years ago today that we put the business up on the market and started to get interest in it. I do remember very clearly those few months, the January, February, March of 2022, where it got very, very busy, interviewing lots of prospective business owners and then finally deciding on the people that we really wanted to sell our company to, and boy, did we make the right decision. You've heard me talk about this before, but anyway, can't believe that that's two years ago. I've had plenty of time to reflect back on all the years that I was in this business. Of course, I still am in this business, but not anymore on the management side. But you often hear people who've been in the industry quite a few years say, You couldn't make this stuff up, and one day I'm going to write a book about it.

Heather Bayer
In the 20 years I co-managed CottageLink Rental Management, there were so many of those days and a lot of stories. We dealt with all manner of things, we dealt with all manner of animals, from bears and squirrels to raccoons and skunks. I'll never forget the call from a guest on the morning of their departure to tell us their dog had been left on the deck while they packed up and the dog surprised a skunk that was living under said deck. The dog freaked out at being sprayed, ran into the cottage and by the time the owner was able to corral the dog, it had brushed against every piece of soft furnishings in the place. That was one crazy day. Then there was the goose that died on a cottage lawn and so traumatized the guests inside the home that they refused to venture outside until it had been removed. That was a few long hours while we tracked down someone to bag up the remains, by which time a raccoon had actually come along and done most of the work anyway. That one resulted in a request for a complete refund for the whole week that the guest was not able to enjoy their stay, even though they'd been there five days.

Heather Bayer
We had bats and we had mice and a guest who made friends with a squirrel that came through a hole in the ceiling. There were complaints about goose poop and mosquitoes and noisy frogs and there were great owners and not so great owners, brilliant guests and those we would never want to see again. I remember a neighbor complaint about a guest who had peed off the end of the dock in full view of the neighbor and his family. It was made all the more interesting when it was revealed that the guest was the ex-chief of staff to a cabinet minister. Yes, we could write a book or we could do a podcast about all the stories that abound in our industry.

Heather Bayer
I want you to stay tuned to the end of this episode because I'm going to be asking for story contributions from you and your chance to come on the show to tell them. But today I'm joined by my former business partner and good friend, Craig White, to share some more of our stories and talk about what we learned from 20 years in this business, what we would do differently if we started up again, which incidentally, neither of us intend to do, and generally will reflect on the whole experience.  So without further ado, let's move on over to my conversation with Craig.

Heather Bayer
I'm super delighted to have with me today my ex, my former business partner of 20 years at CottageLink Rental Management, Craig White. Craig, it's always lovely to see you. We haven't actually been together in person for a few months, so it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

Craig White
Yeah, a great intro. I recall you saying a number of times that a business partnership was like a marriage with good things and bad things. Fortunately, ours ended very amicably. But yeah, there's a lot of aspects I miss about it, for sure. There's a lot of those morning coffee chats, just to see what was on the docket for the day. And when you think about we did that for, I don't know how long we were using Skype and Slack, but close to 20 years of pretty much every day of, Okay, what's happening?

Heather Bayer
Yeah, exactly. And just to frame it for our listeners, we lived three, four hours apart for probably 17 of those years, yeah? So it was only in the last three years that you moved up just half an hour from me, which was such a shame because it was so nice when you were that close. We could just....

Craig White
Well, then we had COVID and we couldn't take advantage of it.

Heather Bayer
That is true. Yeah, I did enjoy that when we could just cycle over and then we'd meet up for coffee. But yes, 20 years of remote chats. You're absolutely right. I think Phil, my husband, for many years of our marriage, he went away for six months. I probably spent more time with you in 20 years. Yes, of course, we did part company when we sold the company very amicably. That's really why I wanted to do this, because we haven't really had this opportunity, have we? Just to have a real chat about that whole experience, because it's been, I just said in the introduction that two years ago at this time, we were just starting to get all that interest in the company and then did all those interviews. I don't know where all this time has gone, but you are still with CottageLink Rental Management. What's your role with them now?

Craig White
Well, we had, as you know, when people buy businesses from the proprietors or partners, there is usually a period of overlap and transition. I think that was something that we both wanted, you and I, as partners and the buyers of the business. We wanted to see it proceed in a manner that we were looking for. As you alluded to, the fact that we talked to a lot of people and that we wanted to ensure that the buyers had a lot of shared vision with us, that our staff was going to be respected and kept on and their world wasn't going to be turned on its head, because they were as much a family as anything as well, and still are. So I've continued to do the things that I've really liked in the business, and that's going out and talking to owners, doing photography and doing cottage visits. That was always my favorite bit. Now it's all I have to do, which is really great.

Craig White
I don't have to do any of the things that I found less pleasant, like dealing with the odd angry guest or angry owner. And I can, but when you don't have skin in the game, as they say, it doesn't create the same level of stress. When the buck isn't stopping here, it gives you a little more leeway to deal with a situation in a less stressful ethos. So I've just really enjoyed this time because it's not full-time, it's hours when they're needed. And then I do some… I get on the phone with the new owner periodically, and we'll talk for a couple of hours at a time just about how the business is going and thoughts and any challenges that they face and what I think of them and what might be a good strategy and how to handle them. So from that aspect, I've got the best of all the worlds right now. I don't know how long that will go, but right now, I'll ride it. I'm enjoying it.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, it's funny because I was able just to walk away after, I think, three or four months and just say, Okay, I don't think you need me anymore. And it was mutually agreed that I could step away. I think about the staff a lot, and I'm still connected with most of them. I have to say it was only two months ago that I finally took myself off the Slack channel.

Heather Bayer
We love the new owners of the company, Justin and Pete. I know a lot of people listening have met Pete. He's been at conferences and has certainly made himself known, because everybody I talk to said, Oh, yeah, I've met the people who bought your company and they've just done a fantastic job. Certainly, I know that was something that we wanted to be assured of at the outset, was that our staff would be looked after and everybody stayed. Seems like not only are they happy, but they're really thriving.

Craig White
I think so. Talking to a few of them, seeing them take on some new roles. It's funny because you mentioned, well, they don't need me anymore. I can back away. That's probably true for me too. I just don't want to believe it. I'm still of the opinion, no, I'm like, you need to have me around to do this. But in truth, they don't. I find less and less things that I'll see in a Slack channel that I would have jumped in on even a year ago, even the six months after we sold the company, I would have been all over it. Now it's no, I don't need to get into those. And as a matter of fact, it's probably not advisable for me to get into that because, as you say, they're all thriving and growing. And yeah, they probably don't really need that. What they need me to do is just the stuff that I've been doing and no more, no less, type thing. So yeah, it's satisfying. And at the same time, there's parts of it that I miss. I miss not being in the game fully some days, but that's the wheel of life, as they say.

Heather Bayer
Well, let's step back a little.... let's step back a little? Let's step back a lot. Just think about when we started out, which was 2003.

Craig White
We had the first discussions....

Mike Bayer
I mean, you and I had been going for a few years, even before that, when I was running Clearwater Holidays back in England, and that's when we first met, because Clearwater Holidays was marketing Ontario cottages to the British Tourist and Travel Market, and we needed properties to do that with. And of course, you had the very first listing site in Canada. Was it the first listing site all the way across Canada?

Craig White
It could well have been. It could well have been, yeah. There was a couple of hardcopy directories. I think Tyler's was one that I don't even know if they're around in any way, shape or form anymore, but that was the printed one, and we went to the website. But that website, built in the 90s, was cobbled together with Notepad and HTML. That was the extent of the tool set and a scanner here and there, and owners would send in photographs for scanning. You forget how much the world has changed in the time that we had that business. There wasn't such a thing as a cell phone camera, and most people didn't even have digital cameras. And heck, maybe half people had Internet. I think when I started the business, it was still all dial-up.

Heather Bayer
Oh, yeah, I remember that noise.

Craig White
Yeah. And so we had to optimize the photos because you didn't want photos more than 15 or 20Kb because they'd take too long to download, and you had to limit the number of photos on a listing to two or three. So everything's so different. The tech was all in its infancy and figuring out how the industry was going to adapt to that. When I was talking about cell phones, I remember a few years into our business, maybe 2005/2006, when we started using cell phones regularly and being out on the road doing a cottage shoot and somebody phoning from the office saying we've got an owner [prospective] in the area.

Heather Bayer
I remember that!

Craig White
And we thought this was the cat's pajamas because we could react so quickly. I'm just a half hour away. I can now drive over and see this cottage. Stuff that we take for granted now, totally for granted, was just huge news back in the day. And I'm starting to sound old when saying things like back in the day, but hey, I'm getting up there anyway, I'll wear that.

Heather Bayer
But it's not that long ago, really.

Craig White
No.

Heather Bayer
It's just that speed of change.

Craig White
Yeah, and over the lifetime of the business. And you look at what's happening now with AI coming into the business. And all those things that we had to adapt or adopt in one way, shape or form or go out of business, I think that's still happening and may be happening even at a greater pace now. Because if you're not seeing what AI can do for you, if you're not exploring the advantages of a lot of the new technical platforms that are coming out every year and changing every year, you can fall behind in a real hurry, and then you combine that with regulatory changes. And it's a challenging business right now. You definitely have to be on top of your game.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I sometimes wonder what there was said when the Internet came and all this technology, it was going to be so much better and save so much time and become less stressful. In fact, it is pretty much the opposite. And of course, as you said, regulations.  It was real Wild West when we started out. You could do anything anywhere, couldn't you?

Craig White
Pretty much. I remember seeing even some of the cottages that we'd go see, because that's changed a lot too, just the nature of the summer cottage. Even when we started the business, some of those first properties probably don't even exist anymore. I remember going to see a property and talking to the owner about his septic system, and he'd cobbled it together out of two oil tanks, the stuff that would make you throw up your hands now.

Craig White
But all the MacGyvering of cottage infrastructure that happened in the '70s and '80s and was still around then, things that we had to deal with. And we transitioned. The phrase that we both learned to hate was, It's just a cottage, from owners, because in the 70s and '80s, it was 'just a cottage'. It was where furniture went to die, as we said, and that part of the business has transformed as well. I mean, the cottage I went to see today was this magnificent new build, nicer than any home I'll ever own. And yet it's somebody's second property. They're not building three-bedroom rustic Viceroys anymore.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I remember talking about this back in the early 2000s, talking about this whole concept of going on a vacation to a cottage. Guests were so much more forgiving then, because they were just happy to have solid walls and a roof. They felt really, really fortunate if they had a TV with rabbit ears. I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this have no clue what I just said. Have no idea what I meant by a TV with rabbit ears.

Craig White
Yeah, and you didn't really get anything, you might get a station or two. Same with radio. I mean, there just wasn't much. And the concept of being away, of truly away. I was talking with about this with Kerri last week. When you would go on vacation, you were away. Nobody heard from you for a week or two weeks, and you could have been lost in the woods. Nobody knew, but nobody was worried about it either, because you weren't checking in. Now, I know, we're driving down to Texas, you were checking in with the kids. How are things going today? And if they didn't hear from you for 24 hours, it's like, Oh, is everything okay? It just wasn't like that. You took off, you locked the door, you left the office. Nobody expected to see you, and people just assume that you would be okay, I guess.

Heather Bayer
Another of these expectations was about cleanliness. When we started, I remember going to see one owner who said that he made his cottage ready at the beginning of the season, and then he went back at the end of the season to do the cleaning. Could you imagine that happening these days? Because those expectations of what a property, a vacation rental should be like have changed just phenomenally. As I said, people used to be very forgiving. It was just somewhere to go on vacation to sleep. It didn't matter if you were sleeping on a creaky old bed with grandma's old mattress and a ratty old comforter. Do you remember those as well? Now, of course, and I'm sure the cottage you went to today, personifies what guest expectations are now.

Craig White
Oh, very much so. Very much so. The other thing is what people paid for those cottages. There's nothing under a thousand dollars a weekend. Well, nothing under $2,000 really. Yet I think when I started renting cottages with our kids, back in the early 90s. I think the first one we rented was $250 for the week. But again, it came with a $250 set of expectations.

Craig White
But everybody was fine with that. The owners and guests. That was the standard cabin rental, even in movies, you'd see the… I remember seeing this in a movie someplace in Quebec, and the owner would go up and open it up in April, and then he'd go back in October to close it down. And guests got what they got, depending on how clean the previous guests left it. This happened even in terms of… Guests had got caught in that mentality too, because I think we had that cottage one of the early years, and the first guest in there was saying, Oh, we'll leave the ketchup and mustard behind for the next guests. And of course, the next guests get in there and saying, Oh, this must belong to the owner. We'll buy our own. And then everybody having that same idea. So at the end of the summer, there's six ketchup, six mustard, six relishes that nobody wants to touch, because they don't know where it's been and it all winds up in the dumper.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I still have that conversation with people these days about what should we leave in terms of food stuffs in cupboards? Because I remember going to one place. In those days, most of our owners were using their properties a lot. They would just clear out for a week or two and rent it out for those couple of weeks when they weren't there, and of course, left absolutely everything. So cupboards would be absolutely jam-packed with stuff. That, of course, you wouldn't even imagine that these days. Certainly in places across the US, in some states, you cannot leave anything. Not even salt and pepper.

Craig White
Is this liability and safety concerns?

Heather Bayer
Yes, it is liability and safety concerns. So if you leave... You certainly don't leave any opened condiments or anything like that. Because I do remember those times of going in to do a changeover in my own place and opening the fridge and there's just a dozen of half empty bottles of condiments and thinking, Well, should I throw these out? I'm sure at the beginning of my journey in this, I probably didn't. I probably left them in the fridge and let people use them, but wouldn't do it now. But yes, there are some states where it is prohibited to leave anything open.

Craig White
Unlike the beer fairies.  You remember the beer ferries? This was on the Moon River property, it was a boat access cottage. We got a call from the guests saying that they had been out and they came back and there was beer in the fridge that wasn't there when they left, but nothing else had been touched. And this was a big mystery, like how do we get this to happen at our place? What's the formula? But it turned out the owner had gone up, missed the changeover day, thinking that the changeover was... They had just got a day ahead in their head. So they went up a day before they were supposed to with their own things. And just the only thing that they had brought with them was beer. So they left it in the fridge and then discovered when they were there that they were too early. So they just dropped in. Nobody was around. They left the beer in the fridge and put a note on saying, Oh, enjoy a few if you like, and then left again, only to come back the next day to do the changeover. But didn't say, of course, that they were there. The only evidence was the beer in the fridge. We still refer to it as the beer fairies.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, never came across that.

Craig White
Which is way better than Santa Claus, when you think of it.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I can imagine that. Yes, we had some stories. We always said we could write a book, and I hear this from so many other people in the industry, I want to know what your best story ever is.

Craig White
That's tough, because there was a lot of good ones. Now, we had… I think it's not an individual story, but one of the most enjoyable things that we did over the years, and I won't mention the name of the guest, but we awarded an annual mock prize similar to an Oscar, to be named in honor of this guest who called us every day to complain about something either minor or bizarre. And everyone in the company, I think there was you, myself, Sandra, maybe Kaitlyn at the time, there were maybe four of us, and Phil, of course, got to talk to this person over the course of the week and deal with her episodes. But the one that I think caught us all when she called and said there was a chipmunk in the cottage and she demanded that we come and evict it. Those were her words.

Heather Bayer
Remember it well.

Craig White
Yeah. So let's call her Karen. It just seems to be a… Maybe she was an early Karen. But subsequently at our end of summer luncheon with our staff, we would always do a mock presentation of the Karen for the guest with some of the most ridiculous issues of the year. So that was always a little... I always enjoyed that. It was something that was fun, and it helped us laugh at things that would have been stressful at the time, but just here's another candidate for this year's Karen Award winner.

Craig White
I apologize to the Karens out there.

Heather Bayer
I always remember the one, and I think it was that little property down on Lake Erie, it was one of yours.

Craig White
It could have been Erie Shores?

Heather Bayer
No. Oh..., tiny little place. It was the one that had the outflow out into the lake, because people would comment on that. But that was one where there was a couple in there and the guest complained from the moment they arrived and the fridge broke down. Do you remember that? A fridge broke down.

Craig White
Oh. Right.

Heather Bayer
And the owner....

Craig White
Doorway to Summer!

Heather Bayer
Doorway to Summer, that's the one.

Craig White
We still have that one.

Craig White
The fridge broke down and the owner said, I'm so sorry. I will do something about this. I will get you a replacement fridge. He delivered a replacement fridge and that was okay for her. Then the following day she called and... was it air conditioning? She said it was too hot. She was too hot and the air conditioning wasn't working. We said, Well, it didn't have air conditioning. So it wasn't advertised as having air conditioning. However, the owner went out and bought a little air conditioning unit and he delivered it to the property. And then she complained that the owner had woken her up at 9:30 in the morning delivering this unit.

Craig White
To deliver something....

Heather Bayer
...to deliver something to make her life easier. I think that was the moment when Phil was instructed never to talk to guests again, because he did talk to her. I'm not sure if he actually called her 'princess', but I know he did say something about not forgetting your tiara on the way out. That was a moment we said, Okay, you never talk to a guest again. And he didn't!

Craig White
Well, we had often joked that... We should preface this with the fact that 99.9 % of guests are wonderful. They were. When you're doing 1,500-1,700 bookings a year and we're pulling out a few stories, they're by far the exception rather than the rule. But that's what makes them so much fun. And I remember that one for sure because I remember that I was heading off on my annual bike trip, because that was a Labor Day weekend.

Heather Bayer
Yes, yeah.

Craig White
And you texted me because I happened to be riding very close to that place. And you said, don't go anywhere near it. Yeah. We often joke that we would, before we ended our time with the company, that we both would allow ourselves to go off on one guest or one owner just let loose all the... The closest I ever heard you losing it with a guest was somebody had phoned… We told everybody what was in the cottage. And as you say, we didn't advertise air conditioning on that one, but somebody had phoned and said, I can't find the dishwasher. And your reply was, Did you leave him in the car?

Heather Bayer
Yes, I can't find the dishwasher. Yes, there's no dishwasher. I can't believe there's no dishwasher. Well, there's no dishwasher on the listing. But you can't advertise a property without a dishwasher. That's what I said. Yes, use the one that was in the car and perhaps drove you there.

Heather Bayer
We're just going to take a short break from this interview now to hear from our sponsor, Minut. Nathan Smith, the Head of Enterprise Sales, North America, answers some of the most common questions asked about the product.

Heather Bayer
Welcome back, Nathan. We all want to be responsible operators, but sometimes overcrowding can happen in a property without our knowing about it. Minut has a solution for this called crowd detect. Can you tell us about that and how it works?

Nathan Smith
Right. Yes. While most people do go straight to the idea of noise detection, our crowd detect feature actually might be just as valuable in stopping noise, or a party. So Minut has a feature that detects the number of Bluetooth devices in your rental. Based on your expected occupancy, there would be a threshold for the expected number of devices. Now that's rarely one-to-one, right? Most people may have more than one device when they rent your property. So for a rental of four, we may expect something like eight to 10 devices. But if suddenly the number of Bluetooth devices detected is showing as something like 25, for instance, or any number over that threshold, we'll send you an alert. In many cases, this will give you the opportunity to potentially stop a party or a noisy issue before it even begins. The goal here isn't to detect one extra person and relate specifically to over occupancy by one, but rather a tool that helps you to know if there's a crowd forming. I think it's helpful because there are some tools out there that may do something similar but often require you to log into the WiFi.

Nathan Smith
In this case, we don't. It's simply counting Bluetooth devices. So if you've actually got a party happening and people are gathering at such a number that they're no longer asking for the WiFi password, they're still counted. So stop the party before it starts with the crowd detect feature.

Heather Bayer
Thank you.

Craig White
I was at RezFest a few years ago and talking to people. One of the common threads was, trying to get people to read something was next to impossible. Just getting information to guests like, You need to read this, but it doesn't happen. Things like what date to check-in or the address of the property.

Heather Bayer
Which is a great segue.  Well, there's a couple I remember. Phil and I on a Sunday evening, and we rarely had Sunday check-ins. It was a Sunday evening and we were at home and our office was in the basement, but we weren't down there. I think we were sitting out on the deck and having a beer or two and just enjoying the fact that it was nice and quiet. We heard a car come up the road - we're really out in a rural area and we were on a dead-end road, so anybody driving up is coming to our place. I went out of the door to see this van outside and it's packed with people. The guy gets out and he says, Hello? I said, Yeah, hello, how can I help you? He said, Well, we're here. Okay, I can see that you're here, but why are you here? Well, we've rented this house. I said, No, you're incorrect. We've got an issue here because this is my house. He said, No, I've got the address here. We've rented this for a week, and he's showing me some paperwork, our paperwork, and it's a booking confirmation. He's pointing to the tiny little footer at the bottom of this. He said, Look, here's the address. I said, Yeah, that's our office address. The address you should be at is the one that's in very large letters at the top of this piece of paper that you're holding with the picture of the property, which looks nothing like the one that you're sitting outside right now.

Heather Bayer
That was difficult. He had given this information, this booking confirmation information to a nephew, because he didn't know how to set up his navigation system. He asked his nephew to put the address into his GPS. The nephew took the address from the footer of this piece of paper and put it in his GPS. Now, this family had got in their vehicle and they had driven two and a half hours in the opposite direction of the location that the cottage they had actually booked was. They were going to the Bruce Peninsula, which is a wonderful vacation area about three hours north of Toronto. We were in a little village, it was beautiful, but not as nice as the Bruce, two and a half hours east of Toronto. There's five, six, maybe seven people in this van and it's seven o'clock in the evening.

Heather Bayer
What do we do with these people? They're not coming in my house. We had a little discussion and we sent them on their way in the right direction. He was okay with that. He understood that this mistake had been made. He said, Okay, so how far do I have to drive? I said, Well, five and a half hours from here, and you'll go past your house on the way.

Craig White
I remember that so well. But the thing that always struck me about that is at what point? The sun sets in the west and you know you're heading west and you're driving away from the sun for more than… At what point do you not question where you're going?

Heather Bayer
I think when I'm going somewhere, I've already mapped everything out. I've looked at Google Maps. I've seen exactly where I'm going. But of course, we dealt with so many different people, a lot of new Canadians, people who hadn't been in the country for that long, and it was this rite of passage to go to a cottage on vacation. I completely understood. This was many years ago, and I think now I would have probably dealt with it in a different way. I think I might have been a bit more empathetic with their dilemma. I've just watched Will Guidara, who wrote Unreasonable Hospitality, deliver a presentation. And when I was thinking about talking to you about this and I thought, Would I have done any... What unreasonable hospitality could I have delivered to this family of seven or eight or ten. I don't know how many were in that van. Could I have dealt with that differently? Would you have dealt with it differently?

Craig White
I'd just say there's very little you can do. It's a mistake, but you've got nothing really to offer them. I mean, you could say, okay, everybody out of the van, stay here and you're going tomorrow. But I mean, that's a big ask. When, yeah, it is a five hour drive. As I recall, we called up the owner and we said, yeah, your guests are going to be late. This is what's happened. And probably some things that we could do maybe offer them a meal along the way or something like that, that it's not on us, but we can make it better for them. I mean, that the mistake is not on us. The meal might be on us.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. When I think back, I think maybe I could just say they've been in the car for two and a half hours. Come in and use our facilities and then off you go. Here's a nice place to stop and have a meal. Just sit down, relax, have a meal, and then drive the rest of your four and a half hours or whatever there is, or maybe even go back home and stay overnight and try again the following day. But coming back on this whole issue of people not reading things, because there were other stories of people arriving a day early or arriving a week early.

Craig White
Week early.

Heather Bayer
Yes. When you've got two families arriving at the same time.

Craig White
Yeah, that happened this year again too. It happened up at Tarry-a-While, a very expensive property. Somebody in the family books a vacation and just looks at the dates wrong somehow, and I guess just in their head, you go down that tangent of planning for a week and it takes one mistake. You don't really do that double check. You say, I'm going to book this week, and then maybe something happened somewhere that, no, I'm going to book the next week, but there's a disconnect. And this is what happened. We had two families book. And when we first get the call, it's always like, oh, it gets all your stress levels shoot up because did we make this mistake? Did we double book somebody? And fortunately, with the booking systems that are in place now, that's almost impossible to do.

Craig White
And of course, the first reaction, I think the normal reaction of a guest is to utter blame on the place that rented them the cottage saying that they made the mistake. And fortunately, we've got the paper trails of here is your booking, here is the dates, here is the reply to your notes asking about the dates. Here is the reply to that reply that you replied to, in all the email chains, because you would never want to get into that discussion of whose mistake it was.

Craig White
But that's a really tough one because there really isn't a whole lot to do. But the problem is they've booked their week off and they don't have a cottage. And the worst part is they've paid for it, because unless we can re-rent that following week, which, and I think we did in one case, fortunately, but unless you can do that, they're not only out their vacation week, they're out for a week's worth of cottage rental, unless the owner is willing to be a very nice guy about it. But those are tough to deal with. And yeah, a lot of it depends on, I think, on how the guest comes to the table with it.

Craig White
I remember the people that arrived a day early at the place down in, like here on down by Sarnia there, and just hauled up the caretaker and ripped into them for not having the place cleaned and ready for their arrival. And that the poor caretaker, almost in tears, called us and asked what's happening, and then telling these people that, no, you weren't due for another 24 hours, which is normally the time that the cleaner and caretaker go in there and do that. I think those are the ones that are a little tougher to have any sympathy for the guest, is like you made the mistake and then you started yelling. I mean, those ones are forever the fodder for stories in my mind. But the ones that come back and say, Yeah, we made the mistake. What can you do to help us? I think that sets a whole different tone.

Heather Bayer
The whole thing taught me a lot about how I react to situations and that knee-jerk reaction you have. I think now, after all these years, I'm much more likely just to count to 10 and just evaluate the situation before leaping in. I never shouted anyway, but before getting angry or irritated, now I will do a little bit of reflection on what the situation actually is before I take that action that might put me into a situation that becomes a bit more difficult.

Craig White
You don't want to be that guy.

Heather Bayer
I don't want to be that guy.

Craig White
...or that girl.

Heather Bayer
No.

Craig White
It's made me a better customer, for sure. Certainly, if I see someone with the in-training badge at Tim's [Tim Horton's] or something and they're screwing up the order, I'm not going to come down on them.  Just say, oh, hey, you'll get it. You're doing great. Good luck with stuff. And minor things like that. And I have to say that I've learned something the other way as well. I had an issue this year with a large corporation that I had ordered something and was just being given the complete runaround with the contract and being very conscious for a couple of months of 'not being that guy'. Oh, yeah, we got delayed. These things happen. No worries, etc, etc. Eventually, it got to the point where I realized that this was never going to happen. And I started to read some reviews of this business that were basically the same experience and things were not… So I had to actually take the other track. And that was to become 'that guy' for a few days to get this to happen. And in my head, I'm thinking, Oh, I'm being terrible, but sure enough, that worked. Knowing that the person on the other end of that phone does not want to spend another day dealing with me, so they're going to serve my request. I always thought that the people that I talk to along the way in that journey, I made sure just to understand, I know this isn't you and I know this wasn't your fault and I don't want to be this guy. I turned that knowledge around and used it that way as well. I'm somewhat ashamed to say, I guess.

Heather Bayer
It's something that I don't miss. I never was able to handle conflict very well. Either way, either being one who was creating the conflict or one who was on the receiving end of it. I think when I walked away from the business, and I know that first summer, because we closed the business in June, so leading into a very busy summer. That was it, as far as I was concerned. I know that you dealt with quite a few issues through that first summer. I'll say sorry now for not helping you out on that one.

Craig White
But again, dealing with them from a different perspective. When we hired someone to take that on, our rationale for doing that was they wouldn't have skin in the game. They're just dealing with it very agnostically. Whereas for owners of a business or the owner of the cottage, it's very personal. And things where you get into a he said/she said, especially things about cleanliness where an owner says, I've left this sparkling clean and the guest arrived and says it's filthy. Well, when it's that far apart, either you have widely differing standards or someone's not telling the truth. And we have no way of knowing who that is, but we're caught in the middle of it. We're the only persons who haven't been there, and yet we're the ones expected to come to a resolution. And that was always the most stressful for me, is things that didn't have a clear path.

Craig White
If something broke, if plumbing failed, yeah, the guests, sure, give them a bit of leash to be angry and yell at us, because yeah, it's their vacation for sure. We get that the owner is frustrated and that's fine too. So we can take a little bit of both of that. But the path is clear, right? Everybody's working toward the same goal. Everyone's version of what happened is the same. It's when you get differing stories. That was the really tough bit.

Heather Bayer
Yes. You just recalled then when we first brought somebody in to deal with that, to deal with those issues, just happened to be your son, the very first law student that we brought in and I think that was probably one of the best things we did. The premise was, and this is what we learned from the owner of another rental company, one of our competitors, who I met at a VRMA conference. I think we met, we had coffee, we're chatting, and I said, So what's the best thing you've ever done for your business? He said, absolute best thing we've ever done was to hire a law student to look after our issues in the summer. I said, Tell me about this. He said, Yeah, second year law students, they've probably done courses on mediation, arbitration, these types of things, and they want to practice this. And this is what we did. I remember coming back and mentioning this to you and you said, Oh, Austin's a law student. He came and joined us for that summer and was amazing. What was the expression that he used in a letter that we used for years and years afterwards?

Craig White
I'm not sure.

Heather Bayer
Oh, 'The full force of the law.'

Craig White
Oh, that was actually later. That was Jacob.

Heather Bayer
Oh, was it? Oh right.

Craig White
Yeah, that was a later student. That was three or four years into that sequence. And just for listeners, just to mention that we eventually made that a permanent position. And we hired somebody who's still in that role and does it marvelously. But yeah, it was prototyped and fabulous advice, certainly to get someone just to deal with those things. I mean, the other thing that we learned from that owner was the saying that you told me was, what is the cost of being right and how much we used that through the years of our business. I think that was maybe one of the biggest learnings of all, consider the cost. No matter how much you retold yourself, it was always pulling back from something and saying, I don't need to be right about this. I need to make an effective business decision to make this conclude satisfactorily for as many people as possible. And if that means I'm wrong or even if I am right, I don't have to be seen to be right or I don't have to prove it. I don't need to be right on this. That's a tough thing.

Heather Bayer
That's very tough. It is tough because you think you're letting them get away with it. I know Phil used to say that, Well, you're letting them get away with it. But no. What we're taking away, they may get away with it, they may do it again. We are not in control of what they do with the rest of their lives. Us carrying on with an issue is not going to make them different. It's not going to make them behave any differently in the future. If you just back off, let it go, we are going to feel better. If they feel better, that's fine, I don't care. But we are going to feel better too.

Craig White
One of the things I remember is we had a guest who was very angry right from day one, and became very unpleasant to deal with. We nursed him through that week. Then I remember going to this cottage to do a photo update and seeing how it had not been kept up and seeing exactly what he meant. And getting his full experience and saying, Oh, I understand now.

Craig White
Perhaps he could have presented it better. And in truth, had his presentation been a little more effective or a little more, what's the word? Something that emphasizes more a teamwork approach, is less confrontational. I think we probably could have done something a lot more. But the way the problem was approached, it immediately became confrontational, and both of us couldn't wait to finish that week. But yeah, I remember getting that experience maybe about a year or two years later and thinking, Oh, it would have been nice to have this information then, because I think my response would have been different.

Craig White
We've spent some time talking about errant owners or errant guests. But in 20 years, I'm sure we had a share of things. I think there were properties that we had listed and maybe missed things on, or key items that say, Oh, I forgot to mention that this was the case, or I think there was one I did up on [Lake] Couchiching that I had spoken with the owner and they had talked about maybe getting internet, but never did. And in fairness to them, they never confirmed it with me. And we had gone ahead and listed it. And we had a very angry guest who absolutely needed that internet when they were there. And that was a case of, Oh, yeah, we screwed that one up.

Heather Bayer
But wasn't that one where you got in the car and you drove there with a Roger's stick?

Craig White
I did. Yeah. With a stick that I still have, because we did retrieve it at the end of that summer. But in fairness, that was a case for the guest to be legitimately angry with us. So yeah, it cost a day of driving and a fair bit of coin just to subscribe and get all that Internet. But one of those things. But I think we're part of her stories now too. This company did this. Everybody has a story. And hers on us is a complementary one too. I think the stories that always the worst ones for me was those calls we get on Saturday night at 5:30, 6 o'clock, two hours after check-in from the the lead guest saying, I think I've been scammed.

Heather Bayer
Oh, yes.

Craig White
They'd rented something out of a paper somewhere or off an Internet classified site without doing a lot of research and then sent money through wire transfer or something, only to discover that what they rented didn't exist. And I always felt so bad for those families because they've driven up with all this anticipation and just get there and this growing realization. You'd have to go through all seven stages of grief in about a half an hour. And just the realization that you've been taken for your money, and all at once it would infuriate me that somebody would do this to people and just feeling so much for these people. And I think we'd get at least one of those calls every summer. And sometimes we were able to help them, which to me was great. I think on more than one occasion we called an owner who had a week free and explained to them what had happened and say, Can you help us out? Just to make it clear, these people hadn't booked through us. They had just found us because they were trying to salvage a vacation at the last minute, but we were able to get them a deal and get them into a place and at least salvage something at the vacation. But that was always the worst story to hear.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I remember that.

Heather Bayer
Well, we have come up to our time, and I know we could talk for another hour or two or three. Maybe we will in the future. Maybe we'll do this again, because we didn't actually touch on any of the wildlife stories and there's so many of those. We'll probably come back and do maybe a part two. But, Craig, it's been absolute pleasure chatting with you again, just reliving some of this. Is it a pleasure reliving some of this?

Craig White
Oh, it absolutely is, because even the the ridiculous stuff I can still laugh at. And we do have to write the book.

Heather Bayer
Yes.

Craig White
The working title is, Loons at the Lake. I love that. There's lots I still have, so if you want to do episode two of this, I'm down.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I think we should. But for now, I'm going to let you go. It's a Saturday evening. It's just before New Year's Eve. You don't have to deal with guests this weekend, right?

Craig White
No, not at all. Not even the guests here. The ones we had at our place left yesterday, so it'll be a quiet New Year's.

Heather Bayer
Well, I wish you a very happy New Year. We will get together when I get back in April, and we will do that bike ride. I will watch you use all that leg power going up the hills while I just press my throttle.

Craig White
Okay.

Craig White
All right. Thank you so much.

Craig White
Take care. Great speaking with you.

Heather Bayer
Well, that was a great conversation with Craig. I haven't talked to him for a couple of months, so it was a good catch up and a really good trip down memory lane, all those stories. We did say there were so many stories we wanted to tell and we just ran out of time. We're going to be doing a part two of that in a couple of months.

Heather Bayer
As I said at the beginning, we're going to do a bit of a shift on the podcast, probably from about April onwards.  We are making a little bit of a shift towards a more narrative, more story-based show. Because of that, we need stories. You heard Craig and I telling our stories, we want to hear yours. So if you'd like to be on the show, if you have a story to tell about this business and it would be interesting for other people to hear it, then we'd like to hear from you.  Please email me at heather@vacationrentalformula.com. Let me know your story.

Heather Bayer
Kerri Gibson did this. Kerri Gibson from Chalets Hygge, who'll be joining me on the podcast next week to talk about community partnerships. She sent me an email a year or so back and said, You were asking for stories, and I've got one. She shared her story with me and then we had her on the podcast. I was so happy to be at the presentation that Kerri did at the Vacation Rental Women's Summit in Nashville just a few short weeks ago. Kerri is really out there now in the industry sharing her story. You could be doing exactly the same. Please don't be shy. Send me an email and we can chat and see how your story could fit in to one of our upcoming episodes.

Heather Bayer
That's it for this first episode of the New Year. There's going to be a lot of changes coming from us. You'll be hearing about them soon. There's the big month of February coming up, which we're calling our SSTIR Crazy month, where we'll be spending each week talking about Safety, Sustainability, Trust, Insurance, and Regulations. Each week will have one of those themes. You'll be hearing about that a little bit more, well, in fact, a lot more over the next few weeks as we lead up into our SSTIR Crazy month. Because we want to bring these core issues to the forefront of everybody's mind.

Heather Bayer
That's it from me for another week. I'm looking forward so much to being with you next time.

Mike Bayer
We hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by Minut. Don't forget to check the link in the description of this episode to meet Minut and discover the best smart device you will ever integrate into your short-term rental business to help protect your investment and keep your neighbors happy.

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.