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

Well hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast and I'm so glad you're here with me today because we're going to be diving into something that's been changing really, really fast. If you listen to me a lot, you'll know what I'm going to be talking about today. It's AI again, but we're talking today about how people are searching, finding and booking vacation rentals online. So if you've been in the business for a while, you'll know that SEO, paid ads and email marketing have been around a long time. We've talked about it a lot over the years, but lately it just feels like the ground is shifting under our feet. Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity and now Google AI Mode are changing how people look for answers and that means we need to start thinking differently about how we show up online.

So I am so happy to have with me today someone who's right at the central all this. It's Conrad O'Connell from BuildUp Bookings and Conrad's been helping short-term rental managers, including me when I was a property manager. He's been helping us get found and booked online for over a decade. He's seen the old ways work and now he's helping clients navigate what's next.

So in this episode, we'll talk about the rise of AI driven search, how content creation is changing and what you can do to keep your marketing personal, even as things become more automated. So if you've been wondering how to keep up, or just where to begin, this one's for you. Let's go straight on over to my discussion with Conrad O'Connell.

So I am so delighted to have back with me once again. and Conrad, you told me you hadn't been on the show for years and years and I thought you'd been on over and over again. But apparently it was just once way, way back and then once again when you were moderating a conversation with other people. Is that right?

[Conrad O'Connell]
Yeah, in this format, I think it's been a very long time. I looked it up, by the way, and if I got my dates right here, I believe this was the first recording that just you and I did was back in 2017.

I think that's the date stamp that I saw on it. So here we are closer to 2027 than we are to 2017 at this point, obviously. So it's been a journey in that respect. And going back and listening to it, I didn't listen to the whole thing. I couldn't bear to do it. I couldn't get through the entire episode of my own recording quality and everything and how I thought at the time. But it was actually a really fun time capsule. So I downloaded it. I hope your feed never goes anywhere, of course. But I downloaded and I saved it just because I may want to think about that some point down the road. But very different from then from now. I've had three kids since we've had that conversation, for example, just to give you a reference point.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I've had grandkids and just so much has happened in eight years that we're going to be talking about that. We're now compressing the 'what's happened' into weeks rather than years, because things are changing so rapidly.

So who is Conrad O'Connell? For anybody who hasn't met Conrad before from BuildUp Bookings, I'm going to hand this over to Conrad to just do a little introduction of himself. Where he's come from, what he does, and maybe a little bit about where you're going with your business.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Yeah, for sure. So my name is Conrad O'Connell. I live in South Carolina, North Myrtle Beach specifically. I run an agency called BuildUp Bookings. We started that agency.... Well, it was called something different back then. If you go back to the first episode that we did, you'll obviously figure that out. But now it's called BuildUp Bookings. Started that in 2016. So I'm coming up this year and doing this for nine years and next year will be 10 years doing this, which feels crazy to me, because it doesn't feel like it's been 10 years. But anyways, our agency focuses specifically on search, social and email marketing for vacation rental managers. Now we are getting more into the website development design kind of business game. So that's kind of something that we've added more recently. But our core focus, what we do for the majority of our clients, vacation rental managers in the US, typically in leisure markets, is search, social and email marketing.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. And that's so interesting now because with the advent of AI, that's the first time I'm using that on this podcast, in this interview. And we've been going for two minutes and twenty-two seconds.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Paul and I joke about that on our feed. Sometimes we wake up 30 minutes before we mention it and we're like, hey, that's not bad.

[Heather Bayer]
No, I can't get beyond two minutes, I'm afraid. It's not taken over my life, but I am just so fascinated. And when I get fascinated with something, I get really immersed in it. I go down all sorts of different rabbit holes. People that are listening to this podcast will know that over the last six weeks or so, it's morphed into more of an AI focused show, which is probably what I'm going to keep going with. And I'll be making an announcement about that over the next few weeks, I'm quite sure.

But yeah, we can't go far without mentioning AI. And I know that's going to be a good part of this discussion. I've got to go back to what we were discussing before we hit record, because we were...

And you may only be 33, but you sound like an old puss.

[Conrad O'Connell]
There's elements of me that are 23 and elements of me that are 53.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, when you're talking about paper maps, remember the paper maps. Yeah, I remember the paper maps. I used to love them.

My husband was a navigator in the Royal Air Force, so he flew airplanes for a living. He navigated by the stars. He did have navigational equipment on the aeroplane, but they learnt about navigation by navigating from the stars.

Mariners still do that. It's good to know that stuff. And so you and I had been talking about calculators and the fact that I remember when calculators first came out. And it was like, oh my God, we can't have people using these because it'll take away their mental acuity and they'll never be able to think again. And then we got talking about paper maps and navigation. So when Phil was in the Air Force, he had what we called ordnance survey maps, which were these huge paper maps. We could lay them out on the floor, and I guess they were about six feet by three feet. And then they folded up into the nice sort of accordion style map. And we had an OS map for every single area of England.

So we went and we went walking. I'd get out the ordnance survey map and we'd look at the public footpaths because the map showed all the public footpaths. They had contour lines, if anybody remembers what contour lines are, that showed where the hills were and how high we would have to walk and the elevations and all those things.

And I was really adept at reading ordnance survey maps. I could map out a walk, and they showed the pubs. The maps showed where the pub was. So we could walk from pub to pub at lunch, walk in the morning, pub at lunchtime, walk in the afternoon, pub near where our car was in the evening and off we'd go home. Drinking and driving wasn't a thing, though, fortunately. Something else that's different now than it was back then. Yeah, that's a very good change. But yeah, I remember those. And so in that discussion, when we started this conversation, we were saying that then GPS came along and the paper maps have disappeared.

I unearthed one out of my cupboard the other day because when I first came out to Ontario, I was driving around Ontario and we only had these paper maps. And then there were books, really nice books of maps and they're very detailed, but they'd have all the snowmobile trails on them. And three times I found myself driving down a snowmobile trail because I misread the map. But yeah, you know it because the signs are very small. They're very close to the ground.

[Conrad O'Connell]
That's a very Canadian experience.

[Heather Bayer]
My husband's saying that, look, there's way too much grass growing up in the middle of this. So I'm sorry, I get excited when I'm talking about this stuff. Let's get to the topic of this discussion, which is how things are changing.

We're going to be talking about paid search. We're going to talk about SEO. We're going to talk about website design and development and where you are on all this.

So let's kick off with how people are searching these days. I'm using Perplexity a lot more to search, not so much ChatGPT, but I know people are using that as well. Instead of going to Google, I don't very often go to Google anymore.

So what are you seeing? What's your take on all this? And then, of course, I want you to touch on Google's AI Mode, which I was reading about this morning.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Yeah. I've been lucky enough to get in the beta of the AI Mode. It feels very similar, honestly, to how Gemini works or any other Google tool, basically, where it's mixing together their web cache, which is obviously the best in the world.

They have a better web cache, obviously, than OpenAI or any third-party search tool, Perplexity being, et cetera, with the Gemini type interface, the large language model type interface that we've all now become somewhat accustomed to. I think that the main battle with AI Mode, just touch on that quickly before I go back to the search engine and share conversation, is what's clear to me is, like, outbound links are getting chewed away and eroded at a rapid rate, which I know is some of the other questions that we were going to talk about today.

So particularly on informational content, particularly on something to the effect of the best restaurants in Toronto, the best places to go, fishing in Myrtle Beach. These are all search terms that are just getting these paragraph AI overview style answers, whether it's actually in an AI search tool like Perplexity or whether it is in Google. The click traffic to that is eroding.

Now, we'll come back to that in a second of should you keep doing it or not, if that is the case. But to your question here about, like, search engine share and these things picking up pace at this moment, and Paul and I did some research on this. It's very clear to me that there's a small bubble of people talking about these trends and these people are using these AI tools, but it's not necessarily at the expense of Google in a way that maybe some people are assuming.

So some of the data that Paul and I pulled down, and this was on the Heads in Beds Show, I can put a link here if that helps. People can go dig that out in the Show Notes if that's interesting to them. But the highlight version of that was that it was somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three hundred visitors were coming to vacation rental websites that we looked at in our own client data.

This was a few months ago at this point, and it was like several million visits from Google. So when I say that it was a small percentage, I don't mean it was one or two or three or four percent, like it was zero point zero zero two percent or something like that. If people are getting referred to a vacation or a website, at least from a tool like Perplexity or ChatGPT or Gemini or the like, as opposed to a tool like Google or a search engine like Google, write a more traditional search engine.

In fact, if you take Bing's market share, it was 20 times, 100 times greater than these LLM search tools as far as referring visits. Now, that doesn't mean that people aren't using these tools. What's very clear to me, as a user of ChatGPT mostly that's been like my primary LLM tool that I use the most, is that I'm using it for different things.

So I don't see it in my mind, and I don't think most people are using it as this idea of Google is not here anymore and then now using this tool and it's a one for one for replacement. Maybe more so with Perplexity in the example that you gave. I think it's more of I'm now doing new things that I wasn't doing before using this interface because I would never go into Google and ask it.

There's an error in this json-shema.org markup script, which literally happened to me yesterday for a client site. I don't know what the error is. I misunderstand the documentation. I copy and paste the documentation. I copy and paste the script and I say tell me what the error is. And then ChatGPT stays thinking for 35 seconds and then spits out the right answer and the right code.

I would have never gone to Google to do that before. So did Google lose a search in that respect? Not really because I had to go to Google to get the documentation and to get the thing there. And then I paste that information into ChatGPT. So that's the thing, too. It's my other belief in what I am seeing right now is that it's not there was this fixed pie of search volume or search activity and the introduction of ChatGPT made it so that pie immediately got smaller. The pie may stay the same size or may get bigger. There's more people searching from different devices and so on and so forth. And I think Google is aware of the people.

This narrative is out there because they released data for the first time in a long time recently. I think the number is four trillion of memory searches now. They process four trillion searches a year. They updated data. If not, we can dig it out and put in the Show Notes again. But they hadn't done that in quite a while.

And it was like a three, five, six, seven X increase from the last update that they gave a few years ago. So, again, like people are using Google just as much as they were before. There are some use cases that have been replaced, quote unquote, replacing Google with new use cases. But that doesn't automatically mean that Google is at some massive disadvantage. And it's this is the most successful search company the planet's ever seen. I don't think they're going to go away quietly in the night would be my take on it.

[Heather Bayer]
What about the AI piece that comes if you're searching for something on Google and the AI piece comes up at the top. Now, again, maybe I'm an outlier. I tend to go there first. It's there. I do click on it. It's not like it's a sponsored ad, which I tend to avoid. Does your research show that more people are using that. Or is it essentially not getting that traction that it is with me?

[Conrad O'Connell]
Yeah. So two things there. I think when that overview is present, it's absolutely significantly harming the click through rate of organic results underneath it. Right? Particularly if it's a quick answer box. And this goes back to this been happening on Google for more than a decade, really. If people were to go do a search on a website called Celebrity Net Worth, they'd read a really interesting story about that site. Basically, the premise of it was, what's the net worth of Justin Bieber? What's the net worth of Drake? Trying to think of famous Canadians just as it were. If you go do searches like that, this was happening 10 years ago, Celebrity Net Worth. This guy ran this website and he was like, I spend literally hundreds of hours pouring over court documentation and property records and looking up contracts and trying to figure out what this person's net worth might be.

And then what Google did is just scrape out his answer. OK, Justin Bieber is worth $200 million, whatever the case may be, OK, and put on the top of Google. And he was like, that's not fair. The deal was I give you content. You give me traffic. That was the deal. Now you're scraping out, putting out that answer in the box. You're killing my traffic. I no longer have incentive to do this work.

Again, this was almost a decade ago at this point. So I do think that if you look at a site like that, like it's very obvious what happened to it, which is that it got less and less important and valuable over time. Or if you think of a query that I've given this example before, how old is Joe Biden or how old is Donald Trump or how old is - insert whatever celebrity or a political person here? Again, the Wikipedia used to get that traffic. You might click on it, read the article and find the age there. Now there's just an answer box at the top. So this is all pre-AI Mode searches. This is all pre-AI overview type searches. And that was occurring for a long time.

Now, what's very clearly happening is that it's gotten significantly, quote unquote, worse recently with these AI overview boxes, which are almost a cousin, I would argue, of structured snippets, which came out again, seven, eight years ago, where they were giving these little bullet point type article summaries again at the top of the search results. But it used to be that people would still click through the structured snippets. In fact, people speculated that, oh, if you have a structured snippet, are you going to lose the traffic? And the answer was no. When you went look to the search console data, I don't feel that way about AI overview.

So if the AI overview is present and the answer is summarized properly in that AI overview, I think it decimates the click-through rate traffic of that person coming from Google over there. So that's a bummer. I don't know what the answer is. Are people still going to produce content, not in the next year or two years, but like 10 years down the road when you don't actually get any traffic for it? You have to speculate about that. What's the business model for sites that mostly produce content?

I think AI reviews are a great example of why TripAdvisor should be a stock that you shouldn't be invested in, right? Because TripAdvisor gets the overwhelming majority of their traffic through Google. Google is taking away all that informational - things to do, area information, restaurant review-type content. They've been working on that for a very long time. But a site like TripAdvisor is absolutely going to see, I think, serious, severe traffic declines from things like that. The more and more AI reviews pop up.

So that's tough. Luckily, that's not really our client's business model. That's not really the business model of most people listening. It's not necessarily that they want to traffic on that site to make money from it. It was that they wanted traffic on that site to build audience, to build awareness, to build a retargeting list, that sort of thing. So that being chewed away is not ideal. But I would argue it doesn't change the core fundamental pieces of ranking well and getting good traffic from Google. I think those things haven't changed for queries where there's not an AI overview, in my experience.

[Heather Bayer]
You worked with us with CottageLink Rental Management over time when I was CEO there? And we did run paid ads, I believe. And I never quite understood how they worked because I never click on paid ads. You can probably get that a lot of what my thinking comes from what I do. And I know that I tend to be more of an outlier, so I should think differently. You did have me thinking differently, that's for sure. Tell me about paid ads and what the thinking is about them right now.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Yeah, a quick note on that maybe, because I think that anyone who's good at marketing, I think one skill set they tend to maybe address over time is having that perspective of seeing it from someone else's point of view. So I think when I hear someone saying, I'm concerned about running these ads, I'm concerned about tracking them, I'm concerned about the profitability. I try to put myself in their shoes and I totally understand.

I've run a small business. Like, if someone comes and tells me, hey, we want you to go spend a few thousand dollars a month on this thing that you weren't planning to do, my stomach gets a little bit in knots, right? If I don't feel like I understand it well or I don't know where I'm going at. So I think that there's nothing wrong with saying, I don't understand this well and therefore it feels almost strange or alien to me to then go pop my credit card in Google and say, yeah, sure, go ahead, $3,000 a month. So I totally understand that logic. And there's clients that we work with today who I can show them definitively that they're spending $100 on Google and they're getting back a 40 to 1 return on their investment and I can't get them to spend more. I'll make it simpler. They're giving Google a dollar. They're getting back $40 in gross booking value, which under any commission model is going to be profitable.

I don't care where you are in the world. If you have any sort of commission, you're going to make money on that deal and I can't get them to spend more because it's like, nope, that's what our budget says. That's all we can spend.

So anyways, the paid ads thing is at times, I want to say emotional. I don't mean it that way, but it can be more of the numbers don't always connect with people if they can't see the forest or the trees as it were. But honestly, if I look at a lot of the queries where these AI overviews are popping up on Google, many of them are not paid ads results, right?

So a lot of these AI overviews are not taking traffic from something like Google ads because they're not on these very commercialized queries. They don't really show today often, to be honest with you, on vacation rental queries. If you do a search, Destin Florida vacation rentals, it's very rare. And I probably joked about this last time on the podcast. If not, I've joked about it a thousand times since. No one's looked at more vacation rental search results than me over the past 10 years. I feel confident saying that, because it's completely disprovable, by the way. Like, no one can actually think that through or not. But anyways, I look at them obviously multiple times per day and have done so every day for almost 10 years straight.

And even all the changes that I've seen over the past few years, the vacation rental block was a bigger dip to traffic in my experience on those particular high-value search terms. Again, vacation rentals in Destin Florida compared to the AI reviews block and the ads are always at the top, right? The ads are always there before anything else comes underneath it.

So I think if anything, ads have gotten more important, not less important with this change because what's happening is if the organic results keep getting pushed down and down, the place to get the placement, the place to get that traffic to your website is through advertising, right? It's through Google search ads specifically. And now there's been so many different, probably it would be a whole episode in and of itself to do all the different changes and modifications that Google has with different types of search advertising or advertising in general.

But let's just think of our typical text ad at the top of a search result when I search for vacation rentals. That's working just as well now as ever. And I think maybe, again, for some of our clients, it's more valuable now than it was a year or two ago because they, even if they, quote unquote, rank number one, they're not getting the same traffic they were organically as they were previously.

[Heather Bayer]
Okay, so let's talk about the content that's behind the talks. Once again, going back to when you were working with us, we talked a lot about content, blog posts, how we use social media. What is working for vacation rental operators right now?

And there's so many tools that they can use. And I know I'm pretty adept now at recognizing what is completely ChatGPT, even though it's got better and better. And I know even if you're using Claude for generating content, it's even better, I think, than ChatGPT.

But still, how would you address that issue of sounding to AI?

[Conrad O'Connell]
It is something we've had to address 100%, because we used to have a very different content model than we do today. Our content model used to be regional writers. We'd find a regional writer, let's say, to recruit for a client. They would typically just be freelancers. Then our content manager, who is more of the kind of quarterback running the show, if you will, here at BuildUp, would say, okay, I need to then go do keyword research. I need to create a brief with a detailed outline of exactly what the article is, the best hiking trails in Ontario, whatever the case may be and then go through and build out that content. It would go through a very typical process of content creation, quality check, SEO check, editorial review, and then formatting and publishing. So when you publish one piece of content, five people have to touch it to go from the initial just like stem of an idea to an actual, okay, here's the URL that we can then share and put in different places online, right?

That's still the case today, but we have leveraged AI, obviously, to help us outline and put together some of these content briefs and do some of the writing. So I do think that if you just log into any web interface, ChatGPT probably, because it's the most popular, like you said, it's almost like a scent that we can just detect, or there's certain styles that we can just detect very easily that I think is very detectable, if you will. But I don't inherently think that's automatically bad, to be clear.

So if you were doing best hiking trails in Ontario, and you went into ChatGPT and asked it to write an article, it may in fact pull out good hiking trails in Ontario. That's certainly feasible. The question is, is that actually good in a piece of content to rank in Google ahead of all the other search results?

And that's where I think the answer is almost always no, unless no one else has written that piece of content before, and I'm sure a keyword like that, there's probably 50 articles at least on that same topic, then we're in a zone where we've just polluted the web more than anything, right? We just put out another junk article, a four out of 10 on the quality scale. It's out there. It's probably not going to do well. It's probably not going to rank. So I think if you're using AI, it's still your responsibility, or it's still your process to say, how can I enhance this with my own knowledge, my own information, extra data points, those little links on the Google Maps, the elevation change, all these things that aren't easily accessible or maybe findable, just send a simple query into any AI tool.

I think it's your responsibility to go and add that in and make your article actually useful for someone reading it on the other side, and that's where I think the results can come from. Yeah, I think if someone today was just like, oh, look, I can click a button and use AI to generate an article. Absolutely.

And I think that's a really good starting point. I think AI, to this kind of broader discussion we were having before we hit record here, is the best assistant, virtual assistant. It's the best junior employee. It's the best first draft generator that's ever been created because of the cost, because of the quality is pretty good, never takes a day off, never sleeps, et cetera. There's all these good things about it. But I still don't believe today, even in any discipline that we do on the marketing side, that it's okay.

I took this quick little prompt. I spit something back out. I can just copy and paste that and put that on line, or I could put that in social media. I could put that in a blog post, and it's just going to do very well. I think if you do that, you're putting in the bare minimum effort, and you're probably going to get back bare minimum results that we might take on it. So any sort of AI content creation, I think, has to be supplemented and augmented significantly by a writer, local tips and tricks, editors, et cetera, to get it in a more production-ready state. And that's a change that we've made over the past, like, six or seven months or so.

[Heather Bayer]
What about adding in brand voice, brand tone, creating custom GPTs for your... Because I have one, which is Heather's Voice. And I've uploaded a ton of old podcast solo episodes, the transcripts from them. Not necessarily my spoken voice, but the words I've used, because I use words in a particular way, like everybody does. So I've uploaded Heather's Voice. We have our brand, our brand tone, how we want to come across. How valuable is it is doing that?

[Conrad O'Connell]
I love that. I think that's ultimately the use case that all these tools want us to get to, which is not just, to your point, taking something out of ChatGPT and saying, write me a LinkedIn post on the podcast I'm about to do with Heather Bayer, and instead tell the story of, I was on this podcast so long ago. My life has changed so much since then. It was so awesome to reconnect with Heather. That's what people will respond to a little bit more if I write that way. So I think if you have a... I don't want to say a shortcut. I don't mean that in a bad way. But if you have a way to train the AI a little bit better on your voice, on how you write, or how you particularly resonate, or your messaging, et cetera, I think that can make a lot of sense. And I think that tools like that are the... I think we'll get there. And probably where we are now is like you having to tell it.

I think where we're going to be soon enough is it will just know. It will then just look at all the responses that you've given it, the things you've typed into it and go, ah, I know how you write now. I know how you think. I'm going to modify my responses a little bit to be there. But I think if you're doing that right now in the short-term, where you're again forcing it a little bit to train on your style, I think that's fantastic. And I think that is a good shortcut into how I think AI is going to be in a very short period of time.

I'll give you an example. I've done something similar. I have a webinar next week. I'm not sure when this comes out, that particular webinar occurs. But regardless, in every email to promote it, I kind of tell a story. And sometimes I struggle to tell a new story every single time. So I was struggling with this one. So what I did is, I took my last story that I did write myself, copy and pasted it, put that in ChatGPT, and said I'm writing this email to my list to get them to register for the webinar I have coming up. I need a story that talks about these four things and it kind of helped me a little bit.

And honestly, the first draft wasn't great. I was like, no, it's not really the thing. Come back two times later. Okay, that sounds good. Go ahead and finish the story. And then boom, it wrote something that I think was very on brand for what I was trying to communicate. It was trained, if you will, on that last email that I wrote. And then I got something that I really liked that I made small tweaks to. 80% of it maybe was from that idea.

So in a way, like that was written by AI. Ultimately, I'm the one clicking the button on the publish or the send or whatever. And I feel like it is in my voice because I took it, I worked with it, and I got it to what I say, what I wanted to say, and then I sent it out there.

So I think those methodologies, those ways of getting content out there are really strong and I think people are going to continue to invest in that for sure.

[Heather Bayer]
And improvements are happening all the time. GPT remembers now. When we first started with this back in, I guess I got into it in January 2023, and it was pretty basic, and it didn't really remember what you'd said before and you had to remind it and all sorts of stuff.

But now, I'm finding more and more that it has memory, it's bringing back in things that I've said to it previously.

[Conrad O'Connell]
I think one mistake that I've noticed ChatGPT makes with me frequently is when I'm working on a project for a client, it then assumes that's me. So it'll be like, oh, let me help you with your vacation rental business in San Diego. And I'm like, no, that's not what I was doing.

So then I'll have to go, there's like those little shards or memory, little snippets I could delete though. So maybe I could be improved by, I don't know.

[Heather Bayer]
Yes, I've just noticed that change is... It's getting more dramatic, I guess, I can't think of another word to use, but I talked to Amber Hurdle probably only about three or four months ago and that episode was entitled, Your ChatGPT is Showing......

[Conrad O'Connell]
I did listen to that one, yeah.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, and I think that is not so much the case anymore. It is, if you want to write something, then post it on LinkedIn and keep all the emojis in. We know you've written ChatGPT because we never used emojis in every sentence before.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Well, the one that gets me is a little asterisk because in ChatGPT, it'll be bolded typically and then when you copy and paste it, particularly as plain text, it gets converted into asterisk. Yeah, who would ever, technically that is markdown formatting. I've written in markdown formatting before when I'm writing papers or doing blog posts way back in the day. But you never publish content in a place where markdown formatting does not work. It just looks so silly.

[Heather Bayer]
For example, if you are copying and pasting, make sure you take out the piece right at the bottom where it says, would you like me to convert this to a PDF or create? Right? ChatGPT is there saying, I've done what you asked and now I'd like to do something else for you.

Yeah, exactly. But do remember to take that piece out before you publish it.

[Conrad O'Connell]
I use the unfollow button on LinkedIn regularly, which is, I don't know, maybe like a three strike system in my head. I don't keep track, of course. It's just like, all right, a few irrelevant useless posts I'll swallow and just deal with. But when I see it over and over again, like if I saw that three times, I'm just like, click unfollow. Because like, you're basically, you're polluting my attention. When you're posting content online, like one thing I think about, because I've done a lot of it over the past eight or nine years and you do the same, is I'm asking for your attention, which is a very valuable resource, right?

So if we're asking for someone's attention to listen to this, it has to be valuable enough for them to want to tune in. They're on the treadmill. They're driving, they're out in the garden, whatever the case may be, it needs to be worth their attention. I think the more that I go through this process with these AI tools, I realize like, you almost have to guard your attention a lot more carefully because the volume of what's being produced now is so much higher than it was before. People who were never posting on social media platforms now feel like, oh, I can do this very quickly and out of the thing and I can click a button.

But it's kind of garbage, right? So it's like, how do we find that middle ground between like making it good, making it worthy of someone's attention and actually valuable for their business? I think it's really challenging.

I think it's our challenge.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I come at LinkedIn in a bit of a different way. I just really hesitate to post anything. I'm very vulnerable to criticism. I can't post anything which would come across... perhaps an opinion piece that somebody's got to jab at, because that gets to me. So if you're out there listening, please keep that in mind. If you want to say something negative of my posts, I will really take it personally.

Anyway, Connor, let's go back onto this whole area of email marketing now. When we used to do email marketing, it was just, you wrote a message, you just sent it to everybody. But now we've got to really capture people's attention and that means making it personal, making the subject line jump out so somebody's actually going to read it, because it means something to them. Can you talk to that?

[Conrad O'Connell]
I don't think that we fully uncovered everything that's possible there, to be honest with you. I think we have a lot of work to do, like in our own company, because segmentation sounds really easy on the surface and it's really hard in practice, because segmentation is often either doing a ton of data, manual data work to get the right fields and the right places. So for example, when you were running CottageLink, knowing if someone came with a pet or not sounds relatively straightforward.

Okay, we either have them as they paid a pet fee or they didn't. So when we export that data from our PMS of choice, we can then tag them as pet fee. Yes, I'll tag them as pet friendly. No pet fee, probably didn't bring a pet. I'm sure some did, but probably didn't bring a pet. We'll go ahead and not mark a pet fee. They may not want a pet friendly newsletter. So in the next newsletter I send, I can make the argument and I think that the data might bear this out. That if I send it with a pet or a dog in the header of the image, like maybe we'll get a little bit better response rate, or something from that person who brought a pet last time versus the person who just came with their husband, their wife, their kids, whatever the case may be. Didn't bring a pet, we send them a more general cottage picture, right?

Those things may work. So I think that type of that level of segmentation, I think, is something that we have done well and is maybe a little bit easier now. Where it gets beyond that is where I think it does get a little more challenging, because one thing that I've struggled with, like in our own company, is when we're doing another segment for a client, we have to justify that from a cost perspective.

And I have to understand what segments are actually meaningful. For example, knowing that they stayed in a two bedroom versus a four bedroom, is that meaningful or not? Like on the surface, it sounds like it should be.

But then in practice, we've done some testing where it hasn't always proven to be the case that if they stayed in a four bedroom before and we send them more four bedrooms, they can work better than if we sent them a more diverse cross section of properties that we might have in our program. And so it's actually maybe a little more timid to be like, this seems like a dial that people want to turn up to the maximum on personalization. But then when we send a lot of newsletter content, we sometimes will send a similar message to big chunks of the list or we'll have a handful of segments, not 50, where we're trying to personalize.

Hey, Heather, it's almost creepy, right? I know you stayed last time with a pet and with your husband and you came down to Gulf Shores in your RV. It's like, OK, that is true.
But it's a little bit creepy almost. And I don't think that those always increase response rates in the people in the way that people might think in my experience. So I think we have work to do here on our side.

But the one piece that we struggle with that I think most people struggle with that we talk to when we're potentially bringing them on as clients is getting the data from the PMS over to the email marketing platform of choice. That is still a little bit of a battle, particularly with those segments and things like that intact. And I know there's people that have built some software tools that have made that a little bit easier, but they're not widely available. There's certainly no PMS platform that I'm aware of that has a very native sync between, let's say, a platform like Constant Contact, MailChimp, those types of things, HubSpot, whatever the case may be, and get that in there. So I think we have a lot of work to do when I say that, in BuildUp specifically.

And then I think a lot of other people in the industry aren't really doing it that well either. Or they have a big team where they have a massive list and they can justify it. Like I spoke with a property manager a little while ago who was in a market, 900 plus units. And it's oh, yeah, they have two people on what they call a lifecycle marketing team. And they work 80 hours a week on just email, outbound SMS, outbound plain text email. So almost like CRM style messages to past guests. And it's yeah, you can justify that when you're doing $35 million a year in gross booking revenue. Most smaller managers can't justify that.

And I guess my final point on that is that my sort of belief is that best companies have inventory that's largely similar, that you're attracting a similar type of audience. So I think that almost does some segmentation for you, because if someone stayed in one of your 10 bedrooms before and all you have is eight, nine, and 10 bedrooms, then they're accepted to all your inventory if you're in one market.

I think the segmentation probably matters a lot more for people that are like very multi-market. They're in Florida and they're in Colorado. It's like that's where you really have to think about segmentation a lot more deeply, probably.

Last thought there would be like, I think the one thing that I've seen over and over again over the past several years is that when people are faced with this idea of it's a lot to do, they tend to do nothing, unfortunately. So like, I would believe someone would be much better off and I've seen situations like this sending mediocre designed emails with mediocre copy to their whole list and not segmenting versus sending nothing, which is, I think, what most people do because then what happens is we try to reactivate that list.

I talked to someone a while ago in Cabo, Mexico. I remember this conversation so distinctly. And he goes, good news. We had some PPC things we were getting going. I've got an email list of 12,000 past guests that have stayed with me before. I'm doing this since, let's say it was like 2000, something like that. I'm like, oh, phenomenal. Tell me about where the emails are hosted. Tell me about your activity with this list. And he goes, that's the thing, Conrad. I've never sent anything to these people. And I'm like, nothing? And he's nothing. And I'm just like, it's useless.

Maybe we can look at the last year or so and maybe we could start with that list and give it a crack and see how it goes. But I'm like, anyone who stayed with you in 2004 and you're going to email them in 2023, which is probably when I had that conversation, or 2024. It's there's no connection there. I'm like, they've completely forgotten about you. They've gotten quite literally a million or two million marketing messages sent to them since then across every form of media. And they completely forgot about their vacation in Cabo in 2004.

So I'm just like, I am a believer in, yes, we want our marketing to be great, of course. But if you're a small property manager and you're doing something, I promise you that is much better than doing that. Nothing. You're better off sending a really simple plain text email. I have a client that sends plain text emails that double his click through rate on these highly professionally designed emails that we did for him. It's just, hey, Heather, I just wanted to let you know we just added a new cottage to our program, click here and check it out. All the best Keith. That's what he sends. Right? Very simple stuff. And that outperforms these highly professionally designed stuff.

So anyways, just a moment of someone sitting there on the fence of this seems overwhelming. I can't afford to hire someone else to do it. I'm small. I don't have it yet. Do something. And I promise you, it's better than doing nothing.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. This is interesting because it gets me thinking of a Realty website or a Realty platform that sends me an email every time a new property is listed. And I'm not that interested in moving at the moment, but I have been in the past and I always click on them. It's just curiosity. I just want to see, just have a look at these properties, how much they are. And then when I get on them, I'm clicking through all the photos.

[Conrad O'Connell]
That's a lot of owner recruitment is like that. Homeowner recruitment. I know you've had Brooke [Pfautz] on several times and he and I do another podcast together. Obviously, we've done that one before with you as well. And I've learned so much from Brooke on the owner side of things. I think I had a decent handle on guest things before I first met him and started working on some of the inventory related projects. But I've learned so much from him about the homeowner side, which I'll be honest, I'd ignored. If you'd asked me back in our first conversation about homeowner marketing, I'd be like, yeah, it's not my job. And that's the clients get the homes and then we try to market them.

That was kind of my mindset back then. But I think on the homeowner side, one thing that's very clear to me, and Brooke's talked about this at length, is that the majority of people who end up signing were in one of these long-term sequences. They were in one of these situations where there was a conversation. I'm sure this happened when you were running CottageLink. Time passes, things change, things happen and then how do you become top of mind?

And I think that's where real estate is another good example. How do you choose a real estate agent? I actually looked at some data on this recently, because we do have some real estate clients as well. And basically, 80 percent of people choose a realtor based on either the realtor they worked with before, so the last time they bought or sold, they go back to that person if they had a good experience, or number two from referral from a friend or family member. So if there's 100 people buying and they need a realtor, you're only really marketing to about 15 of them, maybe 10 or 15 of them, because the other ones are all going to go to someone they worked with before, or the referral of a friend or family member.

So that's a really tough business to just come from nothing and say, I'm going to go build up this massive portfolio, or this massive pipeline of new customers without benefiting from that loop of referrals and having done past deals. So that's why it's hard to be an agent at first. It's not that these young agents are not intelligent, or don't know how to write contracts, or whatever is involved to be a good real estate agent. They have no base to build off of. They're pushing off, but they're pushing into water where they can't actually go anywhere. And I think that's the same struggle that a lot of occasional managers face on the inventory side.

It's we don't have that past referral. You don't have that past marketing connection and so on and so forth. But when you have that, whether it's through email, SMS, physical mail and talking about reports being sent to people, when you have that kind of memory over time, it's like things filter in and people find you.

And the larger clients we have get the most homeowner leads. It's a really unfair thing when you think about it, right? If you're a small manager trying to break into a new market, it's like, how do I get the word out there? I think that's actually the hard part is how do you set yourself apart, because the big companies, I promise you, get all the homeowner leads. I've seen it happen in our consulting work for the last seven or eight years.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. And this is a big deal, getting that part right. And I know the year before we sold CottageLink, we were getting a lead every single day. But that was as a result of years and years of work. And a lot of those leads, I say a lot of those years, quite a lot of those leads were people that had been in touch with us five, six, even 10 years previously. And for a whole bunch of reasons, they didn't get back to us or they just didn't come back. But we had kept in touch with them over the years. One of the things we did, if you remember, we had an owner blog on the website. So we would write articles just for owners, any owners, how to spring clean your property before you open up for the season, that sort of thing. And we would promote those articles. And that was just something that we did. And those people just eventually came back to us.

Anyway, talking about websites, it's tougher these days to get somebody on a website and to get them to book. What can somebody do now, something smart they can do on their website, to actually make it a little more sticky? And I'm sure we've had this conversation many times before, to get people to just come in and take a look around.

[Conrad O'Connell]
I think the template sites are a lot better than they used to be. I don't know if we have any PMS sponsors we're going to upset if we name specific companies, or whatever the case may be. But I think some of them have done a much better job of improving their website platforms that have made it a lot easier for - I'm starting, I don't have a massive budget maybe to go out and hire someone or to hire one of these custom agencies that will charge you a lot of money to build a custom website. How do I get something going?

I'll just call it, OwnerRez in particular. I think their template websites are really strong. And we have clients, I was talking with someone the other day about this. We have a client who just did a new custom website with us. We worked with her for almost two years on our template OwnerRez website. And right before we swapped over to the new website, she was doing anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000 a month in direct bookings off of a template website. So there was nothing custom about it. We wrote content for it and we did all the normal best practices as far as SEO and website design. But it was the $20, $30 per month OwnerRez template site that we were building from and we were getting a lot of reservations from. I do not think that it's necessary to have a custom website.

Now I do think that you'll run into limitations on almost every platform out there when it comes to just using the template site that a PMS gives you. Some are better than others. You have to look at them and evaluate. Is that the most important thing to you or is that just one factor amongst many when you're choosing a PMS? I try not to ever get into the PMS recommendation game. I know there's people that are in that game, but I try not to get there because I realize that people have so many different criteria that they're choosing from. That has nothing to do with the website you're questioning, or nothing to do with the marketing side. It's accounting and operations and things that I'm honestly not knowledgeable enough about to tell you if those PMS are good or bad for those things.

But I think on the website side, yeah, the answer is starting with probably starting with your template website, making the best version of it that you can. And then when budget allows, probably going into something that's a little bit more customized using, for example, WordPress is the platform that we still build off of. And we've now built plugins to accommodate your typical flow. It's basically homepage search results, property detail page checkout. There's really four pages that matter. The other piece of the site are a little bit more straightforward content, contact us pages, category pages, that sort of thing.

So it's probably best working with a vendor who has done it before. I think you probably don't want to be talking with someone who's maybe they're outside of our little bubble here, but they've never done it before. They're going to run into some weird esoteric problems that they might not be able to deal with. But luckily, there's a lot more companies now, I'd say, than there was probably when he first interviewed. And the price points have gotten in some situations, I think, a lot more reasonable. I don't know if you've had Eli on from HomeRunner, but he's offering basically a plug-in solution to connect a WordPress site to a lot of different PMSs at a very reasonable fee, a few hundred dollars compared to something like that before would have been done by a custom agency. It might have been 10,000, 20,000 dollars because it was such a random one-off request, as it were.

I think that things have gotten a lot better, but it's still going to be an investment into your business to build out a website that's actually really custom to you, looks nice. But don't be afraid to start with the template websites, like that can take you pretty far. I think sometimes people hit the eject button too early, or they feel like the template website's holding them back, when probably it's traffic holding them back, not the template website in my experience.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, so for those who are thinking about getting into direct booking for maybe the first time, what's the best place for them to start? Where should they kick off?

[Conrad O'Connell]
In mastering the occasional marketing in that book that I wrote, it's coming up on two years now. I'm working on Version 2 by the way, so Version 2 will come out at some point soon. Because I didn't mention AI in that book either, so obviously a huge miss, because at the time that wasn't really a thing, if you will. But I still believe the principles that I wrote in there are still what applies today, which is like we start with really basic stuff. We start with a brand name. You'd be surprised from these times I talk to people, and they don't even have any sort of brand associated with their properties or with their company, right?

So even if you have one listing, you can call it the example I give on the podcast that I do is Conrad's Cool Cabin Rentals. If we're talking about a management company or Conrad's Cool Cabin, which is not a real thing, but I could brand my listing in that way. And that's actually the place to start, is like you want people who are at least finding and looking for your specific listing. And that number may be 10. There may be 10 people a month that search for your cabin online. Awesome, because that's 10 really qualified people that we could convert one or two of, and that's going to get you going. That's going to get some initial momentum. So if someone has one listing, I still think they can get some level of direct booking. So are they ever going to be 80, 90 percent direct bookings? I don't believe so. I think it's very challenging to do that.

One concept that we talked about a lot, too, is this idea of having a commodity property versus a specialty property. And what I mean by that commodity, I don't mean low quality. I just mean by commodity. What I mean is how many replacements are there for that stay. So if you have a three bedroom oceanfront condo in here where I'm at in the Myrtle Beach area, awesome. So do 45,000 other people. So it's like that's a really tough thing to market and get more direct bookings on, versus when you see these really unique architecturally interesting properties, really unique and monetized properties.

When you see these things that really stand out, it goes away from that commodity into more of that specialty. If you have an audience that cares about it, then your direct booking just works better. It's easier to get people to be interested in that property because they see it and they go, I want that. And then they're drawn to it. So that's I think the battle that probably I didn't understand in our last episode that I understand so much better now, which is size as part of it. But specialty, I think, is a key part of that process as well.

Even if you're small, you can be small and specialized and I think get a lot of success with direct, or at least get to a comfortable level of 30, 40, 50 percent level on direct. And if you're a commodity, you can be quite large and actually really struggle, I think, to get a lot of direct bookings. If you're a commodity and you have 100 of the same condo, it's really challenging to get a lot of direct bookings because you're just playing the rates and fees game at that point, honestly.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. And I remember talking to somebody. I don't know if it was Lorraine Woodward or somebody else about this recently. If you've got this one condo in a big building, really pointless to create your own website for it.

[Conrad O'Connell]
It's hard.

[Heather Bayer]
But if you've got one condo in a big building and you specialize in accessible travel and you offer a beach wheelchair, that sort of tips the balance. You can then put the link to your website on a site like Becoming RentABLE and you speak to that specific audience. And that really is niching down. But, yeah, very tough if you don't have that niche because why is somebody going to come to your website as opposed to just dropping into Airbnb when I just want a condo in Gulf Shores.

[Conrad O'Connell]
And that's what I think, from an investment standpoint, I don't own any vacation properties and some people are sometimes surprised to hear that. But I think it's because I've seen all the underbellies of how these things go badly. And I've seen some bad stories, particularly recently with people that bought at the peak. And I look at some of the situations that they're in now. We'll get contact forms from time to time, Heather, that are desperate people. And I feel bad. And this has happened a little bit more recently where they made a bad investment, basically, into a property. They overpaid for it. They have very high costs in the property. It's not doing as well. And then they're maybe I can sprinkle a little marketing in and save it. And that's often not the case.

But in those situations, I think if I were to look to my own investment, if I were to do something down the road, it would have to be something specialized. And like you mentioned with Lorraine, that's one form of specialty. I think architecture is a form of specialization. I think highly monetizing it for a certain group of travel could be another form of specialization. So here in the Myrtle Beach for area, for example, there's a lot of golfers that come. I actually was talking to Rick Oster recently to see if we could maybe work with him again. He has highly monetized specialized properties for golfers in the RTJ Trail in Alabama. These are things that really appeal to me. So the outside of those properties, for example, isn't the most interesting thing you've seen. They're very nice-looking properties. Don't get me wrong. But looking from afar, you wouldn't really see it.
Then when you get close, oh, I understand where you're going. The location is very unique. And the amenities in that property are very unique.

And he's found a niche there that's worked quite well. Yeah, if you've not done the work, to be candid, right, and you don't have the amenity stack there, if you don't have specialization, if you have a commoditized property, then I guess you're selling the same thing as everybody else. And I'm surprised that you get the same rates, maybe a little bit better than everybody else.

So the game in this business, I think, to really do well is figuring out scale and specialty. If you can figure both those things out together, at least with some level of success or some level of detail, I think you can really build an awesome business as many of our clients have.

[Heather Bayer]
So I'm going to want to wrap this up in a moment. So, of course, I've got to come back to AI at the end. We'll start with it, we'll finish with it.

For someone just getting started with AI as an assistant to help them out with different things, what's a simple way? What do you recommend that they kick off with without them getting overwhelmed? And what should they perhaps avoid? Yeah, I could probably tell them what to avoid because I've done everything wrong. But what's your perspective on this one?

[Conrad O'Connell]
Yeah, what to do and what not to do with AI. I like that. That's a good ender.

Okay, so if we were talking simple, this thing sounds simple, but you'd be shocked how often I catch myself not doing this sometimes and I see all the time, people using it and not doing this, which is ask it to build a prompt before you ask it to do the thing for you. I know this sounds so simple and I'm sure you've covered it on recent episodes, but I'll echo it if you have, which is don't just go in there and say write me a blog post, again because what you're going to get back may not be very good. But if you first ask it, I'm trying to write a blog post. Help me create a prompt that I could use to write the best blog post. I want it to be detailed. I want it to be specific. I want it to have all this information. I want to compose new ideas. Ask me questions until you have all the information you need, then build a prompt.

Then you take that prompt copy and paste it, go back into a new thread, hit enter and go. The quality of what you get back is 5x better, is 10x better, when you do that. And it just takes another two or three minutes.

So I would say that's one thing that people don't do is they still use really weak prompts. And I think that's a very common mistake.

[Heather Bayer]
I would just like to add on to that. Ask me questions because I've done this for ages. Ask me questions and then you get this long list of questions.

And I got a little bit overwhelmed with that. And then I learned recently. So you also say, ask me questions. Do not give me a long list of questions. Ask me one question at a time and do not proceed until I have answered that question. And that has absolutely changed. It's changed a lot for me because I can get a lot of questions, but it asked me one question and then I'll give the answer and then the next question. And then it will come with, my final question is.

[Conrad O'Connell]
And you're like, yes, I've got it now.

[Heather Bayer]
Yes, I've got it. So that asked me and I love that. Ask ChatGPT to write the prompt that you're going to use.

[Conrad O'Connell]
It'll be better than what you create, 99.9% of the time. Everyone's going to get a dud back maybe. But for the most part, it's just the quality difference.

I kid you not, it's 5x or 10x better. So that would be my first bit. My second bit you asked about what to avoid. I mentioned the comment earlier about treating it like a junior employee. So if you had a junior employee, would you not carefully review their work, particularly if they're new to your company? Of course you would. So I think the common mistake that I see people making, and making fun of it, is not critically evaluating everything you're getting back. Yes, it's an AI. Yes, this is new technology. Yes, it's very impressive, all this kind of stuff, but it'll make mistakes. It'll say wrong things. It'll not do the right data analysis.

So even if you use it to save time, you can't lose one thing I do agree with. You were talking before you hit record about people in your family being somewhat skeptical. One thing I want to take from what their skepticism that I think should be applied is that maybe trust the initial response, but then verify everything in that response or go through it with a fine tooth comb and say, okay, you suggested this idea, is that actually the best idea?

It's trained on 'the average'. It's almost what it's trained on, right? Because it takes all this context, all this content, all this information, and then gives you a very average response based on all that context that it has. But that may not be what you're after. So I still think you have to critically evaluate and review it. Just as if a junior employee, first day on the job, went to you and said, Heather, I think we should do ABC.

And when you're running CottageLink, you may say that may be a good idea because maybe it's a fresh perspective, someone coming in from the outside and giving you an idea. It could be a horrible idea and you don't want to do it. And you still have to have the discernment and the taste to understand what's the differences between a good idea and a bad idea.

And if you're using it to help you, it's not in charge of you. And I think that's one thing that people can obviously fall into that trap very easily of letting it be in charge of you and saying, ChatGPT said, like how many kids are going to say that in the next 10 years? ChatGPT said XYZ and that's why I did this dumb thing. And it's now you still have your own human judgment. You still have your artistry, your taste, how you want to apply that in your business, in your company.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. Those are such wise words. And the one thing I really take from that is never go for the first pass. Always go back and look at it and then ask for a reiteration of it. And sometimes you see something that looks really good, but you just do that reiteration and it makes a huge difference.

Conrad, it's been so good to chat. We will not leave at eight years.

[Conrad O'Connell]
I was going to say, I'll see you in eight years. That was going to be how I signed off here, but now we won't.

[Heather Bayer]
No, we will not leave at eight years. Now you mentioned a webinar. This episode is coming out on June the 4th, so maybe somebody will listen to it before the webinar, depending on what time it is, because we do publish at three o'clock in the mornings. But anyway, tell us a little bit about where people can connect with you and find you in the easiest way.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Yeah, for sure. So buildupbookings.com is the website if you click 'Getting Started', or you click the 'Book a Free Call' in the top right option, you will get a chance to talk to one of my awesome people on my sales team. And we could talk with you about what we could help you with. If it's anything related to marketing, we probably are interested and obviously we'd like to see if we could potentially be a valuable resource to any vacation or company out there. If you want to talk with me, I'm most active on LinkedIn. That's where I've got the most engagement or that's what I log-on to the most, if you will.

So if you go to LinkedIn, search Conrad O'Connell. I'm pretty sure I'm the only Conrad O'Connell on LinkedIn, or certainly the most active one on there. That's for sure. I can say that with confidence. I'm pretty easy to find there. Or if you go to the BuildUp Bookings website, scroll down to the footer, there's links there and people can check that out.

Pretty easy to find if you have questions. People can email me. Just my first name, conrad@buildupbookings.com would be the email. I get too many emails, but I'll do my best to respond. Maybe it won't be right away, but it'll get processed eventually is how I typically feel about that.

[Heather Bayer]
I will put all these links on the Show Notes anyway. Will the webinar be recorded and released?

[Conrad O'Connell]
For sure. We're actually doing a bit of a series and we've probably done about a dozen of them so far and they're all on YouTube actually. When they're done, we put them all on YouTube. Again, that's linked on the website. People can find that pretty easily. So it'll be recorded. I guess it's the day after. No worries. We're doing it with Steve Trover and I think it'll be a good topic about hiring an agency versus a freelance or versus everything. So it'll be a good one.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. Yeah. And Steve is really immersed in AI as well.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Yeah. Sharp guy. Sharp guy. So I'm looking forward to it.

[Heather Bayer]
As an endorsement, Conrad and BuildUp Bookings worked for our company a number of years ago. And I know it was a number of years ago now, because actually it's three years ago. Almost to the day that we sold.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Phenomenal.

[Heather Bayer]
But I always remember it was such a pleasure working with you. It achieved a lot. And so you get my endorsement 100%.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Thank you. It's so funny. We get in on this note, which is Heather, you may not realize this, but this episode I did with you so long ago helped me so much, because I got my biggest client from it. In that episode, after it came out, I got reached out to from a client. Oh, I could probably say at this point, it was a company in Hawaii called Elite Makena Properties, which kind of doesn't exist in the same form now. And that was called Gather. But at that time from 2017 up until about 2019, 2020, they were my largest client, and they paid my bills. They got me going. And it came from this episode. So it wasn't anything that you did other than hosting the podcast. But that moment, this moment I had on the show so long ago, got me going, got me started, got me a big client. And obviously everything I built off the back of that started from that. So thank you.

[Heather Bayer]
Well, that's good. I hope this one does the same.

[Conrad O'Connell]
That'd be awesome. So we'll hope for the of best luck and let the cards fall where they may as it were.

[Heather Bayer]
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Conrad, for joining me.

[Conrad O'Connell]
Absolutely. Thanks, Heather. Appreciate it.

[Heather Bayer]
Thank you so much, Conrad. That was such a great discussion.

As you can tell, if I get into this AI conversation, I just go off on one. It's always been the same for me over all my years and decades, or whatever. If I get fascinated by a particular topic or subject, I just get 100 percent immersed in it and it just lights me up when I talk about it. So you've probably got that, which is probably why this show is beginning to veer a little bit more over into AI.

We are looking at spinning off some of these episodes into a specific new show and you're going to hear more about that, probably next week and some other initiatives we have underway that promote AI in STR. So yeah, wait for that, It's a coming.

That's it for this week. It's been an absolute pleasure being with you. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to Conrad. I can't believe it was eight years since we last had a conversation. I think because we worked with him, I was having conversations all the time, so maybe that's why I thought he'd been on the show much more than he actually had. So as you can tell from that, it was really worthwhile. Hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you next week.

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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