[Heather Bayer]

Well, it should come as no surprise to you that I'm going to be talking today about AI again, but slightly different today.

I am fresh back from the three-day AI for Business Summit in Orlando, where I got to geek out with 600 other people. And although a few people told me they ran Airbnbs, because nobody knows any different these days, do they? There were no property managers there. I knew nobody. It was really weird. And I'm going to be talking about that, talking about conferences. But more importantly, I'm going to be sharing some of my key takeaways from the AI for Business Summit.

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

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and as ever, I'm super delighted to be back with you once again. And as I said in that introduction, fresh off a three-day geek out at the AI for Business Summit in Orlando. And I want to share everything that I took away from that summit. I've been to a lot of conferences over the years, and mostly, yeah, I would say probably 90-95% of them have been in the short-term rental or vacation rental industry, whether I've been attending them or whether it was conferences that we put on, as in 2016, 2017 and 2018, when we ran the Vacation Rental Success Summit out of Toronto and San Antonio.

And I know some of you that are listening to this went to those summits, those conferences. They were the very first ones, really, that were being held outside of the Vacation Rental Managers Association, and maybe some of the software conferences. But when we put out Vacation Rental Success Summit, VRSS, it was sort of like the very first one, and it did so well. It's a bit like this podcast, you know, it was the very first one back in 2014. You know, I did beat 'Get Paid for Your Pad' by about five months, launch to launch. And I do hold that out as the Vacation Rental Success podcast being the first one out of the gate and still here after 11 years. And we will still be here for quite a while longer, as well as spinning off a couple of extra shows, which you're going to be hearing about very shortly.

But today, surprise, surprise, Heather's here talking about AI again. I do promise you that we are moving back to some interviews with some really successful property managers over the next few weeks and months. I've got a lot of these scheduled out. The first one will be Alexis Miller from Cottage Connection of Maine, and she's going to be with me next week. So make sure you set aside time to listen to that, because I am blown away by Alexis and her story of being the daughter of one of this industry's most renowned property managers, and that's Audrey Leeds Miller. I'm sure many of you do know her. If not, look her up.  

She's been the recipient of awards. She was one of the Pioneer Awards winners from a past Vacation Rental Women's Summit. So Alexis is coming along to share her story about being brought up in this business and what it takes now to be a young property manager in 2025.

So that's next week. But for now, we are into AI again, because I'm obsessed by it. I'm taking you on sort of on this journey outside the vacation rental industry this week, because it is really deeply relevant to anyone running a business in 2025.

What I'm covering today is about artificial intelligence, but it's also about the power of community and finding the people who not only understand where the world is going, but who are actively building the future. So just to give you a little bit of context here, since I embraced AI back in 2023, it was sort of spring 2023, if you remember that ChatGPT was introduced in December of 2022. So since then, I've been curious. I've been pretty cautious, but I've been constantly searching during that time as I've got more and more into this. I've been searching for the people who are using it in a thoughtful and ethical and practical way to drive real business results. And of course, in our business, I've been searching for people who perhaps understand hospitality and know that hospitality always comes first.

So over this time, I've tested all sorts of tools. I've played with ChatGPT a lot and Claude and Perplexity and NotebookLM. If you listened to last week's podcast, you'll have heard what I've been doing with NotebookLM.

And I've also read more about prompt engineering than I ever expected to, because I have gone from that single line prompt, which is a bit like a Google search. And I think a lot of people are still using  the prompts in ChatGPT like a Google search prompt. And now my prompts are coming up on five, six, seven pages long, and they really deliver massive results.

But anyway, over this time, I just kept feeling that something was missing. I needed a community, my AI tribe, because I've got my short-term rental tribe. That's you guys. That's you who I meet at conferences and we hug and we share stories and we follow each other on LinkedIn and Facebook. But I wanted to get into another community, another tribe, that was really going down this AI rabbit hole in the same way as I was. So I went to a few places and I signed up for a couple of groups, maybe four or five groups, actually. There was one from Social Media Examiner, if you've come across Michael Stelzner, certainly socialmediaexaminer.com is a great place to go to learn all about marketing. So he's very much focused on marketing, social media, etc. And he has a very thriving group, which provides a lot of education. So I joined that one. I didn't stay that long. It just didn't fire me up,  people are posting and they are focused mostly on marketing with AI as a bit of a side dish, if you like. And I wanted to find the group that was more AI focused.

I joined Rick Mulready's group, which is another which has lots of tutorials, lots of people interested, but once again, very marketing oriented. And it all changed when something came across my Facebook page. It was an ad for free three day online event. Now, I'm a real sucker for these. I tend to sign up for them. I get all excited. I set aside three days. Of course, you just you're not going to sit there for three days and just learn about AI and nothing else, unless you go to Orlando for the live event, which I've just been to.
And I did sit there for three days. And I didn't even want to get up and go to the washroom in the middle of the session, because I might just miss something. So anyway, back to the free online event, because this is what it all started for me because it's completely changed how I see the potential of AI in business and in my life as well.

So that online summit happened in May. It's three days of presentations and panels. And I've been to these things before. They just seem to be this pitch fest. You know that they're going to give you nuggets of information. But at the end, they're going to sell you something. This wasn't it. So I listened to maybe three, maybe one a day of these presentations and I didn't come across the sales pitch. So that was when I decided, OK, this is good stuff. I'm learning from this and I'm not being sold to. So I upgraded to their twenty seven dollar replay package and I watched a few more sessions.

I've still got that, but actually went a bit further than that because well, I'll come back to that in a sec. I just want to say that the content covered everything from marketing automation and branding, to sales funnels to standard operating procedures and workflows and productivity and mindset. And it was practical and generous and just none of the fluff you sometimes get in free summits. So I paid my twenty seven dollars, but it wasn't giving me that community. That community came when I had to pay a little bit more. So that was ninety seven dollars a month.

And I thought, OK, I joined Michael Stelzner's community for five hundred and seventy dollars. And it had a 30 day money back guarantee. And I got my money back. I joined Rick Mulready's group, which was a little bit more, maybe seven hundred dollars for the year. I stayed there maybe a week or two and then got my money back. This one had a 30-day guarantee and it's just like, well OK, why not try this too? That was when the real transformation came, because I thought I was just joining a community and it is definitely an active community. There's daily posts, there's weekly office hours and there's a really active Facebook group as well that you can join for free, of course. And I'm going to put that link in the Show Notes to that Facebook group. But people were in there sharing prompts and these weren't, as we talked about earlier, they weren't the one line Google prompts, if you like. Just asking a simple question and expecting a great response. These were lengthy, comprehensive and thorough prompts that people were just sharing. They're building systems, they're launching products.

And it was the first time I felt really surrounded by people doing the kind of AI experimentation that felt really purposeful. And it was community driven. And then there were a couple of other big surprises that I didn't realize when I paid my ninety seven dollars. I got access to GoHighLevel, that is built in as well. Now, if you have a CRM already, you might have heard of GoHighLevel. It's comparable to Active Campaign. Many people say it's way better than Active Campaign. And if you don't want to get into the big money of HubSpot, then GoHighLevel, it's very well supported by people. So that came as part of it.

And there was also an app. So the app actually gave me access to ChatGPT and to Claude and to Perplexity and to Grok and to branding materials and to prompts. And I was just a little bit blown away. And then on top of it all, as a community member, I got a free ticket to the three day live event in Orlando. And that's where things truly took off.

So I don't know what to say about these three days I've just had. It was electric. There were over 600 attendees. But what stood out immediately was the diversity, not just in background and business type, but in age. This wasn't what I sort of expected. That it was going to be Gen Z tech-fest. It was going to be Bros. But it was a real balanced 50/50 gender split with an average age of around 45. There were people in their 60s, their 70s, a couple of ladies in their 80s, which blew me away, because I thought maybe, you know, I'm sort of getting up to being one of the older ones. But really, I was almost in the minority at my younger age of not yet 70. So many were retirees or near retirees who decided to start a new venture. Some were building service based businesses. Others were launching product brands or content platforms. But every one of them was fully immersed in AI, not just as a curiosity, but as a core part of their business strategy.

One thing I got out that was mentioned in the very first session that we are here at the leading edge of this AI revolution. We can get into it now and by 2027, it will be fully embedded into our brains, but also our businesses. But in 2027, it's going to be pretty much saturated with people who are still playing at it and not really getting there thoroughly. But it's just going to be very, very busy. So these people that I was talking to were stressing how important it was to adapt to it now.

And then there were those who were there because they just wanted to talk the same language as their grandchildren. But, you know, I've just come back from Orlando full of this and talking to my 11 and 12 year old granddaughters and talking about AI. And I'm getting blank stares. They're not listening to it. Which is quite interesting. I will have more discussions with them. But it made me reflect if these people in their 60s, 70s and 80s can reinvent themselves and dive into new technology with such enormous enthusiasm. What is stopping any of us?

So I want to give you some of my highlights from some of the speaker presentations and some of the tactical takeaways that you might want to consider. Now, this AI for Business was founded by two very, very smart guys, Francis Ablola and Brian Hanson. And they have brought in some really experienced people to support them and to support the community that they're building.

So Francis kicked off by talking about authentic personal branding, encouraging everybody to find and own their own authentic brand identity. And he broke the process down into five steps. Number one, identify your one word brand essence, which is and he asked everybody to find their word. My word that I wanted to I want to convey with our brand is inspired. My LinkedIn profile says inspired AI consultancy, which is what I want to do. I want to inspire the people that I'm working with to embrace this, to bring it into their businesses and realize that it's not taking over. It's augmenting. It is sitting alongside the creativity of you and your team. So that was my word inspired. Some came up with creative. A few came up with reliable, which is not bad in itself. But I certainly like inspired.

And then we're encouraged to think about our own origin story and communicate it clearly. For those of you who've been following me for a long time, you know that I harp on about building that about us page, getting yourself out there with your own origin story, because this is the one thing that is standing us out against the crowd now, isn't it? You've got to be unique. You've got to be authentic. So own your origin story and communicate it clearly.

Thirdly, be emotionally magnetic. Use stories, use language that connects with your audience. And of course, you need to identify your audience because until you've identified your audience, it is a little bit of bit tough to speak their language to them. So that's what I will add. And a lot of other speakers talked about finding your avatar. You can use ChatGPT and Claude and other platforms to help you create your avatar.

And I came away from this three day event with a number of these amazing prompts. And this is something I want to give to you. I want to give you a prompt that will help you create your avatar. So listen to the end. We'll tell you where to get that prompt.

But authentic personal branding, your takeaway, use it to refine how you present yourself on your website, on your profiles and any other social media. And then from that, AI can help write listings, bios, email templates that sound like you and not a robot. So anything that you create, whether it's content, whether it's communication, whether it's something that goes on your website, it is written in your voice.

So then Brian Hanson came along, very smart guy. And he talked about smart systems and process automation. And he talked about how he automates nearly every aspect of client interaction. And he uses tools like GoHighLevel, Zapier and Make. And if you don't know what these are, I will be doing some explainer videos over the next few weeks. There was a great session on creating video. So I've got to practice. So I'm going to do some explainer videos. So watch out for those two.

But Brian showed some flows for capturing leads from social media or a website, which is really easy. Sending immediate, personalised replies when that lead comes in. I know from my time at CottageLink Rental Management that we'd get a query in from a guest and somebody would respond to it, not always immediately. But with these workflows and processes, that response can go out immediately, the moment that is received. And it's personalised. It's not just, hey, we got your email, we'll get back to you. But it's a real response.

He showed flows for tagging and segmenting leads so that you're then able to market directly to different segments and then triggering email sequences based on the behaviour of the client that is connecting with you. So just to give it the STR slant, to give it the vacation rental slant - I know that argument about vacation rental and STR is still ongoing on LinkedIn so I'm using them interchangeably.

So you could implement similar flows for inquiries and bookings. Automatically send, you know, your welcome packets. You could do upsell emails for late checkouts and tours and review requests post stay. Now, I know a lot of the SAS products that are out there do these, that they've got them built in, maybe built into a PMS. But I think it's really worthwhile getting to understand how you can do this yourself. And this can turn a 10 minute task into a one click system.

So the next presentation, which I absolutely loved, was by a lady called Rachel Roffe, and it was called Lean Print on Demand Business. I always thought print on demand meant you had product to send out to somebody and you wrapped it up, and you took it to the mailbox, etc. But that's not the case now. Rachel uses ChatGPT to create product ideas and she uses Midjourney, which is an image creation platform, to create mock-ups of what she wants to put on things like mugs, T-shirts, cutting boards, dish towels. She comes up with the design to go on these items, but she doesn't have the items in her inventory. She sends them out to a fulfillment house, and when somebody places an order, whether it's on Etsy or Amazon or eBay, if they place an order, that order goes directly out to the fulfillment house, where the design is printed on the particular product and then sent to the buyer.

So think about this. You could create your own line of branded merchandise. Think, you know, welcome gifts for guests or small souvenirs they can buy during or after their stay.
Maybe creating downloadable travel journals or local guides to make an added value product, but you don't have to produce them yourself and have that inventory and get it out to your guests. You can create this on-demand product system, print-on-demand system, to get that fulfilled for you. This was put across as a really great business idea for your kids or for your grandkids, and yeah, I've got one of my grandkids who is quite interested in doing this, so I'm going to be having a chat with her later on.

So all of these things are going to be in the Show Notes or links to all these people and some of the things that they were talking about will be in the Show Notes.

The next one up was Kevin Anson, and his presentation was called Video Marketing at Scale, and he went deep on how to build effective marketing videos fast, and he broke down how to write scripts using ChatGPT, and then he talked about the four-part video structure, having a hook, dealing with the problem, what's the problem, the story of how to deal with it, and then the call to action. He talked about how to film batches of videos in one sitting, and then simply editing with Decript and Canva for brand consistency. So he gave prompt examples like, write a 15-second video script to promote a luxury lakeside vacation rental stay to stressed out parents, and then he showed how to personalize it for different platforms such as Instagram and YouTube and TikTok. It was fascinating. I could go off and just spend my life doing that, I think. It was just such fun.

So the takeaway for us is, use this to market your properties online, your inventory online. Film videos that showcase their unique features, whether it's a hot tub or it's a lake view, or it's a pickleball court, and use Kevin's format to structure them. It made me think about pickleball, because I do a lot of pickleball play, and thinking that a hook for a video could be having trouble finding a place where you can play pickleball on vacation. And the problem is that it's difficult to find places to get open play, even where people live, let alone when they're going on vacation. So let's say you have a property that has a pickleball court, and you tell a story of people arriving, and they all get out the car, they've all got their pickleball gear on, and they just dump all their stuff in the property, and head out onto the court, and they are happy for the entirety of their stay. And then the call to action, of course, is book this, book this property for your next pickleball vacation. So I love it. I love it.

You could do guest interviews, do exit interviews when they're about to leave and ask them to give a testimonial. Do a day in the life at our rental walkthrough, and then speed it up. So, you know, it's getting coffee on the dock. It's a walk in the local town to the local farmer's market. It's lunch in a local restaurant. It's an afternoon out on a canoe or a kayak. It's a barbecue, and then an evening around the campfire, and you could create a neat little very short video just with these little cameos, and then the call to action at the end. So yeah, I love that one. I love that one. I'm going to go and watch that one again when the replays come out.

So next, and I love this, the guy's name was Joe Zapiain. And he came to talk about, guess what? Zapier. So he was talking about AI for project and process management, and he shared how to run a service business entirely through a product called ClickUp. ClickUp is something that we are currently moving over to. One day after I got back, we are getting rid of Asana, we're getting rid of Notion. It integrates Google Drive. It's like a project management software all in one. Maybe some of you are using something like Asana or monday.com or other project management tools. But do take a look at ClickUp. They've got a very generous free package that you could give it a try. And actually, when you go from free to the next level, which I think is $7 per person per month, it's very, very reasonable and there's loads of tutorials. I loved it.

So Joe uses it to store his SOPs and his training documents. He tracks project timelines and client interactions. And he uses it to automate onboarding tasks. And he was talking about creating a workflow where you use ChatGPT and then Zapier to connect to a lot of the different platforms in ClickUp and then output to the team or to owners or to clients. Once again, I think I'm going to get in touch with Joe and ask if he will come on the podcast and be interviewed because this was fascinating. I want to know much more about it.
And I'm sure you would like this as well.

So he uses AI to generate procedures with prompts like create a checklist for onboarding a new cleaning team at a short-term rental. And with all the knowledge base that is built into ClickUp, it will generate that checklist. So for takeaway for us, it would be building your operations manual this way, creating ClickUp checklist for cleaners, for maintenance staff, or your virtual assistants. It helps you build it once and then you never lose track again. Now, of course, I know some of you will be using Breezeway or Turno or other operations software. But if you're not, and you'd like to consider doing something yourself, then head on over and have a look at ClickUp.

So next up was Chris Moore, who talked about client qualification and delivery, and he uses AI to overhaul his client onboarding, so think owners, of course. Chris showed how to ask the right questions before a discovery call to auto generate summaries for teams and to pre-fill proposal templates based on inputs, you can see how that would work for owner acquisition. That was definitely what came to mind when he was talking. So the takeaway is, this is something that you know, using AI to send pre-arrival forms to guests asking about their preferences, you know, if they want early check-in or travel style or allergies, for example, and then use AI to generate a custom itinerary or local guide just for them.

So I really I enjoyed that I enjoyed every session. There was not a single session, I was not totally focused on.

Bernard Ablola, I talked earlier about Francis Ablola, he was the first one on, Bernard is his brother and his specialty is LinkedIn for thought leaders.

Now this was an interesting session. His approach to content strategy was really efficient. It was very personal. He showed us how to build a week's worth of posts for LinkedIn with ChatGPT. He used frameworks like his story insight offer, which I'm going to have to go back to and have another look because I've got that written down and I'm not sure what that means. But the takeaway here was you don't need LinkedIn, but you do need constant visibility if you're on there. And if you want to use LinkedIn as a really powerful marketing piece for you or lead generation. So Bernard gave us a method to build weekly social posts, some behind the scenes hosting insights, guest reviews or some photo tours of your space. So it was a great method. I will put a link to Bernard Ablola and his site in the Show Notes.

Gosh, there were so many more that I haven't covered here. It was just such a real fire hose of information. And it was hard, you know, I just got back at three o'clock this morning. I slept for three hours. I got up at six. Can you hear it in my voice? So I left Orlando with this massive notebook of ideas. Well, in fact, it wasn't a notebook. I didn't take a single note. What I did instead was I set ChatGPT to advanced voice mode and I had it record every session. And then I asked ChatGPT just to give me the key takeaways and highlights from each session. So that's what you're getting today. It's what I brought back from those ChatGPT highlights and takeaways.

Now, there's always one caveat with ChatGPT, that if you ask it something and it's not really clear what you want, or whether you haven't given it enough information, it will hallucinate. It will tell you what it thinks you want to hear. And I heard this a lot from people over the weekend that they are spending a lot of time arguing against the idea that ChatGPT is going to take away our jobs and it's going to take away our livelihoods. And to an extent, that is clearly going to happen, certainly on some entry level and some data input type of jobs. But for those of us who can see AI as something that sits alongside us, supports us, gives us back just massive amounts of time that we can then use so much more productively to be more creative. And in our business, of course, it's a tool that lets you focus more on hospitality. It lets you focus more on human connection and creativity. So if that was the big message that came out, it was definitely it. AI is not the answer to everything. As one of the speakers says, it's the amplifier, it's the enhancer, and it's the assistant, but the value still comes from us. It's our insight, our vision, and our voice.

So let's pull this all together a little bit. What did we hear? Well, here's a few things you can automate guest messaging and integrate upsells. That's going to boost revenue with less effort. I mean, who doesn't want to do that? You can use video marketing strategies to increase bookings and to showcase your unique space. And then what's really important to me is you can organize your business behind the scenes with AI generated standard operating procedure workflows and click up boards. I can't wait to get going on click up and see how that's going to work.

Keep in touch with me. I will be keeping everybody informed, mostly on my Facebook group, which was The Business of Short-term Rental and Property Management. And I know many of you listening are members of that group, but that group is now changing just with two letters. So it is now The Business of AI in Short-term Rental and Property Management, because we're pivoting more and more now to helping companies, helping operators, to understand that this is not scary stuff. It's not complicated stuff. If I can do it, seriously, if I can get to grips with this, absolutely anyone can. I know it can seem so overwhelming. And there's times that I definitely get overwhelmed, I was a little bit over the weekend. I had to step back and go, whoa, there's a lot of information coming at me. I can't take it in all at once, but we have AI to help to take this information and make it more palatable, more easy to digest, if you like. It just shows you we're coming up on lunchtime because I'm now using all this food related metaphors. Yeah, you don't need to do it all.

The thing is, is to pick one area that you can improve with AI and you'll begin to see just how powerful and freeing these tools can be. We'll be launching a new program later in July, which is called the AI Ambassador Program. And what we're doing with this is we want to help companies to embrace AI through a dedicated person within their workspace. So it's not me just creating a course that you can come and sit and click to the end and really not take it in. This is about training somebody in your workplace who has already shown that they're interested. You know, they've shown that perhaps they're already going down that rabbit hole a little bit. And they want to be that champion, that advocate for AI within the workplace. And we're going to teach people how to run little workshops. We're going to teach them how to use prompts, how to create a business brand that is consistent across everything that is done.

I talked to a property manager recently and we do an audit and I asked them what platforms people were using. And we did a, you know, a little bit of a straw poll. And we had one person who loved Grok and we had one person who used ChatGPT. And then we had somebody else who said, I just found Perplexity. They were all using these different platforms. There was no consistency in brand. Although they had a brand, there was no consistency in branding in what they were creating through their interaction with all these different platforms. So an AI Ambassador is the one who gets everybody together and says, okay, let's spread our brand across everything we use. Let's add in some consistency here and make sure everybody's on the same page using the same platforms and getting consistent output. They will learn how to see where hallucination comes in. They will learn to identify bottlenecks that can be dealt with with AI.

And I'm also pleased to say that we now have a team that is able to implement some of these AI solutions within a company. So I'm not going to be doing this. I now have a team that does that. So if you need a workflow to create SOP management, for example. So if you've got somebody new coming into the company and they're unsure of what to do on a particular piece of software or a particular process or system you have, you have your SOPs all loaded into the workflow and they can just ask a question. They can have a written answer or they can have a person who talks to them, an AI person. So these are the things that we're building out right now and we'd love to share them with you.

So just one thing I want to mention, another AI for Business free three day online event is coming up in July. So I'm putting details on that in the Show Notes. Just go and listen to a couple of them. It's free. All you've got to do is sign up and you will get access to that three day online event. And there is no hard sell on anything. If you want to see them later, if you want to watch recordings, then they ask you for $27, which I think is really reasonable for the amount of value that you'll get. If you want to talk to me any more about AI for Business and my connection with them, because I am 100% committed to this group now and I'd be happy to talk to you.

So what else? Was there anything else I wanted to share with you at this moment? Oh, and there's one thing I did forget. I did mention earlier on that I wanted to give you this prompt to help you find your perfect avatar. So all you've got to do is go to the Show Notes and click on the link to get the prompt and we'll get that to you. I'm testing it right now. It's I think it's pretty darn neat. So I look forward to see how you use it.

Don't forget, if you've got any questions about any of this, or you want to jump on a call with me, then I am more than happy to talk to you about it. I'm thinking this stuff from the time I wake up in the morning to the time I go to bed at night and I'm absorbing a lot. And as I have always done over these years in serving my community, whatever I learn, I want to pass on to you.

So thank you for coming on this journey with me today. I hope it sparked some inspiration, helped you see AI in a new light, perhaps one that feels more accessible, useful in your business. So once again, I'd love to connect, point you in the right direction.

So until next time, keep testing, keep showing up, stay curious. We're all doing amazing things and I think there's so many more amazing things to come. I can't wait to see where this all takes you.

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.