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VRS486 – What to Ask, and How to Ask – A Chat GPT Masterclass for Short-Term Rentals with Bart Sobies

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This episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast is sponsored by
The Vacation Rental Formula Business School
The Short-Term Rental education platform to solve your business challenges

We had to hop on the bandwagon and talk about ChatGPT, and who better to join me than Bart Sobies of the Australian direct booking software platform, iBooked.online.

Bart has been immersed in the world of AI for a few years, but the public onset of ChatGPT has enabled him to reach a much wider audience with his enthusiastic take on the AI language model that has the world in its thrall.

Bart says,

“Now, when you're listening to this episode, you might be listening to it when it comes out. You might be listening to it in a year's time. So this stuff is going to get better.”

Well in fact it already has.

Between recording this episode and publishing it, ChatGPT4 has arrived, Microsoft has added AI to its Edge browser and Bing search engine, and it’s powered by the same advanced technology that OpenAI used to create ChatGPT. (There is a link at the foot of these notes to a post comparing the two.)

And there’s no waiting list to get into it.

Technology is moving fast and if you aren’t using it, you are missing out on massive opportunities to save time, create amazing content and boost your business in so many ways.

In this episode, we explore the many ways ChatGPT can be used to elevate our businesses and take us into uncharted territory.

Bart shares:

  • Why he is polite to ChatGPT
  • Ways of using AI to create concise messaging that reaches a target audience
  • The importance of context in prompts
  • When to start a new chat
  • How to generate listing titles
  • How to request description rewrites
  • An easy way to write a job description
  • Ways of taking the emotion out of review responses
  • Some drawbacks and limitations of the model
  • The enormous potential of AI going forward


    iBooked.online

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Heather Bayer

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

Heather Bayer

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and as ever, I am super excited to be back with you once again. Still going on this countdown to leaving the sunshine of Gulf Shores, Alabama, and heading back north up I-75 and back into the snow. It looks like it's going to be pretty cold and snowy when we get back home, but what the heck? After five months down here, I think I'd actually quite like to see a little bit of snow, even if it's just for a few days, because at least we know in April, that even if it does snow, it will go away pretty quickly, so it's fine.

Heather Bayer

I'm not going to talk about the weather anymore. I'm going to talk about something that we really haven't discussed at all, which is artificial intelligence and machine learning, because it's on everybody's lips at the moment.  Every time I look at a news report or articles on just about every popular website related to the short-term rental industry, you're going to see something about AI and ChatGPT. And actually, just before I started to record this, I was looking at some AI-generated head-shots. Mike's been working with a company, and I'll put a link to them in the Show Notes… let me just see what they are called. They're called Try It On, and you send them images, and I'm sure you've seen these, you send them your selfies, and for a relatively small fee, I think it was about $25, they will send back 30 or 40 different head-shots generated by AI. And I tell you, they actually don't take out the wrinkles. They don't take out the crow's feet around the eyes. One or two of these, I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, that's what I'm going to look like in 10 year's time. So I won't be using those. But there are one or two that look like me. But it's really weird when you're actually faced with this array of different head-shots, and you know that they're all based on this one image of yourself, but it doesn't look like you.  At least to me, it doesn't look like me. But anyway, we'll probably share a few of these on the Facebook group and get some comments on them, because I find this fascinating.

Heather Bayer

We've been using AI platforms for a while for generating things like headlines. You put in a summary of something that you're writing and say, Give me a funny headline, or Give me a headline that's eye-catching, or something that's going to surprise, a surprising headline, something like that. And they come up with some great suggestions. So yes, we've been using a whole range of platforms, AI platforms, to help us out with content generation. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. And I know that we have discussed this in the past. We've been talking about predictive hospitality with Evan Dolgow a while back. That seems like ages ago that I went to Miami and saw Evan talk about predictive hospitality, and it seemed like it was just all so new. And now it's not. It's just mainstream and everybody's using it.

Heather Bayer

And I know that my friend Bart Sobies in Australia has been doing a lot with his clients over there and his clients in the US with AI and ChatGPT and how to use it in our industry. So I wanted to bring him on board and have a good conversation about how we can actually practically use it. And by practically, I don't mean just give it a topic and have ChatGPT generate an entire blog post, which you then publish. But I want to know more about how you can use ChatGPT, or other AI platforms and still retain your personality, still keep that bit of yourself, your voice, your brand in there so that it's not being diluted into something that is completely generic that you can see everywhere.

Heather Bayer

I'm sure now you're probably looking at articles and things in the press, and you're probably saying, these were generated by AI. They were generated by ChatGPT. You can see it, and people have just copied and pasted the bullet points and not done any customizing, shall we say, of them. Anyhow, I'm going to talk to Bart about all sorts of things.  You're going to come away with some really great action points on how to use this very powerful new resource that we all have at our fingertips.

Heather Bayer

I'm super delighted to have with me today Bart Sobies. We're in the afternoon here in Gulf Shores, Alabama. We're on tomorrow in Australia – that always screws me up completely – Bart, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.

Bart Sobies

Absolute pleasure. And it is a pleasure to be joining you from the future.

Heather Bayer

I love it. I wish it were with lottery numbers, though. Don't we all say that?

Bart Sobies

Yeah, absolutely. The lottery, knowing what's happening ahead of time. It's one of the golden nuggets out there.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, great shame. Somebody will work it out since we're talking about the future today. So maybe by the end of this, we'll have worked this out.

Heather Bayer

We'll have to ask ChatGPT, right?

Heather Bayer

Yes. So that is going to probably be the main topic of this conversation. But firstly, Bart, just welcome back. You were on the show not so long ago. We met in Miami at the Book Direct Show, which was a great event. And I know that you've been to numerous events since then. And you're now back in Australia again. So just give us a quick recap on what you do, who you are, and you can tell everybody why I suggested that you come on and talk about ChatGPT.

Bart Sobies

Yeah, beautiful. Bart Sobies is my name. I run a company called iBooked Online [ibooked.online]. We are specialists in book direct websites. So we help short-term rental owners get more direct bookings through creating a really beautiful website where people can book direct. But I guess our biggest point of difference is that we spend a lot of time, and money, in optimizing that user journey so that people can really check out. It's not just visiting a website and it looking nice, it's actually saying, What triggers do they need to follow to get through to the checkout? Beyond that, I'm also the host of the Accommodation Show. Also now we've launched the Accommodation Professionals Network, which is a training network where you can go and get yourself educated and collaborate with other hosts to become better at your business and a real professional in this space.

Bart Sobies

Why did you get in touch with me? Well, hopefully, I did a good enough job last time when we met. But really, I'll tell you the story – I think it was in November – that was my first real encounter with trying one of these new AI tools. Actually, I lie a little bit.  Before that, I don't know if anyone knows, I heard of a tool called Jasper AI. And that was a tool that everyone was using to do copywriting, to help them answer questions that they had. And then the media started circling. Hey, there's this new tool called ChatGPT. And I was saying, yeah, I've heard about it, I've used it once, don't really understand it. I want a deep dive. I've gone in, I took this thing apart. I really understood how ChatGPT works – it's the worst name ever – and how you can use it in your accommodation business, in your short-term rental business to become a better operator, but also to just save yourself a lot of time, effort, and money. So I created a course, a five-day challenge on Facebook. We had over 350 people join up and then learn about ChatGPT. And I think that's when you reached out, Heather, and you're like, Hey, what do you know? What can you share with my audience? So that's why we're here today.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, that's exactly it. And I love that you're in the training and education business because I think it's so important that we get to share the knowledge that we've learned over time and help people do this business the right way. And that's why we're all involved. The majority of people who come on to this show are involved in book direct.

Heather Bayer

I'm just writing a course of my own at the moment, and I have a topic that says it's not all Airbnb.

Bart Sobies

No, you're absolutely right. And look, what's fascinating is that using this technology and it's going to help you get more direct bookings. That's how we've always pitched, that we market it, because you're going to be more effective in terms of communicating with potential guests on your website, be it through email, be it through social media and just doing your marketing efforts. You're communicating more effectively because now you've got a tool which is probably better than most people writing in English. People are doing dissertations and they're doing all these exams and they're writing better than a human would. You're using this technology to communicate more effectively with your guests, then convert them into more bookings. Funnily enough, it's still going to help you get more bookings through the OTAs as well. We had a few people in the course, they got to the first part of the five day challenge where we optimized the descriptions and the titles. They came back the next day and they said, Hey, Bart, I just got three more bookings last night. I said, What?  So that's how powerful this particular technology is. And it can be from both sides. So, number 1 is you're saving your time and effort, but the other side is, yes, you will get more bookings if you're communicating more effectively.

Heather Bayer

I think it takes away the issue that's faced a lot of people for a lot of time, me included, and that's writer's block. You don't have to have writer's block anymore. No more staring at a blank sheet saying, how do I describe this property? Or how do I start? What do I put in this blog post? All you have to do is to create a prompt, and we're going to talk about things like prompts and what that actually means and what your responsibility is to create this thing. But let's go back to the very beginning about creating content and how important it is to have for a direct book website.

Bart Sobies

Yes. When I'm doing my training, when I'm teaching people, I'm always teaching people about understanding your audience and who's actually reading and where they come from, what their background is, and who your audience is, who you're actually talking to. And I think that's the first part of the puzzle overall. It's really understanding your audience and being able to talk to them effectively in the way that they're going to understand. And for most people out there, most people that I've ever worked with that have built a website, they start talking about themselves from their own point-of- view. And they say, This is my short-term rental. This is what's in it. There's a bed, there's a pool, there's a kitchen, there's a TV, you can watch Netflix on it, and all these things. And you're just talking about your property. And to be honest with you, for most people that are reading this, it's really dry, it's really boring. There's nothing that differentiates you. You're not really talking to your audience. But if you knew that this person was coming for a trip to visit an area because they want to go sightseeing and they've come with their family to show them around as a cultural type of experience, then you would start to rephrase everything on your website in the context of that person.

Bart Sobies

You would be saying, Hey, this is the perfect place to come and stay for a weekend away with your family. We've got all of these things that are suitable for you. We've got toys for the kids to play with. We've got a separate area for you to be able to do some work if you need some quiet space. Then not only that, during the days, this is what you might get up to. You might get out into the city. It's a five minute walk to a local cafe where they've got the best coffee and the best croissants and the best whatever it is in your area. And what you're doing is you're re-framing everything in the context of people that are visiting. And if they get to your website and that's the first thing they read, they go, Oh my God. They understand exactly who I am and what I need. Guess what's going to happen?

Heather Bayer

Yeah, you're in their head.  And what happens is that that immediate rapport is created. This person gets me.

Bart Sobies

Yeah, exactly. So their likelihood of booking direct at that stage goes up infinitely, because very few other people or very few of your competitors will actually be doing the same thing and talking directly to your audience. And there's an argument here that might say, Heather, well, if I'm talking to a group that's a family, then what about everybody else? What if it's not a family? What if it's a couple that's coming to visit us? And now we're talking directly to families, so what about the couples? So that's where you really need to do a lot of work. And like I said at the beginning, understanding who your potential Avatars and audiences are, target two or three of them within your copy. And that's going to get you far more bookings because the other people that are on the fringe of those top three, they're going to book anyway.

Bart Sobies

But at least you're talking to those specific categories of people that are coming. So that's where technology comes in, because where you said, and I want to go back to this, the writer's block.  We can get really stuck on knowing what to write. When we're writing to a couple, when we're writing to a family or to an audience.  So we don't really understand that. Well, it's very difficult to get started. It's very difficult with those first words to say, what do I write? What is going to be interesting to a family? You can even tell when I'm talking, there are things where I just don't know the answer. And I would now go to ChatGPT and say, alright, what would be the perfect experience for a family of four in my city?

Heather Bayer

Okay, let's go there. Let's go and get a little bit more specific. So we're talking about the Avatar, and we've covered this in many other episodes. We've talked about Avatar, persona, whatever you'd like to call it. This is your perfect target guest, the person that is most likely to come and rent your place. And you should have this bio of this person; where they live, how old they are, what their family makeup is, where they work, what they like to do for leisure. You've mentioned this. So how do you take this? You've got this picture of your perfect guest, and maybe it is… Is it Gen Z now, the youngest… You're a Gen Z investor, let's say, and you want to attract retired people, but you've got absolutely no idea what they might want to do beyond playing pickleball, because we know that everybody that's retired now plays pickleball, including me.

Bart Sobies

That's just such a great question because we don't really know what's typical. But by the way, there's a lot of generalization that you're going to be doing. I want you to be conscious of this. We're not talking about… Of course, when we write our Avatar and we talk about ideal customer, we're talking about one person or one individual or one family group, so then we can write to them. But there's a lot of generalization in there. So if we're going at the lowest common denominator and say, what do retirees generally want when they go and do this experience? And funnily enough, I was actually at a conference last week for a big event. And Tourism Research Australia had actually done this awesome research. And what they've done is they've said, Okay, retirees, what is it that they actually want from a place if they're traveling to do a cultural experience? And then you find out, and then they've done the research, that, Oh, you know what? 38% of them – and I don't have the exact number but we can post up a link to it – 38% are interested in Indigenous experiences. And you go, What? Really?

Bart Sobies

They're really interested in Indigenous experiences? Yes, they are. So what you would do i,s you would do two things. If you wanted to create a story of an experience of staying with you for a retiree, 1) you could go to ChatGPT and you could put in a prompt and you would make something like this. You would say something like, ChatGPT, can you please? And I always like to use please. I don't know why; I've had people comment on that. Why do you always put please? I don't know. I feel I should be polite to ChatGPT because it's so helpful. Could you please write me an ideal day or an ideal experience for a guest who is a retiree to my city? And what will happen is ChatGPT will take the Avatar, the retiree, and it will take the city, and then it will start to create a whole lot of words, which will then guide you in terms of writing a copy on your website for the retiree. And then if you wanted to… Sorry, one last thing. Then if you wanted to, and this is where ChatGPT is so important, is you want to give it the right prompts and the right data, you might go and then grab the research and you might say, the top three things that retirees like to do are food and drink, theater, and Indigenous experiences.  And then ChatGPT will take those three and build on that and your location and your Avatar. And then it will start to give you some really concise messaging that you can then convey to your potential guests.

Heather Bayer

Yes, what I wanted to pick up on there, you actually said that this will guide you in the creation of. And I think this is really important. And I have seen a lot recently, and in some popular short-term rental writers' articles, those that are just copied and pasted directly from ChatGPT. And I don't think you have to be around it that long to realize what is generated directly from there and what has been taken as a guide and then personalized and somebody's own brand has been put upon it. How important is that?

Bart Sobies

There's a few things you want to be careful of. One is if your audience starts to understand that you're copying and pasting from something that's AI generated and they can see it, that's where the problem arises. There's actually nothing, in my view, conceptually wrong with just copying and pasting if the data is accurate and if it's perfect. The problem we have right now is that the answer ChatGPT will give you a little bit too generic. They sound the same. They're picking up on the same language model. So there isn't that much randomness, which is actually happening, which is actually that randomness or the character that you have within the way you talk. It gets lost and it becomes very generic. People can start to pick up on it and see it because they're going to see it more and more and more with everybody. Then that's when they can disengage. So someone starts reading it, they go, All right, this is really enthusiastic. Why is Heather so pumped up about Bart coming onto the show, she never talks like that. Because: 1), you may have given ChatGPT the wrong prompt, or 2), you haven't gone through and really read what's been written, to then reword it into your own words.

Bart Sobies

There's a few tips that I'll give. One is that there are some tools – if you're looking at plagiarism and that thing – there are some tools that can actually rewrite the content to then avoid the ChatGPT detectors. That's another story altogether. But you can also give an instruction in terms of tone in the way that you want it to sound. And then therefore, you could say, Hey, please write this as though I was the President of the United States, or Please write this as though I'm Joe Rogen. Or, Please write this as though I'm Elon Musk, whoever you can think of that's quite a popular voice, and it will do it for you. But yeah, 100%, you want to be super careful with those prompts and the words, and you definitely need to read everything and potentially add your own voice to it so that it sounds authentic.

Heather Bayer

You did mention… you were talking about retirees and giving a prompt to generate some ideas on what this Avatar could do when they came to this particular location. And you said after ChatGPT comes up with the first iteration, you then ask it another question, or you give it some more information. And I think it took me a while to come around to that it wasn't a one and done thing. So could you go into that in a little more depth as to the fact that it is a conversation? And as you go forward, you generate more and more and better material.

Bart Sobies

Yeah. So there's a few things I want to cover off here, and this is really important for everyone to know. The reason why it's important to listen to what we're seeing right now, it's not about ChatGPT; that's one of the things I really want to emphasize. This is about AI and the technology getting better to help you within your business in all sorts of ways. And we'll talk about those ways in a second, the things that you can do using this technology. And this technology, it's all about language and it's using that language to generate responses, and that's the key to this. So you can get different data points and they can analyze it with different models. But this is actually using a language-based model to then give you the answers. Therefore, because it's using language, it can only give you answers based on what you've given it. And if you're not clear and concise and if it doesn't really understand what it's meant to do with this language or this data that you've given it, then it just won't work. It just won't give you the answers that you're actually looking for.

Bart Sobies

So the more accurate you can be in your questions and the more data that you give it to work from, the more accurate it can be in your responses. Now, when we talk about retirees, we talked about quite generally, we said, all right, they're going to visit this particular city. We said that they're probably going to be interested in these different things. So we're giving it a few hints to get it going. Now, if we wanted to elaborate on it, we might say, You know what? This is a group of retirees. There's four of them. Or we might say, you know what? This is a solo retiree traveler who's super rich, filthy rich. And then you put that in and you know what? The experience will probably be completely different to a group of four retirees. So what you can do is, as you go through, one is you can change the tone to say, Could you please rewrite this in a different tone? But also, could you now please rewrite this, but rewrite it for a solo retiree that's got lots of cash or that loves to sell or whatever it is?

Bart Sobies

You can keep on giving more and more context and the more you give it, the more accurate the answers can be. Now – you will have done this before, Heather – you've given it more context and it gets it completely wrong. Have you had that happen before?

Heather Bayer

Yes. And I've come back and said, No, that's not right. And then, of course, you get the long apology.

Bart Sobies

Yeah. That's right. I'm so sorry I got that wrong. Let me try again. And so it's important that people listening understand that this tool is a tool that you can use to your advantage, but you have to know how to use this tool. And right now, the tool we're using is called ChatGPT. In the future, you'll be using a different tool depending on what gets developed and how this technology moves forward. It's all about your understanding what prompts to give it. There's two things that I do. One is, if it hasn't quite understood it, but I see that it's going the right direction, I will give it more guidance and say, All right, you've got this description correct, you've got all of these bits correct, but these parts here that are not quite working, we don't really think that this person is going to be interested in going nightclubbing. You got that completely wrong, please remove that part, but please add that they want to have a go and see an orchestra or whatever it is. I'm generalizing a lot here. So then you can rewrite that, or you might need to take a step back and go back to your initial prompt and then rewrite it and then ask a different question or rephrase the question with a bit more specificity as to what you're actually looking for in terms of your answer.

Heather Bayer

Here's a question for you. So if you're going to do that, do you start with a completely new thread?

Bart Sobies

This is a good one. So this is trial and error and experimentation. I've actually gone through and put in the same question with a word difference, like an ‘and' or an ‘or' or something like that. And then it's given me completely different responses. I actually find that the longer you thread it, the more it starts to pull from content which is a little bit irrelevant to my last question in there. So I'm generally quite often using new fresh prompts to then get going rather than try to work on previous ones. Most of the time, maybe about three questions deep. And then after that, it gets a little bit confused and it's a bit like, Oh, I don't know which parts you want me to take from.

Heather Bayer

Yeah. Thank you for that. Because I was a little confused about whether to just keep going and keep going. And then I forget what came up at the top as well.

Bart Sobies

Yeah, that's right. So sometimes what I'll do is I actually take the last answer it gave me, which I know is most relevant, start a new thread and start working from there and going down.

Heather Bayer

Excellent. Let's get really practical here with things that people can actually do. We've talked about this group of retirees going to one location. So it's like it's a blog post or it's an evergreen content article for your website, what else can we use this for?

Bart Sobies

Where's it going to help? So when I did the five day challenge, this was where I got my head space into it. I said, how do we get more direct bookings? How do we use AI in the most effective way? I think that the challenge was all about, one, to get more direct bookings, but also to get more bookings overall and just to be more efficient and that sort of thing. Those are the two areas that we're going to talk about now and the different things that you can do. You would have heard me clicking around. I'm just bringing up my list to make sure I don't forget anything that's really important.

Bart Sobies

So, I think that if we start off with the basics, we're looking at things like optimizing your listings. So, the title of your listing; the title is one of the most important ones, and that's where you're going to get most people clicking or engaging with it. It's actually interesting because some of the OTAs don't even give the title anymore when you're actually doing a search as a guest. But these titles, you're going to have them on your website, on a lot of OTAs as well, so that when they click on them, it's going to explain what your property is all about. So what you'll do is you'll go through and you'll go to ChatGPT and you'll grab the whole description of your property. Then under that description, you'll say, Please create 5, 10, 15 different titles for the listing. And then you'll also potentially say something like, Please make these short or concise, or Please make them in under 30 words, or Please make them target this particular demographic. Then the last part is you're also going to say, Please make it engaging, then that's going to call people to actually click on it and that sort of thing.  So that's the first one, it's getting your title.

Bart Sobies

And the second part is your description. For most people out there, they haven't used this tool, they haven't gone through and re-looked at their descriptions, because quite often we just don't have the time, we haven't thought about it. Get your whole description and then just put that into your favorite AI tool, ChatGPT this time around. And then just at the bottom put, Please rewrite this in a more engaging way, or Please rewrite this in a way which is more appealing. And that's going to generate a response which you'll find that there'll be bits that you will take and you'll put into your description and you're pretty much good to go. So optimizing your titles, that's one of the top things. And that's what I was saying before. People have done this and then immediately over the same night got more bookings just by improving their description. It's pretty incredible.

Heather Bayer

Okay.  So we've got titles, we've got the listing. What else are we going to be using this for? I'm using it for so much at the moment, and I did, as a bit of an experiment for the first time, I put my prompt in. I'm talking to an expert on ChatGPT about using it for short-term rentals, what questions should I be asking? And it generated a really good group of questions. Not all of them that I'm using, but it was real good triggers for me to create a good interview. Now, I'm using this and I used this recently when I talked to Keith Brady from Florida Vacation Rental Law. I wasn't really sure of what questions I should be asking a lawyer about. What do people want to know? So my prompt was, talking to a vacation rental lawyer who specializes in writing contracts and agreements and whatever else he does. And what questions should I ask him that will be appreciated by an audience of property managers and hosts alike? So it generated all of those questions. So that was my example of what I'm using it for.

Bart Sobies

Yes. So the key thing here is whenever you've got an opportunity to try to get more information, then it's worthwhile asking the question. You lose nothing by going into ChatGPT and saying, Hey, what do you think about this particular problem that I've got? How would you resolve it? And that's all that it's doing is you're going in and you're saying, Your problem is that you've got a guest and you don't know too much about law. And then what it's doing is it's actually filling in some of the blanks that you might not have the answers to. So what it does, because it has pretty much all the information on the internet, bar the last two years right now, but that will change, it's giving you a much broader context of information or much broader range of questions that you would never, as a human being, be able to think of yourself.

Bart Sobies

So therefore, when you're asking, Hey, what else can we do? Anything. Any question that you have, or any problem that you're dealing with, you can go into there. I put clients that I work with, that I consult with, and they say, Oh, I've got to find a new staff member. Do you have any examples of what I could write as a PD? …That's position description, by the way

Heather Bayer

Right. Thank you.

Bart Sobies

Then, ChatGPT, I'm looking for a VA for my short-term rental. Can you please write a position description? It will do it for you, or at least give you an outline to start working from. And then you say, Oh, I also need this person to do X, Y, and Z. So that's one of the things that the people are doing. So for hiring and that stuff, guest queries, questions, that thing, you can ask it to answer them. So for example, someone might be saying, What are the best things to do around the area? ChatGPT, what are the best things to do around this particular area? And it'll start to give you answers on there. How do I use this particular appliance? You can give it a go and it'll start to give you answers. So all the guest queries and that sort of thing, as long as it's not too data-heavy. So for example, availability dates or what are the price? We're not there right yet, but it's not going to be long before it will be able to answer these questions.

Bart Sobies

Guest queries… But let me give you another one that most people haven't thought of, reviews.  After you've done your 100th review, be it even positive or negative, and you've got to respond to them and say, Thank you so much for the review. It gets exhausting and you just don't know what to write anymore. So many people now are grabbing the review, popping it and saying, Give me a really nice response to this particular review. Then if we go even further, where I found it even more powerful is if the review is not favorable and creating a response to that, it can be incredibly powerful, because it takes a lot of the emotion that you would have as a host out of it. You say, You said something really bad about my property. I'm really upset. I want to get a bit of revenge, or I don't know what to write, and I want to be empathetic, but I want to be stern because they're the ones who are in the wrong. So you can ask it that, to give you a response. And then with that response, you might be like, Oh no, that's a little bit too harsh. Make it a little bit less harsh, or Make it a bit more stern because you're being a bit too kind here.  So responding to reviews is a huge one as well.

Heather Bayer

I've seen a couple of these. People have been posting them. And you hit the nail on the head. You've said it's taken the emotion out of it. It's not an emotional response. It's a response based on what was written in the original review. Now, that may have had emotion in it, but ChatGPT, or whatever you're going to be using is not reacting to that emotion. It's simply giving a factual response. The ones I've seen are just tremendous.

Bart Sobies

It's incredible, isn't it? It goes back to that as well is that you've got to be careful not to just copy and paste and go, yeah that's going to be the right answer. And if that negative review doesn't have enough context and let's say they're just bashing your business and they haven't said anything about the fact that they stay in a short-term rental or whatever city, then you might need to give ChatGPT a little bit more context within your answer. So for example, I get the review and then I'd say, ChatGPT, this is a negative review that I got for my short-term rental property. They stayed for a week. They were a family of four, blah, blah, blah. Can you please respond in a really empathetic and positive way to this review, and then it'll do it. And then you might go even further and say, Could you please find ways to get them to change their review score? And then all of a sudden it'll start putting ways to change the review score. And do you know why I know this? Because I've done this.

Bart Sobies

I recently had a five star review change to a four of one of my courses, and I believe it's because they couldn't get access to it, which I don't believe was my fault. If they can't get into it, that's not up to me. But of course, it was an issue, and it is an issue. And so then I said, hey, what can we write to get them to try to change the review? And then we wrote it as an email. We sent through the email and the person said, these are the issues that I had. And then we managed to convert the four to a five with the use of ChatGPT. And  I wouldn't have been able to write the email in such a great way as ChatGPT did. And it did take me four goes to get it to really understand the context of what the issue was.

Heather Bayer

Yes. And once again, it's not necessarily a one and done thing. It takes a little bit more time. What about drawbacks, limitations? Are you finding that people are making mistakes when they're using these these tools?

Bart Sobies

Look, most of the time, especially when we did the five day challenge, and just so everyone knows at the end of this, I'll give you some links, you'll be able to get back into that and get into the challenge content so you can go and review it. But 90% of the time it was just understanding how to ask the question. Also, the fact that right now the data might be a little bit old, so therefore it will give you information that might not be current right now.

Bart Sobies

Now, when you're listening to this episode, you might be listening to it when it comes out. You might be listening to it in a year's time. So this stuff is going to get better. The models will get better at answering the questions and understanding what you're asking. But that's just going to take time. But that time… people are like, Oh it's going to take years… It's going to take months. Literally months. It'll just get better and better at answering your questions in a way that you see fit. Particularly now that Bing is integrating ChatGPT into its search engine. It's going to have so much data that's constantly crunching, so it'll get better at answering it and making sure that it's answering the right way.

Bart Sobies

So what are the limitations? The types of questions that you have right now, the fact that you can only put in a certain number of words. Therefore, there's a certain length of text that it will only take and analyze. Then I think that the other big limitation is…… Oh, I lost my train of thought there. But look, there are different limitations. I was going to say that it's about the content not being yours, I guess, is the other part of it. Is that it's not your content. Yes, you've given the prompt and there's a little bit of legal debate right now as to who owns that particular content, whether the AI owns it itself, whether the person who created the AI owns the content, or whether you own the content because the content wouldn't have been created had you not asked the questions. So there's a little bit of a wrangling there in terms of where the copyright lies. But from my understanding at this stage, it's pretty safe to use without any copyright implications. But it's still a ‘to be determined' area, so don't take it as granted. So my advice is whatever it gives you, edit it enough that it becomes your own.

Heather Bayer

So if there's somebody listening to this who's never used this tool, this resource, any of these resources before, what do you suggest that they do to actually get into this and to start working with it?

Bart Sobies

Funny you should say that. So the first thing is you want to get yourself an account, you want to get yourself logged in. It's “open.ai” that you want to go to, and that's how you get yourself an account and get yourself set up. The first thing you want to do is just get in there, get your account and give it a go. Just punch in some questions, see what answers they actually have. The next stage is just about educating yourself and trying to open up your mind to what's actually possible. Jump onto “ibooked.online/ai”, and then we'll give you access to the first step of getting yourself set up so that then you know that you're going the right path. And for example, some people can't actually get onto the platform. We'll show you what the alternatives are to actually get yourself into this space and then educate yourself, figure out what you can do.

Bart Sobies

The things we haven't talked about, Heather, are SEO; coming up with better keywords.  We haven't talked about lead magnets. So that's ways of providing information for people. And I want to cover this very quickly.  Giving people information that's so good that they want it and they'll give you something back for it. So they'll give you their email address to find out what the 10 best attractions are in your area coming from the point of view of a local. So that's the stuff that you do is to create a lead magnet to get people to come in. Guides. So if you've got a digital guide book and you want to pad that out and give more information, you're going to be using that. If you want to write blog articles as well. The potential is enormous, but you need to educate yourself. So there are people that are working on this all the time like myself, and you'll be able to go and say, Oh, what are you using it for? And go, Okay, those are great ideas and I'm going to start using them in my business. The third thing that I highly recommend, if you're running a team, or if you've got people working your business, they must be educated on this as quick as you humanly can. It will save you so much money in terms of your business and it will increase your output in terms of what your staff can actually achieve in a much shorter tisort of justme frame.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, that's great. I see the minutes ticking away here and we're touching the surface, I feel. But this is a conversation we will probably review over the course of the next year, because my last question here is how do you see this all evolving in the future? And what impact is that going to have on short-term rental operators?

Bart Sobies

Yeah.  Look, with AI and with this technology, it's going to become more embedded in everything we do. So right now, we're all going to ChatGPT and putting in our prompts and that thing. I don't believe that in the future we'll be doing that. I think that if you actually look at the way this thing is going is that they're incorporating this into a traditional search engine. So a lot of this stuff where right now you have to go and do it, it's just going to become part of our life. I think it's going to become very, very quick that everything changes. So then you'll log into an app like WhatsApp and you'll be writing a message. I'll be writing a message to Heather and I'll say, can you just write a response to Heather? And then it will just do the responding back and forth. So when we're talking about guest communication, I think that all of this technology will very rapidly be embedded into everything that we do. And rather than actually writing the answers, we'll be guiding the robots to do what we want them to do. Write a good response, a bad response, and then it will do the language part of it for us.

Bart Sobies

The downside of that could be incredible because what's going to happen to humanity if robots are writing everything for us, then in terms of short-term rentals in the short-term, it will be the operators that take on this technology and start using it within their business. In the long-term, I think that it's embedded into everything that you do. So for example, you'll be writing a listing on an OTA, and the OTA will come back to you and say, Hey, we've got a much better title which we think you should use. So it just become more seamless and just integrates into everything that you do. It'll be writing an email or write half the email for you. It's already doing that stuff. So the future is we won't be doing much writing anymore. And the other part of it that is important, voice. So right now, there's more and more technology which will transcribe for you. So then you'll just be doing everything using your voice. It will write all the… It will pad it out for you, make it look really great, and then send it as a text.

Heather Bayer

Yes, exactly. I was exploring some voice potential this week. Just record your voice. And I think in the future, I'll just give a few prompts into a platform of some sort, and the virtual version of me will be asking you the questions.

Bart Sobies

Yeah, well, that's exactly right. To be honest with you, when you had sent through the questions to me, then I came back to ChatGPT and go, What are the answers to these questions that Heather just gave me? So therefore, the relevance of us becomes less and less.

Heather Bayer

Yeah, scary stuff!

Bart Sobies

There's a whole other episode about the potential dangers of this sort of technology, and it does need to be regulated. It's absolutely critical, but not for today. I do recommend that if you are a copywriter, if you're a journalist, if you're doing any of this stuff, don't shy away. Unfortunately or fortunately, it's here to stay. You can incorporate it in what you do and become better at achieving the results that you want to.

Heather Bayer

Yes.  That's a great note to end on. I mean, as a content creator myself. It's like, I'm not going anywhere just yet. So I will continue to, and I'm sure you will continue to, use all these resources as tools. That's exactly what they are.

Bart Sobies

Yeah. And look, you're going to keep innovating, and that's the whole thing. You'll find different ways to use these tools to your advantage. And it's all about at the end of the day, it's about communication. So you're trying to communicate more effectively with people. And if this can help you to get there, then great.

Heather Bayer

Yep.  Bart, it's been an absolute pleasure. We need to come back and revisit this probably in about six months time. And that will be really interesting because I know things are changing at warp-speed right now. And we'll come back in six months and the entire landscape may be very different.

Bart Sobies

Yeah.  Over the next six months, I'll be traveling actually all over the world talking about ChatGPT AI and how we use it in terms of direct bookings, because we make those websites, we get people going there. So I can imagine from this conversation where we're already at, and it'll be completely different in six months' time after doing that tour, so looking forward to it.

Heather Bayer

Okay, well, thank you. Thank you for joining me from Australia tomorrow.

Bart Sobies

Yeah, my day is about to get started. Have a good sleep tonight.

Heather Bayer

Yes, I will do. Enjoy your day, Bart. It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you.

Bart Sobies

Pleasure's all mine. Thank you so much, Heather. Take care.

Heather Bayer

Thank you so much, Bart Sobies. This is such a fascinating topic. I could talk about it at way more length than I… If you could imagine that… I could talk about it at more length than I have been doing over the past few weeks. But I'm just super excited about it. I think we've all got to get into it. We've all got to understand what it's all about and what impact it's going to have on our business in the future. So I will come back to Bart in the next few months, maybe four or five months, and revisit this and see how quickly change is coming and change is being made. I'd love to hear from you if you have been using AI in your business.

Heather Bayer

If you've been using it for reviews… responding to negative reviews, perhaps… If you've been using it to create content, or if you've been using it for any other purpose, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at heather@vacationrentalformula.com. Just a quick mention about that email address, we've have had some issues with it in the past few months, and it's just been fixed and nearly 200 emails dropped in my inbox that I had not seen before and I'm working through those. If you did email me and I haven't got back to you, you will hear from me. It will start with this big apology and then I'll answer whatever you asked me. But you can now get in touch with me at heather@vacationrentalformula.com and I will respond.

Heather Bayer

That's it for me for another week. As I said at the beginning, nearly wrapped up here in Gulf Shores, soon to be heading home back to a proper studio. And it will be a proper studio. We're actually building something a little bit new and a little bit different to go along with the new YouTube channel that is coming very, very shortly. So watch out for that as well. Thank you very much for being with me once again, and I can't wait to deliver more great content to you in the future.

Heather Bayer

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