Heather Bayer

Today I have the pleasure of talking to Neely Khan, a seasoned travel and hospitality writer with a wealth of experience in the short-term rental business. We hear a lot about storytelling and how it's really important to tell the stories of our business and our location and make our websites and our social media platforms really interesting through the use of storytelling. So I'm going to be asking Neely all about this and asking her, is it possible for somebody who's not a natural storyteller to do this without too much of a challenge? Listen in.

Heather Bayer

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

Heather Bayer

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer. And as ever, I am super delighted to be back with you once again. And just a week or so away now from heading off to Germany to visit my family, and then off to Barcelona for the Short Stay Week, and then on to the UK for more family visits before I come home at the end of May.

Heather Bayer

It's going to be a blast. And I'm really looking forward to it all. Certainly looking forward to getting together with so many industry colleagues in Barcelona. I have missed out on so many conferences recently, well, in the last year, and that FOMO, that fear of missing out is going to be dispelled when I get to Barcelona because I am not missing out at all. I can't wait to see so many people that I haven't seen for a long time. In fact, haven't seen since Miami in October of 2022.

Heather Bayer

So I met my guest today at the Book Direct Show in Miami last year, and I've had her on my radar for an interview since then. So I'm so delighted to have got her scheduled in before we get to meet again in Barcelona for Short Stay Week. As we all know, the travel and hospitality industry is constantly evolving. I've just got into LinkedIn. Usually, I'm an early adopter, but with LinkedIn, I've been a very late starter, and I'm now getting into LinkedIn and just seeing how much I have missed in the past few years not being in there.

Heather Bayer

But it's also overwhelming. There is so much happening in the industry. There are so many new people coming into the industry, the disruptors, the ones that are making a massive impact, and it's so exciting to see. One of the most important aspects of this whole evolution is the topic of storytelling. And as I look at all these LinkedIn posts, that's what people are doing, they're all storytelling. They're telling the story of what's happening in their business and what they're doing that is making an impact on others and on their guests and on their support staff, and I'm finding it really, really fascinating to see how people are doing this very compelling storytelling. Whether you've got a unique property or a special location or a personalized guest experience, the ability to tell a compelling story can set your short-term rental apart from the competition. And in this episode, we're going to dive deep into what it actually means to be a storyteller in the short-term rental industry and why it really is essential for success.

Heather Bayer

I've been storytelling for years. I remember at an industry conference a number of years ago, I told a story about a goose, a Canada goose, that had died on the lawn of one of our managed properties and the family inside the property who were completely freaked out by this dead goose on the lawn and really went over the top with it, telling us that they were all traumatized and somebody would have to get out there immediately to remove the offending corpse from the lawn. And I told this story in a presentation, and it obviously struck a chord with many people, because over the years, and this was probably about 10 or 12 years ago, over the years, I have had people come to me or they've commented about the goose story. And it really confirms why storytelling is so important because it does click. A good story will click with people and they will remember it for a long time. So I'm going to talk to Neely and we explore how hosts and managers can develop their storytelling skills, even if they're not natural storytellers, and why it's such an important part of creating a memorable guest experience. So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn from one of the best in the business.

Heather Bayer

I am so happy to have with me today, Neely Khan, who is a… I think you call yourself a storyteller, but you're also a travel writer and a hospitality writer.  Neely, thank you so much for joining me. We met in Miami at the Book Direct Show, and I've been wanting to get you on the show ever since then. So here we are.

Neely Khan

Thank you, Heather. I'm so honored to be here. I've been listening to your podcast, ironically, since Miami, and I'm a big fan. So the pleasure is definitely all mine.

Heather Bayer

Well, thank you very much. And we're going to come on actually a little later in this podcast to talk about a slightly different podcast that you've been producing along with John and Mateo. We'll cover that off a bit later on. But I want to kick off by asking you… I said you're a storyteller, what's your story? How did you get into this business and in the role that you're currently in?

Neely Khan

That's a great question. Great question. I will start from the very beginning because as you've explained, I definitely see myself as a story person. I think I first realized the power of stories when I was very young, about maybe about seven or eight years old, and I used to really struggle with math and anything to do with numbers at school. So physics, anything that involved equations and things like that.  I was brought up in a very academic environment, so because of that, I would always get into trouble with my parents, my dad in particular. So one day, we were learning some equations in school in my math class. And as a way of helping me remember the equation that my teacher was repeatedly trying to teach me, I thought of a story to help me remember that particular equation. And lo and behold, after that, I understood what he was trying to explain to me for months straight away. And I realized after that moment that… I was so young at the time, but even at that time, I realized in that moment that when you wrap a story around something, anything, it immediately becomes more interesting and perhaps, more importantly, more memorable.

Neely Khan

And then as I journeyed through my academic years, every time I had trouble understanding anything in school, I would write poems, I would write stories. I think I was the first child student in our school who had a creative poem displayed on the wall of a math classroom. And I remember my math teacher saying to my dad on parents' evening, Your daughter is a very good storyteller. So it definitely started from there. Storytelling, for me, was very much a way of helping me understand the world in a way that related to me. So I did very well in school, again, because of my academic upbringing. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I was always an avid reader, very stereotypical writer-ish behavior, and I loved, loved, loved poetry. That's the first piece of writing I actually started off with, with poems. So during my academic studies, I moved to Cambridge to study further. I studied English literature, of course. And then while I was at university, I started working in hospitality, and what I found was that exercised a different part of my personality. I think oftentimes people believe that writers are very introverted, but whether you're introverted or extraverted or ambiverted, you are genuinely fascinated by people.

Neely Khan

And I think this is a commonality among all writers, all storytellers. So I really enjoyed the work I was doing in hospitality. I started off with basic front of house and I moved up to training and recruitment. After I graduated, very shortly after that I became a single parent. I was very young at the time, and it was around the time I became a single parent that I was only about 22. I realized that I needed to actually pursue what I wanted to do, pursue my passion and not victimize myself as a single parent. So even though I had a good full-time job in hospitality at the time, I left that job to write stories for a living instead.

Neely Khan

I do not recommend this method to anyone because I had no plan, I had no business experience, I had no money. I had a three-year-old and I just started writing. And I started off by writing about myself and my own story, being a parent, being a writer, being a storyteller. And that got me my first bit of business. I decided to niche into hospitality because of my passion in hospitality anyway.

Neely Khan

And then I further niched into the short-term rental industry after having met Chris Moore. It was a complete serendipity. Chris Maughan of I-PRAC and AES Events Group. He was my first client in the industry. After that, Chris invited me to Damian Sheridan's very first Book Direct Show in London, which was about three and a half years ago, maybe four years ago. And I think that's it very much took off from there. So the journey started off at a very young age. But here we are now.

Heather Bayer

What does a day in the life of Neely Khan look like then?

Neely Khan

Oh, I love that. I'm definitely a mix between…. a very good, comfortable blend between….. I love routine and familiarity. I'm a Taurus, so it's very much ingrained into my soul. So I always start my mornings off doing exactly the same thing. I go to exactly the same place every single morning, have exactly the same drink. I have a cortado in the morning, and I spend the first hour of my day, after I've dropped my daughter to school, to just do something I enjoy. So that might be some journaling, that might be some reading, that might be working on a project that I'm particularly excited about. So I will always do that; that is a given. That's my daily time in the morning that gets me into the right mindset. Being with my daughter and having the mummy duties, I tend to have about five solid hours every day before it's time to collect Sophia again from school. So during those five hours, I do all the writing that I need to do. Ironically, being a writer and a storyteller doesn't actually involve that much writing. It involves more reading, more researching, more visiting places, more talking to people.

Neely Khan

So after that very routinely morning with my coffee, it very much depends on the project that I'm working on and what I feel like doing. I like to have a little bit of fluidity, so I take the day as it comes.

Heather Bayer

You can certainly tell from talking to you that you're a storyteller. I'm drawn in to listening to your story. So this is what we're going to talk about now, because we hear all the time about brand storytelling. This is something that everybody has to do. You have to tell the story of your brand. And I've heard from people who say, I don't understand this. What does this actually mean? Do I have to go on out and find a fictional story about… Because I know if you go into… I'm sure we'll discuss this. If you go to ChatGPT and you say, tell me a story, there was a lady called Susan, and she was in short-term rentals, and it will come up with a relatively bland and generic-style story. So that's one way of looking at storytelling. Can you give me some flavor of what storytelling actually is within this business from the perspective of a host or a manager of a small company?

Neely Khan

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the answer would actually be relevant across the board, across various industries. From a business and commercial point of view, when people speak about brand story, brand storytelling, and you're absolutely correct, it has become a bit of a buzzword, a buzz phrase. For me, layman term's definition is using the power of narratives to drive an emotional reaction from your audience and then get them to take action, whatever desired action that it is that you want them to take. So however you choose to articulate that story, whether that be through writing, whether that be through video, whether that be through audio, the idea primarily is always to trigger some kind of emotion. And obviously, this plays very well into emotional marketing. And this is why storytelling is so important. Not because there's a beginning, middle, and an end, not because there's a conflict, not because there's a villain. Obviously, these are all elements that make stories and are extremely, extremely important. But ultimately stories trigger emotions. And we all make decisions based on emotions, no matter how pragmatic we might claim to be. But that is how it's wired into our DNA. So that would be my definition of it.

Heather Bayer

Okay, so let's look at, let's say, a manager of a small company and they've got 30 or 40 properties. I'm thinking about those because these are the people I'm going to be talking to at Scale Rentals…. are you talking at Scale Rentals or the Book Direct Show?

Neely Khan

I'm speaking at the Book Direct Show.

Heather Bayer

Right. Still, there'll be these types of people around about 30-40 properties. Can you give me an example of the type of story that this person could tell in their marketing?

Neely Khan

Absolutely. So within our industry, the easiest way to look at it is compartmentalized storytelling, within our industry into business/corporate storytelling and personal storytelling. So personal storytelling, which is the storytelling that I think most people in our industry are most familiar with, is when you use your own story, your own personal story in your own journey, and use that to engage your audience, to build a relationship with your audience, to build trust with your audience, and then leverage that for your business. So if you are a property host, property manager, you could speak about your own journey of how you got started in the industry. If you do that well enough, your audience will warm to you and therefore feel drawn to your brand and feel that by then spending money with your brand, by booking with one of your properties, they are connecting with you. So that's how you would use, in very, very layman's terms, personal storytelling.

Neely Khan

The other side of it, corporate storytelling, which I think we definitely could do with more of in our industry, which I don't see as much of in our space, is when you place your guests at the heart of the stories that you're telling.  And this is actually probably more of what I do in the services that I offer. So you make the guest the hero of your story, and you yourself step in as the guide. If you've read Story Brand by Donald Miller, then I'm sure you'll be aware of this concept. So every story you tell is about your guests. It doesn't even have to be problems about their desires, their needs, their aspirations, and how the service that you're offering, so your property or even better, the vacation, the experience that you're offering helps that guest reach their desired outcome. And you make it all about the guest. And there are lots of different ways that you can do this. Even across your website, you can use story-led content to do this across your social media posts. But it is very much about placing the guest at the heart of all the stories that you write and that you tell. So those are the two ways that I would split it up and look at it. And they're two very different ways of doing it, both equally important.

Heather Bayer

I think I've talked a lot on the podcast about the About Us page. And it's interesting, whenever I look at a website, when I'm looking for a product or a service, I go directly to the About Us page to find out who are the people behind this. So often you find the generic, our company does this, and it's not a story. I'd like to start with that, really. So if you were advising somebody on how to do their About Us page, what would you be telling them?

Neely Khan

It's a difficult one, isn't it?  Because, I think if I'm not wrong, the About Us page is the most visited page after the homepage when it comes to just your regular guest's booking journey. And obviously, I think the big confusion here is that, well, if it's called the About Us page and we're talking about us, then it's quite difficult to not make it all about us. And the best bit of advice that I think I've heard about copy generally on websites is don't ‘we' all over your website. You want to use the word ‘you' far more than you want to use the words ‘we' and ‘our'.

Neely Khan

So I love the idea of an About Us page, because people who are booking with you generally do want to know more about you. That is important. Again, it's very important for building trust. I would personally, I feel like it's like a mindset shift, and it's about just changing the way you look at it. Maybe instead of having… I mean, you don't need to call it your About Us page. There is such a thing as being too smart and too creative. But if somebody took the About Us page, and maybe re-framed it as their ‘story page', you can still tell a story about yourself and still make it very, very relevant and interesting to the person who is reading it.

Neely Khan

So for example, if I'm telling you a story that I tell very often about me being a single parent and being a single mum, so I'm telling a story about myself. However, while I'm telling that story, I may be telling another group of women about it and saying things like, when I became a single parent, I didn't know how I would balance my work life with my personal life and my responsibilities as a mother. And as I'm sure you can understand, because I'm sure many of you can relate to this, can you imagine having a really important meeting and then having a call from school saying that your daughter needs to be taken home? So it's about using phrases like that, I'm sure you can imagine, or inviting your guest, if it's a host telling their story, inviting the person who is reading that story to imagine themselves in their shoes. So there is a way of telling your own story but still making it very relevant to your guests as well. I think that is more difficult to do. I would definitely say oftentimes it helps to have somebody to help with that process.

Neely Khan

But I think that is the best way to do it, because if you're simply only talking about yourself and how many awards you've won and how you got shortlisted for X, Y, and Z, these are great achievements, don't get me wrong, and you should be proud of them. At the end of the day, I think the most important question to ask yourself when you're creating copy for that page in particular is, do my guests care? And how is this relevant to them? And just be quite ruthless with that because ultimately, again, your guests and the people who are visiting your website are the most important people.

Heather Bayer

One of my favorite ones is from a site called Sea Horse Diamond Beach, and it's in Australia. It's a lady called Dianne Denton. I don't know if you've ever come across Dianne. She's an amazing person, and she invites people with horses to come and stay at her property. So she has a stable for their horses and she knows from her personal experience, and this isn't in her About Us section, that people with horses love the idea of riding their horses along a beach. And she tells a story about her horse and how magic it is to ride that horse along the beach. And she wanted to create something, create a place where people just like her could come and bring their horses. Now, that to me is just that perfect blend of this is who I am, this is what I'm doing, and this is how I'm going to impact you by that.

Neely Khan

I love that. And again, so she told her story, but she's inviting other people like her to imagine themselves in her shoes. And that's a great example. In storytelling, we call it transportation when you describe something or an event and you invite your audience to imagine themselves doing the same thing in that scenario. So very powerful. I can see why that works so well for her.

Heather Bayer

Yes. That's a sort of like ‘come along on this journey with me'.

Neely Khan

Yeah, absolutely.

Heather Bayer

So as Dianne does it…. her avatar, her persona, is people like her, somebody with animals – and she accepts dogs of any type – so pet owners of any sort. So her avatar is somebody like her. How important is it to have this avatar, this persona, target market, target person, whoever you want to call it? How important is it to have that before you start your story?

Neely Khan

Oh, yeah.  I mean, that's like the golden rule, isn't it? I think any marketing/ branding course or whatever you sign up for, it's one of the first things that you'll be taught is to identify your guest's avatar. And not only just to identify them, but know them inside out. It is the most important thing. I mean, anything I write, you have to know who you're writing for. Otherwise, you are literally shooting in the dark. And it's not even just about that. If you're articulating your story with writing, for example, it's about learning what language they use, what phrases they use, what words and ideas they resonate with most, and mimicking that and using that in your copy and in your content. So without identifying that first, it's impossible to write a story that's really going to drive the engagement and have the reaction that you want. Absolutely the first thing to do.

Heather Bayer

Yeah. We've had a number of episodes on here where we've talked about defining your Avatar. A bit of a spoiler in my… Which one is it? One of my presentations in Barcelona, I think it's in the Scale Rentals one, I talk about throwing spaghetti against the wall. This is what a lot of us do in marketing is you just throw the spaghetti against the wall, hope something's going to stick, meaning you're marketing out to absolutely everybody in the hope that somebody's going to come along and like it enough to look further, whereas targeted marketing is very different.

Neely Khan

Niching. Yeah.

Heather Bayer

I absolutely love that. So once again, I'm going to come back to examples. Could you share any examples of any specific brands that you know really do this well, that do storytelling well?

Neely Khan

I'm going to lean into the more unconventional examples because I think with storytelling, when it comes to short-term rental brands, I think we've seen quite a few brands sharing their own personal stories, which is great. A really interesting one, this is actually quite a recent example. We reaped the benefits of it just a couple of weeks ago. So a brand I work with, AES Events, they offer corporate short-term rental accommodation in the South of France. And they, well we, recently started creating a lot of long-form content. AES Event's, short-term rental accommodation is geared towards a very, very corporate market. So you wouldn't ordinarily think that the creative, fluffy-type of storytelling would work with that particular audience. And the brief and their content marketing strategy is all about creating long-form content, very much journalists type of stuff and reports. So what we recently did is, we started sharing stories within these very long research heavy pieces that would get these corporate clients to book with AES Events when they went to visit the South of France for the Cannes Film Festival and things like that. So the reports that we created, they're very research heavy.

Neely Khan

They sound quite… There's a lot of information in them. But to help us break them down, we used stories, mini stories of how other similar brands, similar to the ones we were targeting, were basically attending these film festivals and the events in Cannes and then booking on to brands like AES Events. And it was really cool because what we did was, we created really long-form reports. But because we broke them down into stories, we then emailed the little mini stories to a targeted list of the brands that we were trying to attract. And off the back of that, the engagement was great from the actual target brands that we were trying to engage with. But off the back of that, we actually had [UK] Channel 5 over here get in touch with us and ask us if we would be interested in sharing some of the stories for a documentary that they would be running. And I remember when I got the email, when I got the LinkedIn message from one of the ladies in the Channel 5 studio, she said, We really appreciated the way you've shared these corporate stories and we would love to do some mini film-type narratives for an upcoming documentary that will be airing at the end of the year.

Neely Khan

So this is very much an example of corporate storytelling. It's very much an example of showing how storytelling is not just for things like your About page, it's not just for pretty Instagram tiles and things like that. It's very relevant for that, don't get me wrong. But even if you have more of a corporate market, even if your target demographic are more the businessy type of people. Again, narratives work for everyone because it's a universal language among all of us. So that is my favorite example, purely because the ROI on that was huge. And I know for a fact that was because we embedded stories into the long-form content that we were creating.

Heather Bayer

That's a great example. That brought to mind something I'm watching at the moment, and I'm sure you've come across Welcome to Wrexham.

Neely Khan

Yeah, I've come across it.

Heather Bayer

We are completely obsessed with Welcome to Wrexham at the moment.  For those who haven't watched it, particularly maybe those in the US. Or maybe you have seen it in the US, I don't know. It's about Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buying Wrexham Football Club, which was a fairly lowly football club in Wales… is it in Wales?

Neely Khan

Wales, I think.

Heather Bayer

It's Wrexham, it's in Wales. Somebody's going to shoot me.  Andy Meddick, I'm so sorry, Wrexham is in Wales. Yes.  And the reason I mention it is because it is such a compelling documentary because of all the stories. And you mentioned, just pulling in Channel 5, wanting to use some of these stories. And I find this documentary that we're watching so compelling because of the stories.

Heather Bayer

And now I'm going to go back again to how can hosts and managers create these compelling stories when they aren't natural storytellers? Because most of us aren't natural storytellers.

Neely Khan

That's interesting, because I genuinely think we are all born storytellers because we tell stories without even realizing that we do. So somebody coming home after a long shift at Tesco, a supermarket, coming home to their wife; Honey, how was your day? What did you do? Oh, we had a customer and they were complaining, a checkout, this and that. And then somebody dropped the juice box on the floor. That's a story. We all tell stories without even having realized it.

Heather Bayer

I think that's it. We don't actually realize that we're doing it. So yes, you're absolutely right.

Neely Khan

Yeah. But I understand your point, because I think as soon as you say storytelling, especially to business owners, they think of a long narrative with the beginning, middle, and the end, like Shakespearean-type stuff. But newsreaders, people in our everyday lives, your barista when you're ordering coffee with them and they're telling you about how they got a haircut last week, we all tell stories. So I think understanding that first and foremost is that every single one of us, 100% has the ability, the natural biological ability to not only tell stories, but to appreciate them and receive them is the easiest thing to understand. So I would definitely start off by just try understanding that realization first.

Neely Khan

In terms of actually using storytelling for your short-term rental business, now, there are so many different routes you can go down and there are so many different ways you can do it. I've recently started working with somebody in the industry who actually approached me with exactly the same question. I want to use storytelling for my short-term rental brand. I have no idea where to start. So with this person, and I think this is a great way for anyone to start, what we're doing is, again, we've split it into personal storytelling and corporate storytelling.

Neely Khan

So we're going to start off with this person's personal story. First, we are writing down their personal story, very much with the intention to use that as part of their personal brand and to help us then determine how we can use the best parts of their story and help us determine the values and the brand personality of their business, because it goes hand in hand. So that's what we're starting off with. And that will inevitably inspire lots of other ideas. And actually, it's a really great therapeutic, almost somewhat of a healing exercise when you write down your own story. So that is personally where I would start. After you've done that, it definitely becomes a lot easier to start thinking about the storytelling you can use in your business, the corporate storytelling. Start off with what it is that you want your brand to stand for. A lot of people fixate on features. I have this many properties, we have this, this, and this in each property, and big mountains, and beautiful views. And yes, these are great things, but focus on the benefits. Is there a giant bed in your master bedroom? I know we're not supposed to use the term master anymore, actually, so forgive me.

Neely Khan

Or is that what you're offering? Or are you offering a good night's sleep at the end of a really long day at the office or as some escape? So it's definitely about that. So I would say definitely start with thinking about your personal story because that will inspire ideas for your corporate storytelling. Once you start focusing on the stories you can start creating for your business, think about your guests and what problems you're solving for them. But I know it sounds quite ambiguous. I think when it comes to storytelling, there is so much you can do. I always say to people that this is something that you should really think about, almost because it's not just about copywriting and content writing. A lot of what I do crosses over with branding as well. It does form a large part of your brand identity and your brand personality. So it's important to bear that in mind as well. And I think it's really important to think of your brand as a story brand before you even make a start with things like your website copy, if you want to refresh your website, your blogs and things like that.  So a lot of information, a lot of ideas I know. But that is the order I would personally go in.

Heather Bayer

I just want a quick shout out, in fact, to Daniela Derin, who won the award at the Shortyz for Skol Apartments, Marbella a week or so back. I mention Daniela because I interviewed her last week and she talked about her marketing to bring in more digital nomads and doing it by using a simple hashtag, which was #workwithaview. And that in itself is a story because it's just a few words, but it actually says so much.

Neely Khan

I heard that episode, actually. I listened to that a couple of days ago. And Daniela is amazing with… She actually, that is the perfect example, that hashtag. And actually, she's focusing on the benefits, isn't she? She's not telling people that you can sit here and this is what you will see. But it's about working with the view. She's reshaping how people are working. And again, we talked about niching earlier, didn't we? She's focusing on working nomads and almost selling a dream. I know it sounds quite corny, but that is very much what it is, isn't it? You are selling people the dream who doesn't want to work with the view, especially now it's so relevant. So yes, Daniela is great.

Heather Bayer

Well, we did it with our company, CottageLink Rental Management for years. We were selling this dream of leaving the city and imagine sitting on the end of a dock early in the morning as the mist rises up from the lake and you sit there and sip your coffee as you hear the sound of the loons. Once it gets evocative like that, that to me is the story that sells. And it did. So I think anybody can do that. And we used to use the word imagine a lot at the beginning of a listing. Imagine. Imagine sitting on the end of the dock or imagine sitting around a campfire at night with the sound of the crickets and the loon. There's always a loon in the stories.

Neely Khan

I love the sound of the crickets. It's so romantic. But you know what's interesting, Heather? As soon as you say that to people, you write that in a story, ‘imagine', they will imagine. It's what we do. It's actually impossible apart from…. there are very, very, very few people in the world who can't do this. But it is near impossible to read something, to read a story without imagining it in your head. Have you noticed how whenever you read something, you just automatically imagine yourself in that space. And that is what we want to do. That is what we're trying to do when we're using storytelling in business and just in our everyday lives in general. So I love that ‘Sound of the crickets', I really love that.

Heather Bayer

Well, I think I remember being taught years and years ago using all those senses, what you can see, what you can hear, what you can taste, what you can feel, and getting all those senses in there. Then you're attracting people who are perhaps more auditory or more visual or more gustatory, describing not just the nice restaurant down the road, but ‘tasting' the amazing food of the region, that sort of thing.

Neely Khan

Yeah, it's great. And again, with storytelling, it allows you to go even beyond that because storytelling is the only content form that you can use where you invite people to connect with almost a higher purpose, which I know sounds quite airy, but again, it's a great way of connecting your audience as to what it is that you're trying to speak about, but also to your values. And everybody, especially now, it's so relevant now, today's travelers, we all want to be a little bit more socially responsible. We all want to do more where sustainability and things like that are concerned. And again, you can use storytelling to really drive those values forward and connect it to more bigger universal truths. And it's literally limitless what you can do with it.

Heather Bayer

I love that. Let's address the elephant in the room, and that's ChatGPT.

Neely Khan

Yes, of course.

Heather Bayer

Because I've heard a lot, you know, copywriters are done now everybody can do their own copy. You've just got to put the right prompt into ChatGPT, and it will spit out reams of copy that you just copy and paste. Over to you. Go!

Neely Khan

The robots are taking over, right?  So my talk at the Book Direct Show…. I feel that a lot of people have got this impression that my talk is like an anti-ChatGPT talk. I'm not anti-ChatGPT, I'm certainly not anti-AI. I'm just pro-human and pro-emotions, and that is very much what I like to lead with.

Neely Khan

So ChatGPT, is it going to replace writers? Is it going to replace storytellers? Yeah, maybe the bad ones, the ones who aren't doing a very good job; as harsh as it sounds, that is true. Now ChatGPT can churn out content a lot quicker than a human being. Most of the time it's accurate. Most of the time it's relevant. Most of the time, if you prompt it correctly, it's readable, it's okay. The one thing that completely stumps me when people talk about how useful ChatGPT is, and this is the only thing that I have a real big issue with, is when they say it can replace human beings, including the emotional part. ChatGPT, no matter how much AI progresses over the years, no matter what happens, ChatGPT will never have a soul.

Neely Khan

Again, I know it sounds awfully romantic, but storytelling, writing, is thinking. Writing is not words on a piece of paper. Writing is not me saying things to you. Writing is thinking. It's the result, it's the consequence of thinking, of feeling, of experiencing. ChatGP cannot do that, it cannot provide context, it cannot provide substance. It cannot provide the unique nuances that we love about stories so much. It cannot paint a picture in your head as well as a skilled writer can. Not any writer, but a skilled writer. So that is the most important thing to me. I think emotions and emotional marketing, the very core purpose of storytelling, that is the only thing that only humans can do. And to me, it's as straightforward as that. ChatGPT will never have the ability to do that. It can replicate it and you can prompt it to use more adjectives and more emotional phrases in terms, but it will never provide context in the same way. There's also the other side of it that, wouldn't you want to read something that's been created by a human? I know I would. Maybe not everybody would. But I think there are definitely people who would much rather read something that's been created as a result of the feelings, the emotions, and the experiences of a human being.

Neely Khan

I think it will turn into a luxury, unfortunately. That is the way we're going. But it can never be replaced. Those are my very strong thoughts about ChatGPT and replacing writers.

Heather Bayer

I use it extensively right now. I churned out 4,000 words the other day for a very lengthy guide I'm writing. It's now 6,000 because it's got 2,000 additional words of mine, and they're all stories. So it might have a few checklists in there that, okay, do me a checklist on kitchen equipment, which is great. So I've got this nice list of family-friendly amenities, but I feel that you can't just do that because it's so recognizable as AI. And I don't think we'll ever get away from that. Certainly to me, I can recognize AI written material.  And I could not do that without interspersing with my tone and the way… I mean, I've been writing for years and I love to write and I have a very specific way of doing it. It's a bit like what I'm doing now on the podcast, but it's in the written form. Couldn't do without that. So thank you for your take on it. I completely agree with everything that you offer there.

Neely Khan

It's great for listings and FAQs, if you want to save time, it definitely has its uses. But like you said, where the story stuff is concerned, and I'm very much like you, I think you can tell, at the moment, it might change, but you can tell when a story has been written using AI. We call it syllable patterns, don't we? So when people have used ChatGPT to create something, their content will have that very familiar tone of… And I can hear it when I read the content. It's very obvious.

Heather Bayer

And then they forget to take ‘Regenerate' off the bottom.

Neely Khan

Oh, gosh. Oh, my goodness. You have one job. Can you imagine?

Heather Bayer

We're coming up on our time now, and I'm so enjoying this conversation, and I don't want to finish it without talking about Derailed. And I want you to explain to the audience what Derailed is, because it's something that I heard you and John Stokinger and Mateo [Bradford] talking about at the Book Direct Show in Miami. So how is it going? What is it and how's it going?

Neely Khan

Thank you very much, actually, for asking about it. I appreciate that very much. It's a project that is exceptionally close to our hearts. So Derailed is the short-term rental industry's very first episodic fiction murder mystery podcast. And it is a phenomenal example of how you can use storytelling as a way of creatively marketing your short-term rental brand. So John and Mateo of the No BS Short-Term Rental Podcast, they are absolute legends. Please do have a listen to their podcast – as well as this amazing one. They are great, great, great guys; super creative. So they approached me about a year ago and they said, Neely, we want to create this murder mystery story and we want to wrap the story around vacation rental brands. Can you help us? And as soon as I heard the idea, I thought it was a wonderful, such a great idea. So we have written a fiction story. It's completely fiction and it's set across 13 episodes. It's within the murder mystery genre. So it's a pretty dark genre, but it's also a very interesting genre.

Neely Khan

The story is completely fiction, but we have embedded real-life vacation rental brands such as Casiola, Mount, Boostly, I'm not going to try and name all of them because I might forget them, but a huge shout out to all of our sponsors. We've embedded them into the story. Now, what this does is this is something that I would love to see more of in our industry. It's a big part of what I do, but I feel like we just don't see it enough because it's new and it's difficult. What this does is that it gives people a fiction story to enjoy and to really get their teeth into. Because it's a fiction story, we can let our imagination run completely wild. However, we can create plot holes and weave real-life vacation rental brands into our fiction world. And I always say to people when it comes to storytelling, that bit between real life and fiction, that's the most exciting part. And that is where derailed sits. So throughout the story, there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on. It's a great story. Please do listen to it. Throughout the story, we have created plot holes where we weave the vacation rental brands into it. And then we get the characters to speak about the benefits of the brand as if their target guests and consumers would in everyday conversation, which takes away the pitchiness/whole salesy vibe.

Neely Khan

It's very, very difficult to do. It's probably the most difficult, creatively challenging project that I've ever worked on. Mateo and John have been… They are so amazing. The production has been amazing. Everybody on the team has been just amazing. But I think this is the ultimate and the most creative way of using storytelling to market vacation rental brands. So it's episodic. You do need to listen to it from Episode 1 to follow through with the story. And we're on Episode 7. Episode 7 comes out next week.

Heather Bayer

Wonderful.  Well, I'm going to put that….. there will be a link to Derailed, the podcast, on the Show Notes.  I'm downloading all the episodes and that will be in my ear all the way across the Atlantic when I head to Berlin and Barcelona, so that's a commitment. So when we meet in Barcelona, you can ask me questions.

Neely Khan

I can ask you who done it? Who do you think did it?

Heather Bayer

Looking forward to that. But I love the initiative. It's not the first great initiative that's come from John and Mateo, and I'm sure it won't be the last. But I think this is one that everybody should be listening to. So if you're listening to this podcast, if you listen to the No BS Podcast, then you probably know about it. If you don't, go to that one as well.

Heather Bayer

You mentioned earlier on, Neely, there's a lot of podcasts in this space. There's hundreds of them. I'm glad to say I was out there, the very first two to hit the space way back in 2013.

Neely Khan

Really? I didn't know that.

Heather Bayer

But be selective when you're looking for your podcasts. There's some extremely good ones. There's some that maybe are not, let's say, not as polished, and I'll leave that. I'm probably talking too much, probably edit this out actually.

Neely Khan

No, don't edit this out. This is very relevant.

Heather Bayer

It is relevant.

Heather Bayer

Neely, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I think we could go on, but we'll sit down over a coffee in Barcelona, I'm sure, and continue where we leave off here. I loved this conversation. I'm sure my audience is loving this conversation too.

Heather Bayer

I'd like to hear from you, my listeners, about your stories. Email me at heather@VacationRentalFormula.com and tell me where I can find your stories on your sites or on your social media platforms and I'll share them with Neely. Thank you. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me.

Neely Khan

Thank you, Heather.  Appreciate it. See you in Barca.

Heather Bayer

Absolutely.

Heather Bayer

Thank you, Neely Khan, so looking forward to meeting you in person once again in Barcelona. So you guys are going to get probably sick of me talking about Barcelona by now. I will stop, obviously, in a couple of weeks' time, I'll be back. So then you'll get the debrief, the Barcelona debrief, and then I will stop, I promise. But it certainly looks like it's going to be a great event to meet and catch up with people that I haven't seen for a long time.

Heather Bayer

So I hope you enjoyed that. I've been such an advocate of telling your story. Actually, I do like the idea of the personal story in an About Us page on your website. I've seen some absolutely great ones. It's one of the reasons I ask everybody who comes on the podcast to talk about how they got into the business. Tell me your origin story, because every single one of them is fascinating, and I've heard so many. I've done, what, coming up on 500 episodes. I have heard so many origin stories. They're all slightly… Well, some of them are very similar, but everybody has their own slant on their story.  And I just love to hear them all. So think about it for your own site. How do you tell your story without…… as Neely said, without weeing all over the page? That one is a keeper. I'm going to be using that one at some point in the future.

Heather Bayer

So thank you so much for listening. It's always an absolute pleasure to share these amazing people with you. If you want to talk to Neely, you'll find her LinkedIn and her email address, etc., on the Show Notes. So just let her know if you don't want to be doing your storytelling.  If you want somebody else to do it for you, then Neely is the one for you.

Heather Bayer

All right, the sun is shining outside of my basement and I'm heading up there to get outside and do a little bit of gardening in this brief period of sunshine that we have here in Ontario before the rain comes again. At least it's stopped snowing. I will be back in your ear next week. I'm looking forward to it. Hope you are too. See you then.

Heather Bayer

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