Julian Sage:                         00:00                     In this episode we’re talking all about channel managers and which one is right for you, so stay tuned.

Julian Sage:                         00:07                     Vacation rental machine helps hosts just like you learn how to start grow and scale your short term rental business. The show’s all about creating systems that help you automate your business, give you more time and money freedom. If you’re ready to start living the vacation rental life, then subscribe to this podcast today, come and join us on our Facebook group, the host nation where we’ll be talking about starting, automating, and scaling a short term rental business. Now on to the show.

Julian Sage:                         00:32                     Hey, welcome back host nation to another episode of vacation rental machine. In this episode, I am with Jon Bell and we are talking about channel managers and channel managers are something that you use with your short term rental business when you are trying to advertise on multiple platforms. But the nice thing about channel managers and also kind of the negative thing is that they can do a lot. Tthey can do more than just advertise your listing on multiple sites like booking.com, Airbnb, VRBO, HomeAway, but they also have a lot of other functions. And finding the right channel manager is really important because when you start looking at them, they’re going to have a lot of features that are going to be advertising themselves and offering different services, but you need to know which one is the one that you need. So Jon, you’ve been looking around at different channel managers and you’ve probably tested a few of them. There’s probably a lot of them that are saying that they can do everything, all the bells and whistles, but what have you found to be the best type of channel manager for your business?

Jon Bell:                               01:28                     You know what? It comes down to a couple of features, right? My channel manager definitely has to manage my calendars so I don’t double book. If you’re out on multiple platforms, let’s just say you’re out on TripAdvisor, you’re out on Airbnb, booking.com, Expedia, HomeAway, you’re on all kinds of channels, flip key, all these things. Well, what happens if somebody books on one channel within three minutes of each other? Are you double booked? Do you have to deal with that on canceling on one guest? Where do you cancel that guests from? Which profile do you reserve or hold tight? You don’t want those issues. So channel managers are there to help alleviate that piece. That is the one key piece that they need to do absolutely well. They can’t fail at this, right? I know a lot of channel managers use other types of integrations.

Jon Bell:                               02:24                     Most of them will connect through ical. Some of them will connect directly with two way communications. Just make sure whatever platforms you’re on, that your channel manager supports it in some sort of way. That’s the one key thing that you must have. Other benefits that a channel manager might give you might be a direct booking website. I use my direct booking website for my channel manager and it actually works. It’s friendly. It’s easy to set up. People can pay there. It links to all my Stripe accounts, so it’s good. That piece is done very well.

Jon Bell:                               03:02                     Some of the other pieces that you might see channel managers do is messaging to guests. For me, that piece only comes in as an important thing when they book on a platform that smartBNB does not support just yet. So when somebody books direct, of course smartBnB doesn’t have integrations with my website to then run messages through, but when they book, I have some type of messaging system that does go out and send them the information that they need. That’s important. For me, those are the top three things that you need out of a channel manager.

Julian Sage:                         03:35                     Now, Jon, I know a lot of people that are just starting off when they get their listing up online. Typically, they’re going to be signing up and putting their profile or listing on Airbnb. How important have you found channel managers to be with increasing your business?

Jon Bell:                               03:52                     Well, I mean just including some of the extra features that you can get from a channel manager. We’re talking about expanding businesses, right? Let’s talk about a little bit of co-hosting. If you get really good at this business, you’re probably going to end up picking up a few people that have their own properties. Channel managers do have portals for owners that you can link to and they can pull reports and see all the bookings and things that you got from all your platforms in one area. This alleviates you having to give them a login to log into your account or a separate account to just view those reports and things like that. If you’re going to do any type of co-hosting, I recommend that you do find a channel manager that has that function that allows them not to go in and look at messages that you’ve sent to guests and things that guests have sent you so they can find something to complain about. One of the other key pieces to grow my own business was to have people direct directly. I’ve said this before, that you know, I, I try to rebook anybody that books on one platform one time. I want to rebook them the second time through my direct booking website and I’m able to accomplish that via my channel manager that provides that option for me.

Julian Sage:                         05:08                     Yeah. Jon, one of the things that you mentioned about offering co-hosting services is that that’s going to be a professional way for your clients when they are going to be working with you to be able to identify, you know, what exactly are you doing because they do have a little bit of insight into, you know, looking at the calendars, seeing you know, how often it’s booked, looking at maybe some other things. I know different channel managers also offer revenue projections. They tell you how much a listing is making. So a lot of different services. As a professional host, having a channel manager not only is good for being able to expand your listing out there, but also allowing your clients, your co-hosts, clients to handle a little bit more invested to look into the business. And one thing that you did bring up that I think is really important is that professionalism, because when you are, because Jon has lots of rental arbitrage properties that he is using and when you are going to these apartment complexes, you’re not just saying I’m a company that list on Airbnb. No, you’re saying I’m a corporate housing company. I offer my services to you booking.com, Expedia, homeaway. This is just one of the channels Airbnb that we advertise on. So having a channel manager legitimizes how you’re going to be distributing your corporate housing business, your rental arbitrage business.

Jon Bell:                               06:25                     Yeah, you hit the nail right on the head on that one. Just having the evidence and proof that you know, Hey, I’m not relying on Airbnb. Again, Airbnb is just that negative short term rental platform that people feel like things are going to happen or it’s the party people. So the further you can separate yourself from it, the best. Lastly, one of the other things that I really look for in my channel manager is some type of analytics. It’s important to run your business when data and if you have a central place to collect your data, that is always going to be key because you want to know your numbers. You want to know exactly what you’re bringing in. You want to know what’s going out. It also helps with the accounting side of things if you can tie in an accountant and stuff like that.

Julian Sage:                         07:12                     One of the big things that you told me one time, Jon, was that you try to avoid channel managers that are doing all these different functions. What, why, why is that? Why is it not important to, why? Why would you not want to have a channel manager that does everything? All the bells and whistles,

Jon Bell:                               07:26                     You know, it’s just like spreading yourself too thin. Right. You know, if I’m, if I’m a carpenter why, why would I go start farming just because I have a big yard and I could start farming. Like, you know, am I going to be good at farming if I’m just doing it myself? Probably not. I got to do a lot of research. I got to do a lot of data gathering. I got, I’m going to do some fumbling along the way, but that’s at the expense of who you as the person that’s using that platform that didn’t initially probably come out with the plan that, Hey, we want to be this powerhouse that does all of this stuff. Unless they have a lot of money, they really can’t master these other arenas if they didn’t start out in that arena. That’s why I love tools like smartBNB because look smartbnb said, Hey, I want to just solve this one issue and they master it.

Jon Bell:                               08:15                     They just kill it, right? Channel managers are really there. It’s just so you don’t double book and you have one single platform to go in and look at all your bookings, all your revenue, all of that stuff in one central place. All the extra stuff is really just an add in and you should be careful when picking one because they all say they can do all these great things that fill all these holes within this business, but yet they aren’t perfect and sometimes the integration even in house isn’t even perfect. Here’s an example of that. Before switching to lodgify which is my channel manager at the moment, I use Tokeet and Tokeet for me was good. It offered great things, but then they started to grow and expand and start to pick up all these other things. They started doing signatures. They started doing this upgraded workflow thing and then they wanted to start doing signatures for contracts. Well, what started happening when they started adding all that stuff, the foundation of just the, the PMs started to go wrong. It would disconnect and fail and then I would wake up in the morning and my stuff wasn’t connected. That’s the worst feeling that you have. Just your stuff isn’t connected to the thing that’s supposed to support you and make sure you don’t get in trouble with. All of these bookings is broken. What do you do?

Julian Sage:                         09:42                     You’re right, Jon. The channel manager really sounds like it is the foundation of your business. You’re building your business on top of this channel manager and then you’re integrating in these other services like smartBNB, like dynamic pricing, like these tools that are better suited for what their particular mission is. So Jon, what are we looking at with pricing? Because all these different tools, like the dynamic pricing, we are looking at around 1%, the automated messaging, usually that’s a type of subscription service. The more listings that you have, the more expensive it gets. What are you looking for with a channel manager pricing?

Jon Bell:                               10:17                     PMS systems have a couple of different options as far as pricing goes, right? You could pick the fee where they take a percentage of your revenue and they just take that from you because they’re your PMs. There’s also another one which is more just flat, right? You just pay for the amount of properties that you have or a certain set group of properties that you have where can expand to and you know your pricing there. In most cases you can do that on an annual or monthly basis. For me, I prefer to just a flat fee because I want my cost to be the same. I don’t want to have to just estimate, Hey somebody else who’s just taking an extra 3% I mean like Julian just said, if you got 1% and 3% coming out just because of your tools, well I mean that’s almost 5% right? So somebody is just taking 5% of all your bookings. That doesn’t really work for me.

Julian Sage:                         11:15                     All right? So all of these tools do add up as an expense, but they can also make you a lot more money. Dynamic pricing. It’s going to help you to be able to price your listing at that optimal range. Channel managers are going to be able to get your listings out on multiple channels for advertising and you can also collect emails and do more direct bookings and your automated messaging is going to streamline that process so you don’t have to spend so much time responding to everything. So even though there is a cost with these tools, it is an essential part of scaling your business, scaling your vacation rental machine. So if you want to see all the tools that we use, Jon and I then to shorttermsage.Com/Tools and we’ll constantly be updating that with the things that we are currently and actively using in our business.

Jon Bell:                               12:00                     In this business, things, tools and stuff change constantly, so you might have to change from where you’re at to test out something different, but you should really always have an eye out on what the market is bringing to the table. All this stuff is still about to explode just because there’s more people in this space, these tools that are starting to perfect what they do, so don’t just stick with one forever. I mean keep your eyes out. I’m always listening, right? I’m still looking at new PMs systems because I’m at the top of where I paid for with my current. I’ll let you guys know what I picked and why, but there’s still other things that are out there that are better for people at different points in their acquisitions, right? Starting with zero to five units, you might be okay with anything but growing past that you might need something else. Don’t be afraid for change. Just keep your ears and eyes out and start looking for where you’re trying to go.

Julian Sage:                         12:55                     So question the day, which channel manager are you going to be using? Leave it in the comment section down below. Until next time, host nation. Keep on hosting. Hope you hosts found value in this episode. If you did, please go on over to iTunes and leave us a review and that would greatly support the show. If you’d like to connect with Jon, the community, and I, then go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation, talk to you hosts in the next episode. Keep on hosting.