Navigating the Fragmented Technology in Hospitality: VRMA 2023
here for but I'm here to keep them on time and to give you outle time if you want to ask questions at the end it is an hour and 15 so it's it's a good chunking session um but also time for questions two important pieces of housekeeping number one if you have a phone by music but turn the sound off so you get interrupted and the second which is the most important one and I know because I've been on the stage here presenting we really like to know whether or not you got anything else with the end so fill in the review please please please like you want your guests to leave you a review these guys would like you to leave them aw most importantly one I like to know is the session you next year so we got four excellent gentleman here we have n we have FR we have John and we have I was attempt to pronounce the but I would get a um at this stage I will say over all right thank you everyone for coming out um really appreciate you after lunch in our session uh so today we are going to talk about the technology in the short-term mental space and specifically um it's very fragmented it's a very chaotic landscape and the interesting thing is our industry the short-term rental industry is about 80 billion industry in the United States and about 172 billion globally and yet we have a lot of Entrepreneurship uh with people coming up with Solutions and products that solve specific problems on a consistent basis that's a good thing because they're able to solve problems and make life easier at the same time there are so many tools uh overlapping feature sets um some tools competing some tools doing one thing in one way or another and so it creates uh a chaotic landscape um and we have over 500 PMSs around the world at this moment and other. So today we have some of the best minds been thinking about Tech fragmentation in our industry we have Luca from Jurny, Francois from Enso Connect and Pierre-Camille from hospitable and basically as a kind of a famous problem there are lots of Technology you can see there are lots of different categories and within each category um you know there are multiple options and solutions and how is a property manager supposed to understand you know what tool will work for them and what won't right so this is the landscape that we're working in so I think I want to start off by asking you guys um Luca, why don't you start i' like each of you to kind of explain what you think problem is in our industry uh and a little bit on where you see that impacts operators and vendors. Nice to see everybody I'm excited to be here for anybody that doesn't know me I'm Luca Zambello, CEO and owner of Jurny. Why I'm excited to be here is because I've been talking about fragmentation
for a long time and uh I'm very excited that it is recognized as a problem uh it was a problem when I started being a property manager I'm not a property manager anymore but that's how I started and I grew companies to 300 units um across five different cities. And Technology became probably my number one problem and where I was spending most of my time actually to manage these different solution and making sure solution work properly with one another and actually help me scale my operation and so I decided to develop a solution for myself at first and then turned that into a product and we took a completely different approach think that the rest of the industry um I'm excited to be here and talking to this guys about this problem. hi everyone uh my name is Francois I'm the co-founder of Enso Connect we are a guest experience platform for the vacation rental industry um solving fragmentation in a slightly different way uh than what you might see on on this panel, but also in general in the in the industry. We operate about 25,000 properties. We still startup but we're excited to be here at VRMA uh and meet everyone so thank you for having me. Hey everyone, I'm Pierre-Camille. Thank you John for organizing this friendly talk and making it very International because we have two French people on this stage talking about integrations. At Hospitable we have a very interesting story when it comes to fragmentation,
because we never wanted to become a PMS. Most of you in the room will probably should not be a PMs and in addition to on top of it it's basically automation, that's what we're known for. We have about 80,000 connected listings on our platform and the best service that we offer is the guest experience products that automate inquiries, all communication with guest to the end and direct bookings. We are mostly focused on property owners and yeah talking about the matter of fragmentation and thinking about the fact that there's an overlap and product expand and you have multiple problems of doing the same thing over and over we really started as an automated decisions product and still having PMS so it tells a lot of things about the state of things in Industry. So I guess the question is you know fragmentation is because there is lots of different tools is tools on talking to each other like what are some of the key things that you guys are you know identify as a for problem? Yeah I think you mentioned a few of those problems I I think number one is there's so many solutions. And so many solutions that would
do the same thing with the just kind bit of different flavor. uh that's one problem the second problem that we especially saw when we were property managers and started Jurny, was that this solutions are not meant to be working with one another and the reality is you don't only need a pricing software you don't only need a guest verification system, you don't only need a channel manager and a PMS, right? You need all the solutions together and you need to be working with one another and to communicate different information back and forward. And the industry is not being built like that, right? um and so I know that we all took different approaches to this problem um but the the approach we took was to go to these partners and say: "hey number one - choose one partner per category". Because we were thought: what a property manager has to do is to actually do that first you have to choose your tech stack and you have to then start implementing this different solution and trying to make them work well with one another. So we did that for the property manager. We took our 10 plus year
experience in the industry to choose the partners and then try to I don't want to say "force them" but like to to really say if you want to work with us you have to modify your API so that there is a two-way Communications so that we can Implement everything and put everything into a single dashboard. So what I'm saying with this is that the infrastructure for a non-fragmented ecosystem did not exist up until probably now. And still doesn't exist for many reasons from from for many of uh software providers. The second problem is that when industry started there wasn't this many
different solutions and so you have a lot of these Legacy PMSs, most of the PMSs are out there are 10 plus year old and so they've been built that way but the industry has evolved dramatically since then. And so that's uh I think second biggest reason why fragmentation exists. So I'm going to go with something a bit more controversial and I'm going to say the fragmentation problem the biggest problem behind it in my opinion is that we see it as a problem um it's a source of I think for a lot of tech companies as John had pointed out you've got companies ranging from guest verification to upsells to experiences like expanding within your business and Beyond and uh it's only been happening from other Tech players and all these interconnections that you're seeing through your marketplaces and so on uh that being said it is understandable that having multiple logins and having different vendors to pay for and understanding the dependencies between the different tools becomes more and more complicated uh as you scale. So I think the one of the issues that I see with fragmentation is that a lot of uh systems are going out there uh claiming to be all-in-one or wanting to be all-in-one um and this kind of blurs the lines of what they're really good at and therefore deceives you as the property manager when you're thinking of oh I need an all-in-one solution I want everything in one platform. You know, my Tech Team doesn't
interact with the same tools that my sales team does we don't build code on our CRM. You know, as simple as that, every scaling business has different departments and different systems for those different departments. Now your objective as a property manager is to figure out how to centralize all this information in all these different departments. And I think today's conversation we're going to look at a few of these Solutions um you know that you might not even see in the audience today but for you to build uh those data models and and store that information.
Just as a commentary to what said a lot of it is just kind of the fact that the different tools are not talking to each other in a in a seemless way and because of that information the same information is is living in multiple places and and then people are trying to make things work right and I I talk as more as a property manager that's where I come from but that's where Solutions start to try to figure out how can the various tools start talking to each other in a workflow that makes sense for your your business so for me the end result for property manager is that all these tools you have in multiple same data hubs in different platforms like you have to manually to be able to chat with. Talking to one another is very important. I want to zoom out but just a few things, for company like those, bouncing what you were saying, Francois, we have 127 software contacts, we're a team of 57. I was blown away by those numbers. But again every company is facing the same problem about having the customer data. Say that our Revenue data are basically being exported by every team to a certain degree. It's also what seems odd to me is that the the original cardinal signals of most of this industry which I've not seen anywhere else is the fact that the OTAs have basically created a system where the only Integrations that were compatible with them as a main source of customer data the only recipients were the property management software whose responsibility was specifically to integrate with those third party adding value service providers of which there is an overwhelming amount. And we could have this thought two years ago maybe we would have thought there was a clear winner there is still no clear winner in this particular industry and it creates to duplicate the work multiple times over and over reinvent the wheel, both for operators and for software providers alike. I'm going to talk about that later but it seems to me like there was nothing particular
in the Industry to promote the communication of data and free and open environment to actually be able to mine this data and extract the most value out of it. so that's something that I've never seen in any other industry. I don't think, maybe even healthcare or financial services maybe have those very restricted buckets. But this is vacation rental, this is not the same level of Regulation. This is not a regulated industry. Sometimes there is some tension, but it's perfectly migratable in 2020 plus. I just want to add a little context. It is so well said especially with the OTAs um now I have to be careful here what I say um but I just want to give a little story for background um when I started my company it was we wanted to be a platform that would help digitize the guest experience. And well the first thing I was asked
was well do you partner with Airbnb for it. And I was like no I don't and I probably do need to cuz I need to get access to reservations and so on and so we went together with my cofounder, we went online try to figure out how can we work with Airbnb how can we get the reservation information so that we could do whatever we wanted to do with it and while the answer is we couldn't. uh the API is closed off and you need to have an application and speak with people so we reverse engineered it and we found a way to work with it. And we ended up going on Reddit and on Reddit we found an API key that worked. So an API is like literally you know the keys to the kingdom and it works and yes and so the first like 2 months we had API access and we're like yeah let's go raise some money for this. um 2 months later stops working
cyber team at Airbnb is like yeah you're not doing this so I put on a fancy suit and I went across the street to the Toronto Airbnb offices knock on the door and I was like hi um I'm Francois, I'm doing a startup and my API key is not working. And they're like who are you um so I explained to them and they were like great yeah come back to us with more properties. Chicken and egg - how am I supposed to get more properties if I don't have Airbnb. So we went out to Market and the only available systems that would allow us to connect to these channels were Property Management Systems because they were the only source of Truth. Just to give you more
of the technical understanding behind it these APIs. Only one system can connect to your OTAs, so if you have a really cool platform for counting or if you have a really cool system for whatever it is that's going to help your business it cannot happen right now, because the OTAs only have one single uh source of integration. I we announced Airbnb integration 4 days ago or a week ago that's because Airbnb finally changed this I think all three of us actually have gotten it um but there's still a lot of work to be done from a data perspective in order to unfragment this industry all the way from the booking channels down to your third party market place integration so just thought i' add a little flavor. to yeah know I think you're bringing up a really good point and that's the job in my opinion of the PMSs that they have not done. As a property manager in
the years that I've been a property manager switch five PMS and if you talk to anybody that has like scale operation from a handful of units to like 400-500 units, they have switched PMS at least three times at least and they're still not happy with the solution that they have right now. Cause in my opinion PMS stoped doing their job. And I'm not generalizing every PMS, but I'm saying most of them have and especially the Legacy one that have been around for a long time they stopped innovating in my opinion and like you said the need of having a centralized database that collects all the information and demands this information from their Partners that's the PMS responsibility and that's what I think the winners of the future are going to be. Otherwise solutions like yours either you go directly to Airbnb, which means then you lose all the opportunities with all other partners, or you have to work with somebody who understand this problem. I just wanted to add something because here you have exactly the case of Enso Connect that basically had to go to Property Management Software as API get access to the data owned by the OTA. They licensed uh in some way to the property management software. For a company like Enso Connect, for someone like Francois, that was the go to market. So the point is to
read access data so that their service can deliver value but obviously being a small seller eager to deliver value to their customers first, the focus has never been on pushing the data back so that they consolidate the experience for the end user of this property management software, so that those users would then have that Holy source of truth that is supposed to be the PMS and has been lagging behind in my view for a little bit too long um and that basically is the I think the the kind of Wheel of the industry has been for the past maybe five years with PMS that are starting to innovate because they have a lot of connections, Integrations that they want to maintain internally therefore it's very difficult for them to catch up new technologies most reasons of which being you know you could have an example for smart locks could have an example for OpenAI's ChatGPT implementation. And there is still nothing from those added value service providers that have great incentive for them to do so saying that that's fashion for a product company to deliver value to another service while they still want to charge their customers on another product. Just to bring it back to the original thing because you as property manager is probably think okay great that sounds like a "You problem" when it comes to Tech doesn't sound "Me" but actually affects you directly right because when you're looking at these different vendors and these different solutions uh we're limited by the data that we synchronize from other the channels the pays the OTAs and so on and I think what we're seeing more and more and and you might not see the um results of this just yet is API first companies that are going to drive that kind of interconnectivity between the tools that you love and use or new tools that you're interested in. But one thing that I always ask property managers is: "Where is all this information? Where do you centralize it and for the most part it's "in my mind". No one seems to use a you know Google Drive although we going to get there soon or Notion
or some sort of Excel sheet to really centralize and use that as their database. This is the source of Truth for my business and then I push it to the PMS and I push it this and that uh so I urge property managers to really start thinking about their business as a tech company uh as well as of course a hospitality company uh because things are going to start getting messier I think before they get cleaner when it comes to technology. Unless somebody fixes it for them. The way I see it is part of this conversation is that fixed is kind of a distributed solution as opposed to like an entity creating a singular API for our industry. Just because if you do that Innovation gets locked down that one API you know created right so I want to kind of move on some things that uh we've been thinking about to move forward. So this is by all means not absolute in terms of all the solutions but these four options that we have on the screen right now kind of ways that we see as five aspects of how the industry starts to defragment. So first you have consolidation via acquisition right so these are bigger companies uh you be private companies or larger companies buying up smaller players basically consolidating the tech with the you know usually it's to say we're bringing that technology in house but sometimes it could be to kill competitor sometimes to buy you know buy um you know buy their customers or that and so the consolidation part is interesting because it puts it you know it can get to this like one platform that does everything at the same time if you do wish for that you may start having limited options in terms of the Technology Solutions that that is available for you to run operational business. Integration via Marketplace and I think right now there's a lot of activity
within our industry right now on marketplaces where different companies are partnering and creating a Marketplace and then the property managers go in and they can choose from three pricing software and five accounting software and whatnot and it's it gives you a lot of options. But one of the cons of that is again the PMS becomes the gatekeeper of who gets to be on that Marketplace and it doesn't right so the PMS is essentially deciding for you the options that you have available. White label is similar except that it's internal decision by the company and they choose who they want to partner with and right with their product that was along the lines of what Luca was saying. Actually let me I would say no one on this panel is on the acquisition side but on the Integration via Marketplace here I would say Hospitable right now they're doing a lot of marketplace um that there or I'm asking. I'm not saying. No? Okay that's fine um the fourth option right now and this is not a longterm option is essentially semi-custom builds so that you have multiple tools that don't necessarily talk to each other but creating workflows and links so that they actually start working together so you get your option of the you know of the tools that you want to use um without the PMS as a gatekeeper. Now the reason why I I brought this up is I'd like
you guys to kind of discuss the various aspects of what you see the proposed on um both for you as technology provider and what it means for property managers. I'm biased cuz I think we are probably I guess full white label. I mean and again for us it was a need as a property manager myself to just simplify. I think anything that becomes scalable needs to be first simplified and to simplify things is actually very complicated it goes a lot of work into it but you know I always like to use our company (Jurny) as an example as a company has simplified things from a user experience more products than one but what's behind extremely complex they focus in the end of the day on the user experience and in my opinion 80% of the market is eventually going to go there. That's obviously
my opinion. Some people here have a different opinion but I I believe because at the end of the day property management is about the guest. Focusing on creating guest experience. Focusing on getting the best assets and not spending wasting your time every day on making sure your technology work and be on top of what's the latest piece of technology we should be using I think that's someone else job. If you look in every other industry, where consolidation already happened, look into into the sales side and marketing side, with system like Hotpot it's a one system that does all. Do they do everything in house? No, they integrate other solutions within their system. But that's their job to make sure that they run a great system and the system works properly and it is as updated as possible for their users right? Obviously I think the the solution that is going to still exist um I think you called it as a kind like customized build custom-build I think large property managers probably are always going to have a custom-built because and want say large is thousands of units, cuz they're going to have very specific needs that they're not going to be met by other players. The other two I think especially on the marketplace I think it's going
to be hard it's going to be tough I'm not saying it's impossible but the way it's been done today it wasn't working for me as a property manager and I don't hear a lot of people being happy about that. So that's my view. what I say is okay so Acquisitions let's break down there's two I mean there's multiple reasons why companies get acquired. Running out of money or they aren't doing really well and they want to sell out. There's so many different reasons. When I see the private equity moves by vacation rental companies or uh systems is squeezing the juice. They don't care about building functionality uh they just care about charging you as much as they can. When I look at companies working together and buying each other out um then there's opportunities there of collaboration and companies being embedded within one another um but we haven't seen that yet. I
mean can you guys name a company that bought another company and then actually embedded the systems within it? I wouldn't say "embedded" but I think the closest I see is Guesty bought MyVR, and there's two separate systems but they're not sunset the progam, not yet, right? So are they not sunsetting because there's a lot of customers or are they not sunsetting because the technology? so I'm not going to go in there because Guesty is one of our partners. Anyway, but when I look at marketplaces white labels and semi-custom builds I think this is where uh you as a property manager need to start thinking about what is most important and what is the problem that you're trying to solve. So when you're bringing on technology sometimes I see operators kind of just sign out a bunch of tech because it solves a bunch of problems but they don't think of it as the infrastructure of their business, right? again I go back to this idea data and so long like how does this information share from one place to the next? So I do think marketplaces are going to continue to exist. It's in every industry, whether it's your accounting systems - they integrate to every other tool. Whether it's what you mentioned Hubspot - they have marketplace with thousands of Integrations. but I think for operators in the vacation rental industry it's going to be these sort of Zapier- like functionalities Because every single property management company that I speak with is different, every owner is different, every guest is different, everything is different and that is the biggest problem with a one size fits all, One-Stop-shop system is that it just won't work for YOUR business. On paper it works for most businesses but does it really work for YOUR business? And so the idea of bringing on best-in-class white labeling some of this technology, providing a Marketplace.
As much as you go back to this idea of a whole, but it's fragmented. It's fragmented because your operations are fragmented um you're not running a hotel where you have one building and everything's in the same place you have a fragmented business in a way and so the tech stack reflects that as well to meet your unique Hospitality needs. So again I don't have a specific view as whether or not the white label or Marketplace or custom is the way. I think it's a combination of all three of them, that's going to propel you into the next sort of digital age of hospitality. I just want to address one you obviously you mentioned lab um I think if you do manage and you not manage properties yourself you'll understand there s CL their tool for everybody and there's other tools that are not tool for everybody right it has to be customized and I think a prop system actually needs to be able to be adaptable based on different needs where you want managing like multi families or like Boutique like uh style places or your single funding homes your system is built well enough it needs to be customizable that way but single Solutions like a prising software you cannot say that pring software is better for for different operators yes maybe the UI but theend of the day right how many of you guys price Labs raise your hand how many of you guys have wheelhouse raise your hand how many of you guys have Beyond pricing raise your hand you know what I mean it's like everyone has different systems for their how much time provider have you been on the other side of the table cuz I have I spend hundreds of hours researching who the best providers you have to work with and then at the end of the day maybe you don't even like any swap it the end of the day the main thing that you really need is to make sure that it works for what you're doing it need to make sure you need you need pricing you don't need any confident without pricing you need pricing you pricing works you need that works you need a system that is reliable you need someone who's actually going to raise a hand and take responsibility over the the technology and nobody does that in this industry it's a finger pointed industry when I was on the other side I was so frustrated how much these providers nobody took something wouldn't work finger point you you never is is everybody's f is no one's fa at the same time you're like okay but I'm the one who's pay the price for it nobody's taking responsibility over and to me that's not sustainable I think the industry just build them up in a way so that they can Shield themselves and I think that's the problem the biggest problem in my opinion with the marketplace is nobody takes responsibility and with the PMS the way they've been built. Yeah so here I accused you to have a market place. So that's that's actually true we have little bit of everything and we have two and a half out of four. So integration via Market places you have white label. You think about it but I want to go back and think
about the consolidation acquisition and there is nothing more exciting as software providers to talk about how we can consolidate the marketing further for good reason. So just to give you a few numbers about the concentration especially in the United States the number of contractors went from 175 in a scope of 20 years I don't think that's necessarily winning for everyone. And Amazon sells 75% of all books 64% of old books the thing is at what point is consolidation becoming concentration becomes actually completely detrimental to providing customer value. Because then software providers have buy or compete. And then what did your defence actually what if
you load as an operator because you're all running on the same platform on the same product. One Outage can have a critical impact on the entire vacation industry and I think that that's will be completely on we're not the market vacation management software that is basically the winner takes it all. I would have said a few years ago that the winner takes the most but there reality is that one this is really a narrow segmentation they are three different markets. You have an Enterprise you have mid-market, you have self property self managers and they have absolutely different needs, different thesis onto the product that we're building. And going back there was an example of Slack versus Discord um some of you using slack for your business in your company and you may be a gamer and using Discord. You
realize this is the same product, it has the same features, they just package in a slightly different way and more importantly positions to a different user. So going back consolidation and acquisition is a shame in our industry for hundreds billion dollar industry with so many capital that's been injected over so long that you still actually don't have mergers that are based on the expansion of product. It's all about acquisition of the number of listings and never about elevating the user experience.
Because it's still too likely capitalized to really get one of those numbers to get risk aversity. Even companies that have raised 170-75 million dollars have still not broken the ceiling. that is really not good. SE any what the case and again. So based on all customer verus your customer profile which is really property owners and self-managers, which are really 85% of the market 85% of the listings there are times when we want to integrate these unique bespoke products, that are really going really fascinated, but it's a gross margin killer. The more Integrations we have, the more we have to maintain those Integrations to keep our satisfaction high, and that really limits our capacity to develop new features or to expand the scope of integration because some customers are going to be more interested into that type of thing. There's always a customer that type of thing. And that's very difficult to commit on that for the next 20 years. I believe we are going to be successful
because we're going to have 100 Engineers working on maintaining accounting integration. Very hard to propose. We also went into the white label, space. To us about building a direct premium frame. So we thought that every property owner should have an opportunity to list their property directly. But it's very difficult you can anything to do so in a way that going to be sustainable. First charge back, the first cancellation, the first email from your payment processing the first guest that's not going to be respecting house rules, without any threat or without any insurance that create if anything that direct is fantastic but it creates a boom in the number of issues that you need yourself directly. So we decided that we would be bundling those integrations together. We maintain
it and we provide one package which is close to a private OTA doesn't offer tax compliance going out to permitting taxes for your business, that is going to be doing the payment processing you don't have to do any of the writing. that's going to do the insurance with $5 million that's going to do with the gas betting and all those customer services that you need to be running a successful direct booking business without having to go through the hassle of it. And that's anything that's one case of bundling 30y offering into one and that's what everybody in industry is doing those are all integrators and that I think is delivering significant more value you gain speed you able to negotiate terms and basically get that back to the customers because going to get something that's probably three times more expensive for them to buy but because we're able to negotiate that as provider they that 30% of the cost in most cases. So that that's basically my thought I find again just like what Francois said, what is the goal of about having an all-in-one? That's about not fragmenting your guest experience and that's about gaining efficiency in your operations. And as long as those two items are there you can be happy with your tech stack. You can decide to be happy with your tech stack absolutely you can also decide to be happy about either if you guest have one flow, unified and can reinforce your ground and you are still running business efficiently in full.
That works I just think that it's difficult to do so because there are so many obligations and requirements built-in this all-in-one that distracts software providers that you're using every day from achieving those two things that I call Mission critical. There are too many instruction as so we want to contribute to an integration piece, I'm not going to say that right now, andar p as well but it's it's problem that is going to be Sol by new operators because those currently in the market are already I think stuck on that gross margin problem having to maintain so many things with digital capitalization in any cases thank you um so I have a very I think it's very simple question: do we want all-in-one or do we You have to Define all in one because it means like right now it's like it's it means everything and nothing. I think we are all doing one thing but at the end of the day you need to fix the problem for the host and and you have to solve for the um I don't think there's going to be one solution that fits all. I think that it's about Bing true to a problem and really go deep into that problem and I think the bigger players in the industry stop doing that I think that's where the problem is really mly but I think the newer generation software I think at the end of the day we can all disagree on many points we one which we understand there is a problem in industry but it's only recognized by a few and I think that's the reason why we're encountering a lot of these problems and um yeah for us like I don't know when we talk about a black label I don't know if there's really a category to Define us specifically because we do go one partner in specific categories but we have many partners for other categories depends in a way we do have a market we try to simplify things uh really for the hosts we have today because me personally I'm trying to build the software that I wish existed when I was a property manager because really I couldn't be a property manager because I was focused on everything asked beside the guest. everything else beside like finding good inventory because I didn't have the time my time was spent to trying to negotiate things with the software providers and making them work well with one another connecting to different channels. Connection didn't work, pricing didn't sync, guest verification
didn't work, Access Control wasn't working properly and and centralizing automated messages wasn't working properly wasn't customized to my life so that's why I started building I said I wanted to be honest with myself and really build what the ultimate tool that I wanted to have when I was in the books. And I think consolidation is something that we're is we're heading to consolidation whether we want it or not because has to happen because that's what the consumer in the end of the day wants and I don't think anybody's providing as of today besides two companies that have started. um I'm going to go back on consolidation though from what your in I on like it's it has nothing to I don't don't think it has to do with the the one system I think it just has to do with the operational efficiencies that's it um if if different systems spoke together in a way where uh when one thing happens on one it updates on the other and send the information to do whatever you need to do um we wouldn't be having this yeah but it won happen if you have not a centralized system that allows for all that like Z for instance that has done that for many other applications because there's it's it's an existing problem in many other industry but nobody has done that for for Hospitality you have to have MW if you don't have MDW is not going to work fair I mean I would say zavier is more the connector than the centralized absolutely a and this is where I think looking at some of the tools that we're going to be looking at this uh after connect the tools that are out there rather than have one centered system that feeds all this information I think you need to have it's not work otherwise I think there's too much uh tency in having one system that governs your entire business so ym are worth sometimes hundreds of billions of dollars that's what they do and they centralize everything it's true if you don't have a system to it happens in every single industry I'm not just making this up any industry you have a centralized system to centralized app your PC works the same exact way whether you have a Mac or Windows that's what a operating system does Windows like you can have a Windows system or you can have OS that's an operating system that's centralized everything for you and that's where you all those programs can talk to one another otherwise if you don't have a centralized system it won't work I I completely agree let's look at the verticals of managing a Hospitality business that's what I mean is when you look at the different vertical of managing a property business there's the the operations there's the distribution there's the financials there's all of these different vertical now whether it's one system that governs all three or five or one system for each let's put that aside for a second I think the main debate is finding ways to connect the tools that are out there already that are doing a great job at a specific vertical that you might already be using let's have another hand no somebody need somebody needs to be responsible is it the uh property manager responsibility to do that spends what we spend at the time like literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in developing our own technology for what somebody else should do that I think it's a kind of a balance right like if you have property management company and you have your specific needs then it's up to you you know to make the connection so that it works for right that's the I absolutely disagree I think a level customization should should exist but what's the property manager job I mean I'm asking you guys you guys join this industry because you want to be involved in technology on or because you want to host guests to build a business no fine but to build a business you need to build systems right any business looks at the prop they and creates a system so that it doesn't happen again comp work with CRM that already by billions of dollars companies and and and they're not developing themselves all right let's look to your comment and then I actually have a wa to love this it's a very tough job um I I just wanted propell you to be forward because I think both of you are going to be right and I think of course have to way but I think the risk development especially on the side of Earth which is just one of L but still the prime is the the fact that they recently went on a wave of opening up the API to more added Valu providers is basically step one onto a fundamental evolution of the industry that I think every man of company has been has been calling for the past few years we went on that integration from a paradigm of Monopoly of the connection with the property manual software putting all the responsibility on that realizing that actually most of the value for the that's found from the PMS pretty muchal you think about it but actually from all those added value service providers priceing experiences all the things that that that you need to have on the future for future future of per fure business and on the T of breed rather than holding one kind of best product for his the best product for pres not the best overall nobody knows what it is but the best for you and I think because of the the investment from that to that Technologies actually will probably unlock step two which is fragmentation not based on property of software providers but really on based of you have your own connection you can you can add more with a p con but you can basically still retrieve and um gain extract more efficiency if you would like from those OTAs that allow you as a property man have to own to connection I think they still a talk of town for 10 years but you Tech en property manag companies you have operators that become software providers because they have experience they wish they would have not know that's the case Journey but absolutely not very this industry at all and I think that's that's now made technically possible be transparent about it at hospitable we have customers that have thousands of distincts those are the one that CH cancel the services from hospitable not because they want to switch to another chance but because they are building their home you have a case in Europe of Gest ready which are not already because they have enough critical mass to be able to negotiate not directly they build their own fragmentation is not having more funders that not talking to one another it's the catching up changing the p and allowing the actual people that give them money give them the supp to have that direct connection so that you can have that take enable business without having to deal with the PMS but building your own customer processes I think we're talking before about the modes I think that is closer to what is a mode for property management companies because those companies that will be able to invest into their Tech will be able as return to yeah get more efficiency seduce more customers or clients to bring them more properties that's what I wish for in this industry in particular so for me more fragmentation not less comes from a PMS too more on the industry level not for you as an operator read your own PMS good luck but that's the point who should take responsibility of that like I'm hope for to have a Marketplace but you need to be able to manage it nobody takes responsibility over disc configuration to be working properly that's the bottom line problem so I love you and I I the only reason I say this because I fundamentally disagree with it even though we have different views on it we're both solving the same problem at the end of the day right we're in the same uh we're headed in the same direction for the property manager I think as a property manager you know what your problems are maybe one day it's Revenue maybe the different day it's operations maybe a different there is no software out there that's going to dictate what a property manager means I think a property manager comes in and says you know what I'm I know so you have a problem you're like you know what I'm having a lot of messages with yes we can't seem to answer them okay I'm going to go hire a vehle I'm going to go use a tool or I'm going to go do this I'm saying you're missing the whole part I'm I'm saying the problem is not the fact that you have to have multiple Solutions is the fact that those Solutions don't work with one another and there needs to be someone responsible to fix that so this is sustainable I have been on the outou side I've managed properties and there's no one that takes responsibility actually a question or thought around this why not just create the MU saw for the SDR industry why not do that like an API connector exactly so this is where we're at with this slide I'll give you an example actually see so we were we were trying to partner with a company for smart locks in the industry and uh this was a year and a half ago and they basically this industry company I won't any names came up to me and said yeah we could certainly do a partnership we'll be here and you'll be here and I was just that's a great start to any partnership um and so she was research I'm like man this is going to be really hard to connect all these different devices CU one person is a the next person is yeah the next person is that and so we found some people seen um I wish I know I wish I had kept it as a secret I wish I kept it as SEC uh these two now use SE guest uses seam host way us the seam it's basically just an API connector for smart devices right that's exactly what you're saying and I think this is what we're going to see across the board with different vertical whether it's payment gateways um I have to go out and integrate strip I have to integrate L I have to integrate this that it's so many different resources when really all I'm trying to do is solve payment piece or whatever the other vertical of your business might be so completely agree I think the the future sure and we see about 20% of Y combinator companies in the latest cow are apis of something so I think what that gets at is one second what that gets at is companies to start building out some fundamental infrastructure within our space so that peers are Reinventing the wheel with ls and uh's not doing it but now guess is going see to do the loot information few day a few weeks of uh you know development time I have some of the other cies up there that's not directly related to the short-term rental industry but play or PL that's how all the financial institutions are just connecting without everyone having to rebuild that API connection right rling is one on HR and merge is another kind of an API company right so it seems like it's not like we need V to create an API for the industry but it's more that we need companies we need companies that identify the problem and then to your point theyve Tak responsibility for the fact that that works and then we as software providers and usend users just expect it to work right so I think that's why I forwarded I think we making the same point get me up for something that I understand yet but um I I just want to point something out like we're seeing two different things like I'm not saying that a the IND shoot the for this connections and yes there's going to be some property managers they want to be tax and they want to go the but just like the computer industry there's the high customization side of things there's also companies that come iniz things and I think the majority of you who want to have a product that works and reliable and put together all this different API for natur because we're talking about API but if you're talking about 90% of Po don't know how to work with an API so yeah you're seeing your point of view but only from Tech side of stuff from being a tech person not being aost of manag 3 years that's I was in university before this I have zero experience in Property Management so completely agree um but my only I think we're saying the same thing here and I'm not asking anyone to build any AP I think the argument is just that the movement for defragmenting this industry is companies that are focusing on API first to create collaboration that that is that is now whether we wrap it under one system whether we let you choose the different systems that's a whole debate bit of itself but I think the overall solution to fragmentation is collaboration over competition it's collaboration over all centralization of this information and data as we've seen with as we've seen with pms's and as we've seen with other systems you seen one small component which is which is the probably the biggest technology Revolution that we are ever going to encounter as Humanity which is AI and not having a centralized system with all the data you basically have a power bu AI we are probably the most best best company in the industry working with AI we're the only one actually as real life products with AI um I'm sure there's a lot of products out there but you guys can see it for yourself what we are doing and we can actually substitute already what a lot of movie parts are made by needs today and that can only work because we have a centralized system if you don't have a centralized system that work just just so um we have one question that then we I believe that one thing that makes this one thing that makes this fragmentation very painful is the lack of standardization because one of the difficulties with integrating with so many apis is that there are different languages what is a booking what is a reservation a multiple a hold a tentative thing Etc uh why do we need to have dozens of cancellation policies different for each Channel H PMS etc etc and that's where I believe in a way we wouldn't need calization of ownership Etc but we need a Common Language so that these have together and it's a work that we all have to do together I think the r is a great place for it to start we'll need the OTAs to work but if we find a Common Language then fragmentation will not be so so painful and it's the work that we could all do together I you know me standard for reservations you have in this we want soing everything always there um so you have implementations of those stards that's actually the biggest prr because you're forcing CH managers software Chann distributions hey have a nice product something happen to it otherwise come on make money I want make money I'm going to integr every that's what my customers are paying for but Google is using the same closing OPI as booking.com so for software it's basically very easy I should say that full little words on that software very easy never nothing is never easy but it's basically a little bit better a little bit easier to now is that a good API it's a very different question I love earing this API because it's really modern involv it standards are frozen on the Ice Age whereas another AP mobile can actually react changes something happened to us two three years ago that basally I got everything and we need to react strongly about conation polies and all I reproted a every every time over basically having something unified but it's true that it needs to be very easy to develop with prop software um with um with other channels Rec I believe I believe we towards at is PMS L definitely you won't need a connectivity partner it just means you will add more to direct access to proprietary data bucket that your OTA is only about your guest so we have uh a few months ago released a product iOS connect I'm sorry I will do a spech it's for software providers that don't have the integration that would like to add it um and we basically releasing it with I think a dozen companies that have implemented in that production which basically means that API where their customers can connect their accounts and be able to manipulate their without having to deal with the burden of managing the own integration and it's a point AB zero we are developing it it's free for the B2B as others it's free to the end user as well because we believe the biggest opportunity that's being Miss in this industry the fact that these things are not API connected which cause a problem for the OT in terms of because for The Operators any size because they're lacking efficiency and therefore they they're going to stop their business Al together and it creates fragmented Tech expence all over the place really really turn toer industry when dies all over the place and has need to move between several differents that's all but I I really there were talks for the past five years about as th API I remember that very distinctly the people that were in this tunnel were the people that were enterprising 1,000 plus properties and they wanted to set terms to property management software um I don't think I don't think anything come of it it just basically spe were really more about what features we are coming impl so that was really a big gap between what I was expecting from those conversations and and what actually is that it was again on the PMS side Integra with the PMS side and I think you're going to have what we doing with those people connecting into the works and service providers is basically going to happen at the same time especially with that phase two on opening up a to more proper management companies directly with a very low lowers get lower and lower is that you're going to need connectors to integrate prop management software as well well that's so much question to your point I feel like that is something for that to actually lead on a vocabulary for the industry that's some standardization that everybody could appeal towards that is international that is something I think could do and would be really helpful do you agree or do you not think they should be I think there be very difficult for an organization to force the tech road map of and and also just general like we all use different languages uh program our back end front end whatever uh we all have different data models based on structuring information and what we need it for um I think one of the basics is going to be just the commonality around uh naming some of the variables that would be amazing if you could not like have your API in Spanish get it if you're in Spain but like do your API in English that' be great um things like that would be awesome but um standardizing apis to that level is going to be very difficult I have yet to see a connector of of PMS I think there was a there was a company we seen a year ago or That was supposed to connect all the PMs and provide it as access to to to operators so again we're not going to see I think it's very difficult to see what you suggested um but there's some work that can be done by the RMA for sure uh to help technology companies at least share the key variables that we can all use to promote Innovation Absolut and I think if was if it's kind of a top down approach I think the amount of future inovation actually gets cycled at a certain point because that's all that's kind problem like what already that innovation in right okay so I have a cou questions um and they kind of go in two different directions so one is how does right maybe this is a topic for another day but Bic I've heard in the past it's spoken that when you're talking about valuing valuation of a property management company that white labeling is the way to go that you do not want to be selling a management company having just you know a test St that's 15 de because your your company is is really has no value really at that point you might sell based on contract if you're property management company because you don't have anything is a value that's an asset other the ACT contracts so I'd like to get on that um another one is what is it that is the biggest road block to open API right now is it money is it time what is the number one road block for open apis and the last one is fr does the interview meet off this across the street now um I can answer that second and third one third one yes now we been working with the know they're an amazing um um I don't have say they actually are but the second part about why don't we have an open API and why companies there's two two parts to it I think you look at it first is do they even have an API um have they bu the documentation um have they gone through
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