Meta Just Entered Travel. STR Operators Should Notice.

0:23Brandreth Canaley: Good morning. Happy Monday.

0:27Michael Goldin: Hello, best day of the week. And I don't know if it's going to be a short week or a really long week. Probably long, but we'll be a long week.

0:34Brandreth Canaley: I think a long week. International travel weeks are always longer than you think

0:39Michael Goldin: they're going to be. Yeah. It's like four days longer, although it's the same amount of days.

0:44Brandreth Canaley: Yeah. Well, my day, my travel started last night when I flew to New York and then I'm flying from New York to Guestival in Madrid. So I was going to be a tired Brandy on the way home on Saturday. Okay.

0:57Michael Goldin: It's good for you. You're still young. You're still young. Jamie's got some gray in the beard. I've got one gray hair now.

1:04Brandreth Canaley: I have mine in here. It's looking all gray. But how were your weekends? Do you guys get up to anything fun?

1:13Michael Goldin: It was a good, relaxing weekend. The first kind of relaxing weekend in a long time. and probably the last one as well with busy conference season for me and my wife working on a few of the weekends. So we enjoyed it thoroughly. Yeah, ours was pretty laid back. I did take my youngest to an amateur wrestling match, which was so awesome. Like WWE wrestling or like? WWE wrestling, but like at a brewery and they set up the whole than that. There was like five different groups that came out at different times. It was, it was incredible.

1:54Brandreth Canaley: And this was a no way sad. No way sad. Very fun. Our five-year-old was thoroughly entertained. Okay.

2:05Michael Goldin: That's great. You made it down to the city. I did.

2:09Brandreth Canaley: Well, before that I was in Saratoga for the night because my mom and my grandmother, their birthdays were both on friday but it was my grandma's 95th so we had um a nice party for her and all my siblings were there and it was very fun um and then i drove back to boston in the rain i keep that keeps happening to me i hate it but yes now now the the travel starts so i'm ready like conference season commence yes this is ding the gong jamie are you going to any of the user conferences or you just skiffed and verma uh skiffed verma darm yeah the i'm going to the big industry ones and not any of the user ones okay sweet that's fair well our first topic today another another chat has entered the picture um we have uh meta's muse agent trying to book travel and uh jamie before the show you were saying that you had attempted so what were your findings yeah so and as always i like to play with these and get a sense of i mean how good they would be at booking type of travel i would take whether it's with the family or for work uh and after using it for about 20 minutes i see like when brian chesky says like the chat interface can be horrible for trying to book travel, like not being able to see photos and not being able to compare different things, just like a horrible experience for trying to book travel.

3:41Like this was it. I hadn't really experienced that with ChatGPT. It's sort of the embedded UI was always pretty good with the OTAs, but this was, at least on the travel side, pretty lacking. Yeah.

3:56Michael Goldin: And I played with it as well. According to Skift, Muse allows direct bookings for airlines, but for nothing else. And it pulls up web interfaces for you for everything else. So, I mean, this is V1. They just launched it. It's going to get 10 times better. V1 of ChatGPT was terrible. And it continues to get better and better. So the real question is, how many of these are going to exist and where are people actually going to be searching and transacting? I guess, top of funnel searching, and then where will the transactions continue to lead? And I think we've talked about it on the show a lot. The OTAs have the giant head start because they have all the inventory right now.

4:47Michael Goldin: But there will be tools and capabilities to sync into these different channels. over time and have agents be able to book. So question for you guys, since Moose wasn't great. The hype in sort of X in Silicon Valley world has been around GrokBot and it's sort of agent first, like going out and doing things for you. Have either of you guys tried GrokBot?

5:15Brandreth Canaley: No, I'm my level. Well, I've committed to one. I'm a monogamous chat user. I have Claude as it. I'm just committing to Claude. I got, when I opened Instagram earlier in the weekend, it was like, do you want to use Muse? I was like, absolutely, I like violently exited out. Like I, first of all, I don't want to give meta any more of my data than it already absolutely has. And, you know, Michael, before the show, you had a really great point. There's going to be all these options, GrokBot or Claude or Chat or Musey or whatever, But it's like you're going to choose one and that's going to be and are you going to choose are you going to choose Gratbot or the whatever meta has?

5:55Brandreth Canaley: I don't know.

5:56Michael Goldin: Yeah. ChatGPT already has so much of like my preferences and my history and whatnot that it's going to be tough to swap to anything else. It'd have to be really compelling to do so. And while Muse knows everything I did back in my teens and 20s due to whatever crazy photos I might have uploaded and then subsequently deleted. To your point, Brandy, it's not one that I'm going to kind of jump in right away, head first and lean into. It'd have to be pretty compelling to kind of swap lanes at this point.

6:34Brandreth Canaley: I will say I do love their little mascot, their little avatar. He's so cute. It's not enough to get me to use it. But I did. They got cuteness points. So I'll give them that. And the Musy was the name I had given it. My five-year-old gives all of his stuffed animals. Oh, I thought that's what its name was. No, it's like he calls them like Seely, Diney. Like he just adds. I had a Seely growing up. So I get it.

6:59Michael Goldin: I named my muse Jeeves because I used to love the Ask Jeeves portal.

7:03Brandreth Canaley: Oh, no, your millennial is showing, Michael.

7:08Michael Goldin: Hell yeah.

7:10Brandreth Canaley: Well, you know, so I think like a lot of things that are coming out, we'll just see how this goes. V1, not super impressive, but they do win cuteness points. And I mean, I don't know. I don't want to give meta any more of my information. So this is probably going to be a pass, even if it's great. I barely even use Facebook. So like.

7:28Michael Goldin: Yeah, I want to touch on Paul's comment real quick before we change topics. but Paul states that this is the type of release that loses potential travelers. This isn't the final product, but the OTAs are going to be more embedded. This is a chance for someone else to dethrone the OTAs, but this just further deepens that relationship, I think. I don't know, Paul. People evolve. I use GPT, and then I swapped over to Gemini for a while and then back to GPT because it just got so much better. These models jump so quickly that, you know, I do think people will end up choosing one. I don't know if it's completely set in stone yet, but they might have a personal one and a professional one.

8:17Michael Goldin: Who knows? But let's find out.

8:22Brandreth Canaley: Let's find out. Well, there is big news for someone on this chat or this call, this show. Sorry, Monday brain. The coffee hasn't kicked in yet. But Jamie, AirDNA has released dynamic pricing tools. So congratulations. You're jumping into the foray. This makes a lot of sense. Obviously, you have all the data. So yeah, why don't you give us kind of the spiel, the pitch about what you guys have been up to? Yeah. And so one, it was a lot about the data and we think we have the industry's best data. And one of the best ways to deploy that data for an average user is to create the best pricing tools out of it.

9:03And so that's number one. And number two is like, it is a competitive place, but we've seen there hasn't been a lot of innovation done in dynamic pricing tools. A lot of them still feel like in 2015, 2016 when they launched. And we thought that the time was sort of ripe to come in and disrupt a bit. And ultimately, like we felt that there should be an easy button for dynamic pricing. So letting you sort of start with a strategy and then build your price, your settings, your discounting all towards that goal. And then finally, like AI should be introducing itself into the AI equation. Like you should have all your contacts available, which in AirDNA Adapted does.

9:52So your property, your market, your comps. And then you should be able to interact with it, ask questions and adjust settings, all that directly with the app. And that's what we launched. So you're entering, I mean, there's the three price labs beyond.

10:10Brandreth Canaley: And we all know that in our industry, people get attached to their technology and change management is super painful and people just get used to their products. So what is your pitch to an operator right now? Why should they choose you over someone that they've been with for a while they might be more comfortable with? Yeah. And one is sort of the ease of use after you've implemented like all of these tools. Let's say you've got 40 different knobs that you can pull and each of those knobs maybe interacts with your price in different ways. A lot of them conflict in many different ways. So like let's give you a way to like have all those settings work together towards that owner outcome, that business outcome that you're working towards.

10:50and then i mean none of them i don't think do ai well and just like you want to interact with clod and sort of ask questions around the business like air dna did launch the mcp for adapt on day one so yes you can use it but also you should be able to go into the pricing tool and it's like how am i pricing for halloween like and it sort of tell you that and then like all right what should we do It can tell you some suggestions what to do and then, okay, let's implement a discount 10 % for these properties on these nights and then it just do it. So that sort of flow we think is going to, how revenue management should work.

11:30And no one was doing that yet.

11:34Michael Goldin: Great answer. The no one was doing it is one thing, but aside from the big three, there's also a long tail of pricing companies out there. Why not just scoop one of them up and build off their back? What was the build versus buy? Yeah. No, we did want to buy coming into this. So we've been evaluating different opportunities over the past few years. None of them presented a price point that was actionable or an underlying tech that was valuable enough to actually acquire. So after a lot of searching, a lot of sort of digging, a lot of sort of trying to understand what the ecosystem really looked like, we decided that the best way forward was just to build it ourselves.

12:30Beautiful.

12:32Michael Goldin: and coming out, it looks like price points at about 20 bucks a listing. That puts it towards the premium in the market. I know it's always easier to lower prices in the future, but coming out is super premium. What's the strategy there? One is that, and we feel like a lot of the dynamic pricing tools out there, like get you with that low initial price. And then they tack on things on the top, like, oh, now you have to pay for the data that sits behind it. Now you have to pay for each comp set. Now you have to pay for price listing optimization. So with AirDNA, we've sort of bundled that all in to that per listing price.

13:11So you get unlimited comp sets. We're going to be rolling out listing optimization later this year. So all that's going to be included in the price and you can sort of get access to all the data you need and not have to do that. And so when you look at the all-in price, it's actually significantly lower than a lot of the competition. And then we do do, and for larger property managers, multi-listing discounts, like you're going to get down to a competitive price if you've got a lot of listings out there.

13:41Brandreth Canaley: Nice. Well, it's exciting. I mean, you guys are the kings of data, so it makes sense that you would have a pricing tool. And I'm sure that also is embedded in your, or part of the package with uplisting so you can i mean part of the thing that we also launched with was the integration so you guys are going out the sd val we're guestie was a launch partner so we have the integration there host way and obviously uplisting but also uh hospitable owner res and we've got 20 more in the pipeline to launch before the end of the year so with ai and the ability to do integrations quickly. Like the whole pain of integrations, I think has been solved a lot with some of the new encoding tools.

14:27So that's great. And then we've had success in the past, and it's been what, two weeks since we launched, like tens of thousands of listings already connected, almost a thousand syncing today. And it's been seeing adoption pretty quickly out there.

14:42Brandreth Canaley: That's really exciting. Congratulations. Congratulations. Yeah, congrats.

14:46Michael Goldin: I know you guys have been working on it for a while, so I'm sure it's good to get the monkey off the back. Oh, yeah.

14:52Brandreth Canaley: Awesome. Well, we had a surprise kind of last minute story pop up today about our favorite Airbnb, but this is actually something we were all pretty excited about. So this is an article from the Wall Street Journal. Airbnb sets up$250 million fund for housing construction, to invest in housing construction. And this is something that makes, I think, a lot of sense. It's like one of the biggest critiques about short-term rentals. And now they're like, we're going to help plug all these funding gaps. and you know that i think we've had this conversation a lot it is blaming str is an easy like scapegoat in a lot of areas and there certainly are certain areas like central barcelona where this has had where short-term rentals have taken over for right but when you're dealing with countrywide housing problems it's because there's a lack of housing supply and there aren't homes being built.

15:48Brandreth Canaley: So I think this is a phenomenal PR move and something to do with all that cash they're sitting on. And yeah, I think I love this. I think this is a great play. Yeah. And having come from the real estate side, being at CBRE and sort of seeing the conversations happening on getting apartment deals done, I love where they've decided to put the money. So when you think about getting an apartment building built, you've got like the construction loan. You've got the equity that the investors are putting into it. And then a lot of times there's this middle. So it's whether it's mezzanine or sort of less dollar financing that they're coming into of like the bank's already said we will, or the partner will already say we'll do the construction loan for maybe 65%.

16:39And the equity partners come in, they've sort of pulled together and 15, 20 % in equity of the investors that are looking to do this deal. And there's like maybe 10, 15 % left that needs to come in to get this deal done. And Airbnb saying like when there's a deal that's sort of on the finish line and it's this last bit of money that needs to come in to get the deal under construction and add new housing into these markets that they're going to come in and be that last dollar financing, which it feels like a great opportunity for them to really make a difference in terms of adding more housing into these markets.

17:17And I just like there's so many different ways you can like and people complain about housing, but then they don't actually do anything to sort of impact the problem that this is. And they're finally putting some money towards maybe getting something done here.

17:34Michael Goldin: Yeah, for me, it makes so much sense that it doesn't make sense why they're doing it now and why they didn't do it last year, two years ago, 10 years ago.

17:43Brandreth Canaley: Yeah. They could have maybe.

17:45Michael Goldin: Ever since they've been profitable and had cash sitting on hand, I did the rough math or rather chat GPT did the$250 million fund, which they're not deploying all at once. It's what they're separating apart represents between two and 4 % of cash and short-term investments, liquid investments on hand. That's so nominal to a company like Airbnb. That this is, it's great and it's altruistic, but it's also a very good PR stunt, if you will, for them in markets that they're probably getting hurt in, like Austin, with short-term rental regulations. So it's a tool in the tool shed for their government relations team to go in and say, look, we'll invest in the community.

18:34Michael Goldin: They'll get investment returns back. So it's not, you know, donations. and it combats one of their biggest anti-legislation moves of their platform. What I don't understand is why now, now that they're broadening out to be a more wide OTA and not 12 months ago or 24 months ago. So maybe this has been in the works for a while and it just took some new C-suite teams to get their feet underneath them and say, this is the path we should do. but I also know their former CFO a long time back, I'm drawing a blank on his name, but he made a ton of money at Airbnb doing investments of the cash they had on hand.

19:19Michael Goldin: So yeah, I like the move. Makes total sense, put cash to work. It's such a small piece of their available cash, but I wish it had come sooner. Why not?

19:33Brandreth Canaley: Yeah, when I saw the headline, I was like, it doesn't really seem like a lot of money for like a housing project. Like, you know, and this is obviously not going to one, but then in the article, so they're providing 6.4 million to this project in Austin that was affected when interest rates went up and there's like, you know, the gap between getting your funding and actually breaking ground. So it's this, I thought that was such a perfect example of how they're not building the project, but they're able to come in and help these projects that need, I mean, it's crazy that $6.4 million is like a little bit of money to get the project over the line, but that's fantastic.

20:08Brandreth Canaley: And to anyone that would comment, like, this is just a PR stunt. I'm like, so what? This is a PR stunt that has actual like substance behind it. Like there is a real product that's helping that community and also is helping their image. And I don't really like, I think it's great. I think if you could do both, that's a great stunt to do. Yeah. But also like there is the ability for this to sort of backfire too. Everyone loves to hate on developers, greedy developers going out and building housing and taking advantage of renters. Everyone loves to hate on Airbnb. So Airbnb sort of, I'm providing money for developers.

20:52It feels like there's going to be some negative headlines out there, even though I'm sort of coming in with the best of attentions, it feels Yeah.

20:59Michael Goldin: The fact that they're not the developer and they're just the capital partner should help that front. And it's affordable housing.

21:06Brandreth Canaley: It's like actual, it's not like a luxury tower.

21:10Michael Goldin: Yeah. It's also important to call out what we know, at least so far. They're not building hotels. They're not building buildings that are dedicated to be short-term rentals. This is to combat the anti-housing narrative. What I'd be curious to find out is, do they plan on putting this in the friendly building program and allow the tenants to then short-term rent their own properties? So more will come out on this story. And as soon as that starts to happen, then I think that's the biggest risk that the narrative changes is they're not actually doing this to help affordable housing. They're doing it to add more supply.

21:53A lot of times the developer is not the operator. They're not the, and they a lot of times flip the building after they build it. So it might not, you'd think it'd be, oh, Airbnb providing money to help get this built. Like I think the owner would be ripe to be part of the friendly building program. Like it might not be the same owner that actually sort of launches it after it's built. Time will tell.

22:17Michael Goldin: I'm excited to find out.

22:18Brandreth Canaley: Yeah. Well, our final story is the opposite of this, which is great. They fit so well together. But kind of this phenomenon that started in Italy of having villages that are basically empty become a decentralized hotel. And I think it's using short-term rentals for good, our powers for good, and helping these villages or hamlets or whatever that are empty revive themselves or sustain themselves. I think it's a great idea. And it was really interesting reading about it that it came out of this huge earthquake that happened in Northern Italy and how those towns started to figure out how to survive in the aftermath of that.

22:58Brandreth Canaley: And now in Germany, in Rwanda, in Japan, there's examples of governments supporting these efforts of how you can revitalize or maintain these dwindling towns. And I think short-term rentals, this is perfect. Throw them all on Airbnb.

23:13Michael Goldin: be this is like a dream project to me like take over an entire small village and you name it doesn't matter where and turn the village into a resort and sounds great even better if half of the town is still there but in these cases i think uh these are just mostly abandoned places uh stunning views, great architecture, everything sets up to be what you want for a resort. The problem is it would probably take so much capital and investment to get these places to an ADR or a standard that you're going to attract resort-style prices. But in terms of cost basis, cost basis is near zero. and a lot of supplies are there and the charm is there so threading the needle of trying to keep it somewhat authentic but also turn it into a destination because that's what these would be um i i would this would be a dream project to work on so i do think it it goes into one of these themes and i feel like this theme would be like what part of skiffs like global and research when they come up with themes, but it's like on mass population decline.

24:37So like there's so many countries and I just pulled up the UN numbers on like next decade, like Japan is expected to lose 5 % of its population, 6 million people. South Korea, 3%, 1.5 million. Italy down two and a half percent, losing 1.5 million people. Like this is a real concern for many countries of like in the U S we worry about the lack of housing, not enough being built, pushing up housing prices. And many of these other countries is the opposite. There is not enough people for all the housing that exists. And so it's like, what creative use cases that can they come up with? One, can they push people to try to live in these areas that are in rural areas trying to see, are seeing population declines.

25:27And then for a country like Italy or Japan, where there's already so much tourism, is tourism a solve there? We make short-term rental is legal and try to find investment in these areas. And really, I killed two birds with one stone of finding use for all these homes, but also create economic activity and jobs for the people that still want to live and work in those areas.

25:56Brandreth Canaley: Yeah, absolutely. I think they're giving examples like there's a handful of year round people that now have employment in those areas. And then there are seasonal workers that come in. So if you have an area that is sparsely populated, but you can give a significant percentage of that population full time or maybe seasonal employment, like these economic, the economic gains aren't going to be some massive employment program, but it's doing a bunch of these little things a little bit at a time that provides some stability in the region that I think is really compelling. Yeah.

26:28Michael Goldin: And I know various groups within the European Union have investments to help revitalize some of these towns. So, you know, may as well throw this out there, Brian, you've got 250 million going into affordable housing in America. What about preservation housing and preservation of history in Europe? Peel another 250 off. That'll go a really long way. You can save probably five towns with that. So

26:56Brandreth Canaley: you can auto list those on Airbnb as part of the agreement.

27:02Michael Goldin: Hotels and the short terminal platform. So it crossed. You could build an airport and send flights there to rental cars. use the whole power of the platform.

27:14Brandreth Canaley: Yeah, exactly. The unified journey throughout that. So yeah, very, it's, I think it's, it must be, I mean, a little disconcerting if you're in these areas just watching, you know, your town or your community disappear over time. And I think this is a great way that communities could kind of like be brought back together. And I don't know, it's something that it's hopeful in this kind of like sad topic. But yeah, so really interesting stories this week. I think that it's interesting. I think my favorite story of the week is, I mean, aside from AirDNA launching something very cool, it's definitely the Airbnb investment.

27:58Brandreth Canaley: And I'm very curious to see how that goes. And so what do you guys have going on this week? I mean, I know what Michael's up to. I'm about to see you in Madrid. Um, but Jamie, what do you have going on? Yeah. Uh, last week, uh, of no travel for me. So trying to keep it, keep it chill, get some projects done around the house. We had a, a dishwasher go out, um, on Friday. So that was a fun project, water everywhere.

28:27Michael Goldin: So Jamie was the dishwasher all weekend. I just proud. I got it fixed. I found the part, got it installed and it's, it's, it's done. But Yeah. Then up to New York and Skift Global Forum next week.

28:41Brandreth Canaley: Yes. I'll be seeing you there. I get to see both of you in the next two weeks. Very exciting.

28:47Michael Goldin: Yep. Brandy, I'm going to need your help in Spanish. I know.

28:51Brandreth Canaley: I'm ready. I'm ready to be the translator. I was like, wow, I really hope Gessie doesn't ask me to say anything in Spanish on stage. Yeah. Brandy and the boys go back to Spain part two. So I'm pumped. and if any of our listeners are going to be at Guest Eval or at Skift, definitely let us know. We'd love to meet up with you. It's always fun seeing people IRL. So let us know in the comments or in a DM and we hope you have a great rest of your week.

29:37Bye.