Hospitable Town Hall, May 28, 2025

Summary

Highlights

• Hospitable introduced two new hires, Michael and Sven, to bolster their team's marketing and technical capabilities. 🤝
• The company is rolling out new upsells and security deposit features to streamline operations and protect revenue. 🚀
• Enhancements to rental agreements include fillable fields and optional agreements, offering more flexibility to users. ✍️
• The team is working on expanding their payout capabilities to Canada and the EU, aiming for a broader reach. 📈
• A Q&A session allowed users to provide direct feedback and ask about the features in development. 💬

Key Takeaways

• New hires are set to enhance Hospitable's growth and support. 🎉
• Upsells can now be managed for any booking channel, boosting revenue opportunities. 🤑
• Security deposits with chargeback protection are being piloted for Airbnb bookings. 🔐
• International payout expansions are in the works, aiming for a broader global reach. 🌍
• Rental agreements have been revamped with new customizable features. 📜

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Agenda The chapter introduces the agenda for the town meeting. It begins with the speaker realizing they are muted, and a brief pause is indicated before the meeting starts.
• 00:30 - 05:00: Team Introductions The chapter 'Team Introductions' begins with a welcome message to the bi-weekly town hall meeting. The speaker informs the attendees that the session is live and being recorded, offering a backup viewing option on YouTube in case of connection issues. The meeting is structured to first provide quick updates on products followed by a Q&A session.
• 05:00 - 06:33: Product Updates The chapter titled 'Product Updates' begins with introductions, a typical process when there is a new hire in the company. The focus is on a newcomer named Michael, who has joined the team as a Growth Marketing Manager. The humorous tone is set by mentioning the 'shared trauma' of public introduction, with Michael being the first 'victim' to be 'sacrificed.' The chapter suggests a casual, light-hearted meeting atmosphere, characterized by getting to know team members better.
• 06:33 - 10:00: Presentation on Money and Business Operations The chapter opens with a greeting and introduction in Dallas, Texas, focusing on promoting the Hospitable product. The speaker shares a personal anecdote about their first job at a radio station, where they facilitated contests and gave away concert tickets, like those for Justin Bieber.
• 10:00 - 17:00: New Features and Solutions The chapter titled 'New Features and Solutions' opens with dialogue between a radio host and Michael, discussing future opportunities for public engagement. Following this, Sven from the 'city of cheese' makes an introduction, setting the stage for a broader discussion on new features and solutions.
• 25:00 - 30:00: Security Deposits Feature The chapter discusses a new 'Security Deposits Feature' and is interspersed with personal anecdotes from the speaker. The speaker, an individual from Gouda, mentions their unusual hobby of participating in 16 obstacle runs since 2020. Additionally, there's a humorous account of their dedication to closing all activity rings on their Apple Watch consistently for the past five years, even to the extent of waking up in the middle of the night to achieve this goal.
• 35:00 - 37:30: Dynamic Pricing Updates In the "Dynamic Pricing Updates" chapter, the conversation touches upon the participants' dedication to certain tasks, indicating a humorous reluctance to admit obsession over them. The dialogue then shifts to welcoming a new team member and discussing their first project at Hospitalible. The new member joined at the beginning of the month, and although there hasn't been an introduction earlier, the conversation explores what their initial project will involve. Currently, the new member is in the process of familiarizing themselves with the product.
• 37:30 - 40:00: QuickBooks Integration The chapter titled 'QuickBooks Integration' primarily focuses on an individual's upcoming project related to chat improvements as their first major task. The discussion touches briefly on potential future contributions to other products, as mentioned during a town hall meeting. Additionally, the current workforce at the company, hospitalitable, stands at 102 people, with frontline support roles experiencing significant growth this year.
• 43:00 - 44:30: Community and Events The chapter 'Community and Events' highlights the significance of teamwork in successful product development. It acknowledges the expansion of the engineering team by 25 people daily to focus on product improvements and bug fixes, emphasizing the collaborative efforts to enhance the support experience.
• 45:00 - 58:30: Q&A The chapter titled 'Q&A' primarily revolves around upcoming features and enhancements intended to improve user experience. However, it acknowledges that a substantial amount of effort is dedicated to product fixes and improvements. The presentation aims to discuss strategies related to money, suggesting a focus on increasing financial gain for the audience.

Hospitable Town Hall, May 28, 2025 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I'm muted. Few seconds until we start our town
• 00:30 - 01:00 hall. Awesome. Hello everybody and thanks for hopping on our bi-weekly town hall. We're live and recording. So if you lose connection, you can just head to our YouTube and to catch the live stream there. We'll start with some quick product updates and then we'll jump into the Q&A section. So let's get into
• 01:00 - 01:30 it. Believe today. And I'm going to be starting with some team introductions as is basically happening every time that we're having a new hire and basically making sure that we are sharing the same trauma of being exposed to everyone in the public. Uh so first victim being sacrificed is Michael uh who is joining the company as a growth marketing manager. Michael, who are you? What are you doing? Share your video. Yes, you get it right. Fantastic. It's great start. Um yeah, tell us more who you
• 01:30 - 02:00 are. Hello everyone. Uh, I am in Dallas, Texas. I'll be working on just helping more people learn about Hospitable and hopefully fall in love with the product. And a weird fact about me is my first job was at a radio station and I was the sort of person who would pick up when there was contests to get free concert tickets and stuff. So, if you ever entered one of those trying to be like caller 19, I was probably on the other end of it giving away like Justin Bieber tickets. Okay. You were not not yet a
• 02:00 - 02:30 radio host though. Not quite. Not quite. Okay. Well, that's uh that's something we can work with for for another thing. There's going to be plenty of opportunities to do so in the public. Thank you very much, Michael. Uh that's definitely some help that we need on this. Next, we also have Zven uh who is joining us from the city of cheese. Yes. Uh hi everyone. Uh Sven. Um, as PC
• 02:30 - 03:00 already mentioned, I'm from Ka or as most people probably know it, Gouda, uh, with the cheese. And a fun fact about me is that since 2020, I have done 16 obstacle runs. Wait, wait. You are you you're the person that closes all your rings that have been closing all your rings for the past five years. That's right. On on your Apple Watch. Yeah. To the point where you have to wake up in the middle of the night because your rings
• 03:00 - 03:30 Yeah, I'm not that obsessive about it, but close. Yeah, you're not that obsessed about it. Said no one ever. Okay, which is great. I don't think I've closed all my rings for a while now. So, thank you, Van. What are you going to be working on? So, it's been a while actually since you joined uh hospitalitable. You joined at the beginning of the month. You just we just could not introduce you last last. Uh what is your going to be your your first project? What are you going to be working on? Um yeah, so um uh I'm just getting familiar with the product right now, but
• 03:30 - 04:00 uh I'll probably be working on some chat improvements uh as my first big project, but that'll be coming up coming up soon. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Zans. Obviously, we may hear from you in a later town hall for a product that you've been contributing towards. Um now that means as of today we do have 102 people uh that are working every day at hospitalitable uh the roles that have actually been growing the fastest this year definitely on the frontline support
• 04:00 - 04:30 side. I do believe uh that you will see some very meaningful impact on that on your support experience. Now sup it's a a product lacospitable requires a lot of teamwork uh to be successful and so we also have been very fast and increasing our engineering team uh 25 people every day today uh to basically working on uh working mostly really on fixes and improvement to existing product. You
• 04:30 - 05:00 only get to hear about the new features that we're releasing which obviously improve on the user experience. Um but definitely most of the work is still happening uh for fixes and improvement of the product. Now what are we going to talk to you about today? Uh we have a very ambitious presentation and we're going to talk to you about money. Um which we like at least you guys should like it too. Um and we're going to talk about how we can make you more of it. Andrew,
• 05:00 - 05:30 now is your turn. I'm coming. I'm coming. Second here. Okay. Yes. So, um, one second. Let me get on the right slide here. Okay. So, yeah, what we want to talk about is that you are running a cross channel business. Each channel that you're on has different requirements, different things they expect you to comply with, different rules. And uh you know this is this has come up recently and we're going to talk
• 05:30 - 06:00 about that a bit is they're sometimes in flux, sometimes changing and yet your business um needs to keep operating through all this change. And that's why we think as a channel manager that's kind of our job to help you navigate those changes to protect your business, protect the revenue that you earn um maybe even in addition to um your reservation income to protect your income generating asset which is your property um and and so on. So, how do we do that? Well, what we're doing today
• 06:00 - 06:30 and what we're going to talk about um from the various uh features we'll talk about today is we have some solutions that are either brand new or or just improved to help you streamline your operations, to help you protect your property, and to help you help you earn more money on each and every reservation that you have. So what we're calling this is drum roll please payouts. It's not super exciting in
• 06:30 - 07:00 itself but it unlocks a lot of uh features for us. So payouts um is something that is is not new in itself forospitable. This is something that we've been refining and growing and learning from uh over our whole process of direct what has it been two and a half years. Um, and we're thinking now it's time to kind of grow both the geographic reach of where we do payouts as well as grow this outside of direct. So again, direct today is available in the US and the UK and Australia. We're
• 07:00 - 07:30 really hoping and we've even started working on it now in the early stages of expanding this to Canada and the EU uh later this year. At the moment, we're processing a million dollars a week in guest payments and we've learned a lot around uh along that journey and we want to share that and move to the next features that can be powered on that kind of fintech foundation that we have. So today we're going to talk about two
• 07:30 - 08:00 features um security deposits and upsells that are powered by payouts but no longer tied just to direct. So by controlling the flow of funds by giving yourself um or by giving your account sorry these these kind of um an e-commerce basically hub um we can now start to unlock more and more fintech features today security deposits and upsells later. Next slide. Going beyond with owner payouts something that the mobile
• 08:00 - 08:30 team will start talking about in the near future. um potentially selling trip insurance and payment solutions which are going to be part of our relationship with OTAAS going forward. Um we announced recently that we are on the path for an official uh integration with Verbbo which would make us a payment solution for Verbbo. Uh we have the same opportunity with booking. So again, taking the uh asset that we've built up on direct and leveraging that so you have um more and more capabilities with
• 08:30 - 09:00 um for example in the US where we're doing tax remittance on direct premium leveraging that into a merchant of record solution um that you can use on your different OTAA bookings. Now why do we feel like we're well positioned to do this for you and to provide um kind of a unique value uh amongst other channel managers? Um, we have invested a lot in the kind of risk management. Uh, when we when we launched direct premium, it was all about offering you direct booking, but not just doing the easy way, doing the hard way and giving you the things
• 09:00 - 09:30 that were, you know, kind of the the value ads from from OTAAS. What do they do? Well, they protect you from chargebacks. Um, we have processed, I think, 184 chargebacks in the last 12 months. I don't know how many you might have dealt with on your business. Um, but we've learned a lot. We kind of kind of consider ourselves a bit of of experts on chargebacks. Um, and not only does that protect you from your your fraud and your and your revenue stream, but it also protects you if you're your own portion of record like on Direct Basic, um, some of you have already
• 09:30 - 10:00 learned the consequences of having chargebacks. Um, we would prefer you not to have those consequences, not to lose that time defending yourself from those and that's something we're well positioned to do. So we talked about um the ID verification that uh in the last couple weeks we've have been completely revamped upgrading to a state-of-the-art solution that is integral part of this. It's an integral part of the damage protection we do. It's an integral part of some of the features we're talking about today going forward. And rental agreements we'll be announcing some some
• 10:00 - 10:30 improvements there. And these are the things that that helped help set the relationship between you and your and your your guest as well as protecting yourself um and your property going forward. So, this is an interesting time to talk about these things, right? um unless you've been living under a rock. Um Airbnb has kind of rocked the boat and talked about um either taking um a revised look at some of the positions they've had in the past or just starting to think about um
• 10:30 - 11:00 enforcement or um a stepped up attention on some of these topics. Now, we're going to share some of our opinions on this. We are still waiting on clarification uh from Airbnb on some of these these topics. Um but for example, our outlook is that security deposits are here to stay. They are an integral part of your protection. Um but they are going to be under more scrutiny from Airbnb. That much is clear. We feel like our role as the as the property management system, we can help you use
• 11:00 - 11:30 these in a compliant manner. It's important that we use them well. We've had a lot of thought about this uh in our own secure deposit solution. Um these are not to be used frivolously. um it's not a good experience for the guest, you will get in trouble doing this. We're going to help you use them in the best practice way, right? We believe that upsells are here to stay. Now, there's not a solution available for these on Airbnb today for us to say
• 11:30 - 12:00 implement an upsell system within their own payment infrastructure. That doesn't exist. We would love for that to exist. What we have today is the payment infrastructure to do that. We are waiting clarity again on how Airbnb is approaching what upsells hosts should be able to tech take how to protect their own revenue is um a topic it's in discussion but we'll talk more about that soon rental agreements IDB verification these are all things that are critical to your business are going to be under
• 12:00 - 12:30 more scrutiny rental agreements specifically they might have to have some kind of a justification so this might be your HOA that requires this or the ID verification or the state of Arizona requiring sex offender checks. Um, you might have to provide justification going forward, but we want to give you the tools to do this. Again, we think we can do a good job on, for example, the data protection of ID verification and doing um kind of the best state-of-the-art solutions to help you operate in a compliant manner on the OTAAS and protect your business.
• 12:30 - 13:00 And with that, we will pass to Nick, who's going to introduce the first feature um that we're offering uh today. Thanks, Andrew. And yeah, let's get straight into it. So, announcing upsells are now available for any bookings wherever you are hosting. That means that whatever OTAA you are on, wherever your listings are at, even if you're just doing manual bookings, even if you're importing through ICAL calendars,
• 13:00 - 13:30 you are now able to offer upsells to your guests to drive more revenue for your business. We want to meet you where you are to help your business grow. Um, yeah. So, what does that mean? um you are able to access a link that leads to a guest portal for any booking. Um you can share that with your guest and they if you've set upselles inhospitable um and activated them, they will be able
• 13:30 - 14:00 to choose from those available for them and purchase them with our payment infrastructure and you will get the payout through our payout infrastructure. As Andrew just mentioned, apart from sharing the guest portal link directly, you can also add a smart upsell short code into your messaging rules. What that will do is use AI to intelligently add or not, if it decides not to, some text and a guest portal link in that message to potentially upsell a guest on the spot.
• 14:00 - 14:30 And you can also add an upsell simple upsell short code to add the guest portal link uh in your messaging rules wherever you want to add your own text about um offering upsells. So that's sharing uh with your guests. Now who is this available to right now? Direct premium subscribers. very very soon as we finalize our um payout method um infrastructure and our user interface soon that will be to everyone with one exception um legacy customers unless you're on direct
• 14:30 - 15:00 premium this will not be available. So, in summary, right now, if you're on direct premium, you can go ahead and set this up and start using this very soon, matter of days, everyone else. Um, with the caveat that I also mentioned next, um, upselles so far have been a pretty basic experience. Uh, we wanted to feel much more like an e-commerce solution. Um, that means that pictures and descriptions are now available in upsells for you to set up and those will
• 15:00 - 15:30 show up in the guest portal when a guest is viewing those products. This is live right now. And on top of that, again, in uh the same theme of e-commerce, uh if you want to be able to sell more than one quantity of a given thing, let's say somebody wants to buy three packs of firewood to top up for the uh snowy season during their winter stay, no problem. In the guest portal, they'll be able to select three quantities of firewood and pay for those three at the
• 15:30 - 16:00 same time. That's also live right now. So that is upsells for all platforms, all OTAAS. And next, let's talk about rental agreements. All right. Um, I'm very excited to talk about rental agreements because there's been so many questions in the past town halls and we've been saying it's coming, it's coming and and now we have some really exciting updates today. So, um, as part of what we've been calling rental agreements 2.0,
• 16:00 - 16:30 We have lots of highly requested improvements starting with the ability to customize the guest portal task reminders. So, if you aren't familiar already, we are automatically sending reminders to guests on your behalf when they have pending tasks, which include rental agreements that need to be completed in the guest portal prior to check-in. And for a lot of you, the reminders are fine, but we've heard a lot of feedback that you really need
• 16:30 - 17:00 more control. And I mean, those reminders are coming from you. And so, you should be able to make them sound like you. Um, and now you can. So, you can now customize those reminders, meaning that you can disable them, you can add new reminders, you can change the timing of the reminders. Um, and you can also customize the content just as long as you include the guest portal short code. We want to make sure that's included there so your guests have the ability to go on and finish that task.
• 17:00 - 17:30 And and then also just like all other messaging rules, you can also add uh templates in additional languages. So you can send those reminders in other languages just like all of your other um messaging rules. Um, and so if you want to go edit your reminders, um, you can go into guest experience and then under guest portal, you'll see the ability to update those reminders. If you don't want to change them, you don't have to do anything. They'll stay as is. But for those of you who need a little more control, that is available for you. Now,
• 17:30 - 18:00 um, we've also heard that some of you want to be able to ask us to sign a rental agreement, but you don't want them to be required before check-in. Um, maybe you're not comfortable with withholding uh, check-in instructions and scheduled messages until the rental agreement is get is signed, or maybe you have an agreement like an optional waiver that doesn't necessarily need to get signed before check-in. Um, and by default, all rental agreements were
• 18:00 - 18:30 required, meaning that we would um not allow the guest to receive scheduled messages with check-in instructions until that rental agreement is signed. Um, now you get to control that as well. So, if you would like to make a rental agreement optional, you don't need to require, if you don't need it signed before check-in, um, in the rental agreement uh, conditions, you can mark that it is not required for check-in. Um, and in that case, we won't hold your scheduled messages if it's not signed.
• 18:30 - 19:00 All right, I'll give you the And then next, what so many people have been waiting for, um, fillable fields are available. Um, and instead of having you listen to me talk about fillable fields, we're actually going to show you. So, Matt, our lead engineer in this project, is going to share his screen and show you what this looks like. Hello everybody. Uh this is going to be my first town hall demo. So this is uh really exciting for me and hopefully for you as well with this feature. Uh so I
• 19:00 - 19:30 am going to share my screen and I'll give you a little walk through around where we're at with fillable fields. So uh you have your rental agreements um as you're aware right now. Uh so you can access these via guest experience uh and then in guest portal rental agreements and uh yeah I can show you what this looks like. So, uh, yeah, up until now, you're able to use short codes and custom codes within this. Um, and now we're going to add the ability to have these fillable fields. Uh, we've got a,
• 19:30 - 20:00 uh, a collection of these that we've we've predefined for you right now. Uh, we're going to start with these and then get feedback on this and see how that goes. Um, so yeah, just want to show you an example of how you would use these, uh, within your templates. So, uh, yeah, as normal, you can use your short codes with the percent icon. uh you can now use the curly bracket to begin and you can select from the available fillable fields that we have here. Um so again we're going to start with a small number while we're piloting this um and then expand that out then um as we hear feedback on this feature. So uh if
• 20:00 - 20:30 I preview this uh we get we show you what the uh guest would see uh when they view the rental agreement. Uh so again we populate the fillable fields here and yeah we show you what that looks like. Um, but let's have a look at what the guest will actually see when they get to the guest portal. So, we are going to go to uh yeah, this one I've set up previously for this. Um, and we've got one rental agreement task here. Um, and yeah, when we view it, uh, we get to see
• 20:30 - 21:00 all of our short codes populated. Uh, we've updated the styling of this if you've seen it before. Um, yeah, just to to fit in now with what we're going to do for fillable fields. And uh we're able to enter uh the details that uh that the form is asking for. So uh the guest can click through here and continue. Uh I will just quickly go through these. And uh you'll notice as well we have some of these codes as uh required
• 21:00 - 21:30 and some of them as not. Um so a guest doesn't have to fill in the not required for uh fields if they don't want to. Uh I will just zoom in as well just so you can see it. Uh because I realize my screen is quite big. Um so yeah, once you've entered all the information, uh they can then click and sign as they were previously able to do. Um and then submit their rental agreement that will then submit and produce the PDF and uh yep, there we go. So it's all
• 21:30 - 22:00 signed. uh you can download the rental agreement afterwards and we populate this um with the information that was submitted. So you get to see the information that I've posted here. And then if we go back into hospitalitable uh if I go to the calendar uh for this reservation, we will also be able to see the signed agreement um with the information filled out here. If they haven't filled any of the non-required fields, um we show them as hyphens. Um and then yes, you're able to download a
• 22:00 - 22:30 copy as well. So, uh, yeah, this is how we're going to start. We're going to look at doing a a private pilot for this. Uh, but I think Abby will will tell you a little bit more about that. Um, oh yes, thank you, Matt. Uh, we have one more thing uh that's going to be available for rental agreements as well, and that is ID collection and verification. So, I already saw somebody asking in the chat, what about collecting a photo ID as part of the rental agreement? Well, um, starting
• 22:30 - 23:00 next week, you'll be able to do that as well. Um, so if you're one one of the things that we wanted to do here is if you're going to collect a copy of the guest ID, you need to make sure of a couple of things. One, you need to make sure that you're doing that securely. Uh, two, you want to make sure that it's a valid ID. And three, you want to make sure that it actually belongs to the primary guest, especially that that guest is signing a rental agreement for you. Um, and so now what you can what
• 23:00 - 23:30 you'll be able to do is when you create a rental agreement, you'll be able to check a box that says that I want to require guest identification as part of this rental agreement. Um, and when you do that, you'll be able to collect and verify the guest ID. Um, we're doing this using a streamline version of the ID verification that we've been having great success with on Direct Premium. So Andrew mentioned this at the beginning of the call um but we have been rebuilding our guest verification for
• 23:30 - 24:00 direct premium. If you've joined the past couple of town halls you've been hearing me talk about this. We've been doing it in such a way that it's provides a very smooth experience for the guest. And so we're taking what we've been doing there and bringing that to you so that you can collect the guest ID um as part of getting the rental agreement signature. So how will that work? Um the guest will upload their ID as well as a selfie. Um that will be done securely using the our our state-of-the-art uh ID verification vendor and then your that ID will be
• 24:00 - 24:30 verified for authenticity and facial recognition and passive livveness detection will also verify that that ID belongs to the guest using their selfie preventing fraud and impersonation. Um and then you'll have a copy of that ID um available through the inbox. So um ID verification like rental agreements is going to be available to all users. Um but there will be an additional cost of $2 per reservation. Um so we we have a
• 24:30 - 25:00 cost of of making sure that we're verifying the ID. We're collecting that ID and doing it securely. Um and so you will pay the $2 to get that ID verified. Um this is coming some of the features are available now. So the um optional agreements and the ability to customize your rental agreement reminders or guest pearl task reminders rather is available today. Um but we are running a pilot for fillable fields and for next week ID
• 25:00 - 25:30 verification. Um and we're going to make those features enabled for you automatically if you've already provided feedback or upvoted feature requests um for us. So, we'll do that today, but if you haven't um or if you're not sure that you have, you can scan this QR code um to sign up and join the pilot and we'll get those features enabled for you as well. Hello everyone. Thanks Abby. Um so, the second thing related to payouts this
• 25:30 - 26:00 week alongside upsells, security deposits. So, we will be starting a private pilot on Airbnb reservations for our new security deposit feature this coming Monday. Uh, we're going to automate the collection management release uh and communication of the deposit. As we've sort of talked about already, this this feature will come with chargeback protection. We're going to limit checking instructions uh until we've secured the deposit. Lots of other
• 26:00 - 26:30 good stuff which I will go through. Uh but first on the next slide just to walk you through a little bit how this will work for Airbnb reservations. Um so once enabled for new reservations we will add security deposit collection as a check-in task for the user in the guest portal. Um the same as we do currently for for rental agreements or ID verification. The guest will then um just need to add their card details at
• 26:30 - 27:00 which point we'll we'll then collect the deposit 2 days before check-in uh and release it 2 days after checkout. We'll automate that communication for you then. So we'll send messages via the hospitalitable inbox um for things like collection reminders and return confirmations. Um and finally, you you'll then be able to request those deposit funds at any point should any issues arise um arise during the reservation directly from uh the inbox
• 27:00 - 27:30 itself. And then um just on the next slide. So we've done uh quite a lot of uh research on other security deposit providers as well as other solutions uh from other PMS's and we really wanted to address uh a lot of the downsides that we saw. Uh and that's something that we believe that we've done. Um so here's just a little bit of a comparison on why we're really excited about this feature. uh why we think it's great and then
• 27:30 - 28:00 hopefully why you guys will as well. So, first um as I've said a little bit, this is fully integrated and automated. Um so, you just you need to input the deposit amount and then that that that really is it. Everything else happens on Hospitable. So a lot of other providers or third party tools that we've seen, there's a lot of manual steps that take place off platform um potentially requiring a separate configuration or setup. Um part of that is that guest
• 28:00 - 28:30 communication side of things. As I've said, we automate all of that for you through the guest portal or reminder messages or if uh a deduction from the deposit is needed. And then next for um Airbnb bookings, we are including ID screening with every security deposit reservation. So that will also um automatically get added as a check-in task in the guest portal and it just adds an extra layer of protection for
• 28:30 - 29:00 that booking. For a lot of other providers, um either they don't have that ID screening or if they do, it's part of a separate product. You know, there's an additional cost or it's a different process or flow. Um, next then, so as I mentioned, we will restrict those checking instructions until it's secured. Uh, as well as offering chargeback protection, so you do not need to deal with any payment disputes. And ultimately, uh, so we will ensure that every booking is covered from check-in to checkout. This one kind
• 29:00 - 29:30 of surprised us a little bit, um, but we found that quite a few other tools would either take deposits after check-in or would end and extend holds. that typically results in that deposit appearing on the guest bank account twice um or potentially just being unable to extend that hold. We didn't want to do that. Uh we want to make the experience good for everyone involved and ensure that you know all those reservations were covered in in the entirety. And then finally on the pricing side of things, so this will
• 29:30 - 30:00 cost 2% of the deposit amount irrespective of what the deposit is um the deposit amount is. So um this is on the lower side of comparable tools uh we found which typically cost between 2 to to 3.4 3 and a half% plus a processing fee or an additional subscription. So we really believe that there's there's a lot of a lot of value here. Um and then last on the next slide. So if this all sounds good uh if you want to get
• 30:00 - 30:30 involved you can sign up to the Airbnb pilot by scanning the QR code on the screen here. Once uh once we confirm that you've been added to the pilot, you'll be able to head to the pricing page of the properties you'd like to collect deposits on um input a deposit amount. We'll then take care of everything else. Uh and then last, just a quick reminder that we are still in beta also um for direct um reservations for direct premium users also. Um that's
• 30:30 - 31:00 all from me. I think over to Andrew now to to give you a little bit of a recap on all of this. Yes. And I will try not to speak too quickly. We handled sorry we covered many many things and um yeah uh round of applause to the engineers that really tried to get as far as possible with some of these things for this town hall. Um not all of them are completely released yet. So let's just recap where we're at with these features. So, security deposits, as Tim
• 31:00 - 31:30 just covered, these are going to go to a pilot for Airbnb uh from Monday. Um so, you could sign up for that. If you miss a QR code, it's going to be on the YouTube recording. Um and these are all ready in beta. So, if you are a beta hospitalitable customer, you've got access to early features um for direct premium, right? And going forward, this is going to uh um if you are not a current host pro or uh mogul customer, you need to have direct premium to have
• 31:30 - 32:00 access to these payouts. Like we said in the beginning, payouts is what's um kind of powering these new features going forward. The new kind of hospitalitable payouts are not going to be for legacy. Your path to get payouts is to be using direct premium. There is a regional limitation like we talked about. So, we're going to work on expanding the the regions of the of the globe uh where we support payouts. So, again, US, UK, Australia. We're going to work on expanding that throughout the rest of the year, Canada, EU, and giving more and more access to our hospital payouts feature for our customers. Upsells uh
• 32:00 - 32:30 announced by Nick are live today. Nice and simple. all channels including Ical's even anyone that can receive a link basically and you have a payout solution by being a direct premium user or in the future by being a payouts user um when those are available um coming soon. And then the third feature we talked about today is rental agreements on the next slide please. Um so rental agreements uh some great announcements already that
• 32:30 - 33:00 are are live. So, the feedback you gave us on controlling the content and the the scheduling of reservations is live. Optional agreements are live. The the latest feature and what I think a lot of you guys were waiting for, fillable fields, is going to go to pilot. We just need to do some last checks on that. So, um that is available across all channels for rental agreements. It's just the fillable fields. Uh if you give us just a little bit more time, we're going to work through a pilot audience with those, make sure those are working perfectly, and then ship them out for all users, all plans on on rental agreements. And with that, I'm going to
• 33:00 - 33:30 pass to myself and give you a couple updates on dynamic pricing. Short and sweet um but uh a high impact one. So the feedback and we've been doing I think two to three calls a day with people um walking through setting upospitable dynamic pricing um and we're starting to be able to respond to some of that feedback. So I think the one of the number one things we've heard is you're looking at the previews of dynamic pricing. You're comparing it to what you're using now. And a lot of you that are already using like a third
• 33:30 - 34:00 party dynamic pricing integration um you want us to be more reactive like that solution you're using. So we're going to start giving you the tools to do that. So starting from uh any minute now like we really are rolling this out now. Um we're going to roll this out first to our local customers to help have them help us pilot this and then we're going to roll it out to to the other tiers. But your weekend factor. So, if you want us to really kind of juice your Friday, Saturday weekends, there's a big difference for your property and we're not we're not seeing that in our kind of
• 34:00 - 34:30 our global model for all customers, you can take that to the extreme. You can even turn it down if you want to, but we'll allow you to adjust that. We can factor so your your pricing can can be more personalized for your property. Um, the other big factor is local demands uh local demand and events. So, we had people in, you know, football heavy heavy properties where if there was a home game, your prices were hundreds of like three, four, 500% higher. Um, we're going to help you get there. So, you can then take that demand factor in the same
• 34:30 - 35:00 way and you can move it down the slider to all-in and be 300% up and that'll help hopefully help help you personalize that model to to your property there. We'll look at other factors going forward. Um, we're trying to get a seasonality factor in as well. I think if we can do those three things well, that's going to address like 85% of the the feedback we've gotten. This feature continues to to roll out. We've gotten great growth. I think we did 50% growth from the last town hall on the number of hosts that are taking this up. We're about over 3,000 properties now using
• 35:00 - 35:30 our our integrated um dynamic pricing solution. The other thing we talked about in the last town hall on the next slide is rule sets. Um we were hoping to be more aggressive rolling these out um but due to a number of factors uh we we slowed that down a little bit. So, uh, they're currently in a very small pilot audience. We're going to be rolling them out starting from Monday. Um, and starting with hosts that aren't currently using rule sets on their Airbnb calendar. Um, that's where a lot of the complexity was. We worked out most of that now, but we're still going to be careful rolling that out so we don't u mess up anything on your
• 35:30 - 36:00 calendars. So, from Monday, anyone not using Airbnb rules, you're going to start to have the ability to mark up your calendar. And particularly for dynamic pricing, um, this is going to help you correct um, and like spot check way. Hey, this weekend this is not to my expectations. I want to apply a 50% markup on my base price or I want to raise my men price for this Christmas weekend. Um, that's what we anticipate rule sets being super useful for as well as all the other features that you can do there. Pricing and availability. And with that, I am done with dynamic
• 36:00 - 36:30 pricing and to accounting. Accounting. Hey everybody. Um, all righty. Today we are going to share a little bit more about our new QuickBooks integration. Um, but first, for those of you who are on Mogul and are wondering to yourself, do I need to buy QuickBooks? Um, the answer is probably no. If you are not already using QuickBooks and you still want to do accounting, that's fine. We actually offer some native accounting features under reports. You just need to create a business and click on reports to view a profit and loss statement. But
• 36:30 - 37:00 this QuickBooks integration is for those of you who use QuickBooks, like QuickBooks, and want to continue using QuickBooks. Maybe you have a bookkeeper or a virtual assistant who's already got their processes honed in and love QuickBooks and you just want to stick with it. That's great. This is for you. Um so this new QuickBooks integration um does several things much better and differently than the one that we launched um late at the end of last year. Um one, it allows you to connect multiple QuickBooks accounts. So a QuickBooks connection is now associated
• 37:00 - 37:30 with a business and we have the context of your business in mind. So, if your business is one that contains properties that you own and self-manage, we're going to do the accounting according to that. If it's a property management business where you're managing on behalf of others, we'll do a little bit uh give things a little bit of a different treatment based on how you're actually operating your business. Um, we're using cash basis accounting methodologies as well, which is different than what we did before. Now, this is all under the great advice of Brandon, our accountant in residence, who is a CPA and a
• 37:30 - 38:00 property manager and an owner um and does arbitrage himself. So, um, we're feeling very good about this new QuickBooks integration and are excited to share it with you guys. Now, um, this is included in the Mogul plan. Um, if you, Gabby, if you could go back one more slide just real quick. This is included in the Mogul plan. No additional cost for connecting your QuickBooks, which is uh very different than many other PMS's in the market who would charge a per connection fee. Um, and to start, we're going to offer one-on-one onboarding for those of you on Mogul who want to get connected.
• 38:00 - 38:30 That's really going to allow you to talk to me and Brandon as you're connecting your account. Ask any questions, get specific accounting advice while you do that. Um, and then we'll be opening it up to be more of a self-s serve on boarding for those of you who are confident and just want to get going. Um, probably at some point next week. So, that QR code will allow you to book a call with myself and Brandon to uh book that one-on-one accounting onboarding. Um, and again, if you don't want to do that over a call, that's fine. The self-service onboarding for QuickBooks will be available next week as well. So, we'll keep you posted
• 38:30 - 39:00 there. Okay, now on to the next slide. Um, this is just a general are you interested in Mogul slide. Um, Mogul includes accounting like I mentioned, it also includes owner statements. Um, and if you're interested in accounting, interested in exploring the QuickBooks integration, or are interested in another huge feature that we have coming up, which we'll share a lot more about in our next town hall, owner portals coming mid June. um we would love to talk with you about that. You can scan that QR code or go to that link to book
• 39:00 - 39:30 a call with Brian to learn more about if mobile is a good fit for you. That's all I've got today. Back to Gabby. Okay, awesome. So, now on for some updates on our latest integrations added to the apps page in your hospitalitable account. First off, we have Happy Guests, a third-party solution that you can consider for using for guest check-ins, rental agreements, guide books, and more. So, you can
• 39:30 - 40:00 actually scan this QR code and learn more. It will take you to the hospital apps page, and you can read all about it. Next up, we have welcome screens. Welcome screens allows you to greet your guests with key information for their stay on your TV. So, automatically synced to your hospitalitable booking calendar. And you can also scan this QR code and learn more as well. We also have a community announcement from Petra, our community
• 40:00 - 40:30 coordinator. Hi everyone. So if you've been here for the last town hall, you saw that we launched a new community home and you can find it under community.hospitable.com. This is a place where you will be able to ask. You are actually already able to ask questions, provide answers, find answers. This is place where we're going to provide product updates, town hall recaps, etc. There has been some questions about the Facebook group. So, we are currently checking both places,
• 40:30 - 41:00 but as the time goes, this is going to be the place for the community, and there's going to be much more things coming up as the community grows. So to login it's very simple. You just click on the login with hospitalitable. You're going to be taken into another tab where you're going to add your hospitalitable credentials and that's basically that. So there is no any complicated registration. Um so if you haven't please registered um you will see me there. You will see other team
• 41:00 - 41:30 members there and we're looking forward to grow this new home with you as well. Thanks Petra. Awesome. And we have some events coming up uh at the start of June. We have our host and toast events in Orlando, Atlanta, and Charlotte. So, this is a chance to grab some food and drinks with the Hospitable team, but also to meet other local hosts in person. So, if you haven't already, scan this QR code and you can actually grab some tickets, and we would love to see you there. I will be there, so I'd love to say hi. And of course, we have our
• 41:30 - 42:00 next town hall, which is in 2 weeks. Uh you can scan this QR code and we'll give you all of our town halls that you can add to your calendar. We will move on to our Q&A portion, but just briefly, here are some useful links that you might want to check out. Okay, you can raise your hand and I will call you on stage. But first up, we have Wait, wait a minute, Gabby. I think Nikita wanted to answer some questions from Q&A live. Uh, and so because people
• 42:00 - 42:30 have been kind enough to be asking questions on the Q&A section with literally 14 people on that side of the stage trying to brace with a wave in the chat and in Q&A. So Nick, go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, there were quite there were like several questions straight away in Q&A after the upsell section. So I thought it's it's just nice to come back and and address them. So Stacy first of all asked um when someone buys something uh with upselles and hospitalitable does that money head straight into uh the customer's bank
• 42:30 - 43:00 account that's already to connected to hospitalitable? Yes, that works exactly like direct premium. There is like a 24-hour period after the actual payment happens when those funds are released into your uh bank account. Also, does charge a fee for this feature? Yes. Upsells come with a 7% service fee on the host side. Um, and two more questions. Is there a way to disable upsells unless a guest requests one say early check-in? No. Uh, we do not have that in place right now.
• 43:00 - 43:30 Um, that would require a little bit more AI magic to to enable that. Uh, third question, can we use upsells without hospitables payouts for example EU or do we have to wait for the introduction of payouts before being able to offer to uh upsells? You will have to wait. uh you can only use hospitalitables uh payouts as they are right now to offer upselles. Yeah. And why is that? Why is the EU more complicated with two people with
• 43:30 - 44:00 the same accent as we have? Explaining to Europeans why it's so complicated. I can I can say basically there the the KYC the ability to create a payout is not the part that we want we're mindful of. Um there are some specific payments payment things that are a little bit differently like for example security deposit uh may work a little bit differently in Europe uh than it is uh for the United States. Um there is also some income reporting
• 44:00 - 44:30 obligations. There's also some sales tax consideration like VAT or other lodging taxes that are imposed on top of it. Uh so the direct team in particular is working without work on uh internationalizing our direct premium products so that we can basically do take the tax liability on your behalf. Uh so that for you it's just a problem of having a product catalog um receiving the money but there is a lot of things that are in between um to do that and
• 44:30 - 45:00 just like yeah just I think a few few months ago I discovered like there are income reporting obligations for Portugal that we as a platform needs to complete and so every little country is its own little uh kingdom of regulations. Uh so yeah we're going to take a bit of time uh to handle the European Union. We would love to break it to a place close to ours. Definitely. Um, okay. Good. Um, I think that's it for
• 45:00 - 45:30 now for for the for the race questions from Nikita, but then we can go on to the live Q&A segment. Um, yeah, let's go start first with Sean. Sean, I'm gonna pull you on stage here. Hi, Sean. Hello, Sean. How can we help you today? Can you hear me okay today? Yes, perfect. I have uh several questions. I'll keep them short. Uh my first question is the
• 45:30 - 46:00 I'm trying to understand the uh guest portal and what are the developmental plans and uh uh I'm guessing you're collecting some feedback in terms of uh of how to develop that that guest portal at the moment it seems like uh it's only visible to the guest and host has somewhat uh no visibility. uh at all. So um
• 46:00 - 46:30 uh meaning many times I have no idea what guest is looking at uh what information they're getting uh have they signed in not signed in um and and all that stuff. So having some kind of a maybe a host dashboard for a guest portal. The other is um is their plan I'm guessing the the guest portal is available uh sort of as a um as an app uh on uh
• 46:30 - 47:00 guest phones. Most of the uh uh guests are accessing uh pretty much all of the Airbnb OTAA on their phone. Majority of time it's a mobile device. And um I'm kind of um trying to see if uh I need to create a uh my own app uh property for the for the guest which would have contract
• 47:00 - 47:30 agreements, digital guide, um house guide, how things work, reach out for messaging, uh so on and so forth. uh pretty much a complete uh app as though it would be like an Airbnb type of app, but then I would have visibility and then if I need to upsell things or provide some information, send some links, I can communicate through the the guest app instead of guest having to use other mechanisms.
• 47:30 - 48:00 um which will tremendously cut down uh guests need to have uh other communication method um are you building your own PMS Sean? I well it seems like there's a need for it. So whe when I see you guys developing uh guest portal, it's like I I only wish if these added features could be added from a host perspective, meaning build a guest portal available
• 48:00 - 48:30 as accessible which I can modify the contents I can review, monitor and see things uh and collaborate. That that sounds like where we're where we're headed. Yeah, I think to the the point of like the the host dashboard having visibility, we're we're trying to do that in the inbox, right? And so you're going to see statuses on a lot of those things like if you scope for example a security deposit or you scope a rental agreement or ID verification you see those statuses in the inbox and that's where we kind of provide that if we're not doing a perfect job with that that's
• 48:30 - 49:00 something that we can work on and and we love the feedback. Um when we talked about the sensitivity of some topics in Airbnb one of them is having a required app to customer has to download to have a stay. I think it's a little bit sensitive and building an app is a huge undertaking. So, I'm not sure if I would recommend that to anyone to go down that like we're going to try and get you there. Um, we love to yeah have your feedback and do a better job of something that that that is in line with what you want. Um, and that is the guest portal and there's a lot of road map
• 49:00 - 49:30 ahead of us for for that. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay. And what so one thing I think maybe to to clarify um as a host you can see what the guest sees in the guest portal by simply going into the conversation in the inbox and there's the guest portal link access it you'll be able to see what the guest sees like it's as simple as that really okay thank you Sean for your question
• 49:30 - 50:00 thank you Nick and Andrew for the answer uh while we're talking about the um the guest portal with both of you. Can the guest question can the guest portal integrate with third party upselles company for example the OCO? I I answered that in chat but I'll just to voice it voice it as well. Uh right now no we we do have plans for that. We do want to support thirdparty vendors whether that's upsells or guide books or or other third parties in the guest portal. It makes total sense we want to get there. Yes, just not now. And in case that was a
• 50:00 - 50:30 person associated with EOS at least you're great. I mentioned the name again. So we have no bad bad blood against any other vendors that are doing things and are specific at it and relentless. That's it's great. We living in an industry with a rich ecosystem of applications. We provide one solution for those businesses which is always accessibility to access to the OTAA data with our direct primit data. Uh guys, we don't have ownership of of the of your
• 50:30 - 51:00 behavior. You guys do whatever works well for your business and if we can help and making that streamlined within one vendor that's great but that's on us uh to deliver. Um and I think we have Mike from Happy Guest in the chat so we're all friends. Yes. Mike Okonnell the CEO and founder of Happy Guest created very recently. We know Mike for years. He's been fantastic in his job at Turno and now obviously creating his own business in a bootstrap fashion which I
• 51:00 - 51:30 obviously want to command. Um I'm I'm in my he's in my DMs on Slack and we basically I'm not I do don't not believe that there is any bad blood between us but yeah we if anything we're raced on but quite frankly he has a lot of advance on us on all the things that he that he's doing. So everybody does better uh we don't have to censor ourselves. Um so great. Um, Debbie, next up is Richard. Hi, Richard.
• 51:30 - 52:00 Hello, Richard. How can we help you? Good. Good. Thank you for taking the time to answer a question. Uh the question I had is about uh auto messaging through hospitable and I seem to be having an issue with it uh responding appropriately to booking.com. I uh keep getting a a
• 52:00 - 52:30 message in my emails um that you know is stating that the the auto message that I have for either inquiries or bookings um through hospitable isn't getting to the booking.com guests. Is that a booking.com issue or is that something I'm doing on my end in a you know wrong with hospitable?
• 52:30 - 53:00 I I think so. Okay, that that does ring a bell. I don't know if anyone wants to help me answer what the bottom line is that fundamentally to get an answer we need to be able to investigate this. So I would still push uh for sharing that to support. Do have you already skated this to support Richard? Uh no, this was today was the first time we got the message and I knew that we were hopping on this uh town hall meeting. That's great. Um yeah, I think
• 53:00 - 53:30 the support team should have a bit of a look at this data. So you can u join the support team directly on live chat uh with the little uh messenger that's on the bottom right. You could also send us an email and if that's the case just share basically the the reference um to the to the email that you've been that you've been receiving. Um that's basically what would be the best way uh to be able to answer your question at this point in time. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Sorry I cannot bring more but there is a lot of moving pieces uh to
• 53:30 - 54:00 those things. Okay. Next up we have Anna. Hello Anna. How can we help you today? you uh Yes, perfect. You're muted yourself. Hi. Yes. I had I was talking to Brian I believe like a week or two ago about our direct booking website with you guys and I don't know he said he would bring it up to someone's attention about the the format of the I guess template that I was using is
• 54:00 - 54:30 cutting off my writing on my website. He said that he would speak to someone about seeing if something could be changed or something. And I wasn't sure if you guys were made aware or if this is something that even you guys take care of. Is it a hospitable site is the first question. Yeah. Um then yes, that would be something that we would take care of for you. Um and it's quite possible that
• 54:30 - 55:00 Brian has raised our engineering team already. Um and so I'll I'll see if we can track that down and figure out if there's an issue with the template that you're using. I can chime in if if I can. Hey, Anna. It was actually fixed this morning and it's on my list to reach out to you. So, I' I've got a thread with one of our engineers. They've been swamped with stuff, but it was about the the format wasn't really fitting on a mobile screen or the the desktop screen and and it had something to do with the the lines of text. You have a bunch of like asterisks in your
• 55:00 - 55:30 in your text of your listing. So, I think our our system for some reason wasn't reading that appropriately. So, they were able to change make some changes and you should be able to now see that it should work. If you go to your website, it should be shown as expected. Okay, perfect. I think I checked like two days ago. It wasn't there yet, but I'll check again today. Yeah, check today. I I'll reach out to you again. If it's not working, just let us know. Okay, thank you. Yep. Thanks. Thank you, Anna. Thank you, Brian. leadership being escalated and then
• 55:30 - 56:00 solved immediately by because it was already escalated. Of course, we want to pay attention to those issues. Uh we know they have an impact uh on your ability to take bookings and we're prioritizing accordingly on the impact that we can have as well. Uh yeah, there's plenty of comments in the chat. Gabby, let's move on. Next, next up is Thomas. Thomas. Hey guys, how is everyone? I don't know. Tennis. Um, how you feeling? No, I just I just wanted to jump on a comment that
• 56:00 - 56:30 I heard. I I don't know who exactly said it, but someone said we can just go into the portal and sorry, we can just go into the conversation with the guest and click the link and get to the portal. And that's just not true because if you click the link, if the guest hasn't signed a rental agreement yet, for example, it just requests the access code that was just sent to the guest to log in. There is no way for the host to go into the portal. After signing, you can click the link and all it does it tells you that yep, the guest has signed. So you I I as a host who's been
• 56:30 - 57:00 using this and I love the feature, I've never seen the portal before. Okay. I needed to preface what I said with unless the guest portal is Yes. Unless there's a task that needs to be completed that requires sign in. Yeah. So, um I I I just I just want to second what the uh other gentleman said is like a bit more access or visibility to the portal would be greatly appreciated and
• 57:00 - 57:30 as I put into the into the um comments in the chat is um I would really love the functionality to upload um PDF guide books or something uh into the guest portal you mean? Yes. Yes. so that they have continuous access and also are you know in terms for upsells you know if there's a reason for them to return to the portal you know like how does this coffee machine work or how do I how do I heat the sauna or something every time they come they see the upsells it is more likely to actually upsell something
• 57:30 - 58:00 makes total sense yeah right that was me one thing Thomas a very dirty thing for the moment when you click the link it um and it as a pending task, it ends with SL check. And if you remove this, you will see the general guest portal, but this will definitely not remove us adding visibility to you just for the next days or whatever if you want to see it. Okay, awesome. Thank you. Tommy is
• 58:00 - 58:30 saying that he's looking forward to working on the guest portal accessibility. Totally on your side, Thomas. And I think we all are uh a little bit. It's just basically now we pushed a lot of product to have security deposits across all OTAAS to have upselles across all OTAA. So we know the guest portal is going to be receiving far more traffic and so now is a moment where we're going to be able to work a lot more on the design of this. So
• 58:30 - 59:00 that's something for example I talked with Matt our designer uh to start working really on the guest bone uh because we believe that's basically the one of the things that has the greatest impact in the company at this point. It's millions of reservations that basically are processed to speedable every year. So we want to make sure those are represented nicely. The way we typically do things is that first we get an MVP, a minimum variable product, the ability to take a security deposit on an
• 59:00 - 59:30 Airbnb booking, the ability to sell to capture funds for an upsell uh on a forta booking, the rental agreement with Phil, etc. And then it expands. A product is never finished. And while I understand the the fact that there is frustration about the fact that we have a lot to do, yes, and you know what, a year from now, we'll still have a lot to do, etc., etc., but we need in this period in time, the the thing that I'm
• 59:30 - 60:00 pushing for the entire company, for the entire team, we need to first get the the we need to first get the airplane carriers, which is strategic. We create a lot of room. We create a lot of place in our product. then we need to have the planes which is why it's a little bit chaotic at this point in time. I get it. Over time it will feel far more organic and add a lot more value. So what you see now is basically those prototypes of airplane carriers they're launching and
• 60:00 - 60:30 then over time uh you will see this becoming far more compelling. So I hope that by the end of June uh we have a better design for all the guest portals and all the portals uh that basically are coming up. Okay, thank you. Thank you Gabby for hosting. Uh I think Miles is going to be busy at uh his event. Uh and uh yeah, we look forward to meeting you again two weeks from now uh with again more updates on features on some on the
• 60:30 - 61:00 products that we'll be launching today uh so that they can be expanded to a larger audience. Um and yeah, some additional things that uh other teams have been working