The one and only, David Angotti, Co-Founder of StaySense, joins the pod this week!

From Private Jet Pilot (yes you read that correctly) to Vacation Rental Property Management, David and his team turned on the afterburners in the super-competitive Smoky Mountains market and were able to organically grow to 130 properties in a 24-month span.

This man has worn every hat there is to wear in the professionally managed short-term rental industry. He breaks down how receiving feedback from end-users breeds success and has the potential to change lives.

The industry is continuing to change and with all the ongoing regulations, David talks about the importance of coming together as an industry to tackle these day-to-day problems.

We converse on how StaySense is marketing properties, destinations, and websites in a way that creates excitement and a better future experience for the customer.

You don’t want to miss this interview!

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors at Vintory!

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Overcoming Pride Breeds Success With Featured Guest David Angotti

Mateo, How are you?

I’m fantastic, as usual. How are you?

This is the 51st episode. We put out insane stats. I can’t believe it. I’m proud of what we built. I’m excited to start with an amazing guest.

Before we dig into our amazing guest, who I can’t wait to get in, dig in, and talk to, on that note, I want to say thank you to you for everything that you have done to make this show a success. I don’t think people know the amount of work that goes on behind this show. It is a hell of an achievement. I’m proud to have done it with you. I appreciate all the work and sweat equity you put into this to make it happen.

Shout out to Will, HFM, my partner, John, and everyone out there. Last but not least, thank you to all of you who read, downloaded, supported us, walked up to us, and told us you love the show. We appreciate you for reading. We are going to get better. We are going to bring you new, fresh content and all the things you want to read and don’t think you want to read moving forward in the future.

If you like the show, leave a review on Apple Podcast. Help us out and scratch our backs. We have a five-star rating of seven reviews.

We got to take the wins where they come. Can we get to our guests?

Let’s get to our guests.

This episode, fresh out of the RMA, we are honored to have someone that is a vet in the industry. For as long as I have been in this space, I have always heard his name in a positive light. I was honored to meet him early on in my career in Smoky Mountain place or Vegas. It was somewhere where we met up, the one and only David Angotti, formerly of Smoky Mountain Rentals, in SmokyMountains.com. Presently at StaySense. Overall, he is a great guy if you get to know him and those who know know. David, welcome to the show. We are happy to have you here with us. I didn’t go too far deep into your resume because we will talk about that in a little bit.

Thank you, Mateo and John. I’m excited to be here and be a part of what you are doing for the industry. Congrats on an awesome year. Seven five-star reviews were 35 stars if I’m doing my math correctly.

I can’t even convince my mom to go ahead and leave a five-star review.

I have been horrible about asking. We are going to need to make t-shirts that have the No Bullshit Short-term Rental Podcast on the front and leave a five-star review on them. It has a QR code that goes directly there.

Thank you for having me on. I’m excited to be a part of this, hang out with you guys and talk about all of our favorite spaces, vacation rentals, short-term rentals, and what is going on there.

I cross paths with most people. I have heard your name, and I know what you do. I have talked to business partners of yours in the past. I know David Angotti’s story decently. You mentioned earlier that we met truly in person for the first time in Chicago, which blows my mind. Why are we staying far apart? Do I have this force field around me? Am I unapproachable?

You do have that force field. I’m not going to take that from you. A lot of it has to do with COVID. There are no conferences, no hanging out, no going out to the bars together, all that for a few years. There was a time there right before COVID when I was taking a little easy on the conference circuit, concentrating on launching a new brand and some things with that. That took some time away from those personal connections out and about. I can’t give you an answer other than how our paths haven’t crossed in a more meaningful way before now.

It is on both of us. We have to stop allowing this to happen in the future.

At the dorm, I was with both of you. I feel like I was with both of you at the same event.

Was it 2:00 in the morning?

John goes to bed early. That is probably why. When John and I met up in the Smoky Mountains, you weren’t at that conference. You and I had to meet another time, and that is when I met John. Look at the providence. How did we get here? When you and I met, you were in the process of transitioning SmokyMountains.com and launching into your new space. We got to go back to the beginning because it is one of my favorite things to talk about. Where were you when you got into this space, and what were you doing in the years 2004 to 2009?

This is a crazy wild ride through those years. 2009 is when I came into the space. If you back up, it is the path into the space. I was a pilot for NetJets. That was my profession at that point. I was flying the fastest passenger plane in the world. I’m flying the rich and the famous. That was life. It was going well. I was at my final career destination, and life was good.

Around that same time, we launched an EdTech startup. That thing took off. It went to the moon quickly. When we exited that EdTech startup, I was sitting here, 29 years old in 2009. I’m like, “This was a good ride, and I’m done. I have given the world what I have to give. It is time to retire.” That lasted for four weeks. It was a great four-week retirement there that first time.

When I came back and started to work again, I wanted something meaningful that wasn’t like a bank account number to show. We had accomplished something so we bought a nice property out in the Smoky Mountains. It was a 6 to 7-hour drive from where we were living at that point. I’m like, “We are going to have that property. There is something tangible to show for the success we had, not like numbers on an account somewhere.”

We went out there and started to use different property management companies because I was afraid of trying to self-manage. I didn’t know the processes. I wasn’t satisfied with the internet marketing of any of these companies in 2009, which came as a shock. It was like set it and forget it pricing. There were three prices. You had your low, your shoulder, and your high season pricing. You knew it was going to be like a buy three, get the fourth night free. If you were further out, it would be buy 2, get 2 free as you get closer. It was the early days of yield management.

None of them did a great job. We enter the naive optimism period of my short-term rental experience, where I’m looking at 400-plus companies in the Smoky Mountains and thinking, “None of these guys can do it as good as me. I’m going to start a property management company.” My good friend Wes Melton and I had been tossing around these different business ideas. We decided, “We were going to do this short-term rental property management company in one of the most competitive markets in the entire US and do it from scratch.”

We went after it, and it was a journey. We grew to 130 properties organically over a 24-month time period. It was a fun ride, but it was a lot of work. Your mind fills in the gaps on something like that, and all of the gaps we fill as these easy things. None of those gaps are easy. You can start to realize that one failure at a time.

A couple of years in, both Wes and I are looking at each other. This isn’t what a couple of tech guys are cut out to do. We are meeting with the city, engineers, permits, and all this stuff that goes into property management or owner meetings constantly. There is a stain on the carpet. It doesn’t matter that we doubled your revenue over last year. Let’s talk about this stain right here in this one spot. This isn’t what I have to do.

We can do a whole episode on owner meetings.

We need to do owner meetings uncensored so people can get in there and talk about it.

It started to set us up because we learned that side of the table well. It was more than most OTAs or listing sites because we sat in that seat for an incredibly hard couple of years. All of a sudden, a property management company we are dealing with comes to us and says, “This listing is showing up incorrectly on your website.” I understand that is not an inaccuracy. This is a highly emotional undercurrent that is happening in the background of an owner wearing out this property manager that is coming to us and saying, “We need this updated.”

This is a more holistic understanding of their side of the table from that. I want to give back that experience for anything. However, we did move past that. We divested the property management brand to VTrips and Steve Milo. He and I are good friends to this day. That was a fun experience handing off all of the headaches to him and getting paid to hand off those headaches to him. He has done a great job with it. He has kept most of those owners and even staff members from that time, which was in 2016. Like any good acquisition, it had its wrinkles up to the end. The Hattiesburg wildfires tore through town the night before we were supposed to close.

We had Wes and he mentioned this. This is insane.

We thought the deal was going to fall through over that. It still goes through and makes us even more thankful for the relationship with Steve. I’m watching him take care of our owners afterward. He helps the owners and staff follow that. We have this niche show OTA in the Smoky Mountains market. From there, we had this brand we had built because we only divested off the owner contracts, not SmokyMountains.com, the domain, and the content. We had built considerable value as a brand at that point. We started to onboard property management companies and grew aggressively in that market for a few years.

During that time, we started to realize we had something that we could duplicate in other markets. That is the story of how we hop into StaySense eventually because as we launched Florida and Hawaii, it got confusing to a property management company to tell them, “Why don’t you go ahead and opt-in to the Smoky Mountains, and we will distribute your properties down to dust. That doesn’t make any sense. StaySense became a holding company or an umbrella over multiple brands down below there.

That is the short version of the story. We have done a lot of things that are cool in marketing and with people along the way. There are some wild things that I would have never seen coming. I ended up developing a neighborhood of purpose-built homes with a guy in the Smoky Mountains market. We have built 35 homes together out there. We have done a lot of these little things that round out my understanding of the industry because now I’m sitting here. I have been a property owner with property management companies, rent by owner, property management company, and developer of purpose-built, and I own multiple niche OTAs. I feel like I have touched almost everything but housekeeping at this point. That is next.

I love this because this is my shared personal experience in theory versus application, especially the value of that from someone that is also creating tech, platforms, and tools to solve problems in real-world time and the understanding you get from being hands-on. It is interesting to see the web approach to each aspect of the business, the building, the managing, the tech, and the platform.

I don’t think people do theoretically. We would have more advancement in our technology and products. They would be more valuable if there were more of that experience-driven into that and more of the people who were creating this stuff were continuously hands-on in a way they knew these problems quickly. I love that approach.

I have tried to write down the biggest thing I learned in the past year. It was in 2019. I happened across this thing called Kruger Dunning. I’m not sure if you guys have heard of that before, but it was these psychologists. They did this intense survey of this group of people to grade people on their knowledge versus their perceived knowledge. It is a fascinating study. I highly recommend going and reading it.

A common example is coaching the NFL teams. I would have done this if I were the coach. People honestly believe that they have a better capacity to understand this game than the coaches, the analytic coaches, and the people that poured over tape for several hundred hours than the person that is the experts. On Monday morning, you have people go back and look at that.

We have that in our industry where people don’t understand those knowledge gaps. They fill in those knowledge gaps with the expertise they don’t have. That is about Krueger Dunning is all about. It is this idea that sometimes you don’t know enough to know what you don’t know in a nutshell. Coming to grips with that as I matured in the industry and felt like I knew less about the industry as I knew more about the industry was an important thing to understand. It speaks to what you were talking about a second ago, Mateo, of that multifaceted experience that each of us has. We bring that expertise that maybe other people don’t have. How do we share that with each other through mediums like this?

[bctt tweet=”In our industry, people who don’t understand those knowledge gaps fill them in with expertise they don’t have.” via=”no”]

We are doing this show where we are trying to soak up that information and understand the other side of the table and coin. It is important in any business, but especially short-term rentals when we are dealing with multiple two-sided marketplaces layered on top of each other and complexities of non-standardized products with all these different types of employees to make this whole thing go. Everything from high-level tech employees. All the way down to a laundry facility that scales up and down based on demand. You think about all the different stakeholders and profit holders along the way. This is a business class nightmare to even write a paper on this, much less livid.

Thinking about this makes my mind boggle. That is where you and Mateo have lived on both sides of it. I haven’t had the opportunity to do that. I have worked on multiple different sides of the vendor side of the space. I have seen different angles from payment processing to marketing to PMS to the OTA side of things.

I will never have that working hand knowledge of being a property manager and understanding that side of things. That is where this show is valuable to me. I have had the opportunity along with Mateo, to speak with 51 of some of the brightest minds in this space and get to dig deep and dive into all these things and understand. I have a greater grasp and understanding of most, but I don’t have that practical hands-on yet. I will figure that out one of these days.

Part of it is also cultural. If you are selling a product, you have to be the best. You have to be professional, even though you may not be all of that. We don’t, in our business interactions, approach this as, “I have a skillset. You have a skillset. Maybe together, we can solve these things.” It was like, “I’m the expert in this space. I’m going to tell you how my product is going to solve your problem.” Instead of saying, “This is what we have to offer. Let’s talk about how we can solve solutions for you.” That is a completely different mindset.

Maybe not everyone, but I see a lot of these sales reps, and people in sales feel like they have to. Even though they may have been in this position for a few years, they always have to be considered experts in that space, and they are not. Talking to people that have been in this space, and this is their livelihood. They are the experts. They are the ones that have the knowledge and the real-life experience. I feel like it is a cultural thing.

In all sales, we are looking at this side of things that you have to put yourself to be successful in a sales role. I have been a big believer in relationship building, understanding the needs, and being a good listener. To go ahead and be a good listener, listen to where the actual pain points are and try to understand what the problems are. You can come and gain a ton of knowledge of this.

In my role, I spent the first three months reaching out to property managers, interviewing them, and asking them, “How do I build an OTA that doesn’t suck? Tell me how I do this.” Understanding and coming back, “I don’t know how to do that. Dive deeper. Tell me more.” Those types of questioning and understanding that is what breed success. They are few and far between that go ahead, and we will put that into an application

You bring up a good point. You have these property managers. We can reach out to them. We can ask them, “What do you need?” That almost becomes this team of free consultants. That is how we approach it here internally. When somebody complains about something, instead of viewing it as a complaint, we have a subject matter expert on the ground in Gallen, Destin, Maui, or wherever they are.

They know the market way better than we know the market. They understand the guest’s needs better than we understand the guest’s needs. We are getting this advice, not from one but dozens of these companies that make up this team of people that are coming to us free of charge. They are paying us to offer us advice that you couldn’t buy to make our unique selling proposition stronger.

They are paying you to consult for you.

That is a beautiful thing, but pride is a hard thing to overcome. You must overcome pride to be able to take that free consulting. When we get too good at taking the feedback of our customers, that is a dangerous spot. That is where our unique selling proposition and our business selling points are going to start to falter because we are no longer serving the needs of our customers. In this business, it is more complex because we have two sets of customers. Those customers compete against each other. We have to filter through the recommendations we are getting from property managers or guests because those competing interests can be challenging things to overcome.

I would like to throw in a third customer, which is homeowners. There are three customers that we deal with every day.

The way we explain it to somebody new to the industry that starts here is we have two sets of customers, and our customers have two sets of customers. We have that final downstream customer. That is the homeowner. They are also a customer indirectly of ours. The multi-layered, two-sided marketplace is the way we typically explain it.

We were talking about doing a show once when we invited family members on and asked them to describe what we do for a living. Can you imagine inviting my grandma and asking her what I do for a living? It is pretty complex.

John, you are a great communicator. You would figure out a way to tell her that one of the oldest businesses in the world, short-term renting, has been around since we have been staying in structures. You can say that you are advancing that through technology. There is always a way to explain it.

If somebody asks me what we do, it is a lofty goal. What we try to do is help each visitor into each market that we serve. That doesn’t mean each visitor that stays with us or that books through us, or even books through the property managers. This is what we were founded on. When we founded the company, we didn’t even know we were going into short-term rentals at that point. We knew that we understood content marketing well and technology, so we wanted to positively impact every vacation to that area. We felt like if we did that, we were going to figure out the monetization later on. That has been our playbook as we launched additional markets.

If you look at HawaiianIslands.com or our third brand that we are in the process of launching, that is building traffic to it right now. We have now photographed over 1,000 points of interest with professional photography. We are doing that pre-revenue and helping end users. We are reviewing all of those things. We are sending our team to hike the mountains and take pictures of the waterfalls because we have adopted this idea. If we help every visitor to each region, we develop trust for both ourselves and our clients. Over time, it lifts up the industry and each of us. That is how I explain it to my mom or grandma. She was like, “What do you do?” I help every visitor that comes to the Smoky Mountains or Panhandle.

Let’s say you are trying to pick a restaurant. How do you do it? You can go to Tripadvisor and see a bunch of sideways blurry photos, or you can go to an advertorial. We tried to bridge that gap. We have professional reviewers that go in and they will say, “This steak is dry. Don’t get the steak here.” We will simultaneously have professional photos at the same place and insider tips on how to get a family member up on stage at a dinner theater. How do we help people? That could be a true story for your businesses. When we help the broader market, that is how this whole thing moves forward in my mind.

It comes to a great question, and you have said it in a roundabout way. There are probably 1 or 2 people that are reading this blog that doesn’t know what StaySense is. Explain outside of what you do. What is your elevator pitch for someone that has never been exposed to StaySense?

We are a family of niche listing sites. We have three, SmokyMountains.com, FloridaPanhandle.com, and HawaiianIslands.com. What sets us apart is instead of going head to head with the big OTAs on paid marketing channels, we build each of those brands to millions of website visitors a year through organic methods. That is how we develop content that reaches as far and as wide as possible in a helpful way.

In doing so, we will inevitably be in the conversation when it comes time to book a property, whether it is somebody searching for dauber cabins or whatever the term might be. They will see our brand rise to the top oftentimes even above Airbnb, Vrbo, or any of the other big players that are out there, hop or whoever. Here we are. We rise to the top. That is how we monetize it.

If you go on our page and search for something like Chimney Tops Trail and you see cinematic videography, and photography, these words on the page that tell you exactly what to expect. When you go to Chimney Tops Trail, there are no ads on that page. That page is there to help you. We naturally start to attract this traffic, that is, repeat visits to most of these destinations we are in, links, and search engine authority over time, which then builds up the monetizable side of the business.

You mentioned Hopper. The interesting thing is you will never see Hopper competing for marketing dollars because we are never going to go in and do paid searches. I’m not going to say we are not going to do it in the future, but that is not what we are doing now. It is a close user group. All of our marketing dollars go to TikTok and streaming services like Hulu. You will see commercials. We are going for that demographic, but you are never going to see us compete in SmokyMountains, Hawaii, or any of those.

That is what you are doing in that organic reach is necessary and more companies, you hope no other companies do it, but it is the right approach. When I travel with my family, I’m looking for experiences and actual, not necessarily the paid sponsorship, come here, do this and do that. I would love to see those go that Chimney Top, see that video, and be like, “We need to go do this.” Have it organically drive me to a short-term rental that I can go ahead and book for my family.

One correction there is, I wish everybody would do this. We talk about the rising tide lifting all ships. I believe in that to an extent. When we were brand new in property management, there was a company in the market, Cabins USA, there. They were huge compared to us. We had one property at this point. Chris Lacey, who was their VP of Marketing at that time, reached out to me and was like, “I saw your writing on Search Engine Journal and Moz. I’m excited you are coming into the market. I have these SEO challenges. I’m trying to figure out on this website redesign. I’m guessing the answer is no since we are about to be competitors, but could you help me with that?” I ended up meeting him for coffee and providing him with some guidance via email.

This was in 2013. The enemy wasn’t Cabins USA. It was the hotels. I wanted Cabins USA to get to develop a great website and give users great experiences in the market because I knew they would be back the next year. If I took care of them that year, they might be over to beat the next year and back to Chris the next year. We all need to take good care of these people. When we do that, we are going to see this space continue to expand. The competition, at some point, is going to become each other, but I don’t think we are at that point yet. We are at a point where we are still expanding rapidly.

[bctt tweet=”We all need to take good care of these people. When we do that, we are going to see this space continue to expand.” via=”no”]

The competition is regulations. That is our competition now. It is big pockets that are spurring up these things. It is still hotels because they have deeper pockets. Look at Honolulu now. What they are dealing with is horrible. That is one of the dozens across the country now.

I don’t think we are going to overcome that. I think $65,000 was raised in a few minutes. You look at the amount of money the hotel lobbying groups have, and the different OTAs have. They are aligned more with hotels at this point, unfortunately. We are going to overcome it with positive experiences for end users, almost like Uber did. Make these people want this bad that we have an army of people acting on our behalf. We use the $465,000 to mobilize that army. Not to go buy off politicians like the other side is doing, but rather have a whole army of people that are leaning on the politicians and helping with the change that has to happen. That is my two cents.

That is what this is about you. We want your two cents.

It has worked in other industries. That is how we are going to win this. We have to have fanatical customers that will go to bat for us. Otherwise, the hotel industry is much more consolidated than vacation rentals are. They are going to be able to have a louder voice due to that consolidation and the deep pockets that each of those voices has.

Do we get to a point where we are all in the mix together? Are we ever going to be the big bag of Skittles in terms of hospitality, where we are all considered and have some commonality? Do you see that happening? Is there always going to be this us and them?

We haven’t reached that in our small slice of hospitality. If we can’t reach that unified voice on short-term rentals, it is hard to think about us being able to reach it with hotels in the mix and other things in the mix.

It seems like hotels are adopting it. Hotels are taking on aspects of what we do because of their situations and the place they find themselves in. You have condo hotels and boutique hotels. The more they mimic or operate short-term rentals, the better they seem to do. There is data shown. You see the hotels doing that. Does it get to this place where we are in this Venn Diagram, and there is this space in the middle? Is it always going to be that? Will we ever be under one umbrella? Will we always coexist in this little hybrid space that is flexible and works with whatever way the wind blows?

When we think about the practical implications of your question, you call out their condotels or even traditional hotels like the Hilton in Chicago, where we had the VRMA Conference at. I got hit with an email. I don’t know if you guys saw the same one. They have a vacation rental within the hotel. They hit me with a message like, “Why stay at a vacation rental when we have this four-bedroom place with daily housekeeping and all the advantages, more or less of a vacation rental of a hotel?” We are going to be hit with that. How are we going to respond to that? That is the first takeaway from your question. They are going after us.

You take markets like Vegas, the condotels there, whether Palms or MGM. We own a unit in the MGM there. There is this marriage happening slowly in some of these urban markets, especially because of regulations. They are able to get through some of that regulatory red tape because they are the hotel lobbying group. You start to look at something like that. Part of the path forward is aligning what you are talking about all under one umbrella.

That is nothing new. The W has been doing it forever. You got the resident at the Four Seasons. Living in hospitality coexisting has been in short-term letting. Even in traditional commercial real estate and multifamily real estate, they got short-term let and in-law suites in those buildings that are furnished that they rent out at points at a time now to a more directed audience. I get it.

The model has been there. We have seen different models that have worked and are continuing to work. We are going to see more of that, especially in cities like Atlanta, where there is a lot of high-end multifamily real estate that is sitting there and occupied. It is not viable for housing for everyone. What do you do with that?

We have some of that happening here in Nashville. It is not going to shrink as a percentage of the market. That is for sure.

The scary thing about it is it is all coming together one way or another, but we are not necessarily all playing nice together. When we are all together, we are all in this mosh pit together. You had a great point, David. If we can go ahead and align as short-term rental/vacation rental ideals and what is appropriate, what our focus as an industry should be, and how do we go about this? There are lots of different things we can talk about with regard to unifying code and all these different things that make things a lot. People and companies are striving to get there, but no one is saying, “This is how it has to be. This is what we need to do.” Everyone wants to be in charge or have a great idea as opposed to aligning together and coming up with a solution.

Who gets to say that? Who does that? Is there a secret mafia of vacation rentals? Maybe there is. Let me stop talking about it. Who gets to make that decision? I don’t know if they are still pushing forward with Steve and that group that they were pushing for this commonality within the space to get an open common API language, structure, and standards for our industry. The last time I heard anything about that was in New Orleans in 2019.

It is ripping a Band-Aid off for everybody if we are going to go ahead and do this. Everyone, when you go ahead and rip that Band-Aid off, unless you are the 1 or 2 companies that have already gone ahead and put the right foot forward and the right efforts forward, everyone else is put on pause. We don’t have the developers, the engineers, or any of this to go ahead. The resources there and the logistics behind this are a frigging nightmare. Until we all decide we need to rip this Band-Aid off, and we have to do it right now, we are all vying for that top position because everything is based on revenue.

You don’t even know what that is. What are you building? You can’t even answer that. You can’t say, “It is going to be all this dev resource and all this other work.” Yes, you have an idea, but to build what?

If I’m looking at different OTA connections and I could look at every one of them separately and know how their code is, there isn’t one that is 100% known. If we can go back to hasp standards and the homeware of 7.2, we start here, build from there, and everyone needs to go. That is a different story.

That is the only way to do it equitably across the board. Dave, please jump in. That seems the only way that makes sense.

You have to look at parallel industries. When you see this adopted in the past, there has to be that starting point. The starting point is not a blank whiteboard where we are like, “This is what we want it to be.” The starting point is this coalescing behind something that is built that is there now that we are like, “This still sucks, but it sucks less.”

We are going to go to this method that sucks less. We are all going to agree to adopt that standard. We will evolve it over time and get better. When you start to outline something from scratch, that is great, but it is like remodeling a house versus building from the ground up, starting with your architect. One is going to happen much quicker. One is going to be much more affordable and doable for most companies. It is that common thing that we can coalesce behind, and there are varying opinions on what that one thing is now. I’m not going to step into that now.

We will have you on for the future. We could step into that together.

Think about it from an end-user perspective. That is what I always come back to. It is the end user that is on our websites that are trying to plan their trips. If we have a single standard, all of a sudden, things become much better for the end user. When things become better for the end user, they become better for all of us. That is the thing that people lose sight of. That single standard is bigger than any of our egos.

I’m wrapping back around to what Mateo was talking about, and you two as well, John, I’m like, “What don’t we do with something like O’ahu where they have banned short-term rentals? How can we figure out how to work with hotels there?” Sometimes it is not like this umbrella that we all sit under and sing kumbaya together. It is like a barnacle method. What got approved for the hotels? How can we exploit those same laws, be like this barnacle on the ship along for the ride, and figure that out?

That is what the hotel industry has been doing for years.

Why would we do this from scratch if they have already paved the way and they have certain things approved? It is less resistant to check some of those boxes they have approved than to go and get a whole new approval. At least in the short-term, if you run a property management company in O’ahu, it got obliterated almost overnight.

What is next for you, Dave? You got a lot going on with StaySense. You got your three different markets. What big audacious plans do you have for yourself and your companies?

Our goal when we launch each site is to touch every vacation in those markets. We aren’t at that spot yet in Florida. We have a long way from that spot in Hawaii. Those are our next big goals. That’s where we are taking the profits from the company and reinvesting them in the future. It is becoming these sites in those areas that represent the areas well that also drive additional visits to the area that provide useful information to somebody planning a trip. They were like, “Maybe I should come to the Smoky for 5 days instead of thre3e. Maybe I should go for a shoulder visit down to the Panhandle because the weather is nice then.” All of a sudden, we all start to benefit because those are additional mites booked.

There is a selfish monetizable angle to it, but what that looks like for me for the next year is making those sites awesome sites. Practically speaking, when we look at the Smoky Mountains, we had a couple of pieces of content there that drove most of our success on search engine rankings and things like that. I have gone over that in some of the talks I have done at VRMA through the years with how to grow a site from 0 to 1 million website visitors from scratch. One of those was our leaf map and the Smoky Mountains, which predicts when the leaves are going to change for the entire United States or how to survive in the national park when you get lost. These kinds of things get top-tier news coverage and start to fuel results.

We are looking for the next one of those down in Florida and Hawaii. We are looking at things like pricing colorblind snorkel masks and trying to develop a partnership on the colorblind snorkel mask. If somebody is visiting Hawaii that can’t see color, they have these corrective lenses that allow them to see color. They would be able to go check those out from Snorkel Bob’s or one of the companies there free of charge and use them to see color and see the reef in full color as most people see it. They have never been able to even see a blue sky like some of these people.

We are looking at cool things like that, where all of a sudden, there is the PR angle on it. We are also positively touching the vacation of that family that has the colorblind individual as we are building the PR and brand up in that spot. Those are the things that drive me and make me tick. How do we do this fun? Marketing things that change lives or change vacations. We want to keep doing this. We have our plan for world dominance, which includes 1 million listing sites eventually. We will see if that happens, but now, the focus needs to be on doing that for brands 2 and 3 to fund the future.

Have you met Lorraine Woodward yet?

No.

I’m going to make that introduction to you. You guys need to meet. She was on the panel with us. She is, if not, going to be the expert in accessibility travel. We will talk about it off the air. Shout out to Lorraine. I will connect you guys.

To loop back around to that standard API, how did we let a listing site know that this is accessible or mobile-friendly, even if it is not fully accessible? Sometimes that is good enough if grandma can make it up two steps to the main floor and be part of the vacation. It doesn’t have to be a ramp. How do we communicate these things to end users where grandma wants to be part of the vacation and the family wants grandma to be part of the vacation?

We need a way like Hopper, SmokyMountains.com, or whatever listing site to be able to help grandma understand that she can be part of the vacation in the same way she is when they go to a hotel. That is a whole different ball of wax there. It is one little small facet of this need for this standardized API eventually.

It is not even grandma. What about the people that is their everyday life? They don’t go on vacation because they can’t.

My sister grew up in a wheelchair. I get it. There are things you can do and things you can’t do. That is the world of that life. We can help make that world a better place. If we make the whole world a better place, our business is better.

[bctt tweet=”If we make the whole world a better place, our business is better. ” via=”no”]

David, thank you so much for joining us. It has been an amazing conversation. We could go on forever, but we should probably go ahead and put a pin in it for now. It is the 51st episode. If you like what you read, go ahead and please leave a review. We were looking for our eighth review.

Dave, we are going to have you back because we scratched the surface. I love your vision and what you do. I love that you walk it and how you talk about it. We will have you back. You are a friend of the show. We will get you a hat, but you are welcome anytime.

Thanks for having me on. It is a pleasure speaking about short-term rentals with both of you. Thank you for what you are doing for the industry, and keep up the good work.

Important Links

• Apple Podcast – The No BS Short-term Rental Podcast
• SmokyMountains.com
• StaySense
• NetJets
• VTrips
• Wes Melton – Past episode
• HawaiianIslands.com
• Tripadvisor
• FloridaPanhandle.com
• Hopper
• Cabins USA
• VRMA Conference
• Megaphone.fm/AdChoices
• https://Vintory.com/nobs/