Twenty-five is kinda a big deal, and we couldn’t be happier to share this episode with the one and only Sarah Franzen!

The Director of Revenue Management & Analytics at Natural Retreats shares her journey into her current role and talks with us about the intricacies that make our industry so much more fun than the hotel space.

The inaugural VRM Intel Vacation Rental Revenue Manager of the Year award winner is humble, yet more than deserving, and attributes success in this space to a willingness to fail and most importantly own it!

This is a great conversation without any crystal ball upcoming travel predictions because rev management is a science, not a guessing game.

The No BS Short Term Rental Podcast brings the right people to the table at the right time, giving their audience an inside view and real take on the industry like no other.

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There’s Harmony In The Numbers With Featured Guest Sarah Franzen

We’re excited to be here, bright and early. We are joined by Sarah Franzen, Director of Revenue Management and Analytics of Natural Retreats. Sarah, how are you?

Welcome.

Apparently, I’m doing better than you.

I’m out of it.

This has been amazing so far. I love this so far. Welcome to our show. We are excited to have you on here. I can’t wait to dig in and talk with you because you’re a pioneer of sorts and we’re going to dig into that.

I didn’t wear my pioneer outfit. If I’d known, I’d have the Little House on the Prairie bonnet.

Do you have one of those? That would be amazing.

No, but I do own all of the Little House in the Prairie Books. I love them, yes. That’s like home too.

My wife got through reading every Little House on the Prairie book to my kid.

It’s so good. I read them out loud to my daughter when she was little.

He finished reading them. I think they spent like two years reading every Little House on the Prairie book.

They’re so good.

He loves it. I’m there with you.

The funny part, I didn’t even know it was a book. I remember the TV show growing up. I didn’t know a series of books.

Based on the book.

I remember Michael Landon.

It’s based on the book.

Falling down the hill.

Carrie going down the hill.

They all lived and the kids slept upstairs. I remember that.

Good show.

Good show, better books. We daydream of going back into those times as a family and how much simpler it would be and how much more you can get out of life. A lot of technology and things in politics have complicated things over time. It’s fun to think about that stuff.

Shaun and I made a movie about that. You have to check it out. It’s super interesting.

Which one?

I’m going to look at the name. I’m going to find it too. It was one of the last ones he did before he took a break. Remember, they were hiding from the world and they were in a park in Pennsylvania, but they had all decided to move into the middle of this park where planes couldn’t fly over. They would be completely isolated from the world. They were thinking and were living like in the 1850s, but they were this isolated community in the middle of these woods. They created this mythology of these monsters to keep the kids and everyone from leaving. It’s that ideology that life was so simple back then. They had their own set of problems.

You could get eaten by a bear and nobody would know. Very few people would know.

Your small community would know that you were eaten by a bear.

They’d know you’re gone. That’s cheerful, sorry.

That’s how we do it around here.

I feel like this isn’t where it was supposed to go.

That’s all right. It doesn’t matter and that’s the great thing about the No Bullshit show. Speaking of where it should go through, tell us your journey into this space. Tell us how you got started. You seem like a person that loves revenue management and numbers and crunching numbers and analytics. Talk to us about that and how you got started and how you’ve gotten to where you are now.

I never thought that I would be doing this. All the way back to college, my goal was to own a music school. That was what I wanted to do. I was a music major and a business major. My two degrees in undergrad were Focal Performance and Business Analytics. The goal was always to have my own music school, which I did.

In the process of that, I worked on and finished my MBA in Georgia. My ex was in the military, so we were all over the place. I worked on the MBA at the University of Georgia. Prior to that, I had gone to do my Master’s of Music in San Jose. All with the idea that I was going to be a music school owner. It’s always been what I wanted to do.

I accomplished that then the army, as the army is, moves you around and I ended up in Virginia, which is where I am now and was too tough to continue to run a music school from Virginia when it was in Georgia. I got away from that and became a music teacher in a middle school. As crazy as that sounds, I liked it and that was cool.

There were some other issues that went on with your home state with the military and working full-time and so left that. When my daughter’s father and I split, we decided that we were going to co-parent and we were going to raise her in one place. We’re going to do the army thing, so he committed to staying in Virginia. I committed to staying in Virginia and so that was great. I was like, “Now, what do I do?” I’m not teaching.

I had taken some time off from teaching, which got me into hotels. It was one of these things when I applied for a hotel sales job. I was like, “What is hotel sales?” I had no idea what hotel sales was. I went into the interview completely oblivious to what hotel sales was, but I had my own business before, so I had been able to talk that up a little bit. I landed this job as a director of sales for a hotel, not knowing that was a thing. I didn’t know.

Over the course of the next year or two years, figuring out that hotel sales 1) Exists. 2) Figuring out what it was. 3) Realizing that I don’t like being a salesperson. I am an introvert by nature and being an outside salesperson was exhausting, but I learned of this thing called revenue management when I was in hotel sales. I was like, “I want to do that. That’s cool.”

We had this revenue manager and we’d meet once a week. We’d talk about demand, all sorts of stuff that I was like, “That’s cool to me.” It was my goal then very early on to figure out how to break into that. I went from that director of sales position to another director of sales position still here in Virginia and was given the opportunity to not only be director of sales but also be a revenue manager, which if you have any knowledge of sales and revenue management and how they should work, it’s a completely bad idea. Horrible idea. I think I was successful at it, but there were certainly many opportunities where if somebody who wanted to mess with things could mess with things and be unethical or be very long side.

It’s a little against the grain the way it should be.

It was like, “We don’t want to hire a revenue manager, but we know that it’s important.” That was how it but I loved it and so that was it. I was a hotel revenue manager and, from there, went into hotel revenue management with Marriott products. That was always what I wanted to do then I knew somebody who worked for Natural Retreats and they were hiring a revenue manager. I was like, “That’s cool. I would love to grow my personal development. I’d like to continue to grow.”

I applied and got the job at Natural Retreats. That was in 2015 and I had a whole set of ideas of what I thought that was going to be, all of which were wrong. I had no idea the differences in practice were primarily between hotel revenue management and vacation rental revenue management. Since then, it’s been this, I don’t want to say an uphill battle, but in a lot of ways, it has been. It’s been an uphill discovery of what revenue management is in this space. It has challenged me to look internally to say, “I know what revenue management is in a hotel space, but now I have to apply principles more to the short-term rental space.”

You don’t have a lot of the tools and resources that you do in a hotel. It’s very much automated in the hotel world. You have to think through things from a conceptual perspective here. Over the years, I’ve been thinking and growing and trying to figure things out, but that is a long-winded answer. I’m sorry that I took it, I don’t know how much time.

I can’t believe that.

I feel like I couldn’t explain it.

I think it was spot on because one of my first questions and you answered it before I could even get to it, was going to be like the challenge of transitioning from hotel to short-term rental management. I came from rented, so when we transitioned to revenue management, we were doing something completely different before. I was like, “Revenue management?” I always had this idea of what it was. I had friends that worked in hotels and they were like, “It’s pretty straightforward. You put this in place and it runs.”

I was in a rented and working with the team there and came in with Cliff and I was like the universe. It was like, “This is vastly complex.” There are so many different things that go into it and so many factors you have to consider and account for and run. It was intriguing. It was a great learning experience but very different.

It’s so much more fun. I will say it is more fun in this space because you have to think. You have to use your brain. You have to think a lot conceptually. It is a completely different challenge, which I love. It is an uncharted territory or it was. It is not so much anymore. There are a lot of tools and things that are coming into play in this space, which is neat to see, but it is still fairly new.

The obvious difference is the homeowner component, which you’re not going to have that on the hotel side, but then there are so many more different variables and complexities that you probably didn’t even think about when you first got into it. I bet that even now, there are new things that are popping up with new technology, with new integrations.

You’re like, “This is going to be easier, or shoot, this is harder now because now we’re looking at this variable, which we never had to look at before,” which would have to be exciting for a person in your position. With that said, you’re with Natural Retreats now for years. How much have Natural Retreats grown in the years that you’ve been there? We know there have been some major acquisitions, so I’m sure the portfolio heads you’re managing are a little different than they were years ago.

I wouldn’t even be able to tell you even by number how many units it’s grown, but we’ve grown primarily through acquisition. We also focus on organic growth within our current markets, which is a significant focus for us. It’s always easier to grow where you already are. That said, when I came on, I think we had maybe five or maybe six locations, I would say.

We currently have sixteen, so we’ve expanded that significantly, expanded the team. What’s more significant, even than unit count, is the business mindset of the company. It has grown from acquiring a greater number of properties to making and doing that in a smart and intelligent way that works for us, our business strategy, and what we’re trying to accomplish, not just growing to grow.

Also, from my perspective, from a revenue management perspective, understanding that there is a lot of information that we are taking in from our own system that we record and all this other new market data that’s out there, where we’re able to start making decisions from a very data-driven place, which is something that I would say has been significant huge growth for our company over the years.

More so than the number of units but just the attitude and the way that we approach things have grown just exponentially. I appreciate that and I feel it’s been a significant way for my department to contribute to the business as a whole and I appreciate that. I want to be able to contribute. We’re not setting rates and creating discounts. This is all something done within the larger context of our goals and what we’re trying to achieve as a company as a whole. I think that is significant for my company and one of the reasons why I appreciate it and love it here.

It’s great points. It’s something that Mateo and I have had conversations about in the past with brand and the Natural Retreats brand is a strong brand. I like seeing where the brand Natural Retreats has grown in these past few years. We might even been talking with Simon about brand and how significant that is going to be for these companies that are growing and scaling and to recognize it as a destination or as a property management company. You’re not going to say, “I’m staying at Natural Retreats.” The importance of that for our industry and there are certain brands that do it well and there are some that don’t and from everything that I see, Natural Retreats is doing it well.

That’s good to hear, but it’s hard. Building a brand in any hospitality space is hard. Hilton and Marriott got a foothold. They’ve been doing this for a long time. Even when it comes to searching or anything like that, do people know Natural Retreats? People in our industry do. There are different ways to look at branding. Branding is significant for the company to understand who you are and what you’re trying to do and lay the foundation for your business goals.

A brand is significant because it does inform how you move forward. There’s more to branding than just like people will say, “Airbnb is like,” they’ve built this brand. Everybody will talk about, “I stayed in an Airbnb,” and that is significant for them in terms of their reach. For us, anyway, I seem to think that building a brand is more than do people know who you are. It does help you know who you are because if you don’t know who you are, you’re not going to be able to move forward with that to tell other people who you are.

That is a challenge in our industry because we have a lot of smaller companies out there, single-location places, that are very successful and have built a brand of their own. It’s not to take away just because they’re in a single destination or they have fewer than a thousand properties or whatever. It doesn’t mean that they haven’t built a brand. They probably have built a very successful brand. Just because Sarah Franzen, in Charlottesville, Virginia, has never heard of this brand in Topeka, Kansas, doesn’t mean they haven’t built a brand. It means that I haven’t heard of them and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The conversation should be also like, who are you trying to be? We’re talking about a brand in a company like, not everybody’s trying to be Vacasa. Not everybody’s trying to be these large V trips and these large-scale players in the space. Some people are okay with their business being a certain size and not going outside of that. That gets eclipsed a lot because everyone’s always talking about the growers and the scalers and who’s going to be the biggest and baddest guy in the room or company in the room.

That’s not everybody’s goal and we don’t hear people talk about that a lot, but I know plenty of property managers that are happy in their space. They don’t want to rock the boat. They’re sensitive to people coming into and changing how their business will run, but they’re not trying to be the biggest company in their region or the country. Hopefully, okay with them and we don’t hear those stories.

That’s something we got to bring up, John, for a future episode. Get some of those smaller beds in there and have that conversation because I feel like we don’t even focus on that. No one’s talking about that, especially around the branding conversation, because the industry’s had them for a while. Unique little bed and breakfast that have done their things forever and got repetitive guests and do well and they’re successful.

At the end of the day, it’s a great idea. We need to have that on a future episode. At the end of the day, if someone’s got 50 units and they’re able to run it successfully, like for four-person staff and hire with some outside hired housekeeping team. They’re paying the bills and happy life at home and have plenty of free time, perfect. Their work-life balance is great. These are all great personal decisions people have.

Do you want to have a portfolio with 50 that’s profitable or a portfolio with 5,000 that’s not? There are a lot of things that go into that. I think that that has been one of the narratives we’ve been hearing a lot, which is just this growth through acquisition and the big dogs coming to swallow up the little and you’re right. It’s about your goals. It’s about what the business goal is. Some people don’t care about the things that some of the bigger ones do. I shouldn’t say don’t care. That’s not fair.

I want to quickly pivot here for a moment. Earlier, before we hit recording, I said I had a little thing I wanted to throw at you that you might be surprised by. This is a true or false question for you. True or false, I went to college for music education.

I feel like it’s probably true, but I didn’t know that.

I did. I played the French horn. I went to Plymouth State University in New Hampshire for music education. I was in the conn artist horn quartet. I was in all states. I was in all New England districts. That was my elementary all the way through one year of college. Unfortunately, in Plymouth State, I was also a snowboarder in skier and could ride Loon Mountain for $5 with my student ID. I majored in snowboarding and marijuana. The music education only lasted a year. I had high aspirations. I wanted to teach music. In high school, I spent a whole semester going into the elementary schools to help teach the kids in school and conduct a country band. I can conduct.

That is super cool.

That’s our little connection. Truly, I wish I still had chops. I don’t even have a French horn anymore, but I used to play brass. I used to sing in chorus. I was the super band geek.

It’s funny. I’ve met a couple of other folks who have a significant music background who are also in this space. Obviously, I didn’t know this and at the same time, it’s not surprising because I’ve found that there is a significant contingent of people in our space that have an arts background, which is interesting to say the word but very cool. If I’m going to listen to a brass instrument, it’s going to be a French horn. I love the French horn. It’s beautiful. It’s tough to play very well. When it’s not played well, it is not beautiful, but I’m sure you were a beautiful player. It’s an amazing instrument, so very cool.

Thank you. That was my little connection there. There are a lot of bits I miss. I miss orchestra. Every once a week, we’d go. We had an orchestra that was about a half-hour drive and we’d get everyone together. Sorry, I digress.

I did not know that. You know that was my son’s major. He just changed his major to film, but he was playing trombone. He’s still in the trombone choir at his school, but he’s changed his major to film.

Another very cool mellow instrument.

It was the legacy instrument in our family. My father is a jazz pianist, but his growing up. He started with the piano but all through school, but he played the trombone all through college and continues to teach music to this day. It’s crazy.

Sarah, tell me about winning the inaugural Revenue Manager of the Year at DARM.

First of all, congratulations. We got to be better.

Thank you.

That’s a huge first. That’s a huge first for you.

It was a surprise, a complete surprise and complete honor. I still am like, “Are you sure that you want me to be that person?” You don’t always see me banging my head against my computer every day, but it was cool. It was nice for Amy and Expedia group to honor the awardees at DARM. It’s nice to be recognized, regardless of what you’re doing. They had the Pioneer Award and Innovation Awards that went out. It’s cool to be acknowledged for what you’re doing.

As I said, it was a complete surprise. The story behind that was that they were awarded the Pioneer Award the first day. The person, I cannot remember his name and I feel terrible about that, but the person who came up and accepted the award was like, “Amy told me that this was coming, so I put together a few words to say.” It was very touching. We’re like, “That’s great.” The second day was the Revenue Manager of the Year Award and I had an appointment in the first half of that session where they were awarding that. Amy had asked me, “Are you going to be at this session?” I said, “I’ve got this meeting.” She’s like, “Can you make sure that you’re there at this certain time?” I was like, “Yes, sure.” I walked in in the middle and the thing is going on and I’m like, “Okay.”

I sat down at her table and I was like, “Did you need me?” She’s like, “Hang on,” then it happened. She announced me and I was like, “You didn’t tell me anything.” I thought that anyone who would get an award would be told about it ahead of time. It was a complete shock, but it was so very kind and meaningful to be recognized among a bunch of peers who could have very easily won it too.

The good news is that there are so many people going forward that can win this thing. There are so many of us that are going to work every day and trying to figure stuff out. Sometimes we fail and sometimes there’s a win, and you ask, “Was that me or?” There’s a lot of second-guessing of oneself in this discipline, but a lot of cool people that I’ve gotten to know in this industry are doing what I do every day. It’s cool to have that acknowledged and recognized. That was neat. Completely surprised and honored by it.

We’re excited to see you when we are at DARM. It was a great conference and well deserved.

Thank you so much.

In that line, there are two questions I have. Shining the spotlight on revenue management and during your time. Even in my own time, it’s in knowing the importance that the industry is placing on it now. It hasn’t always been the case. To be very clear, not everybody’s great at revenue management. Even though they may work hard, do good things and do okay, not everybody’s great at revenue management. That’s why we’re seeing the importance of it pushed to the forefront and more tools being pushed towards companies being able to either empower their revenue managers or themselves to do it themselves.

My first question to you is and knowing you, it may be a little hard for you to answer, but I would like to know. What do you think makes you different in this space? What makes you different as a revenue manager than the others in this space? What makes you good at what you do from your perspective?

The people who, I don’t even want to say do the best because I fail a lot. Maybe that’s one thing. I’m willing to fail and I put that out there. I’ll tell people, “I don’t know this. This could be completely wrong and if it’s wrong, we’ll learn from it. We’ll pivot and we’ll move forward.” That is one thing that I was okay with messing up and failing ever since I was small.

Now, do I beat myself up about it? Yes, I do. I think that’s significant. I will say that almost everyone I know in this space who’s doing the same thing is pretty much of the same mindset. I do think that it’s important to think about your company as you’re managing. Your company becomes very granular when you’re doing the day-to-day stuff. Your company is not just us but it’s our owners. It’s our guests, so understand as a company what we’re trying to accomplish. As owners, understanding what they’re trying to accomplish. As guests, give them a fair product, whether it’s price or quality.

Whatever it is, offering them a fair, if not exceptional, hopefully, experience through product and price. I think that understanding that’s not going to look the same for natural retreats or Vacasa or like you’re saying V trips or a smaller independent business in a single location. That’s going to look different. How we are approaching things is going to be different and that includes revenue management.

Early on in this space, there was a lot of talk about how do you do this, see these tips and tricks. It was always worrisome for me in a lot of ways to see that because I know that one thing isn’t going to work for everybody. When you see and hear people get up and talk about, “You should do this or you should do that.” When occupancy gets to a certain, that’s not going to be the case for everybody.

It’s not a one size fits all thing.

It’s not. If you can go into it thinking that and knowing that and understand, be very confident in your company and what you’re trying to accomplish. Also, be willing to completely fall flat on your face and own it. That’s the other thing. It’s one thing to fall flat on your face and to own it. Another thing to fall flat on your face and try to like push that off to somebody or something else, that’s significant. I don’t know if that’s unique or special to me. It might be unique or special to people who are trying to figure this out and trying to advance their company and their company’s mission because as I said, there are a lot of people out there doing that.

To follow up on that, it’s interesting on the tech side of it. We’ve seen a lot of tools coming into play. Do you think the community is getting it right in terms of what they’re providing revenue managers? Are they on the right path? Are they giving you the tools you need to continue to be better at what you do to make your job easier or make you more effective in this space? Are they on the right path and/or are there things you would like to see develop or see more in this space?

They’re getting a lot more right. The tools are getting a lot more sophisticated. The tools are becoming smarter. With any tool, whether it’s revenue management or whatever, if you’re going to adopt these tools, you’re going to have to be willing to work the tool. These tools that are out there now, this dynamic pricing software that is out there now, are very good if you work the tool and manage it well.

I can’t say for sure if that’s the case, but I have seen how they’ve developed over time. I’ve had relationships with these companies for years and I will talk to them about things. I’m not going to be able to say anything specific now because I can’t think of anything, but I’ve talked to them in specific terms about, “It would be nice to see X or Y.” They’re very receptive to that. They want to create tools that we can use that work for us.

They’re always very open to ideas and critiques. I think they are continuing to get better. Some of the companies that are out there, like you were mentioning, maybe they’re not ready for revenue management or they don’t think they’re ready for revenue management. One thing I would say is that I think in revenue management, you can take things in small bites. You don’t have to have a revenue manager on staff.

You don’t have to have a revenue management department to do things considered part of revenue management or revenue strategy. Some of these tools may be great for people who are like, “I’m a one or two-person show. I just need to have something.” Maybe they set it and forget it, which is not ideal but is that better than nothing? I don’t know because I don’t know that. It’s important for folks to acknowledge that being open to revenue management strategies will likely get the ball rolling and help them in the long run.

That’s not to say that, “You should do X, Y or Z,” because I don’t know your company. I do think if you’re thinking along those, data’s important and we can use this to help our company grow and develop, that’s the first. That’s the first step you take, even if it’s just how you’re thinking about things. It’s a long way of saying these tools have gotten much better. There’s a huge value in these tools if you’re willing to put the time and energy into using them and managing them.

I got a question for you. The US is opening up to international travel to the fully vaccinated and I think it’s early November. Is there anything you are seeing or anticipating for Natural Retreats or just in the US in general? What do you see the impact on travel here in the vacation rental space?

The first answer is, I don’t know. The second thing that I will throw out there is that the narrative is true. We’ve all been talking about how there’s been this fundamental shift in the way that people travel for Americans because a lot of other countries have been closed and the international traveler coming to America.

I would imagine that shift in travel didn’t just affect Americans. It’s affected other countries as well. I do think that the uplift in the US with travelers staying closer to home or drive markets or things, I do think that while people will start traveling more internationally, that’s something that people have learned and have grown to love.

I also think that the same thing may apply in other countries. They’ve been having to do the same thing. Some countries have been completely locked down and haven’t been able to even travel within their own country. There’s a part of that is permanent everywhere. It’s one of those things that I’m not sure. I can see us seeing fewer international travelers here and seeing fewer people traveling internationally because they’ve discovered something more locally.

I could see it completely boom. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’ve seen anything significant now yet. I think people are probably still like, “Is it going to happen?” The way that things have been going, it’s like, “This is going to happen.” No, it’s not and, “Yes,” no, it’s not. People are probably waiting for it to happen then when things happen, things close down again.

I wonder if people are a little bit jaded about that, like, “I don’t know if I can bank on this being open.” We all hope everything is, but there’s also been a little bit of this psychological trauma thing going on with travelers. You don’t want to like get your hopes up about too many things. A lot of that stuff and I know that international travelers, generally, that booking window is going to be a little bit wider because you don’t plan a trip to London next week.

You are probably going to see that happening, but I don’t necessarily know that we’re going to start seeing that happening until we have arrived at a date and something has happened. Things are open and people start to feel a little bit more confident. I don’t think it’s like, “It’s going to happen in November or whatever it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen then, so I’m going to start booking my travel.” We’re probably not going to see as much of that. There may be people who are doing that. I have not seen it personally but it’s going to be that tentative, “It’s opening, so maybe I’ll start looking here,” but it’s not going to be fast. We’ve all been jaded by that a bit.

We’re tired.

It’s going to be interesting to see. There are a lot of other things we’re not considering too, like what is the economy going to be like? What is the cost of travel going to be? Gas is off the chain now. What effect is that going to have on local and regional travel and airlines?

Rental cars. Once you get here, what are you going to drive?

You saw what happened in Hawaii. I don’t even know if you were able to see Mandy’s V trips, the video or the movie. They were in a U-Haul. Remember when you heard about people renting U-Haul? They were legit in a U-Haul. In one scene, he was in between the lava banks, trying to turn the U-Hul around. Insane.

It’s like that supply chain thing. That analogy but it applies everywhere. Who knows? They can maybe get here but then what? We might have a great vacation rental for them, but how do you get there?

What does that affect? The supply chain issue is going to affect our business too. Our ability to get the business and things that stock our properties and we’re not having that. This is that brand. These are the things that you have to be able to think about when you want to truly look at what the impact is going to be when things open back up. Opening back up is awesome. What’s the environment going to be?

You can’t get people to staff restaurants now in these destinations. It’s like, “They’re all coming but is that going to be open?” Is it going to be open seven days a week, or has some of them gone down to abbreviated hours? It’s all interconnected. It is tough and that goes back to the whole hesitancy of people like, “Am I going to have the experience that I want to have if I book my stuff now?”

We’re going to open up, but what does that mean? I think a lot of it’s going to be very tentative like, “Well see what they do.” I would like to think that it’s going to open and everything’s going to be great but if it did now, would everything be great? Would people have a great experience in the market if they get to some of these markets that are affected by the supply chain or by the employment outlook of some of these hospitality-driven businesses?

It’s so interesting. This whole supply chain thing is baffling to me and to see the impact its head on all sorts of the industry to date, even from the small mom and pops here that rely on supplies, small supplies, packaging supplies and stuff. I was talking with my wife. Someone was saying, “Shop local and you won’t have to deal with that.” No, our local companies still rely even if it’s made locally and it’s manufactured locally. They still rely on supplies that are coming from overseas to go ahead and make these local things.

You can’t do everything locally. It’s interesting to see the overall impact that this is having on society in general now. What does this trajectory look like? The hardest part for me is, “Are we getting back to normalcy for one thing?” Everything else is so far from normalcy and it seems like it’s this crazy snowball effect. It’s hard to predict what it will look like in six months or a year. It’s difficult.

It’s a good example of how everything is interconnected. You can talk about supply chain or about employment or whatever. I wrote something months ago about the whole technology thing. I think we were talking about technology offline, or maybe it was on here. The improvements that technology has brought to our lives, so whether dynamic pricing software or whatever you want to talk about.

What I was writing about was this concept of loss. When you introduce certain things, there are certain things that are lost. It doesn’t have to be a negative loss but an actual loss of something. When you do one thing, it affects something else which affects something else. To be in tune to what you want to do or what you’re doing, it’s valuable to look forward to those 5 or 6 steps, like, “If I want to bring in dynamic pricing software to my company and we’re going to shift the way that we look at things or the way that we do things. What is lost there?”

It’s not necessarily a negative thing. It may not be a productivity thing. It may not be this, but what goes away? How does that affect 5 or 6 steps down the road? Anything like this. The supply chain, there’s an issue. I’m a crocheter and I need to get my yarn or a needle. Where does that come from? How is that going to affect what I want to do in two months if I want to do? That’s all important. There’s a loss there.

There are probably a lot of things that you gain, but there’s always a loss when you change something. That’s something that I try to think about, whether in my career or personal life. That’s significant and I don’t always think about it the way I should, but it’s significant enough that I try to get myself thinking like that.

That’s an awesome way to think of it too. Especially equating that the loss is not always a negative but understanding that loss is there because technology is supposed to replace things or either a process or something within that line. Whether it’s good or bad, we also plugging us in determines whether that happens or not or what that is. The way email was supposed to free us up from work and bond us to work even more.

Now you’re emailing on vacation and you’re emailing from your phone. It never stops.

To go back to the movie we were talking about earlier, technology getting away, hiding, going back to easier, the movie was called the Village, FYI. It’s interesting because now, it brings up a good point because business owners and us all are going to have to make decisions moving forward. Even coming out of this pandemic and having time to sit and focus on a lot of things, the reason people aren’t returning to their jobs is that a lot of change is happening.

People have time to sit, be quiet, figure things out, and make different decisions. How this is going to play at both the macro and micro level in our industry and the economy abroad is unknown now. On the other side of that, we see a lot of things happening, but we don’t know what the effect of those things are going to be at any aspect of our life. It’s exciting, frightening but it’s going to be interesting.

There’s a lot of unknown.

It should make your job and all of our jobs a bit more interesting coming up. Some challenges maybe but challenges are fun.

That’s right.

You did say this earlier. You wouldn’t change it. This is much more rewarding and challenging than on the vacation rental, short-term rental side than, on the hotel side of things. We’re just adding some more monkey wrenches thrown in there for you.

There you go. That’s right.

Sarah, it’s been so much fun having you on. Thank you so much for joining us.

That was my pleasure. Thanks for asking.

You left us with some great nuggets, but do you have any other nuggets that you’d like to leave the audience with?

I hadn’t thought. I need time to think about that, but I do appreciate the time to chat. I love this thing, talking with people in the industry and throwing ideas around is valuable for everybody, regardless of your discipline. A lot of this is not revenue management. It’s, “How do we exist in this space?” In other spaces too. According to Mateo’s earlier comment, our world is changing and people are thinking about things differently. We’re going to all have to shift because everything’s shifted. It’s not the way people think about travel. It’s how they think about where they work, how they work, and when. These are all important things. I appreciate the opportunity to throw it around with you.

You’re going to have to come back and see us again. We’ll have to continue the conversation a year later about where we are at. It’s been awesome having you. Thanks for coming in putting up with John and I.

My pleasure.

Until next time. Thanks, Sarah.

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