Does this sound familiar? You're struggling to make the switch from long-term to short-term rentals, and you've been told to rely solely on OTAs for bookings. But the pain of high commission fees and lack of control over your business has left you feeling frustrated and stuck. It's time to break free from the OTA dependency and take back control of your booking success. Let's explore how you can maximize direct bookings and increase guest trust for your vacation rentals.

I think education has never been more important in the short term rental world. We've got so many things across the world that we're dealing with, including regulation, including legislation that different countries are bringing in different tax changes, we've got new companies entering the space all the time, we've got different booking trends, so many different things that people need to be aware of. - James Varley

My special guest for this episode is James Varley.

James Varley, the founder of the Holiday Cottage Handbook, who has a rich background in property investment and a successful transition from long-term rentals to managing holiday lets in the UK. James's journey is a testament to his expertise in navigating the nuances of the short-term rental industry and building direct booking success. With a strong emphasis on sustainable business practices and a genuine passion for sharing knowledge, James has become a trusted voice in the industry. Through his various platforms, including a free downloadable ebook, an engaging blog, and a weekly podcast featuring industry experts, James is dedicated to providing valuable insights and support for property owners looking to maximize their direct bookings. His commitment to empowering others in the short-term rental space makes him a valuable ally for those seeking to thrive in the industry.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Discover the secrets to starting a successful short term rental business.
• Learn how to smoothly transition from long term to short term rentals and maximize your profits.
• Uncover the benefits of holiday lets in the UK and how they can elevate your rental income.
• Master the art of building trust and securing more direct bookings for your vacation rentals.
• Navigate the complex world of short term rental regulations in the UK with confidence.

Connect with James and Holiday Cottage Handbook

Website: https://www.holidaycottagehandbook.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/holidaycottagehandbook/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hchandbook/

The key moments in this episode are:

00:00:30 - Getting into the Short Term Rentals World

00:05:43 - Building Relationships with Neighbors

00:08:37 - Core Mission of Holiday Cottage Handbook

00:10:46 - Importance of Education in Short Term Rentals

00:12:01 - A to Z Resource and Podcast Series

00:13:34 - Booking Trends and Content Development

00:14:48 - Defining the Industry

00:17:10 - Vacation Rentals vs. Short Term Rentals

00:18:40 - Common Pitfalls and Education

00:24:03 - Involvement in Regulation

00:27:47 - Importance of Booking Direct

00:28:07 - Convincing Guests to Book Direct

00:28:29 - Trust and Convenience in Booking

00:28:52 - Time and Effort in Direct Booking

00:29:23 - Connecting with James and Holiday Cottage Handbook 

FREE GUIDE: 10 Ways to Drive Guests to your Website instead of Airbnb: https://directbookingsuccess.com/10-ways-to-drive-guests-to-your-website-instead-of-airbnb/

Show notes are available at: https://directbookingsuccess.com/podcast/

Follow Jenn on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/directbookingsuccess

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the direct booking success podcast. I'm your host, Jenn Boyles and I'm super excited to be here with you today. I have James Varley with me today. James is the founder of the Holiday Cottage Handbook. Welcome, James.

Thanks, Jenn. How's it going?

It is great. It is a sunny day in Vancouver and I'm raring to go. Let's get started with how you got into this whole crazy world of short term rentals.

Well, I started out as a property investor when I was living in Doha in Qatar in the Middle east. So I lived there for ten years working on the People World cup project. I started investing in property, initially investing in buy to lets, so regular long term rentals here in the UK. And then a few years later, I recognized that we needed a place to stay when we were coming back to the UK, especially after my daughter was born in 2018. Staying with family is okay when it's just two of you. When you've got a little baby in tow, you really need your own space. So, yeah, I switched from buy to let to short term rentals and I've now got a couple of them, which I managed just around the corner from where I live now in the UK. I'm just in the north of England between Leeds and York. And when I made that switch to short term rentals, I noticed there was this big difference in the amount of information and education that was out there for people who were investors and wanting to get involved in this space in buy to let here in the UK. Loads of great websites, forums, podcasts, all the information that you could ever need to get started as an investor or a landlord, as we call it here in the UK for short term rentals, I couldn't find something similar, something comparable. When I was investing in buying Toledo, I used to listen to this property hub podcast. They'll listen to it now and it's so informative, it's loads of valuable free education, pointing people in the right direction. They have a forum, they have a website, they even have a magazine, they even have an investment vehicle where you can invest with them in buy to let. And yeah, when I got to the short term rentals world, I was like, where's my property hub? Where is it for holiday lets, as they're called here? And there really wasn't much. And like a lot of people in this industry, they start up with one or two properties, they find a problem and they try to deliver a solution. And for most people, it's delivering a PM's a property management solution or some kind of tech tool or upselling tool or dynamic pricing tool. But for me, because my background is not in Silicon Valley, my background is in the media and communications. I thought, well, maybe I can set up a communications tool that's going to help hosts and property managers, whatever the stage of their journey, because that's what I felt as a comms and media professional that was really missing from the space. So that's the story of how I got involved as a host of property managers and then took it on to eventually founding Holiday Cottage Handbook, which is what I did after the World Cup finished in December 2022.

Right, and you came back to the UK. Yeah, I can see that. When you have a child and then want to stay with family and friends and they're like, yeah, maybe not anymore, maybe it's time you get your own place. I can see that happening.

Yeah. I mean, to be fair, our family was very accommodating, but yeah, it's just flipping hard work when you're dealing with travel costs and everything else. I think this is one of the reasons why I love short term rentals so much, because when you're traveling with kids, getting a short term rental instead of one hotel room and having four of you in there, or having to get two hotel rooms, it's just such a great option. You've got the kitchen there, you've got the lounge area, you've got more space. Everybody's got their own bedroom. Yes, that's what convinced me really, to buy one in the first place. And yeah, it's definitely one of the main reasons why I love them so much and why when we travel as a family, that's what we use.

So you've got two properties there in the northeast of England. Can you tell us a little bit about your business there?

So the two properties? Yeah, they're in a village which is halfway between Leeds and York. So Leeds and York are both pretty popular tourist cities, especially York. Quite a rural location, village location. But close by we have several businesses and enterprise zones. So we get a lot of different types of guests. We get people who are coming to visit the cities, we get parents that are coming to visit their students. They're both big university towns. We get people here staying during the week. And it always amazes me, you know, the guests that we get from all over the world, we've got a. A lady who comes now twice a year to one of the properties. She's got family nearby. She lives in California, she books it out for a month. In spring and a month in fall every single year for the last few years. And yeah, we've had guests from all over the world for all sorts of different reasons. I'm always amazed at why they end up in this little village between Leeds and York. But it's great because we tick a lot of boxes that people would want and also because of our location, we don't have that much competition. We're not in Devon or Cornwall or a seaside location. We're in a place where there aren't that many other short term rentals. So we do pick up, you know, when family and friends are visiting people who live here, we're the place that they go to to stay, which is great.

So you have a good relationship with your neighbors, no issues there?

Well, there were. I mean, I think there are a few raised eyebrows when we started because it was very new for village, because there weren't really other short term rentals, like I said, but with anybody setting up an STR, it is so important to get to know your neighbors and to let them know what you're doing, to share your contact information so they know who you are. And it kind of takes the fear out of it because we all know that our industry doesn't necessarily have the best press and we hear so much in the media about Airbnb party houses and Airbnb properties taking over and there aren't enough properties for local people to buy and all this kind of thing. But I think once people realise who you are and what you're trying to achieve and the fact that the people coming here 99% of the time are great guests and they're spending money in the pubs and they're contributing to the local economy and it's. We're employing cleaners and handy people and plumbers a lot more often than we'd want to employ, but we are making that contribution to the local economy. So I think once people start to see that and see the positive side of the industry, they're much more on side. But of course, you're with your neighbors. It's so important, isn't it, to develop those relationships, to make sure that they're allies and not opponents.

Great. Yeah, no, I 100% agree with you, definitely. And your guests are coming. What a mix of direct and OTA bookings.

Yeah, I mean, I did what a lot of people do when they start out. I knew next to nothing about STR, so I bunged it on Airbnb and that was it at the start, and it was great. We had all the occupancy that we wanted and I wasn't really aware of other otas when I started out. I knew that booking.com was doing a bit with vacation rentals, but back when I started they were very much dominated by hotels. Airbnb seemed to be the only game in town and it was sufficient for what we were after, which was when I started it. Really with me living in Doha, I just wanted enough bookings and occupancy to make sure all our costs were covered. And then we had a place to stay when we came back. But yeah, it's definitely developed over the years. I've got to know the industry a lot better. We're on other otas now. We've got a direct booking option. We try to turn those OTA customers into direct bookers the next time and it's certainly something I want to do more of. And I have done a lot more of it over the last year since I stopped working for the World cup organising committee, which did take up a lot of my time. But since then I've concentrated much more on trying to get those direct bookings and to build a more sustainable business. Basically, that's what it's all about.

Great. Okay, let's get back to the Holiday Cottage handbook. So you've started that when you realize that there was a bit of a gap in the market and your day job had finished, which is, you know, you need some time to put this together. What is the core mission of Holiday Cottage Handbook?

To be useful to hosts and property managers. To help hosts and property managers develop sustainable businesses. It's about sharing knowledge. It's about being helpful, and we do that through a variety of channels. So the first thing that I worked on initially after the World cup finished was to develop an ebook which is free to download from our website. Just go to holidaycottagehandbook.com comma, put your email address in, you can download that for free. So that's a guide to buying and managing short term rentals based on my own experience, based on my research. Also, we have our website which has a blog section with the latest news stories from the industry. We have an a to z of STR which details a lot of different topics related to STR. So like Wikipedia for the industry really. And we keep updating it and editing it as we go along. We have a newsletter and we have a weekly podcast as well. So we're very multimedia, we're active across everywhere. The podcast is very much the hero content. So the experts that come on there from the industry, we've got a lot of CEO's, founders, directors, co founders, that kind of thing. And the knowledge that they're sharing with people is relevant whether you run one property or thousands. So I'd really recommend, if you want to know what the latest trends are, to understand what's going on in the industry, to learn how to be the best host and property manager you can possibly be. Yeah, have a listen to the podcast and listen to the experts who really know what they're talking about. I'm better at asking the questions than I am with the expert advice.

I think you're doing pretty well today. Don't worry about that. So we're talking about education. So can you tell us about, you know, in your opinion, why education is so important?

This industry is changing and developing at such a rapid pace that I think if you don't inform yourself of what's going on, if you're not reading the latest trends, if you're not up to date, you're very quickly going to get left behind. So I think education has never been more important in the short term rental world. We've got so many things across the world that we're dealing with, including regulation, including legislation that different countries are bringing in different tax changes, we've got new companies entering the space all the time, we've got different booking trends, so many different things that people need to be aware of. If you want to be a great property manager and a great host, and you're really serious about this and you want to have a sustainable business for the long term, it's just so important to keep up to date with what's going on out there. And ours is one of the platforms where you can really immerse yourself in this industry and keep yourself up to date.

And can you tell me a bit more of your a to z that you've got on your website? Because that sounds really intriguing.

Yeah. So it's a resource really for everybody who's involved in STR, whether you're a host, a property manager or an industry professional, this is the place really to go to learn about different topics. So it might be accessibility, sustainability, dynamic pricing, digital guidebooks, property management solutions, all these various different types of things. You can go, you can learn about it. We share different links to different companies that are active in this particular space. Some of the subjects there are sponsored by companies. So for example, the digital guidebook section is sponsored by Iran Estee. They offer great digital guidebooks. So yeah, it's just a resource that we keep updating. We keep adding new sections as the industry develops. And it's also going to be the foundation for a new podcast series that we're working on, which is going to be kind of bite size episodes, specifically about the different subjects that we have in the a to z. So we'll have ten minute episodes about those different things. So a ten minute episode about dynamic pricing tools, about PM's. So we talk about these subjects all the time on the podcast, but they're kind of like they're in the middle somewhere and we're talking to a CEO. So this gets kind of straight to the heart of the action. If you want to know about a certain topic, this will be a place where you can learn more about it. So we're working on that at the moment. We're talking to a couple of potential sponsors, so hopefully in the next few months we'll be releasing that.

That sounds like a great resource up and coming. Really does. So with managing your two holiday rentals yourself right now, how has that impacted the resources and the advice that you offer through the Holiday Cottage handbook?

It's been huge really. I mean, that was what convinced me to start the business in the first place is the fact that I've got these two properties and I know a little bit about it based on my own experience, but I think there's a market out there to help people more and more. I think being a host myself means that I kind of have my finger on the pulse. I know what's happening. I can see what booking trends that I'm experiencing, I can see where my customers are coming from. And then that helps me really to develop content for holiday Cottage Handbook because I can talk to some of our sponsors and collaborators like Key data and beyond. And I'll say I'm seeing this. I've had a load more bookings from booking.com this year rather than Airbnb, which is a big switch in what I’ve had previously. Is this happening elsewhere? This is an example that I chatted to beyond and key data about earlier this year and key data came back and said yeah, we're seeing the same thing. Our customers were reporting similar things, though. Me being a host myself means I've got my finger on the pulse and I can put myself in the audience's point of view. And that's the most important thing really. When you're developing content, your audience always needs to be at the heart of it. And as a host and a property manager myself, I can think, well, that's a topic I'd be interested in. So I need to be writing about this and talking about it on our channels.

And just a little while ago, just as we're recording this now, just recently, you did a poll, didn't you, about what we should call this scattered fractured industry. Can you tell us a little bit about what you found out there?

Yeah. So when I kind of started, I'll be honest, I think we've gotten to the point in the last few years where certainly here in the UK, it's just known as Airbnb. When you say I've got an Airbnb, people know what you mean. If I said to people, I've got a short term rental, I think I'd get some blank expressions. Honestly, they wouldn't really know what that meant. And then, of course, we have a lot of other wonderful terms as well. We have some people here in the UK who call it self catering accommodation. When we talk about mortgages, we call them holiday let mortgages. The government calls them furnished holiday lets. If you speak to industry people, they're calling it short term rentals. If you're speaking to somebody in the US and North America, they're calling it vacation rentals. So it's confusing. I think it's confusing for people in the industry. It's a bit confusing for me as a comms professional. That's my background, comms media. Like, what on earth should we call this industry? What should be the name? Is there something else that we can come up with? Can we have a capture all term, which means that, you know, something that we all understand and we can run with in future? So, it was actually a conversation that I had with Richard Wharton, who's well known in this space as an industry expert. And we had a call and we were like, what do we do here? After the call, I said, well, I'm going to put it to a poll, I'm going to mention it in a newsletter and see what people think about it. And I think the most interaction we got was on LinkedIn. I tagged a bunch of the people who'd been on our podcast before and said, what do you think? And we got a big response and a lot of people shared it. And they got involved with the poll about what we should call the industry. And the overwhelming response was that it should be the short term rentals industry, which is helpful for me because it means I can start just using the term short term rentals and STR. But I think still, as a sector, we need to do a better job of explaining what the short term rentals industry actually is. Because especially for politicians, the media and the general public, a lot of them would give you those blank expressions when you say STR or short term rentals. If you say you've got STr, they probably think you need to go and see a doctor. So you need to be, we need to have this all encompassing term.

I love that. Yes. Go see your doctor. You've got an STR. Yes. Yeah. I'm really glad that you did it. When I saw you doing this poorly, I was like, oh, finally, someone's taking the bull by the horns and finding out. Because, you know, being in England, holiday lets, holiday cottages, holiday rentals. You know, we use the word holiday instead of vacation. Coming over to this side of the world in Canada and the States, its vacation rentals and short term rentals. But I didn't realize the big divide between the two, the sort of sectors within the sector, short term rentals are more sort of the investors and the city people, whereas the vacation rentals are like their vacation spots and people that have been doing this, you know, pre pandemic and pre Airbnb and things. So it's interesting to hear the different terms and how they're used. I still try to use all of them all the time, which is very confusing for everyone. I say to my clients, we're living in an Airbnb world for good or bad, so we have to be looking at what they are doing as well as using that word. But yes, I know sometimes I say to people a short term rental and they go, is that like an Airbnb? It may be, yes, exactly. No, it's better. So let's talk about the people that are coming to you for education, for advice. What are some of the sort of common pitfalls that they fall into? And where do you see Holiday Cottage Handbook sort of helping out?

Well, I think one of the reasons that I started the platform is that I could see this common problem, especially among people that were starting out, because I think right now a lot of people, when they start out with a short term rental, end up joining a Facebook group. And when they say, hi, I'm just getting started, don't know what to do. Should I allow pets? Should I charge a cleaning fee? I've heard about dynamic pricing. Should I use this? And really, we're definitely here to help the people at the start of their journey. We're here to help people, whether they've got a few properties or whether they've got thousands. But the common problem, I think is, again, within Facebook groups, and especially Airbnb dominated Facebook groups, there are a lot of people on there who are only listed on Airbnb. And they just, like you were saying before, they live in an Airbnb world. They have no idea about different platforms, they have no idea about direct bookings. They don't know anything about the technology that's out there to support them. And I think that's probably the vast majority of people who are involved in this industry, even though they probably don't know that they're a part of this industry. They probably just think, well, I'm running a little holiday cottage and it's maybe my annex or maybe it's the house down the road, or it's a property that I bought as a second home. And we use it most, a few weekends a year, and the rest of the time we let it out. It's trying to help those people, maybe become more professional, become more aware of what's out there, and hopefully convince them to build better and more sustainable businesses. So I think one thing is that there's such a wide spectrum of people who are involved in short term rentals. You've got people at one end who are literally renting out a room in their own house all the way through to really serious professional property managers who are scaling massively and have got thousands of properties. And I would say the average level of knowledge is probably really, really low. And the Holiday Cottage Handbook is helping people. It's helping to kind of bring that level up, hopefully a bit, especially in these rapidly changing times where we've got lots of regulation and politicians getting interested in what we're doing and new taxes and all the rest of it. So, yeah, it's for everybody. But yeah, I think there are a bunch of common problems, and I think the main ones being that the average host has a low level of knowledge and really is very, very unaware of what's going on in this industry.

Yeah, no, I agree. I'm probably in the same Facebook groups that you are, and I think I saw one this morning. Hi. It's my first time. I'm ready to Airbnb, you know, and what should I do? And then they get a barrage of advice, which is often contradictory. Some of it doesn't even make sense, and it is not really helpful in the grand scheme of things. So education does not have to be costly, does it? You're investing in your personal development, but also in your business of your short term rental. But it doesn't have to cost anything, does it?

Well, the great thing about our platform is that it doesn't cost a penny. Everything is free to the host and property managers. So you can listen to the podcast, you can get all our newsletters, you can download the ebook for free and look at the a to z of Str. And yeah, I mean, like you're saying there with the people in the Facebook groups, that was the thing that led me to start writing the ebook. I mean, the Holiday Cottage Handbook is called Holiday Cottage Handbook because that's how it started out as a handbook. And when I started writing it in January 2023, I was still working with the World cup committee at that point, but the tournament had finished, so I didn't have much to do. So I started writing this ebook and I thought, well, at least I can do something that can be helpful to people. Maybe I'll put it on Amazon and I'll sell it for $2 each and then I'll go and go on with my career and maybe I'll go and work on the next tournament, something like that. In the end, this business kind of took on a life of its own. But yeah, that's how it started with those people who are struggling and they end up finding a Facebook group because it's the only knowledge, the only accessible knowledge that they can find. And yeah, like you say, they're getting all this contradictory advice and that's not really ideal. So hopefully our platform and many other great ones that are out there can help to fill that void, can be useful to hosts and property managers and help them get to where they want to be.

And I have to congratulate you on getting into sort of the regulation space. It's not something any of us want to really be dealing with. But I know that England is now having a bit more, a few more issues, let's put it that way. We don't have to get into the details. And in the same way that I'm getting involved here in the canadian space with regulations, I think that it's almost our public duty, in a way, to get involved with what is going on around us, so that not only can we educate others, but help them through it and for other areas of the world to see what is going on so they can learn from it too. Do you agree with that?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean. I mean, recently we had the spring budget announcement here in the UK. So the chancellor announced that the furnished holiday lettings tax regime would be abolished. That's all we know so far. There's been no further information. We don't expect this to actually come before parliament anytime soon. We're going to have an election at the latest by January. So everything is up in the air, there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of people worried about what might happen. People have seen what's happened in the buy to let sector here in the UK, where there have been a lot more taxes, particularly for people that have got mortgages and higher rate taxpayers. Yeah, I mean, the government has made it more and more difficult to make a profit from. But the real issue, I think, with the short term rental space is that it's playing such a big part in tourism in the UK. It's boosting economies, like we were saying before, it's helping to employ people, it's helping those local pubs and restaurants and cafes and supermarkets to keep going in areas where they might struggle without those numbers of tourists. So I think the government has to be really, really careful. It has to look at the data, it has to actually gather the data in the first place and then make decisions based on that. I think the big problem from the industry is that the government hasn't got the data yet. We don't know exactly how many short term rentals there are in the country. There will be areas of the country where there are a lot and they're having a bigger impact in other areas of the country where there aren't that many. And it would just be absurd, I think, to raise maybe 300 million pounds in extra tax revenue from a furnished holiday lets if that's hurting your tourism economy by half a billion pounds. That just makes no sense. So hopefully the government will see sense. But yeah, I think it's really important to talk about these things. We've done loads of podcasts. I was just recording a podcast today with Alistair Handyside, who's from Pasc UK, one of the main lobbying bodies for the holiday lets here in the UK. And yeah, so that'll be coming out soon. We've already done a podcast with Steve Taggart from my getaways. He was actually in parliament when the announcement was made. And we've done other things as well in relation to mortgages. So, yeah, it's all about, like I said at the start, really being useful for the audience, helping people, guiding them through this and taking out some of kind of the media headlines, the media screaming this is the end of short term rentals, or hammering hosts and property managers, that kind of thing. Though I think helping people through this issue and sharing the knowledge that they need to know to build sustainable businesses.

I hear you and I support you 100% and I'm glad that you started this business in the UK and that you are providing this education for hosts and owners and property managers, especially in the UK, to help them with their businesses. And going back to your first business of running your two holiday lets, I'm going to use the english term running your two holiday lets. And I know that you're getting bookings from a variety of sources, including direct booking. So I'd like to ask you, what does direct booking success mean to you?

I think for me, at the level that I operate, direct booking success is making sure that somebody who comes through an OTA the first time books direct the next time. We do have a lot of repeat guests and, you know, it's important to, I think, build that trust among the guests. You know, once they know you, once they meet you, once they understand the guest experience that you provide, the communication that you provide, these things all help them to book direct next time. It's wonderful when we have really savvy guests who are actually looking to book direct. And I had one of those last week. He stayed. I think he came through booking.com initially and then he emailed me afterwards because he had all my contact details and I pushed him to book directly. He emailed me afterwards saying, I always want to book direct and can we do x, y and z. I'm like, of course we can. Here's the link. Away we go. So, yeah, it's trying to make sure that anybody who comes through an OTA makes sure that they book direct and do everything you can to build that trust and make sure that people are comfortable booking directly. Because even just providing a link and saying, hi, here's my direct booking website, it's not really enough for a lot of people. They still need more convincing. And it's not just going to be a case of it's 10% cheaper here. Again, there are a lot of people out there who will, just for convenience, just because they trust it more, they're going to continue going through an OTA. So it's doing a lot of work on that trust and convincing people that booking directors is the best way to go.

Like you need something else to be doing with your time, right?

Something about it, yeah.

Well, thanks so much, James, for coming on today and sharing with us what you're doing there in your own business, with your short term rentals, but also with Holiday Cottage Handbook and the education that you are providing there free of charge, which is amazing. I'm going to put up your website, which is holidaycottagehandbook.com, the show notes, how is the best way for people to come and sort of interact with you, connect with you.

So yeah, head to the website. Make sure you sign up for our newsletter. You can download the free ebook and listen to our podcast. You can listen on the website or on Apple podcasts or Spotify. You can even watch it on YouTube if you like. If you want to connect with me, you can email me Jamesolidaycottagehandbook.com or connect with me over on LinkedIn. More active on all the social media that you'd expect. So yeah, come and say hello.

Wonderful. Thanks James.

Thanks a lot Jen. Been a pleasure.