The Future of the Guest Experience Is Smarter Software with Margot Schmorak

Margot Schmorak (0:00)

How wonderful would it be to not have to respond to guest messages in the middle of the night? Or if a guest has a question about something that you already have, maybe in your digital guidebook or in your PMS, wouldn't it be great if it could just answer based on the things that they should already know? That's what the AI platform will do for you.

Avery Carl (0:27)

Hey, y'all, welcome back to another episode of The Short Term Show. Today, we have Margot Schmorak. She is the CEO and co-founder of one of my favorite PMS tools, Hostfully, and she's going to talk to us a little bit about what they've had going on for the last few years. If you're not familiar with Hostfully yet, then we'll do a little re-intro. We have done a podcast episode before with her, which was a few years back. If you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to it, but we're going to interview her again today. I'm as always your host, Avery Carl and how's it going Margot?

Margot Schmorak (0:58)

It's great. So happy to be here again.

Avery Carl (1:00)

Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah.

You said you're sitting in your short-term rental in Sonoma right now.

Margot Schmorak (1:06)

Yeah. We have a short-term rental in Windsor in Sonoma County.

We rented out not a ton because we actually also come out here with our family a lot. I have three kids and my husband, and we're in a little bit of a smaller house in San Francisco. So this is our basis away, but also we rented out in between as well.

Avery Carl (1:25)

Awesome.

Let's just reacquaint our audience with you for maybe we have some new listeners since the last time we had you on. Tell us a little bit about you and Hostfully.

Margot Schmorak (1:36)

Yeah. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Hostfully. Hostfully has been around since 2016 We were originally known for our digital guidebooks product, but since 2018, we've been working on our PMS. We are one of the very few companies in the world that have the preferred partnership with Airbnb, booking.com, Verbo, and Google, and also Marriott.

If you're looking to shop for a PMS, we really focus on customers that are a little bit more on the small side. Our sweet spot is property managers have anywhere between one and maybe up to 200, 300 properties.

We've been around for a while. Hostfully is a global team, but we focus mostly on property managers in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. We do have customers in about 85 countries or something like that. But most of our focus is there.

Avery Carl (2:32)

Wow.

Margot Schmorak (2:33)

Okay.

Avery Carl (2:34)

So between one and two or 300 properties. It's a wide range for most of our audience.

Margot Schmorak (2:40)

It's a wide range, but what we're really focused on is the property manager that really wants growth. Growth can mean different things. It can mean growth of your property count, or it also can be growth of the way that you're operating your business to make it more profitable. One of the reasons why property managers love joining Hostfully is because we give a lot of optionality and choices about how you configure your short term rental.

We don't force you down one path, but we really focus on the smaller scale property manager and we help them grow. Our happiest customers are the ones that started with five and now they have 200 That's why we talk about that range.

Avery Carl (3:19)

Got you.

Margot Schmorak (3:20)

Yeah.

Avery Carl (3:21)

Amazing.

When people are looking at all of the different PMS options, because that's one of the biggest questions we get from our clients, is, okay, which PMS tool do I use? So what are some... I mean, those people that are new, they don't even know what to ask or what to look for. So what would be your advice to them when they're out there shopping for which PMS they're going to use?

Margot Schmorak (3:44)

Yeah. Well, I always like to look at what companies and people do instead of what they say.

Unfortunately, in our industry and like many industries, there's a lot of talk, right? And there's a lot of words thrown around. And especially if you're new to the industry, you can get really overwhelmed with the terminology and you can feel overwhelmed because even if you are asking the right questions, which I'll go through in a minute, you'll hear a lot of the same things.

One of the things that I really value and is the reason why I'm still the CEO of Hostfully today is a lot of integrity. And so Hostfully is a very high integrity company. When you talk to somebody on our sales team, you're going to get the honest truth and we will even talk to customers about how Hostfully is not the right fit for them. If they have things that they want out of the software that we can't offer, it's becoming less and less so because we're building out our software platform. But just to be honest with you, we really want to find the right customers for Hostfully. So what I would do is definitely look at the review sites. You can look at review sites like Trustpilot, Captera, there's a bunch of them out there. You can look and see what do people say about how it is to really work with these software platforms like Hostfully. That's going to be a really great starting point. You can also talk and listen to people like you, influencers in the industry about who is on their podcast, what are these people saying. That's a really great source. Then finally, you have to take a look inward, actually to know what your own needs are. What do you really need out of property management software? Some people want a whole all-in-one solution that has everything under the sun built into it. Other people want a little bit more choice. Some people want something that's like you said, built for larger scale property managers, some people want something that's built for smaller scale property managers. At Hostfully, we focus, like I said, on that smaller segment that really wants to grow. One thing we've done this year is made a huge investment in our product. We've made some really big changes.