Finding new partners and joining forces to overcome the crisis — meet Miro at Direct Booker
Let’s start with an easy question, why tourism, how did you end up in the tourism industry?
Haha, yeah, easy question, but not an easy answer. Ever since I was a kid I was interested in travelling and in everything connected to travel, meeting new people, exploring new areas, new experiences, new cities, and countries, so I guess it was a natural thing to become one of the members and active participants of this great rollercoaster. I don’t want to go too much into details about my previous experience as that would bore the readers, but one thing led to another, and after approximately 15 years in the industry here I am in Direct Booker, and I’m very happy to be here.
Why Direct Booker, what’s so special about them?
I’ve known these guys for years, they started little more than 10 years ago, and I can vividly recall driving with them in a car on our way to a football match when they explained their idea to me. My response was “ah, ok, so something like Adriatica.net?” (Adriatica was one relatively similar company that used to operate in Croatia), and they were like “well…yeah, but better!”, to which we all started laughing. Initially they started with their small capital and were doing property management for a handful of their friends and neighbors, and then little by little, they grew in numbers and started hiring people to assist them on their journey. You could see the determination and the vision they had from the beginning, and I could see that they will become one of the major players in Croatia, but they even outgrew my expectations and launched themselves as one of the major players in the world. I mean, of course, when you start with some project, you always aim to be the best, but only a handful of people will have the vision and the determination to do what they need to do in order to ACTUALLY become one of the best. Up until recently I was working in another major tourism company, I was going through all the ranks there and learned a lot from them, and then when Direct Booker was looking to hire someone in their new position of Global Partnerships Director, it was a natural fit for us to finally start working together.
Ah yes, you recently celebrated your 10th anniversary, congrats!
Thank you very much, much appreciated! We hope it’s only the first decade out of many more to come, haha.
Which products does Direct Booker offer to their partners, how can people cooperate with you?
Well, we have decided to have 4 directions of our movement (4 different projects basically), some of those projects are already in a very active phase while for others we are in high stages of development and we’re expecting to launch them very shortly.
First of all, there is our direction of “Management”, which is our core business of being short term rental property managers for approximately 3500 units in the Dubrovnik and Split area, this “direction” is our bread and butter, and we have been doing that very successfully for the past 10 years.
The second project is closely tied to the first project, and it’s a project of “Franchises”, which we have also been doing for several years rather successfully. We offer our know-how, brand, support, and technology to potential franchisees to enable them to develop the “same” property management agency in their place of residence. The fact that we currently have 24 franchisees in 11 countries tells us that this project is running very well, however, we still have space for growth there, so recently we started focusing much more on this area of business.
The third project is “Software” and it’s probably one of the core reasons why “Management” and “Franchise” are a success. Throughout these 10 years of Direct Booker, we’ve used many different software to manage our properties and streamline our business, and none of them covered all of our needs, they were either too bulky, or unreliable, or simply too expensive for the features that they were providing. We perceived that the primary reason for this was relatively simple, most of these systems were built by IT companies, who approached their development in an “IT way”, and who perhaps did not really have too much experience in the industry itself and therefore did not know what agencies need. That was the reason why it was decided to go with the logic of developing our own PMS with an integrated channel manager, we understood that the cost that was associated with development would be high, but we perceived that the benefits from this internally developed solution would far outweigh the costs. Our final version of “Booker Tools” PMS was launched in 2019, and it was received excellently by the industry, as we are either a preferred or a premium technology partner for airbnb, booking.com, expedia…so we obviously did a very good job with our development. We are not stopping here, at this point approximately 20% of our staff are IT engineers who are further working on developing additional modules for this system.
The fourth project is “Direct Booking”, that one is in high stages of development, and it will be launched very shortly. We’re working on developing an OTA website where we will combine all of the units that we manage from our head office, units from our franchisees, and units from our Booker Tools partners (who are using our PMS), to create an additional channel where travellers will be able to book directly with property managers. We’re expecting to have that project up and running before the end of Q2 2021.
How challenging is it to find new partners in these times?
One of the very frequent sayings that is usually circulated in the time of crisis is: “every crisis is a new opportunity”, and that seems to be the case in this Covid crisis as well. But then again, finding reliable partners is always a challenge, especially when “reliability”, “trust” and “partnership” are keywords by which we operate. For 2021–2022 we’re not aiming for a huge number of technology partners, nor are we willing to sign a contract with “anyone” to be honest. What we’re looking to find is a decent number of good partnerships with true professionals who will develop a mutually beneficial cooperation with us, where they understand that this technology will put their business on a higher level but will at the same time cooperate with us to develop the technology itself on an even higher level. We are still in the phase where projects regarding further development of Booker Tools technology are in full speed, for example in March of 2021 we completed 2 major additional modules, a revenue manager and a website generator, which are now available to our partners. Until the end of 2021 we are planning to develop several additional modules like for example “market place” (where agencies will be able to “exchange” their inventory with another agency through Booker Tools), integration with smart lock apps, integrations with quality management services like Properly, and many more.
We are an agile technological company open to suggestions from our partners in regards to additional modules that could be developed or integrated, but we perceive that good suggestions will hardly come from people who are just “passers-by” in the industry, and that they can also hardly come from people or agencies who have 5–6 units under their management. This was the reason why we created a special offer for the attendees of the Tourism Renaissance, because we understand that this summit is a place where there is a good volume of people and agencies with knowledge and expertise from the Short Term Rental industry.
Nino (CEO) already mentioned this in his interview, but it does not hurt to repeat the offer; we offer a 50% reduction on the entrance fee for a franchise, and a 100% reduction on the entry fee for the Booker Tools PMS. If you have in mind that we operate on a revenue-share principle, this essentially means that our potential new (technology) partner can move their business to Booker Tools right away with no cost whatsoever. Our first invoice towards our partner will be once the partner charges the reservations from his side, and our invoice will charge them only for the reservations which were actually completed and charged. As an example if they have 140 reservations that are currently booked for May 2021; if it turns out that 65 of those reservations are cancelled and “only” 75 are completed, our partner will get an invoice from us for our fee for these 75 completed reservations, and will receive that invoice in early June (after the partner has received his money from guests). We perceived this as the fairest way of cooperation, where we are not a “burden” to our partners when they do not have incomes themselves, which is especially important in this time of crisis.
What is your expectation of 2021–2022, how long will this crisis last?
Oooh, hard to say, to be honest, this is one situation where not even a crystal ball can help you figure out the right answer. We see some very positive trends in the last 15–20 days regarding the number of bookings, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that this trend continues in the following weeks. General news in Europe in regards to Covid are very different from country to country, in some countries you have reductions of restrictions while their “next door neighbor” is increasing the restrictions at the same time, and this will probably be the case in the following months as well. Due to all of that we will probably have another “last minute” type of season, where bookings will be made a week or two weeks before the actual arrival, so we need to be ready for this. The positive side (if you can call it that) for us who are within EU is that it is reasonable to assume that EU will have a more “lenient” rules for travels within EU, and that due to this there is going to be a reduced interest for Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, and the rest of “non-EU” countries, which would then suggest that most of EU citizens who will be looking for “sun&sea” this summer will be coming to Italy, Spain, Greece, Croatia, Portugal, France, etc. But then again, you need to account for the fact that for the past year or so there has been a significant number of people who have had reduced income, or no income whatsoever… Like I said, it’s hard to give any good assumptions in this case, especially for 2021.
Has this crisis taught us anything?
I certainly hope so, haha! I’ve seen a great title recently on one portal which said something like this: “people are hardwired to connect”, which is absolutely true, and we can expect that as soon as the Covid is contained there is going to be a significant volume of people who will be eager to travel wherever, whenever. In reality, most of people have been looking at the same 4 walls for the past year or so, and have been seeing the same people on a daily basis, sometimes without the possibility to go and see some of the closest people to them, their loved ones, mothers, fathers, relatives…and we as people are simply not wired to live in those conditions, not even the biggest introverts among us. I listened to one podcast recently which said that they expect that once the crisis ends that there will be a large volume of “revenge-travelers”, who won’t care where, how, or when they are going, as long as they are going somewhere where they can meet new people and experience new things. Hopefully this crisis taught us to cherish the moments we have with our close ones, to appreciate experiences which prior to the crisis might have seem “ordinary” and “nothing special”…and last but not least to cherish the travel itself, as there is only a handful of things in this world which can be a more significant eye-opener compared to travel.
