1st of the Month Bonus: Bridging the Gap Between Resorts and Vacation Rental Channels with Jetstream CEO Emmanuel Lavoie

Alex Husner  0:36  
Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex and I'm Annie, and we're joined today by Emmanuel Lavoie, who is the CEO of jet stream. Emmanuel, thank you so much for joining us today.

Emmanuel Lavoie  0:48  
Hello and thank you for having me on the podcast. It's a big honor for me.

Annie Holcombe  0:52  
Oh well, we're thrilled to have you here. We're excited. So I've been working with you a little bit, and we've kind of known of you for a little while. You did some work with a really close friend of ours, Simon Lehman, and I think that's how I met you, actually the in the first in the first bit. But before we get started, I think there's a lot of people in our industry that don't know much about you and your journey and jet stream, so we'll get into that. But why don't you tell us a little bit about you?

Emmanuel Lavoie  1:17  
All right? Well, I'm from Montreal, so I'm French Canadian, born and raised. I studied mechanical engineering. Got a degree in HVAC. Well, mechanical engineering ended up as a first career that I spent 10 years in HVAC consulting, which was super boring. So designing heating, ventilation, fire protection, I just, I frankly hated it from the first day. I like parts of it, but I was a very unhappy career, and after 10 years of that, I'd grown a business in that career, sold the business to a larger group, and I exited once I'd sold the business and didn't know what I was going to do, and my friend, well at the time, and still, friend, said to me, Hey, I got this little startup, and it's called leave town, and we're trying to be this Canadian OTA. Now I'm sort of blending myself in this but and I joined him in that business, and that was also 10 years ago, so now 10 years in this new career, and that's how I went from being an HVAC Engineer to now the CEO of a travel tech

Alex Husner  2:11  
Wow, and a lot of different things in between, that process to get to where you are now. But okay, so this is, this is funny. I feel like this is like Kevin Bacon, different degrees here. So I've met somebody from leave town at a conference probably like two years ago that you would know who he is, and I can't remember his name, Ben, maybe I remember I texted you Eddie when I met him.

Annie Holcombe  2:35  
I think it's Ben, probably, yeah, yeah. Probably he's he's British, yes, yes,

Emmanuel Lavoie  2:43  
Monday, for sure. Then, yeah, yeah. Shout out to Ben, yeah, Ben, who is now the Chief Revenue Officer at jet stream, by the way,

Speaker 2  2:51  
he's amazing. Oh, cool. Okay,

Alex Husner  2:54  
no, what a small world, though, because I think there was other intersections. And you know, Annie and I first met through OPMA, and I remember you used to be at those conferences, and a lot of the conversation at that point was, how do you get these condo resorts, more hotel style inventory onto VRBO and Airbnb? And I remember hearing that you guys were kind of an option for that, and essentially that's you've developed that into, much further than at that point when, you know that era was starting to become, it was becoming an issue that everybody, they had to be on these channels. They couldn't just keep pretending like they didn't exist anymore. But tell us a little bit about the evolution of jet stream and where you're at today.

Emmanuel Lavoie  3:33  
Yeah, it's interesting that, you know, leaf town, and I think, I mean, yeah, we missed, I think good communications along the way, when leave town become jet stream, because the leaf town is still part of jet stream, but now it's just the OTA brand. So, long story short, well, my business partner founded leave town a few years before I joined them. And at the time, leaftown.com vacations Inc, which is the name of the company, was trying to be a small Canadian OTA with literally eagles and bears on the website, you know, and you know, very sort of Western Rockies, Canadiana, kind of vibe. And it was easy we would go to these were from the Canadian Rockies as a company. So we would go to these resort hotel type, you know, these, these condo hotels you see across ski destinations across North America. And we would say, knock, knock. Can we put you on leave town.com? And of course they would all say yes, because why wouldn't they? Sure? New cool this, you know, new cool distribution that's Canadian minded. Yes, let's do it. But of course, it's super hard to build an OTA, so in order to make money and survive, what we were doing is in the background, manually, without telling our partners back in the day. Now I'm going way back, like 2015 we would list them on verbo when verbo wasn't a transactional when it was still, you know, Platinum listing inquiry format. And of course, we would get inquiries, and then we, you know, have a few staff members that would then call the resort, say, hey, it's leave town. We have a booking for you. The resort thought it was a leave town booking, and that's how we funded and bootstrapped the thing initially, wow. And. Then eventually with Airbnb. And then I like to say, sort we came out of the closet, kind of 2016 I was at a conference. I started telling some partners, hey, by the way, here's what we really are. We're actually putting you on these channels. And instead of firing us, the answer was, this is so cool. If you're going to do that, could you build an API to our travel click or synexes, so that we give you dynamic rates and availability. And again, we still thought, oh, yeah, this is just temporary while we build leaf town.com. That's how stupid, frankly, we were. We were we weren't seeing the light, you know, the road ahead of us. And it took one of our advisors years later, like 2017, kind of thing. We said, you know, guys, your product is not leaf town, it's this connectivity in the back end, yeah, connector thing. And it was like, Ah, so then we re we built an internal brand for the connector called jet stream, and that's how that evolved. And then we raised a bit of money, built a whole bunch of supply side integrations, both to the big, you know, synexis travel, click intopia in the US. I know there's a list in the US, and then same week standard into Europe and built to large channel managers slash PMS systems in France as well. So that's the transition from leaf town to jet stream.

Alex Husner  6:14  
Yeah, no, it makes sense. And there's, I think, part of maybe why. I also remember hearing your name in the early days too, was likely because of Simon Lehman, again, because in those days, I was at condo world, and we were extremely similar to what you just described, that we had built an OTA that we had built for the entire Myrtle Beach region beyond our management portfolio. But then we ended up finding, okay, a lot of these condo resorts, they need connectivity to get not just to our site, but to VRBO on Airbnb. And so we built that for IQ where, and a couple of the other like hotel based softwares, yeah. And it ended up that, you know, that we weren't set up as a company to be able to maintain that. I mean, we were a rental company at heart. And I think, you know, those are the hard truths that companies, when you realize you actually have a skill set that's in a different area or, and it's, you know, it's complimentary, but there has to be that decision to say we're going to, you know, separate, separate the business, or make a conscious effort of how we're spending the resources. And it wasn't in the cards. I mean, that that, but it was very similar. So I remember those decisions and that time period, and like when we realized, okay, this the connectivity could be, could be a big, big thing for us. So it's great to see that you guys were able to run with it, because that's definitely been an issue that's plagued all these condo resorts for for many, many years. Yeah.

Emmanuel Lavoie  7:33  
I mean, it's interesting when expand. We're getting deep here. But when Expedia bought verbo in 2015, or 16, that scared us, because our value prop was taking these resorts, putting them on Airbnb and VRBO. And next thing you know, our big, one of our biggest channels at the time, our biggest channel, verbo, actually had just essentially, sort of became a competitive threat. But, you know, here we are, 10 years later, and yes, they've gotten better now with the multi unit listings, just factually recently, but it still hasn't really been solved. Well, in the industry, we actually sold to red awning in 2018 for various reasons, and we were actually owned by red awning for two years. And part of the reason we sold at the time is because we thought, Oh, well, we've built something that's going to be irrelevant in two, three years. And we bought our business back from Red awning. That's a different chapter, and yet, still, it's still a large business, and we keep growing it. So yeah, I guess our fear of competitive threat was unfounded. I'm not saying it's going to be unfounded for 50 years, but certainly it's taken a lot longer than I think we expected for all of this to be solved by the OTA themselves or by other players.

Annie Holcombe  8:40  
So there's a lot of there's a lot of movement there. And I know the conversations that we've had is trying to get to some of these resorts to make them understand the value of using these channels. And what I think is ironic is that after covid, when vacation rentals became so popular, it was the hotels that were had been kind of lobbying in the background to get, you know, vacation rentals and short term rentals to be shut down. They didn't want them anywhere. And then all of a sudden they started saying, wait a minute, like our guests are going to this. And, you know, they started seeing that their people were choosing these and it wasn't necessarily that they were leaving the brand, you know, like the Marriotts or the Hiltons or the Hyatts for their business, but they were choosing their vacations to go to the vacation rental. So now you fast forward to today, and all the large hotel companies are trying to get into this space, but it's still, it's still a conversation that's ongoing. And we've talked to some of these, these larger groups, about, you know, the value of putting their inventory on that and they're like, Well, you know, they still, they still don't know, and they still don't understand the value of and so what do you think is maybe the hang up or hesitancy for some of these groups to actually put their inventory out there? Oh, boy,

Emmanuel Lavoie  9:43  
that's a really good question. I feel like we were, you know, ahead of the wave. I think we were on a paddle board with no wave when we started well ahead of the wave. I feel like now we're at the beginning of the real wave, and I'm out there marketing non stop to these groups, and for the most. Most part, I'm not even getting responses. So to your point is, like, so why am I not getting responses? Like, I'm offering hate, new distribution, non cannibalizing. These are, these are like, I shop on Airbnb, and verbo primarily, that's how I shop. And a lot of people I know, even my parents, my mom, shopping on Airbnb. She's in her mid 70s now. So these are non cannibalizing guests. You know, why aren't you on the longer length of stays? We see it across our data. I've done case studies with my customers, sort of, at least typically, sort of, well actually, I've done the case studies 28 to 65% longer length of stays. And it's which less, you know, less less cleaning less, so more profitable bookings. I don't know. I don't want to say this. I think that, okay, this is not very nice, if you're listening to this and you don't, this is not directed to anybody in particular. I think there's a lot of people that are, unless in the revenue management game, who are just content with sort of like, Hey, I got, I built this little thing. It's working. Yes, status quo. I think that's probably the biggest interest, because it makes sense for all that we all three understand why it makes sense. So why isn't everybody embracing it? I think it's, I know, with the laziness is a strong word, but it's status quo. It's like, I don't need to give myself a new headache.

Annie Holcombe  11:19  
I think that that's a good that's a good point that you bring up, and so that's where your service comes in, because that's the conversation is people are like, I don't want to add another channel. I don't want to have to do more work. And I know that vacation rental guests, there's a lot of lift there, because they're needy. They want to talk. They want to know everything. So like, there's a perception that goes with it. But that's where the jet stream team comes in. You guys are offering a level of service, which I absolutely speaks to my heart, because when I was at lexicon, that's all we wanted to do, is we wanted to be very hands on and be part of, kind of an extension of their their team. And so we built that value, you know, yeah. So why don't you tell a little talk, a little bit about what you guys do for the service that you offer to these partners? Yeah?

Emmanuel Lavoie  12:00  
So Jetstream is a full service channel manager, I guess, to use that expression, it wasn't designed that way through some clairvoyance back in the day. It's just because we came from being a small sort of travel agency building its own OTA, we've always had our own Guest Services team, ie call center in house. We've always had and then when we started working with these resorts back in the day, they didn't know how to write Airbnb Well, first of all, they didn't even know we're doing it, but we had to write our own Airbnb and verbal listing and same you know, when we signed up by HG in 2018 is like, they're like, We don't know how to write a millennial friendly Airbnb listing. So we've always had to sort of wrap these layers of service around our customers to make sure this whole thing works. So layers of service, primarily are listing creation initially, so content creation and sort of ongoing data led optimization, which sounds like a buzzword, but it actually truly is a big part of what we're doing. Really works, actually. So I'm proud to say that. And then the call center, the Guest Services team, we have agents our own employees around the world, Canada, Spain, South Africa and the Philippines. They've been with us for half a decade, most of them, and they respond to all inquiries. 24/7, which to this day, surprisingly, is a big lift. Help for our resort partners. I was speaking to Vail Resorts, which is also a customer, about a year ago, and I asked them, hey, if we were to jet stream, just tech, just give you connectivity, because they're on synexis. Forget the layers of service, just the tech. But of course, it'd be less expensive. Would you be interested in that? And the answer was like, Oh no, we love the call center. And I'm thinking, you're a $10 billion company, surely you can solve the call center. But it's like, it's so it's so niche, this VR call center expertise that. So that's what we solve as well.

Alex Husner  13:42  
Wow, oh my gosh, so much to unpack. I don't want to move forward and talk about AI until we kind of unpack a little bit more there too. But the one thing that I've seen in my market in Myrtle Beach, which is very much a condo, condo tell resort type market, is that a lot of these properties, I mean, they, you know, they're they charge much higher commission than a traditional off site rental manager, right? And I think that's where the rubber met the road a few years ago. I mean, post covid of like, okay, we definitely need to make sure our listings are on these sites. But now we really have to figure out how we're going to even move forward as a business, because there's so many off site companies that are offering our homeowners in some of these places, that they've developed these properties and everything, but they're charging, you know, 20% versus the on site resorts charging 40 or 50% but the on site resort, you know, there's a lot more that's that's bundled in there. I mean, like, you get, you get more services, but I mean, like, they're managing the front desk, their call center. I mean, they're, you know, expansive marketing everything else. And to me, it's like, you know, I feel like it's surprising to hear that you're still having some companies that haven't realized they have to adopt this. Because if they feel that way, they are literally just putting themselves in a coffin. Because, I mean, if you're not putting yourself on those. Channels, and you have now all this off site competition that is less price than you and is on those channels. And most consumers or guests or homeowners know Airbnb number one, and VRBO, you know number two, as far as vacation rentals. So it's it's interesting to hear that that's still such a challenge. To be honest,

Emmanuel Lavoie  15:18  
it's a crazy challenge. And you're right, you bring a third or another reason as to why is you're right. They're getting competition from local companies. And then the homeowners behind, from my experience, our resort partners, who get a lot of flack from their homeowners, is because the homeowners where they shop, typically is verbo or Airbnb, yeah,

Alex Husner  15:37  
and they want to see their listing, and they want

Emmanuel Lavoie  15:39  
to see their listing. Why are we not on verbo? They're not searching on booking or Expedia. Typically, they're searching on the platforms they themselves book on. You know, if you can help me unlock as to how, how to get more partners? I mean, that's where I spend my day, scratching my head. And we get new partners, and we're growing like life is good, but I it should be a wave coming upon us. Here's a

Alex Husner  16:01  
here's a question that I'm curious your feedback on. Because when I look at these properties, I think, okay, it's a no brainer to me that the reason why, part of why they don't want to put their properties on verbal Airbnb, but part of why they also won't necessarily be that successful how they're set up, is because it could be a beautiful resort property, but every two bedroom is decorated exactly the same, and it's like, Do you Do you think that it would help if these resorts and on site managers were pushing the owners or helping them to develop like a unique brand free for their property, just like regular if I was to go buy a condo right now, I'm not going to decorate it just like a two bedroom motion front whatever. I'm going to decorate it in my style, and that's what gets booked in those channels. But do you think maybe that has something to do with the either the pushback, or is it? Is it part of the solution? I guess

Emmanuel Lavoie  16:56  
I don't know if it has part of the pushback from the resorts, but I completely agree with you that our performance, the performance that we deliver our partners, is, for sure, 100,000,000% for sure, impacted by the fact that we're selling not a super unique product on these platforms. And these platforms, especially Airbnb, really reward, reward unique product and but that's that I can't fix. And I even think I these resort management companies. I mean, they got so much that they're handling already. They have owners that are never happy with the booking volume, never have enough money to invest in this that. So I don't know how to solve that, but for sure that if you come in in one of these resorts and you're able to take one unit and make it really cool and really Alex branded, and also for sure that things perform way better than we can.

Alex Husner  17:43  
Yeah, I think it comes down to an education thing. And Annie and I talk about this all the time, of like that group that used to go to otma, that were the more condo resorts they kind of, they fell in that kind of gray area that they're not hotels, they're not fully vacation rentals. I mean, it could be classified as either, depending on how you're looking at it, but those groups, they definitely do not go to vrma, they don't go to our vacation rental conferences, and they're not hearing these types of conversations. And I think that's like, maybe that's the bridge, and maybe the three of us can figure out how to get it, get it paved. But I mean, I just, I think there's, there's so much to this that, like when you see that opportunity, and you see people that are just like, standing on the sidelines. It's like, these offsite companies are eating you for lunch, like you you have to do something. And like, there just has to be a solution that's put forward, that maybe it's, it's what you're doing from the distribution, but it's also creatively, like, how do we, how do we get them, you know, take the horse to water, but actually make the horse drink Yeah,

Emmanuel Lavoie  18:42  
and drink good water and be successful at it. Yeah, yeah. On this top, I've had multiple conversations over the years. This is typically not an avenue where resorts new partners reach us or reach out to us to solve typically, it's not the hey, my own homeowners are yelling at me because or this and that. But it but it happens. And when I do have those conversations, typically it goes like, hey, so we're this resort in Florida. That was the last one. We're in Florida, and we're losing homeowners to offsite property managers. And of course, it's annoying us. And of course, we're not on Airbnb. Verbal we need to be on Airbnb verbo. And then, can you help us merchandise our you know, because if they book with the resort, they give access to the pool and XYZ. But if they don't, they don't. So there's a merchandising and then the other component we have is that we sell in room types. Jet stream was kind of the early leaf town room type distribution, sort of kings and queens of that. And I say to them, you know? And I think my data supports this, is that at least, if we can get a room type and you have 50 doors, we're going to hammer a lot of reviews on that listing much quicker than individual listings can. So assuming pricing is the same, and assuming hospitality and reviews are good, we're going to we're going to outperform just because the volume where you get on that listing. So there's an advantage there as well for these resorts over the off sites, assuming, again, pricing is good and. And reviews are good, interesting.

Annie Holcombe  20:02  
So I wanted to ask you about the service again, like the call center and stuff. So, you know, these, lot of these companies that you're working with, you know, they are large companies. They have a call center for their traditional side of their business. They're running their call centers. You add this component and then you're doing your call center. Are you getting feedback from them that what you're doing is providing a deeper and better level of service than they're able to do on their traditional side.

Emmanuel Lavoie  20:26  
Yeah, no, that's I've never asked specifically asked, Hey, are we doing this better than your side? I don't know if we could, like, at the end of the day, if they have their own call center that you know all day long, all that team does is deal with that specific property and so on. I don't know if we could be necessarily better than them, to be quite truthful here, but what I do here constantly, genuinely enough, there's not a sales pitch, is that we they really like our guest services team. So we have a really strong onboarding process, and then we have a knowledge base internally, obviously, that we're constantly filling with our guest services team so quickly we're up to speed on what's going on in the resort. So I guess I've never asked them, Hey, are we doing a better job on those on those channels? Of course, we are, because we're distributing them on those channels, but I don't know if we have the depth of institutional knowledge that their own call center may have. Of course, if they're outsourcing their call center to another country, then I'm sure we're doing a better job than that. But if it's internal, the team in Myrtle Beach has their own people Myrtle Beach, and they've been working there for 15 years. I mean, that's a high bar to pass, but we're certainly doing a really good job for our partners on these channels. I never, genuinely, least in the last three, four years, I've never heard a complaint from our partners that our guest services team is not really up to par. And we do a lot. We fight for chargebacks, we

Annie Holcombe  21:37  
bring that up, that in the review, like getting,

Emmanuel Lavoie  21:40  
yeah, that's new about that. Yeah, that. I didn't even know that was a thing. But when we have we hired this wonderful woman based in South Africa who used to work with Vacasa in Ontario when it was long story, and she has an expertise at getting negative reviews removed. I guess if a review has any component of it that is outside of the rules and regulations of the OTA platform. Like Airbnb and verbo, you can lobby to have it removed, and we have a whole Slack channel internally dedicated to celebrating the another one star verbo removed, another one star BNB removed, and we're constantly it's incredible, and that's that expertise. I know it's a thing to do. So bless her for bringing

Alex Husner  22:24  
that to the business. One person that she does this, well, she's like, gold, yeah,

Annie Holcombe  22:31  
really, no, that's that's a huge I mean, the number of conversations that happen on LinkedIn or just at conferences, if people are like, I have this review and I couldn't get it removed, and I tried to fight it, and I tried to fight it, and they just ignored me. And then then you hear these horror stories of people just getting shut down because they had too many bad reviews or whatever. But so when I started seeing this, I was like, you could actually like, I know people do try to fight some of it, but I think she has so much knowledge. Yes, it's almost like she has this like radar for and she scans through, identifies immediately.

Emmanuel Lavoie  23:01  
Yeah, it's like an algorithm. So, so I guess, yeah, do we know as much as the partner on their specific resort? You know, obviously we don't have the institutional knowledge they do, but we certainly have other tricks up our sleeve, at least in the channels we distribute to that we've built over the last 10 years. And of course, we have our own tech team, so we are constantly building, and we know we're not getting into AI yet, Alex, I'll follow your lead on that, but we're definitely one more question, then we're getting a lot of tools that allow us to do these kinds of things.

Alex Husner  23:26  
Yeah, okay, one more question on more just like the what you've seen and then you kind of touched on it, but like, when you're nanny, you know this too, because when from your days in channel manager as well, but like from the rep level. So I hear a lot of companies that think I'm just going to flood, like con resorts, I'm going to flood the market, and if I have 5000 units, I'm going to put up 5000 listings, and there's going to be so much presence, even though all the listings look exactly the same, like this is going to win, in my mind. I don't think that makes any sense. I think it's terrible for the platform. I think it's terrible for the user, and I don't know that it's more effective for the company. But, like, I know companies that are doing that, like, I mean, how do you how do you advise in that strategy of somebody thinking, like, that's the way to go, or, or in some cases, is it the way to go?

Emmanuel Lavoie  24:12  
I wish I had data. Like, I'm a really data led person, obviously, engineer here, but I wish I had data to answer that. I'm with you. I don't think it's the right way to go. We've never done that from the very beginning. That's how we got our start, our big breakthrough moment, our genuinely that like catapulted jet stream back in the day, is Airbnb said, Hey, could you guys build a multi unit, rep level API to us, but we don't have one. You have to hack it. They literally, this is 2016 and our CTO, at the time, came up with a super creative hack. It was really brilliant. Their engineering team reviewed it, we built it, and that's how we launched on Airbnb, with an accepted hack to distribute multi unit. That's how we signed up bill and so on. Anyways, so we've never played that game. To me, I'm like you, it's not the right experience. I don't think the platforms want it. So the fact that it's being allowed on the platforms. Is, it's just a loophole that they're not catching it, so the platforms don't want it. It's a bad user experience. And then, so that's a feeling. I'm talking about feelings like you are. Do I have data to support that one listing with 372 positive reviews is going to outperform three, you know, 50 identical listings with the same hero image? I don't, but I feel like it will just from everything I know about

Alex Husner  25:24  
momentum, the common sense of it, yes, and that's, that's exactly how we had built our connection from our system to airb, mean verbal for those condo resorts, was, it was just a, it was a rep level listing. And it's like, I remember when we turned we actually called it the connector. It was the Condor world connector, and we turned it on. I remember I had, like, it was like, watching the stock market on my phone, of, like, booking, booking, booking, booking, book. It was unbelievable. And, like, it was so cool to see. And it's like, you know, now you get those reviews quickly. And it's like, I feel like, for the condo resorts, that becomes, like, it's really that that's their clear advantage, but they have some disadvantages, but that is a clear advantage that they should be taking advantage of that. So, yeah, super, super, super interesting. All right, wow.

Emmanuel Lavoie  26:11  
Your background is suit. We've we've talked before. It's crazy, that's what I'm thinking. We'll be back in just

Alex Husner  26:19  
a minute, but first a word from our premier brand sponsor. Hello.

Speaker 3  26:22  
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Speaker 4  28:36  
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Alex Husner  28:54  
when Annie and I met at optma 2018 I think it was because her background and what I was doing at that time, it was, like, it all of it was very symbiotic. Of like, we came in there and we're like, okay, these people need help. And like, we were building something she was with. I think we were a booking pal at that point, right? But that and lexicon, you know, was incredible. Of like, seems similar to what you guys do, in a way. I mean, at least as far as, like, the white glove service, and we both saw that of like, this is a big issue that's no one's really addressing, and it's crazy to you know, I'm glad to see that you guys are doing a great job with it, but I still feel like there's so much more that could be etched out here to further fix this issue. So these resorts don't go out of business, because at the end of the day, I mean, I'm somebody, when I travel, I like going to a place that has a hotel restaurant, I can get room service, has a bar, and normally it's a vacation rental that I'm staying in at that resort. But I choose that resort because I like the hotel style amenities, and it's like, in order to have that these manage, i. On site management companies have to exist because the off site management companies, they're not getting into F and B and doing all that stuff. So they're no we've got to protect it somehow.

Emmanuel Lavoie  30:09  
I completely agree with you, and I've evolved to being the same in my travels. Obviously different travels require different types of units, but I also like that very much.

Alex Husner  30:18  
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so now on AI. So your call center, of course, they do a great job, but like, how, how are you looking at things in the future now? Because it's like, I mean everything, not just AI in chat and guest responses and things like that, but a lot of things now, voice wise, are going to AI. Have you guys started leaning into that?

Emmanuel Lavoie  30:42  
Not fully yet, but we're, I'm very lucky. Our CTO just finished. He's been working on his master's in AI for like, six years. So I have a very tech forward CTO and very tech forward team, sorry, AI forward, which is positive. The flip side of that is we're a profitable business with a limited team hustling every day to do everything we can with the limited resources we have to keep growing in a profitable way. So I can't just do all the things I want. So that's like preface is a bit who we are as a DNA, but also the reality of our profitable solution and the limitation which is healthy that it brings. So on the guest services side, we use, one of the tools we use is front which is a third party sort of tool for guest messaging and writing, and we've built our own anyways, I'll get to that in a second. That tool is evolving a lot of AI features. They're not internal to my tech. They're external. So that's helping us in that capacity, but it's still on the voice side. We're still very much a true human voice. We haven't played with that yet. Now, on the chat email side, we've been building something called jet chat for the last year and a half, two years, and it's our own. We used to use third party tools, but it's our own, sort of because we have over 1200 Airbnb accounts, not listings, but accounts. So it aggregates all of our Airbnb messaging. We've just connected our verbal messaging, and we're about to connect our booking.com messaging into that jet chat. And that jet chat, literally, about two three weeks ago, launched the first AI component of auto response, which today is pulling from our sort of our PMS, if you want to call it, we have a proprietary text. So it's pulling from our pulling from our PMS, and we're about in the next couple of weeks, to connect it to our knowledge base. Because we have a separate knowledge base, we use notion as a knowledge base. So and so we're apiing into notion to pull a knowledge base. So that's kind of the first response. So it can I think at this point, we're at about 40% of responses inquiries coming in, being auto responded, still with human approval, though it's not a full auto, but what we're doing, which is interesting, I guess, because I just spoke to the US Canadian government that's going to give us funding, because they said, this is quite unique. And surprised me, it's unique. I didn't think it was unique. Is that when our agents sort of tweak the message that tweak is stored in our vector database to provide, yeah, to provide further context for the next similar inquiry. So it's like the self learning system from the input of the agents. So that's jet chat, and that's new to, well, not new. The unified inbox has been around for about a year and a half. That's our own proprietary tech, but the AI component just launched, and the team is very happy, but it will be a forever work in progress or interrupt.

Alex Husner  33:25  
That's going to be huge for you guys, for sure, because exactly what what you described. I mean, that's the cool thing about AI that's built the right way, that, like, if there's an answer that's incorrect and you correct it, that the AI learns it forever. And mean, I think the difference between, when you look at traditional call centers that you could have Sally, that she on one day, says the check in times two o'clock, and you're like, No, no, Sally, it's three o'clock. And now the next day, she's had a bad day and she forgot. She still says it's two o'clock. Like, that doesn't happen with the AI. Like, once you teach it, it is, it's ingrained, and it's it's forever. So that's where, you know, the companies we're seeing that are really utilizing AI, they're, they're, they're taking the time to train it. They're using it on on copilot, until they get to a point where it can be on auto, autopilot, and just escalate when it gets to to that point. But I think that's gonna be huge for you guys.

Emmanuel Lavoie  34:17  
Yeah, and it's gonna be a never ending journey in that direction. The other place in the other place in the business where we utilize that was actually the first place we built our first sort of cut our teeth into the AI is on the content creation side. So back in the day, when we launched some of our like IHT partners, 600 listings, they were all written by our humans using our recipe we've now, and it's all this seems simple to say, right? But as you know, if you've played with AI, it's actually not that simple to really make things work really well in a consistent fashion, like it's, it's conceptually, yeah, and it's many iterations and lot of trying and this and that. But now we have, we've built some supply side APIs on the content side. So synexis has a content. The Leonardo, which is one of the large content management systems for the hotel industry. We have an API to Leonardo, so when we sign up a new partner, we're able to now suck raw content from their content system. And through various models, including a guardian model that reviews the work of the content creation model and so on, we now produce really polished our content recipe, essentially at scale, which used to take so much time. That's actually the first part of AI that we did before jet chat.

Annie Holcombe  35:27  
Do you think that deploying AI is going to be able to help you grow in other areas? And I think of it from the translation standpoint, because a lot of times, you know, you have the issue with currency, that's, that's one thing, but that's not something that AI translates. That's just have, you know, the way you set up your coding and stuff, but I think there are countries, and I always think of like France, a lot of French travelers, they don't want to speak English, they want to speak French, and they, you know, that's just, that's just their style. So do you think that being able to have AI will allow you and your teams, regardless of where they are, to be able to have these chats and these conversations that are translatable, so that you can still have a little bit of human interaction, but you can translate it a lot quicker

Emmanuel Lavoie  36:04  
pace, for sure. I mean, we've been doing that for a while with Google Translate, because our team of agents, I think only 15% of the team is French as a primary language. So there's moments of the day where our team in the Philippines is talking, not talking voice, but chatting email or messaging app with French customers, and they've been doing that externally through Google Translate and then putting it back into the app. But now with jet chat, it's all internal, so it'll just make us more efficient, and yes, allow us to keep scaling. It's incredible, isn't it, that we

Annie Holcombe  36:37  
can do that now, as I said, we were at the Dharma data and revenue management conference recently. And you know that conference is about data and revenue management, but it ended up being like a more AI than anything. And so one of the one of the gentlemen, Dennis goodheed from casiola, he made the statement like, I predict this conference won't be in existence in two years. Like it's not going to be we're not gonna be talking about data anymore. We're gonna be talking about revenue management. It's all going to be AI, and we might not even have to have this conference, because AI will be running everything now, I don't know that we're in AI data AI, yeah, so it's just, it's like we're moving there so quickly. And I, and Alex knows I was one of those that I just was so freaked out by because it does, it still scares me, like it's still very overwhelming, and where it could go. And you know that it's with every great tool, there's always somebody that could use it in a very, very bad way. And my mind just goes to, like, what people that try to abuse things like that. So I think of it that way. But the more I've played with it, the more it's a it really helps you be more creative, and it helps you get through, like, some of the minutia of getting to, you know, from a to b a lot quicker. You know, instead of taking days to get through a thought, you can get it through it in like 10 minutes, you know, just having that back and forth. So I would imagine, for you guys, and just especially on the review process, we've had the conversation with several guests on the show about, you know, Airbnb had, for years, touted, you know, hosts, the smaller hosts, have better review scores. And really, truly, it wasn't that these larger managers weren't getting reviews and they weren't taking they just didn't have the time to really drive that point home that they needed the reviews or respond to reviews and reviews their guests and all this stuff. So AI can step in, and it's going to help, you know, kind of alleviate that disparity between the large operator and the small I

Emmanuel Lavoie  38:21  
completely agree. Yeah, we're just building one of our core thesis, from an AI technology perspective, is, and this came from our CTO, and I think it's absolutely brilliant, is he's been in organizations before where it's a technology first driven tech initiative, and that has not worked historically for him in his career. So jet stream, the plan was always the tech is there to support, but he wants to create AI champions. And our AI champions sit within our content team, our guest services team, our account management team, and they're the ones who are the matter, subject matter experts at what they need for their role. And then the and then so they're experimenting. And then when they need help, they go back to the tech team. If they need data exposed, new API, this that the tech team is supporting with this today, the tech estate are frontline AI champions. It's so it's, it's really, it's really working well for jet stream. I think it allows us to build not just what the tech team thinks we need, but what the actual team needs by the team supported by the tech team.

Alex Husner  39:19  
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And when we were at DARM Nate Cass He is the former head of AI for open. AI was the keynote speaker. Okay, oh my God, what an incredible like this was. I know Amy's had some really great people as speakers, but to me, this was the most interesting one that she's had. And because I think everybody has these questions of, like, where is AI going? And like, you know, as I'm somebody who, like, I I'm like, let's just do it. But like, you know, Annie being like, I don't know, I'm nervous. But then, like, the more that I like as things have evolved, or last couple years, I started understanding where she was coming from. Of, like. Where those nerves are, and where many people feel that I'm, like, just trying to, like, immerse myself, and I'm like, okay, maybe I should be more afraid of this, not just trying to jump in, but basically, like, the picture that he painted was, you know, the fear that everybody has that, like, all of our jobs could be eliminated, no matter what industry it is. I mean, like that, that is real. But like, where this is going is, you know, there's people are still going to do business with, people they know, like and trust and like, AI is not going to eliminate people. Like, there are still going to be people that are have to be, you know, managing projects, managing businesses, managing oversight on things. And it was more about like, AI could literally do all of our jobs for what, for what we do for a large portion of it. But what it can't replace is you and your relationships and like how you know you making, you know, strategic decisions for the company, and knowing how to move between different partners and things like that. Those are all things that are, you know, inherently gifts that all of us are very good at, but AI can't actually go out there and do that for you, necessarily. It can send emails, but it can't be that boots on the ground. And where he ended it with was, you know, AI might be doing the majority of our actual workload, but what that's going to end in is that we will have more time everybody to be enjoying our lives in a better way that, like, if all the if all the minutia of every job, whether you're a marketing director, a sales director, a CEO, whatever you are, if all the minutia, you know 80 90% is handled now maybe you have more time to spend time with friends and family, or do hobbies or be outside and, like, he ended it on such a beautiful story of, like, Oh my gosh. Like, this is, you know, I hope that's the direction that it goes in that, like, we all know AI is going to take a big portion of what we all do, but not to be scared of it, to be excited about it, because it hopefully we've all been just, you know, dredging in time and tasks that, like, just drain us. Why can't we get to that point where, like, it could actually create a very much more beautiful life? And to me, that was very inspiring to hear.

Emmanuel Lavoie  42:09  
I like that very much.

Alex Husner  42:12  
Fingers crossed. Hopefully

Emmanuel Lavoie  42:15  
it's gonna be definitely disruptive, though. I wasn't. I went and visited our team in the Philippines last fall, and went to Manila, which where most of them are based. And all of our employees in the Philippines have come from a call center background. It's a pretty big thing. Manila's, I don't know if it's the call center capital the world, but it's, I mean, it's massive Manila, and there's a lot of call centers, and these are large call centers. And so those employees, I don't know what's happening to them, because very quickly, like, not even in two years, like now, a 10,000 person call center can probably be reduced to 2000 and then, you know, and then the next 1000. And I just really Dawn up, because he's quite poor. I spent, you know, I spent a good amount of time there, and it was really kind of eye opening on the economic situation, the political situation, the corruption, this is what they told me. So I'm not making this up. And I thought, wow. Okay, so when 9000 call center agents lose their jobs and they don't have positions like us that are strategic and stuff, what do they do? Yeah, yeah. So I don't, I can keep I have all kinds of thoughts on AI, some very positive, like you. Some are like, oh boy, it's gonna be disruptive.

Alex Husner  43:22  
Yeah, that is, for sure, the scary part. And even, I mean, just in the countries that we're in, I mean, like, there, it's gonna disrupt things so much. And I think that's the scary part, myself included, of nobody really knows what this is gonna look like. And in what time span is this three years, five years, but like, they're, we're, we're all living through a massive point in history, right?

Emmanuel Lavoie  43:46  
Yes, we are. I completely agree

Annie Holcombe  43:49  
to your life. Yeah, exactly. Well, so what is, what is on the horizon for jet stream, and where do you where do you see? Where do you see? You guys in say, you know, 18

Emmanuel Lavoie  44:02  
months, yeah, well, so we talked, and I don't want to go deep in this, but we, you know, a big part of our revenue, our biggest revenue driver vertical, is this sort of connectivity between large hotel, resort condo hotel groups and vacation rental channels. We do have another product, I'm gonna go deep in it, but where we are, the PMs, but still a full service PMS, kind of like an evolve competitor in a way, or part of red awnings companies competitor. And in that world, we power small boutique hotels fully. We are the PMS. We're the full distribution, all channels, call center, revenue management. We were connected with wheelhouse and so on. That's a growing part of those. We have multiple verticals in there. One, of the couple of them are growing well, so we're in keeping into that, but in terms of, like, bigger picture, back to what we were just talking about, what we are, what we are now hearing from customers. I know I went to Vail, I gave the example of veil saying, like, Oh no, we're not interested. We love your call center. But I have a few of these customers saying we love you guys. We love your tech. We love your connectivity. But can we just have the tech, like, your whole service layer? It's great. But it's expensive. Could you sort of, sort of, like, AI your service or diminish it and give us just a tech layer? And that's where we're heading to. And this is why this jet chat tool, even though use case number one is our own call center agents, it's actually, it's the foundation that is going to lead to a imagine a full service channel manager of jet stream, but powered by AI, with connectivity being sort of the almost the commodified asset. Connectivity is commodified. It's the services you can sell on top, better data, better tools, call center, content creation, listening optimization, but AI powered, that's kind of where we're heading. There you go. I've never said that anywhere before. So Sneak Peek everybody.

Annie Holcombe  45:48  
What's exciting? I think we I think we can all agree, there's a lot of big things on the horizon. It's just a matter of like, how we adapt and how we you know, if we go into it, I think we have to go into it with an open, open framework, and embrace it and not try to fight it, because it's just like the internet. Remember when that came out and people were like, you know, we what are we doing with this? And we can't live without it now, and smartphones and all the things that have come so I kind of liken it to that only on, like a whole nother. I mean, it's a whole different level. It's change, and people are uncomfortable with change, so

Emmanuel Lavoie  46:23  
yeah, I'm embrace. I'm subscribed to a few AI newsletters, run day run down. It's one of my run day run down. It's every day I get an email. It's free. I just get a newsletter and in my inbox, and it keeps me up to date. So I just try in my role, even though I don't have time necessarily, to be out there, really playing with it. Every single day, I just consume as much content, either through newsletters or YouTube, which is my favorite media platform by far, to just keep ahead of, at least understanding where this is all going, and it helps me steer our internal ship, and, you know, collaborate more with our CTO instead of having, you know, putting my head in the sand, that's the best thing I can do

Alex Husner  47:00  
at this point. Yeah, it's the brain trust. I mean, AI is going to be great in a lot of ways, but there's still things that it doesn't know and won't replace of what we all I mean, you know, just even time in our history today, all the things that we've been through, we've lived through the trenches of resorts and the issues and everything else that maybe it could summarize, but I don't know that there's enough documentation on it, because there's not enough open communication on it. So we'll be interesting to see. But I'm super excited to just to learn more today about what you guys are doing. And I love that you know Annie's working with you guys too, and I think you're onto something pretty big here. So definitely excited to see where you go in the future, and there's a huge market out there that needs what you guys are doing. So it's a good story to tell, and we're happy to have you today.

Emmanuel Lavoie  47:49  
Thank you very much for the opportunity. And Alex saying, Yeah, I can't believe we've seen each other all these times, and we should have been sitting in a corner catching up on Yeah, we

Alex Husner  47:58  
will know. We will know absolutely. I look forward

Annie Holcombe  48:00  
to it if anyone wants to get in touch. In touch with you, Emmanuel, what's the best way for them

Emmanuel Lavoie  48:05  
to reach you? My Well, my name is well, Emmanuel at Jetstream tech.io, T, E, C, H, and first name is double, M, E, M, M, a, n, u, E, L, or LinkedIn, just check me out on LinkedIn. I'm active on LinkedIn, not crazy active, but semi active enough that I check it every day, shoot me a message, and I love connecting,

Annie Holcombe  48:24  
yep, or shoot me a message and I get a message to

Alex Husner  48:26  
him, we're gonna get to we're

Emmanuel Lavoie  48:29  
gonna get you. Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity. Was really fun chatting with you guys.

Annie Holcombe  48:34  
Thank you, yeah, thank you for coming and joining us.

Alex Husner  48:37  
We appreciate it absolutely. If anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I you can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com and until next time. Thanks everybody. You.

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