How Is AI Changing the Way Guests Find Your Venue? 

TRANSCRIPT: How Is AI Changing the Way Guests Find Your Venue?

The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast

---

Michelle: Welcome everyone to today's podcast. I've just confirmed with this wonderful gentleman that he lives in one of my favourite parts of the world, South Carolina, Charleston. Now for those who know me well, I'm definitely a Gone With the Wind girl, through and through.

So let me introduce you to Kenny. He's a data-driven marketing entrepreneur who has spent the better part of a decade merging art, science, and innovation into measurable growth strategies for his clients. After beginning his academic career as a biochemistry major, Kenny discovered a passion for business and marketing at the College of Charleston, where he graduated with honours. That distinctive blend of analytical rigour and creative thinking led him to launch Ridge Media in 2014, while still a student, ultimately shaping a unique approach to marketing that prioritises experimentation, evidence-based decision making, and tangible returns.

Under Kenny's leadership, Ridge Media has grown into a firm that stands apart by applying the scientific method to the marketing landscape. Each campaign is viewed as a hypothesis to test, a puzzle to solve. By combining strategic storytelling with systematic experimentation, Kenny and his team have consistently cut through digital noise and driven meaningful, sustainable revenue growth for an array of businesses. So welcome, Kenny, thank you so much for coming on my podcast.

Kenny: Thank you, that was a great introduction, I love that.

Michelle: So before we get into the set questions I've got, here you are, you're a student, you're studying, and that space of marketing and media can feel at times very overwhelming to a business owner or anybody looking, because we always seem to be confronted with it. What was it about where you were at that point in time that said, "Hey, I want to start a business in this space"?

Kenny: Yeah, I actually started an app in college that was a city guide, because if you've ever been to Charleston as a student, it can be difficult to do some of the things that require more money than you have as a student. At one point I made a spreadsheet with all the happy hour specials, concerts, all that stuff on there. If you're living in Charleston, the one thing you recognise is that everyone you know who lives elsewhere asks you where to go, where do I eat, what do I do, whether it's college friends or people's parents. So I had this big spreadsheet I was sharing with everybody.

As a biochemistry major, with my dad being a dentist, I was trying to be a dentist. He said take some entrepreneurship courses and learn how to run your own business, because if you want to take over the practice one day you need to know how to run a company. So I went in, started basically in a Shark Tank type environment, that was the class we were in. I had to partner up with a couple of teammates and the idea was born: maybe we should make a city guide out of your spreadsheet, what if we put it into an app. Then I started trying to sell ads for the app, trying to market the app. I had to find a developer to do a website, find somebody to do design work, somebody to do my social media. I was more the sales guy and the visionary, less the boots-on-the-ground person doing the marketing.

What I struggled to find, especially as I started piecemealing a lot of freelancers together, was that you'd end up with different colour blues, a lot of different stuff that didn't cohesively work together. So I thought, well, I've got to find an agency, or find some company, rather than piecemeal this together. The more agency-like work I started doing, the more I enjoyed being on the client side of that relationship. I really learned that I feel like there's a lot of smoke and mirrors, a lot of vanity, I couldn't get clarity on what I was actually getting from these people.

So at that point I found there was a gap in the market, because a lot of the business owners I was talking to about buying ads on my app would say, "I don't really want to buy an ad on your app, but I want help with social media, can you help me with graphic design, can you help me make shirts, can you help me with my website." At that time I was really just trying to fund the app, so I'd say yes and put our developers on it. By the end of the day, I ended up having more profit from the agency with no name than I did from the app.

I sat down with my professor. I said, "My dad's going to make me go to dental school if I don't find a way to talk him out of it," because I hadn't made a lot of money doing this. My professor said, "We made a lot of revenue, I think you just spent a lot of money trying to run an app. Let's split your books." His name is Dr Dave Wyman, he's still a professor at the College of Charleston, he actually helped us get entrepreneurship established as a major. I'm now the president of the board of entrepreneurship at the College of Charleston business school.

He helped me split the books. He said, "Look, you lost a boatload of money on your app, you made money as an agency, I think you run an agency, but I'm not sure you're an app maker." I said, "Dave, I don't really know much about running an agency." He said, "You're running an agency now within your marketing firm, you're already doing it, you just need to make a name and sell this app." So I went to my partners, decided to get out of the app, I didn't have a lot of equity in it, so I basically said, "Hey, look, y'all can more or less take this." I took the marketing firm idea, debated the name, and because my last name is Ridgell, which people struggle to pronounce, I always say "ridge with two L's," I thought, well, it's easy, let's just call it Ridge Media. It's a nice mountain area in terms of the upstate of South Carolina, that's where I'm from, Greenville. I thought, we can draw some mountains, we'll have a logo, we'll be off to the races.

At that point it was more that I saw a need in the market from all the business owners, 250 paying advertisers, who didn't want to talk about the app, they wanted to talk about what's trending on social media, do you know how to run Google ads, do you know how to fix my website, my WordPress site's messed up. I realised there weren't a lot of agencies typically focused on that small-to-medium-business space. It's obviously changed, there's become more of a movement in the agency space since, but back in the day it was large firms that didn't deal with small business, and freelancers doing little bits and pieces of their area of expertise. I really saw a gap in the market at that time, so I thought, well, we can be a one-stop shop, à la carte, where we can come in as a consultant, strategist, and plug and play into their needs.

At that point it really came from seeing an opportunity to not have a lot of resistance or competition in the market, which is hilarious because now marketing is the most competitive space in the world.

Michelle: I love how it's all come together. I can see what your father was saying, go and do a business course, because I think that's the biggest thing, a lot of people go into business without having done one. I know when I started up, thirty-three years ago, I had no business expertise, but my parents had been in business, and I thought, well, what's my one good thing? I was a good typist, a hundred and ten words a minute and all that. So I set myself up doing overload typing, which everybody now gets someone overseas to do, but back then it was really hard to sell. People were going, "I don't know about giving you this tiny little dictaphone tape to leave my office and for you to type up."

I was probably six months in when my father sat me down and asked how much I was making an hour. I worked out it was less than ten dollars, and I'd come from a really big corporate background making good money in those days, because I hadn't factored in electricity, printer cartridges, all those sorts of things. Dad said, "Right, you're going to go and do a course, you're going to learn," and it made such a difference, because it was all those tiny little things, cash flow forecasting, that I hadn't thought about, I was just thinking as long as I've got enough money to pay the mortgage, the car, the groceries. But you've got to think long term.

I also loved how your professor sat you down and said, let's just look at these books, you're this, not that. Sometimes you need somebody like that to say, "What are you doing?"

Kenny: Absolutely. He was like, "What are you doing?" And I was like, well, back then, in the early 2010s, owning an app was kind of all the rave. I wanted to own an app, I wanted to sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars. He said, "Well, right now you're just losing tens of thousands of dollars, you're just funding it from your other business." I was like, "Okay, yeah, good idea."

Michelle: That's right, it's stepping back and actually looking. I created my own software program many years ago, it's over twenty-five years now, a massive, robust, proprietary system. I remember, probably about fifteen years ago, I was at a conference talking to these people, and I got home and said to my husband, "Seriously, this bloke called me a researcher." My husband said, "What do you think you do?" And I said, "Oh, I just talk to people and we write down all this data, we've got qual and quant information." He said, "That's a researcher." I'm thinking, I never really thought of it that way, it's these labels, it was a bit like your story. To me, a researcher was a data analyst who was really boring, sorry to any researchers out there listening, whereas I want the stat, but I want the information behind it, and that sounds like you, it was finding it.

I love, on your website, and I'm going to read this out, it says "some friends we've made along the way," instead of "my client list," which everybody's got. I love it, and it sounds like that's what you've done, you've created all these wonderful friends as you've gone along, which is fantastic.

So let me ask you a serious question now. You've applied the scientific method to marketing, treating every campaign like a hypothesis to test. What does that look like for a hospitality leader building a weekly metrics habit, and what's the experiment they should be running with their numbers each week? Considering, in an industry like many industries, we've got four-plus generations, some who look at data and go, "Yeah, that's great," and stick it in the top drawer, others who want to do something with it, and some in between. So what are your thoughts, and tell us, how do you test this each week?

Kenny: The biggest mistake we make as marketers, and we can all fall into this trap, is not isolating variables. You end up wanting to test too many things at once, and then something works and you're like, wait, what was the piece that changed? Was it the audience, was it the creative, was it this? I think a lot of it is less about what you're testing and more about how you're testing, that's how I'd break it down. Really make sure that if you're going to make a video, call it that, and run it to three or four different audiences, because people interpret data differently. You're also trying to sell hospitality to, say, a nineteen-year-old who might not have the same spending capacity as a sixty-five-year-old. So the idea is understanding, especially in larger markets like Charleston, that people are coming in from everywhere, from all different walks of life, and the creative might land differently with a different segmentation.

You've got to make sure that creative is tested against all your audiences: okay, this type of playful, entertaining creative works with this audience, now let's test the second piece of creative. But I'd say the one thing we all tend to do is last-touch attribution. Somebody watches the video, then goes and Googles your name, and Google gets the credit. The idea is we need to be tracking multi-touch attribution, where these people are actually finding us. So a lot of it is understanding what that user journey looks like, what's their path, and if you can monitor that entire path, starting with your creative and one controlled variable, you can move the uncontrolled variables around it and follow the path to make sure it works.

I'll give you a good example. We created really cool videos that had great social engagement, and then the person who found us as this fun, engaging brand hits our website and there's no playful, entertaining value to it at all. So that nineteen-year-old who thought this was a hip young hotel gets on the website and thinks, I don't really know if this is the place for me, it looks like there are only old people here. And the older guests are thinking it looks like only young people stay there, because we've made the mistake of hiring a bunch of young, cute models for our ads, and then running ads with a nice romantic couple in their forties on their anniversary, but the website makes it look like everyone there is twenty-five. So you've got to make sure you're sending people to the right landing page.

I think a lot of it comes back to itinerary-based landing pages. This is a trick I always give away: use a landing page with an itinerary based on the different audience you're talking to. Drive traffic to that landing page, set up creative around whatever audience you want to run it to, make sure the creative lands with them, and once you find what lands, make sure you've got a landing page that converts that audience. Because they're going to find you in another place too, they're going to do their credibility check, they're going to look at your socials, and you've got to make sure you've got that nice, diverse mix on your social tile, whatever everybody's calling it now. They land there, they look at your last six pictures on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, and the idea is to make sure there's something for everybody, because if you're running a plethora of campaigns and audiences, you've got to make sure you're touching everybody. Then they land on your website, and you also want to have, are you on a romantic getaway, are you going with families.

I'm actually planning a trip right now to the Dolomites with my family for Christmas, and I'm using Claude, I'm looking at Instagram, I'm looking at websites. We're bringing a two-year-old and a nine-week-old, so my wife and I don't need a late-night scene, we want to go skiing, eat good food, have babysitters, and have a big enough room that we're not sitting on top of each other. So our search is different. I looked at one place right before I got on this call, and they'd actually sent me an email back with a nice offer, they had a Santa where they gave gifts away, they had a little landing page about what to do with your kids on Christmas Eve. I said to my wife, I think we have a winner. This one's set up for kids, and they might have just written one paragraph of copy, and the other places might have had something for children too, but they didn't put me on the right page. It's all about that user journey. So to hypothesise, a lot of it is really about understanding your audience, understanding your control variable, and then controlling that entire pathway.

Michelle: I love how you say that, it's really mapping that customer journey. What I do is map the customer journey once they're inside the venue, but what you're doing is mapping that journey outside, where does it start, and how do we actually get them to walk in the door. So in that case, when you're talking about different landing pages, just to give my audience a clear idea, is that you've got your website, and on that front page, are you here with family, are you a couple, they click on whichever one applies, instead of having multiple first pages to try and work out. So it makes it easy, and it's the children first, isn't it, because if the kids aren't happy, you're not going to have a great holiday, and people realise, you know, is this a family that might just think it's all too hard, we'll stay at home, or we'll bring grandma to look after the kids. So as you said, they've really hit the target market, haven't they, they've thought about it really well.

Kenny: Exactly. We stayed at one hotel a couple of years ago in London, and we went on to four different countries during that trip, naturally, as Americans travelling to Europe, we hit multiple spots. But it's funny, I'd say we stayed at nicer hotels, ate better meals, and probably had a better room elsewhere, but I specifically remember, we had a two-year-old with us, walking in and they had a little pathway called a passport, for what the two-year-old could do on property, and at each place she got a little treat and a sticker, and if she collected all the treats and stickers she got ice cream. So naturally, what she wanted to do was go shake the bellhop's hand, and it basically forced us to tour the whole hotel. They gave her a little stuffed teddy bear at one place, a little bathrobe and slippers at another. It's funny, we tell that story all the time, how was Christmas in Europe a couple of years ago, we stayed at this awesome hotel in London and did all these other cool, awesome events, but the child was the happiest there, so that's the most memorable spot, even though we did all these phenomenal things around Europe.

Michelle: And that's understanding who your market is, isn't it, and that's what's key, even if you've got multiple markets. Over these three decades I've been saying to my clients, you've got data, because we've got loyalty programs, membership programs in our venues, and they go, "Oh, it's just data." No, you've got to bring that data alive. Now you've got so many different generations who are really into this, and you can do so much with that information to really target the right people. I don't know about America, but here in Australia, this would be probably the second or third year that our big companies, our big shops like David Jones, actually send you an email about a month out before Father's Day, before Mother's Day, giving you a bit of a pre-warning that over the next four weeks you'll get a number of emails about it, and if you wish to unsubscribe just from those emails, you can. So they're actually giving that person an option to opt out. Is that happening in America as well?

Kenny: Yeah, I think a lot of it, in the right tiered structure. We run some different club memberships, from golf courses, and it's kind of the same idea, what are you interested in. One of my favourite experiences recently was going to a hospitality conference, and you always have your off days at conferences, they asked us what we wanted to do, and then basically all the emails I got leading up to that trip were tailored to exactly what I'd selected. I wasn't bringing my wife, I wasn't bringing my kids, so I wasn't interested in those things, I wasn't going to the spa, I wanted to play golf, I wanted to ride horses, they had a cool equestrian centre where you could shoot guns too, but I'm not a big gun guy.

So you could select what you wanted, and all of their pre-arrival marketing, the upsell emails, were tailored directly to me. Of course they still tried to upsell me on some other things, but they said if you'd like to not receive anything else about archery, I could opt out, same with skeet shooting, I opted out of all the huntsmen, outdoorsmen stuff. But they gave me that option, they sent me one email asking would I like to opt out of these, broken down by interest on property. I thought that was a really cool way to do it. Naturally, they're a massive property, so they've got the budget, they've thought this through, they know exactly what they're doing. But smaller businesses can learn from that concept and bring it into their own business, because there's nothing worse than opening your phone and finding a mountain of ads from people you bought something from ten or fifteen years ago, and thinking, I'm not even on your radar anymore.

Michelle: And I think, by giving you that option to select, you're going to read their emails instead of just unsubscribing from the whole lot, "I'm out, I'm done."

Kenny: Exactly. Think about how many amenities a hotel sells. As a hotel guest, you're probably only going to use two or three of them, though next time you visit you might be interested in others. I liked how they did it per stay, so next time you stay they'll re-opt you into the campaign. I think that was a cool idea, but so much of this can be done simply, with an "if this then that" approach, a simple form. Back to your quiz comment, not everyone loves a quiz, but people do love multiple choice, and if they don't have to type, they'll just click, it gets people responding way more than you'd think.

One of the things we do a lot for hotel groups is adding more detail to the enquiry, not making it feel like "tell us about your group," but laying out the specific questions you need answered. You're getting qualification up front, and you're also getting more information about what they're looking for in their group experience, and the more information you get up front, the shorter the call ends up being, and the happier the person is, because now you can do a better job pitching what they actually want. Do you want a wedding? Okay, how many people, what are you looking for, do you want to rent any rooms out? You just need to break it all down, because then it cuts to the chase.

I think today everyone's so busy, we're all cut for time, we don't want to explain the entire background. If you make it easy for people to give you information, they'll give it to you, but if you make them type it all out, people are lazy, they're not going to type.

Michelle: No, they just check out. And I think it makes it easier for the coordinator too, whether it's a work trip or a conference, when you're trying to attract people. As we all know, organising a conference is like herding cats, everybody wants different things, so the more information the venue can give upfront, the options, who's the target, what's the age demographic, the language they speak, all of that makes the flow easier. It's worth the time you put in at the start, isn't it?

Kenny: It definitely does. One trick we've done is set up segmentation of your audience in your email marketing, once people fill out the group enquiry forms, you can actually feed that into Claude or one of those LLMs, and it starts pre-drafting what an itinerary for the conference would look like. That way, if you're the salesperson, you get on the call and say, "Hey, I went ahead and pre-drafted an itinerary, let me ask you a few more questions and fill it in." Right after the call, you go back to that same tool, say, "Here's the last couple of things," even record the meeting and put the notes in, and within fifteen minutes you can send them a full itinerary. The faster you speed to lead, the better, if you're the conference planner in the office trying to plan the company retreat, you send this in, you go to three hotels, and one gives you the whole itinerary back in fifteen minutes, you think, maybe I'm done, I got what I want.

Michelle: When you think about it, ChatGPT only started three years ago, in October, and here we are, whack it into Claude and it's done. The speed and efficiency it creates is absolutely phenomenal. So let's look at, what are five to seven metrics that hospitality leaders should actually be reviewing every week, not just monthly, and what's the real cost of waiting for a month-end report to tell you something's wrong?

Kenny: I think the most important thing to look at is branded search. I think one of the biggest things we do wrong in the hospitality space is waste money on our own name. If I'm already looking up, say, the Claremont Hotel because I know I want to go there, well, if people are typing that in, number one, look at your spend on branded search, and look at your amount of organic traffic on a branded search. That tells you how your social campaigns are doing, how your brand awareness is doing, those two pieces alone will give you a lot of insight. If you can carve money away from that branded search pay-per-click campaign, essentially paying for your own name, and you don't see a dip in organic traffic, or you even see growth, you're basically testing whether you need it, sometimes you have to keep it for defence, because someone else might bid on your name and win it. But those are two big things a lot of people miss.

The others are a bit more like, you need a real cost-per-booking efficiency KPI, and you need to be looking at revenue per room. I think that's a big thing marketers don't get enough credit for influencing, what people spend once they're on the property. You're selling a limited amount of inventory, so per week you really need to watch that. Say you're getting $500 a room, and one guest comes in and has a $150 bottle of wine, a $300 dinner, and a massage, they've spent six or seven hundred dollars that day, and the guest in the next room went out to eat and didn't even stop at the bar, they spent nothing. So you made $700 in one room and zero in the other. If you can find ways to keep people on property spending more, make sure that's built into your marketing, market to your current guests, there's stuff you can do internally too, not just pre-stay digital marketing but things in the room itself.

The last piece I'd say is monitoring the number of clicks to your booking engine versus non-bookers, because one of the things we're all learning now is that the pathways AI users take will often take them right into the booking window. I was recently at a conference, and it's kind of staggering, because a lot of the time we all lose visibility right at the booking window anyway, we don't really know what happens once someone gets there. If you can't get that visibility, you need to switch booking agents, because the bounce rate off that page is likely the highest bounce rate on your whole site, and it might not even be on your site, it might be a third party.

The whole theme at that conference was that people are starting to build full landing pages within the booking engine itself, this is our hotel, these are our amenities, everything we offer on property, because people's path to the website is getting shorter. They land on the homepage, press book, look at the dates, go right to what are the rooms, what's the room size, and you never got to tell your story, you never got to tell anyone why you're different. Most of us aren't competing on price alone, we're selling an experience, so you'd better tell that story on the room page. I think that's changed a lot in the last year, your pathway through ChatGPT or Claude is going to put you right onto the suites page, the room packages, and people aren't going to click around the website as much anymore. You lose the ability to tell the customer who you really are and why you're different, and I think that's a big metric to track, how many people land on that booking page and leave, because if all they see is a room size, a sauna, a spa, a fitness centre, that's it, they'll just keep looking until they find the one that gives them more, like that Dolomites place I mentioned, they had all the Santa and Christmas Eve information right there on the room page. I got there through Google AI, I was talking to Gemini, and it put me right on the booking page, and all that detail was there.

Those are the five key things I think really matter. The rest, impressions, cost per click, everyone's already looking at, but these five are specific to hospitality and can really make a difference.

Michelle: Thank you for sharing that, and you're right, you go to a booking page and it's just the room in dot-point form, bar fridge, ice machine, tea and coffee, television, and I think, I'm paying a thousand dollars a night for a television? But that space could be used to say, this guest has a child, let's really focus on the Christmas aspect, because at that particular time of year you're away from family and friends by choice, so you still want that Christmas feeling. If you want it, you want it, and if you don't, well, at least it's telling you it's there.

You talked earlier about how busy and noisy marketing is, and certainly the digital noise coming at us from every direction, whether in our personal or business lives. When we look at our businesses, where do most hospitality operators drown in data that doesn't actually drive a decision, and what's an example of a genuine vanity metric they should stop reporting on?

Kenny: I think calls would be a vanity metric for me. For a hotel, calls aren't really a metric that drives revenue, and let's be honest, sometimes the people calling before they book aren't necessarily the guests you want anyway. I think a lot of people focus on calls as their vanity metric, but form leads, it almost feels like better quality comes through a form. I'd almost throw calls out the window and look more at forms, because people sending forms are usually more inquisitive, particularly if they're emailing in. Even something that's not tracked much, someone just emailing in questions, I did that myself for the Dolomites trip, I didn't bother with their form, I just went to the footer, found the email, and emailed the people. We're going to New York for a conference in a couple of weeks with some of my staff, and I was using their concierge to book things, I said, I might stay with you all from now on, this concierge was so helpful, but that's a touch point their marketing team probably isn't tracking as an owner.

How many emails are coming in, how quickly are they being responded to, what do the forms look like, because you could be losing really quality people there. They're probably serious about coming, if they're taking the time to type, and we talked about people being lazy, if they're taking the time to write an email or fill out a form, they mean business. They're not sending it to a lot of people, they're probably choosing two or three and sending those forms out.

I think everyone can drown in data. Room comps and revenue reporting can be really drowning too, I'd say slim your comp set, because some people want to look at everything. Obviously as a marketer I'm not in charge of revenue, but a lot of it is correlated, and you can get into these calls where it's "our competitor's doing this," and start looking at what the corporate flagged hotels are doing, and if you're an independent hotel it's hard to cut through the noise on all of that, because now you're looking at all the marketing metrics and all the revenue metrics too. I have a new guy who's worked for me for about a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty days, and he hasn't done a lot of hospitality before. He said he feels overwhelmed, what's REVPAR, what's ADR, there are so many acronyms. He's in his forties, been in marketing a long time, and he said he didn't realise hospitality was such a numerically dense space. I told him, it is, there's a lot of numbers being funnelled at you, and he's asking, what am I supposed to be looking at.

Michelle: You made a couple of really good points there, Kenny, one being it's quality, not quantity. Some people get worked up about "we got a thousand calls today," but how many actually converted to a sale, versus somebody getting ten calls and making a million dollars, because it's the quality there. The other point is around forms, part of what I do in my research, in layman's terms it's mystery shopping, but it's a six-hundred-page report looking at every aspect of a business, and for my clients I always send enquiries, whether it's a wedding, accommodation, or just, I'm on a road trip coming to your area, what have you got. It's the time and the accuracy of that response.

I go to so many conferences where I say, I've sent all these emails and got absolute crickets, because either nobody responds, or it's a cut-and-paste reply that hasn't even acknowledged what you asked, I've got a dog, it's just my husband and me, we're travelling from X, Y, Z, and they've just gone, "Here's what we can offer." Do you think, and I think I know what your answer is, that response rate needs to be within a matter of hours, not twenty-four or forty-eight hours, whenever you feel like it? But also, what do you think the quality of that response should be?

Kenny: I think it's got to be personalised, and back to the AI comment, I'm not saying it needs to be handwritten, but the idea is, plug their information into a prompt, then rewrite it in your own language so it's tailored back to them, don't just copy and paste. A lot of what I see is someone's clearly just gone to ChatGPT and said "marketing firm owner bringing three employees, coming from a hospitality conference, staying in the West Village," and the response is so generic I could have googled the same answer myself. I wanted to take my staff to do something actually unique, I knew there was a Broadway show that weekend.

The one we ended up going with was Casa Cipriani, not surprising, Cipriani is one of the elite hospitality names in the world, but the level of accuracy and response they gave me was impeccable, they asked me so many questions, it felt like homework, but when I answered them, it came back, and I was already deciding between two or three hotels, and this woman basically walked me straight to a decision. Then they called me, said they heard I'd walked through the details, asked to get my credit card, said they'd go ahead and book everything, did I need transportation, help booking flights. I was fine on the flight, but that's about as good as it gets, you could tell it was a real human really reading the response and paying attention and trying to help.

Michelle: What I liked was the combination, yes, they used AI to make sure everything was accurate and get a really quick response out, but then a real person got on the phone and had an actual conversation, and that's where it goes from just ideas to "here's my credit card, this is great," it's that one-stop shop. It sounds a bit like how you started your business, they're a hotel, but now they're saying, do you need help with flights, transportation, all of that.

Kenny: It's white glove concierge, coming back around, isn't it. I remember when I first heard that term years ago and thought, what's white glove concierge, and now it's all the rave, everybody wants that handheld experience, and people who have the money will pay extra for it.

People want to feel like they're getting value for their money, they want to feel something special, because no matter someone's level of income, their money matters to them, and it doesn't matter where they end up going. I feel like the first touch point is that email or form, and how quickly and well your reservations desk responds. My wife was pretty judgmental about it, she said, if they can't answer these simple questions properly, they're going to be horrible when we get to the front desk.

Michelle: That's exactly right. And that's where you start thinking about who's actually responding, is it somebody in your organisation who's walked that floor, or somebody who's never been to your hotel and is just giving you a robotic, scripted response. I know there's cost involved in all of that, but I want to be hearing from somebody who's actually walked the floor, who's thinking, yes, that room would be perfect for that family because of X, Y, Z, or that conference space would work because of this.

Kenny: That's the difference between eighty per cent occupancy and getting into the mid-nineties, those little things. That's how you fill the gap, by making yourself so desired that people want to come back and tell their friends about it. You're always going to book some business regardless, the idea is that's how you go from hovering at sixty, seventy, eighty per cent, to crossing into that eighty-five, ninety range. It might cost more money up front, but in the long run you'll be so busy it actually costs you less money and less time, because you're not losing so much out the bottom of the funnel. I always call it in the funnel and out of the funnel, so many people are falling out of the funnel and you're burning leads, if you can capture more of them, you don't need to spend as much getting new people into the top of the funnel.

Michelle: Yes, it's simple mathematics, but it takes a while to actually work that out. Now, if an owner or a general manager wanted to build one simple weekly dashboard, pulling from their booking engine, their Google Business profile, ad platforms and reviews, without living across five different tabs and five different passwords, which does my head in, how would you tell them to start?

Kenny: I don't work for Agency Analytics, but I'd say we use this dashboard called Agency Analytics, you can plug all your metrics into one place and have it send you a scheduled weekly presentation, and you can actually prompt it with your KPIs. We'll say, here are our three KPIs, we always have a demand KPI, like impressions and reach, an efficiency KPI, and a conversion value KPI, how much revenue we're actually making. Every week that gets pre-assembled, and it highlights which ones are making the biggest difference, because if you're getting no reviews or not many calls, and especially in hospitality, direction requests are too late in the buying journey to matter much, so the idea is picking out three to five things that actually correlate to your bottom line and focusing on those.

Revenue per room is a big one to check each week, because you can quickly realise something's broken, if you suddenly see your revenue per room drop a hundred, a hundred and fifty dollars, did our emails not go out, what happened with the qualification of these audiences, something went wrong somewhere, and that's real money once you multiply it across however many rooms you have. Form leads too, if you notice forms slowing down or your response rate slipping, it's going to trickle down and affect you in a couple of weeks. If you've got thirteen unanswered forms, don't look at phone calls, look at the forms. We always try to monitor time to respond, under twenty-four hours is okay, under twelve is good, under eight is really good, but if that window starts expanding and your forms start dropping, it's going to show up in a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two, but you'll feel it, it'll be downward pressure.

Michelle: Definitely, because those people have moved on, they've sent the form, they're expecting an instant response, our lives are instantaneous now, we're not going to sit around waiting, and people do move on very quickly.

If you've seen this play out across a decade of client campaigns, what's an early warning number, something like review response rate or call abandonment, that predicts a revenue problem weeks before it shows up in the quarterly result?

Kenny: I think it's branded search again, that's something you feel the impact of quickly if you're monitoring it, the amount of branded search, the amount of direct traffic to your site. If those drop, something's gone wrong in your brand and marketing, your social media's stopped working, one of your video campaigns has stalled, maybe you paused your display. A lot of it comes back to multi-touch attribution, if we're only looking at last click and not the first click, so many people think, oh, I got this traffic from Google ads, but Google isn't stimulating that traffic, someone else stimulated it further up the line.

We picked up a property in Texas that had done a lot of PR, her property was very good, and about a year before we came on she'd had this massive wave of free press, and she'd basically ridden that wave of branded search and branded traffic without ever building any diversification into bringing people in. I told her, your brand search is plummeting, you've got to start building actual branding campaigns, and she just wanted to dump more money into Google ads instead. We ended up not working together, because I said, look, I don't think this is going to work, you've got to fix the problem that people don't know about you anymore, we can only do so much discovery through keywords, you've got to fill the funnel back up, because right now there's not enough fish coming into the net, you've got to bait the water before you catch anything big.

You really need to be watching your branded search and your direct traffic, because if those numbers start moving, you're going to feel it, I promise you. That's something nobody looks at, why are we looking at how much direct traffic we're getting, it's important, because if people know your URL and two hundred people came this month but only twenty-five come next month, those hundred and seventy-five people mattered.

Michelle: Where have they gone? I think that comes back to that vanity thing again, doesn't it, "I've had four thousand impressions," but actually, how many of them booked, how many actually clicked through, Kenny?

Kenny: Or they're in the wrong audience, back to the idea of testing. If it's the wrong audience, that's a big problem, we've shown the fun, playful ad to people who are actually on business group trips because we got our audiences crossed. That's one of the main things you'll notice, you see your brand search or direct search fall, a lot of the time it's because an audience got misaligned with one of your creatives.

Michelle: Right, yes. And there's a lot going on in a business owner's or a GM's mind, so that's why it's important to think about what you can outsource and who you can trust, coming to somebody like yourself at Ridge Media, knowing that they can handle all of that.

Before we finish our conversation today, which I've thoroughly enjoyed, I know this is going to be one I go back and listen to again because I couldn't write all the notes as fast as I wanted to, is there something I haven't asked about, either what you do or how you see the market going forward, and also, how can people contact you? I'll put all of this in the show notes.

Kenny: I'll start with how to contact me, you can find us on LinkedIn, the company name is Ridge Media, R-I-D-G-E Media, and our website is RidgeMediaLLC.com. We always do free audits, I'm not a big believer in charging money up front for that, you can just send me the reports you're getting now, I'll ask you some questions and get back to your team, it's usually pretty dense, probably a ten to twelve page audit with competitor analysis, looking at everything, no pressure to work with us. I always enjoy getting into the numbers, the biochemistry side comes out in me, I probably overdo it, the new guy I hired asks why I do so much for free up front, but I think it's about doing my due diligence, showing the value, and even giving away free ideas, it boomerangs back. I hear this a lot, someone says a year later, "I took your campaign idea and tried to get my current agency to execute it, and now I'm back to see if you can do it properly." They might not use your ideas right away, but giving people tips, value and resources comes back around in the long run.

I think one of the things changing quickly for us right now is around itineraries, if you don't have scripted-out content for specific age groups on your website for AI to crawl, and it's funny, we were doing this before AI even existed, back to what you said at the very beginning, sometimes you're on the mark and sometimes you're behind the eight ball, we were really on the mark early on driving traffic to specific pages on the website about the guest themselves. The way AI's working now, I don't know if anybody's heard this term, the hub and spoke model, you really need a hub, so if you're a couples-trip business, you need five pages about couples, if you've got four target avatars, say couples, business trips, whatever you want to call them, you need those four avatars, your four core customers, and five landing pages for each of them, so that's twenty new pages on your website, which sounds crazy, but it's something you should be putting on your website today, because of the AI traveller and the number of people going online trying to search this information out, it's got to be tailored to the person asking.

The questions people ask now are so much more thorough, a year ago I'd ask a very basic, bland question, now I'm giving paragraphs of detail, and people are doing that too, that's why I think you need at least five pages per avatar, that's one really big thing everyone can think about, just making sure your website has enough content for your audience to find information without ever touching your website, you want to be cited on a lot of these LLMs.

Michelle: Goodness me, my head is spinning, but everything you've said is so important, and it's breaking down what I can actually implement today, because it's very easy, Kenny, to think, "Oh my goodness, these are fantastic ideas," but feel overwhelmed and not do anything. It's just doing something to start that ball rolling, and of course, reaching out to Ridge Media and having that conversation, I'll put all that information in the show notes.

I agree with you on doing that audit and doing something upfront for people, some will take it away, and as you rightly said, some will say "I gave it to my agency but they just didn't understand it," and people come back, it's all about reciprocity, isn't it, it does come back to you. You've got to eat an elephant one bite at a time, you can't eat it all in one go, so just start taking one small bite and work your way in.

Kenny: Yes, and make that connection with people.

Michelle: Thank you so much, Kenny, for this opportunity to have this conversation with you. I wish you and your team all the very best for the future, and have fun in the Dolomites for Christmas, it sounds like it's going to be a great time.

Kenny: Absolutely, thank you so much, Michelle, I look forward to talking to you again soon, I really enjoyed our conversation as well, it was great, love your energy.

Michelle: Thank you, take care.