Going from likes to reservations

Welcome to Hosting Trips, your #1 resource to start and grow your outdoor recreation business 🚀

If you’re receiving this newsletter for the first time that’s because you’ve expressed interest in listing your trips on Outerthere or our Host Accelerator Program and I’m only now getting around to making updates. Sorry for the delay. Enjoy this newsletter.

“But how did they get so many guests on their trip?”

If you’re like me, you’re low-key stalking every other outdoor host in your city and asking yourself the same question.

But the reality is that copying what they’re doing, lowering your prices (to $0) or anything else you can tweak won’t help you answer that question.

There’s only one way to find out. And that’s to compare your trip to theirs. How will that help? Think of it like a race. You always know who’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd. And even if you’re not top 3, you’ll at least know your time or effort.

By keeping your trips siloed on your website (or a generic social network), you’ll never truly know how to increase your headcount. And inversely, you’ll never know if your above-average groups are a fluke or repeatable.

Makes sense? So, ok, what should you be comparing besides IG photos of group sizes?

First, you’ll never actually know how many of the “guests” are actually freebes. So if IG photos are your benchmark, just invite all your friends to go free for that awesome group selfie.

Second, if you’re getting 100 visitors to your reservation page and 20 guests RSVP to a free trip, you may think you’re crushing it… until you realize that another trip gets 500 visitors and they’re getting 10 guests to book at $100 each.

This simple example illustrates how much more data exists between your web traffic and reservations. Data like ranking, conversions and booking intent.

Interesting, right? So where do you get your trip data to compare to other trip hosts?

That’s the rub. You can’t.

Unless you list your trip on Outerthere because frankly, this data does not exist anywhere else. But without it, your chances of growing your outdoor hosting business are as good as winning the lottery.