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[00:00:00] Sarah: Hello. Welcome back for another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

[00:00:04] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:00:06] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:00:07] Sarah: Let’s start this episode like we do each and every week, and that is featuring one of you, our incredible listeners, who’s using our hashtag, #STRShareSunday. If you use it on Instagram, we’ll share you here on the podcast, on Instagram, to our entire email list. Annette, who we share in this week?

[00:00:21] Annette: This week we are sharing @coops,C-O-O-P-S,vacationrentals. That’s @coopsvacationrentals, and they’re in the Gulf Shores. Sarah, when am I ever going to go to the Gulf Shores with you to see your beach flip?

[00:00:34] Sarah: How dare you bring that up?

[00:00:35] Annette: Well, listeners, if you don’t know, Sarah did HGTV show on Gulf Shores a while ago. We need to have a binge.

[00:00:42] Sarah: It actually was good.

[00:00:43] Annette: Sarah, can we–

[00:00:44] Sarah: Have a little bit of–

[00:00:45] Annette: We’re going to maybe schedule a watch with our listeners here. We’ll see. I don’t know if we could do that on Zoom.

[00:00:51] Sarah: I can give you the cliff notes. I cry a lot. They sent me the wrong countertops. We didn’t win.

[00:00:55] Annette: But we’re still going to buy a place in Gulf right?

[00:00:58] Sarah: I like it. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:00:59] Annette: But Coops Vacation Rentals, I want to highlight two things. And the reason these are fresh on my mind is I actually just got back from a trip on the beach and the house that we rented, it slept 10, but I want to tell you something space wise that I loved. There was so much parking, and there is so much parking here at Coops Vacation Rentals. And what I love is they actually show it in the photos on the listing.

[00:01:26] And it’s rare that you see someone show how much parking there is, but I think now that I’ve experienced it this week, we had five SUVs because it was a beach town. You had to bring all of your linens, all of your beach towels. We brought a lot of stuff, bikes. And so that is an important thing. It made our time so much more enjoyable that we could all park our cars and use them if so needed.

[00:01:47] And the other thing that Coops Vacation Rentals has that we didn’t have that I would have loved is they supply an EV charger. And they are being very vocal about that. It’s in their listing. They show pictures of it. And my nephew had a Tesla, and he had to charge it before we left. And so that was slightly annoying.

[00:02:04] So I just want to say Coops Vacation Rental, two of those things that really I was paying attention to on this last trip, he is crushing it by showing that to his guests that you can charge your electric vehicle. And there is plenty of parking, not only for your electric vehicle, but anybody else that comes along.

[00:02:21] And so as hosts, sometimes I think there’s small things like that we forget to add. So if you have great parking for your guest, add that in your photos, let them know. Oh my gosh, we know X, Y, Z has a suburban. They’re going to be able to park that. Or someone else is coming with a car. We’re going to have four or five cars. So that can become something that’s really annoying to a guest. And I don’t know about you, but also, it’s another sales push of like, if you stay in a hotel, it’s like 50 bucks a night to valet.

[00:02:49] So do the math there. If you’re trying to get someone to stay with you, it’s like parking is free in all these spots. So Coops, way to go with the EV charger, thinking ahead, and then also with all of the parking spaces and letting your guests know there’s room for them there.

[00:03:01] Sarah: Before we dig into today’s episode, Annette, I want to do a little internal survey. You just said this here on the podcast, and then we talked about it on our Instagram account when you were on vacation, but let’s just quickly talk about bringing your own sheets and towels.

[00:03:16] So we did a survey on Instagram, and so many hosts who are in “traditional beach vacation rental towns,” and I would say 99% of you who responded to it, I would say maybe 20 people, said that they supply the sheets and towels. How was it as a guest? Obviously, you are a very discerning guest because of what you do full time with Thanks for Visiting. But truly, what was it like to bring home your dirty sheets on the plane?

[00:03:41] Annette: I have to be honest that obviously I was a guest, but I was also a secondary guest as my brother and sister-in-law had rented the beach home. So my sister-in-law got the brunt of it because I actually left a little early also. That’s why I think we had so many cars, because we had to bring linens for six beds.

[00:04:09] It was so much. So it was linens, towels. And also, she had a friend that lived on the island and she actually didn’t have twin sheets at all. She just doesn’t have them at our house. So her friend had to bring those over because she’s like, I don’t want to buy twin sheets for one week.

[00:04:26] The one thing I did enjoy about it though, is I knew they were super clean and I knew where they were coming from. So there was parts of it that I was like, oh, I’m making this bed. This is the pillow. This is a pillowcase. I see the mattress.

[00:04:36] Sarah: Wait, did we have to bring the pillows, like your pillow?

[00:04:39] Annette: Again, I was the guest host. I don’t know if those were their pillows or not. I think they supplied pillows. I do think they supply pillows. But again, I like that. I could see there was mattress protectors everywhere. I could see that there were pillow protectors. So I got to see the before, and making my own bed, it made me want to buy a beach house where you didn’t have to bring the linens, 1,000%.

[00:05:01] I’m like, Sarah, what are we doing? We need to go to a place where– the other thing that we didn’t do that we could have done is obviously rented them through a linen company and had them delivered and picked up. But I should shop that. I think I wrote down the linen company specifically there to see how much it would add on to the trip. But I can share that it took me three minutes to make my bed. It took me no minutes to strip my bed.

[00:05:26] Sarah: I feel like you’re being very diplomatic. Did you like it or not? What would you have rathered?

[00:05:30] Annette: I can share that this house did not meet all of my cleanliness standard. So I’m actually glad that I had to make my bed. So in this situation, I’m glad that I know my sister-in-law laundered the sheets. I know where they were coming from. I’m the one that put them in. I did get to see the mattresses.

[00:05:46] Sarah: Oh, so you didn’t bring your sheets to your sister-in-law. Not only did she get this property beach, they also brought linens.

[00:05:51] Annette: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I was a guest. I didn’t have to bring–

[00:05:54] Sarah: I see. But do they to the podcast?

[00:05:56] Annette: My family?

[00:05:57] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:05:58] Annette: Yeah, sometimes.

[00:05:59] Sarah: Oh no. Okay. Well, hopefully they don’t listen to this.

[00:06:00] Annette: No, no, no.

[00:06:01] Sarah: I need you to be able to speak freely. Because here’s the deal.

[00:06:04] Annette: Oh, if I had to pack them in my suitcase? No way. That’s what I’m saying. They brought them from their home. That’s why we had all these SUVs.

[00:06:11] Sarah: And also, here’s my question. I wonder if your sister-in-law, as she was organizing this and prepping this and then having to bring sheets, do you think she was cursing?

[00:06:20] Annette: Oh, absolutely. And she was like, oh my gosh, no wonder. This is going to take me a full day or two when I get home doing all this laundry. Yeah, it was a lot of work. And she had specifically purchased those IKEA zip bags that you can get on Amazon. She brought five of those because we also had to bring our own beach towels. So again, that’s why we had five SUVs. We had a lot of stuff. Plus we brought all of our own food. We only went out to dinner once.

[00:06:44] Sarah: The food, I love. That’s cool. All right. I just wanted to know.

[00:06:47] Annette: But as a host, thinking through the financials of it, I’m like, this is brilliant.

[00:06:53] Sarah: Yeah. If anyone out there is a part of this culture, it’s definitely cultural. I can tell that. This island, this is how they do it. They’ve been in this way for years. It’s not broke. Don’t fix it. But as the vacation rental boom, the Airbnb boom and now all these hosts do supply towels, I wonder if they get push back. Like what the heck? Are people staying elsewhere? I just wonder what that impact is.

[00:07:17] Annette: Just letting you know, I don’t know how close I would’ve read, let’s be honest, if I booked this place and I showed up there with no sheets and towels.

[00:07:27] Sarah: Yeah, was there a Target nearby?

[00:07:29] Annette: Amazon, I don’t know.

[00:07:31] Sarah: Okay. All right. I just needed to know.

[00:07:33] Annette: But we can do a whole episode on that property and that island

[00:07:36] Sarah: Okay, but on to someone who definitely supplies the bedding and the towels, because this is an ultimate luxurious experience that we’re going to take you on, everyone tuning in. We met Nick Taylor when we were somehow invited to a castle stay in the UK. And we were immediately enchanted by Nick’s accent, of course, but he is from Cape Town and he runs a boutique short-term rental management company.

[00:08:10] And I know a lot of our listeners, a majority of you, you own your own properties, you manage your own properties, and then sometimes you’re so good at it, your friends, family, acquaintances ask you to manage theirs too, and so you end up accidentally starting a co-hosting business.

[00:08:24] But if any of you out there love this industry and you’re thinking about ways that you can sink your teeth more into this industry, this episode is going to be amazing for you because Annette and I knew we needed to open up our horizons to learning from people in this industry that are outside of the United States. Because the way people think about things, the opportunities they have that opens up their minds, for example– I’ll give you a little bit of a teaser. Labor in Cape Town is a lot less expensive than it is for us here in the United States.

[00:08:57] Annette: And when we say a lot, one clean is what he could probably pay a team member for a whole month’s worth of service on a large property.

[00:09:06] Sarah: And while we recognize that, okay, we cannot copy what Nick does here in the United States, it does make our brains think, okay, but how could I emulate that? How could I introduce that, a fraction of that into my own business? And that’s what Annette and I mean by opening up our horizons in terms of how other people.

[00:09:26] So if you’ve noticed some of the international flavor we’ve been bringing to the podcast, it really is an effort to help us help you guys think outside the box. But Nick, he manages, what, did he say, Annette? $150 million of property in his property management. And he’s very specific on the kind of properties he manages.

[00:09:44] Annette: It must have tourism appeal. That was a new term for me.

[00:09:48] Sarah: We loved it.

[00:09:49] Annette: Let’s get on to the show.

[00:09:50] Sarah: Nick from Nox, welcome to the show. We are so excited to dig into your multifaceted background in the hospitality industry, but why don’t you take us back to the early days of Nick Taylor and where you got your start in hospitality?

[00:10:06] Nick: Thank you so much for having me on the show, Sarah and Annette. Really, really pleased to be here. And I can’t wait for our time together. Where do we go back? I know in the United States, there’s a number of operators that have 20, 25, 30 years of experience in this industry.

[00:10:22] But I started off leaving school in 1999 and studying hotel management. And wasn’t quite sure why I ended up doing hotel management, but that’s where I found myself. And did that for a year and a half. And then after I finished, I had to do some training and a company from the United Kingdom, from London came out to recruit us, young South African students, because apparently we work really hard and managed to get myself in a flight and headed off to London, England, in 2001 at the age of 19 years old. 

[00:10:55] And ended up working in a hotel group that had seven of the top 10 hotels on TripAdvisor in London, company called Red Carnation Hotels. Had five years with them and worked in the front office and operations, high touch, high level of hospitality, really, really top five-star service levels. And I came back to South Africa in 2006 because my then girlfriend, now my wife’s father passed away very unexpectedly. And I was just looking for work for six months, and then we were actually going to emigrate to Canada.

[00:11:28] I’ve got a Canadian passport. My grandparents were Canadian. And I saw this advert on a Craigslist equivalent called Gumtree here in South Africa. And it was a startup, and my business partner now, Richard Marshall, pretty much said, I need somebody to help me with my tax returns and to do my books because I’ve just started this little business and I have no idea what’s going on with the actual business, but I’m driving around with mops coming out of my back window and meeting guests at all kinds of crazy hours of the day and haven’t really focused on the business side of things.

[00:12:02] Now, when I was in London, I studied finance and accounting, hotel finance and accounting at chartered accounting. So I said to him, well, I’m here for six months then I’m going. I can help you get your bank reconciliations done. And I walked into an office in 2006 into an industry that I knew absolutely nothing about that I couldn’t find much on the internet about and arrived straight out of London in a suit and tie and fully dressed up and kitted, and people are walking around in jeans and trainers and t-shirts.

[00:12:30] And I say, well, this is a little bit of a change of environment. But the first few years was more just about trying to understand the business and try to understand what this was and how this could be compared to the formal hotel sector that I’d find myself in after I’d studied. And I remember going to a trade show, Richard Marshall, my partner, he said to me, hey, why don’t you come on a trade show?

[00:12:54] And I said, what’s that? He said, no, we’re going to go find some business. So I said, well, this sounds interesting. So we went up to Durban, which is about a two-hour flight from where I live in Cape Town, and arrived at this trade show, which was the tourism convention. And this was an intersection of all kinds of supply and demand buyers coming in from Europe, from the US, all over.

[00:13:15] It’s come and find an interesting product in South Africa. And Richard and I had a stand next to a global hotel chain, and we were trying to stop the German tour operators predominantly, and I’ll stand to say like, hey, we’ve got a private home. Don’t you want to come and put your guests that you sent to South Africa into a private home rather than this big hotel?

[00:13:38] And they all looked at us pretty weirdly, like, what are you doing? You’re not familiar with this as a product in this industry? And it was a hard sell. But what it did do is, for the first 15 years of our business before Airbnb came along, it allowed us to create a base of international tour operators and travel agents.

[00:13:56] South Africa is a long-haul tourism destination, and there’s a fair amount of handholding. So what tends to happen is that people will come on once in a lifetime trip to South Africa to come and see the Big 5, see the animals, and just come and explore a part of the world that they’ve perhaps never been to.

[00:14:12] And to do that, it’s always useful for them to have a destination expert holding their hand along the way. So we actually built the business. 70% of our business was through third-party travel agents and tour operators. And about 30% came direct. This is late O’s and early 2010s, 2011s, that kind of stage. Airbnb and Booking.com hadn’t even cottoned on to the fact that this was a segment in the market that they could access.

[00:14:42] Airbnb wasn’t even a thought at that point in time. But what that allowed us to do is to create an environment of– tour operators and travel agents really trusted our brand and products. And that put a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we were delivering service and standards which were exactly the same as what they could expect in the global hotel chain.

[00:15:03] And that’s all they wanted. They just wanted service guarantee and brand standards. And off the back of that, we were forced into implementing some standards, which were akin to what you could get in a five-star hotel. Daily housekeeping, Monday through Saturday. That comes as a standard in our rates. It’s baked into our rates, baked into our service provisions.

[00:15:28] In-person meet and greet, on call 24/7 concierge, all the bells and whistles. You had cable television, everything that we could possibly do to try and mirror– shopping experience with guests. And that still happens to this day, they can pre stock their villas with groceries and get in-room massages and airport transfers, you name it. We’re a full-service, full concierge, and that’s where we are today, 20-odd years later.

[00:15:58] Annette: When you started with Richard, though, with the mops coming out of everywhere in his car, how many houses, when you answered that Gumtree, I think you said was the site, were under management at that time?

[00:16:12] Nick: I think we had about 12.

[00:16:13] Annette: Did you guys own all of those or were those all owned by other owners?

[00:16:18] Nick: So Richard also fell into the industry. He wasn’t banking in London. Came back and his parents owned a guest house in Camps Bay, an area of seaside location here in Cape Town. And they decided to go off on a three months overland trip through Africa. And they said to him, well, here are the keys. Look after the place.

[00:16:37] And there was a big property boom in the early two thousands in Cape Town. South Africa, after being in isolation for so many years, became quite a popular tourism destination, was very affordable, and an investment destination. So we would literally have predominantly British tourists and German tourists coming to South Africa, having an absolutely terrific time lying on the beach, going to the estate agency on the beachfront and going, well, that’s only £50,000 or dollars. I’m going to buy that.

[00:17:11] And they would literally buy it and get on the plane two hours later and then go, well, what now? And this is when Richard started realizing that there was a whole lot of lights on, but nobody really staying. And just through word of mouth and being local, living in the market, people started saying, hey, I’ll be back in three months.

[00:17:27] Can you look after my place and make sure that you can flush the toilets and keep the lights on? And Richard said, yeah, sure. No problem. It just grew very organically off that. So he had been doing that for about three years before I joined him in 2006. And it was real startup territory. It was an absolute mess.

[00:17:44] Annette: When you came over from your hotel experience, what was the first thing that you saw that was like, why are we doing it this way? We’ve got to mirror what your five-star hotels were doing. What was something that you injected immediately into the business?

[00:18:04] Nick: Yeah, it was to do with the service standards ultimately. Hotels have got it so down packed. It’s systematic. It’s all under one roof. You can guarantee your level of service. And when I arrived in 2006 at Nox, we didn’t have the technology to be able to help service standards.

[00:18:25] So it was all clipboards and pieces of paper. It was a completely different world almost 20 years ago. So Richard and I started spending quite a bit of time on the operation side of things, and more importantly on rates, pricing, and distribution. Back then we used to have an Excel spreadsheet, which we sent out to our two operators on a Monday morning with the calendar for the next six months with blocks on the Excel spreadsheet with this property’s books.

[00:18:53] And the rates were static. They were locked in for that period of time. And then we’d send an update the following Monday. Richard’s father is a software developer, and we started building some technology to be able to distribute our rates and pricing in real time to our network of international tour operators and travel agents and just try and make the whole process a lot more efficient. 

[00:19:17] So yeah, coming from a hotel operator background, Richard, he came from a business background. His father was a software developer. We just started fusing everything together and implementing some really, really strict service standards and making sure that we’re accountable to ourselves, as well as our guests and our owners.

[00:19:35] Sarah: There are hosts out there, and I think these hosts come from a standpoint of getting a little defensive, maybe, because– I actually don’t know why, but they’ll say, well we’re not a hotel though. We’re a vacation home. So if you heard someone say that to you, Nick, knowing what you know now by going through your traditional training and now 20 years of being in the vacation rental industry, what would you say to someone who says that to you, like, well, we’re not a hotel? We’re a vacation rental home.

[00:20:06] Nick: It’s a good question. The product and the service delivery is different. The underlying index, the underlying base of what we’re providing ultimately is a head on the bed. And whether it’s a guest house, an igloo, or whatever you’re doing, if you’re providing somewhere for someone to sleep for a night, you’re providing accommodation.

[00:20:30] And whether that’s in the form of a hotel, vacation rental, guest house, bed and breakfast, it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the principles remain the same, and that is that you’re in the hospitality business. And yes, we’re not a hotel, but we provide the same thing. People make decisions based on whether they should stay in a hotel or an Airbnb or a guest house.

[00:20:53] If they need somewhere to sleep, yes, some people might choose a vacation rental over a hotel because of past experiences, that’s what they want, depending on the type of experience they’re looking for, but we’re competing directly with hotels and guest houses and bed and breakfasts every single day of our life.

[00:21:08] Sarah: I want to know more about what’s become important to you and your business partner over the years? From your spreadsheet with your pricing blocked for a week and then getting the update the next week to where we’re at today where we have so much data and so much information, down to the brand standards that you introduced all those years ago and how those have changed over the years. 

[00:21:34] Today in 2024 with the boom we just had after COVID and all that, what do you think is more important? Is it the happy guest? Is it the revenue that you bring in, whether it’s for an owner or yourself as the investor? Is it profit margins? What do you guys use as your North Star? What is your main focus and everything else will fall into place if you hit this nail on the head?

[00:22:00] Nick: The epicenter of what we do is the happy guest. If you have unhappy guests, you don’t have a business. You’re unable to deliver service. You’re unable to get referrals, recommendations. The North star is the happy guests. If the guest is happy, the by-products of that happy guests are revenue, and if you can control your costs, ultimately profit.

[00:22:26] We always think about this and have for the last 20-odd years, what is more important? Is it the guest or the homeowner? We have two clients, and that’s what makes it really, really an interesting industry and what creates the juggle, isn’t it? We have owner representative teams.

[00:22:45] We have guest service concierge teams. We’re not too sure who’s more important. Obviously the owner at the core of it is our asset. And without the owner, we don’t have that base to be able to deliver a happy guests. But if we have happy guests, we’re going to have happy owners. So no one can really answer that question. It’s probably a good poll to put out. Who is more important, a happy guest or a happy owner?

[00:23:12] And our owners often say, you’re always looking after your guests. You don’t look after me. Because we are very much more guest centric as an organization that we have been owner centric. And only have over the two or three years that we really started to focus on the owner experience or our organization more than the guest experience.

[00:23:30] But ultimately, most of our KPIs and metrics and how we manage our teams and performance is done on guest reviews and guest feedback. Because we know that those reviews and feedback will enhance an experience for a future guest and allow us to build a stronger relationship with our partners. We call our owners our partners. We routinely send out all the guest reviews to our owners. We’re not hiding anything that we haven’t owned, a dashboard, the technology being used.

[00:23:56] We recently started working with Boom, which has an owner portal, which has all the guests’ data in there. And that holds ourselves to account with our owners because if there’s one or two bad reviews in there, the owner is just going to go, well, what are you guys doing? Is it the property or is it your service? So you have to have that guest service right up at the North star. And then naturally the owners will be happy. Revenue will come in and profit will be a lagging indicator of guest satisfaction.

[00:24:27] Annette: Let’s talk about unhappy guests. What can you offer to Sarah and myself and everybody listening? What is your triage when there is an unhappy guest? What do you see works for you every time to transition them from an unhappy guest to a happy guest?

[00:24:43] Nick: Ultimately, you’ve got to make the guest feel like the most important person in the world, right there in the end. And there is nothing worse than having an unhappy guest leave your vacation. It is the worst thing ever. You know that they’ve been a little bit disgruntled.

[00:24:55] They’ve complained about one or two things along the way. And then it gets to the end of your stay and you just had that kind of bad feeling. It’s the emotional feeling within your body or your team. And everybody knows that this guest hasn’t been happy. So it’s our mission to try and make sure that before that guest leaves, they have had some very, very hands-on high-service interactions with us.

[00:25:23] We’ve worked on some form of a compromise of compensation or a discount on a future stay or given them something which they may not have experienced. And when it comes to unhappy guests, I hate giving financial compensation. It’s the worst thing ever. Because what happens is that you refund them via Airbnb or put some money back in their bank account and they move on and that’s all forgotten.

[00:25:48] So what would make a really big effort to try and do is to say like, listen, Mr/Mrs Guest, we know we’ve messed up here. We didn’t check the air conditioning was working properly, or we didn’t foresee that the hot water would stop working, or whatever might’ve happened. But you know what, we’d love to treat you to something that you might not have thought about.

[00:26:09] And they go, really, what’s that? And we go, we’re going to put a beach picnic down for you. Would you like to have a beach picnic? Or would you like to have some kind of an awesome tourism related experience in and around Cape Town? Which is on us. Because we know that if you have a good experience, which we’ve done, which has exceeded any realistic expectation, they’re going to remember that.

[00:26:33] South Africa is well known for its wine. We live in the wine region here in Cape Town. We often send wine after the guests have left. They’ve been a little bit unhappy. We’ll send some wine off to them in Germany or the United Kingdom and just leave them as a little token of goodwill to go, like, really sorry. We messed up. Enjoy some South African wine, and hopefully we’ll be able to share a glass in the future again.

[00:26:54] Sarah: I don’t want to gloss over that feedback, Nick, because we just discussed how it is complicated, especially, listeners out there, if you’re a co-host. You start managing for other people, or if you own and operate your own properties, guest criticism or guest feedback or something going wrong that feels very out of your control, we have to own the fact that we do have control over turning it around.

[00:27:18] If they are the North Star, if it starts with them, then everything dominoes from them having a great stay for the longevity of our business. And Nick, you guys have been in business for so long and you can look back and say, all of those beach picnics, all of those investments we made on turning that unhappy guest around, it must be worth it for the longevity of your business and making sure that you stand out amongst a sea of people who don’t do those things and let the guests leave unhappy, leave those terrible negative reviews.

[00:27:48] So how do you measure that turnaround of that guest, or what is the KPI that you guys do when it comes to unhappy guests? What sort of documenting do you do to help you learn from that mistake, whether or not it was something in your control or not, so that you can continue to improve? Because we’re always continuing to improve, but what do you guys do?

[00:28:09] Nick: It’s part of our business KPIs. We look at it every single week. We assess how many guest reviews have come in that are below our standards and targets. We discuss it at a leadership level. Myself and Richard are in those meetings every single Monday, and we go through any guests that might have had issued us with negative or a review which isn’t as good as what we would have liked.

[00:28:32] In terms of how we prevent it in the future, it’s very challenging. Yeah, you can implement service standards. You can do as many pre arrival checks as you possibly can, but it’s hospitality. You’re never going to be able to meet everybody’s expectations. They might have booked something– it’s a little bit cold here in Cape Town at the moment.

[00:28:48] We have a number of guests in-house at the moment who are complaining about it being too cold. And I’m sat there this morning in our leadership meeting and I said, guys, I don’t think we prepared well enough for winter. But we’ve got huge villas, three-storey villas that are these massive mansions. And to warm up a very large building without having to implement all kinds of energy provisions is challenging.

[00:29:15] So what we try and do is just make sure that that guest leaves knowing that Nox at least tried something. We do not let a guest leave going, well, they didn’t care about me. I didn’t feel as though they listened to anything that I was complaining about. So in terms of that, we also track and monitor every single guest feedback, our staff performance manager on it, where they’re incentivized.

[00:29:38] We’ve got a quarterly review system where we look at the performance of each single property, how their property is performed, and whether it’s reached our targets. Our target is 4.8 out of 5 effectively. And so that’s what we’re aiming for. Through the technology that we use, we’re able to look at the service levels and all the reviews that we collect from the OTAs, as well as direct, as well as throughout to tour operators, travel agents we’re asked for.

[00:30:05] That feedback is effectively a management tool, and we’re able to assess staff performance and service delivery across 80% of our staff who are in our operations. And we get a very clear indicator.

[00:30:17] If a property’s consistently not reaching that target we are then not afraid of going to the homeowner and saying, we’re carrying your property in our portfolio at the moment. It’s not hitting our targets. This is the guest feedback. We think that you really need to start looking at this and that, otherwise we might need to have a difficult conversation in the future.

[00:30:39] And we’re not afraid of doing that. We are not a business that wants to scale to 1,000 properties. We’ve currently got around about 200 under management. They’re all really, really great homes, about 150 million US dollars under management. But the principle is that we’d rather have a portfolio that is delivering to our internal standards and KPIs than carrying stock and inventory which is not able to give the chance of having a good guest experience.

[00:31:11] Sarah: So you celebrate quality over quantity inside of your–

[00:31:16] Nick: 100%. Absolutely.

[00:31:18] Annette: So how do you select these owners? There’s only 200 in the portfolio right now. I’m sure you have a lot of people that want to work with you. What’s that checklist look like for someone to come on board?

[00:31:27] Nick: We’ve got an extensive checklist. So our ultimate determination is what we call tourism appeal. So we look at a property, and if this property has tourism appeal or tourism potential, we start going, yeah, this is going to work for our portfolio because it’s offering unique experience.

[00:31:46] No disrespect to operators. You have thousands of units in condos and apart hotels, and that is that business model. That’s absolutely fine. We tend to find it a little bit commoditized. We’re at the essence of the hospitality organization, providing great, unique tourism experiences, and not necessarily just providing that head on the pillow.

[00:32:07] We want to make sure that every guest comes and then goes, wow, this is amazing. I love this villa. So things that we look out for in terms of the actual property is to make sure that it’s well located, it’s of a luxury standard, that it offers some form of view. We believe that views are ultra important.

[00:32:26] We won’t take on a property that does that has a view of a brick wall of the apartment building next door. It’s got to have something that somebody is going to remember and they’re going to be able to tell their friends or come back to it. So we probably take on four of every 10 properties that we see.

[00:32:43] Annette: Does the size matter in tourism appeal? I had to. Sorry. I just need to know.

[00:32:48] Nick: Size matters everywhere, doesn’t it?

[00:32:51] Annette: But honestly, in tourism appeal, does the size matter in the properties that you bring on? Is that a baseline?

[00:32:59] Nick: We provide a better service if the property is larger. We’re a hands-on property management company We tend to find that the smaller one bedroom and two-bedroom apartments are somewhat commoditized. The other competitors can deliver a service which is perhaps a little bit more economical. With our brand standards, it comes with costs, housekeeping six days a week.

[00:33:21] That’s an owner cost not a guest cost. That all gets charged onto the owner. Full on guest toiletries, linen laundering, all of it is included in the fees that we charge our owners to improve the guest experience.

[00:33:35] Sarah: Wait a minute.

[00:33:36] Annette: Yeah, we got to slow that down.

[00:33:38] Sarah: Slow that down. Let me unpack that, Nick, and make sure I understand this. Because, I will tell you, this is runs rampant in the newer co-host space. And this is very interesting. I love turning things on their head. They are obsessed with, the new co-hosts, the people who are just getting into property management, the guest has to pay for it in some way, shape, or form in their overnight accommodation fees.

[00:34:05] But you’re saying that, yes, there is a market for the overnight accommodation fee, but everything else comes out of your owner’s– so how does that work out on the owner P& L? Are they paying to have the guest stay essentially?

[00:34:22] Nick: Our service standard, as I discussed earlier, is to offer housekeeping six days a week. The cost of that type of service is inexpensive in South Africa. It’s the labor markets. If we can do it, it’s not going to cost the owners. I’ve heard of some of the rates that are charged for an hour of cleaning in more developed countries, and we wouldn’t be able to provide it.

[00:34:46] It would cost thousands and thousands of dollars to your homeowner. So in terms of a percentage of annual revenue to provide housekeeping six days a week, it’s less than 5% of the annual revenue.

[00:34:59] Sarah: Got it.

[00:34:59] Annette: Okay. Well, I want to talk about an operations point of this though. How do you communicate with the guest? Because a hotel room is different. Actually, Steve Davis from Operto told us like, an average hotel guest leaves a room 11 times a day. How do you communicate with the guests the time that their room will be turned over? If there are hosts out there wanting to offer more of a daily cleaning, what does daily cleaning entail?

[00:35:29] Nick: Good question. So it depends on the property. Our principle is that if the property is less than three bedrooms in size, that will typically have a full-time cleaner employed by Nox. We have 85 full-time housekeeping staff on our payroll. They will be shared amongst those smaller units.

[00:35:54] So a housekeeper will go into a property for a couple of hours, do a refresh clean, do the kitchen, make the beds for the guests, do a bit of a sweep, and clean while the guests are in the house. How it’s communicated is by our check in, meet-and-greet staff, and in our guestbooks, and our guidebooks and prior to arrival, and all of our communication, we say heads up. And some guests don’t want it.

[00:36:18] Some guests don’t want to see anybody. And if they don’t want a cleaner, that’s absolutely fine. No problem at all. We’ll strip that service out of their stay. Obviously, the larger the property-our cleaners, we intentionally employ them because they become part of the organizational culture. They’re incentivized.

[00:36:36] They’re well looked after by our team, by our guests, by our owners. And especially in the larger homes, what happens is that they are 100% accountable for that villa. So were able to performance manage them on that. They get to see the same guests who come back to that home six months or every year later.

[00:36:58] And they really look forward to seeing this cleaner in the home. And they enhance the guest experience so much. They’re a real asset for us, because they’re actually spending most time with guests than anyone else. They’re in the property. And I guess love the authenticity of that type of an experience because they’re actually able to sit down with somebody from Africa who comes from the local community and ask all kinds of interesting questions.

[00:37:26] And they build some really deep relationships. Our peers get left loads of tips, wonderful food and wine and everything else when the guests leave. Yeah, they have a good time.

[00:37:38] Annette: That’s fascinating. Each villa then, do you supply all of the linens, all of the cleaning, like everything stays within that property since you have one cleaner assigned to it?

[00:37:49] Nick: That’s right. They go in Monday through Saturday, regardless of these guests or not. They are fully employed so that might be, 10 days or two weeks between a reservation. They’ll still go in Monday to Saturday. They’ll do some deep cleaning. I’ll make sure that that property is 100% perfect.

[00:38:09] It is guest ready, regardless of there’s been a guest that has left this morning and there’s a changeover. But if there hasn’t been a guest in that property for two weeks, it doesn’t matter that property. That property is guest ready at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and we know it.

[00:38:26] Annette: Okay. Nox properties, do you have the same exact sheets in every single property, or are they different? Just because there’s so–

[00:38:32] Nick: Well, it’s from the same supplier, but all the beds are different. Some of these different shapes and sizes and extra length this and king and twins that can be broken up and we need expanders and comforters and what, it becomes a little complicated. What we actually do when we onboard a property and part of our checklist is to make sure that this property is equipped to be able to almost be self-sufficient and sustainable.

[00:38:53] So we’ve got to make sure that there’s three sets of linen that we purchase for that property that belongs to that property and that owner. If they leave our management or decide to look for a long-term rental or sell the property that is all the owner’s stock.

[00:39:07] So we spend enormous amount of time at that onboarding phase to make sure that brand standards that we hold ourselves to can be delivered through that onboarding process. And that’s down to the quality of the crockery and cutlery, linen, guest amenities and supplies. That’s all done right from the onset. We know if we can get that onboarding right and do a check before it’s guest ready, that property is going to be good to go.

[00:39:33] Annette: What do you do with the cleaning supplies, since these are full-time team members? We’re in the US. We got Amazon, Costco. Are you sending deliveries? Is your full-time team member communicating to you, I need more cleaning products? How does that purchasing and delivery happen for you?

[00:39:51] Nick: That’s right. We used to use Google Forms. It was just a simple form submission from the keynote and that sent it through. Then we’ll come through to our central office where we have a stores. We’ve hold all of our key suppliers some stock in our storeroom, and then our hosts who are effectively our guest relations staff are running around picking up that delivery and taking it off back to the villa.

[00:40:16] We’ve recently moved to Boom, and Boom or have a requisition and ordering system in the platform, which is actually really helpful because now we can start to see utilization at a villa level and we have to get some really decent analytics. We can start to see, well, this property has gone through 246 toilet rolls, and they’ve only had five nights of occupancy. There’s a problem here. What’s going on?

[00:40:41] Annette: Sounds like the family had a problem. I don’t know.

[00:40:42] Sarah: Okay, before we go down that path, I do want to pivot this conversation a little bit because you not only offer the hospitality services, but correct me if I’m wrong, you also have a real estate division, correct?

[00:40:57] Nick: That’s right.

[00:40:58] Sarah: Because I want everyone who is out there who is obsessed with running their short-term rental who loves this industry now, and they’re thinking about ways they can grow within it and maybe it’s not managing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of properties, how you’ve diversified your revenue. Talk to us about how you started down that. Was it always from the beginning? When did you decide to add that on? And are you glad you did that? Do you regret it? Tell us all the juicy details by having a real estate division.

[00:41:29] Nick: We love our real estate division. It’s small. It’s boutique. It’s never going to compete with the national real estate brand. We don’t want it to. We started it about six years ago. It really started being quite serious during and just after COVID. Our tagline is Nox rent, buy, manage, sell.

[00:41:50] So it’s a circle. You stay with us as a guest. You love your experience because we deliver in great hospitality and excellent services. And then we go, while you’re in house, hey, would you like a private property to have some of our portfolio if you’re interested in actually buying a property? And you know what, we can manage it for you.

[00:42:08] We’re showing you how we can manage it because you’re staying with us. And then, you know what, you like that villa? That’s great. We can also give you all the financial forecasting and historical rental performance of that property, all your revenue, all your expenses, so you know exactly what you buy.

[00:42:25] Roughly 80% of our portfolio is owned by foreign owners. So they will visit their properties at certain times during the year and the rest of the time, we’ve got the keys managing it for them. Then they come on holiday. It makes sense for them to be able to actually get some income, pay the local rates and taxes and leave some money here in South Africa for when they come on holiday. It’s sitting here waiting for them.

[00:42:52] So that’s really good. Obviously, we do have some owners who are very much investment-orientated. They buy the property, the pure view, to generate income and yield. But what happens is that our guests become our owners. A lot of our guests that have stayed with us end up becoming our homeowners and our client.

[00:43:10] Annette: How do you market? Because that’s a fine line of, you don’t want to be too noisy at Nox about trying to sell. I would call that an upsell on them buying the accommodation. So how do you bring in the hospitality to let them know it’s an offering that you have and then to have them take you up on the offer? So what’s that introduction, that call to action to your guest that you could also help them find their home?

[00:43:34] Nick: In a few ways. We do a fair amount of branding and in-villa experience. So we’ve got some really interesting guidebooks, which will very gently mention this kind of thing. We’ve got a couple of back-of-the-door signs in the villa, which will say something to the effect of, enjoying your holiday making. Why don’t you make it a little more permanent kind of thing?

[00:43:56] And we don’t want to hard sell, but we know that if a guest phones us, they’re pretty interested in key. But we’d just wait for the phones to ring then hassle people when they’re enjoying their much well-earned and looked forward to vacation and try and sell them a property. As a guest, I wouldn’t want that. So we just let them know that we provide the service. If they’re interested, they can get all of us.

[00:44:20] Sarah: How hard was that to introduce to your hosting business, Nick, the whole real estate side? Even not now knowing that you actually came in from the hotel, hospitality, operational, revenue, financial side of things, to add the real estate brokerage side of it, was that a lot of education? Was it a lot of building? Was it really painful at first?

[00:44:51] Nick: It was intentional. I remember we had a villa that was in our portfolio that was sent to our guest. And I thought, well, hold on, there’s something happening here. And with all due respect to the estate agent at the time, they didn’t know what they were really talking about.

[00:44:59] They didn’t know all the financial performance. They didn’t know the metrics. They didn’t understand our business, and they couldn’t sell any management services because they came from a real estate background. So we made it very intentional that we wanted to provide almost like a concierge, again, high-touch hospitality buyers’ service.

[00:45:14] And that came off the back also of us deciding on the strategic direction of our business where we’re all faced with this. As our hosting businesses have grown, you start to look at different regions. You start to look at other nodes where you think you might be able to set up a management company.

[00:45:32] We intentionally have not done that. We’re hyperlocal, hyper focused. We want to make sure that if somebody comes into one of our areas of operation, they see our branding, they know who we are, and we’re just here and we’re providing the full suite of residential services.

[00:45:50] And that is management, sales, rental, short-term rentals, long term rentals. That has been a real interesting journey, and it has required a lot of training and development and learning and licensing. And it hasn’t been straightforward, but I wouldn’t have done it any other way. I’m so glad we get to offer it. And we’ve got a small team, about four agents, and we don’t want to be huge. We just want to try and be able to provide value and sell properties in the areas in which we operate now.

[00:46:19] Annette: And someone that buys from you can still go and have their property managed by someone else. I know that’s not ideal, but I’m sure that has happened.

[00:46:26] Nick: Yeah, it does. It does happen. That’s one of those things. As I said, to our owners, we’re an expensive management company because of the additional services that we offer our guests. And sometimes that doesn’t work. The property’s needing to sweat, be sweat.

[00:46:43] It needs 250, 300 nights of occupancy a year. At as low cost as possible, there might be a better manager for that unit. We’re not afraid of saying, you’re buying a property, but I don’t think we can provide the management services. And that’s always a bit sad, but that’s the way it is.

[00:47:00] Ultimately, we’ve made a decision to try and stick to our principles and what we want to deliver in terms of service and value to all of our guests and our owners. And if you’re consistent in that, it makes it very easy to be able to talk to your client.

[00:47:17] Sarah: And we don’t need specific numbers. I’m just talking high-level. Does that translate into better profits for you guys, and for you, the owner, Nick, the co-owner, the co-founder? Because I know a lot of people, it can be very hard when you’re starting a business.

[00:47:33] You’re in year 3, 4, 5, 6. We actually have one of our community members right now going through this very thing of having to sit in that doing of the same thing, staying hyper focused, staying in the course. Introducing new things like your brokerage, you do that, I’m sure, at a very strategic time. But does it pay off, Nick? Being hyper focused, in your experience, does that mean more profits for the owners of the business?

[00:48:00] Nick: Absolutely. Yeah. Definitely, without a doubt. I think what it also leads to is better retention of the community. If you’re delivering value to the community through different products and services, your marketing reach and your advertising reach becomes a little bit broader into a slightly different segment. Your name and your brand gets spoken about a little bit more.

[00:48:20] And in terms of pure numbers, the real estate side of things is not a costly business to run. Yes, it’s high in commissions when an agent does a deal, and there’s some marketing which needs to happen, but a lot of the real estate marketing, it’s hard to differentiate.

[00:48:38] I know in the US you use Zillow. We have an equivalence here and then various other listing platforms. You can’t really differentiate. So ultimately, as a short-term rental portfolio, you’re able to sell the properties that you have mandated to your guests and no one else can tap into that.

[00:48:57] There are a lot of real estate competitors out there who are trying to find buyers, but you have a bit of a captive audience. And if you’re able to suggestively market your portfolio for sale to your guests, no one else is accessing those guests at that point in time. And in terms of profitability, look, it hasn’t doubled our business.

[00:49:19] It’s marginal. It’s probably 10% in terms of revenue, 10, 12, 15%, somewhere about there. But it delivers the full suite of products and services. And I think that’s more important. Where do we go in the long run? I’m not sure you can have some good years and some bad years, and the real estate market is hyper cyclical. And we go with the flow. We’ll keep on riding the wave.

[00:49:40] Annette: We’ve been fascinated by this when Sarah and I go to vacation rental conventions. You and your partner when, if any of your villas ever come up for sale, do you consider buying them yourselves and keeping them within your portfolio? Is that something that you talk about? And have you done that in the past, ones that are just like–

[00:49:59] Nick: Absolutely.

[00:50:00] Annette: Awesome. I want to ask about that. Is it just like, holy smokes? Do you have like a first right of refusal with your owners? Because you’re one of the few people that we’ve chatted with. We’re always like, if it’s crushing it, why don’t you just buy it? So how do you have that, this is crushing it? We’re keeping this within the Nox portfolio for yourselves.

[00:50:19] Nick: Good question. Generally, if the property is crushing it, it’s not going to go cheap.

[00:50:24] Annette: Right.

[00:50:24] Nick: And we’ll be doing a bit of injustice, a bad service to our homeowners. So my partner and I have a few properties in our portfolio, but they haven’t come from within the portfolio. They’ve been in the open market. We’ve identified these properties. We’ve gone, well, there’s an opportunity there. Let’s bring it in. It hasn’t been given the love and care that it really should have. It’s got all this sort of tourism potential. Let’s Noxify it, bring it in, and then we should be able to really get a decent yield of it. And some of the numbers are absolutely astounding with the properties that we have bought.

[00:51:01] Annette: So you’re trying to find those diamonds in the rough, something that has tourism appeal that’s on the market that you know you could do, like you said, Noxify it and it’ll bring in those numbers. Awesome.

[00:51:13] Nick: Absolutely.

[00:51:14] Annette: Because you’re familiar with the numbers in the area.

[00:51:17] Nick: That’s right. Having the real estate division brings you closer to the market. So you’re constantly watching it. You’re seeing what’s going on. You’re a little bit more closer to the cold face than you were just running a short-term rental operator.

[00:51:27] Annette: So that right there, that’s the gold. When you’re saying, hey, 10, 12, 15%, but what you said, is that proximity?

[00:51:35] Nick: Yeah.

[00:51:36] Annette: That part of that proximity to being closer to those deals, if you had a look at those properties that you and your partner own together, what is that margin on those? And you wouldn’t have that higher margin without doing some of the other work. And that’s where I think some people get so fixated on one stream in their business, not understanding how they all work are connected and flow together.

[00:51:59] Like you said, rent, buy, manage, sell, and then you’re networking as you’re doing that to find those properties. That’s brilliant. I think that’s the part that we want to share with listeners, is those doors open that way, by being more connected. And like you said, you’re hyperlocal. And you being hyperlocal and staying hyperlocal has also allowed you to see those deals.

[00:52:19] Nick: Definitely. You get a very good idea of realistic prices for a property when it’s being sold. And as a rental operator, we know what a fair daily rate is. It’s exactly the same thing. So if you start working in a bit more of a hybrid environment and you’re able to have access to what’s happening in the real estate market and you’re watching it closely because you’ve got alerts on various listings, in your weekly meeting working with the agents, you say, what’s happening out there? Have you seen anything that looks interesting?

[00:52:49] And they come to us and say, well, yeah, I’ve got a mandate on this property. Doesn’t look interesting to you? And you run the numbers and you go, not quite for me, but you know what? That’s a great property for somebody else who might be looking at buying and having a vacation or that they want to use a few times a year.

[00:53:05] Obviously, we don’t need to use the properties that we bought because we live around here. So it’s pure investment. 100%, that is our strategy. We want to be hyperlocal, keep it focused, keep it diversified, rather than expand internationally and have all kinds of operational complexity.

[00:53:26] Sarah: I have one final question for you. Annette might have one too. You’ve grown over the past two decades now. Does it get easier in terms of your investment of time, Nick? I think you could speak to a lot of hosts who are getting into managing for other people or growing their own portfolio, and they feel so burnt out, Nick. They feel so tired.

[00:53:47] And the thought of growing in any way, shape, or form feels almost impossible because they’re like, well, I can’t give possibly any more of myself. There’s a book out there, The 10X Rule, but it suggests that actually 10X-ing is easier than being on the smaller side. I don’t mean small in terms of hyper focused and hyperlocal, but just a few properties, a handful of properties. In your experience, has your life, your private, your personal life, has it actually gotten easier with the growth of your business and the maturity of it or not?

[00:54:14] Nick: Every business goes through those growing pains, and at a certain point in time, it reaches a point of maturity, and that is done and achieved off its leaders, off its custodians of the business. Richard and I have been extremely intentional over the last five years. We’ve adopted a methodology called the EOS. Entrepreneurial operating system. You familiar with it?

[00:54:39] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:54:40] Nick: Since we started implementing the principles of that methodology, it’s made things a lot easier in terms of us being able to have longevity in the organization. Yes, burnout is a thing. That homeowner calling you at 11:00 PM on a Saturday because the neighbor’s complaining or whatever it might be. So it’s interesting because over the last few years we’ve been able to design and structure the organizations.

[00:55:06] So we still know what is happening on a day-to-day basis, but we we’re able to put up the guardrails around where and how we can add value to the team, to our clients, and to the community. So yes, it does become easier. And I’m not too sure at what point a business can start to afford additional key members of managerial teams around them to create that buffer between you and everything else.

[00:55:33] But ultimately, I think it’s important that as hosts and as people in this industry, we’ve got to make sure that we don’t need to know that the toilet isn’t flashing at villa ABC. That’s fine. We don’t need to know everything that’s going on a day-to-day basis, and it’s quite important to be selective of where we’re committing our energy.

[00:55:56] Annette: And my final question for you is, I know that most of your team has been with you for over five years. I want to stay hyper focused on the cleaner because now that we know that they’re staying basically in one or two properties six days a week, how do you keep them motivated and engaged? Give us some tips there because that is monotonous work. It is the hardest work, and your retention is phenomenal. So if you could teach us a few things as we wrap up, that’d be awesome.

[00:56:23] Nick: Culture, culture, culture.

[00:56:25] Annette: But what does that mean? They’re at the home all by themselves. Help us.

[00:56:32] Nick: Cleaners. Yeah.

[00:56:34] Annette: How do we do that? How do we create a culture when we’re not in the home with them and make them feel that way, especially if it’s an individual owner? How would you say we could make them feel there’s a culture there?

[00:56:45] Nick: Branding. Put them in your uniform. Make them feel part of the organization. Give them a really nice apron. Look after them. When they need a bit of bleach, make sure it’s there in 10 minutes. Respect them, and they’ll respect you. And we find this with remote teams. If you’re able to deliver service to them, what they want and what they need, if they want to take a day’s leave, make sure that they’re on the app to be able to submit that day’s leave and get that response back to them immediately so they can plan their lives.

[00:57:15] It doesn’t matter where they are. If you respect anyone in your organization with what you expect back in terms of service delivery, they’ll stand by you. Don’t forget about them. There are as important as a person sitting in the office right next to you.

[00:57:32] Annette: Right, for sure. And then do you do any sort of incentive programs for them at all? After they’ve been on for a year or after they get X amount of reviews, what does that look like?

[00:57:41] Nick: Correct. Every three months we have a look through the reviews and they’re entitled to a quarterly incentive. They get all kinds of benefits, which they wouldn’t necessarily get in other organizations or in a hotel. The working conditions are really nice. Hotel cleaners can apparently clean 16 rooms a day, which is absolutely mind boggling. 

[00:58:01] So if you think about it, in a villa, that’s got 180 or 200 nights of occupancy, yeah, the work is not as intense. So I think the conditions really lend themselves to that sense of longevity in terms of what the alternatives are. And yeah, we look after them. They’re paid well. They’re part of the family, and we want them along for the ride for a long period of time.

[00:58:27] Sarah: Nick, where can our listeners see all the amazing properties that you manage? Where can they learn more about you and your ethos?

[00:58:34] Annette: See them. They need to book them when they’re going on their trip to South Africa.

[00:58:38] Sarah: Yes. Tell us where they can find you.

[00:58:40] Nick: Our main website is www.nox,N-O-X,.capetown. C-A-P-E-T-O-W-N. And off that we’ve got three other websites, one which will bridge into our rentals website where our guests can book. It’s noxrentals.com. The second we’ll take users through to our property website, and the third one will take users through to our management website, which is geared for our homeowners. And yeah, we’d love to see any listeners from anywhere in the world come down to Cape Town, come visit the place.

[00:59:15] Annette: Yes, tell them we sent you.

[00:59:16] Nick: And don’t worry about the safety. I know we’ve got a bad safety record, and everybody goes, oh, you’re going to Africa. You’re either going to be eaten by a lion or shot at or something. Crime and everything else, it’s not that bad. It really is a wonderful place to visit. 70% of our 5,000 bookings a year come in from overseas, and we have many, many returning guests coming in every year and have done for the last 20 years.

[00:59:44] Sarah: I didn’t hear about the animals eating me, but I’m glad that it’s not as bad as the media makes it out to be. Nick, thank you so much for imparting your knowledge today to everyone who’s tuning in, including Annette and myself. We learn something every time, and my gosh, you turned some things in our heads today, and I am so grateful for you sharing. With that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

[01:00:06] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[01:00:08] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting

[01:00:08] Sarah: Talk to you next time.