The Modern Hotelier #179: How Video Can Supercharge Your Website | with Jason Craparo
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Steve Carran: Welcome to a special episode of The Modern Hotelier. We are coming to you from the Dallara IndyCar Factory in Indianapolis, Indiana. We are joined today by Jason Craparo, CEO of Hovr. Thanks for joining us. Jason. How are you doing?
Jason Craparo: I'm doing great. My pleasure. What a fantastic event, we're happy to be here.
Steve Carran: So, Jason, first thing I noticed when you walked in was this. IndyCar attire you have on. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? 
Jason Craparo: Yeah, so we've got a super creative team and one of our employees, actually our chief product officer, Rachel, she's from Indiana, huge, Indy 500. She's there every year. She goes, we gotta do matching shirts. And we're like, all right, let's do it. She designed everything down to the logo, the sponsors, these are all our, our new branding, our patches, and the numbers on the back. I have number one is. The number that you joined the company. So I was the first employee and all the way up to 15.
Steve Carran: Now I saw her do the IndyCar racing outside. And I've never seen somebody, somebody so excited as her when she got out. 
Jason Craparo: Literally ear to ear, I mean, that was a dream come true for her.
David M.: So I know Hovr well, but for those who don't know Hovr, talk about the guest experience problem that you're solving. 
Jason Craparo: Sure. So people want to go on vacation, they wanna travel they wanna experience new things and they're having a really hard time on current websites, being able to book with confidence.
They wanna know what it's really like. And so video obviously is one. So, uh, the average US adult is spending six hours and 45 minutes a day consuming video. 87% of all web traffic is video. And so. They video one. And so the websites though, they have large blocks of text images that are maybe outdated.
We're talking about hair blow dryers and ironing boards, uh, and square footage. And people just really wanna see the video. And so, uh, with Hovr’s product of Suite, uh, suite of products, we have the ability for marketers to just drag and drop video elements that allow their guests on the website to book with confidence.
Steve Carran: That's great. And some of the hot topics in hospitality this year have been AI automation data. How is Hovr utilizing those tools to bring value to hotels? 
Jason Craparo: Well, we view AI. We have a generative AI product, and we view AI as allowing the human to do things that they ought to do or want to do just a little bit faster.
And so if you think about Hovr, there's a couple of variables that you kind of have to do. You gotta go, well, which page should I start with? Video. And, and where on this page should I put the video? And we have a couple features. So which feature should I use? And, and well, if I'm gonna use that feature, which content from my whole library should I use?
And then where do I send them? So it's about five key variables. And our generative AI product tells you what page to use, which area of the website's gonna have the greatest impact on your revenue generation, what video you should use and where to send them. And so it helps the our admin user, do what they wanna do a lot faster.
David M.: That's great. And so I'm the old guy here. I've been around a long time in hospitality. The tech stack keeps getting bigger and bigger hotels, their biggest pain point is integration. So maybe tell everyone how simple it is to, to, to plug in Hovr. 
Jason Craparo: Yeah. So we've got one snippet of code and you just copy and paste it and you email it to a developer and you say, can you put that in?
And it's a two minute task for them. Uh, and then they're ready to go. The marketers are ready to drag and drop any website, whether it's WordPress or custom built. Anything under the sun we integrate with. But the really cool thing is that hospitality is such a family affair, you know, like we play well and, and other people play well in the sandbox.
So it's just been so nice for us to come in and have so many large companies and small. Uh, wanna resell us or add us to their stack. And if I'm marketing, I Hovr can help me if I'm an advertiser. Hovr can help the roas. If I'm building websites, Hovr can help, you know, deliver efficient video. So, uh, we also play well with so many other players in the space.
David M.: That's great. 
Steve Carran: Absolutely. So I've seen more and more hotels utilizing video on their website. Thanks to Hovr. How are you seeing video increase engagement for hotels? 
Jason Craparo: Oh, abs, it's. It's astronomical. Honestly, it's, it's a, um, you know, images are cool, but the average human being can process an image in 13 milliseconds that's faster than it takes us to blink.
So when we see an image, we've already processed it. We know what the room's like, and so we're innovating even further. By the moment your eye processes, that image, we transfer it into, video image is gone. You start to process the text. And now you're back into video. We continue to just push the envelope, listen to our customers as to what they're seeing.
Our engagement rates, we regularly benchmark over 25%. We wanna see minimally 10 to 15% click through rates. Um, when somebody sees video, the eye is just drawn to it. When the video's delivered in a story format, like our, the human brain is a story addict, we, we seek out a character, and then every night when we go to bed, our brain stays up and tells itself stories.
So it's looking for a good character, it's looking for a good character. And, and so when you can zoom out like a good nineties sitcom and say, you know, like full house, Hey, we're, we're in San Francisco, we're in this neighborhood, we're actually in this house. And then it's the family and stuff. So that's what we try to do is not just deliver video, but in a story format where the brain can pick it up and follow the story and we get you excited. So excited. That you kind of stop everything you're doing and you book now. 
David M.: That's great. Well, we really appreciate you sitting down with us. I hope you have a great HITEC, but better yet, I hope you have a great night. So thank you for joining us.
Jason Craparo: Thank you. Appreciate you guys. 
Steve Carran: Thank you, Jason, so much, brother