The Modern Hotelier #141: Transforming Hotel Websites into Direct Booking Machines | with Tarun Goyal
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Steve Carran: Welcome to another episode of the Modern Hotelier. We're excited to release a conversation with Tarun Goyal, founder and CEO of Simplotel. David, what were some of your favorite takeaways from this episode?
David: Well, I think with all the independent hotels that either listening or that we have interviewed and talked about, it's a great concept of leveraging what the OTAs do well to help you get more direct business. So kind of taking and stealing those tricks of the big guys to help your, you know, smaller independent hotels are, is, is just a smart concept.
Steve Carran: Absolutely. I loved how he was talking about Simplotel, you know, as the the potential guest comes to the website, it changes and personalizes and remembers what that guest was looking at or interested in. In the age of hyper personalization, I feel like that's one way that hotels can definitely drive more direct bookings.
So, enjoy the episode and let us know what you think!
David: Enjoy it.

David: welcome to the modern hotel. Your hospitality is most engaged podcast. I'm David Molloy,
Steve Carran: I'm Steve
Jon Bumhoffer: And I'm John Boomhoffer.
David: Steve. Who do we have on the program today?
Steve Carran: Yeah, David. Today we have on Tarun Goyal, the founder and CEO of Simplotel. Tarun has an impressive background of product management, which has helped him be a CEO for the past 12 years. Simplotel is a technology company focusing on improving digital presence for hotels across the globe. Welcome to the show, Tarun.
Tarun Goyal: Thank you for having me, Steve.
David: All right, great. So we're going to get started. So we're going to go through a quick lightning round. We're going to get to know you better where you grew up your career, and then we're going to dive into some industry questions sound good.
Tarun Goyal: Fantastic. Just don't ask me very hard questions.
David: Oh,
no, don't worry. You're going to do great. What's something you wish you were better at?
Tarun Goyal: Omnic speaking, probably. I'd love to be better at that.
David: Okay, good. What's the most used app on your phone?
Tarun Goyal: Black. And I hate that.
David: What's, what's
a luxury you can't live without?
Tarun Goyal: My yoga class and the morning coffee. These two, you take them away and my life is empty.
David: All right, so if you could trade places with someone for a day, who would you trade places with?
Tarun Goyal: that's an interesting one. I'd probably take places with my wife. I think she lives in a very interesting world that I would love to be a part of.
David: So what's your favorite city and why?
Tarun Goyal: New York City. Just love the energy there. The second one is Mumbai, which is very close to New York, right? so these large cities with a lot of cafes, restaurants, just the energy is, uh,
David: that's great.
The last one, if you could have a superpower, what would it be?
Tarun Goyal: read people's minds.
David: Oh, that's a good one. All right.
Steve Carran: Very well done. Well done. So now we're going to get into your background a little bit more about what makes you tick. So, let me see if I can get this right. You grew up in Ahmed, Badaad, India, which is on the West side of India. how did that shape you into who you are today?
Tarun Goyal: So if you look at somebody's life, it's a collection of events that happen to get you there. And while things are happening, you really don't know. Why those events are happening. So Ahmedabad is known for being very entrepreneurial. Like when I was growing up, you know, India is a very patriarchal society, but all my friends, moms would be investing in stock markets, but most people would not even know that most people out there would run businesses.
Right. So, the. People in, in that city are extremely enterprising and extremely entrepreneurial. And I'm sure some of what I'm doing is, a result of what I saw growing up over there. The other thing is I've actually lived in nine different states across my life, right? So it's hard to sort of compartment life life and said, you know, I got this from here.
From there,
David: And so you got your degree in electronics engineering. You then got your MBA in business administration and management. What caused you to those majors?
Tarun Goyal: I, I'm a strong analytically and I think by behavior, I'm an engineer. Like I like to think around with things. I like to break things. I'll open up. I will open up a TV to just see what's inside it, right? The way, I consume a lot of technology and I like to build technology, right? So that part of me is an engineer, but I also knew very well that I did not want to be the one creating the technology, right?
So, uh, we went to some software contest when I was in college. I was really good at programming, but I really wanted to learn the business side of things, right? So, And I also wanted to live in the United States. So with those choices said, you know, I don't get an MBA in the U S and I liked it so much.
If I don't spend the next 16 years of my life in the U S in various cities.
Steve Carran: And that kind of leads into our next question. Coming from India to the United States, was it culturally hard to adapt to some of the cultures in the U. S. coming from India? And do you have any, I guess, differences that really stuck out to you when you came to the U. S.?
Tarun Goyal: I mean, I think plenty, if you'd asked me this question in 1996, when I moved to the U S I'd give you a laundry list, but, you know, very simple things like the world wasn't as close as it is today at that time. Like, I mean, the internet was not there. only exposure to the U. S. was the American films that we had watched, right?
And those give you like some warped view of the American culture, right? I mean, it's not, we don't really, you know, today it's very distant, right? Because you, there's a lot more media out there. So you show up and maybe a simple thing, like when you ask somebody, how are you? In India, you'd say, I'm fine. And in the U.
S. we say, I'm good. And, and that causes the distance. It takes a little bit of time to just adapt, right? There's like a whole slew. I'm vegetarian. So I went to, a pizza place and, uh, they had pepperoni pizza. And I thought pepperoni must be bell peppers. So I ordered one of those and I got a slice of something that looked like meat.  
And, uh, I went to that person and I said, is this non vegetarian? And they kind of said to me, funny, because you know, what is non vegetarian? So I think I could go on and on. It's just, uh, An amusing, uh, list of, things that you stumble at by the time you adapt, right? You just keep hitting one of these things and it's, uh, for somebody observing it, it's actually quite funny, what a new person from a different culture does there.
Steve Carran: I never thought about the pepperoni thing. I totally see your perspective on it. Should be peppers, but, that's funny. So now we're going to dive into a little bit more into your career and how you became the CEO and founder of Simplotel. So after college, you did some consulting, then you were a product manager for JDA software, then a product manager at Amazon.
Before you became a project manager at Amazon, you, uh, dabbled in finance a little bit, at Amazon, but I understand you didn't enjoy the finance side of it, but
Tarun Goyal: How do you know this? How, how do you know 
this, 
Steve Carran: Hey, we got it. We got to do your research
Tarun Goyal: you, you have the superpower that I'm looking for. You can read my mind here.
Steve Carran: So from my understanding, you didn't really enjoy the finance that you did, but I'm sure it helped you as a CEO. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Tarun Goyal: Yeah, so I think you're absolutely right. When I graduated from an MBA program, I was majoring in finance and my whole rationale of majoring in finance was I felt like this was one skill that would be hard to learn outside, right? I mean, you could learn a lot of other things, but It's a very concrete, um, still.
So I graduated with a degree in finance and I always had this thing that I must learn finance. Right. Uh, so I was a product manager doing, having a reasonably successful career. I get this opportunity at Amazon and finance. And now I'm like, Oh, remember you wanted to do finance and Amazon, right? Let's go do it.
Right. And I show up in finance. Uh, it was a good experience, meaning you get a lot of visibility into the business. But what I didn't like about financials, I was missing in action. I felt like. I was in a support role that was helping the business grow, but I really liked being in the business growing it, right?
So I did not like it. I did my term there and then I moved back to product management inside Amazon. But what I learned there is. Like when I was raising funds for Simplotel, right? That experience of creating a case for why we need another few hundred million dollar investment in warehouses, right?
How do you present such cases to executives, right? How do you measure a business, right? From a P& L perspective. So today, you know, uh, the other day my finance guy came to me and there were some things that he wanted to explain to me in my books. And afterwards, you know, he gave me a compliment. He Tarun, I did not think that you would get it this quickly, right? While at that time, and this is an advice that I give a lot of people as well, right? Life things in life happen for a reason. You just don't know. Ultimately, when you look back in life, I feel like something conspired to gimme that one year in finance because I really needed that skill and I think I'm a lot more effective attel because I did that one year also.
I did not like it, right? There's so much goodness that came outta it, right? So yes, but I'm actually surprised you know that I did not like this. I have, I have to sync up with you offline to figure out how you're reading my mind, Steve. It's scary.
David: Well, that's great. So then you went to Expedia as a program manager and then Mantra as VP of products. So what did you learn from those two roles that you take with you and you kind of use in your day to day right now?
Tarun Goyal: You know, it's actually, what is even more interesting is what did I have to undergoing from Amazon to Expedia, right? So, you know, I think I was very arrogant at that time. I was a kid, I think, uh, and, you know, going from Amazon, I was like, Oh, I understand e commerce. I know how this whole thing works. What I did not realize at that time is that the way e commerce works in travel and the way e commerce works in product e commerce is vastly different.
And as you think about it in. Product e commerce channel loyalty becomes easy to create. Like, you know, if you want to buy something, you quickly gravitate to an Amazon, right? And the reason for that is, you know, speed of delivery becomes important, reliability of delivery, authentic products. If you ever have an issue, the ease of return, right?
All of those things start forming a moat around the business, right? In travel. People switch channels quite easily because ultimately the fulfillment is an email that you get from an airline, right? If you're buying a United Airlines ticket, whether you buy it on an Expedia or a Priceline or unitedairlines.
com or united. com, right? The experience that you get is exactly the same in most cases, right? So people switch a lot more, right? So that was one thing that at Amazon, you know, we assume that when somebody is coming to your site, they actually end up going to buy with you, right? The second thing that unlearn was In travel, the searches actually start on Google.
Whereas with product, the searches were starting on Amazon. So we did not care as much about SEO or ranking on, on Google as much as we did in, in, in Expedia, right? So although a lot of other things are similar, right? Like how do you drive conversion? What does a checkout look like? How do you build a site?
And you know, what are the levers? But you know, these two fundamental customer behaviors. So although at a 10, 000 foot level, they're both e commerce, They're vastly different. And if you can understand these, and if you can take advantage of these, and if you look at the way OTAs work, they take advantage of these.
These differences and they, it helps them drive substantial conversion out of it. So I think David, it was more about unlearning. And I wish I had unlearned faster. It took me almost five, six months to like figure out that this beast that I'm dealing with is different, right? You 
Steve Carran: That's great. And in 2013, you started Simplotel. How did you get the idea and what was the main, what was the main reason that you decided to start Simplotel? I want the honest one.
Tarun Goyal: So the first answer is actually easier, right? What gave me the, the impetus, right? So I was very, Amazed by Shopify and what they did, right? We used to have a business at Amazon called Web Store by Amazon. And I used to close that, that closed as well, right? I just felt like as e commerce is happening, individual product owners should have a way to sell online, right?
And then when I went to Expedia, I saw sort of the commission structure that was going out there. So I saw this huge shift happening to online. And I saw this huge, imagine if you're a business owner and if you're Investing all the capital, you're taking all the risks. And then, you know, you have to pay a huge percentage of your top line, not your bottom line for bookings that are growing, right?
So I felt like, and I saw the kind of technology that they were building, and I was like, if the small hoteliers or an independent or a boutique hotel has a chance to compete with any good tech, right? So that was sort of like how these ideas came together, right? And what I started doing was I gave up my job and I started selling.
And in about two months, I signed up about 15 to 20 hotels, and that sort of gave me conviction. These hotels were writing checks to me, right? Saying, if you build this product, right? We will, we will use it. So that gave me the conviction. Now, the more juicy part of the story, you know, why did I start it? I think it was midlife crisis too, right?
When you turn 37, so when I graduated from my MBA program, first job interview, when they asked me, what do you want to do long term? You know, it's one of those standard questions, right? My response was, I want to start my own company. And that went on for every job that I did, which were actually three in my career.
And then. When I turned 37, I was like, either change that answer or do it now, because when you're going to be 60, you may not have the energy. Now I'm 50, I don't see the energy there. But that was really the trigger point to give up the job and say, Hey, it's now, or, you know, you will not have a time, which essentially is midlife crisis.
You see a lot of people around that age make a lot of decisions. You know, we, we moved to India that I think was midlife crisis also, because, you know, we were like, if you have to move to India, this is the right time. We started Simplotel. I think that was really midlife crisis and nothing else to you.
Steve Carran: now. I totally understand what you're going through. That's
Tarun Goyal: wish I could read your mind. I could have a question for you, Steve.
David: Yeah. No, you guys. Yeah. You guys are making me feel really old because I did not have a midlife crisis at 37. I'm just having it now. Probably. All right.
So for those
who may not be familiar. Can you give us an overview of Simplotel? Like give us some more, like more of the details behind it, you know, and how it's actually impacting hotels.
Tarun Goyal: So we started Simplotel with a single purpose in life. The lens at which we view the world is how do we drive direct bookings for hotels? The single metric that is shared in our entire organization every morning is how many room nights did all the hotels On our, that are using our technology produced the previous day, right?
Uh, on an hourly basis, by the minute, right? So we, we think of our technology as a ways, uh, or a means for hotels to reach the goal of driving direct bookings, right? So we believe that one of the secret sauces here is, or not so secret sauce as such, right, is technology. See, if you, if you end up going to an Expedia, or if you go to an Amazon, or if you go to a booking.
com. Essentially, you're interacting with a website, whether you like it or not, that's a piece of tech, right? I mean, I know sometimes you don't think of website as a tech, but really it is, it is tech at the core of it. And so if you think about what happens in travel, people start their searches on Google, right?
How do you get more people to your store or to your website is an interesting problem, right? Second, we know that when people come to your website, they're not going to book in the first time. There's this research from Focus, right? That says, you know, customers can take visit up to 37 websites before they make a booking.
It is insane. 37 websites really, right? But that's what is happening. Now, if you look at hotel websites, they get judged by design largely, which they shouldn't be because you know, it's ultimately a hotel's brand, especially for independent boutique hotels, right? But if you knew this, that you're going to get a lot of traffic from Google, and if your website does not pull traffic, and if you don't realize that. Technology has a big role to play in pulling traffic to your website. You're off, right? Let's take a simple example. See, think about the world from the perspective of a Google engineer, right? they have to write software to crawl half a billion websites every day and create a catalog of those.
So that when you and I go and search for. a hotel in New York City or a hotel in Manhattan or a hotel on Upper Midside, right? They can actually show us the right set of listings, right? If our website loads fast for the software program of Google that is coming and reading the website, would Google reward us?
Would they be able to index our website better, right? So it's a lot of things are to make the Google crawler's life Easy when it's coming to read your website, right? And it's hundreds of things that you do. So we take care of that stuff and it's largely automated. So that stuff does not really break, right?
The second piece that we focus heavily on, in addition to all the hygiene things like the load time, we believe our booking engine loads faster than anybody else in the world. We just released something else yesterday, which makes it even more fast. So we're going to continue to do that, right? The other thing that There's a inherent assumption in our tech that the first time the customer is coming to the hotel website, he or she is not going to make that booking, right?
So it all becomes a massive data capturing machine. The system is tracking just like an Expedia or a booking. com, everything that you're doing. It is nudging you to log in so that I can get your email address. It's nudging you to fill in a form so that you can get this special offers mailed to you. And all this, nobody's doing this as a human, right?
It's all tech at the end of the day that's doing it. So. The hotel websites get similar capabilities at the booking. com does like if you go to booking. com search for New York City and don't make a booking right after some time you start getting mailers messages saying you know rooms are going fast in New York City they may even throw in a genius deal saying log in and you know there's a special offer just for you when you go there to booking.
com it shows you New York City it remembers the dates that you selected it you may even show you snapshots of the properties that you've searched over there right Booking. com has figured this out, Expedia has figured this out, but hotel websites, when you go back the fifth time over there, treat you like complete strangers, right?
So, what we've done, and we've shamelessly copied a lot of things that the OTAs do, right? And we make it available to independent hotels, because these behemoths have engineering teams that are, you know, like, Thousands of people now for an individual boutique hotel to afford that kind of tech becomes very hard But if we were to offer it as a sas platform, we can make that investment And deliver superior results to our customers today.
We work with about 3, 500 hotels across 26 countries. And the single metric that we hold ourselves accountable to is, did we increase their room nights from, from where they were, are we continuing to go their room nights for them online?
Steve Carran: That's very interesting. So I just, one thing that you said kind of piqued my interest. So like, if I do come back to the hotel website after the third, fourth, fifth time, is what I was interested going to remain kind of top of mind? Like here were the dates that you're interested. You were interested in the King's suite with, Whatever XYZ package associated with that.
So the website's actually going to remember what I was interested in when I come back.
Tarun Goyal: Absolutely. So we track everything for you, right? So we're tracking your, we nudge you for your information, depending on how far down the funnel. If we don't know you at all, right. When you come back, we say, Hey, it's great to see you again. Right. You don't even know your name. If you have filled in one of our nudges and we have your name, we may say, Hey, Steve, it's great to see you again.
our rooms in New York are selling fast for the dates that you're searching for. Click here, make a booking. We take you right to the point where you left off. Right. and take it to the next level. So see where, where we are heading with this stuff is imagine if I knew your birthday, Steve, and if you came to the website and they said, happy birthday, Steve, if you come stay with us in your birthday month, I have a special offer for you. So imagine the kind of things that we could do to drive that, that's where we are headed, right? What we want to do is be this massive data collection machine that's happening silently, which is what an OTA website largely is, right? If we're tracking what the customer is, gather all that data, use all that insight to the benefit, like, for example, if you made a booking and you come back to the hotel site, and I know your check in is tomorrow, why not do upsells instead of trying to sell you a room, right?
So, think different options that you could do over here and the intelligence you can build with all the clickstream data that you have about the hotel, with all the fingerprints that the guest is leaving. At various places. How do you get this person who is in a shopping mode, still trying to decide which hotel to book and which panel to book that hotel on to choose to book your hotel and directly on your website OTA is really the game that we're after that.
Steve Carran: That's awesome. My first thought process if I went to a hotel website and it said happy birthday on the 16th or happy birthday month or even like was offering upsells like hey we're looking forward to see you tomorrow just from the website. I'd be like wow. This experience is incredible. I can't imagine the experience that I'm going to be getting at this hotel.
It's kind of that hyper personalization age that we've, we've kind of talked about a few times, but that's, that's awesome. Go ahead.
Tarun Goyal: See, like if you're a loyal customer of a hotel, right? I mean, there's this hotel that I'd stay in frequently, right? Every time I go in there, right? They're like, welcome back. Right. Websites treat us like strangers and this is hospitality, right? People are coming there, especially if you look at the boutique independent hotels, right?
The reason that a guest wants to go stay at a boutique property is largely the experience, right? It's not the cookie cutter. Now, why do the websites, despite having all this data, just throw that data in a garbage bin and not use that to create this delightful experience, which your front desk and operations team.
Worked so hard to create like their hotels like this hotel that I go to all the time They know I like dark chocolates and they put dark chocolates on my bed instead of milk chocolates, right? Just because I gave them a compliment one. There's this other hotel where it But while having coffee and that's my poison right in the morning, I just complimented saying that, you know, I love your coffee when I was checking out, they gave me a bag of coffee right now.
Imagine how much harder is it to create that kind of an experience? Kudos to the hotels, the boutique, luxury, independent hotels, this time very hard, right? But on the e commerce site, right? They stop at a pretty looking website, right? And that's, if you change, like you have a good Ferrari and you put a good Ferrari engine in there and now this stuff runs, right?
That's the game we are after, Steve. 

Steve Carran: So you know, we've kind of, we've, we've heard from a few different companies that help hotels drive direct bookings. You know, what really makes Simplotel different and unique?
Is it the technology? Is it the people? What really, what really is it?
Tarun Goyal: Thank you for asking that question, Steve, right? See, most of the times, I think it's an overused word, right? That we help drive direct bookings, right? I think, uh, and that's part of the challenge that we have because, you know, there's so much noise out there, right? All our customers already have a website and they're like, why do we need you?
Right? Every time the test drive us in the bookings, they never leave us. So, key is technology, which of course would not have happened without the people, right? Ultimately, how much code will I write and how much ultimately is the team that pulls it off, right? We had a passionate bunch of people who are so focused on, we will spend hours, weeks, months, trying to figure out how to reduce a hundred milliseconds of load time from our website and booking engine.
It's insane, uh, what we do sometimes, right? It's just. Sometimes the team comes up and, you know, just yesterday, uh, one of the engineers that recently joined our team came to them and said, you know, I don't help you understand, you know, we spend all this time bringing our load time down by hundreds of seconds, right?
How does it even impact your business? It's just an ego trip that you're in. And I'm like, you know, just launch this feature and see the room nights that we were doing yesterday and the room nights that we will do today will be different, right? And he was amazed, like he just found that feature and we could see across our platform, the needle move, right?
Now the needle did not move by like 50%, right? But it'll move by three, four percentage points. Now if you do hundreds of such things in the in the tech world, right to Improve your conversion by like half a percentage point one percentage point So soon your conversion starts going by 20 percent, which is real dollars When it comes to the customer.
And so somewhere I feel like, you know, we are, we are maniacs. We are like obsessive compulsive disorder, people who are just going after, like, why is the conversion not happening? What can I do this even more? And how do I like. Another 15 seconds of no time, get rid of it from there, right? Could we do this?
Could we? And part of the problem, a part of the thing that is in our favor is because we do so few things. This is the only thing that we do for a living. We don't even have a channel manager. We don't even have a PMS, right? All we are after is. Drive direct bookings, right? So we are like a horse with blinders.
The only thing that we can see in the world is direct bookings. And we go after that problem, I believe deeper than most people. I'm sure anybody else could do it. I mean, there's no magic here. It's just the focus and the passion with which we build the tech over here. Right. We remember the customer, we make the website load fast.
When I was at Expedia, right, we did an AB test and we saw completely counterintuitive, right? When we gave guests the choice to pay now, pay at the hotel at Convergencia, right? I mean, just simple things like that, right? We give such choices to our customers, right? So it is almost like death by a thousand paper cuts, like to try e commerce from your site, you've got to get thousands of things, right?
And what we've done, and I think everybody knows this thousands of things. Now, if you go search on the internet, you'll find these thousands of things. What we've done is we've built technology. That automates 990 out of these thousand things that we could automate so that our customers sites Load fast.
They remember the customer they personalize they give guests the choice they do this they do that, right? So that's really it's no magic. It's just A fine art, if you will.
Steve Carran: And a lot of hard work, it seems.
Tarun Goyal: Absolutely. But it's fun, though.
David: That's good. So we talked about how personalization as kind of an OTA feature and how they've done a good job of perfecting that and making that more standard for guests who are coming back. What are some other, examples of what OTAs are doing that hotels can implement? They can implement with you.
Maybe they're going to help drive more direct bookings,  
Tarun Goyal: In fact, you know, if any one of our hoteliers wants to come, we'd give them a checklist of the, it's a few hundred point checklist, and they could take it to the current website people and booking agent people, and they could just implement those, right? The challenge is it's not a one time thing. Every time a change happened on the website, you got to make sure that.
So I think we can bucketize things, David, into a couple of categories. First is just, For lack of a better word, hygiene type stuff, right? Your website must be loading fast, right? Your mobile is important, right? I mean, it sounds cliche, but you'll still find, like, if you really want to drive phone calls to the hotel, right?
For banqueting, put a call button on your banquet page and you'll see the phones ring a lot more versus putting a phone number there, right? Now, when I tell you this, it sounds obvious, right? But go to a lot of hotel websites on the banquet page and still put a phone number. Now imagine somebody on mobile phone trying to like copy that number, doing it, right?
I mean, they might just, it's an opportunity that you're letting go, right? So one category of stuff is this, what I would like to call, you know, basics or hygiene, right? Website loads, fast videos. There are beautiful videos on boutique hotel sites. Slow internet connection, they just don't load. Now, YouTube has had this technology for years, where they detect your internet speed, and they will change the resolution of the video based on your internet speed. Why don't hotels do this, right? So your really nicely shot video does not load on this customer's side who's struggling with the internet a bit, and you lose out on that, that opportunity to, to market to that customer, right? So that's, that's one set of things, right? The other is Real features right that that for lack of a better word that that get into it, right?
For example, i'm tired of seeing websites and booking engines that look very different A lot of booking engines still load on third party domains, right with all the security concern. I mean, you know, honestly A customer does not know Simplotel, right? A guest who is trying to pick a hotel site. So I go from a nice hotel website and I go to a booking engine that says Simplotel in the URL, right?
You know, it's, it's silly. Some people will not book there because they think they are interacting with a third party, right? Now hotels are asked to pay money for this kind of stuff. Why? I mean, if your job is to drive room nights, why don't hotel guests do this kind of stuff, right? The next, all the action that's happening in the booking engine, The website is oblivious of, right?
It's almost like a great wall of China built between the website and the booking engine, right? So what I do here, like, oh, I will look for this suite and I look for this and I had this add on, right? And I come back to the website. It's complete stranger. So you know that great wall of China must ring town, right?
It must be, like, if you go to an Expedia or a booking. com, can you tell me where the website ends and where the booking engine starts? It's just one smooth, seamless experience for the user, right? But in an independent boutique hotel, there is a website and then there is a booking engine and there's a wall between them, like, and we're trying to, we're working on breaking down that wall, right?
So, literally, David, it's, and you know, we could, anybody who's interested, we could give them a check. There's thousands of things that we need to do. some of these are obvious, right? Like get your cycle load fast, right? If you have videos, great. We find good videos engage customers. Over 5 percent of customers start engaging, right?
But make sure that thing loads fast on, on mobile phones when somebody is not in their office on a high speed internet connection, right? So again, it's read by this house by a thousand paper cuts, we try to solve each one of these small things because that's the only thing that we do for a living.
And we have a large team that only does this thing, right? So therefore we sort of end up driving bookings for our customers.
David: That's great. 
Steve Carran: That's great.
And when I think about websites, I just think about it's almost overwhelming. There are so many different components and things to think about when dealing with specifically a hotel website. Are there any key metrics that hotels should be looking at when evaluating their websites that might help drive direct booking?
Tarun Goyal: think part of the problem, Steve, is it's vendors like Simplotel, right? That make things complicated for people. But if If you really think of your website and you think about it as a store, right? So imagine if you're going to a Nordstrom or don't even know they exist, right? But a nice, nice store, right?
What are the things that you'd worry about in your store? Your website really is a store, right? The first thing is the footfall. Are people coming to your store? You can have the best store and the best merchandise. If nobody's visiting your store, you're not going to sell your product there, right? It doesn't matter.
you know, nothing else matters. The first thing, first metric that I would measure is footfall or what is known as traffic. And I would look at it based on what are you getting free from Google and what are you paying for from various sources, right? So I would look at, that metric and you could have several, but pick one or two metrics.
What is important over here is trends matter more than absolute numbers, right? you getting more people tomorrow than today? Are your marketing efforts and pay special attention to wherever you're paying for that traffic. That stuff better produce for you. The second thing that happens when you go to a store, you see this nice mannequin.
You see this nice display. You see this nice signage. You see this nice. Promotions, right? The goal here is to get the person who is coming to your store to fall in love with your product because if they come to your store and they don't like the product, you're not going to get that customer or you're not going to sell, right? In an e-commerce or a website world, this is known as engagement, right? And there can be several main measures of engagement. Is the person that you got to the website liking your product, is the merchandising happening here? The design matters. Here are the videos and the content matters here. The technology also matters 'cause imagine, again, a slow loading website, right?
You have the best video. The customer came. You did not load. You're not engaging the customers. You lost that person, right? So for engagement, there are several metrics. You could look at time spent, or you could look at bounds. I personally prefer bounds, right? But I would look at it by channels. So for your organic traffic, look at your engagement rate.
That should be your benchmark. Everything that is paid to try to approach as close as possible to the engagement of your organic traffic, right? The third. Thing that you want in the store now is that somebody's come, they've fallen in love with your product, now you want them to buy over here, not open up Amazon on their phone and get it shipped.
You know, the showrooming thing that's happening, right? Where people look at that item, find a cheaper deal and move, right? The third part is the checkout aisle of the store, which I think is your booking engine. How many times have you gone to a store and left the store if the checkout aisle is very long, right?
So, If your booking engine is loading slowly at that time, you're not going to convert this person that you've already sort of worked so hard to get on your website, spend dollars in marketing, spend dollars shooting that video, getting them enticed. Now they're going and booking it on Expedia because the booking was either too hard to use or loading too slowly, right?
So the third metric is conversion, which is Out of all the people that came, how many were, did you, were you able to get them to transact directly on your website, right? you can look at conversions as bookings per visits, bookings per booking engine visits, whatever you may want, right? But three large categories, you must look at traffic, you must look at engagement, and you must look at conversion, right?
Pick any metric on these and consistently monitor those week over week, month over month, year over year.
David: Great. And so we talked about hotels don't have the luxury of a product. Like most people will go to Amazon and just search for the product. So how do hotels do a better job of leveraging Google to drive more business?
Tarun Goyal: I think the piece that people miss out on, right? I mean, what is Google's job? Ultimately, why does Google even exist? Right? Google exists because when you and I go to Google and search for something, it shows us the best result, right? Because if tomorrow some other website or some of the search engines started showing better results than Google, there's very little cost for the consumer to switch from Google to some other platform, right?
So. Google's job is to show the best results to your customer. Now, I think if you keep that in mind, and if you build your websites for your customers, you will get Google to play along with you because that's aligning with Google, right? Now think about it, right? Google knows that people love fast loading sites, right?
So imagine if there are two websites that are completely equal in all other regards, but one loads faster, the other loads slower, which website will Google show to its customer? The fast loading one, because the customer cares about the load time on the site, right? If there are two websites that are completely equal, but one is mobile and device optimized, and the other is not, which one will Google prioritize?
The one that is mobile optimized, right? For people that are searching on mobile, right? So if you think about it, the goals of Google are no different than your customer goals, right? The second thing to keep in mind, right? So design your website for your customers, not for Google, is the number one advice, right?
Don't try to game Google. Just be authentic, right? Do the right thing for your customers. See, a lot of time our customers will come to us and say, you know, we want to, you know, we'd love to rank on this T. O. H. says best hotel in Manhattan, right? And we're like, okay, tell me why you're the best hotel in Manhattan.
If you can't answer that question well, Google is never going to rank you, right? So the other piece is the content, right? Third piece that usually gets missed out is tech. See, for example, imagine Google is like a librarian, right? It literally has to read. A billion websites and index them, right? So when you when we go and search for this hotel in manhattan It's not going and reading those sites earlier.
It's actually already read those books in the library and created an index for you, right now If you make Google's crawler's life easy, like giving them a table of contents, saying these are the pages in my book, right, which are essentially the pages of your website, also known as a sitemap, right?
Google crawler loves that because in the time it's giving you, it can crawl more of your pages. In the sitemap, if you tell Google that, you know, these pages have not been updated, but this page has been updated recently. Can you crawl this one before you crawl these other ones, right? You're using the bandwidth that Google is giving you a lot more effectively.
And when you do that, the Google does a better job indexing and does a better job, right? science, but a first point, look at your customers, design your websites for them. be authentic. Talk about if you want to rank on the best hotel and the customers around the world are saying it's a bad hotel, right?
Google reads your reviews also. We're not going to rank you for best hotels, right? Maybe pick a different, know your customers by becoming their third, invest in tech can drive you significant traffic to your site as well.
Steve Carran: That's great.
So, Tarun, we've been asking you the questions this whole time. So now we're going to turn the tables and we're going to let you ask David and I a question.
Tarun Goyal: My first question for you, Steve, is how did you know about my Amazon finance thing?
Steve Carran: I had to interview all your family and friends for this interview.
Tarun Goyal: Well, gosh, you're creepy, Steve.
David: Yeah, we hear that a lot.
Steve Carran: Yeah. Not the first
Tarun Goyal: It's scary. I mean, I don't think many people know that. So, I'm amazed that you found that out.
Steve Carran: to do my research for you.
Tarun Goyal: Well, you do it well, uh, maybe you should do some research for us as well. Uh, question for you. If we, like the question that you asked me, right, David, that, you know, it almost sounds unbelievable that you can drive direct, but we have data.
We have proof points, right? What would your advice be? What are some of the good ways to convince your tenures? Like, you know, we could even do a trial for them and say, or if an audit for them and say, this doesn't work, we'll give you your money back or whatever. Right. Any suggestions on what a good way is to convince, uh, the hoteliers?
Because it does feel like same again, same again, right? any suggestions on, uh, uh, what would you do if you were me?
David: Yeah. I mean, I think what you're doing is the right thing. So for me, when I look at, you know, you look at some of the booking engines that are out there, they're more than a decade old. Whether you look at the Synexis booking engine, the iHotel, your booking engine, they haven't really done many updates, but some of the things that you hit on was, Yeah, look who's succeeding.
Expedia, Booking.com A lot of times hotels get caught up in showing too much. So they have too many room types, too many rate plans. And then when you go to an OTA, you're like, wow, this is really simple. I was on the hotel's website and they had 20 room categories and six rate plans. And then I go to Expedia and it's like, you know, deluxe double double.
Here's the rate go, you know, breakfast, no breakfast. And so I think hotels need to start to think more about exactly what you said. How are they engaging with their customer and how are our customers used to being dealt with as they get more and things get more and more simplified. So Amazon doesn't look like a million dollars, the website, but it's simple.
You can search stuff, you can get what you want. You can check out very simply. So to your point, it's not only speed and actually how fast are things downloading, but it's speed to get from start of transaction. to end of transaction and another thing that hoteliers, especially, well, I say all hoteliers, they do a horrible job of leveraging the data they have to help improve business.
So, I mean, how many hotels have you stayed at or signed up and never got anything from the hotel or if you do get an email blast, it's always something that's like, this doesn't even connect to me. Like why, you know. Why are you sending me? I live in Phoenix. You're sending me a Thanksgiving getaway in New York City.
Like, I'm not leaving my family to go to New York City for Thanksgiving because you sent me an email. So, I think you hit on a lot of good points, but I think it's like you said, it's that culmination of, it's not one thing, you know, you hit on death by a thousand cuts. Well, hopefully it's staying alive by maybe taking a bunch of, a bunch of different vitamins or something of that nature.
So, I think you hit on a lot of good points. I would tell you just have to, have to make it a point.
Steve Carran: Well said. Well, that's great. So our producer, John, he's been listening to this episode for in the background for the whole time. So Turin, we are going to have him ask you one more question and 
Tarun Goyal: Oh my 
Steve Carran: get you out of here.
Tarun Goyal: now I'm scared. Go John. Sure.
Jon Bumhoffer: Yeah, yeah, you should. You should be. No, just kidding. Um, you kind of mentioned you asked David how you could convince hotels. I want my question was what to when people start using Simplotel, what are hotels saying? Like, what are the results that they're seeing? Do you have any numbers you could share or like how how it's impacting them and getting those direct bookings?
Tarun Goyal: I think the first thing that they, they say is it's unbelievable. Like, you know, everything that we're telling them when we're prospecting them, uh, there's a little bit of leap of faith on their side, if you will. Right. And then when they see the results, their jaws drop, right. And like, you know, we'll see, and we could share some data with you.
I don't have it right now, but you know, we launched a hotel website. Um, immediately we see the Google searches increased by like two or three X immediately. Like the minute that we launched it, like right there, you can see the, the graph sort of jump up. Right. Bookings, of course, they, uh, they're lagging.
So what we hear from hotels is almost like a disbelief, right? We didn't know this could happen, right? It's not unusual for us to have grown. website bookings by 2x, 3x of what they were doing, right? And then especially hotels that are heavily reliant on OTAs, we're able to shift substantial amount of that business.
The other thing that we've also heard sometimes, which was a complete surprise for me. So this is from very early hotelier that had signed up with us in the early days. And, you know, we were running a few experiments, you know, when we started putting videos on their website and started making them load fast, their OTA bookings also jumped.
So what we realized is that, you know, if there's a better price on OTAs or some other, you know, offer going on there, or, you know, the genius or whatever, right? At least this hotel won out against competition, right? So the other thing that is very interesting is these online channels actually help each other.
They're not as competitive as you think about. So a good website helps the OTAs. A good OTA ranking helps your website. A good TripAdvisor reviews helps your website, right? So. It's a combination of these things that come together, which are also sometimes surprising that, you know, a great website for the hotel sometimes jumps their OTA bookings, and that's another feedback that we get.
So we just didn't know that these things are so interrelated. Uh, right.
David: Well, that's great. Well, we really enjoyed this. That does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. This is where you get to let people know how to connect with you, how to connect with Simplotel. Plug away.
Tarun Goyal: Yeah. So we do free audits for you, if you're ever interested, if you want our checklist, happy to share that with you. Uh, Reach out to us, hello at simplotel. com, that's H E L L O at simplotel, S I M P L O T E L. com. Our website has our contact information, probably the best way to reach us.
David: Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier, Hospitality's most engaged podcast. Whether you're watching or listening, we appreciate you and hope to be with you again soon. Thank you for joining us.