GAIN Momentum - Lessons from Leaders in Hospitality, Travel, Food Service, & Technology

​GAIN Momentum episode #70: Video is the Future of Hotel and Travel Websites | with Jason Craparo
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Adam Mogelonsky: Welcome to the GAIN Momentum Podcast, focusing on timeless lessons from senior leaders in hospitality, travel, food service, and technology. I'm joined today by Jason Craparo, founder of Hovr. Jason, how are you doing?
Jason Craparo: I'm doing great. I'm doing great. It's here. How are you doing?
Adam Mogelonsky: I'm doing fantastic. It's a Friday afternoon and the start of spring and uh, I love the Banksy in the background. It's great for taking those meetings, I'm sure.
Jason Craparo: It's a metaphor for sure.
Adam Mogelonsky: So I'm wondering if we can start today's podcast off by doing a deep dive on what Hovr is. Give us the, uh, the sales pitch.
Jason Craparo: Sure. So Hovr is a digital storytelling platform. So in the market right now for travel and hospitality, We have the, the lowest conversion rate of all of online shopping and the highest cart abandonment rate. There's no easy way to deploy video. Um, but this, uh, this buyer in their decision making journey has dreaming.
It's the only industry that has dreaming as a stage. So these, uh, these pieces come together, right? It's like that we really need to. You know, boo sales, and people want to dream. And we know that the human brain is wired for stories. It craves stories and characters. And so what we do is we help brands tell the story of their unique resort or property, uh, airline, whatever makes you special, whatever way, uh, that you are differentiating, uh, in some way that a consumer finds meaningful.
We try to bring that out. And so we've developed features that seamlessly weave video components into the fabric of your website so that it feels native and any question that you're bringing up, that information or images or texts that you're using. Anytime you bring these things up on a website and they're causing more questions, we use a content touch where a human touch was once necessary.
Adam Mogelonsky: I love that you mentioned the term storytelling. And a lot of people probably don't know that about the, the dream phase of the guest journey for hotels versus other verticals. And I'm wondering, because a phrase I often use to govern how I work is the story is the specificity. So I'm wondering, without mentioning any names, could you give us a picture of how you've taken.
A website for a hotel in a certain category, and then deployed, deployed, Hovr, and really showing how that story can be expressed to show a net gain on the revenue side.
Jason Craparo: Yeah. Um, well. In particular, right? We'll take a, a hotel in New York City. So a lot of people know New York City, right? And, and they may even know some of the neighborhoods. But when you do a search for hotels in New York City or best hosts in new in hotels in New York City, you may end up on the hotel's website.
It's the hotel's job, just like a great nineties sitcom to say, Hey, here's the city, here's the neighborhood we're in, here's the street we're in. And so it's not like telling a story like this is Jill. Jill is going, uh, to get her hair done and Jill needs to find a place nearby. It's not, not telling that type of story, but.
Placing content in context. So here's where we are, and then we're getting local, now we're walking through the front door. Here's how it is. So kind of rolling out information that's a in just a five second span that helps us gain comfort. Oh, this is in, uh, Bryant Park or, oh, this is in the, the Lower East side.
I know where that is. That's only two blocks from this really cool restaurant I like to go to. we, we've put together, we have a feature we call pathways. Which is kind of like having your own Instagram stories or TikTok right on your site where you can just swipe up. It's mobile immersive, uh, it's actually optimized for the mobile device, but you see one clip that might be three to five seconds long, you swipe up to get to the next one.
Uh, the engagement on that is probably 35%. The click through rate is over 30%. but it's helping people understand where we are, what we can expect, and we're rolling out and kind of. Providing information for people on their websites in a way that they already know how to consume content.
The short form video has won. It's not going away. People don't have time to leave your website and go to, uh, YouTube and look through all the videos and try to figure out. Uh, the reviews on OTAs, um, and, and they say that, um, video is the new, is the new review anyway, right? Because people have different tastes, you may say, the pool scene's loud.
I came for the pool scene. you know, vary varying degrees of, uh, perception there.
Adam Mogelonsky: Awesome. So just going back to the dream face here and how that connects to the website, because we are talking about conversions, which is. Incentivizing the direct channel to do its job, which is to sell, sell rooms for as low a commission or cost of acquisition as possible. Tying that back to the dream phase, how does Hover help with connecting the dots with the dream phase to the booking phase?
Insofar as things like content, SEO, any sort of paid search and really driving that funnel to know what's gonna get people to the website.
Jason Craparo: Sure. Well, the clients that we speak with, is not the only initiative they have going on. So they've already paid someone tens of thousands of dollars for SEO, they're optimized, right? Uh, they're paying tens of thousands of dollars or, or close to that for many of them, uh, per month. On, on pay per click, right?
And so they're doing paid search, paid social, they're in these channels. And so when someone does land on your site, you wanna make sure that you, you're making the most out of that, that visit, right? Because, uh, Expedia reports that on average you're gonna visit 38 sites before you end up booking.
Well, my gosh, let's hijack those 38. Bring some of what they're looking for onto my site so that when they arrive we can answer the questions and we can drive them to an emotional state of excitement. What you're really looking for on a website is we've just paid all this money. We finally got them.
It's a golden gift. They arrived on our website. We don't wanna act too cool. I know a lot of sites, you know, they're optimized for design and we don't wanna show too much, or we don't want, we don't want the aesthetics off. You have one chance. To make a great impression and drive someone to a state of excitement and excitement is this anticipation of an experience that is novel and unique.
So you have to show them something that's novel and unique. And this could be your pool scene, it could be a rooftop lounge, it could be the horseback riding that's nearby the kids' club. It could even be the people that work there in the kids club and how, you know, this is such a family friendly place.
but to drive that type of excitement. You can infuse content to get people excited. It's the type of content they want to consume. Uh, I don't know anyone, uh, there's a stat out there that says like 85% of the text on a website goes unread. But a lot of marketers that we see, or just, I look at a lot of websites every single day.
They use a lot of text to try to describe and there's nothing wrong with that. But if 85% of it is going unread, we may want to use a medium. We know people are hip two, which is video.
Adam Mogelonsky: And on the content creation side, for those videos, we're talking about five to ten second clips, is that correct?
Jason Craparo: Yes, we believe, uh, and our data suggests that, this type of consumption is not long form. if you put out a 45 video, um. It's not gonna get consumed to the, to the end. Ironically though, uh, three, to five to seven second short clips stitched together, even 10 of them. We find that half the people that enter a pathway finish every single video. So you can consume collectively 60 seconds at once, but it's being broken up into clips. Um, which is a really great way to kind of, uh, get into again, the behavior. They're already scrolling, uh, these types of apps. And so to have that type of experience where I see I'm framed where we are in the city now I can see the activities.
Now I'm in the room. Now I can see the nightlife. It really goes and it adds to the experience. And of course there are calls to action offering them an off ramp at any point in this journey where they can say, okay, I've seen enough. I'm ready to book.
Adam Mogelonsky: that's very interesting about the TikTok effect, I guess, where everyone wants these very, very short clips. And I guess we all have a DD so, as it's said, a picture is worth a thousand words, but a video is worth a thousand pictures.
Jason Craparo: I have not heard that, but now I will start using that.
Adam Mogelonsky: There you go. You should, you should hire me, right? As a marketing officer or marketing executive. getting back to the whole idea of design aesthetic of the website and some hotel brands not wanting to disrupt that with, uh, any sort of over the top video content. How do you get around, get, get them around to seeing your side of the picture.
You've mentioned the 30% conversion and then of course there's the ROI side of things, which I believe is some astronomical figure that you can now say, but how do you get them around to see your side of things and just the ability to really drive engagement and conversions and revenues?
Jason Craparo: well, it's not really having them. Like see our side, so when they come to us, they want video. They want an efficient way to deploy video, and there is no efficient way currently to deploy video except going back to their web developers, whoever they may be, and doing like a YouTube embed. Harsh square, round angles, YouTube branding, videos at the end of those videos that pop up and that they're recommending things that don't have anything to do with your property.
So that's kind of like, or, or a Vimeo embed. Um, so those are kind of like the solutions, but there's no efficient way. And so when I say keeping the aesthetic, that is our job. So. When we hear feedback, um, this is how we innovate, where people, for example, say, you know, I love the anchors, or I love the text highlights, but wouldn't it be cool if you could do this and say, okay, so you want something more subtle.
You want this image to transform into a video when you hover over it or you tap. Uh, so a lot of our innovations come from our clients who at first it may seem like you know, I have a specific design I'm looking for where I like, for example, um, their text, we went, when we went to market, we had players that just had generic, uh, font and people were like, boy, I really want it to be more on my branding.
So now hover inherits the font of the client, right? We just pick it up. Uh, we just pick up their hex colors, right? They want it to, uh, blend in and seamlessly look like it was built custom for them. And so a lot of our time is spent. Trying to make it make it easy for people to say yes. Like, you know, you don't want it to seem jarring.
You want it to seamlessly weave into the fabric, as I said earlier, of the site. So a lot of our time is spent just listening to the client. What else, you know, where do you want to go with this? Uh, where else do you wanna deploy video? And we, we learn a lot from our clients, and then we build the things, and priority prioritize the things that they, they want us to build.
So that's kind of the secret too, is like, instead of us. Thinking of something, building it in a silo and then showing up and saying, ta-da, do you like this? We're constantly, every single day, I mean every single day, speaking to clients, uh, and prospects about what other problems they have, what needs they want.
and it could be around what we're doing and a little bit outside of it too, where we continue to kind of innovate.
Adam Mogelonsky: So to take a step back, the official term for what you're describing is lead user innovation in hospitality, and this is where I become a little bit of a devil's advocate. Hospitality is a rare bird. There's so much customization. Every hotel has different wants and needs. Eventually you have to put your foot down as a founder, as a leader, and decide on a path with limited resources what to do.
So take us a step back from the founding of Hover, when that was, and your initial vision, your idea, and then how you optimized for lead user innovation and as well your own vision for the product and knowing where the market was headed.
Jason Craparo: Yeah, so initially this was something that we had ideated for e-commerce. So you can imagine you go, you go onto the north face and you're looking at a tent and you're like, can I put this thing together like by myself on the mountain during a windy condition? Like what's this gonna be like? And so you would leave the site to go to YouTube and type in like Winona nine 10.
Assembly. Right? And so people do this all the time, even for like DIY projects and stuff. They, they go to YouTube and so we're like, wouldn't it be great to just. Deliver this video on site for them so that they can knock down this mental hurdle by the tent. And so we went to, uh, some conferences in e-commerce and people loved it, but they wanted customization.
They had 2000 SKUs, right? And so they, they had a lot, a hotel may have 10 different room types, and that's on the high end, right? Uh, so, so for us, we had an investor come in. He was in travel and hospitality. He really liked what we were doing. And he said, Hey, we believe this could be a multi-billion dollar exit if you never left travel.
And he's like, you should really give it a look. And so as we started to talk to prospects in travel and hospitality, we started to realize that they also had the same problem, but people weren't building tools. Necessarily, uh, like startups, all the, you know, e-commerce gets a lot of attention, right? It, it gets a lot of new tech, a lot of sizzle.
Uh, and so this was something where there wasn't a, a dominant player supporting these hotels. And the hotels usually had limited resources, so they needed to be able to drag and drop right on the site. They didn't like the fact that they had to talk to a web development agency, and that agency, uh, a lot of times we heard was not so responsive to them.
they were like, yeah, you know, one or two changes would be weeks, right? And so we wanted something that you could in 45 seconds go to the internet or, or Dropbox, Google Drive, wherever, bring your video in, trim it down. Deploy it on site in 45 seconds with call to actions and your branding. And people in this industry really liked that.
They liked the, you know, you think about a marketer for a hotel. Educated, experienced, creative, they have ideas, they wanna be able to move fast and do stuff, uh, but they're usually limited hamstring really by, uh, software developers who, you know, you gotta go through a cycle, project managers, QA cycles.
And so for us to be able to rapidly deploy the video and then any changes you wanna make. They really loved as well. So you could, you could optimize a call to action, you can swap it out, you can change the color, the appearance, anything of these moments in seconds. that was really powerful for this group.
And so we ended up going to digital travel connect out in San Diego with the technology and the revised focus to be able to support marketers and so in, in travel and hospitality. And I, I sponsored the event and spoke. To my surprise, when I got off stage, there was a line of people and they were like, Hey, can I talk to you?
Hey, this is really interesting. And so it was at that point where I just said, Hey, we, we wanna get to know these people a lot more, talk more in depth about their problems, their fears, their worries, uh, and then let's go to work. Really building a scalable solution for this, for this segment. they've adopted us.
I mean, it, it's scary going into a new industry because you know there's incumbents and there's players, but I. We have found the most friendly, helpful, um, not profit seeking, just friendships of people that'll be like, oh, you should try this event, or Let me make an intro to you. And, it really has taken a community.
We are certainly working really hard to try to, uh, deliver value for our clients and for this industry, but. Uh, people like Catherine Poet from uh, miles Partnership, like making introductions, telling me what events to go to. Nick Horgan, uh, at Amaze Insights, making introductions, advising David Mully from Gain coming in as our advisor, Chris Green.
Uh, so many people. Uh, then we ended up starting to get investment from CEOs of hotel groups that were like, Hey, this is the future of tech. And so we just feel like we've just been adopted and treated really well by this industry.
Adam Mogelonsky: It's people to people industry. Well, we're all super friendly. That's. Why we're here. You mentioned a lot in there talking about that journey and that initial big pivot from retail into travel and hospitality. Just to confirm before we move on, what year did that pivot occur? What stage of the company were you at?
Jason Craparo: So we had a working product. We were on the Shopify app store. So if you had an e-commerce storefront on Shopify one click plugin, it would inject the code add hover. And that was about 2023, the middle of 2023, where we said, we should take a look at, uh, travel and hospitality. And ever since then in about, um, you know, two years I guess coming up, it's been really wild.
Some of the largest, property management ownership groups and travel and hospitality. Not just hotels though, golf and leisure spa wellness, um, airlines now, um, the rail. So it's, it's lodging, but it's transportation, it's attractions, culinary nightlife. So, um, so, so much in this industry.
Adam Mogelonsky: So it's been a relatively recent pivot. The name of this podcast is Momentum. How do you manage that scale? Because it's very easy to be all over the map. And then hospitality is all about servicing customers, and then you don't have the proper support. You maybe staff up too quickly, you know, don't hire correctly.
How do you, how do you manage that scale?
Jason Craparo: Yeah, I'm like grinning because that's what I'm doing right now is trying to manage the scale. Um. We've got about, a hundred plus now, um, you know, hotels or, or sites that are happy paying customers. And, um, a hundred percent retention, which is wonderful, uh, and a hundred percent trial to close.
So anytime somebody tries it, they buy it. and so we have to continue to deliver on the brand promise, but by all accounts, from what we're seeing in the next two quarters, uh, we could bring on 650 more. Groups, hotels and, and just websites. So we are, we're trying to, we're hiring up, uh, we're trying to use technology as well.
So last year, just before High Tech, we released a new generative AI feature, uh, which we believe can help support the customer. Um, like we're here for people, but do people really wanna. See us and, and coordinate a meeting and, and have us like sit down and walk them through things initially. Yeah.
But in my history, I. In my experience, people want their answers solved. If they have que sorry, they want their questions solved, they want the answers to their questions. And so, uh, they don't necessarily need to talk to us. They, they want kind of the result without having to speak to us. And so what we, what we ended up doing was I told you that 45 second process.
That was a process that could take full teams 30 to 45 days. We brought it down to 45 seconds with a generative AI product. It's one second and no humans. And if you think about, uh, what we do, I'm just gonna break it down into a couple steps with a couple different variables. So your average client would have to think about the following things.
Well, which site? Which page on my site should I start with, right? Uh, where should I add video? Uh, which site? And then let's say, say the homepage or the rooms page or the amenities, right? So then you get that, that's one decision. And then you say, well, where on this page is the best place to put the first video?
maybe it's on top of this image. Maybe it's highlighting a piece of text or a phrase. We're bringing up some something that maybe a pro a perspective guest doesn't know about. So we wanna define that. Using content. And so we can then recommend which page, which place on the page is gonna perform best, and then which moment type to use, is it fill, is it a pathway?
Is it an anchor or a text highlight? Um, and then what content matches what you're trying to accomplish here. And the CTAs, so that generative AI product. Called suggestions can literally walk you through the happy path of which page to use. Where on the site, what type of moment should I drop, what type of content?
and do that all in one second for you. And we wanna lean more into that so that I. Our clients can use suggestions to be able to create an entire journey of videos for their guests on the web without having to do any heavy lifting. Like it can just be done for them. So that's, we wanna be here and we have, I.
Amazing customer success people, but we also want to continue to innovate and build technology so that, and, and I've been saying this for 20 years, the best customer success. You know, you hear like, uh, Verizon, 97% customer satisfaction. to me, the best customer success is the one you never have to use because it always works.
that would be the best case for me.
Adam Mogelonsky: Very interesting, the whole idea of generative ai and there's, and I love that you drilled down to one specific use case or multiples in terms of suggested. Deployment. The other side of artificial intelligence that we're seeing is the whole analytics side to tie back into what's gonna drive the most conversions, as well as looking beyond just website behavior into the actual product improvement.
So for instance, where I'm going with this is because you have that extra layer of interaction through hover. You not only know what's gonna. Work to improve the direct channel, but you also know what people are looking at the most. So therefore you can say, well, people are really interested in this dining outlet versus this dining outlet.
What does that say about the future of how you evolve the actual product? have you seen your product, uh, have you seen hover being used this way at all?
Jason Craparo: there's data that goes into the generative ai, which, which helps. Um, and then there's just our own observation of the data. You know, the roll up of all the data. And we can ascertain a lot from this, and we build products based on this. So ideally, in an ideal world, you know, you would come on a website and we'd say, Hey, you know, Adam looks like, these other 2,500 people that came yesterday and this piece of content did well.
So we'll show it to Adam. Then you don't engage with it. So we say, okay, no, no, maybe this one will do better. Oh, okay. He's watching that one. He likes that one. Okay, great. So now we're gonna, um, so what type of content do you like that's gonna drive you? Like if you are a couple coming for an anniversary, and you're, you're doing a staycation versus someone who's commuting in, uh, flying in with three kids.
You should be delivered different pieces of content, uh, because we're gonna show you the Rooftop lounge and the, the Michelin Star restaurant and the spa packages versus someone that's coming for the kids club and the pool and the nearby beach activities and such. So we're certainly like heading in that direction where we wanna dial it up, but it does come with crunching the data.
So we were surprised. Um, we used to have one call to action on every moment and. We realized, like when we first launched, we're like, okay, some people click on this button, some do not, but we didn't know like what happened afterward. So we're like, okay. So we had an idea in the company to add a secondary CTA.
And within three months, the secondary click and it, and it has sustained for over a year and a half that secondary CTA. So the primary could be book now view availability. Everyone wants you book, book, book. But the secondary one could be view all packages. See different room types, explore the hotel view amenities.
So there a lot of times people are ready to book fantastic. We have an off-ramp for you book now, but more often than not, two times as often. So it's a two to one ratio, pretty clear. Uh, people are still in the process of gathering, more information and evaluating alternatives. So equally as powerful as a direct booking right now is.
Do you want to take a next step with us? Would you like to see the room packages? So we get 'em over to that site. Right now you're on the room packages or the deals or the specials, and we show you another piece of content. We say, would you like to book now or would you like to see the differences in the room types?
Right? And so if we can get you to go through a couple different pages where typically you would just abandon, right? That's why the card abandonment rate is high. People go in, they check prices, they look and then they, and then just go. We believe. Um, have you, have you read the, uh, Lululemon case study,
so, uh, the, the Lululemon, you know, the clothing company, they, they did a case study on it, uh, when I was in grad school.
And they don't call their salespeople. Salespeople, they call them educators. And so they hedged on the bet that, and, and they thought that their clients, if someone became educated on why our technology, the silver sweat wicking technology, right? And all the other innovations that they put in, if we could just educate people, they would come to the conclusion that it was worth the $96 for a t-shirt, right?
So Lululemon. Has educators. If you go into the store and you touch something and you look at it, someone may come up near you and say, Hey, this is actually part of our tech line. It's got silver wicking technology. So you are there to educate and inspire, right? And then they have the personal touches with your name on the dressing board.
But that's kind of not, not necessarily new and novel. And same thing with hover. Like we think that if we can educate you and inspire you in a site visit. Uh, driving you to that level of excitement that you're gonna figure out that this is the place you want to be, that this is the place you wanna spend time on.
So, we do want direct bookings and we certainly crunch the data on that. And I'll, I'll touch more on that again to your actual specific question. But what we found is if we can get you to go to a couple more pages, consume a couple more pieces of content, become more educated about the differentiation in this spot, you're more likely to book as well.
Adam Mogelonsky: I love how. You've drawn the connection, the Venn diagram between excitement, inspiration, education, and the word I use is just plain trust. The reason why people don't buy from you that book now button, whether that's a hotel or visiting one destination versus the other for travel, is 'cause they don't trust you enough.
And travel and hospitality is a very personal experience. When you're going to a hotel, you're trusting the host to take care of you. While you are not conscious. In the middle of the night, you're trusting that your beds are gonna be good, that the rooms don't smell, that there's no bed bugs, that the air conditioner is relatively silent, cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And then travel. They wanna know, is this destination safe when I get outta the airport? Uh, and uh, are there gonna be cabs that even take me to my hotel? This is the video is king, the medium is the message, and you're essential. Essentially just giving them that story to develop trust with the product, be that a room or, or an airline or a nightclub, et cetera.
Jason Craparo: It's trust and the word we use is confidence.
So the only people don't make decisions they don't have to make. And the only reason you abandon your cart. Is because of indecisiveness, you don't wanna make a mistake. And so when the amygdala senses fear, stress. Release cortisol. You're like, no, no, I'm good.
I don't know. Like I, for me, I have three little kids, a five, seven, and nine. I go on a trip. I need to know what this place is gonna be like. I need to know our location. Uh, I can't get it wrong, especially if we're flying across country or a six hour drive. So if you can help squash my fears, show me a good time.
Make it demystified that when you say trust, outdated photos, really long descriptions that could be generated by chat GPT, you know, on your website. Um, you know, I don't know how old these photos are, there's no timestamp on photos, on websites, you know, I don't know if the place is under construction, so people just trust.
Video, I can actually see it for myself, even with a couple of our hotels where honestly the videos were taken, um, with an iPhone 15, just a simple pan, two seconds from one side of the room to the next, you go, I know what this place is like, okay, there's enough room for us. Um, so absolutely trust is key and we want people to be able to book with confidence, not feel like you were, kind of duped into, well, we showed him just enough to get him to book.
But we didn't show 'em all the bad things, and certainly we don't portray or project the bad things. We just try to show you the real feel of people that are at the, at the property.
Adam Mogelonsky: we've talked a lot about the confidence being reflected in increased conversion rate. I'm wondering, do you also have any metric to share with us insofar as more or increased time on site, which is another one that is related to that.
Jason Craparo: We do. So, um, your bounce rates, uh, typically our clients, I think across the board. The bounce rates go down, especially if you have a pin, uh, above the fold, so the page loads and there's something there more likely to just tap in. they do spend more time. They also go to more pages as well. Uh, so there are a lot of cross page traffic.
and this is, you know, when we started, like I said, 2013. Um, in this segment we didn't have great attribution tracking, but as we, as we found out, travel and hospitality, right? People have budgets they think products have to perform. So we do have a subset of clients who they just wanna make sure they have video for people, so they wanna see the performance of the video.
So we get granular into. Did someone hover over this element? Did they engage with it? How long did they watch it if they watch it, did they click the CTAs? All, all of those kind of things with the video components, every single element, every single video gets all of that treatment and more. But then our clients also wanted to know what type of an impact is this having?
So. We had to beef up the attribution and really the, the logical answer was just creating a booking engine pixel so that the client could see the difference between. Someone watching a video and then purchasing a package and not watching a video and purchasing something. and then also if they did watch a video and bought how much, how much are you bringing us?
And so the ROI figure we have, we just got a stat from, uh, the Pink Shell, which is a, an amazing resort down in Fort Myers, um, that they're over a one over 100. ROI, that's an outlier. but in terms of, so we call it ROI because that's what the clients call it. We internally call it hover influenced revenue.
By all accounts. This is our client's traffic. They either bought it or earned it in some way. So what we do is we just raise our hand with, with this attribution tracking and say. There was a client there, there was a prospect right on your site who did engage with a video and they did purchase, and here's how much that that was.
Um, and so that, that's something that we had to build that was like an industry standard where you have to be able to show people what you know. It's great that we're delivering video. It's great. They stayed longer. It's great they watch three videos, but how much did we actually earn from this? And so some of our clients that pay just a few hundred dollars a month.
Are seeing over a hundred thousand dollars, in influence revenue every single month, which is phenomenal. And what we find in the data, so just back to the stats and what we're compiling, and this is how powerful video is too, across now almost a hundred thousand transactions that we've compiled just in the last few months.
We know that if you watch a video. and, uh, book, you will spend about $211 on average. If you don't watch a video and book, you'll spend 1 69. So, you know, a about a 30% jump if you watch a video. And so you think, well, why would this be the case? And so we're, we're hypothesizing, but this is kind of what we hypothesize, is that watching the video.
made you potentially book a longer stay. You realize there's more to do here. So it might be adding another night. It might be upgrading to a better package now that you've act. So a lot of our clients, if you're showing all your room types, well, wouldn't you wanna show a video of your nicest room type?
Or, uh, if you want 'em to move from like a, a basic deluxe to some type of king, junior suite or something. So, there's that, or then ancillary items too, like adding other packages, uh, you know, breakfast or the, the flowers, roses, whatever it is.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. Yeah. You took the words right outta my mouth. The second you mentioned a, a book, a booking pixel. The first thing I thought of is how can we use that to track more ancillary spend and show something related to total revenues? And again, that goes right back to trust is a lot of times you're at a hotel and you only stay there two nights and you arrive on site and you're like, oh, I didn't know there was a spa here. Oh, if, if I'd known I would, I would've stayed an extra night and had taken a spa day.
Jason Craparo: Absolutely. Uh, so I, I do this talk where I show that my wife and I booked, uh, the Omni Homestead down in Virginia. Well, if you go there and you go to their website, you are gonna see so many different things that you can do and you would never wanna spend. You know, two nights there, it's like, well, we gotta do the horseback riding and then we gotta do the hot springs in the town, and the kids are probably gonna wanna spend a half day at the pool.
Uh, we're gonna wanna check out these restaurants. So if they can show you why you wanna stay longer, uh, or you wanna upgrade the package, um, to include some of these other extras, that's a win-win for everybody.
Adam Mogelonsky: So, yeah, this is all, uh, I guess the term. That connects all this is neuromarketing, sort of the buzz term, which is essentially just marketing with an extra layer of psychology on top of it, which is really what we're getting at. Going back to the Lululemon study and really getting in the mindset of customers.
And we've also talked about how quickly you're scaling, so what's next for hover? How are you gonna keep scaling? How do you guide that roadmap, uh, for staying one step ahead?
Jason Craparo: I'll, I'll connect it to the neural marketing too. So, um, last year, about July, I'm sitting there and I'm looking at this data and I'm going like, it's working. And, and of course like we built it to work. We hoped it would work. We're optimizing it to work. But when you bring something to market that never existed and you have patents on it, it's a brand new technology.
You don't actually know if the end user will respond to it, if they're gonna watch the videos and click the buttons and things like that. So it, it started working and it was like. It was working very well, 20 to 40 times the industry average, click through rate and regularly, like you plug this thing in, it works from day one.
And so I was on this mission, you know, July, August, September to try to figure out why it works as good as it works, and what I ended up. on what, what I ended up coming to conclusion was this concept of driving excitement, like educating and, and inspiring people to action. And so I, I took this program at Wharton on neuroscience, and that's where a lot of this started to click.
Oh, that's why they're doing this. And these are the levers we can give to the marketers to be able to drive this type of, uh, emotional state. If you think about. Using a website, browsing the internet is something we always do in isolation. it's not a group activity, whether you're on your phone or your laptop.
And so, um, you know, to get you to the state where you're gonna be confident and ready to book, we're kind of prepping you up, propping you up and say, okay, we ready, we're gonna do this. Uh, what do you need to see? And what do you need to feel? And you don't wanna feel, you know, duped again. So you need the good stuff that the videos, compelling reviews.
Um, even now we're bringing in, audio so you can hear birds chirping, um, fireplace crackling, uh, water, little, you know, if there's a stream outside. And so we want to try to, uh, stoke all of the senses. So I'm seeing this and I'm hearing this, um, and it's making me get really excited to be able to book.
And so now we're using and infusing the storytelling with the neuroscience to be able to craft really compelling journeys for people. And what we also find is people want and are open to discovery. This is the key thing. So, there's even, uh, a component when you, when you take the program at Wharton on neuroscience.
There's even an ethical, there's an ethical neuroscience. Like we can't just go around making people do things they don't want to do. Right. That's that's crazy. And, and so what we find though is, Travelocity. Travelocity reported all the data in their ecosystem.
They said that, of all the people that that search for a city, let's say, uh, hotels in Dallas, over 50% of the time, five zero, not one five over 50% of the time, if you search Dallas. You end up booking Austin, you search San Diego, you go to Phoenix, you search Chicago, you end up in Denver over 50% of the time.
And what this means is, and there's so much more coming in right now, people are open to discovery. They want to be sold a better time. They want you when they arrive at your site to show them what is so amazing. I, I tempt me. Make me splurge, right. I'm open and that has never been more true. I, I live this out.
So we are the customer for Hovr two. My wife and I are kids. We've always traveled. My son Noah, who's nine, he went on 54 flights before he was two years old. Like he was, this guy was going with us and we just loved to travel and we know that we could. We could just say, Hey, you know, do you wanna go somewhere next weekend?
Sure. And so we don't say like, back in the old days, I need a flight to Miami. What's the cheapest one? What are the applicable routes? Now it's where should we go? Where's the weather gonna be nice? Where can we have a good time? Where's it gonna? And so then you end up piecing the, the package and the trip together.
You kind of back into it. It doesn't start out with I have to go for work, I have to go to Miami. It's. There's probably six or seven places we could go. let's search around.
Adam Mogelonsky: That's the dream phase, right? Dreams are malleable in a lot of ways. They're fungible
Jason Craparo: Yeah. And they literally want, I mean, our data suggests people are open to discovery and exploration. The problem is that most sites were, I. Made for conversion at a time when you needed to just make it the easiest thing to book. Hey, I, I need a flight from Philly to Dallas. Okay, we got those and now it's like, well, we need to make sure that you understand where we are.
Things to do nearby. Uh, once you're here, we're gonna have an array of activities. Uh, there's gonna be a wine tasting a, a happy hour here, and so. it's more of the discovery. I, I want to, I want to use the hotel, I wanna be happy when I'm in the hotel. I wanna have the standards, but what's a little special and extra?
Tell me your story. And then a lot of people are now getting hip to, even on their website and our clients are doing this for sure. Once I decide I might stay at your place, can you also on your site show me what there is to do nearby? Right? Why this place is so great.
Adam Mogelonsky: So to wrap up here, we've mentioned a lot of things that are right now, presently can happen near term. We have the emergence of adaptive websites and also something we haven't talked about, which is conversational commerce, uh, you know, tying into voice or chat bot, et cetera, to close out here. Where's this all going?
We, we know that video's the future. We know that it's gonna get more engagement. where is the art of selling and dream phase hospitality headed?
Jason Craparo: so for us, we, we are gonna be looking a lot at personalization.
dynamic personalization, like I said, being able to deliver the right piece of content to the right person at the right time, and adding this other component of in the right medium, maybe you need a case study, maybe I need a gallery of images.
Someone else may need audio or video. And so trying to deliver, uh, very. Um, contextual relevant items, not just the right piece of content again, but like, who am I, what, what is my purpose? Um, so being able to deliver, you know, you're gonna go on a wine tasting and you're gonna do a spa package. showing people like What's in it for them? What's germane to who they are? Um, that, that's one big piece. Uh, immersive, interactive experiences on the website. Multi-sensory, uh, content for sure. that's why I want to go. Uh, this is on a roadmap. Um, and then being able to have this content delivered, Cross platform, but also over a period of time because we know that booking a trip and being inspired and discovering also isn't something people typically do by themselves.
Like I would not book a trip right now and just tell my wife about it. I might send her something to get her engaged. So one of the patents that we filed early on, but never built but may come to fruition, is a, uh, essentially we call it breadcrumbs. But imagine being on a website and being able to drop on any website you're on.
Uh, the Vice Ray you know, in, in Mexico, you're, you're on the website and you right click and drop a breadcrumb for a loved one, for a family member and say, check out this pool scene. It's absolutely amazing. They get an in browser notification, they join you. You're now consuming collaboratively this website together, talking and browsing, co-browsing, uh, on the same site, making a booking decision together,
which
Adam Mogelonsky: Whoa, co-browsing. That's a, that's a,
I'm just thinking, I'm thinking about the data involved to make that happen, but that's very cool.
Jason Craparo: Yeah. So a lot of what we built is the precursor. We've also patented it, but uh, this is something that we just, we believe strongly that could. Truly be an awesome experience for people to, uh, be able to switch between it, leave breadcrumbs, which are comments, uh, or, or kind of plan together. and just the web, you know, websites, the internet is something that was built a long time ago by, I.
People that, uh, did it for a certain purpose, but we believe the website is a canvas. And what can we do? Uh, what, what do people wanna do? Where can we innovate? So, that's something that I really want to see happen in, in 26 is, um, this kind of cross device co-browsing, sharing, um, inspiring each other and making it really simple to book.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. The website is a canvas. That's a great way to finish off. Jason, thank you so much for your time. It's been fantastic.
Jason Craparo: I appreciate you.