35 Burst results for "Expedia"
VUX World
"expedia" Discussed on VUX World
"That 2023 I think is the year of LLMs definitely hitting the conversation AI big style. Yeah, it would be interesting to see like the last person you have kind of at the end of the year kind of where it's evolved. Yeah, absolutely. I've made a note of that, yeah. Yeah, we should do like a year in review 2023. All of the kind of J because it's going to be mad I know I know for a fact what voice will have done. I've seen what a couple of the other vendors are working on and it's only going to go it's only going to continue. The thing that is interesting to think about is the risks of this. We're going to publish this probably tomorrow basically the risks of letting these things out in the wild. Because my little bit of paranoia in the back of my mind is all the vendors are going to try and implement large language models as a way of kind of like differentiating. And therefore, clients may then start using it. And if I is taken off using it responsibly, then we could be in a bit of a dicey situation. Obviously, Microsoft are working on it and OpenAI work on it. So if you ask it something, this rare system or whatever, it will guard against it. So there is some protection in place, but still it just makes me a bit nervous about letting these things out in the wild and what it could be fantastic, but it could be some side effects that we're not quite understanding. Yeah, I kind of feel like that's what we're going to see a lot of this year because it's even like maybe you're not intending to do harm in any way, but maybe you're asking a question that it can't answer, but it's not actually answering it like factually. It's like, yeah, I'll go get this for you, 'cause it knows like, hey, somebody could go get this for you, but that's not what this chat bot actually acts on. So it's telling you something that's just not realistic at all. And I think kind of finding those guardrails is going to be really interesting to see how people start to define those. Because I think that's going to be challenging because I think it's going to be a lot of things that we're just not going to think of until people kind of go in there and test it and which could definitely be risky and I'm sure we'll see some surprising things. Definitely, definitely. And on a mask, I like less impactful perspective. It can be quite rude, I don't know if you've noticed that. But if you ask, for example, if you would ask chat GPT the same thing over and over again, it starts to things like I've answered that. And little quips like that that, you know, if you're a designer chat, but you want to be really sensitive about the dialog you want it to be in line with the persona and personality. You don't want to kind of put the blame on the user. You want to always take the blame yourself and all this kind of stuff. And I've seen some responses which are kind of like, it's not how put it that way, it's not how I would have drafted a response to the user. It can be a little bit abrupt sometimes. And so it's always a potential layer to kind of like, for people to think, hang on, is that? Is it having a go at me there? Is this thing annoyed? There's always something that might happen like that. That would be interesting, 'cause I feel like we're in this phase right now, especially with the younger generation, we're uncurated is better. Post a picture of whatever it doesn't have to be filtered, you don't have to be posed, all that kind of stuff when you're talking about like the social media phases. And so what you just mentioned about how GPT is responding, feels a little bit less curated than how we're used to designing. It's like we want to have a certain voice. And I don't know, that'll just be interesting to see like, are people going to like that? Are they going to be offended by that? Are we going to move into a phase where maybe we become a little less curated? But at the same time, with businesses, you can't really do that because they're going to be responsible for whatever's happening. But that just made me think of how things kind of are transforming on social media and I wonder if any of that will come to play and how we designed some stuff. It's definitely more natural. It's definitely more natural, isn't it? It definitely more free flow in some of the stuff it would take a conversation designer, age is to be able to create the responses to enable a free flowing conversation. But yeah, there is definitely considerations that we don't really know. We can't do anything about yet because we haven't come across the things, as you said, that we don't know yet. The unknown or nons. In fact, these are known unknowns out there. We know there's something that's going to happen. We just don't know what it is. That's class. Cool. Nice one. Well, thank you so much, Molly, for joining me. It's been absolutely fantastic. It's been absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is a wonderful, such a great conversation. Yeah, likewise, and maybe we'll do this again towards the end of the year, and we'll see what's going on. See whether Expedia have embraced the LLM revolution and how much damage might have been done over there. Hopefully not there and I think we do, right? Exactly. Cool. Nice one. Well, thank you all for tuning in. I will put the links to the Edinburgh event in the show notes as always. Video backs EU 23 if you want to save some money on the ticket at the European chat bot dot com. North ends, but I feel like that needs a better domain name. The European chatbot dot com but anyway, get yourself there. We'll see you in Edinburgh on the 16th. Thank you so much, and we'll see you on the next one. Which is going to be with a forget who is going to be with an apologies for that. But it's going to be with bot's crew on Thursday. We're going to be talking to core AI potentially next week about large language models. We're going to be talking about normal, which is a platform built from the ground up. On large language models and on Thursday, the 2nd of February, this is one for your diary, Molly. We have the CTO of core here on the podcast, which is going to be amazing. We're going to get a real close up look at some of the LLMs being produced at core here. And how that is going to impact conversational AI for the enterprise in future. So we look forward to seeing you there. Until next time, see you later.
VUX World
"expedia" Discussed on VUX World
"I'm still here. I lost you for a minute, but you came right back. Yeah, yeah. I thought so. So I was basically saying, once something's live, it's often easier for the people that maintain it, to just continue maintaining the live system, which means that 6 months down the line, what actually live may well be completely different to the initial design. But then something happens or something a new use case gets thought about or created. And then you need to go back to the design again. And it's kind of like this, it's just this disconnect between the development and production and the design. I don't think anyone's quite managed to solve it. And I don't exactly know what the answer is to be honest, because everyone's using different systems in production. So it's hard for one single design tool to be able to cater with the output of so many different production systems, you know? Yeah, I think you're totally right too. I think it's more of a cultural thing than it is. A tool to solve it. It's like, sure, you can have a great tool, but if you're not using it, then Google Cloud that great, you know? So you need the people and culture in place to make sure that. It's staying and going, but then it's like, I don't know, to your point about process versus the culture as well. It's like, yeah, you can then process it's only as good as the people and how you started to towards it as well. And obviously there's a lot that comes into play. It's like, there's a lot going on with new designs coming in and a lot on people's plates. So it's understandable that it's not an easy day to keep up with, but I don't have a good answer for that one either. I think it'll be interesting. I wonder if there's anyone out there that's listening that maybe has saw that 'cause I would love to hear that. I like to be really interesting. Because we're definitely ever striving towards it. Yeah, I know there is people that are trying to solve it, but it's a very difficult problem. All of the systems that I've seen and used that try to be the trans design into production code or vice versa tend to tend to take a lot of effort to kind of to make happen and to get work in. So I know that it's a problem that people are aware of, but it's not necessarily a problem that I'm seeing a solution for any time soon. I think we might have lost you again there. Yeah, this happened before. This is one of the reasons boze and girls why this platform riverside FM is not a platform that we will be continuing to use because it is ridiculous. I'm going to ask Molly when she returns if she can return. About her thoughts on large language models. Inevitably, large language models will change conversation design. I'll put a video out there last week with voice flow. Looking at voice floors, AI assist feature, which is just launched, which is really good. It will do things like generate sample utterances. It will generate entities and synonyms for those entities. It will do things like create variations on the prompts that you create so that when your assistant responds, it will have different responses. And mix that up a little bit. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. It's really interesting. It's also got this freestyle mode, which means that you can turn freestyle on on anything that is outside the scope of the assistant, do a kind of pick up the conversation. And it will kind of try and get the assistant back on track. So it's definitely something that is going to be very interesting. And we've got money back hello. Hey, sorry about that. Got kicked out. No way. Yeah, I've just explained that I think I'm going to move away from this platform because this has happened on two episodes now. And it's not good enough so I think with my river back to our old software, I was basically just kind of seeing that as you kind of dropped off. I do know that people are focusing on that problem of trying to link together the design development, but it's not quite a simple solution, otherwise obviously it would have been done by now. But as you were kind of rejoined and I was just explaining that about as we wrap up to get your thoughts on the future of conversation design, excuse Winston down there, my wife and sort of just on their way in so Winston goes mental. So the future of conversation design large language models obviously there's a lot of activity around things I've chatted and that Microsoft's rolling out OpenAI's APIs into Azure. They've got a voice flow, for example, the announced AI assist, which is I don't know if you've had a chance to try it, but it's pretty cool. And download AI or explore and it cognitive exploring it. And so just curious to kind of get your thoughts really based on some of the conversations that we've been having here around our best practice for conversation design process for conversation design. What are your thoughts on these large language models is generative models and how they might kind of influence the conversation design process today? In the future, it's today. I'm excited to see the opportunities it brings because it seems like there's a lot I was actually just having a conversation with. Some people in the Austin area last week about this and we're talking about how we can automate certain pieces of the process. When you're reviewing all of the different utterances coming in or even just being able to generate sound when you're going into testing and trying to build out your models, I think that is awesome, like being able to leverage it, kind of for some of those pieces that conversation designers own and just helping to evolve it. It's also really exciting to see I played with the voice for one, see how they're using it and think about how maybe even could use it like internally to help people kind of guide people to different things, even maybe just as they're starting out at a team or teaching them like this is how we do things and it helps with maybe onboarding and stuff. I don't know. It'll be interesting. I think there's a lot of different directions that can go, I don't see it as replacing conversation design anywhere in the near future because I definitely still see people needing somebody to be reviewing everything that's happening. Still makes a lot of sense. I don't think it's quite there to completely understand, but I'm excited. I'm excited to see what's to come in a different use cases that people start using it for. Definitely. It's not really much of a prediction because I think most of us happen, but I think we'll definitely see every conversational AI vendor, including large language models and generative AI into their products to help the creation process for conversation AI. And perhaps some of the management of dialog as well. Because obviously in order to care for a conversation that can go in lots of different directions. Really a business for Expedia, you really only care about the intense that you support in. You don't really care about anything else. You don't care what the weather's like and see how I'll leave someone asks you about that because they're going on a trip there. It's not really something that Expedia should really be focusing on. A lot of small talk stuff in that. I think that hallucinations are huge risk implications of using these things in the wild aside. I think there's some value there both on the creation side and on the actual end user interaction side. But I definitely think we'll see all of the vendors implement that into their systems. With maybe the exception of IBM and Google and those cloud kind of players, they seem to be a little bit behind in terms of features and stuff like that because obviously they rely a lot on people just cord and stuff themselves essentially so I suppose technically speaking if you use like Watson, you could build a kind of a fulfillment layer that sends all requests to Watson to the OpenAI APIs and then basically build it like that yourself. But anyway, I know I'm going a bit of a tangent but I've definitely agree and conquer
VUX World
"expedia" Discussed on VUX World
"Additional feedback to what we're already looking at it and looking at it from a different perspective. And lots of testing and just iterating there working with our product and engineering team as well to start thinking through what might the first phase of this be because our designs tend to be at a higher level to start and we might be looking like one level above what we can actually deliver first. And so we want to start bringing in engineering to talk about what might that first phase be and how can we kind of break this down into chunks so that we're delivering it and that agile way and not saying like, hey, this is the final one. We got to deliver this all at once. So we definitely try to break that down into pieces. So it's a little bit more bite sized. Nice. That's a good way of approaching it. That's the way that we tend to do it. And also how I've always approached the kind of whole concept of service design, which is design for the best possible situation that you could imagine. And then work your way backwards from that. So if this is the ideal, what's stopping us from doing that? Okay, well these fundamental things are stopping us from doing that exact thing. Okay, so in the short term, what can we do that more or less as far as we can get towards this, but not kind of having across that kind of those major kind of stumbling blocks. And you speak of my language with user research and usability testing. I think this far too many teams don't really do it. It's crazy how I think there's design teams all over, not necessarily social media, that would be too much of a generalization, but teams work on our conversational AI. That never have a user involved until the last moment. And that's even including things like, I would even class, analyze and transcripts and stuff like that as user research because you're informing your design decisions based on actual user behavior. But there's just a lot of it lacking. And it's crazy. How can you design a conversation without the other half of that conversation? Yeah, and it's so easy to get stuck in the way you think if you're not testing it with other people. Even if you have a team, I remember when the first testing rounds we did when I was at Home Depot was like we were all there. We were like, the designers that were working on it even our product commanders and engineers, you know, we were like, this is this is thought out. We got this. This is definitely like there's no way we missed anything when you test it. And you get so surprised, it's so easy to just, you know, almost like groupthink comes into play, even though you have a bunch of different great minds trying to solve for the design and make sure you're not missing anything. I just feel like it's always really interesting. People just think differently, you learn a lot. It challenges your perspective. So I'm with you. I definitely love the research side of things. And I'd say for the new people too, 'cause I know you mentioned that there's some people kind of breaking into this space. Get scrappy with it. Don't feel like, you know, it's not that you always have to go to user testing or do a full fledged wine. Maybe you're just getting outside of the box and asking some friends or family that and having them test it with you or reading things out loud. So think of different scrappy ways to do it as well. It doesn't have to be as formulated as it might be in an enterprise company where we're going to release something. Definitely any outside kind of insight is much better than insular kind of thinking, you know? Yeah, it's mad. I think humans are generally I think we just have this thing where we get an idea and we just run with that idea. I think a lot of what designers are good designers do well as they get an idea and in fact they generate lots of ideas. And then figure out which of the few ideas here has the opportunity to be successful. Then validate those ideas through user research and then take the one that shows the most promise and then do a bit more on it and then go back and re validate it. So it's almost like you're sort of like every time you take a step, you're testing the ground in front of you before you put your weight on it. Whereas I think that this is not just the case for design projects. I think it's just humans in general. We tend to just take a step and get onto a path and just continue down that path without really without thinking about it. So I think the more user involvement you have in conversation and air process is definitely the better it is, I think. I totally agree. Yeah. What about so we mentioned we mentioned these people who are kind of trying to break into conversations and maybe junior conversation designers who maybe I know of a couple of companies there's obviously a lot more than this, but I know of a few companies that are silly and right now that have very small team. One designer who does most of the most of everything a developer that they'll work with who will manage some of the integrations and stuff like that. And that's pretty much it. Some of them may get to a product owner, some of them may kind of I was going to say user research, but actually that's not usually what I'm seeing. So for these really small teams, or for those that are not really part of a conversation design setup, what are some of the differences between those kind of fairly self contained self managed small teams, working on relatively smallish projects. Versus working that somewhere like Expedia, where you've got a much larger team, you've got division of labor based on certain skill sets and job functions. And the process involves a lot more people, arguably a lot more git in the process. What are some of the differences between that the small, I suppose you could call it start of our beginner conversational AI team versus a more established enterprise team. Second question, the first thing that comes to mind is kind of this scale at what you're looking at solving the problem. I think like an enterprise as it tends to be a lot more vast, which is not very surprising. But you're also then taking in the different pieces and how they're already established, whereas with a smaller routine, it might be, you have the ability to kind of move through that and try new things a lot quicker and faster. You probably have a really good understanding of what's happening end to end maybe at the whole company, even outside of just your space. And so you're able to kind of digest it, pick up that information a lot quicker, whereas at a larger company, sometimes it's information finding in the upfront. And that discovery phase, it's not just that you're discovering the problem scope you might just be discovering what information might already be out there to somebody, maybe did it three years before, and then it stopped and now you're picking it back up, but you didn't know that they were doing that. So there's a lot of different ways to look at it. So it's like the scale gets larger and then also the different teams that there's a lot of different teams that you might be working with in order to kind of move it all together. I think I've been trying a lot more to get the teams that I work with it to think about it as an ecosystem, even if it might not be something that we own. Like how can we get other teams to buy into the fact that we should all be caring about the same problems and looking at it holistically as opposed to just saying like, hey, I'm focused on this space and I'm focused on this space. But if we really look at that all together and kind of more move towards solving that, I think that's the beauty of kind of smaller places at times as it's easier to accomplish those types of scenarios where you can look at the whole picture and it's not as hard to find what pieces like made that whole picture where it's like we might have 85% of the puzzle and you're just like, I don't even know if this other piece exists. Does somebody have that? Where is it? What's going on there? So there's a lot of information finding that
VUX World
"expedia" Discussed on VUX World
"Of information. Nice. Do you have any criteria or any sort of frameworks for that sort of evaluation process? We used to use some stuff with we've got a few different things, but the thing we used to look at is things like for assessing whether something is a good fit for voice, like is the user in a context which restricts the use of their arms, for example, like wash it up. Are they in a context where it restricts the use of their mouth like in a public space? And the context will depend on given the context that might lend itself to a certain type of use case. And then the qualities of the interaction itself are the requirements of the interaction might also lend itself to a different type of use case. For example, if the information we're trying to convey is like tabular, it's not a really great fit for voice, whereas it may be a better visual sort of complement. So there's a couple of things like that which will allow someone to say, okay, this use case here has these kind of criteria. We believe that it is or isn't a good fit for which kind of channel are which kind of conversation. If you've got anything like that, any frameworks or criteria that you kind of use to assess whether a problem can be solved with a conversational interface. Yeah, I think the second part of what you just talked about, I really resonate with thinking about what is the information we're trying to deliver. And does that make sense? Sometimes if it is very visual heavy or if we're trying to give you multiple options or if it's going to be something really lengthy to read out, doing that over voice doesn't really make sense. And also voice at least for my experience being that it was so tied to contact centers has been a very specific use case. It's people who are coming. They have some issue that they need help with. And they're calling for that need. And then when we're assessing if it's a good, if it's a good use case for self service, it's can we close that gap without having to get them somewhere else or can we take some pieces of information before they're getting to the live agents that will help expedite the process. So it was very much about making sure we were forward moving with that. Like how do we show progress and not just make it that, hey, we're collecting information that then the live agents can ask you for again. If we can't pass that information on, there's no point in wasting their time. We should just make sure we're getting them where they need to go. So I would say the voice use cases is pretty specific to those help contact center calls. And then when it comes to the chat side of things, it's a lot of what kind of information are we trying to relay, how can we show that what kind of visuals or different things like that makes sense? Is it something? I guess something I didn't actually say it with the voice stuff is maybe it is that if we have to give you more information or if we know you'll benefit from this different rally, maybe it is something where we're going to offer to send you a text that maybe move you out of that channel if that makes sense. A lot of times when they were to make decisions so we tried not to switch as if it's something where it's like they're already 30 in the voice channel. They probably tried to try a few different things. We might want to give them the option, but we're not going to try to force them out of it if it's not something they're interested in. Yeah. The voice can sometimes be a last result for people kind of. I've tried this. I've tried that. I'm going to just call them, you know? And then when they get through to someone, it's like, all right, okay, I know you want me to go back to the website. Oh, thanks. I have seen some interesting applications of at least kind of like opening up a parallel channel. So for example, there's some good use cases out there for like debt collection, for example, like someone calls and they need to go through an expenditure review or whatever, then send in their link to a farm, is it makes sense, 'cause they can complete the farm, but then they can stay on the phone, they're gonna ask questions. Oh, what if I don't have my previous 5 years address oh, well, just put your last address or whatever it might be. You can ask kind of questions about it. And then other things like if there's a use case for a voice channel that requires the user to submit something like a portal or proof of ID or something like that. You've got the ability to just send a text, get them to our WhatsApp message send them, get them to send it back and so on. I've seen it kind of work, but what I haven't seen is like live data around completion rate of these things. Do you know what I mean? If someone fawns up and they're in the middle of a conversation and you send them a text and they need to send you a fort or whatever, how many of them kind of drop out at that point because you know what this is just too fucking long. I can't be one of these. I don't know if you've got any insights on that kind of parallel channel use cases or not. I don't. I mean, the ones you just named though seem very in line with how we think about it of trying to continue to progress you for it. So if it's something that we're going to have to get this information from you at some point anyway in order for us to help you. I think that makes a lot of sense, but that'd be really interesting to see that data like how often do people drop out, is it something where they're able to complete it? Is it hard to do? I think that'd be really interesting. Yeah, because there's a lot of companies out there that are kind of have this as almost like a USP, not a USP necessarily but like a feature. Look, you can send a text message so you can do this a while on the phone. And it's like, that's kind of cool. But does it translate in real life? Is the question? But yeah, so any other things in that discovery fears that you think is important to understand we've spoke a little bit about use case feasibility problem feasibility. You're kind of eluded to like, do we have the whether it's technology capability or resource capacity or whatever it might be to be able to deliver this kind of thing as a better served in a different way. Any other things in that sort of discovery fairs that you're looking out for in particular. I think I did think of that we haven't talked through. Yeah, I suppose at that point it's kind of just the problem scoping paired with. The technology stuff you're talking about. Yeah. And then once you've got through that discovery is, you found a problem, we think it can be solved. We understand broadly speaking what a kind of high level solution might look like and what it might take to do it. Can you walk us through the next phase of the design? What does that design process look like? Yeah, so it's kind of taking that information from the discovery phase starting to build out a starter design. At that point, I would definitely be closely engaged with research to start thinking through what users can we start to test this with getting some feedback attending any sort of design create Sessions that's when I really like to get it in front of other desires as well. Especially if you can identify designers that might be in a similar space, but maybe they're working just on the web or a different channel than you. But they're solving that. Maybe I'll use an example from for Expedia. So if we were solving something with a booking, then we might want to be pairing with the team who actually handles the booking process through you clicked your hotel and now you're going to check out and so they're very they understand that process very well and maybe we're trying to solve for something within chat. That'd be something where I'd want to be having a design career with them so that we're getting their feedback since they have a similar knowledge scope. They're just looking at the problem differently. So I turn to identify those areas where we might be able to connect with different teams who can give us just some
VUX World
"expedia" Discussed on VUX World
"It gives you the chance to really hone in on what your expertise is and then really collaborate and work together and you always have those kind of different minds to bounce ideas off of, which I really enjoy. So I think just in general having more heads solving a problem and making sure that you're not kind of getting stuck in a rut is helpful. So even if it's even if it was when I was like a single designer on a team, there was always this opportunity for collaboration or going to crits and stuff like that so that we could work together. But yeah, that's kind of how we're broken out and then different teams focused on kind of like different areas depending on how we're trying to service a traveler might have some focus on the boys areas, somebody got them chat and then within the chat you might have different focuses depending on kind of what the traveler is trying to accomplish. It's interesting because as teams begin to kind of mature, you tend to find a little bit of more of a division of labor, as you said, but a lot of the kind of smaller teams would have one designer who does the architecture. Does some of the movies the technical specification does some of the NLU design does a lot of the testing might do their user research and stuff. That's kind of that comes with pluses and minuses, doesn't it? On the one hand, you've got complete ownership pretty much. Especially if you're using a low chord platform as well. You can build most of it yourself. So you've got a degree of ownership. And you've got a real thorough understanding of what you're working on. The downside is that without other people's perspectives, you tend to miss things. And also without kind of specialisms in certain areas. You end up, I think, overlooking stuff that, because you're trying to focus on NLU design and performance, and then you're focusing on dialog design and prompt creation. And you're focusing on whether or not the end to end conversation makes sense. It's kind of like the focus on so much stuff you can miss quite a bit of stuff going. You're like, so I think having that division of labor tends to tends to work. Yeah, I definitely agree. I will say that I like wearing the all hats when I was first coming into the conversational space. It was really nice because I learned so much. So when it comes to being like a newer designer and having that ability to kind of dive into all those different areas and really just test what is it that I'm interested in, how can I build these skills? So as far as my kind of career trajectory and how I learned and evolved within this space, I definitely appreciate that that was kind of my starting ground because it did allow me to test the waters a little bit and really get a thorough understanding of how the space works. And now I'm able to understand too like my own self and like where I want to focus and then also how to better partner with some of these other specialists as well. Nice. So where does your where does your role begin and end then let's say for someone who is literally had someone connect with me this morning or yesterday trying to kind of get into conversation design, wondering where's in which she could break into conversation design? To give people like that a bit of a flavor for what the role actually looks like. Where does your role kind of start and end? In a given project sort of thing, what's the kind of score of it if you like? Yeah, so it starts with the discovery phase when we get the problem. We're kind of digging into the problem. What are we trying to solve? What's the best way to solve it? I think a lot of times it's a designer, your partnering with product and product might have an idea of like, hey, we know we have this problem. We think this is how we want to solve it. And sometimes different things like a chat bot or assistant might be thrown around as a solution. So I also think we kind of have that responsibility to evaluate the problem and really look at it and say, is this the best solution? Yes, I know you're coming to me as a conversation designer and I would love to help you but I think it's also getting dad to understand like sometimes that's needed sometimes, you know, we need a new self service functionality and sometimes that's not the best. So that's kind of where the discovery phase of it starts and then moving through the design for it. So these are like setting the strategy or looking and seeing where are we trying to engage and what modality is this going to be on, the flow writing, doing research, going through all that kind of stuff, and that it really kind of ends at the handoff to development. Well, that's hard to say, too, because I feel like kind of never really ends. There's also always that continuous learning, but if you're looking at one given project, you know, starting with a typical discovery and going through the designing of the given solution for that problem. And then handing it off to development. But I'd say we also like continuously try to look at the data to say, is it working? Are there any improvements that need to be made? And cycling then from there. Nice. Yeah, that discovery part, I think, is really crucial. And I think that there's a lot of companies that just jump into conversational AI because it's nice and fancy and stuff like that. And it's kind of like any use case we'll do, let's just run it. For those who are trying to kind of understand a little bit more about what makes a good use case for conversation allowed to solve, you mentioned there about working with product teams to, first of all, evaluate the problem. What kind of things are you looking for when you are evaluating the problem? What does that kind of piece of the puzzle look like? I think it's going to get good understanding of can we solve this problem? Is this a complex problem? Like sometimes the answer is that even though a customer might not want to speak to a live agent, they need to. They need to just get there at this person is going to have a much better understanding of what's happening. Maybe this is something that's been solved already, whether it's on web or in voice. And we can point you to go to area where it's been solved. So there's no need for us to remake the wheel just to have it out there. There's something else that we can kind of leverage and either put you or guide you in that right direction. When it comes to solving pieces within a virtual assistant, I think a lot of times it's about defining what your scope and capabilities are there because there's things that we know assistance do well. And there's things that they can't really do that well. So making sure you're within that scope and you're also transparent about what that's dope is. So it's clear to the user what they can and can't get help with. So I think it's just kind of like digging into those different areas and then kind of from there like defining what is it that we're able to do for this problem we're trying to solve. And does it fit within this and what our team has the capabilities of solving or is it something where it's like, hey, this is this is maybe more of a process that we need to look at more holistically and solve the fact that this process isn't being done well. And it's not something where we can just throw a module into a chatbot and say like, hey, now this is better because we just gave you a few pieces
VUX World
"expedia" Discussed on VUX World
"You are. Okay, so is that on the in that laughter example is that using sort of NLP based search or something like that or is it the interface of the assistant itself will turn more into a knowledge base kind of format? The latter. So turning a little bit more into the knowledge base so just as a look like you're the pop up model on the corner and you know you're in an assistant. It just might be like embedded in a different way but using the same functionality. Interesting. That's one of the things that I think we'll see a bit more of is taking it away from the little pop up in the corner and making it a little bit more of the real estate on the site. There's no reason why certain pages don't have little kind of embedded conversational interfaces that allows you to interrogate a certain part of the site or whatever it might be. You know, I've been a bit more, I suppose it's putting me if I'm wrong I'll see what you think about this, but it seems as though designers have such a strong kind of role in the creation of a website. They have such a strong role in the creation of a chatbot or a digital assistant. And then what happens is something I think probably more technical in nature makes a decision. Or someone makes a decision to just put this little widget in the bottom corner of the web page. And it's almost like all the effort that's gone into the design of the website. And only if it has gone into the design of the digital assistant. There's this disconnect in terms of making the experience of the website and the experience of the assistant the same experience. It seems to be a bit of a disconnect there. Do you think? I totally agree. I think it's something we see often. And it just pops up and it's kind of giving you something, but from like a user's perspective, it can kind of be out of context, or it's like, where do you get that from or what are you doing? And there's not as much connectivity into actual journey and experience that are travelers, our customers are seeing. And I think that shift because I definitely in other designers have been talking to, I feel like we're thinking about that as well as how can we make it not as intrusive because there's also, I would say almost like a battle of trust when it comes to making sure that users are willing to go back and interact with your platform and want to test out the technology because they have a bad experience somewhere and maybe it is enough in the box corner chatbot feel they're going to be less likely to then go and interact with yours. I think that's something that we're trying to get around as well of how do we continue to build trust and how do we do it in a way that doesn't feel as intrusive because if you definitely see a lot of people having strong opinions about a traditional chat bot at times that's the difference I suppose between putting a conversational AI in your call center and the voice channel versus a chatbot because on the voice channel the adoption of that is just built in. If you call and you get put through an assistant, you're more than likely just going to talk to it. Whether or not it solves your issue, you're more than likely to give it a go. Whereas on a website, there's a big disconnect between a chatbot being there and someone actually using it. It needs to be a conscious effort on behalf of the user to engage with it. Rather than a bit of default behavior built into the channel sort of thing. It's interesting. I don't know if you've done any exploration as far as usage and adoption rates on the different channels that you have, is there a difference in terms of customer adoption based on web versus contact center or otherwise? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't have any, I haven't done anything specific to look at the usage between the two but I do think you're right when it comes to voice versus chat because I mean you kind of have to. Some companies force you into calling you have an issue. The only way to solve that is by calling. And if they have a voice assistant, you're just going to have to use it because there's no other way to get through it, which, you know, that can be good and bad. I definitely have some opinions on that like should we be forcing people to do something that they don't want to do. I don't know if that's always the right methodology, but you're definitely have to more often and voice and to be honest, I feel like you see as well a lot of times they're already disgruntled in that scenario and they're going to know they're probably going to be more disgruntled when they're going through it so people kind of just like bump up and they're like we're going through it. So there's a lot of opportunity to kind of surprise and delight I think in the voice channel and if you can really think about the customer build a better experience, it's awesome and I think it will give you some trust and continuity to that willing to try in other areas as well. So I think that's where that's a little fun to play with as a designer and really think about how can we make this better knowing that. I mean, most people that are calling a customer service. They're already not very happy that they have to do that and take that time out every day. So how can we just make it better there? Yeah, definitely definitely. Hopefully my microphone is a little bit louder. The I got some feedback there from Miguel, who was watching the broadcast that it was a bit quiet, hopefully that's a bit better, Miguel, I've turned it up a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I suppose you're right in terms of like forcing people into a certain channel is not exactly a good idea. I think the behavioral scientists would call that a gentle nudge, whereas a customer on the other end of it, which she was not very happy because they've had an issue or whatever is probably not going to be at the same. But it's interesting. So can you walk us through a little bit of what the setup looks like at Expedia, you're kind of running on the conversation design side. Who are you working with? What does the team sort of look like? Is it multiple teams? Can you give us a bit of a flavor for what the kind of setup is like over there? Yeah, so as a designer we're partnering with product and engineering also have some machine learning specialists that are great, especially when we're working on the NLU side of things. Our design is actually split into. We have some specialists with a content design as well as research. And so that was a little bit new for me as opposed to at Home Depot, the conversation designer kind of wore all hats. You were doing research. You're also the content creator there as well. But it's been really great to have the different specialties and kind of especially seeing
VUX World
"expedia" Discussed on VUX World
"There we go. Hello. Ladies and gentlemen, boz and girls, welcome to vu X world. As we approach, I don't know if you know this Molly, but VOX world is approaching its 5th anniversary. Nice. There you go. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it'll be, it might be two weeks time, you just missed out on the flagship 5 year anniversary episode. 12th of February, perhaps. Our 14th, nothing I'm counting. It can't be the for you, because that's Valentine's Day, isn't it? I would have got killed if I'd have been podcast no bandage. But it's somewhere around that market anyway. So yeah. But thanks for joining me. Appreciate it. How's things? Great. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. No, worries, no worries. It's an absolute pleasure. And thank you for tuning in. If you are tuning in, I want to give a quick shout out to the event that we're doing in March. We're going to be able to EU chat bot summit in Edinburgh, fantastic city. Have you been at Edinburgh before Molly? I actually have. Have you? Yeah. Nice. I did a little golf trip with my family. Probably 5 years ago, so we flew under there. Oh, you're a golfer. Yes, I am. I was a golf game at the time. I was in a golfer at the time. I was a spectator, but then I got into it afterwards. Yeah. Yeah, some of the best classes in the world are in Scotland, said Andrews and stuff like that. So yeah, so it's going to be an edible, it's going to be absolutely immense. We've got all kinds of interesting companies that are going to be presenting there. We've got love holidays, step stone, who has total jobs group and stuff in that portfolio, decathlon, Eleanor, core AI, they're going to be presenting our stage, it is absolutely, it's going to be amazing. We're going to be showing the best practice for enterprise conversational AI and implementation. And if you're tuning in to this podcast right now, whether you're watching live or watching or listening to the replay, you can save I think it's around about 20 or 30% on the tickets if you use the cord. 23 at the European chatbot dot com. European chapel the European chapel dot com promo code V UX EU 23 will save us some money on it. Because I hope definitely to see you there. It might be a bit of a long shot for you, Molly, given that you're over the other side of the pond. But for those in the UK, definitely get yourself to VOX at the EU chatbot summit. March it is, by the way, I should tell you the date as march the 16th. So there we go. But so you've been Edinburgh. Did you enjoy it? I did. It was a good time. I only spent a few days actually in Edinburgh. But we were doing the driving like you sounded saint Andrews and it was actually the year that the open was at court university. So I went to that. Nice. Nice wicked. That sounds really good. Yeah, nice one. Cool. So tell us about yourself money for those that for those who don't know, tell us about yourself and what you do at Xperia leading user experience lead is your title, is that correct? That's correct. Yeah, so I'm a conversation designer at Expedia. Password with Home Depot, I've been in the conversation space for about 5 years now. It's one of those things. I feel like you hear a lot of people saying it kind of just fall into. And that being the product that I was working on that really got me more involved and the conversation design of things. I was really kind of breaking into UX at the time because my background before that was in. Advertising. And just loved it. It was one of those things. I kind of, it was a nice little mix here moving from advertising and going kind of into design and advertising is all about how you're communicating with people, how can it resonate with people in a very different way, but you're kind of thinking about all of the same kind of psychological stuff of what are people thinking about, what's going to resonate with them. And so it ended up being a really nice shift in something that intrigued me as well just personally. So at Expedia, working on all of the assistants across the platform. So it's much more heavy and I would say technical space. I don't know if that's fair to say, she's at Home Depot has such a presence in stores. So that's something that they really focus on that drives a lot of what happens on the technology side of things, whereas Expedia is kind of technology first since, you know, everything's kind of online or over the phone or through chat. So working on all of those platforms across the enterprise. Nice, nice. So it's interesting. A lot of people have come into conversation design from a marketing background. I think that a lot of the use cases, especially sort of I suppose, like 2016 and 2017, maybe 2018, there was a lot of activity around kind of marketing use cases for conversational hours. And I suppose there still is a lot of haptic and stuff that focus on commerce and we did a talk desk webinar. We've talked last year at the end of last year, which was all focused around commerce and stuff. Is that the kind of use cases you're working on with Expedia, they've focused predominantly on that kind of like front end customer journey. Or is it more customer support and stuff like that like some of the some of the other companies like potentially Home Depot, for example? A little bit about what kind of look at it, you know, like pre and post fucking, there's kind of different reasons that people are coming and trying to get help and it might be, you know, they're trying to make a decision on what's the best thing to book for them. Other packages, how can they kind of get things going together? And a lot of it's like minute details as well. Like if you think about you're going to travel somewhere, maybe you're a traveling, you have a child, so you're traveling with your child and you I know there are certain things that that house or something of the sort so you want to ask those questions that might not be on the site. And then as well as kind of the post booking, something goes wrong or maybe you need help. You get there and you can't get in. Or the front desk isn't giving you the help they need, that you need when you get there. So there's both of those and our group really looks at that end to end. There's a little bit unique because the other teams tend to be split out and focus on one space versus the other, but what you see a lot with the assistance and support is you really need that full journey view to understand kind of what's going on with that traveler and how can we best help them. You use the word assistants plural a few times. Is that because there's many different assistants, many different bots like how is it how does it work? If you've got different butter do different things, like how does it actually how does that work? I guess maybe assistance isn't as plural more for the modality not necessarily because there's a bunch of different ones doing different things. It's just that like are you reaching out via chat or you're reaching out over the voice? Are you connecting with one of our live agents? Because that's all kind of the same even though we might have like the virtual assistants that help you with certain things. It's like we still need to understand what's happening once you get to that Y of agent as well. So looking at all of those assistants and different areas as opposed to multiple assistants doing different things. I'm with you. It was photos. So you mentioned a lot of different channels there. Expedia, digital assistant, what channels is it? Where would people interact with it right now? On the web on the app or over the phone are the primary ways that you'd be interacting with it. And then as well as on some of the on the web, there's some areas where you might just be getting help and it might look more like a web page than an actual chatbot. So trying to bring some of that all together of its fluid and where you're getting help and it's not as much about what it looks like or where your touch point feels the same and it feels like you're getting the same type of assistance to my where
Good Life Project
"expedia" Discussed on Good Life Project
"He uses HIV all the time. His system is by heart rate. So he's constantly looking at his heart rate. And so even if he's not necessarily sleeping, he stays in bed every day, 12 hours, but during the fight week, where he won the world championship, he stayed in bed every day for 20 hours. Just lying there. Sometimes sleeping, but just also like anything that would raise his heart rate. He says, even when he goes to feed his birds in the bird feeder, he's like, that's going to, that's going to raise my heart rate. And I'm, I've got to just be focusing on completely being in restore mode. It's so amazing to just think of restoring as such a central part of even a performance is a thing you're calling for. It's so nice out there from sunny Mexican markets to sleepy Greek waves and when you go as an expedient member, you save more on things that matter. Expedia made to travel. Terms apply seaside for details. Good luck project is supported by a Monday dot com. So behind the scenes here at good life headquarters. We've actually got a ton of fairly complex overlapping projects rolling in at any given time and our team is distributed across the country actually multiple continents. One thing I've learned when teams are engaged connected and really working effectively towards a shared goal, anything is possible. That is where Monday dot com comes in. Monday dot com work OS is a flexible platform for teams to work together their.
Good Life Project
"expedia" Discussed on Good Life Project
"In your brain. There's a daily buildup of fatigue in your muscles. And it doesn't work to sleep on the weekend late, right? And it doesn't work to sleep when you're old, because you never make up for that. What you didn't take care of last night or what you didn't take care of by exercising or any of the more by eating well, you have increased inflammation. You have increased free radicals, oxidative stress, all this stuff builds up. And so no amount of sleeping in on the weekend or taking one walk a week or getting yourself to nature for a two week period once a year is not going to recover what happened every single day leading up to that two week vacation. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense when you laid out that way. It's like, well, yeah, I'm sure that makes sense. And yet, it's so really ripples into the choices that we make in the day to today basis. It's so nice out there. Out there in the Mexican markets where chili stretch in the sun. High in the mountain air between backcountry skis and kids doing the first snowplow. Or next to the pool after a long day of forgetting what day it is. We're all here to get out there and come home or us and us that went away. And when you save on travelers and Expedia member, you can travel even more. It's so nice out there. So let's go Expedia, made to travel, terms apply seaside for details. A lot of what we're talking about here is that these down states and updates attached to this thing called the autonomic nervous system, which so many of us learned as kids when we're taking bio in high school or middle school, was the part of the nervous system that you quote, it just happens automatically. And there's really nothing that you can do to influence it. And I think a lot of us still hang on to that mythology, but in fact, now decades and decades of science show, well, that is not really entirely the whole story. I think that the truth is, is that many scientists.
WTMJ 620
"expedia" Discussed on WTMJ 620
"Expedia prices of flights from Wisconsin to Jacksonville and Tampa and Miami to try and make this a hard game for Packers fans to get to what sort of a crowd of you expecting today in Jacksonville. There? What do you think the split is going to be between states fans, Packers fans and maybe just like Rob Lowe? NFL hands at fans wearing their NFL caps just to check out some NFL football and what is going to be an off week for the Jacksonville Jaguars? Minutes away. Yeah. I mean, I guess I don't know the exact breakdown that we should expect. But unfortunately, I mean, I think probably a lot of Pakistan's were already prepared to travel and have taken the time off. And it booked flights that they could change. Um, you know, because New Orleans is, you know, usually a popular destination for road fans. Whereas safe stands are going to have to make last minute adjustments. So I mean, my my natural inclination would be maybe a 50 50 split. I don't I don't know if that's true. We'll see in the stands today. I know that good pick Jacksonville in part because it was close to the Gulf South and the Southern fan base. That they could get it would get, you know, fans a chance to get there and, you know, I mean that experience story. I think a little bit a little bit too much was made of that. It's not like they were trying to stick it to Pakistan's or anything, but I think when they represented with their choices, Hey, you get to play your home game and Jacksonville. Miami, Arizona or Denver. And this week which one do you pick? And they're like, Uh alright. What criteria should we should We base this on those criteria was good as any My, quite frankly I respected the hustle of the whole thing like If you've got to move your home game, you might as well make it feel like a home game as much as you possibly can. They picked a place where Aaron Rodgers, apparently in the state of Florida, has struggled a little bit. Well, and it's very clearly that when the NFL presented them with their choices, but the answer wasn't we don't care. Just take one. They're like, all right, we're on it. We're on it. We're going to find the best choice. One way or another. Mike. I appreciate you taking some time for us. Our thoughts go out to everybody in Louisiana. Hopefully, everybody can get home soon. The Saints included. Enjoy the game today and hopefully we can check in with you at some point on the line as well. Alright anytime. Thank you. There you go. It's Mike Triplett. He.
Podcast Movement 2021
JAR Audio's CEO Roger Nairn on When Branded Podcasts Need to Pivot
"So perhaps your target audience is in need of a diverse superhero tale. Maybe it's a hard nose detective story or perhaps a newsy current affairs conversation at the end of the day as a brand. It's not about you. it's about them. And you absolutely need to consider this. The entire the during the entire production and throughout the life of the podcast. I'm waiting for the client. That will let me make a fantasy horse adventure. It hasn't yet but we're hoping that it will happen again. with expedia. they created a podcast that offers useful data driven advice. Tips and tricks to the overwhelmed traveler. And so during kovin we actually pivoted the podcast. A little bit to address new needs in questions. At the time expedia was getting absolutely inundated with people Looking to change their travel plans but also looking for information on how to travel safely. Drink ovid as well as a different different carrier Scenarios make money. I was calling them. Roger to try and get my twenty year old daughter back from thailand. That's right yeah. They were getting absolutely inundated and and so we wanted to pivot the podcast to be a support for their customer service team. And so the podcast became more about how to travel the online. Travels you know how to hack the online travel space in a coded world and when we did that the the audience responded so we saw an average consumption rate of ninety three percents. So that's ninety three percents. Listen through rate for an episode which are twenty to thirty minutes long. We increased our downloads. Two hundred fifteen percent and we climbed the charts. I mean we. We appeared in in the top. Two hundred apple podcast charts replaces and travel Each month we secured the number six position. Canada number nine in the united states And it was listed amongst the top podcast featured in travel and leisure lonely planet. The washington post pod drop and all access so new cast like old seattle seasons old. And so the podcast was delivering value that the audience was looking for and as a result the brands got the the benefit from that
WGR 550 Sports Radio
"expedia" Discussed on WGR 550 Sports Radio
"Expedia has your back throughout your journey because it matters Who you travel with. Click to download today. Curiosity Stream has thousands of documentary films and shows available on demand on any device where the Netflix for nerds who flew for history buffs, the Disney Plus for the scientist in us there sure are a lot of streaming services aren't their curiosity stream is the one you definitely need. If you're the type to nature, Doc and chill if you're an armchair astronaut. If you prefer physics to psychics, or perhaps, you know a precocious paleontologist, go to curiosity stream dot com to learn more and sign up today. In addition to kitchens and baths, Cabinet discounters can help you organize any room in your house with entertainment centers, wet bars, home offices and more get started with a free consultation with an experienced designer. See photos of projects we've done plus locations of our seven showrooms at Cabinet discounters dot com. Get more information at Cabinet discounters dot com Cabinet discounters Bring quality Rebus reaction to the latest sports news, insights from the national experts and the info You need to bet on all of today's action. We call that wager tainment Tooele shows are now streaming live morning, afternoon and night with coverage from across the worlds of sports and sports betting. Find out who's hot who's hurt and who can help you cash in the bet you will net Features some of the biggest names in the game like Nick Costello's Ken Barkley..
KTAR 92.3FM
"expedia" Discussed on KTAR 92.3FM
"Lund Mortgage team how you can start saving hundreds of dollars every Month. Call 6 to 3875 99 40 Today Danny Sullivan. Katie A R News. There is a flash flood watch in effect until tomorrow with some scattered thunderstorms and a 50% chance of rain. Today we're expecting a high of 100 eight's and with all the burns right, the burn scars. Adat is warning you with these flash flood warnings. You're going to have to be careful. You could end up with step on the road. Yeah. Or how about in your house? If you're near one of those burn areas. You don't want that to happen at 50% chance of rain tonight as well with an overnight low of 86 a 50% chance tomorrow with a high of one. Oh, to your weather is brought to you by Howard Air. Whether replace or repair call Howard Air and from the K T. A R Business center, Scannell Properties and Indianapolis based investor bought 166 acres of land near Warner and Ellsworth Roads in Mesa. That they plan to use for a large scale industrial project. Specific details are still being finalized. Company purchased the the land for $36 million. This is now one of the largest land sales in the South West Valley in the past decade and make that the Southeast Valley global stock markets rising today is investors look ahead to US earnings reports that are expected to show strong profits for Well, they're they're flat. The S and P is also flat and the NASDAQ is up. 47 points. For more money news, visit the business Center at K T a r dot com and I don't know how much you're willing to spend on a ticket to see the Suns once they come back to town for Game five of the NBA Finals tickets by the way for upper deck. Going for, like 1000 bucks, and you could be paying over 30 grand for a courtside seat. So once you do that, why would you want to fight? With other Suns fans makes no sense to me, but that actually happened at the arena on Sunday. We'll explain, and I'll try to explain the thinking of some people who say the sun's shouldn't call out folks fighting. That's next on Arizona's morning news. Expedia knows what happens when you travel by yours showed up. Actually, you're getting changed. Oh, by.
The Thought Card
"expedia" Discussed on The Thought Card
"Thanks for listening to out. Travel the system. We'd love to hear your tips tricks and stories to email us at podcast at expedia dot com and to hear more about these tips and tricks. Be sure to come in. Find us on social media. we are expedia. you're listening to out travel the cistern and.
The Thought Card
"expedia" Discussed on The Thought Card
"That time frame that might cause that price to change well. Travel is an extremely dynamic environment and the airlines can change a fair at any moment and so the systems are working hard to make sure that they're up to date and the longer you stay stagnant on the as like if you go away and you go cook dinner new. Come back the more chances you have of that happening. So we typically want customers to either do a fresh search so they don't experience that or purchase. If you know you want it because sometimes that price won't be there later. Yeah so dynamic. Pricing is something that you hear. Come up all the time. What are those factors that might go into this dynamic pricing so airlines typically. They monitor each other. Let's a constant thing is looking at the competition and seeing what the fares look like that. Come through another factor is you know is my changing capacity so too i have less planes. Two more planes right. Now you're dealing with the seven. Thirty seven max rates so you have certain airlines that have a lot of capacity sitting and so that means that they're running other planes so their pricing might be a little higher. They could also price lower right because they want to keep the demand going. So typically you'll see prices fluctuate as you come in closer to a weekend if especially if that is a holiday and also for hotels. It's all again going to be a play on what's going on house my inventory like. Let's say they had a convention in a cancelled. Well there's eighty percent capacity right that they've gotta fill all of a sudden so of the stuff is so dynamic that's why they don't have algorithms running their revenue management. They've got hundreds of people doing this. Because the environment changes quite a bit which is a little bit nerve racking. I guess for a traveller but that's sort of the nature of the industry right it just proves how dynamic environment really is absolutely so amy. What are some of the tips that you give your friends and family. All my family thinks travel agent. They still have never understand what i do. They so call me the book all their travel. Typically for me. When i'm looking at going somewhere it's always. Where do i wanna be close into. Do i want to be by the beach. do i wanna walk. Do i want to rent a car. And i kind of base where. I'm going to stay on that. So we've got some great maps on the site. Show you where the hotels located. I think that's key. I've had a couple of friends who've worked packages right and they're going to cancun and they ended up in loom and didn't realize you had to take like a forty five minute car ride to the hotel so it's kind of understanding okay from traveling with three kids. I probably wanna be getting to my destination. Pretty quickly traveling a super stressful with security. And everything else nowadays. That i look to. How can i get to my destination. Easiest the most comfortable est if that's such a word and obviously in a cheaper way what are some of the ways to do things a little bit cheaper than typically staying over week you get. Some better deals our saturday night. Stable fight in hotel. Do offer better deals in that way. If i'm going on a weekend then the key is obviously coming back on monday. That's what everybody does so you look at or even on sunday. So maybe if you can come back on tuesday so kind of looking around. Typically sundays right. That's what everybody's gonna wanna do is come back so you can save quite a bit even coming back on a late saturday checking for the one day later or the one day earlier and seeing how that might sort of affect your trip in the cost of things exactly. Yeah on the departure and arrival on both. Sometimes i've gone somewhere. I wanted to go for new year's eve. We came back nears. Even i saved eight hundred dollars. I didn't really need to be in that island news day so it's just little things like that you know where you're like. Well you saved eight hundred bucks. You can go do something else with that money. Yeah absolutely. I mean eight hundred dollars. That's pretty crazy saving. It's true we talked a lot about sort of bundling. Are you big proponent of that as well like have you seen some decent savings yourself i have. I have some great packages to saint martin before the hurricanes. Such a beautiful place. And i am a proponent just because the industry and i know how the filing works right the filing of the fares and the filing of the rate plans hoteliers value package customers in that. They know they're less likely to cancel. They're less likely to change. Meaning they're kind of in and it's a different kind of customer that books a package. You don't book them all the time right. And it's usually a family trip or a romantic vacation or a honeymoon so hoteliers are definitely incentivized. As well as flights to get better deals when you bundle and again it goes back to them being able to give a better deal that their competitors can't figure out last summer my cousin was getting married and i very very classically waited until the last minute to book it. Even though i knew a year beforehand that she was getting married in spain so abou- maybe six weeks l. I go into book for me and my husband. I just knew that the prices were going to be really tough so i started like searching and you know. We had some flexibility. We wanted to have a little bit of free time like before or after the wedding. So i was checking all these different reasons and then i actually decided to at a hotel for one night and i started searching as a package because at that point i needed a hotel and my flights were each at the time when i was just looking at the flights each one was fifteen hundred dollars and then when i added the hotel in madrid for one night the entire trip for two flights plus the hotel became fifteen hundred dollars so literally adding a hotel for one night in madrid. Saved fifteen hundred dollars. I was like shocked which is really funny. Because a work at expedia and i know that bundling helps you save typically. I've saved at most one or two hundred dollars. I've never saved anything to that tune. So ever since then i feel like whenever i go to search for our i'm like oh my god. I need to look at a package. So it disproves what we're saying. Yeah amazing right amy. So where are you headed to next. Where's your next vacation to. That's a good one. My dream vacation is bora bora. But i've heard maldives is kind of the cheaper version. That's more romantic. Though so i probably will pick something me and my daughter and my mom i did. Just go chill on the beach. And i did some cruising to aruba in accra sows. So i'd like to go back and stay in aruba you. I recently saw some research about the importance of mothers and daughters traveling together and how it creates this sort of extra moment of connection bonding so very on trend. Amy for you to do. You're really on top of the trend seized as i must say there we go. Yeah very into it all right. Amy thank you so much for coming on the show today. It was a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for inviting me..
The Thought Card
"expedia" Discussed on The Thought Card
"I'm misri natasa and you're listening to out travel the system today. I've got amy cisneros director of revenue optimization at expedia. Hi amy welcome to the show. Thank you for having me so excited to have you on. This is a really really big topic. I think one. That's a lot of meat to it. I really appreciate you coming on in hoping to sort of give all of these travelers out there the low down and the four one one on how pricing really happens on expedia and even some of these other sites because i think a lot of what you're going to talk to us about today isn't necessarily specific to our website but it's pretty common for a lot of industry as well totally one of the biggest questions i get all the time is how come. We don't necessarily always have the cheapest price on our site. Well prices are really determined by suppliers and so pricing can vary from day to day. One day a specific flight might be available on a friday. Where that flight at a cheaper price is not available on the saturday. I would say maybe alter some of your search for amador's if you are open to a weekend to weaken travel look at that friday and look at that saturday leave date also look at different times to come back sometimes times. Play into it. I guess from your experience from what you've seen looking at the pricing on a regular basis is it cheaper to buy things sort of separately or would it be cheaper to buy things as a package or does it vary suppliers whether it's fighter hotel definitely will give better deals on the package path and they will if you were to shop the standalone and the reason being is there something that we have in the industry call the passivity which means it's kind of hidden to competitors so a certain airline might give you a price that's half off on the package pass for a flight. You would not see a standalone path and so everybody loves a package customer suppliers our customers to bundle and save and so they're highly incentivized to get better deals package paf okay but it can still vary depending on where you're going in that kind of stuff so it still probably might be worth for a customer to take a look at some of the standalone prices but then also look at. Maybe what it's showing in the package. Path this well on the package path. We have a strike throw so whenever you see a strike through on the price on the left of that strike through will show you how much you would pay if you searched for the standalone components. And so when you see that that means that. Hey there's a deal in here. Then you don't necessarily have to search for the standalone components. Okay i actually personally did not know that so that is frankly a really good tip. Because i would actually go in and i like. I'm one of those people that searches excessively. Because i just that's just who i am so that's actually a really good tip. That's probably can actually save me like a couple of hours of my life. Every time i go so that's a really good one and another thing about the strike. Pricing is it gives you what the total would be so in some cases you can see the package prices seven hundred and then the total would have been a thousand on this standalone for the flight in the hotel. So it's really a good indication on what kind of savings you're getting i to emit crazy sharper when it comes to travel being that i've been in the industry for twenty years. I always want to make sure but the more you are the more you save right. That's our value proposition. It expedient as all those options that we have and so i am a firm believer in bundling versus shopping standalone. So people can see those same type savings no matter what. Their combination is aflame in a car or a hotel car or anything along those lines. That's absolutely correct. So would somebody get more savings the more things that they add on. We don't have that capability today. That's definitely something that we're looking to build out but those different combinations to have different saving so flight plus car might have a different savings value than fight in hotel. It really depends on what dave week. What's the mentor. like for those suppliers. Obviously if it's super bowl weekend right suppliers are going to give not as good of deals if they would if it's just a regular weekend. Yeah that does not any holiday travel. Okay speaking of travel or special events or things like that. Obviously prices concert to really fluctuate so when those prices do change. That's still the supplier like the hotelier or the airline. That's still them adjusting. Those prices really just supply and demand at that point right. it's true. I can speak from an airline perspective. Since i have that background. At the beginning of the year those holiday periods are laid out you know when easter falls. And so maybe you'll save for these two weeks. Prices are going to be a little bit higher for the whole year. That's done and that really helps them. Manage what the demand is going to be because we know everybody travels in the easter. We know people travel on president day. We know people travel memorial weekend and so you set your pricing accordingly. Now close in what you'll see. Sometimes they'll make changes but typically they stay pretty holding fast is from an airline right. They like people to purchase further out now from a hotelier. It's a little bit different right. Because they've got a set of inventory. And so i think that when it's closer and they may be more apt to drop some prices but again it's gonna be really related to how well did i book from memorial or am i two weeks out or three weeks and then some of them also may raise the prices. Yeah so there's a lot of other myths out there when it comes to pricing. I've heard a lot of people say things like. Oh if you clear your cookies then you'll get a better price because they're watching. How many times you search and that means that they know how badly you want the ticket or i've heard things like if you book through a mac versus a pc. You'll see different. Prices are these actual myths or are these legitimate things that actually happen. They are absolutely miss that something that we cannot do. We don't consider anything on a person by person basis pricing that we do today is based on what type of hotel and what type of fight. So you can't actually tell who these people are nor. Do you set prices. Based on who these people are. No not where they're searching from not who they are not whether you have an apple phone or any of that that's data that we just don't have and it's not really legal to do those kinds of things so then what about cookies. Would it be possible if i came in and i searched for. I just said. I was like a crazy searcher so i'm searching for four hours if i clear my cookies. Will i get a different price. Just because i cleared my cookies. You should not get a different price because you cleared your cookies. The only thing that could happen as in the case of some kind of price change like with the flights changing or with the hotel. Maybe changing their inventory. You may see a difference there but not from clearing your cookies so that would just be like a coincidence. Then exactly okay. One complaint that i've seen come in a lot through social media channels and things like that is people will go through a meta search site or something like that and then once they actually get to checkout the price changes or sometimes they like step away from their computer they come back. They hit refresh and the price is completely different. But what's actually happening. In.
The Thought Card
"expedia" Discussed on The Thought Card
"One of the biggest questions i get all the time is how come. We don't necessarily always have the cheapest price on our site. Well prices are really determined by suppliers and so pricing can vary from day to day. One day a specific flight might be available on a friday. Where that flight at a cheaper price is not available on the saturday. I would say maybe alter some of your search for amador's if you are open to a weekend to weaken travel look at that friday and look at that saturday leave date also look at different times to come back sometimes times. Play into it. I guess from your experience from what you've seen looking at the pricing on a regular basis is it cheaper to buy things sort of separately or would it be cheaper to buy things as a package or does it vary suppliers whether it's fighter hotel definitely will give better deals on the package path and they will if you were to shop the standalone and the reason being is there something that we have in the industry call the passivity which means it's kind of hidden to competitors so a certain airline might give you a price that's half off on the package pass for a flight. You would not see a standalone path and so everybody loves a package customer suppliers our customers to bundle and save and so they're highly incentivized to get better deals package paf okay but it can still vary depending on where you're going in that kind of stuff so it still probably might be worth for a customer to take a look at some of the standalone prices but then also look at. Maybe what it's showing in the package. Path this well on the package path. We have a strike throw so whenever you see a strike through on the price on the left of that strike through will show you how much you would pay if you searched for the standalone components. And so when you see that that means that. Hey there's a deal in here. Then you don't necessarily have to search for the standalone components.
The Thought Card
How Flight and Hotel Pricing Works With Expedia
"One of the biggest questions i get all the time is how come. We don't necessarily always have the cheapest price on our site. Well prices are really determined by suppliers and so pricing can vary from day to day. One day a specific flight might be available on a friday. Where that flight at a cheaper price is not available on the saturday. I would say maybe alter some of your search for amador's if you are open to a weekend to weaken travel look at that friday and look at that saturday leave date also look at different times to come back sometimes times. Play into it. I guess from your experience from what you've seen looking at the pricing on a regular basis is it cheaper to buy things sort of separately or would it be cheaper to buy things as a package or does it vary suppliers whether it's fighter hotel definitely will give better deals on the package path and they will if you were to shop the standalone and the reason being is there something that we have in the industry call the passivity which means it's kind of hidden to competitors so a certain airline might give you a price that's half off on the package pass for a flight. You would not see a standalone path and so everybody loves a package customer suppliers our customers to bundle and save and so they're highly incentivized to get better deals package paf okay but it can still vary depending on where you're going in that kind of stuff so it still probably might be worth for a customer to take a look at some of the standalone prices but then also look at. Maybe what it's showing in the package. Path this well on the package path. We have a strike throw so whenever you see a strike through on the price on the left of that strike through will show you how much you would pay if you searched for the standalone components. And so when you see that that means that. Hey there's a deal in here. Then you don't necessarily have to search for the standalone components.
Rants and Randomness with Luvvie Ajayi
Expand Your World With Luvvie's Travel Essentials
"So if follow me on social media you know that travel a lot for work for play. I'm on a flight sometimes multiple times a week and are often post pictures of myself as i travel and i always get questions about Basically my travel central. So i'm dedicating this episodes of talking about it. So here's the thing is travel can be fine but when you do it a lot can be taxing on the body and the mind and that's why it's important to travel well with as many things to minimize your inconvenience and optimize circumstance right. So if you're on the road you wanna make sure that your life is not a difficult as it could be as you travel more and more certain things need to be routine. Certain things need to come with you because you wanna make sure that there's fewer things that could go wrong. Fewer things that make you uncomfortable. So yeah share a few tips. That can help you do better when you're traveling. I like to think about it. Like travels kind of like a project. So pre production production post production. Which in this case means before you go while you're on the go and possibly even after you come back from your trip and i'll get into details about that so the first thing about travel that is important in terms of When you wanna do it is Booking so you can book directly from airlines or you can go on websites like expedia orbitz kayak to find the tickets. Now this matters because If you book directly from a website it's from the website of the airline that you're gonna use. It is best because of the fact that they can make changes easier. It doesn't come often come with extra fees and it's just better to book direct. There's nothing wrong with booking on expedia orbitz but if you ever have to make a change to your ticket you can go through the airline. Also time they'll send you right back to that third website third party website obsolete. When you wanna book i recommend booking from the airline which you can do is search these websites the price comparison. And then you go to the website to book itself so you know delta american airlines united all of those
Newsradio 970 WFLA
"expedia" Discussed on Newsradio 970 WFLA
"Said to get down to business after a day of tradition, tighter than normal security and outreach in Washington. Boxes going all Scott has more live police. So with the elect now dropped from his title, President Joe Biden seeks to build on a message of national reconciliation delivered during his inaugural address Unity. There is no peace on Lee bitterness and Suri no progress. Only exhausting outrage. No nation. Only a state of chaos following a ceremony at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. President Biden is at the White House. Where within the hour he'll sign a syriza of executive orders some ruling back Trump Administration policies. Lisa thanks, Colonel. Well, those executive actions aiming to, among other things, get the US back into the Paris climate accord and back into the World Health Organization. Also rolling back some immigration related policies, and he will order that masks be worn in federal buildings as he begins his plan to take on the pandemic. Vice President Kamala Harris also getting down to business in the U. S. Senate swearing in three new senators the to run off winners in Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Jonah's off. Now Expedia have to serve out. The remainder of Harris is term, giving Democrats Control of the chamber. Now former President Trump telling supporters earlier today. Goodbye way love you way will be back in some form. He gave a farewell address a joint base Andrews before heading to Florida with his family also wishing the new administration great success and luck. He still faces a trial in the US Senate, but the timing remains uncertain after the House voted to impeach him for inciting insurrection. Over the attack on the U. S. Capitol. A record day on Wall Street. The Dow up to 57 America is listening to Fox News. From the Fox News podcast from the monster Nissan Traffic.
Steve Scaffidi
Expedia, Vrbo Implement Enhanced Screening Process for Washington, D.C. Bookings Ahead of Inauguration
"24 hours to go until Inauguration day securities ranching, ending up to another level in the nation's capital, CVS, and the only Rocco Expedia is stepping up screening for those who have booked travel in the DC area ahead of tomorrow's inauguration. The travel site along with its home rental service, v. R B O isn't canceling plans to cross reference all bookings against extremist watch lists. The move follows a similar measure by competitors air being The last week experienced and air being, people say users must present user government issued ideas to get their request fulfilled.
Badass Agile
The State of Agile With Vasco Duarte, Ryan Ripley, and Chris Williams
"One of the questions that came up. I is you know. Let's let's start angry. What pisses us off about. The current state of agile as we experience it daily today. I'm pissed off. And i'm not taking it anymore. I guess i'll i'll jump in here. I've you know todd. And i have been talking a lot lately about we. We've been working with a lot of companies who have been sold. These million dollar multimillion dollar transformations And you know people are slapping different frameworks and different methodologies on top of really deep rooted cultural issues and they're not getting anywhere and at once the money runs out the consultants go away and they're not better off and really tired of watching that play out over and over and over again It's just turned into this big money. Grab where big box consulting firms just slap a bunch of consultants and and others into place. They clear their bench charge as much as they can. They don't really do anything. And then leave and it just That is just perpetuated and over and over again. It leaves a just makes everything more difficult you know. I'm more than happy to come in and clean up and try to teach professional scrum and help companies kind of undo the damage of these big box consultants. But it's like oh. Can we just skip that step in and really learn how to work in new ways and i don't know what do you guys think so. I see the same happening Looking back. I saw the same happening in finland. Let's say late. Two thousand two thousand eight two thousand nine. We heard through the grapevine that accenture have created a natural practice and they had a two hundred page manual and then of course. I was working with At that time two thousand eight dollars working with the one of the first safe adoptions. It was called achard released train at that time. A rt which i thought was kind of a cool art right because his own about art. There's no science to working with people. It's all about leaving the moment understanding. What's going on and reacting and then of course failing but learning quickly and then adjusting right and if i think what what ryan is said and turn the to all the way up to eleven. I would say that we have lost our way we were talking about. The ryan was talking about bringing kanban back to its origins simply fight. Well i would like to remind everybody that this whole atul think did not start with -scriminate. Didn't start with condon either. It started with the small talk community. Doing what they called at that time. Extreme programming xp and if we go all the way back to the roots extreme programming was taking the best practices and just turning it all the way up to eleven. We hear a lot about how safe doesn't have a customer in the big picture. And so on juno that. Xp had a practice called customer in the room so every team had a customer literally. That's what they called it. The customer that told them whether they were going in the right direction. So if i go to what pisses me off is that we're forgetting what it was that we started back in the late nineties. Early two thousands. And i'm not talking about technical practices. We've forgotten those very much. That's for sure. But i'm talking about everything else. Even the the whole idea of what agile is about agile is not about delivering more crap faster. It's about delivering less but delivering what matters about focusing on value. It's about iterating quickly and so the theme in in my presence here on this episode is gonna be you know. How do we turn at all the way up to eleven. Just like expedia back in the in the late ninety s. I liked that. I feel that this thing about who buys the most agile right now. It's either banks or insurance. Companies tend to have the biggest budgets to put out jalen play and so they're of a certain size by their nature if you look at the startup community if you look at small enterprise small medium business if you look beyond tech and you look at how companies are are are pivoting and adapting now during covid nineteen. I still see a lot of really good. Agile really customer focused agile. They get it because they have to. They're hungry. It's easy when you go around a small business to see the customer desire to say. How do we want our customers to feel. That question is present in everybody's mind. We want customers to feel cared for special part of something good. We want them to have not features. Stop talking about features and buttons do but what capabilities we give them and again. I prefer to talk about that. In terms of feelings customers feel safe. Customers feel tend to cared for whereas the minute you bring into a large scale environment. Things start getting compromise. Things get lost in translation as we try to make this work at scale.
Geek News Central
Airbnb Tops $100 Billion on First Day of Trading
"Aaron be airbnb. Open one hundred six dollars per share on his first day of trading on thursday more than doubling in the sixty eight dollars per share price set for its appeal the day before. This is a weird time to go public but did but hundred and forty six dollars per share. The company now has a market cap of eighty six point five billion dollars more than doubled. Evaluation company sought in the ipo. Just a day ago. That puts aaron. Bb passed the market cap of private chapel giant booking. Which has evesham eighty six billion competitor. Expedia has martin of eighteen. It also is market. Cap exceeds mary at hilton maria. An hilton so This is this is awesome. did very very well.
CNBC's Fast Money
Airbnb is larger than all hotel stocks after its IPO
"One of these things is not like the other awards sesame street. Just take a look at the travel sox. Airbnb is market. Cap now. Stands at eighty six and a half billion dollars that is bigger than booking holdings marriott hilton and expedia and it goes beyond travel with. Today's gains. Airbnb is now bigger than target and goldman sachs. We could talk about money being left on the table. We talk about the huge. I stay pop but the question that we need to answer tonight is simply. Does that make sense. That i mean what you say. They're into four billion dollars in revenue. They're expecting double digit revenue growth. At least the analysts are start doing the math. I mean it's going to take in my opinion five years to deserve this valuation. And maybe that's the way the world is right now. Maybe people don't care maybe this sort of the grey fool theory thing but when you sort of look at this and look at jordache yesterday and save yourself. What am i missing i. It doesn't make any sense to me. It takes a long time to grow in these evaluations. And oh by the way we didn't even talk about but the employment Situation this country is not getting better. As a matter of fact that seems to be getting worse and although we can talk about know the summer of next year things getting back to normal a long time from here to there so in my world. It's ridiculously expensive melissa.
eCommerce Fastlane - Shopify - Shopify Plus - E-Commerce - Ecommerce Business
How To Align Your Customer Experience
"Now my guest and says, episode is Tim Ashe who is an acknowledged authority on evolutionary psychology and digital marketing. He's a sought after international keynote speaker and the best selling author of two books I one landing page optimization, and more. Recently unleash your primal brain actually just listened to recently on audible. Fantastic. We're going to dig into that one for sure Tim has been mentioned by Forbes as a top ten online marketing expert and by Entrepreneur magazine as an online market influence to watch. For nineteen years he was a CO founder and the CEO of site tuners, tuners dot, com and their digital marketing and optimization agency. Tim has helped create over one point, two, billion dollars in value for some amazing companies that I know. We all know Google expedia harmony facebook and American Express and cannon and Nestle there's massive list year semantic new to it and humanity Siemens anyways in countless direct to consumer brands. So exciting to have Tim today busy schedule. But please join me conversation with Tim Today. So. Tim Welcome ECOMMERCE battling. A Ha-. Very. Happy Veer Steve. So you've had quite an eventful career I might add keynote speaking around the world are writing bestselling books year you run international conferences, I guess pre cove in our doing some virtual events. So tell me a little bit about best can your entrepreneurial journey so far? Sure. Well, I've worked in a variety of high tech companies when I started university at UC San Diego my undergraduate majors were in computer engineering and cognitive science, and then I stayed there for graduate school and what would neural networks or what would now be called deep learning or machine learning or A. And this was early days We didn't have the big data sets that we do now with the Internet. So I switched Internet marketing and started my first marketing agency back in the early DOT com days and Never, let go of the Tiger's tail and twenty five years. Later I decided you know running an agency wasn't my highest and best use on the planet. So I decided to focus on what I really enjoy, which is the thought leadership in the form of as you mentioned, keynote speaking and writing my latest book and spreading knowledge out to people as opposed to working on client accounts. Right? and. So I did mention a little tiny bit of top of the show but you know you've worked with a lot of some really great ecommerce brands some of the largest brands I might add like what are some mistakes that you see kind of consistently some of these e commerce brands are making today will if we restrict people have different definitions of ECOMMERCE, I, just WanNa start there for some ecommerce anywhere. Any website that has as A. Checkout anything where you sell items directly and for others, it's more restrictive and I'd say it's a e commerce catalog and that's I think a more standard definition. If you also use a lots of different items, you have a homepage category pages, search results, pages, and product, and so on. It's not a website where there are two or three things for sale in those early incidental. Would I don't know is that a fair definition or how would you agree with that? Totally would agree with that yes. So In the case of large catalogs, I'd say the common mistakes that we I've seen in my careers one gratuitous use of motion and wasted real estate on the homepage in the form of giant sliders everybody seems to have those Sh. Yeah. That's a big known my book I talk about I have a whole e-commerce best practices section in my landing page optimization book and I devoted a page to why sliders. An evil that should be immediately removed from your site. While you know what part of it I think to is that it doesn't position the brand well, enough I think with having like motion and I think when people have a lot of different slogans, tag lines or kind of looks and things going out other different sections on the site they think they're trying to blast all of their bullets out on this highly sought after a piece of real estate versus maybe having a proper positioning statement or something. One thing that's very important. That's key to why someone should click. Through or why someone shown up on this particular website having one message and one brand image and go further than that I, would say that I'll numerate the reasons why you shouldn't have a slider on your homepage. The one that you mentioned is by far the most important our brains from an evolutionary perspective are designed to notice things moving in are visual field. It kind of has survival value. If you know what I mean here is coming to eat me I need to know what direction and how big is right So. they're they're an interrupt, their the nuclear option in the face of motion graphics won't get looked at and even in the face of graphics, text won't get read. So anything that's graphics or text on your site can't possibly compete with that atomic bomb of a slider on your homepage. And and another reason that really bad is because it's trying to pretend you have more real estate than you really do. So everybody wants a piece of the homepage and lurk. We can add another frame tour slider. Well Great. Thanks. So now have to sit through a longer commercial nobody likes to do that on broadcast TV. There's certainly don't have the attention span to sit through five three seconds sliders to make sure they saw every frame of the crap you're trying to throw them on your home page You don't really an editorial problem. You can't decide what's important. So you're trying to cram it all in there and make everybody happy except your site visitors that are trying to give you money,
Business Wars Daily
Despite the Pandemic, Airbnb Will Take the Company Public
"I'm Elaine Appleton grant and this is business worse daily on this Tuesday August Eighteenth David Brown is on vacation. There's no other way to say, this twenty twenty is a weird year and yeah, that's a whopping understatement particularly for the travel sector, the latest news and the beleaguered lodging industry. It looks like AIRBNB will go public before the end of the year. The multibillion dollar home sharing company has long been eyeing the public markets. Early, this year AIRBNB was planning its IPO even though twenty nineteen. had been a rough year to in the first nine months of that year and the company lost more than three hundred and thirty million dollars growth was slowing competition already rough was increasing from aggressive rival Expedia, which owns short term rental brands. We are be O- and home away as we reported here, last year the entry of Marriott into the luxury home sharing business didn't help either. When the pandemic hit things took a dramatic turn for the worse the company faced a Billion Dollars in cancellations its valuation dropped from thirty one, billion dollars in twenty seventeen to eighteen billion dollars. This April, the next month airbnb laid off. Two, hundred people a quarter of its staff. It also slowed down plans to expand into TV and transportation the verge reported. Things were looking dire enough that even though it had plenty of cash on hand airbnb chose to borrow money and take on new investment to get through the crisis in total. The company raised two billion dollars at what the verge called. The steep interest rate top executives cut their pay and the eight hundred million dollar marketing budget was slashed the New York Times reported. It all seemed like one gigantic headache I say O'Brien Chessy in his crew. And yet AIRBNB still plans to go public by the end of August. AIRBNB could file IPO paperwork with the SEC if it does shares could trade before New Year's. At first glance that sounds crazy. But it actually reflects a little good news for the travel business along with some dramatically new patterns of travel behavior both here and abroad what do I mean? We'll think about it if you were stuck in the middle of a crowded city, this spring or summer working at your dining room table, would you stay put? Beginning in May a certain number of US said Hell? No. They had a Derulo areas where they could rent other people's homes, AIRBNB bookings, both in America and overseas began climbing back from their black hole for the three weeks starting around Memorial Day vacationers reserved twenty percent more homes than they did a year earlier according to Bloomberg business was best far from the madding crowds in. June. Reservations in the countryside jumped twenty five percent hosts in rural areas earned more than two hundred, million dollars in that month alone payments DOT COM reported international travel is virtually impossible and of course many. Of US are still avoiding airplanes so more and more of us are taking vacations within two hundred miles of our homes about one tank of gas in many cases were also staying longer after all many people no longer have to get back by Monday to go to the office we just take our work with us in a meeting in July CEO Chesty expressed amazement at the rebound in bookings. There is something I never would have imagined telling you the New York Times reported a kind of defies logic, but in June reservations also grew at rival Vr be oh, the Motley fool reported. Optimists see these numbers as a sign of life for the travel industry as a whole but predicting the future of travel right now is best left to gambling halls AIRBNB is fortunes could change suddenly depending on the course of
How I Built This
Starting Zocdoc with Oliver Kharraz
"Oliver Karaz was born and raised in Germany mostly in rural parts of the country his mother was German and his father was from Iran in came from a long line of doctors. For me, it really starts in some ways with my dad and. The timing rapidly had every reason to become a social activist and and so he came to Germany from the Middle East when he was very young around twenty with no money in his pocket no language skills. And you personally then worked on of odd jobs, but he eventually became a psychiatrist but what has really shaped me much more than being born in Berlin is. Social. Active. Isn't that I that I saw him live and that he really made our family mattress we always talked about talent responsibility and the need to use. Whatever telling behind to help those. Around us that we can make a difference. Given that your father was Iranian and your mother was was sort of. German. An Uber even though you were born in Germany, did you feel did you feel as Germany everybody else? So I didn't have a second identity. We only used spoke German at home and yet. As you say I was also a not always fully accepted. So if I give you an example, my school twelve hundred students and you could pick out to the didn't look like everyone else and I was one of them right and even an enlightened country like Germany. That is notable. So I had what I call a visual accent would people would see me on the street and they would ask me how to speak German. So well and But they also school the skipped my name when reading out scores because they weren't sure how to pronounce my last name and opportunities taken away and even at was physically threatened so i. I think that really shaping in many ways because I realized. Very early that in order to be as successful as everyone around me I would have to be dramatically better in really work much much harder than anyone else and so that used to be strong work ethic in me. For the record Oliver is somewhat down playing his work ethic. Because just out of high school, he actually started his first successful company. It was the early clunky days of the Internet, and he designed a way to help people send emails more easily and he wound up selling that business not for a ton of money, but enough to get him through medical school. But. After practicing medicine for a couple years Oliver realized he couldn't stop thinking about that first business he'd started and how he wanted to start another. So he quit his job in medicine and consulting job with Mackenzie and eventually moved to New York. That was my goal was actually to start another company that that's A. Healthcare, but I I'd also realized at the time that I sold my first company and far too cheaply in that I should learn more about business I and at McKinsey God exposure to balance sheets and panels and hit a lot of very practical experience and what it means to manage business. And I think they fondly of my time at McKinsey was one of my better decisions. McKinsey GonNa Mackenzie is a little bit like going to business school. A lot of people at McKinsey have come from business, schools. In that. Many people go to business school thinking they will find a co-founder. Did you were you actively looking around at your colleagues to think maybe I can do something with him or her you know maybe that person. Absolutely and were you just thinking about different business ideas all the time? Well, it is actually very hard to find good ideas and my definition of a good idea was that it needed to have a great mission I. wanted to make sure that we actually do something good in that. We stayed true to sort of talent breaks responsibility, but also wanted to be a large market and to have a great motor rounded and also I wanted to be based on contrarian inside. Because I thought that all of the best companies have that at its core. While she wanted mission, you wanted a company that could kind of dominate its field by building a motor around it, but was also contrary and that's that's that's those are some interesting. Criteria. And that's why I screen for several years rejected pretty much every idea that that I came across And meanwhile. While you're going through all that I guess you meet this guy Cyrus Masumi. WHO's another McKenzie consultant and and just you just. Become friends like he's like somebody like in and you guys start hanging out. While we got put on study together that required us to travel globally and you've ever done that it meant frost were sixteen eighteen hour days together for three four, five months on end and we really. Got To become great partners in that and and what we realized that we had some. Very complementary skills. Cyrus is one of the most charismatic and gregarious individuals. You'd ever meet his very passionate. He could be more forceful, which sometimes was needed to be effective with clients. And you've talked to me now for a little bit as you can probably tell. More dispassionate and logical and more measuring. German? More, German in many ways, right. also was effective with clients by by. and Cyrus is American right? He's American this but that That close listened and how we work together that really started friendship and we stayed close for the study and be caught up over lunch pretty regularly denounce different business ideas off one another and. I think we connected because we had similar interests because. On. Some levels We were equally passionate about what we're doing higher says, passion was more visible to others than mine but we. Were close enough together that we both accepted. The other as. individual that that we could learn a lot from. Was it was it clear pretty soon after you start hanging out, Sarah's that this was the guy because you were. You're on the lookout for a partner. They I think it was was absolutely an option I know reality is that. With. Both founded companies before Mckinsey and we both knew that we wanna do it again and as I. was always great about being. Very honest. Rather than just nice and and I value that a lot. Yeah. All, right. So So this guy, Cyrus Super Charismatic, really smart clearly, the two of you start to to work together. And what what kind of business ideas are are you coming up with? While we kind of fell in love with a new idea that came about a one of these launches were Cyrus. Told me about how he recently ruptured his eardrum by flying with a cold and then found it very difficult to actually find a doctor and he had asked for recommendations and called down his insurance directory listing started with the as. Doctors weren't accepting new patients some no longer accepted two centurions one provider Pasta Way and so he said, well, why does it take four days to the doctor when I'm in pain right? And why can't this much easier? And we. Both very quickly. realized the potential of this idea from. Working at project be new helps us the for actually spending millions of dollars for marketing to grow their patient base because they had wasted inventory, right they had something that I like to call hidden supply, which is these last minute cancellations no-shows reschedules. That the that go to waste, and then on the other, there are the patients who had a hard time accessing this. You thought it immediately clicked with these my God. Yes. Doctor's appointments connect patients to doctors. Yeah. Well, look if you go through the forfeiture that I had read, it's a great mission right? We're making one of the most personal needs more accessible for for patients we can help patients to get in fast we can help the doctors become more efficient. We can make the entire health care system more cost effective people out of the emergency room things like that, and it's a marketplace. So there is a strong mode and clearly anything in healthcare is a large market and I think the contrary and inside that we had. was. The fact that. Most people thought it's normal that people have to wait twenty four days to a doctor because there's a doctor shortage in read our inside was really no doctors have asthma debate ability because of these last minute cancellations, no-shows reschedules and so I felt very about this idea. So. So you member like how long between the time that the you had that first conversation To the time were both you said, let's start this business was like monster or weeks or days. was was weeks. We what we what we started doing is actually. Mocking up the side in how imagine back then in powerpoint pointing just the wire. Website. Yeah. Wire frame. Exactly. We would. We'd go into starbucks and we'll chat up strangers and say, Hey, here's a five dollar gift card. Give me your thoughts. Sorry I'm GonNa. Go back. You just go to people in starbucks Gift Card and say, can you give me your thoughts? Random Person? The absolutely that's that was sort of our market testing. They wouldn't. They would be like excuse me this is a little weird. You're my space. Might also happen from time to time but you know there's lots of people on starbucks is very in German of you. That's debris because usually he would be to report tentative about doing that. Well, you know I think there was a lot less rejection than you think people actually quite open I. Suggest you try this out but if you If you're unthreatening in Luke harmless as we probably dead and then they'll be pretty open. You went up to and starbucks and you'd say, Hey, we're thinking about a company here. Can you just look at his powerpoint give you five dollars Gift Card and what was in the powerpoint, the popcorn and was just what we thought. This website would look like and we would ask them is the set service that resonates with you would you use it and and we got an incredibly valuable feedback here and really set us in many ways on the on the right track right? So and what pointed to the two of you decide let's quit McKinsey. Let's. Let's pursue this. Probably a month or two after we initially discussed idea did anybody say you were crazy for quitting? Everyone. Everyone told us. Crazy and got a lot of negative feedback on the idea to write people would say this is Bloomberg out I would never pick my doctor on the internet or I already have a doctor or you know doctors wouldn't accept patients that that are looking on the Internet of all kinds of protections that people had when they were thinking about their own situation by. When when you talk to people and starbucks, they actually thought about it much more positively. So we were encouraged enough to say, well, this is going to work as long as we get out of our circle and don't ask McKinsey consultants doctors. The responsible be better. All right. So you are in your thirties at this point. And presumably were making pretty good cash at McKinsey because you were probably you'd know expenses you're on the road all the time so. When you quit, I'm assuming you had some money to launch the business and probably live off for a while. Yeah. So I very deliberately had never raised my living standard to the money that the paying McKinsey and I had saved every dime so that I could. No be in a position where can fund this embraced can afford not to take a salary for a couple of years. Wow. So so a couple of hundred thousand and you saved. You know. Maybe. I'm to Germany to discuss personal finances but. I had. Built this. Radio, you can tell the. Story Yeah I I had I had enough money to live off for for several years but I also Saturday night both finance the company early out of our own savings so that clearly diminish We had leftover after that. So now, you both decided to quit. and. You have some technical expertise because you had. You had done some coding but this is next level stuff. Were you able to be that technology founder and Cyrus was going to be the the sort of the business founder? Absolutely not as I add coated but at that point, I had not touched a computer for a long time We knew we need to have a technical co founder and so Sarah's knew a guy named Nick Guanzhou from the time together, trophy software, and this is another company that they would both worked at the that's the company that they're both previously worked together and Nick just brought a totally different perspective and really educated Addison me on a lot of things and and he was really the one who understood a building a seamless experience for the consumer and ends May. Zach Docs. Early Genius, did you did you have the name dock from the beginning? Not, not initially we we went to several phases on on what the right name could be for for while we wanted to have a descriptive name. So we looked at physicians, dot Com Doctors Dot Com, and we actually tracked down the owners of one of these domains and they wanted several million dollars for the domain name. And and we were finding the company ourselves. So that was out of the question. So then we just sat in a room and we brainstorm a list of fifty or one hundred names, and then started eliminating names until we arrived at Dr. What does it mean? or it doesn't mean anything which was the WTO bit we could. There were zero search results. Okay. There's no meaning behind his ACH. There's no meaning behind and and in hindsight it was precisely the right thing to do because it really was a blank slate for us to fill with with meaning and really build a brand around. Zero such as October we started. It address nate the right lake once you know that it takes more than three weeks from picking up the phone and dialing for doctors till you actually see someone you realize Oh, this really not much else that we have to wait so long for to get. And this is more important than most of these other things you already have. Fantastic access View Magin. If air travel way that healthcare workers that wouldn't be an expedia that wouldn't even be Delta Dot Com that would be individual phone numbers for every plane. Imagine. If that happened, you know a half the planes would fly empty it would be a massive pain and that was actually the state of health care before sock. Is Amazing that that the nothing like this was out there in two thousand seven. I look at I. Think. In many ways you couldn't build it a much earlier. In the early days. When we went out there, we were the ones installing Internet of the doctor's offices. We. They they were a many times just migrating from a paper books to scheduling systems. We were at the cusp of digitisation for healthcare. We were just lucky in our timing to get this right in and start offering the service when that also happened. All right. So you decide to pursue Zach dock and it's the three of you. I'm assuming really just at the beginning and were you working out of out of one of your apartments? Did you guys rent space? No, we worked out of respect for. Many. Times we came to make yet the nicest apartment and and we could bring breakfast Burrito and bake him up and you know the the reality is that we originally had a pretty ambitious launch plan right so we got together around July. We wanted to launch by December of two, thousand seven. Something interesting happened were nick send an email suggesting to look at what was then called techcrunch forty. Take is is now a household name but the draw for us back then was there was a fifty thousand dollar prize now it's called tech crunch disrupt think. So it's a major a startup competition. It's a startup competition and we were the first class of this was much less known be budgeted two hours to fill in the application in really which will send it off. He didn't think about it anymore that there was an early July and early August we've heard that we had been accepted, but there was a complication we'd have to be ready by September eighteenth or. That was three months sooner than we had originally planned to launch. So you'd have a live website by September that is right that is right with doctors with doctors, right So we actually debated for a few hours whether we should even tried to go for that but we ultimately said, yes, we can get the website working and we wanted to have enough doctors just a bars wouldn't look pathetic. Brayden. Coded Night Neither Day and nick really busted his but he did the patient facing side of the website and that was the programs. What was potentially even harder because we're tried to launch a marketplace was to actually get the initial supply on there and remember the website wasn't there yet so. Tires ended up going door to door for doctors offices. Excuse telling them a powerpoint page, and this is really a testament to cyrus sheer willing determination if you think about what it means to really start a company early on, there's nothing to show right you may be a powerpoint but there's no website there's no patience. There's no other doctors no social proof and it has to run on passion and very clear that that is Cyrus superpower. He just went to random doctors offices or he had like a list of doctors offices and he started kind of walking block by block. Well, there's a lot of walking involved a we launched in Manhattan so you can literally go down the street and you see. The signs and you walk in. And he was basically saying look, it's a way to connect you to patients. How was how many by the way? What was your objective? How many doctors do you need to sign up to have this website look okay by September Between six and ten was our goal. Okay. So just doable it is a was extremely hard really. Is telling doctors is one of the hardest things to do why were they saying? Well, first of all, it is baby very hard to even speak to a doctor they are being shielded. Their time is very valuable. Office managers are trained not to let anyone talk to them to protect the doctor from people walking in selling them stuff shirt them. Secondly, they many didn't want to give up control over their calendar which has to write. We ask them to post times that a patient could book into it and it was just a far fetched idea for many of them the patients would actually do this. So he got a lot of knows he got a lot of knows. He'd go there and he just simply not leave until he got a chance to speak to the doctor and a few times. It was even escorted out by security. I really think one in a million could have put this off. I mean was he going to particular kinds of doctors or was he generally focused on an Internet general? Practitioners Ob sobe began with dentists Okay. Because our thinking was that. People go to dentists most often, and we wanted to make sure that we have an offering that is relevant for patients as often as possible. I. Got you so so eventually unassuming, you do get what six to ten or how many did you get by September of two thousand seven Eight. In the meantime, you inequity doing the back end stuff you were doing the coding and building the website does right and as you were building it. How did it look? So. The bit that Nick Build looked awesome for the time I think. It was impressive. We were. Very. Satisfied that we had a scroll bar that we had a map that we had back then already the insurance selector and a lot of feature that. Weren't to be found really anywhere else. All right. So September two, thousand, seven, you are ready to reveal. This service at. Tech. Crunch. And Doth Review present or did did Cyrus kind of wishy the spokesperson? Cyrus. I presented Nick stayed behind in New York to make sure that the less the website was actually up and running This is in San Francisco that you went to the we flew out to San Francisco and So we lost sock talk in front of Eight, nine, hundred people. A lot of them were journalists when the judges opened up with feedback guy covers ocoee who we newnan in valued. As embezzles forever apple he came out to said he he didn't get it. He would never use this in front of everyone right and. His direct load something like honestly Oh, it just never occurred to me to go to any doctor that's really burned in in my brain and what was worse is that he seemed to be right we didn't get a single booking. We were hoping that this PR would get us out of our initial batch of users, right because your other. So many tech journalists there. So you know the publicity may be would would would lead to bookings and that was the hope but. It actually took three days before regard our first legitimate a patient, and and in the entire first month, we only got five bookings. You come back from San Francisco and. You know you had Guy Kawasaki. Say I don't I would never use this service? I'm sure he feels differently today but man maybe then Ezio said that but did did you come back feeling like like dejected like losers or or were you excited like how did you feel coming back? While you know I think we obviously hoping we would eventually get more bookings and In the beginning you probably refreshed. The Bookings Report Hundred Times a day by as we were thinking through what we realized. It was really a typical two sided marketplace challenge It's just a classic chicken and egg problem. You need the supply to get the demand and you need the demand to entice them supply and for dark was even trickier. Right when you think about it, healthcare is hyper local. Very complicated. So you have to match. Supply and demand on a Zip code specialty level, and then we have thousands of insurances take. Until we realized that our odds of actually finding a patient that wanted. An offer there. Quite low, and so the best path forward was to methodically build up supply, and so we just kept going put up a huge map of Manhattan on the wall, and then a sleep put little flags on of where the doctor's brother we're on the website in which insurance is accepted and we just we knew the perseverance. Is the name of the game. Back in just a moment how oliver and Cyrus Begin to drum up interest in stock and how they even start to raise some money at figure out how to dress differently, stay with us guy rows and you're listening to how I built this from NPR. Hey everyone. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors who helped make this podcast possible I to epic provision maker of epic bar beef was nature's idea the epic bar was. 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The deal with our personal finance tuneup series will help you feel more confident and get you on the right track listen and subscribe to NPR's Life Kit. And just a reminder, you can preorder the how I built this book right now, and if you do I'll send you a free signed book plate to go inside the book. The book is a collection of insights and wisdom from some of the most incredible and inspiring makers, inventors, builders, and dreamers on earth to preorder and to get your free signed book plate while supplies. Last, please go to Guira DOT COM or how I built this dot. com. Hey welcome back to how I built this from NPR Cairo's. So it's two, thousand, seven and Oliver. Cyrus. Nick are basically powering through with Zach dock going door to door trying to convince doctors. It's a valuable service and the thing about doctors even though they're really smart and capable and we depend on them. A lot of their offices especially back in two, thousand, seven or sort of technologically in the Stone Age. There was incredibly complicated to sink the doctors calendars with ours. Because none of the software was actually made to sink. Were even in the places where we had syncs up and running, we would frequently get. Feedback while the punishment didn't happen because the doctor wasn't available and we really couldn't figure out why this was the case because when we did screen chairs with the office to their calendar and and our calendar, it was identical right and couldn't figure out why that's happening. So I decided to sit next to the office manager I went there and got to know him and his family photos of his dog. I fixed the printer taught a better strategies to play minesweeper still couldn't figure it out. Until one day, the doctor would come out and she'd say, Hey David I'm out next Friday. And then what does David do does he go into the calendar and block out next Friday or does he take a post? It note On a doctor out next Friday and sticks this too is monitor. In the real world. These post it notes, of course happen and but once you know that Matthew Friend, you can start filtering this out and that's one example they were literally a thousand point, one percent solutions that we had to figure out to make this work. Wow. That sounds I'm getting exhausted. Just hearing about that because this is like even like Google calendars, right? Yeah. Yeah. That was that was early days and what we were extremely focused around were making show the experience was fantastic. If something went wrong, we fix it. Right. So I was our customer service I personally would call the doctor and and confirmed the appointment was all said if it wasn't I, personally contact the patient to let them know and then I would offer them. Amazon Gift Card alongside with an apology those actually one case where it didn't catch a patient in time. and. The were in the subway to the doctor, and so I raised them to the doctor's office and picked up a bouquet of flowers on the way there and met them in person to apologize. And that was really a turning point burs. The service has to work and we need to be have this patients I attitude in in terms of how it works completely ingrained in the company. All right. So you clearly need to kind of grow this Were you offering this service doctors for free at the time? Initially. We for free by we eventually started charging fifty dollars per month. But Sam doctor you come into my office and you say, Hey, if you pay me I can bring you more customers. I would be skeptical I would've said to you you who whose, who even knows about you. You'RE GONNA you're asking me to pay you money for Phantom bookings for maybe no customers I mean did some of the doctors say Many. The US summarize our sales challenge. Right? It was very hard because even if you wanted to, we couldn't easily share how many patients their competitors are down the road God like that was something that was confidential. All right. So you are you got this chicken and egg problem. Not, enough people signing up and he gets skeptical doctors but you know that the service could really benefit the doctors, but you also need them to pay for because otherwise you know but business. Meantime at a certain point I'm assuming you guys start to think we'd better go out and look for money if we're going to really make this thing work. Yeah. Yeah. That that happened in the spring of two, thousand, eight we decided we raise series. And we we make the rounds we get in front of a number of the big name, BC New York the also go to Sandhill road in impel. Toho Santo Road we leads and road initially were very successful at all we got Polite knows. and. Ray No feedback control someone took us as I told us you know what the idea seems. Good. But you're consultants I'd and the perspective of its consultants can't get anything done and what realized is that even though we had both founded companies before our Mackenzie Pedigree in our keys and button down shirts, they were really hurting us, and so we wait rank Khakis and button down shirts. It sounds crazy. Were they pleaded pants or were they at least nine pleaded please. Yeah Yeah. Yeah we after hearing that feedback We very quickly just went to the next gap and bought jeans and t-shirts and from that on the combos with VC's when but a lot better. So you went from McKinsey consultant look to this are the tech casual uniform of jeans and t-shirts that that's exactly right and we introduced ourselves not as NBA's and McKinsey Consultants but we introduce ourselves previous entrepreneurs that are starting their next company. was was anyone biting? Were there people who were like? Yeah there's a great idea I'm in. So interesting enough we had raised some money from. Friends and colleagues, and many of those they invested in US business plan unseen just based on the fact that we. Were giving up our careers at McKinsey to pursue talks. So that felt really a great. and. As we started changing how we appeared in how we introduced ourselves to venture capitalists L., we started to get offers and so in August of two thousand eight, we ended up raising five million from KHOSLA ventures expeditions mark. Wow Mark Banya Jeff bezos, and Venus is. All their. Funds are in which sounds like a lot before you WanNa do it's actually. Kinda limited because you still it seems to me in two thousand eight even though you have five million dollars a lot of money you still have this problem which is you've gotta get. Customers, and then to get customers, you need lots of doctors had lots of options but to get doctors, you need lots of customers booking through the site to you do that precisely D- These five million dollars per lily earmarked for making New, York, work, right, Miguel, I market work but. immediately after raising the money the financial crisis hit. And You may remember there was rest in peace a memo that went around about startups, right? Yes. About start ups, never being able to raise money arrested in peace good times. So we got this job is to make the money stretch in. We probably learn not during this time This was really our first go round making hard choices and what I want to be frugal and not to do things we can't afford and We learned to not let money replace critical, thinking and creativity. But now we continued to grind away at New York and at some point felt while if you want to get. To the next level we have to prove. Dr Isn't just a New York City phenomenon. Right? We had to prove that it would work in a second city But at that point, we didn't have the money to do this anymore, and by the way you're still your approach was still the same. It was door to door. That's right door to door and how how you building awareness about the about the fact Zach existed with customers with potential customers. So we it was day very difficult to get someone. To the website. Yeah but when they did. They loved it because it was such a step change from how healthcare used to work for him. Right they used to have to pick up the phone and wait on hold and then plays scheduling. tetris. With the office manager, can you do Wednesday morning about Thursday noon? Friday afternoon, and now they could do the same thing in a minute and have complete overview about the ability patients loved it and they told their friends. So we we started to get word of mouth. Going, and so we saw New York really taking up and we felt like, okay, this does this go into work in New York. At a minimum rate, but we also realized that it took us a fair bit of time. And money to get it going. In New, York and do we couldn't with the money we had left from the five million easily expanded into a new city at the same time. Raising money was going to be difficult because the next generation of investors wanted to see that it works and other cities as Walter. So we were a little bit in this catch twenty, two we ended up. Applying to. Force boost Your Business Competition Four. Forbes has his competition as sell to where they give away money right to they were promising a hundred thousand dollar prize. And at this time. We won. And Yeah what did is they gave us one of these large publishers. Clearinghouse is sex and very useful actually used to cover a hole in one in our only conference room. There was a hole in the wall and we covered it with that. At, this point you are, you are working out of an office, not not an apartment at this point we were working out of A. Shared Office space we work. Yeah. So they had given us publisher clearing house is is check but they fail to give us the small check for three months and we were getting really nervous, but it would still get it but. But ultimately, we got that one hundred thousand dollars and that's what we used to launch and our second market in DC in Washington DC and would did it require you guys to move down there or were you did you hire because I'm assuming you had to? A lot of your early capital was going into sales. Business Development hiring sales reps, is that right? Right, we had a couple of sales reps at the time. A. Very first employee ever was a sales rep is still with the company today and He was great. He figured out how to. Really charm his way. To the doctor. So there were no more security guards escorting anyone out. When did you? I'm assuming that even in two, thousand, nine, two, thousand, ten, and beyond we're not yet profitable. Far From It? Yeah. Far from it right because it's a capital intensive business. Yes. We obviously invested heavily in customer service wanted patients to have a great experience. And we had a quite sizable engineering team because that was actually a major engineering effort. So what started to happen when did you start to kind of see? A real turning point. Yeah. So we we we had launched New, York successfully with. Years. Of hardwork, we've gotten it off the ground is transported that to DC at work well, in DC, and now he said, well, why are we not in more cities and so we actually we raised serious be with fouled respond and We used to expand off the East Coast Francisco then Chicago and we just got better better at it. So we then ended up raising serious and two thousand eleven from Goldman NTSC, and we primarily use this to grow our sales team and sign up more more doctors in from two thousand eleven till two thousand, thirteen, we launched roughly thirty new cities I read that by by two thousand, fourteen would covered. Like forty percent of markets in the US, which is huge I mean that's right I mean that's a huge number of cities. And in that year evaluation. Of tzakda. Past Billion Dollars I mean that's That's pretty remarkable i. mean you were kind of on this like really rapid trajectory and you a pretty straightforward model right and you were charging doctors a flat fee every year and then. They could take all the bookings they wanted and I think that by that point like by two thousand, fourteen knew it was not cheap. It was expensive viewed really raised the price it was like three thousand dollars a year, right? Something like that. Yes recharged Dr Three thousand dollars a year and and there was a flat fee. No matter. How many bookings Actually facilitated for them and and the reality was for some doctors that got a lot of bookings that was a great deal. Yeah. But but there were also doctors that God a lot fewer bookings and for them that fixed cost was actually too expensive and some of them were starting to leave the service, and so we got into a situation that required us to invest a lot to stay where we are and then invest even more to continually grow our overall provider base, which means we had to build out a massive sales team to always sign up more doctors right and. Some point during this time L. Nick actually ran an analysis showed that it would take several years if ever fries to make our money back on on many of the doctors we signed up because you would have to sign up. X number of hundreds of thousands of doctors paying that amount every year. To make your money back to to make sort of our the cost of the sales team back. Wow and L. it. This was pure that would make us dependent on external capital for our very long time, and now it's a clearly there are many companies that have taken. Grow fast at all costs approach. And They Held onto this forty extended period of time by L., it clearly puts talking to a dependency to. Investors in their mind says, yeah. So. Meantime. You know I I from what I understand. There's disagreements I mean there there are you know the leadership team including Cyrus he he's I. Think he's he's sort of his position as the flat fee model is actually the best way to go is that a fair assessment of of his position? Yeah. I think that's right. I. Mean there were two fundamentally divergent ways held the business could go forward right. One way was to continue to work on optimizing the unit economics of our subscription model and the other way was to think about how to make it more transformative leap and then find a new more profitable. And more sustainable model and. Their. Look I can certainly understand The reluctance and taking this leap if companies rechange their underlying business model once they have a certain scale and then live to tell about it, right. We know the names of the companies that have done this net flicks, but from DVD's to streaming adobe. From box software to the cloud, but there's not a lot of companies that do that. and. Needed to make a choice which which direction I wanted to go. And and I should say over that. Became intensely personal for you because hugh and Cyrus really disagreed on on on the direction of the company should take. Steps down he he left the company and you moved into the role of CEO. Those right and what ask you about this neo. Beauty's in the flies of this show is its simplicity and we talked to one person or sometimes too. It's a single narrative, and so we don't have cyrus with us to tell us what happened but I wanna ask you about this time because. This was your co founder. This was your partner This is your friend and he was leaving the company. How did you feel at that time? I all I can say was a very hard and very emotional period for everyone involved and It was certainly a departure But how was through that given these two divergent choices you you couldn't. note, both of us could be useful to talk and. I have to imagine that for for period. China. was sort of the friendship. Look been we were very close we. Were not only friends we had worked for eight years believe together fourteen hours a day, and we probably talked more to each other than to anyone else in our lives but you know. Still touch from time to time and. I think he's joining us on from sideline. He still at prison million owner of the company Yeah, he's still. Here's the thing I mean we've we've told stories about breakups we've had we've had episodes were there were married couples who split divorced but continued the business e O products. Susan Griffin Black and an her husband Brad They continued the business stacy's pita chips continue the business after the divorce sold it for a quarter billion dollars. You guys were worth value to one point eight billion dollars at this point. was was ever party that just thought you know, God look at what we're doing on the core we're going and. I mean did you in service it down and say you know this thing is just growing and? Let's just figure this out. I think the challenge is that it's not as if there was an article way to decide what the right path forward is. As long as investors wanted to give us money growing all costs was yeah. Fine Strategy. The question was just how dependent you wanted to be on the continued goodwill of investors. It sounds like you were tired of going out raising money. You didn't want to do that anymore. Oh, not at all but I think you want to raise money from a position where you know what your turn to is and and. It wasn't clear that the business model would work in in a way that that we could just flip a switch and be profitable. Yeah. So. That was a tough year for you. Two, thousand fifteen. There was an article in business I think business insider, and it was about the sales team. It's October that year and it was. It was some allegations that you know Pete member sales team using adderall even cocaine they were under immense pressure. They were working all the time when you saw that article. And I'm not saying you even aware of any of this. You may not even aware of it but I. have to think that that article really alarmed you and and maybe even embarrassed you. Look A. There were a number of articles in two thousand fourteen fifteen. Didn't absolutely get everything, right but Budweiser I can say is that At. The time doctor had their sales team and we're. Getting very quickly and Your maybe maybe. Too focused on. L. Hitting targets and. Not. Focus enough on creating a strong culture the I hear these stories from six years ago from from time to time and from from now from candidates and and really every time. This happens like a Gut Punch. Because, this we know we're completely different company now. On on so many levels, but clearly, you saw that in new that you had to change something. While yes, I look I l there's a there's a couple of things about this. Right? We are a technology company, but we had said ourselves up too much about. Instead of writing wins and really too little about being adaptable and darning and and building the trust required to try things that now pet the risk of failure. and. So one of the first things I did is to change core values. You know to emphasize those behaviors each one of our values adaptable, not comfortable and other one is progress before perfection learners before masters right and. We only kept really one DIA CONSTANT DEL patients I. Personally that. That was more of the culture that I thought was right for Doc to succeed on many dimensions. So, you take over the company it's got high valuation, but you're still not making money and you know that you've gotta change the underlying business model you're never gonNA make money. And from what I understand this is the beginning of what you have internally described as the second founding of the company. That is right. That is right and that basically happens in in two thousand, eighteen you you launch this new business model where instead of the the dollar membership fee. Basically, you would charge doctors a lot less like two hundred or three hundred bucks, but then every booking you, you would take a cut from that booking. So like a travel agency. A little bit charge for new patient booking. So the existing patients to practice we made free but yes, there was the fundamental idea and. It sounds like such an obvious thing to do but but here's the problem with it and why why are we thought it was incredibly risky to try this. Our best customers that had been on for a long time. They got lots of pockets right and if we start charging them per bookings, their prices go up very significantly in some cases ten times more and that seemed. Competing, insane to us. In. Particular because when we talked to other companies that were at gone through similar changes and even pricing experts, they're number one advisor was make sure whatever you do never charged your best customers more and frost would be precisely. The opposite. In the thing that was counter-balancing this in our mind was well, maybe we'd be able to bring on a lot more doctors because the barrier to entry is now much lower that was there was the back and forth in the team to figure out whether that's the path we want to want to go. So, this is still a risky strategy because you're depending really on new bookings because the two hundred dollar annual fees dramatically lower and I have to imagine in year one, you actually saw drop in your revenue in the year one of of this curve. Second founding. Right. Well, it's from a risk profile worth at that. Right the warriors that you lose all your best customers in with it, all the bookings day used to be getting. and. So we needed to be ready for a very significant drop in bookings and revenue and the second Challenge was here that. The beauty of this approach modest and we got all this money upfront right and Sharon. Now to bond, we're getting paid after the booking with with a thirty day payment periods, we had a huge working capital requirement to make that happen. So did you see a drop and revenue in two thousand eighteen when you rolled this out? No we didn't because we actually didn't see the doctors leave the way that we hit on -ticipant did in fact, you know while we had very much worried that they would be upset and some of them certainly were upset. We were providing so much value to them that. You know what? What took you. So long I knew as getting a great deal all along. So that worked really well, and we had piloted in Georgia initially in April. Two thousand eighteen and then that had worked. So we we then all allowed in Colorado a few weeks later that work to, and from there we went to Washington state and again, very positive results and after these three days. Okay Great. We know this works does it out in our largest most important market? Let's go to New York and that and terribly horribly wrong. They the doctors in New York. Not only were so pissed off they actually I read. mounted a change dot org. Petition I. Don't know what to to to end this practice or something. They were really mad. They were really really mad and I guess you guys responded you said, are we won't we won't roll this out in New York for a while. Yeah look in New York. We. Facilitate Roughly, one in five new patient doctor relationship in the entire city on dock and so. The economic impact for the providers in. was much greater than for the providers in Georgia Colorado Washington. So yes, to give you one example, there's a dermatologist and so and he paid under the ultimate model ten doctor say paid thirty thousand dollars and under the new pricing model, his cost was going to go up from thirty thousand dollars to roughly three hundred, forty, thousand dollars. Wow. So what was your response to that? I? Mean it seems like a pretty reasonable. Concern. Yeah. So look after the conversation with the Dermatologists I. Actually. Put down the phone and I thought you know what? He's right. And so I pause and we regrouped and. We did a couple. Of things during this time, like the first one is we just went on a listening tour. You know we talked to provide their feedback and we just adjusted our this plan to give providers a much longer grace period to decide whether the wants to addition to the new model or not, and then. So then we read on New York six months later and and when dramatically better. So the strategy works and you see results from the strategy pretty quickly like within a year. Within a year, we had we finally at some incredible momentum was really going better than we had expected in our wildest dreams. Our existing client went down to essentially zero. I mean people still retire and and move jobs by no one really left the service and we were adding more and more providers because the barrier to entry was low and So in two thousand, nineteen we began growing profitably. It sounds like two thousand and nineteen was really the banner year. Two thousand nine hundred was a was a fantastic year and honestly we had so much momentum coming into twenty twenty and feel like, Hey, we worked really hard for three years and profitable and now the sky was the limit until. Tells Sam until March of two thousand twenty. Two Marjo twenty twenty and that's. That's really maybe the third founding DOC right? Well, I want to ask you about March twenty twenty because. Your Business is based on people booking with doctors and going to the doctor I have to imagine your revenues must have plummeted like every other industry like I mean doctors offices are still in most of the country. Slow or are trickle of patients coming in. With the lockdown started happening we saw impersonal bookings declining anywhere between fifty to ninety percent by the end of March I'm not surprised and lot of that buys I was getting was to. Lay off people and make sure that we hunker down to weather the storm but I saw an opportunity to build windmills, right so I thought well, we need to be there for our patients. We should be expanding into telehealth and I need every team member to help me do that and so we. Really went all important and supporting video visits and I'll probably June eighteen began redesigning the tire marketplace support virtual care, and so we actually released. Doctor Video Service and we made this available to. Any. Physician whether they are on soccer. for free. And by the way head, you plan to do this. How long would would I mean I'm imagining if you said in in February district I really want to focus on telehealth Would you have expected that by May would have been ready to go. Absolutely. Not I think what has been really fantastic to see is how? We really finished two years of roadmap in two months. Wow, and it's great because it's just gives us a window on what the next phase of doctor will be and really looking forward to that in my mind were the point were Amazon started from going. Books to also adding CDs. We have just gone from doing only in person to also A. Doing telehealth and I can't wait to see how this unfolds. It sounds like you. Might be reading between the lines but. You. Really, admire and respect your co-founders particularly. Cyrus and the work that he did to to build this company but I wonder if do you think that you will a I dunno, rekindle your friendship i. Is it something that is in the cards because a break is? Is Emotionally, it's hard Mesa really hard. Yeah, look I Do I think we'll work fourteen hours together again maybe not but you know I I've gotten through tougher breakups and reconciled in my past, and so I think we are we're in good shape and honestly know we are meeting were talking from time to time Yeah. We both have things to do and places to be so we're. Not, hanging out all the time. But it's now also five years ago So We are we're merch focused on making our join the baby successful. When you think about your journey and All Its happen to you how much do you think this has to do with? with luck and how much do you think it has to do with with the hard work you put in your your skills. Well I'm going look I I believe that there's really three ingredients to success. In order importance there are lock the talent, then hard work and. The only one. That's comedian. You control his how hard you work right and Now working hard to gives you more shots on goal It helps his day on the top of what you your talent allows and absolutely restarted at the right time the right place. So What what I'm proud of an all that journey has only that yet when we were wrong and when be had to revise and. When we needed the grit to actually make it work. I L we lived up to that and and that's really The all that anyone can ask themselves to. Oliver Karaz co-founder of Zach Braff by the way, remember how they originally wanted to call it physicians dot com or doctors dot. com. COULDN'T AFFORD THE MILLION DOLLAR PRICE TAG to buy the domain name. DOC DOT COM wasn't only available the price they paid for that domain name. Six Bucks. and. Thanks so much for listening to this show this week, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You could also write to us at H. I. T. at NPR DOT Org. If you want to send a tweet, it's at how I felt this or at Cairo's can also follow me on instagram that's at Guy Dot Roz. Our show was produced this week by Jet Anderson with music composed by Tina. Bluey. Thanks also to Julia Carney Candice Limb Neva grant and Jeff Rodgers I'm guy. Roz even listening to how I built this. This is NPR. Black voters play a crucial role for any Democrat who seeks to win the White House but some big devise amongst that block and some serious influence
Morning News with Manda Factor and Gregg Hersholt
Expedia Revenue Sinks 82% Amid ‘Worst Quarter the Travel Industry Has Seen in Modern History’
"Group is reporting an 82% drop in revenue in the second quarter is the pandemic has just about shutdown. The travel sector, the Seattle Online travel company, reports a 90% drop in total gross bookings for the three month period that ended June 30th compared to a year ago. Expedia CEO Peter Kearns says the second quarter was the worst that the travel industry has seen in modern history. But they started to see bookings improved slightly in May and June.
podnews
Michelle Obama to release show on Spotify
"Join me for the Michelle Obama podcast. You can listen for free only on spotify. Bracken Michelle Obama's higher ground production company is launching the Michelle. Obama podcast on July. The two thousand, nine, hundred, another exclusive show to spotify that new exclusive apple news today podcast that we reported on yesterday. It has an RSS feed after all can expedia added to some podcast APPs including Overcast Marco Armand describes that as a hack. However, the RSS feed is hidden from third parties in Apple's API and it's mirror. Your L. has also been disabled, and so the intention appears to be. Be that it's an exclusive. And the verge described it as such now we discovered a May many radio fronts. PODCASTS also withholds. There are s feed address. If you use the apple API and at the time, apple declines to confirm this or comment on how this achieved Dan Meisner has spotted than apple is self hosting the Audio? Other apple shows are hosted by art nineteen. An evoke terror suggests in article that we linked to today from our show notes and our newsletter this could be the beginning of the end of the feet and possibly podcast hosts, too. In other news apple is hiring for a US and Canada and deter for apple podcasts. Go go go jobs dot net. Sin Has announced a new distribution agreement with. An Indian music podcasts and video service with one hundred and fifty million active users and to radio DOT COM has a new distribution agreement with twitch, which will bring live radio programming to twitch his video streaming platform on me cost media. somethingyoushouldknow has joined Westwood One podcast was formerly signed to DAX. Captivate has an agreement with songs for podcasters toward our podcast to licensed songs from independent musicians I'm an adviser to them. Radio Days Africa had a session about podcast in. You can read up on the topics discussed for watch the whole. Whole thing if you like four soccer ventures is a new company launching a podcast network. It plans to spend six figures growing shows. It's also partnered with a girls soccer network following on from its launch of a secure podcast distribution. Yesterday on me. Studio has posted an in-depth blog piece at our private premium and secure podcast feeds and the school of podcasting Dave Jackson has updated his big list of podcasts about podcasts. We're hoping he does a podcast about it and titles it the podcast about the list of podcasts about podcasts podcast. Sorry. And, in Podcast News Entrepreneur. John Roya has launched John Rowe show row sold his former company to salesforce in two thousand and fifteen in the first episode. He's interviewed by Jordan Harbinger and jury duty trial of Robert. DURST changes the game for true crime podcasts according to crime story media. WHO's making it? The podcasts launched earlier this week and is to follow the trial of billionaire Robert Durst as it happens,
Marketing School
Why Learning to Say "No" Will Accelerate Your Success
"Welcome to another episode of Marketing School I'm Eric. Su and I'm Neil Patel and today. We're GONNA. Talk about why learning to say no will accelerate your success. Let's reframe this real quick and early days Neil when you're starting out as an entrepreneur. You would always look at the newest opportunities. And what would you do about those opportunities? I always said not always what most cases I said. Yes, and that's what ended up causing me to do one too many things derailing my focus and funny enough 'cause less success over time I think what Neil's also saying is a lot of us become more and more successful. You're going to have more and more opportunities coming your way, and you can either accept the fact that you're. You're drowning in opportunity, or you can do something about it and say no more and funny enough Steve Jobs said this in the past. He says what's really lead to apple. Success was the ability to say no. They said no way more things than they said yes to. And when he first came back to apple after he was fired, he shut down many different product lines, and that's just the basis of it. It's really saying no all the opportunities that you're drowning in. When you say no, and you end up focusing on the stuff that really matters. That's when you double down I was once talking to entrepreneur name Brian Lee, and he created a company called shootout with Kim Kardashian before that was legalzoom, and the most recent one was honest company with Jessica Alba. And I remember years and years ago I. Don't know Bryan while at all I. don't even know him really by interviewed him for my blog years and years ago, and he mentioned one thing that really resonated with me, and he said you need to have super laser focus only tried to do one thing at a time and the moment your growth slows down and you can't get it to keep growing. That's when you expand until then you just stick with what you're doing. Yeah more Buffett and Bill Gates when they first met I believe this is a story, or this wasn't when they first met someone albums. Like what's the secret to your success? They both wrote down one word on a piece of paper and flip it over, and they said focus was the main obey. And the other thing to do just to give more examples. You look at Zillow. You look at glass door. You look at all those companies it's who's the one guy that started all those companies again rich partner. Expedia, glass, door and Zillow, yeah, but he focused on each one. He didn't try to do all of them. At the same time, he took the domain expertise that he had is like I. Know How to build a two sided marketplace. I know how to take advantage of Joe I know that there is a gap in the marketplace attack that so he used the same thesis three times, but he didn't try to do them all at the same time and I can tell you. These guys are older and more experienced than I. can say Neal My. We're getting older. We're not up there yet with them. We don't have the. The experience that they have yet, but I can tell you as Neela I've gotten older. We've gotten better at saying. No, I'll say better than before, but still trying to get better at it. It's hard because we all have the shiny. Object Syndrome. And when you learn to say no, it'll make you really understand what you should be focusing on. Because there's so many opportunities out there. In many cases, we missed the ones that are the best ones because we say. Yes, to so many that we don't spend enough time uncovering the true potential of anyone, business or anyone, strategy or anyone concept, and the same goes with your marketing. Even in the air. Can I talk Omni Channel? Yes, you should go omni channel, but focus on one or two marketing tactics out once doom, really well before you expand into all in because there's not enough time in the day to do everything perfectly well, unless you have a massive team, the other thing is I would google the T. sheets, marketer, and really understand as a marketer that you should try to go deep on one. One thing and then you try to expand and get a little more breadth, but the depth is what you really want to folks when people talk about what Neal's known for Seo or what I'm doing for I think largely people was. This is weird, sometimes WANNA go speak at a conference. They don't know what to call way, so they called me an seo extraordinary and I don't know where the hell they got that from. The same problem yeah. Seo Eric. All right. Put into this box, but I guess that's what we know and Belize pisses me off sometimes when I'm lying. Put into a box, but you have to be okay with that because you try to be everything being nothing
a16z
Growth in Turbulent Times
"Begin by describing a typical growth model and discuss how that fundamentally drives a company's business strategy the first voice who here is Brian's followed by Andrew when we think about a growth model. The question is how does one court of users lead to another cohort of users? And how are you answering that question? In a way that describes not only how you acquire users but the actions they take in your product what those actions generate and how you reinvest whatever that output is back into generating more new returning users so within this model you have hypotheses around the who the what the why who were doing these actions. What are the actions that they are doing and why they are doing them? These are all fundamental hypotheses whether you have it written down or not. I think like a very very simple simple shortcut version of this might be something like I find yelp because I searched Best Dumplings San Francisco and then a yelp page comes up. I'm excited about yelled at some point. Some percentage of those users end up actually than leading reviews and those of us get index like Google and then they end up in Google listings and more people find it right. And so that's kind of how one group of users might indirectly than lead to another group of users versus something like linked in which is focused on getting people to invite their colleagues at people that they're meeting through professional networking and is very focused around getting you to send invites and that's a very different type of loop? It turns out that there is like many many many flavors of this. This is kind of like a verbal version when you go deeper. You're actually able to translate this set of hypotheses and ideas into spreadsheets and numerical models for what's actually happening business and understand with lows right. You're operating against this hypothesis right. That hypothesis gets stronger over time. As you run experiments you validate them. You see the data in data kind of feeds the quantitative version of this in this environment. A lot of those hypotheses are thrown out the window. And what we validated in the past might have changed as a result. You might have tailwinds or headwinds right. The quantitative variables behind these things. Either get stronger where they get worse. But the only way that you actually get a decent picture about is by going through each one of these individuals steps asking those squash right once. You drill down into a spreadsheet. What kind of data are you tracking? What are those metrics? Like if you're a travel company right now I think you're seeing very specific metrics Right if you start with the end of the funnel. What you're saying is a number one. There's going to be fewer people actually like booking and converting like if you're expedia our king regardless of whether or not are looking at flights my guess is percentage of people who actually look out the flight versus. Actually Book. The flight like that conversion rate is probably down. You probably have folks that doing research. Because they're not quite sure. Like when defy or the wafted shut the State Department website where I can actually go and then all the way to the demands question of how many people are in that activity versus. I guess. Light if you're you're inside of you know one of these collaborations tools what's going to happen. Is All of a sudden every is going to be sending more invites other users. Because we're the meetings in right now and says results of that all of those metrics go up when it's happening is if you think about the verbal version of the growth model as a series of events that chained together than what you start to realize they're going to be certain steps that are. GonNa go way way up. 'cause the entire growth models like really radically amplify or there's going to be ones that dramatically tempings out and if step one or two is the growth model start hitting a lot of friction than of course. It's just going to get harder and harder because each group of users going to produce fewer and fewer users if you think about it from an acquisition standpoint saint big engagement well. There's a couple things about this though one is that. I've seen a ton of categorical data out there. People saying this is what's happening to be to be south or this is what's happening to this category and I think I specifically founders. Who Probably. Let's do this. The category is interesting. But it's actually not that helpful. Everybody sits on a spectrum of people who are experiencing extreme headwinds class pass for example would probably seen what ninety percent of their business disappear overnight. And there's people who are seeing extreme tail and if you're sitting on one of the spectrums your job is easier the data's clear it's immediate of what is happening and what the net result is but the founders who are in the middle of the spectrum the hard job you actually have to look at each one of these individual steps to understand what might be changing. What might be happening to build specific. Hypotheses of how. Your Company should act and respond. Most companies will need to go back to basics and reassess their businesses from the bottom up if you are a travel company or an in person fitness company. How do you go about completely? Revamping and reevaluating your growth model. How can founders be proactive rather than reactive? I know it's like Old Silicon Valley message of talk to your customers but honestly this is one of those times where you need to be talking to them at least a couple of customers at a couple times. A day founders. Ceos executives the leaders of the team. Because the only way that you're really going to be proactive is going to get a sense. For what is going on in your customers. Lives and how things are changing what questions they're asking and how their behaviors are changing. And by the time that comes through the data. It's just GONNA be too late and so if you WANNA be proactive. You'd have to go back and rely on a little bit of basically founder intuition in the way that you build that founder. Intuition is just by having lots and lots of conversations very close to it. I think a really big thing strategically. That's changing right now. Is there's a whole discussion for flex? Even be the output goal at the moment. I think this is where the growth model overlays with. Some of the financials the company wildfire. You know we've had several years where it's all been about top line growth and you have a lot of companies that are looking for two x three x five outs year over year growth and then the growth model ends up meeting to support that but I think the whole industry is saying okay. Well maybe actually top line growth of that type of several hundred percentage points. Italy is actually not the focus. Is Everything so uncertain you? We have to watch our cash. So then what I've seen in conversations I've been in is then. Your growth models are actually as much about. How do you grow efficiently from a cash standpoint? And so if you're thing about okay. We need five x growth. And that means that people need to invite each other as at a certain rate. And if they're not then maybe you need to make that up with a marketing spent with financial incentives for users to use the product whether that's in the form of free subscriptions or in the form of a lower priced lane or if your marketplace company you might give people discounts that are dropped into. All consumers
Business Wars Daily
With Travel at Historic Low, Investors Buy Billion-Dollar Stake in Expedia
"How does a little holiday in the Scottish highlands sound lovely? Even during this lockdown plenty of people thought so and reserve properties for rent on the global travel website booking dot com in fact so many tourists continue to putter about the Scottish countryside that it alarmed the locals like rural residents all over they feared travelers might bring Kobe. Nineteen with them at overwhelmed. Small hospitals and so in Blackford. The areas presumably exasperated member of parliament asked booking dot com to quit offering reservations for the bucolic countryside. Finally last week the giant travel company complied. Now you can't get a reservation at a cottage in the Scottish highlands until may ninth or later at least not on booking dot com so reports the Scottish newspaper the National. So why am I telling you this? Little story well because it offers a small taste of the big problems facing the travel industry like so many other industries. Covert nineteen is upended everyone in the travel business from tiny. Bnb's to the largest players that's especially true of booking dot coms biggest rival expedia travel and its parent company. Expedia group in addition to owning. Its namesake reservation site. Expedia group owns other household. Names including travelocity ORBITZ HOTELS DOT COM B. R. B. O. And home away just to name a few the multibillion dollar travel conglomerate however is far less steady than it had appeared to be back in December it ousted. Ceo REPORTEDLY DUE TO DISAGREEMENTS WITH CHAIRMAN. Buried diller and the board over Corporate Strategy Diller who also runs entertainment giant. I A C took over day to day responsibilities along with board vice-chair Peter Kern in February prior to the couvert nineteen onslaught in the US. The company announced what it called disappointing twenty nineteen earnings. It announced plans to lay off three thousand people or about twelve percent of its workforce at the time diller called the company's Sclerotic in bloated sclerotic by the way means rigid or slow to change. Not exactly a compliment. He planned to streamline the business which he believed had become too large and complex by the end of February. The company had put plans in place to save three hundred to five hundred million expenses annually and then the virus which had already been wreaking havoc globally hit the US hard. The effect on the travel industry is beyond devastating the US Travel Association estimates losses of more than five hundred billion dollars in direct travel spending. That's nine times worse than the impact on the travel industry after nine eleven according to Forbes sadly the travel association predicts more than eight million. Us travel industry workers will have lost their jobs by the end of this month. And if the pandemic is devastating most businesses those with fragile foundations like expedia are scrambling to ensure they'll survive last week. Expedia received a promise of a rescue package to private equity firms Apollo global management and silverlake are buying a stake in the company for one point. Two billion dollars that alone however may not be enough to help it withstand the travel slump. So expedia is also borrowing another two billion dollars to give it more liquidity. The company says along with announcing the deal expedia also named Peter Kern as CEO observers say. Kern who has roots in private equity will be well suited to the moment meaning. He'll be comfortable cutting jobs and expenses. The big question of course is not just who will survive. But who will thrive after the pandemic crisis abates and investment in a travel business? Even at CEO prices could be seen as a positive sign. Long-term read Raymond a partner at Apollo Management said in a statement. Expedient is a world class company with an unparalleled collection of online travel brands. He added that the firm which will take a seat on expedience. Board looks forward to collaborating on expedia growth and innovation
Developer Tea
Upstream w/ Dan Heath
"In the book you get into these details a little bit more mechanically Specifically talking about you know uniting people and What are the changes? Actually that you need make to assist them. How do you determine some of those things Finding Leverage One thing I'd like to talk about specifically is how do you know when this is succeeding in the point of no when we're talking about the The children that are that are drowning. It might make sense that if you had a rate of children drowning when every five minutes in that drops to one every twenty four hours then that might make a good measurement but it's not always that easy right. No it's not and I think the reality is. We live in a world where in the fictitious parable world. I mean my guess is that enormous corporate America. What people would be a measured on is? Is the speed of Rescue You know it and in fact. There's there's an example in the book. I think illustrates this. Well it's about expedia the online travel site and back in two thousand twelve. This guy named Ryan O'Neal is studying some data about the call center at Expedia. So if you book a flight or hotel or something in something goes wrong with your reservation you call one eight hundred number. What he found made his jaw drop. He found that for every hundred customers. Who booked a transaction? Fifty eight of them ended up calling the call center for help. Which which would pretty much seem to nullify the whole point of having an online self service travel site and so he starts digging into figure out why are so many people calling us in the number one reason people are calling. I mean to the tune of twenty million calls in two thousand twelve was to get a copy of their itinerary was twenty million calls. Can I get a copy of my tannery? And so he and his boss. Just they're like this is madness. We've got to do something about this. And they make the case to the CEO to create a special team to work on this and they do and The technical solutions as you might expect are pretty simple. They changed the way they send. It's not like they forgot to send the itineraries. They were always sending them. It's just they would end up in spam or customers would delete them thinking they were ads or the sort of thing so the change their strategy and emailing they added a self service tools on the VR and online and so forth and they basically took twenty million calls and whittled them down to zero so from from a technical perspective. This is a trivial problem. But I think what's interesting about? This story is is why this problem got to this level like you would think that there would be an alarm bell. That would go off somewhere. Once you reached like your your three million call for hi Tenora like people would start to take this seriously but but the deal is that expedia like like virtually every other company has to organize itself or chooses to organize itself in in silos. And so you got a marketing team whose job it is to to attract customers to expedia versus. Kayak or someone else. And then you've got a product team whose job it is to make the site so smooth and intuitive that the customers are funneled toward a transaction. Then then you've got the tech team that makes the plumbing run and keeps up time high. And you've got the call center that's trying to minimize you. Know the the response. Time to fueled a customer issue and to keep them happy via net promoter score or something like that and from a silo perspective like all of those goals make sense but but the problem is when you ask a very basic question. Like whose job is it to keep customers from needing to call us. The answer was nobody. Yeah Yeah and it was even worse than that like none of those silos even stood to benefit if the number of calls went down and so. That's something I think that that's really interesting. About upstream problems is that it's often very easy to find owners for downstream problems like your house catches on fire. It's the fire departments problem at that point. Like It may not be an easy problem. But it's an easy problem to define an owner for verses if you flip things around and you say whose job is to keep customers from calling or whose job is to keep your house from catching on fire will. That's a very different
Marketing Over Coffee
Mark Irvine on the State of Marketing
"Good Morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I'm John Wall today. Our guest is Mark Irvine. He's the director of strategic partnerships. At Word Stream. GonNa talk to us about what's going on in the advertising space and we are going to focus a lot on cove nineteen in what's going on. He's done a bunch of research on how this has affected searches. And what's going on with all the ad networks so we're excited to have him with us here today. Mark thanks for joining US John. Thanks for having me. This really exciting. Let's take a step back. Talk to us about Word Stream. What do you do and how did you get there? So Word Stream is an online advertising software that agencies and advertisers alike use to manage their advertising across Google search display Microsoft Bing facebook and instagram and so effectively. A lot of what people do online is a lot of repetitive tasks. In terms of how you go about managing ad campaigns what we do is we try to supply. Yeah that's really the big thing for me when finding out about you guys and talking about what you do is just that as a marketing department gets bigger. You reach that point where you've reached the first milestone where you have one person that you're just kinda like okay you become the ads guru and they're the ones that are doing the testing and learning what's working and not working but then they hit a point where they have to roll them across all the different networks the different channels and it reaches this point where it's completely unmanageable you know. They're spending like an hour of each day in each of the tools and you guys are an alternative to that. Did you see a specific point when somebody finally just cries uncle and comes to talk to you? Is there any specific place where you tend to see people give you a call? Yeah you know. It's really interesting. Because a lot of the businesses we primarily work small businesses and a lot of the people who are working with. They're not just in charge of that one ad campaign but they're also doing email and they're also doing seo and quite frankly a lot of these small businesses they're oftentimes the owner or someone who's out in the field at the same moment in time what you can't do as you operate business what. I've learned I can't do effectively. I can't manage. People manage business manager ad campaigns and do a task all at the same time. If you're just learning paid search or if you're just learning online advertising we specifically focus on okay. Here are the seven things that you need you every single week to be successful on Google Bing facebook and as you go about adding to that yes of course google and being or Google and facebook. They all share similar concepts online. But how you go about making sure. That your touching all of your advertising equally in effectively is a learned task. Yeah I do love that idea of. It's not just. It's not a system for experts where it's a power tool that someone would go in and do all of this kind of stuff but it's really an expert system in that it's reaching out proactively using okay. Here's the things you gotta get wrapped up this week if you want this to work and and it kind of puts people on the right track. That's interesting to me though that it does go all the way down to kind of smaller businesses and people who that's not their whole job so I actually Kinda come in a lot earlier in the cycle that I thought was the case. Are there any guidelines as far as spend or like how much of the marketing mix is coming from advertising? Are there any stats there? As far as when somebody can reach this point you know we often see. We do have people who've never advertised before we have agencies who are just beginning to offer paid search to their Seo clients or what have you. They're just beginning to get in the paid search space. Broadly across the board. When I talk about thirty thousand accounts we see an average spend of about a thousand dollars a month so it's still relatively small across all of their networks but beyond that we take small businesses and we also have some some larger guys as well who use the platform for for time management just for honesty and credibility. It's one of those things that paid searches so simple to get started at so simple to feel like you know what you're doing and in that same process just dangerous enough to be bad at one of my favorite hobbies to do a google search for hotels and in your local city and then go and do the same search on bing and you'll see like expedia or priceline or these large brands off have very different ads across those two networks oftentimes inaccurate ads between the two. So it's very easy to have a large budget and still be unsuccessful on a network. Yeah Yeah I can understand that you are kind of all over the place and it's interesting to me to that it's great. That is all the way down at that thousand dollar a month price point. Because that's definitely doable for for small businesses. Especially if they're able to get a return it only a thousand dollars then. Yeah it seems like you WanNa get up and running as quickly as you can and get to the point where you're not worried about the logistics. But you're actually you know testing ads and getting some useful tweaking exactly. Logistics isn't the thing that gets anyone who has a bed in the morning. So whatever you can do to make sure that you're going in and making changes that are effective in your ad copy rather than just pressing a series of buttons and Google ads or facebook. How can you go about making change? That's GonNa Affect Your Roi. Okay now another interesting thing with your background that I wanted to touch upon love to hear about just kind of how you got to where you are but a big part of it. Is You know your data scientist for a number of years. So you have the background that that we love to talk about people kind of getting in playing with the number so tell us a bit more about your role as data scientists and how you got over there. Yeah it's really interesting. I at ridgely had no interest in marketing when I first started my career. I actually majored in math because my mother told me that. If you'd be willing to do people's math you'll always have a job. And so lo and behold I found my holden in marketing a world where traditionally people were not mathematically your data and I joined word stream about seven years ago and at the time word stream had a still a whole lot of thousands of individual clients. We had a lot of data. But what were we doing with? That data was unique to the individual account. My role as it is. Scientists was really investigating not just the role with an individual accounts. But what was going on across thousands of accounts win at change happened when the Google Surp- changed when new ad copy was tested. When they google start running out with new tests or started watching new ad formats. There are changes that people see in terms of the numbers and anecdotally. Everyone has some sense of what's going on their own account but what's going on at large. We suddenly became the largest data repository outside of Google to begin to run those numbers so I spent six seven years at word stream really just running the numbers under saying the trends in terms of what made someone successful with their online advertising our own client set and as a had all that data as I understood all of that started working closely with the individual ad networks with our partners at Google with partners Microsoft with their partners that facebook. And so now. I'm having Lengthy conversations about the changes that they're having and how I think it's going to impact our SNB's sweet
The Big Story
Some Canadians have made it home. Others havent.
"Are you there. I'm always here Jordan. Where where am I? GonNa go fair enough. Well it's the first day of the work week was your weekend any different from your week. aside from not making this podcast not really. I mean. I've just been kind of cooking and taking long walks no complaints. Can you even tell days apart right now? No I usually ask about three times a day. What Day is it today? I keep thinking that I'm supposed to take my garbage out Because every day feels like garbage day now for whatever that's worth but here's a question. Have you felt lucky over the past little while I don't know about lucky of definitely felt very fortunate? I've been trying to look on the bright side of things I mean. I'm very fortunate to have been able to work from home as soon as needed and my partner and I keep each other company. Why have you felt? I really have for whatever it's worth you know when we do research for the show. I tend to dig into the worst stuff. The reports out of Italy Reports from frontline hospital workers in Canada and in the United States and it really drives home the point and this weekend we were reading and listening to stories of Canadians who found themselves abroad when Justin Trudeau said. Hey this is serious. It's time to get home yet. That's that's easier said than done. Yeah and I traveled in February and I think about it. Now you know if it had been a couple of weeks later at the time everybody said it was fine to go a couple of weeks later. I would have been in that same situation. Yeah and some people right now are stuck where they are and today We're GONNA talk to somebody who just made it home under the gun barely and We'll hear from somebody at the end of today's episode. Who is not as lucky? And she'll quickly tell you where she has her situation's very fluid So we wanted to get her information there at the very least but quickly for people who still do know what day it is. Can you tell us where we are? Clara's the quote Unquote workweek. What ever that means now begins while the latest from Canada's Health Minister Patty. Hi Do. Is that if you're back from a trip and you've been told to self isolate and you don't do that. You could face a big penalty. It is critically important especially for those returning home now to ensure that they follow this public health advice that we're giving them and the advice will be not just advice if if we if we need to take stronger measures we will and that actually happened in Quebec. A woman who tested positive for the Koran virus was arrested for violating quarantine order because she was out walking her dog. Prime Minister Trudeau says between Monday and Wednesday. There will be more than thirty flights bringing Canadians. Who are abroad back home. And we are now seeing the first case of Cova. Nineteen in the north. It's in the Northwest Territories. And they've now shut down their border to all nonessential travel uh some. Mp's are being called back. On Tuesday to adopt the emergency measures that were announced last week. Those include the twenty seven billion dollar fund for direct support and the fifty five billion dollars to help business liquidity through tax deferrals as of Sunday evening. One thousand four hundred and thirty six cases of Covert Nineteen in Canada with twenty one deaths. When you find yourself in a situation like our guest today did of course you second. Guess yourself a little bit. Why did I go? How did I end up? Here what could I have done differently? It's natural but I think you have to remember as fast as this thing. Seems like it's moving now a few weeks ago unless you are really paying attention. It didn't seem that it was going to get bad. And besides buck once. You're stuck you're stuck. There's no point in questioning how you got here. You just want to get home and to do that. You might need the help of the government and as we know government. Can't help everyone right now today. I can announce we're working with Canadian airlines to make commercial flights available for as many Canadians who are stranded as possible. Now we won't be able to reach everyone over going to do our best to help those. We can't nothing is really guaranteed anymore and so you take your chances like today's guest Jordan Heath Rawlings and this is the big story. Julia Morales is a student at McGill University in Montreal and today she is in Montreal and safe so first of all. Juliane glad to hear that. Thank you go out to you back your home now. Yes where were you last week? So last week I was in Morocco originally I was will kind of just traveling everywhere and ended up in ten years from where I was supposed to take a flight back to Montreal. Tell me how you got there. Why were you there? When did you go that kind of stuff? So Group of four other students and a professor and I left from McGill University on February twenty seventh to leave for Morocco on a geological field trip. We were going to go steady the geology of the area and sort of understand what processes lead to the current geology of the region and supposedly for two weeks however we were not able to board our flight out of Morocco because of travel bans that were then instilled by the government. What were you thinking? And I don't mean this in a bad way. But what what were you thinking as the flight approached? And you knew you were going. Were you worried Had you heard anything from the government or anywhere else advising you know actually going into the trip I think. Any of the stresses kind of just related to the usual stress of traveling. Do we have everything we need. Is Everyone have a tenth? Is Everyone have hiking boots Nothing related to the extra corona virus because as we had seen on government of Canada website about point. Morocco is very safe. There were no cases or I believe zero. The two case cases of corona in the country and Italy had yet to undergo this boon which we now have seen the past two weeks So we felt quite confident in going to the country and being safe in coming back. Tell me about when that situation changed in Morocco. What were you hearing? What was happening there so every night as we would have dinner we would actually go on the corona world meter website and see what the the statistics were saying about the spread of the virus and even until the last day we were supposed to be their only about. I believe eighteen. Total cases in the country So we weren't too concerned about our state in the country more was going on in the neighboring countries such as Spain particularly Because obviously we're seeing that it was exploding all over Europe and immediately saw that the political response in all these countries with started closing down borders. We started to get concerned about the fact that we may not be able to return but up until then we have not heard anything from our airline or the government in Rocco or the Canadian government. So we weren't we again. We're not too concerned about the idea that we were going to be able to come back home. Tell me about making the decision to try to get home. What happened and what you do that. Yes so we arrived at Tangiers airport as we were supposed to and as we walked into the airport we received the news that essentially Morocco was closing. Its borders to about twenty countries. It was GONNA stop international flights in and out of twenty countries and among those were Canada. Which is quite surprising because the USA was not on the on that list in the US has many more cases of corona virus than we do and at that point we immediately started looking for other flights out of the country and we managed to book another one through Qatar And three days later we were supposed to cash played. We found out that Qatar was also closing. Its borders and would not allow us to fly through there so this all began a whole spiral of trying to find any flights out. What did you do but did we do what we kept? Trying to find. More flights we booked another flight out of Casablanca on Foulon really quickly counseled expedia actually called us about like a few hours. After having both in told us that the play it would not be going out. We booked another flight with Air Canada which then got cancelled. We booked another flight through Royal Moroccan. That also cancelled we for pretty much just desperate to find anything that would get us out of the country so our original flight was supposed to go through. Casablanca before then heading to Montreal. So you decided to take a flight to Casablanca since it's like a major flight hub in the country and we figured that our chances of getting a flight out would increase if we were in that city and so we just kept trying once we arrived in Casablanca airport. We tried to make sure if our flight would actually be going out. And the people at the counter told us that they couldn't even find our