Hi, welcome back to another episode of Virtual GM. I’m Cody Adent here with Spencer Halford, and today we’re just gonna give you an update on Vibrant Management. We’re almost through the first quarter and we thought very close. Let’s give you guys some updates on what’s been happening. So I’ll kick it over to Spencer and he can share the first thing he wants to share.
Powder Mountain Getaways
Yeah, a lot has happened this first quarter of 2023, and has been pretty explosive. We’ve had, I feel like it’s been really great the first quarter. Um, things that have happened, uh, at least on my front that we see, we’re seeing a lot of like booking pace increase, so we’re seeing our property start to book out more. Um, but then the coolest thing that has happened to us by far recently is, uh, onboarding Powder Mountain Vacation Rentals. You can check out their current setup at powdermountaingetaways.com. It’ll take you to just another page on the Powder Mountain Resort website. And just in case some of you who are listening to this haven’t heard what Powder Mountain is. Powder Mountain is actually the largest ski resort in North America, and this is their hospitality arm. So, people who have homes or vacation rentals on the mountain, can employ basically just kinda like us, a property management company to manage their rentals for them.
And so the interesting problem that they face is that they really have a very strong season with the ski season, and a very weak off-season. What’s so fascinating about that is they’re located in one of the most beautiful places on planet Earth; Eden, Utah. It’s next to several other ski resorts, but it’s absolutely beautiful. Our job will be working on their rate and revenue management, their marketing, and then getting more heads in beds during their off-season. I actually think their off-season has a lot of potential to be just as strong as Eden’s beautiful in the Summer. It’s amazing. It’s a great place to be.
Cody and I were just there last year for Breck’s wedding. Yeah, it was awesome. It wasn’t Powder Mountain, but it was at the ski resort adjacent to it. We stayed in Eden. That’s where Airbnb was. Yeah. It was great. The nice thing about these properties, most of them is they’re ski in ski out. From your door, you can head down the hill and catch a lift. Um, so they’re very high-end, super luxury. It would be great if you found this on Airbnb, especially in the middle of the summer, this is a killer find.
Oh yeah. Even now, they’ve got all this beautiful snow. Kyle did a video today, I don’t know if it’s on Vibrant’s Instagram yet or not, but I mean, just absolutely stunning. He was on the ski lift, pointing out the properties that we’re managing. They’re surrounded by snow, like a three-story house that’s completely just encased in snow. I mean the best; I mean the greatest snow on Earth.
It truly is. Um, check out their website, there are these cabins called the Horizon Cabin. There’s a paved walkway to this cabin, and I was looking at it on Instagram today, and there are about five feet of snow just adjacent to the pathway. I mean, it would be challenging for me to look directly over it. I mean, it’s very, very tall. So yeah, that’s been very exciting as using the has started. We’ll talk more about them throughout the podcast, I’m sure. Um, we’re getting a new website done for them too, so we’re really excited about that.
Utah Luxury Tours
Something else I’m really excited to talk about is a client that’s always been close to me; Utah Luxury Tours. Uh, we started up with them again. They’re one of the first clients that we had. One of the first ones that we did branding for, so we went through our branding exercise with them, and built our first website, which at the time was really great and to the best of our capabilities. But as we’ve grown and they’ve grown, it was really time to enhance and upgrade their digital offering because they offered this amazing, unique and luxury experience. Tthe digital example of that just wasn’t living up. Their digital presence did not convey the luxury that they actually give when you go on an experience with them.
I have to say it is absolutely stunning. Uh, maybe the best site that we’ve ever done. Go to Utahluxurytours.com and check it out. If you love that and want a site like that, contact us. I think it’ll be the site that I use as our example, or as a case study going forward to say this is what we’re capable of because it really just turned out so incredible. So we’re really, really excited to be back working with them, uh, and a partnership that we’re just so thankful to be back in the saddle with.
Mojave Edge
Yeah. And speaking on websites too, if you wanna see great. Before and after a website, check out this website. This is a client of ours in Mesquite, Nevada. If you go to Highlandestatesresort.com, you can see probably the worst website ever made by man. We have transformed that into the same hotel with a new brand called Mojave Edge. And you can find that at mojaveedge.com. Do a quick compare and contrast before and after on these two websites, it’s the same property just with new brand applied. And so what we’re really excited about is oftentimes when we take on a new property, we kill the old website. Well, in this situation, it’s got so much relevance in historical data that we’re not killing the website for a long time.
Yeah. I mean, it might stay up forever, just with a pop-up redirect that says, yeah, please visit our new site. So you really get the opportunity to see what this digital presence looked like prior to engagement with Vibrant. Yep. And what it looks like now when you go to the two sites who never believe it’s the same property,
It’s night and day, and in fact, the experience of staying at the property is even elevated just by their digital presence. In fact, if you looked at the website before staying at this property, I think you’d make a decision not to stay there. Yeah. Did not effectively tell their story. Not in the slightest. And now you look at the new website, and it actually is something that encourages you to stay there and conveys to the T exactly who they are and what you can expect when you go there, as well as really great information about all the stuff that happens in and around the street.
Water Canyon RV Park
Yeah. Another exciting thing, too, we have our first RV property! Mm-hmm. Out in Hildale, we have Water Canyon RV, a beautiful RV spot with a bunch of units. We’re really excited about that. That’s something we’ve never done before. So it gives us an opportunity to engage with the new PMS in Camp Spot, learn a new niche of hospitality, and then continue, to offer support to those other beautiful properties in Water Canyon with Water Canyon Winery and Water Canyon Resort. So really now we’ve got this whole trifecta out there. And so if you’ve got an RV or you’ve got a camper, and you’re looking to go see if some of the most beautiful terrain you’ve ever seen, I highly recommend you pop onto Water Canyon RV because it is stunning. It’s just got an amazing backdrop.
Yeah. I think their website is watercanyonrvpark.com, right? That’s correct. I was actually just out there. Spots are starting to fill up, which is really exciting. Yeah, that’s great. It’s cool to see people out there. This just opened a few months ago, and just like Cody said, this is a Virtual GM property. So something that’s new to us is doing Virtual GM inside of the RV Park world. And that’s actually really nice.
I was speaking to another RV park owner just last week and talking about kind of the, the pros and cons of having someone that’s on-site and, the biggest con is what it cost to keep them Yeah. In, the payroll, right? What’s your biggest overhead on something like this, that, and the land? And so we were talking about that, and just based on what our rate is for Virtual GM versus what it costs to have someone onsite to check in, check out maintenance, answer the phones, and things like that, you can actually get pretty upside down on these really quick, so long as you’re not running your business the right way.
So that’s actually a massive feather in our cap that we’ve been able to swap into a whole new industry in the RV park world and execute Virtual GM without skipping any beat.
Utah Weather Report: Unprecedented Snowfall and Its Impact on Tourism
Yeah, no, it’s been pretty awesome. I’m really excited to see what it does in the season here in southern Utah. We’ve been hit with some unbelievable weather to start the year. So it’s been brutal. We’ve had Utah receive the most snow it ever has in the past 40 years; we’re getting snow in places like Kanab got eight inches the other day. That is not typical for Kanab. We’ve had more snow in St. George than I’ve never seen in my life. It’s absurd.
It was at Water Canyon RV today in Water Canyon Winery, and there were six inches on the ground. Yeah, that’s crazy. So we are actually seeing our year-over-year booking pace right now for most of our properties is behind, but all of our future bookings are up, right? So when you check, you know, what’s been booked through this day last year, uh, versus this year we’re up. But our year-to-year is down, because typically you’re coming to Southern Utah for sunshine and good weather and unfortunately, we haven’t been able to deliver that.
So, uh, but what also is good for those of you listening in the space is we are seeing that the booking window starts to extend. So we are just looking at one of our properties today during, our biweekly meeting. And at the same time last year, they had no bookings August through December, for the whole year they hadn’t received any yet. And this year they have bookings in every single month for the entire year, which is really exciting cause that shows like that, that old school booking window of what used to be like a hundred days pre-covid, we’re starting to see some of that again, which obviously is helpful for, for us because it allows us to plan more appropriately.
And obviously, we know that we put our rates higher out on those future dates because we don’t want to undersell what our property could be at that time. We are seeing some really exciting growth there, and I think we’re gonna have a really, really awesome spring and summer.
Yeah, absolutely. We have some other updates that are really cool, some of them haven’t materialized and finalized yet, and there’s stuff that we really want to share with you. And I’d imagine probably in the next two or three weeks, we will share with you. Yeah, we’ve got some really exciting stuff that we’re not able to share at Spencer’s point, but some of it could be like, you know, we could be doing some really, really cool stuff. So amazing things. You definitely want to continue to follow. Hit that subscribe button and let us keep sharing our story with you.
Meet the New Regional Manager at Vibrant: Emily Frisby!
I also want to announce that we have a new employee. So Emily Frisby is our new regional manager. So she’s been working as a GM out of a property for a little over a year now. A real expert in Web Rez Pro. Amazing with guests, amazing with execution. It’s a role we’ve been wanting to fill at Vibrant for the whole time that you’ve been here, for a long time. So a year, really. But we were so picky in who we wanted to bring on because we really wanted to ensure that person was going to deliver to our standards at Vibrant. What’s so great is being a GM, she knows exactly what she would need that role to give from a support standpoint.
This is Thursday, so she’s been out for four days already, and you can already see the huge impact she’s making. We’re just super excited to have her on our team and it’s also a huge value added for our new clients because now we’ve got someone who can be at each property every week. So we’re really excited about that.
Yeah, it adds just even more value for us on the management side, especially just checking in, seeing what people need, and executing our offerings and our promises. It’s a huge win for Vibrant. If you join the Vibrant Family, that’s definitely something that you’d get to know as Emily. She’s amazing, just like Cody said. Yeah, A wizard and WebPress Pro and really great experience on that hospitality side as a GM at a property too.
New Office Space: The Exciting Next Chapter for Vibrant
We’re also potentially looking at new office space. So we as Vibrant have been in the same office for six years. I think, you know, we actually laid the tile, we did the baseboards or redid the electrical as it feels like home. I spent more time there than probably anywhere else in the last six years cumulatively. And we, I mean, we only have a thousand square feet in our office, and we use every single inch of that thing, literally every inch. So we’re really excited for the growth and obviously, our team is growing as we’re just sharing.
We’ll keep you guys updated on that. If we get that new office, we’ll be sure, to give you a tour walkthrough. Uh, those of you have been following the show for a long time, obviously know Kyle. We’ve got an awesome office for him, and we’re excited to show you guys
Yeah, we’ll show you that. And Kyle probably won’t even get to know what it is until he is in there. Yeah, you and Kyle both see it for the first time together. So that’s, I drew it on the orange table today for Allie, and I was like, this is, I told it was her office at first and she goes, she said, no, that’ll be Kyle’s office. I said, yeah, that’s actually, that was already the plan was Kyle’s office.
Yep. But I think that kind of brings us up to speed, right? Is there anything else that you can think of that? I mean we had, cause we talked about, we did our annual planning meeting in Scottsdale in December. Most of, the tasks that we had coming out of that meeting were pretty well completed, and they were annual tasks.
Unlocking the Power of Stash: Why Vibrant Properties are Joining the Collection
Yeah. So, um, really excited about working with Stash. We’ve talked about them, but it’s never been a main focus. So they’re this amazing platform for independent boutique properties to get some of the benefits of like what a flag would give you through building points and getting free stays. They’re very picky on who they let in their program. So, you know, if you go to a Stash property, it’s going to be incredible.
We’re onboarding Stash on quite a few of our properties right now. Bungalows, Dwellings, Watchman Villas, and Canyons are all joining the Stash collection, which we’re just so excited about and really looking forward to building a strategic partnership with them because there are so many amazing properties out there that the property fits Stash. Yep. They are just truly amazing, but their digital presence is lacking. And so yeah, obviously, their digital presence is where new guests interact with you for the first time, so Stash can’t have a property on, even though the property’s amazing if that digital presence is just not up to snuff. Right. So we’re really excited to build a partnership with them and, hopefully, be able to be that catalyst for Stash to help those properties really show their value through their digital presence.
Totally. Yeah. Feel more information about that. Cody is talked to them men lots of times. Yeah. He’s leading the onboarding on that. So if you have any questions about your hotel rewards, reach out to us. Cody@thevibrantteam.
Transform Your Boutique Hotel’s Marketing Strategy with Our Free Month of Digital Marketing Services
Also something we haven’t discussed yet. We’re still giving away just until the end of the quarter free month of digital marketing. So, just to show who we are and what we are capable of. And then also the benefits of running ads for your boutique hotel. Reach out to me, at Spencer@thevibrantteam.com. We’d love to set that up for you. No obligation, no contract, nothing. We just want you to show you the benefits of something you’re probably missing out on right now. That’s really the confidence we have in our processes. We can give you a month for free because we know that after you see those results, you’re going to want to retain our services.
Absolutely. We really come without cost because the reward on the other side is so high.
Okay, well I think that pretty much covers the first quarter so far. We’re looking really excited, to finish out this quarter strong and finalize our rocks for the quarter, and we’ll give you guys an update once we get to April and kind of give you a recap of how we did for the whole quarter.
Thanks, everyone.
Have a great day.
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