Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast
This show is for the builders and backers of boutique hotels.
Hosted by operators who made the jump from short-term rentals to boutique hotels, this podcast documents the real journey of acquiring, renovating, and operating boutique hospitality assets.
We share lessons learned in real time and sit down with experienced operators, lenders, designers, and industry professionals who bring practical insight, hard-won advice, and unfiltered perspective. If you’re serious about boutique hotels, hospitality operations, or scaling beyond short-term rentals, this show is for you.
Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast
32 - More Human, Not Less: How Smart Hotel Operators Are Using AI to Double Down on Real Connections with Rashmi Bhat
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In this episode, Adam and Micah are joined by Rashmi Bhat — coach, restaurateur, and boutique hotel operator — to explore how independent hospitality owners can leverage AI not to replace their teams, but to free them up for the moments that actually matter. From automating influencer outreach and auditing P&Ls to using voice prompting in the car and walking the vendor floor at AAHOA, this conversation is a practical roadmap for operators who want to work smarter without losing the human touch that makes boutique hospitality special.
Connect with Rashmi:
Find her on Instagram: toastyindian, resohospitality
Affiliate code for Quo
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Affiliate code for MEWS
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Connect with Micah:
Instagram: micahinvests
Tiktok: micahinvests1
Connect with Adam:
Instagram: adaminvests1
LinkedIn: adaminvests1
Tiktok: adaminvests1
Thinking about Boutique Hotels? Schedule a call:
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🏨 Check out The Wesley Boutique Hotel in Page, Arizona: https://www.thewesleyaz.com/visit
📍Welcome to Page Mural — one of the local spots mentioned in this episode:
http://bit.ly/4tCjOu4
I think AI helps you find the people and humans help you build the relationship.
SPEAKER_02Hey everybody, I'm Adam Wallace, and I'm here with my co-host Micah Thomas.
SPEAKER_01We're short-term rental operators who made the jump into boutique hotels.
SPEAKER_02And we're in it right now. Raising capital, renovating a 50-room property. We're figuring it out as we go.
SPEAKER_01This is the Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast, and these are secrets.
SPEAKER_02Welcome in everyone to another episode of the Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Walls, co-founder of Comeback Hospitality. This is the show where we're chronicling our own story, going from zero to one as short-term rental operating into the Boutique Hotel landscape. Thankfully, I'm not alone. I joined a great community, Mike Shogren's Boutique Hotel Secrets community. We've got great guidance, playbooks, all the things. Every week we've got calls, one-on-ones. It's been exceptional. So we started just documenting our journey, but it's been a little bit of a hit, I would have to say. And I think it's not because of me, but maybe because of some of the great insights from guests that we're bringing on the show and also my partner in crime. So with that, let me maybe check in with my mister from another sister, Micah Thomas. Micah, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_01Doing good. Very excited for this episode. We got a very familiar face on today's pod, and I'm really just ready to dive into all things AI. Unlike you, Adam, I love talking about operations and the daily grind and how we can optimize our systems to be more efficient and ultimately increase revenue. So I think today's gonna be a really good episode as we nerd out a little bit about how AI can really improve our function in the hotel space. So excited to be here.
SPEAKER_02I love it. Well, let's welcome in Rajmi Bhat then again, the Queen of Operations as one of our formal Boutique Hotel Secrets coaches. She operates uh a big portfolio, a big team. But again, she's very curious, she's learning, and I think AI is this beautiful space where no one's got all of the answers. But I think the advantage goes to the tinkerers and the experimenters. So excited to have you back, Rajmi. I think this is our second, third conversation. Hope to have you and other BHS coaches on in the coming months. But let's start with AI. How are you using it? It's been theoretical for the longest time. I think AI is here. So how's it showing up in your world?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thanks so much for having me on, guys. It's so exciting to be back. So a little bit quick one-minute bio on me. I started in the restaurant space. I still own an Indian restaurant and a wholesale sandwich company. Got in real estate in 2020. And today we manage several boutique hotels, so think less than 20, 30 doors. And then we have a whole portfolio of short-term rentals. We have a very comfortable team, everyone's virtual. And so I started tinkering with AI when it came out. I think for $20 a month, it's a steal. You can just have so much fun with it. And I started with like most people, which is I'm on ChatGPT. It probably has all of my information at this point. I have different projects, and I just was like, ChatGPT is amazing. It's doing what I want. And then I started hearing we got this new thing called Claude Cowork. And I'm like, there's I'm so happy with Chad GPT. Like, why would I ever need to move somewhere else? So this insane video last week on YouTube. I'm happy to share the link with you guys where this guy was like, I'm automating 99% of my life with Claude Cowork. And I was like, that's probably not me. And that's not me at the moment for sure. Or maybe 5%. But I think it had very cool concepts that I think we can use in the hotel STR space.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's super cool. I'm a great proponent of AI and Chat GPT and just giving them as many prompts as possible to just further our, like I said, efficiency and operations and just in my everyday life. Like, how can I be better? How can I be more efficient? Change the way I'm thinking, the way I'm approaching things to get further in life. So just excited to be able to use it now in a business aspect as much as we are now. I think the one thing that comes to mind immediately is being able to leverage AI for our text-based messaging. We're using AKEA. And I know Rashmi, you're familiar with AKEA, but essentially you teach it how you want to respond, the types of responses you want. And once it learns, you can turn it into agentic or pretty much the automated mode where when a guest sends a text message to the phone number, AI is what's responding to them. So 2 a.m. in the morning, you don't have to pay a staff member to respond and say the Wi-Fi password is XYZ. AI can send a text message in the matter of seconds and get that guest taken care of. So I think of situations like that, AI will never take the place of a human interaction, but every guest doesn't need a human interaction. And ultimately, I know in my specific case, I don't want a human interaction all the time. Sometimes I'm okay with AI giving me basic information to take care of or answer certain questions. So I'm just wondering, maybe do you have any specific examples? I know you mentioned ChatGPT or Claude, but do you have any AI tools that you've been using or testing in your specific hotel operations that are helping you be more efficient?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think you touched on a lot of great points there, Micah. So a lot to kind of unpack there. So first thing I would say, I think tools like Akira are amazing. I think it takes forever to build a product like that. And I don't think Claude Cowork, at least it's probably not going to replace that. But as a management company owner, a lot of what I do is audit a lot of the work our team is doing, right? So one quick thing we're like currently in the process of building, we built it, but it's not running on auto schedule, is we get a lot of phone calls. And so we use Quo, which is formerly open phone, for a lot of phone calls, and all the phone calls have transcripts. So the previous version of Misa, I would copy the transcripts, paste them in Chat GPT, and be like, hey, did we miss a sales opportunity? Or what can we have done better? What do you think? Now we can automate that. If you have a make integration, make is like a zapier. Pull the call transcripts out of Quo, give them to Claude, and then every morning at nine o'clock, I get an email of here's all the calls that went amazing. And we're gonna hear about it. But here's what we could have improved. Maybe we missed a sales opportunity here. Or my team would be manually reviewing a call and that we do follow-ups with guests who didn't book with us. And so they would kind of manually go in and be like, hey, this person didn't book, let me follow up with them. Now AI can come in with a whole list of across the seven hotels we manage. Here are all of the guests that did not book. And then three days later, it'll be like, hey, I checked your cloud beds and I noticed this person didn't book. Should we do a second or third follow-up? So it remembers things. And I think it's in a lot of times catching things that on a human mind would not even think of. It's like I would forget about that guest very quickly, not because we're not paying attention, but because there's so much incoming data that you're like, I just need a minute to process it. And it's finding a lot of patterns that we may have overlooked.
SPEAKER_02Gosh, it's so good. And I I want to immediately make a run and go get our VAs to build this workflow because I think this is the era that we're in, right? Just a couple years ago. What let's be fair, most people have never even used AI. We're a little bit of a bubble. So again, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably tuned in, you're already leaning towards a learning orientation. You like experimenting, you're interested in cutting edge tools and just being more inefficient and more impactful. Kind of feel like we're in the, I don't know, first, second inning of a baseball game. It's very early, not to overplay sports metaphors. But I remember just last year, this last year is the first time I paid for AI. Up until this point, it was just a question answer, question, answer. That was the big breakthrough. That was already massive, by the way. Kind of one point of AI. But now when we're talking about cowork, we're talking about code, we're talking about all these automations and workflows. And this is 2.0, right? This is moving into just a whole nother universe. It's not incremental progress. It's not like we went from one to two. We went from one to 10 to 100 very quickly. So, anyways, I love that you're already playing with workflows, cowork, code, etc.
SPEAKER_00One thing I'll add is like, Adam, your thought process was like, Hey, I'd love to get one of our team members working on this. That's exactly my thought process. But guess what? With Claude's cowork, you can just be like, hey, can you build this for me? And I'll just open a browser and a Chrome and I'll go into your make account and I'll go find the API and I'll do all these things. I'm like, because I went into make and clicked one button, and I was like, I don't understand anything in here. Uh and I was like, this is probably maybe not for me. And Cloud was like, I can just build it. And I'm like, fantastic. Oh, I love it.
SPEAKER_02I love it. It does maybe we can get into downsides and risks and all of that because I think there is something about if we don't know what's in the black box, it's hard to unravel. Actually, I'll hold this up right now. I literally bought from a man in a van in a parking lot over the week. That's not sketchy, Adam. It's extremely sketchy, but back to the future. I was not buying plutonium at the mall parking lot. I was not trying to hit 88 miles an hour, but I was trying to buy a little mini PC to set up OpenClaw. So I probably spent 10 hours this weekend in Linux terminals banging on keys. And Rashmi, to your point, like, I don't know most of this. So who was helping me all along the way to set up my version of OpenClaw, look for security vulnerabilities, patch it, set up the first things? It was Clawed to the rescue. So AI, using AI or supporting AI, I think is what really just accelerates the puck here. So, anyways, I was watching all the YouTubes, listening to all the podcasts. I'm like, dude, I got to get off the bench and I got to get in the game. So I have no results to prove yet. It literally took Herculean efforts just to set it up. But apparently, in an hour using Telegram, I'm messaging my fake bot. His name is Alfred. He's going to come back with an analysis. I'm using AI to help us scan markets and look for potential acquisition opportunities. But again, many others might not be doing this. So let's we can pivot back to today. And if you own a hotel or you're maybe you own some STRs, what other cool hacks, techniques, tips, tricks can we give listeners so that they get get value today? Because sometimes it's overwhelming and you just don't know where to start. You got a blank cursor. It's like, yeah, I've got the world's information, the world's knowledge in my pocket. I don't know what to do with it. So, any clues or tips from your side, Rashmi, about how you're leveraging all of that horsepower?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about the security because I think it's a very big question a lot of people have, especially when you're like setting it up and you're just like, give access, there you go, here's everything. Because you're like, I just can't move to the next step. So my husband's in the tech space, right? So he's very careful about this. The cool thing about Claude Cowork specifically is it actually sits on your desktop. So it's not out in the world somewhere. And so I know nothing about OpenClaw. Everything I've heard, it just sounds terrifying. So I'm like, we're and I won't need that level of automation. I think it's the other part of it. I know where our pain points are. So I'm like, let's just dial in on those. So the reason I was thinking about Chad GPT or Claude co-work was Mike and I were on our call earlier last week. And he was like, hey, I'm trying to figure out staffing for my cleaners. I'm trying to have these laborers, I need to figure out hours. Do I have one cleaner? Do I have five? There's how many rooms I have to turn. And I'm like, input all of that data into Chad Claude and then see it, explain to them, hey, I own a 60K hotel. Half of it is down for rental. Explain everything you're talking about. What questions do you have? And then it will start working through and build you a workflow. So one thing we have done is I own a restaurant. So I fed at all of our PL for the last two, three years. And I was like, are there any blind spots? Like, why am I bleeding money? Where and then I was like, Can you connect to QuickBooks? And it's like, no, I don't have that connector, but you can download and this. And then it was like, hey, there are three invoices that you double paid. And yeah, it just, and I was like, oh, cool. I didn't realize that all fits our contact with the vendors. And they're like, oh yeah, we've had this credit for a while. And I'm like, it wasn't. Yeah, but I think it's just catching all the things that you have all of these security features, and you're like, hey, I'm like looking over everything, but then you're like, ah, there's this one little leak that I definitely. The other thing we're doing from our restaurant is we're looking to work with a lot of influencers that will like, hey, we'll give you a gift card, come to the restaurant, try some of our food. But it's hard to find, and it takes a long time to build relationships, and it takes a long time to find them. So I have a little Cloud co-work agent that basically has the criteria that, like, hey, find influencers within 25 miles, they must have five to 50,000 followers. The engagement rate must be this much. And every morning, every Monday at 10 o'clock it runs. So it ran this morning and it gives us a list of 50 people. Now my team member takes that and then they filter out that list. So I'm not saying it's coming out with a finished product, but it's doing 80% of the legwork. Yeah. And it has their link. And then next week it'll add up on that. And then it's connected to our Instagram. So it sees which who did we DM, who did we chat with, who do we comment, and then it can keep the follow-up process a lot. If not, it was a very manual process, right? So for hotels, a lot of times you're contacting a lot of corporations to be like, hey, come stay at my hotel if you can get a corporate buyout. But how do you find that person's email? So Cloud Coworker could build a little skill that's hey, your whole job is to get me more reservations, go find a hundred corporations every week, write up the email, draft it. And then I we have a work email that's only for our company. So we can send out mass email campaigns if we need to, and then it can do the follow-up on it. So could a human have done that? Sure, it probably would have taken two weeks and a few brand. Can now do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. The first thing I want to touch on is the analytics. I just, it's inimaginable the analytics you get from AI. And it's literally at the touch of a button or at one prompt. You give it a prompt, you ask it to scan and scour all these points of contact or these points of data, and it just comes back to you in what seems to be seconds with a really good analysis of what you're dealing with, what you're looking at. Like you said, you've overpaid, it was able to catch that. That's something that maybe even a human looks over and misses a few times. So I just love that component of it. And I know a lot of people look at AI like it's gonna take jobs away from us. And that could be one way to look at it, look at it. But the other way is AI could be doing what would take a human weeks, if not months, to get done. And like you said, at a significantly higher purchase or significantly higher cost. So the way I look at AI is I never want to take away a job from a human, but I just think it would take me way longer to get done the things that AI is doing for me. And I just don't have the resources if I had to pay actual individuals to do the same exact thing. So with that being said, my thought process goes to where do you see AI taking hospitality? Do you see this being an industry where we step away from humans and we go more with the automated, robotic type of technology for experience? Or is this something that human experience is still a vital piece of, but we just keep AI on the side to optimize the experience each guest has?
SPEAKER_00As a consumer, I want to be able to pick how I interact with people. So I literally just saw a Facebook post last week where somebody was like, I call every single guest before they're walking to our doors. And I'm like, do not call me. That that's like most of my first reaction to that, right? Because I want to talk to people I want to talk to. I don't need to be talked to to check in. That's just like not where I want to spend my energy, right? I might want to have a great talk with the bartender while I'm having espresso martini, but I might not want to give the front desk my license and my and just for my room key, and it's a very transactional interaction as opposed to a meaningful one. I think AI is gonna help take over a lot of the transactional stuff. I don't think it will ever replace the human connection that you have when you're like, hey, I'm out with a group of friends, but maybe the bar slammed and I want to order my drink and I want to get it here because I don't want to leave my friends' group because we're having a great time. So I think it's letting consumers pick like how do I want to be interacted with. But I also think it's gonna make the human experience so much more premium. Whereas before we would kind of see it, because honestly, if your hotel's charging $50 a night, you probably don't have the money to have 24-7 staff. As much as you might want to when we talk about human relationships, your PL doesn't support unless that person's living on property and it's just there, there's not enough business, right? And so I think consumers are not gonna be able to pick this is how I want to be interacted with. So I think the luxury brands, the RITs and the four seasons, there and I think it's interesting, hotels went from cash register to AI. It seemed like we just kind of skipped the whole computer revolution.
SPEAKER_01No in-between.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we're just we we miss and restaurants did too, right? And then COVID happened and I just shifted it for everybody into this whole new model. So I think we're just giving people a lot more options and then we're taking away all the kind of boring stuff that front desk has to do to give them back more time to do the things that actually matter for your guests.
SPEAKER_02And that's maybe a great follow-up question because Mike and I are thinking about this for the Wesley, right? So our first boutique hotel in Page, Arizona. We got under contract, I think it was in July or August, went through the due diligence, bought it in December, and we're in the middle of repositioning it. And we actually just had this last week, uh, our first influencer stay in the first room ever, and she loved it. She's motorcycling across America and getting married in Vegas. Like it's a very cool story. So, anyways, we're elated that we could serve one guest. But I guess as we march forward, we get our 50 rooms kind of dialed in, we get stabilized, we're thinking about all the kind of boring tasks to automate to extend people's capabilities or be more efficient or accomplish more. How do you think about the mix of what AI is good at doing and what people are good at doing and making sure that we're leveraging the strengths of both platforms? If you're getting value from this, follow the show and share it with one person who's ready to move beyond short-term rentals.
SPEAKER_01And if you want to learn more about the boutique hotel secrets community, the link is in the show notes.
SPEAKER_00I think AI helps you find the people and humans help you build the relationship. I think typically to find an influencer, you'd have to spend hours scrolling Instagram and you'd have to be like, is this the right person? Or they reach out to you, then you have to respond to the email, and then you have to go back and forth, right? I think AI takes away a lot of that work, but it lets you focus. Like when they come there, you don't have to be on your phone trying to get some other guests checked in. Whereas you can really be there to experience the moment. And I think at the end of the day, all we're really looking to do as humans is have a lot deeper connections with other humans that are around us. And we're so caught up in our phones and social media and Instagram all day long that we just don't have time, right? We just get so overwhelmed. I also don't think AI is. I know I look at all the videos on YouTube and stuff. I'm like, I've used the exact same tool you're using, and I get nowhere the results. And so people get very frustrated because they're like, I was sold something, but that's not there. And I'm like, I get it, I have no coding background. And so I think it's gonna make people who understand coding so much more valuable because I'm like, I just need to hire a CTO at this point and be like, just build this for me. Because I'm like so frustrated now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and my mindset goes to the mom and pop shop who wants to start using AI because maybe their margins aren't as large as a big industry company. And how do we let's I'm thinking of an older owner or someone who maybe didn't grow up in the boom of the internet, but they're still running a thriving business? What would be the first steps, or what would you suggest, especially in the hotel space, to someone who maybe isn't that technologically advanced or savvy, but they want to start looking into AI and how they can use AI for not just only a better guest experience, but ultimately more revenue and more money in their park pocket. What steps would you say, or what would be like just start here? What would you say first that they could do and have success with to give them the confidence to say, you know what, this isn't too bad. And if I can do this, I know I can maybe try and do something else.
SPEAKER_00I would keep it super simple, man. One initial project I did with AI was like, my backyard look terrible. I literally took three photos and I was like, my budget is $500. I want you to redo this meeting back here. And it was like, got it. And then it went and found Amazon links and Walmart, and then I was like, Go, but in that hotel space, you want to spurse up a room. Go take five photos, be like, my budget is $2,000 a room, including labor. Romildo here who works for me, charges $30 an hour for his labor for a painting. And tell me what's gonna look good, right? And listen, I love interior designers and we pay them all the time, but that requires a capital investment that these small owners may just not have. And then you can spend a weekend or a weekday making that room look really nice and just see it as that first step room. A lot of guys aren't on OTAs, right? Like, how do I even leave.com is so frustrating for so many people. Great, take a couple of screenshots. You don't have to connect anything, you can just jump some screenshots into ChatGPT and be like, hey, I have a profile on booking.com. I haven't looked at it in five years. What can I do to get some bookings today if I turn this platform on? Give me some photos, just very basic things, I think, is step one. Um, and then we can start building on the c the co-works of the world.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, that I would say claude cowork is probably a definitely a more advanced tool, but there's a lot of steps before you even get there that could definitely help out of business. And just wanted to piggyback off of what you were saying, Rashmi, to make things even easier. Adam, you told me this. If you can talk to Claude, ChatGBT, Gemini, whatever you choose, if you talk to it versus writing in words or texting, you can a lot of times say and describe what you're thinking or what you want if you're just talking to it versus the text you put on a screen. So that's a very easy way to have a conversation with an AI bot, I guess you could say, but you can get your point of clock cross a lot easier and get some much better results. I just wanted to add that in there as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. And my house got noisier. My wife and I both work from home. And three months ago, six months ago, we were both extensively using AI. We're here in the Bay Area. We've got friends at OpenAI and Perplexity and all these companies. So I feel like we're exposed to a lot of new ideas, products, and companies. But we were both typing just literally three months ago, six months ago. And now I can't stand typing, and it's all audio based. Uh, I still like to read. I don't like to listen to AI read it back to me. I feel like I can read faster, but when you Just end up uh, and I think researchers have even studied this, right? Like when you're prompting something, writing it down, you just you're going slower. There's a lot of self-editing happening, and you end up leaving out a lot of context that you don't think was important. But these LLMs are actually fantastic at taking lots of noise and lots of information. Too much is actually a good thing. I think Gary V literally will do 30 minutes of prompting just until these are all my thoughts. Just let me go for 30 minutes or three minutes or 30 seconds, right? So choose your own adventure, but then play it back, right? And they can summarize, they can pull out insights, they can pull out patterns. So yeah, literally now, my wife and I each day, you know, it's oh, are you on a meeting? No, no, it's just it's me and Claude. We're chatting. Like we're in a meeting. We are we're having very real conversations. This is how I work now is me in an empty office talking to myself or talking to my buddy. Hey, before we pivot to networking and events, and there's some exciting ones coming up. So I definitely want to leave time to feature that and put some maybe things on people's radar. But uh Rashmi, you'd mentioned something before we hopped on the podcast about short-term rental operators and maybe a hack to use AI to get some things done faster. I remember last year having to do this, but go through, stood up a new listing. I had to caption each thing, I had to build out the listing. So it's just like there are so many things in today's world that I think short-term operators are doing manually that they don't even realize that you could do this. So, anyways, do you want to just maybe give a couple tips of how you use AI with your short-term rentals?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, happy to. So we actually don't do this. I saw it. We have a team that actually still manually goes in and does it. But you can definitely have cloud co-work set up to basically, if you're hospitable or owner as, it can go change photo captions for you. It can go pull all of your metrics. So, like we have a new management team in-house, and they would manually go into Airbnb Monday morning and peel like, hey, this is our listing conversion ratio, this is this ratio, like all this kind of stuff, and manually pull it for all of our portfolios. And now with 20 minutes, a cloud kind of goes in, pulls all of that data about something that would take one human eight hours in reform people on that team. Just pulling data, anything that's like pulling data and putting it into a system that you understand, like the AIs are very good at. Give you another super quick example. A lot of hotel operators are looking at new deals, right? There's always new deals, and a deal takes a long time to analyze, even initially. Forget going in depth, just initially. One thing we're under contract on a deal right now, and I was like, I don't know if this deal is gonna work out or not. So I literally went to Chat GPT and I went to deep research and I was like, hey, think about buying this hotel. Here's the looplet in this thing, here's everything I'm thinking, here's the initial analysis. Pretend I'm a banker, go make me everything I would need. Just go, and like took 20, 30 minutes, and then it just came out with this insane report that was like, here are all the other closest competitors, here's this, here's that, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've done it a lot of times when we're looking to buy bars or other restaurants and but like build me an insane marketing plan. What, where could I add value? What can I do? So initial things that would have taken me five or six hours, and there are things I totally missed too that I would have never even thought of. It just and then one thing I always do when I'm prompting is be like, what other questions do you have before you start working? Like ask me everything off the go. And yeah, just like you mentioned, Adam, I always use the voice. I think even when I'm in my car, I'll just kind of and then start talking. And so things like today, I was like trying to find entrance paperwork for something, and I was like, Where's this entrance paperwork? And Claude was like, Oh, for this hotel, you have it over here. And I'm like, Oh, totally forgot. This is this. And typically I would have gone to my Gmail, looked through 50 emails to be like, What entrance company did we switch? Did we not? What happened? And Claude was like, Here's this, and they're like, Do you want me to call them? And I'm like, No, we're good.
SPEAKER_01It's working too hard for you. That is just great. So would love to pivot. I'm sure there's some listeners who are like, I've heard enough about AI, but honestly, I think we could talk for hours about this. And there might even be other conversations we have in the future, because I think we're at just the beginning of what AI will come to be and how we can use it in hospitality. So would love to if I could just have one final thought.
SPEAKER_00I would just say have fun with AI. I see everyone else on YouTube doing this insanely cool stuff, and then I get in my mind that after do all this insanely cool stuff and then it doesn't work, and then I'm frustrated. Just have fun with it, man. It's $20 a month. Get the paid version of whichever one you're using and just have fun with it and just start building stuff, and then you'll get better as you use it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Love that. So we'll love to transition in the next few weeks, looks like two weeks at this point. We have a big hotel conference coming up. I believe this is the biggest conference for hotel owners in America. And I'll have the privilege of joining a few people uh at this conference as well. So, Rashmi, as a lifetime member, I would love for you to speak more to the AHOA conference and what it has to offer. You're actually the one who encouraged me to go and listen to the independent hotel track and meet some other independent operators. So I talked to Adam pretty briefly about it, just about the benefit. And he was like, Man, it's a no-brainer. You should definitely go and get contacts for vendors and other operators, learn how other people in the industry who've been doing this their entire life or for a few years are doing it. So I just wanted to maybe get some insight and some thoughts from you about the Ahoa conference and what even inspired you to become a lifetime member.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I joined Ahoa two years ago. It was somebody on Twitter. Back then it was called Twitter, it wasn't X, for sure, yes. They were like, hey, are you going to Ahoa? And I was like, what is Ahoa? And they were like, you should definitely attend. I'm actually an Ahoa ambassador this year, just because the organization's been so amazing. And so Ahoa is an American Asian American Hotel Owners Association. Over 60% of Ahoa, I think all of our members own over 60% of like all of the hotels in the US or some like crazy stat like that. And so anything you need for hotels, they have. They have a really great lobby to fight for a lot of things that we're passionate about. Credit card fees should probably not be at 3%. Is like Ohoa's looking to fight, right? Property taxes are a big one. And so they really look out for the things that we need as hotel operators. But also, if your window breaks at your hotel and you're like, where do I find a window replacement? You can contact your Ahoa ambassador and be like, hey, I have this problem. Can you help me? Ahoa has its own kind of hotel funding source. So they partner with 120 lenders across the country. So you fill out, I think, one application, I just get sent out, and whoever wants it can pick it up. And now your hotel funding. Because that's really hard with SBA. Once you get your first one, it's hard to do multiple SBA loans. Oh, yeah. Today I need a new insurance provider. So I went to the Ahoa website, I went to the director, and I just typed in insurance and I got 10 contacts, contacted three. Two of them already called me back. And then the annual membership is I don't know, two, three hundred dollars. It's nothing insane in my mind. And your local Ahoa will have events every quarter or so. So there's the Western Division, the Eastern Division. And so you can be as involved or as not involved as you really want. And just meeting the coolest people who have done this for a lifetime, they're on the industry trends. And then honestly, I was surprised how differently I thought from a lot of members. I think they've I come in with a very fresh perspective on things. And I think Mike, you and I were talking about this last week. Where I was like, being a new kid on the blog isn't a bad thing. You come in with a very unique perspective, but there's so much knowledge to be learned from all of the key players that have done this for so long. A lot of international vendors come there. So if you're looking to get products shipped from overseas, a ton of them are there. Lowe's will be there, Home Depot will be there. Every franchise hotel is typically there. So think Marriott's, Hilton's, Booking.com. You have problems with any of those, all typically there. And my very favorite part is the food is usually pretty amazing because it's all Indian food. Yay!
SPEAKER_01Excited for that. It's probably one of my favorite parts. I think that's honestly what sold me. You're like, the food is good. I'm like, you know what? I gotta go.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you gotta go. They have some amazing parties, and the community is just so welcoming and always willing to help out. And they're very active on WhatsApp. You can get a hold of anyone at any time, really.
SPEAKER_02That's amazing. And and do you have when you walk into a conference like this, do you have particular goals? Do you preset up lots of meetings? I believe you've found some of your past and current deals through things like this. So, how do you even approach, let's say, if somebody just bought a hotel or they're thinking about a hotel and they want to check this out because it's interesting? Let's say they sign up for one, whether it's this quarter or sometime in the future. What tips would you give a rookie who's kind of walking in for the first time who maybe doesn't have a lot of relationships or connections to others in the room?
SPEAKER_00I always like to go kind of see the agenda beforehand, the independent hotel. You've got kind of seen that one. I was like, Micah, you should definitely be there on Wednesday, right? So check that out. Oh, there's so many vendors on the vendor floor. You definitely have to plan. If you're looking for, I'm just gonna pick randomly silverware, right? If you're looking for forks, know in advance, okay, I'm gonna go to booth B30.
SPEAKER_0217 different fork vendors?
SPEAKER_00Yes, there are. Yes. And so I'll be like, got it. The other thing is you can always find all the vendor information online, but the people are not always gonna be there. So every time I go, I'm like, huh, this is my name. I suppose I have the independent hotel year one. This is what I own, this is what I do. And I talk to so many cool hoteliers who are like, this is kind of what I'm working on. This is the contractor I used. So many cool relationships.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and just to really touch on that, I'm almost certain the previous owner of our hotel is a member of AHOA. I'm not gonna say any names, but he owns quite a few hotels and he is he's been around hotels pretty much his entire life. But anyway, we were having an issue with vendors and being able to source our mattresses and bed frames. And I don't think our bed frames have yet to be delivered for reference.
SPEAKER_02They're coming this week, unfortunately. They're coming.
SPEAKER_01I think they're uh the show we do. I'll I'll believe it when I see it, Adam. But you've you've purchased these mattresses more than two months ago at this point. Yeah, that's right. Still not arrived. Something crossed my mind to just call the previous owner. He's a really nice guy. He helps me out. He understands this is our first hotel. So if I have any questions, he'll help me. But I just asked him if he had a mattress vendor. So he very quickly gave me his mattress vendor, who's a wholesaler for Sirta, who supplies mattresses for six or seven different hotel chains. So we got mattresses for significantly cheaper than we were going to pay, and bedframes. I think our bedframes are about $400 cheaper per bed frame. And our mattresses are like $100 to $150 cheaper per mattress. So this may seem like a very minimal amount, but when you multiply this by 50 doors, this adds up pretty quickly. This is a line item that we're definitely looking at. And I'm certain that there will be other vendors who can offer us much more affordable commercial hospitality grade equipment and FFE or furniture, fixtures, and equipment for those who don't know at this conference. So that's probably one thing I'm really excited for. Outside of the food, the food will be really good, but these vendors are going to last a lot longer than the food will. So very happy to meet vendors in not just uh FFNE space, but also the technology space and any other thing you can think of, I'm sure they'll have there. And just it'll be good to learn from people who have been doing this for so long things that we don't think of. When I told, for example, the manufacturer for the mattresses how much we were paying, he immediately asked me, Why are you paying so much for mattresses? I'm like, I don't know. I thought this is what a good mattress costs. We're getting it from a reputable vendor. And he's no, I can beat that price significantly. The same mattress, the same coil count, same hybrid, yada yada yada. So just wanted to touch on that. So that I think that's probably what I'm most excited about. And I'm sure we'll have some tidbits once I go and learn and meet some people. So I think hospitality is just a great community and everybody's there to really help each other out.
SPEAKER_00And a lot of these contracts you're not gonna find online, right? We just end all this time talking about AI and websites and this. Well, you still can't go to AI and be like, I need to buy 150 mattresses. Where am I gonna go? Right. Yeah, because these vendors aren't online. So that relationship is what matters. And how do you like create a Rolodex for yourself to be like, hey, this is the vendor I go to? And again, like we talked about overseas, but there's tons of cool local vendors in the states here who make custom mattresses and they supply the best hotels in the country, and then there's also some outsource vendors who supply the best stuff to the best hotels in the country. So you get the best roles when you go, and the people are amazing, and I have a great time.
SPEAKER_02I love it, man. It reminded me of a CES and some of these big things. There's always like the flashy, sexy, innovative, cool stuff that captures people's attention. But honestly, a lot of the value for hoteliers, I mean the boring stuff. It's forks and it's mattresses, and it's, you know, can I get a hundred more thread count on my thing at the same price? So your value engineering is the terminology we've heard from some other hotel owners that you just have to pay attention to. You have to manage your margins, you got to reduce costs, but you also have to understand when, where is it valuable to spend a little bit of money to differentiate, to stand out, to not just be a Me Too product. And that's what ultimately excited, I think, both Mike and I, and it sounds like Rosh May you as well, as an independent, is if all of a sudden I was just a country inn and suites, he they give you the coloring book and they just said, yep, this part's blue and this part's white, and like color in between the lines. There's almost no creativity to that. So it is all about asset location and then management, and that's it. But I think when you go the independent or boutique route, like Micah, I think our muralist literally shows up this week and like he's doing this badass painting across, like the we're like tattooing our building. That just would not be possible. So, anyways, when I think about conferences, when I think about technology, it's probably this blend of like high, low or like new and innovative and old and boring. And like you're probably gonna fall somewhere in that spectrum. Pay attention to what you like and what you notice, but push yourself, go to the other side. If you're always next to the new technology booth, go to go talk with the fork guy. If you're only with the fork guy, run over and go see. Like, I met uh a guy at the gym that I work out with. He's friends with a partner who's 3D printing cabinetry there for case goods specifically. They're going, the future is not waiting 12 to 16 weeks to get personalized, customized stuff flat packed from China. It's printing it on demand right next to where you are. And so again, that's it was too expensive. We looked into it, and like a lot of the cool, sexy stuff is just too costly. But, anyways, I think it's just a note to people going to conferences like this. Like, you you're probably gonna be attracted to something. Don't let that consume all of your attention because there's value actually at both sides of this. Knowing when to differentiate and knowing when to save some cash. Yeah. Love that. Dude, look, we could go another nine days, but I'm sure our listeners are like, oh my God, please, you've given us so much today. So AI and ops, we talked a little bit about the great conferences coming up. I can't say ahoa, ahoa to you too, sir. And let us know how it goes. Again, we'll report back. Mike is headed there, Rashmi's headed to several conferences in 2026. This is where deals are had, this is where vendors and relationships are built. So, as cool as AI is, it still matters to travel, to be in the room where it happened. So, anyways, hopefully we inspired you as you're listening in to this episode today. There's some really low-hanging fruit, some immediate, simple things that you can do with AI, more sophisticated stuff coming soon. But also, what events are you going to this next year? Do you got something on your roadmap? If not, check out some conferences like Ahoa or maybe even Boutique Hotel Secrets. We typically have quarterly events where we're meeting live in person or there's an online community. Maybe, I don't know, maybe you live in Fiji. You just can't come to America. Maybe that's cool. You can still sign up and get weekly support, one-on-one coaching, and get around great people like Rashmi and Micah. So, anyways, thank you once again for tuning in. If you've got questions, please DM us, please reach out. Let us know if you've got ideas for upcoming guests or topics that you'd like to hear about. We want to document our own journey, but we want to be valuable for you as well. So I think with that, let me turn it back, Micah Rashmi. Any closing comments today? Uh or if people want to follow you and kind of maybe DM you directly. Where can people reach out? Rashmi?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love everything that you said. By the way, another hotel conference. I'm not sure if I will make it this year. I'm it's on my to-do list. I'm hoping that I can make it. It's called the hospitality show. It was in Denver last year. I believe it's in Miami this year. That is another really good one if you guys are looking. And they typically have an associated section for restaurant and bars that's included in your ticket price. So the whole hospitality spectrum of the conference. And then I hang out on social media at Toasty Indian. Funny enough, I don't really talk about my Hikajan on that, but I do share a lot of my life on there. So I'd love to see you guys on there and answer any questions.
SPEAKER_02How about you, Micah?
SPEAKER_01Nice. Yeah, Micah Invest, the Wesley Hotel, Instagram. We've got the pod. You can follow us on YouTube. We're on all platforms right now. So we'll leave some links in the show notes for all of us. But please follow along, ask any questions. We're documenting everything we're doing in real time, and we're trying to get people from short-term rentals to hotel number one or maybe more than that. So just would love to connect with people who are interested and help some people get some hotels.
SPEAKER_02I love it, man. Okay. And Adam Invest on my side. So you know where to find us. So again, thank you so much for tuning in today, and we'll catch you on the next one. So, ladies and gentlemen, that's the pod. All right, that's it for today on the official Bookie Hotel Secrets podcast.
SPEAKER_01If this helps, be sure to follow or subscribe and send it to someone who needs that bigger push. And if you want the community or the resource and playbook to find what we're learning, the link is the chat. Quick note: we're VHS community members to share our own experiences. And if you have questions or topics you want us to cover, reach out and let us know. We'll build this channel for operating just like this at the end.