The concept for the Alex & Annie Vacation Rental Podcast got its start in the middle of the Covid pandemic inside an exclusive Clubhouse group called STR Professionals.
It was a time when vacation rental professionals and others were looking for ways to stay engaged amid quarantines and the mass cancellation of professional networking events.
Annie Holcombe, a vacation rental business development executive based in Panama City, Florida, was one of a core group of industry thought leaders who started hosting topic-specific rooms with special guests once a month in the Clubhouse STR Professionals group.
Clubhouse is a social networking app where participants can have live, unrecorded, and unscripted conversations with experts and thought leaders in different fields.
Conversations on Clubhouse
One month, Annie invited Alex Husner, a vacation rental marketing executive in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to speak as a special guest. Annie and Alex had met a few years earlier at a vacation rental conference in Miami and had maintained a professional and personal friendship.
“We had a really good time [in the Clubhouse room] and after that, we kept the conversation going about how we could do more of this,” Annie said.
Alex later joined STR Professionals as a moderator.
She and Annie often discussed how they wished they could introduce some of the valuable Clubhouse discussion topics to a broader audience of vacation rental professionals. At the time, Clubhouse was an exclusive, invite-only community, though it later opened up to a broader membership.
In spring 2021, Alex and Annie started kicking around the idea of starting a podcast.
“We thought it would be fun to take some of the topics we were talking about on Clubhouse and make them into a podcast because we saw an opportunity to take a deeper dive into some of the brands and people that were coming into the Clubhouse environment,” Alex said during the first episode of the podcast. “The more we talked to people about it we just got so much support.”
An avatar takes shape
In mid-August of that year, Annie and Alex met up at the Data & Revenue Management Conference in Charleston, South Carolina. There, they started playing around on the Bitmoji app to create a cartoon avatar of themselves talking at a microphone. They joked that the avatar would be their logo for their podcast.
Later that month, Alex posted the avatar on social media to wish Annie a happy birthday. She wrote nothing about starting a podcast. But when friends saw the avatar of the two women talking to each other at a microphone, they started asking, “OMG, are you guys doing a podcast?”
“It just sort of took on a life of its own,” Annie said. “So by the time we got to the VRMA conference in San Antonio [in October 2021], we had already in our minds decided to start the podcast but said, well, let’s get some feedback from some people who already do this.”
The decisive moment
During the VRMA conference, Alex went to the restroom when she noticed two women getting ready surrounded by clothes and makeup. She heard one of the women say, “Why don’t we put on our T-shirts that say ‘Ask me about my podcast?’”
The two women were Annette Grant and Sarah Karakaian, co-hosts of the Thanks for Visiting podcast, which started in February 2019.
“‘Oh my god,’ I said, ‘My friend and I are thinking about starting a podcast,” Alex recounted.
She told them she would be back with her friend, then found Annie in one of the lobbies.
“You have got to come meet these girls in the bathroom” Alex told Annie. “Even though that sounds weird, they have a podcast, and they’re going to help us.”
“We just connected with them that day and learned more than we had ever known about podcasting and just made the decision at that point,” Alex said. “Like, you know what, why not? Let’s just let’s give it a whirl. Let’s try it.”
The moments in the bathroom with Annette and Sarah illustrate one of the qualities that Alex and Annie love the most about the vacation rental industry – the people and the mentoring and support they give each other.
Aha moments
In the first episode, Alex and Annie said they wanted to use the podcast to find the “one story, idea, strategy, or decision that led to their guests’ big aha moment.”
They kicked off the first episode of the podcast in November 2021 by talking about one of their own “aha” moments in their careers.
Both women talked about how pivotal it had been for them to have a mentor, after experiencing discouragement from other women early in their careers.
Annie said Russ Smith was one of her early mentors when she worked as director of marketing and business development at Royal American Hospitality in Panama City.
She was part of a team growing the number of rental property management and association management contracts with homeowners and HOAs.
“He let me have my freedom to go out and talk to people and make mistakes and say the wrong thing,” Annie said. “The thing that is great is he never said, you shouldn’t have done that. He asked, what did you learn? What would you do differently?”
Know the value of having someone who just believes in you, she added.
For Alex, an important mentor was Roy Clyburn, owner and founder of Condo-World, where she worked for more than 13 years. He passed away two months before the recording of the first Alex & Annie episode.
“I don’t know where I would be without him. When I moved to Myrtle Beach, I was told by my first bosses I would never rise to a certain level because I had no connections and was new to the area and female,” Alex recounted.
“If not for Roy, I might have believed them,” she said. “He had faith in me that I could do anything and built the confidence that I have till this day.”
Career paths
Their professional paths synchronized in another way, too. They both changed professional roles and companies in the fall of 2022.
In October, Annie took a position as director of business development for the U.S. and Canada at Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy.
A month later, Alex left Condo-World after 13 years and joined Casago property management as chief marketing officer.
Women supporting women
Alex and Annie call themselves “The Real Women of Vacation Rentals.”
One theme in the podcast is the importance of women supporting other women. They want to encourage more women to be mentors in the industry. But it’s important to acknowledge that there are strong men who want to support women to be successful, too, Annie said.
“We want to use the podcast as a means to connect people, uplift people and connect them to the right information or connections and help our listeners have their own aha moments,” Alex said.
Alex and Annie took part in Rent Responsibly Summit: People, Places, and Planet on April 18-19. Access the 2023 STR Sustainability Report and Resource Guide for tons of new industry insights and steps to put into action from the event.
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