Direct booking web.

[Huiping S.]

I saw more and more people talking about direct booking of vocation rental. I have more than half year data of our STR, and did some analysis. I am thinking how to start the direct booking.

Can anyone have direct booking already share some information? Such as who developed the web for you, how much of the cost? or the basic process.

Thanks.

Huiping

[Andy Whitcomb]

Having the ability for guests to book directly is an essential component of operating your STR at a professional level. It allows you to reduce your dependance on OTA's like Airbnb and VRBO, which is essential because you never want your business at the mercy of another. They can and will place you in a bad position in favor of guests, or their own best interest (this is especially true of Airbnb).

Taking direct bookings allows you to control the guest experience from start to finish, and it also allows you to "own your customer". Your direct booking site will allow you to capture your customer's information in the form of an email address, which Airbnb will not give you, allowing you to build up a list of past and future guests. This is invaluable! We use our list to promote new listings, updates to our properties, and to send out emails to people who are on our waitlist for last minute openings at our properties. 

We use instagram and other social media platforms, in tandem with influencers, to drive traffic to our website. We haven't done paid ads yet because we haven't needed to, but that could be another great way to drive traffic to your property. 

We use Lodgify, but there are many other direct booking platforms out there like Hostfully, Guesty, Hostaway, etc.  Most offer a service to help you build your site, so no need to hire a website developer. You can, if you prefer not to go through a service like that, but there are a lot of things in the backend you'd need to have in place that these platforms provide; like calendar syncing, guest messaging, etc.