I am the founder of Hostibly.io a direct booking engine and team management tool for short term rental hosts (Airbnb, VRBO etc). I have been working on it for the past 14 months with a few beta users. We recently decided to launch a booking widget you can add directly to your website as a DIY solution, and I wanted to show it off here and get some feedback if possible!
Hostibly was started to address an issue I found when I booked an Airbnb, my host Daniel had one of his cleaners bail on him and he had to rush around to clean the place in time. We got talking about his business when he came to sort it out in person.
He started telling me about the issues he faced, particularly around managing his staff, promoting his listings, getting repeat bookings and all the other side of running an STR business no one tells you about. I offered to find him a solution that he could implement into his business. While researching I realised there are a lot of full-blown PMS systems out there that will do what he wanted however they appeared to be complex and very expensive.
Daniel just wanted a simple system where he could get direct bookings for repeat customers, a unified calendar and a dashboard to manage his team and their cleaning tasks. So I decided to take this project on and out of that Hostibly was born, an affordable direct booking engine and team management tool for hosts.
We envision two kinds of people using our product, one a smaller host who just wants to have their own website and add a booking widget to it so they can start getting direct and repeat bookings. Two larger hosts with multiple listings who want a custom integration with search functionality, other features on their website, and team management tools.
It uses your own Stripe account to process payments, so you don’t have to worry about platform fees or the like, just standard credit card fees. It syncs with iCal links, which while not as reliable as instant API syncing we have found great success in the across 50 listings using this method of syncing bookings. We have been testing and ironing out kinks for many months now, with real people using it to book real holidays!
If you are a host and have been looking for a fee free direct bookings engine or a better way to manage tasks and cleans with your team, please give Hostibly a try! We are still early stages and very keen for feedback!
Please check us out at https://www.hostibly.io/ Demo website for the widget here: https://widgetdemo.hostibly.io/
We have a 14-day free trial with no CC info. Our sign up has the option for you to put in your business info which makes it easier to automatically setup a few things later, but you can skip that if you want!
Thanks, Ryan – Founder P.S any questions feel free to comment or send me an email!