booking direct

Protection: We took the better insurance aproach by useing Proper which has a fairly robust liability component built in. We chose not to create more friction for guest by adding a signed agreement. However we use the Hospitable Direct Premium which has a robust guest verification process.

Website: We did buy a URL and use it in our marketing. We are currently useing the Hospitable templates which are very basic but they are working on improving them hopefully soon. We have looked around at third party websites but have not gone that way yet. Most of our direct business are returning guest so it has not been urgent. 

Stratagies: We offder returning guest a discount for utilizing direct. This is a bit of a challenge on Airbnb since you can’t list a url without them flagging it. We also monitor our Google metrics and have a Meta Pixel enbedded that helps us target folks who have visited the site with ads. We need to be better at this but we stay booked at a decent pace so not that urgent currently.

We generaly run 80% OTA bookings 20% direct.

​@alinkhart13 

What we’re currently doing (for context):

• Liability:
  We use Proper Insurance as our primary policy and Safely for damage waivers - no more security deposits.
  We also require our own rental agreement across all bookings, regardless of channel.
• Website Setup:
  We use Houfy as our main site and MarketMySTR (GHL) for landing pages.
  One ongoing challenge: the Hospitable widget still feels pretty outdated in terms of design and flexibility, which makes creating a truly polished UX harder than it should be.
• Direct Booking Strategy:
  A few things that have helped us:
  • Making sure guests can easily search us (property name or company name)
  • Using the same primary image across OTAs and direct site for visual recognition
  • Keeping branding consistent across website, social profiles, and YouTube
  • Building a presence that guests can “verify” outside of OTA platforms

Would love to hear what’s working for you, especially anything that materially improved conversion rates or reduced risk.

Thanks in advance!

Liability - We do not use Proper as they were too pricey in my opinion.  We shopped around and found decent coverage we felt would suffice.  I do use Wister, which is a division of Proper, for my general liability coverage for my PM company.

Website - We bought the domain through Wix and built our site through them at first. Found it was too cumbersome and took too much time to update.  We then went to Crafted Stays.  It is so much easier to add properties and maintain.  Check them out sometime.  May not be feasible with 1 property but is great for our PM business.  Our website is stoneycreekstays.net if you want to see an example of their site.  Please tell them that I sent you if you do decide to onboard with them.

Direct Booking Strategy - We do the same thing as the others.  We use Stayfi to collect email addresses and then send emails to them offering a discount if they book directly with us.