Having a direct booking site for your Vacation Rental is the best way to develop a direct relationship with your ideal guests and build your own brand. Using Airbnb, VRBO, Expedia, and other OTAs gives you an instant way to generate revenue with your property, but it comes with its own pros and cons, and we are going to quickly talk about the disadvantages.
Ranking Algorithm: Depending on various factors of your listing and the Airbnb algorithm, your page can perform exceptionally well and appear on the first page, or it may be pushed down to 2-15 pages. You have an 80%+ chance of getting bookings when you appear on the first page, and your chances reduce each time you are pushed to the next page. At ShortRentals AI, we implemented an AI solution for that, which analyzes your listing and gives you actionable insights on how to rank better on the Airbnb SEO algorithm.
Review System: With the new AI integrations Airbnb has for the review system, removing an unfair review, even by having all of the valid evidence, has less than a 30% possibility. You can use ShortRentals AI ReviewRemoval for that, but the result is not 100% guaranteed.
Commissions and Costs: Airbnb and other OTA platforms come with their own cost and commissions.
Guests Direct Contact: There are many costly solutions that require adding extra hardware to your router in order to collect guest emails or phone numbers when they connect to Wi-Fi. Beyond the high equipment and setup costs, this approach often backfires; guests may feel their privacy is being violated by having to share personal data just to access the internet. Additionally, requesting guest contact details outside of the Airbnb platform goes against Airbnb’s privacy policies and can lead to serious issues if reported.
For many hosts, building a compliant newsletter and email list of past guests, so they can promote future discounts and automatically fill booking gaps, is a dream. Unfortunately, Airbnb does not provide any built-in tools to support this.
Building Your Brand: Let's be honest, if you know what you are doing, having a STR business is really profitable. If you are ambitious and your business is growing, you are thinking of having multiple properties of your own or managing someone else's property. In this case, you need to build your own brand to win guests' trust and not be dependent on a single point of failure, which is OTAs' platforms
Obeyin the Rules: You are required to comply with the new rules and changes introduced by Airbnb, VRBO, and other OTA platforms. While these updates can sometimes be beneficial, they may also negatively impact your bookings and overall performance, often leaving you with little control beyond accepting the changes.
After talking about all of the above, you are thinking about what the best solution is to implement my own direct booking site, and this is exactly what we are going to see next.
The idea behind the SiteBuilder came from our in-house need to build our direct booking site for our ideal customers. I'm sure most of you shared this experience, You have a great gusts who took care of your listing like their house, they left and after a while they reached out to you again and asked if your property is available, sometimes we directly talked to them and closed the deal between us by receving a wire transfer, card payment (passing them a Stripe checkout page) or cash paymentn while this is good and you are not paying any comission you are missing a great oppurtunity to scale yoru brand and convert that guests experience to yoru marketing machine for your own site.
While there are some Vacation Rental platforms out there, most of them are not built for the AI era; they are built on top of old, legacy systems with low performance, security issues, integration difficulty with AI, missing modern user experience, and important features for hosts like you.
At ShortRentals AI, we are obsessed with technology and building solutions for hosts with modern era tech to help them save time, money, automate their workflow, and make them more money, and also provide an exceptional experience for their guests with our solutions. Let me walk you through the SiteBuilder quickly, step by step
If you already have an Airbnb listing, the best and quickest way is to click on "Add New Site" and drop your Airbnb listing URL in the form. After clicking on Create Site an AI workflow gets triggered, which analyzes your listing, extracts all of the important information like reviews, amenities, rules, photos, title and description and generates a Unique Selling Point for your site to add it to the hero section and automatically imports all the important information so you don't need to manually input them again. You can also schedule syncing between Airbnb and your direct booking site, so you only need to update Airbnb, and your site gets updated automatically.
After 2 minutes of analysis and creating your site, we got a copy of https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/1267009578086589684 in https://serene-escape.cubite.io
As you see, the hero section is built with all of your existing image galleries, so you don't need to search for where you put those images and import them one by one. The section also includes a title, location, and at the bottom, a USP to convince your visitors that this is the place they should be next
Your site has a booking engine where users can visit, see available dates, and submit a reservation
The rest of the page has the listing description, hosts' information and reputation, house rules, and some CTA to increase your conversion rate
Every site gets its own subdomain of our sitebuilder domain, and you can also input your custom domain and set the DNS records to point to your domain for the site.
Right now, we support Stripe as a payment gateway, and we are releasing a new version to support PayPal and Dodo Payments for hosts all around the world where Stripe is not supported
While we would be more than happy to help you design your site, we implemented a dashboard where you can fully design your site with our branding options, and also a custom css field where you can write css code and apply it to your site. Feel free to use Clause Code or other AI models to write the CSS code and bring it to your site.
Our Frontend system is powered by TailwindCSS and DaisyUI, where you can simply pick the theme name, and it automatically applies colors and changes other stylings like button radius, border width, etc, to change the look and feel of your site.
You can upload a logo, favicon, or even a dark-mode logo of your site, and it applies automatically to the site's user interface
You can add navigational links and buttons to the header of the site by adding text, defining the link type (URL, button, or highlight)
This is the most important part of the setup, while in this section you only see two fields to define the SEO metadata of your direct booking site, a lot of stuff happens in the background
After setting these fields in your browser tab, you should see the title of the tab change to the Meta Title, and both the title, description will show up when someone finds you in the search engine, and the OpenGraph image will be your listing thumbnail or the first image of the gallery.
30% ranking well on SEO and AEO is having high-performing pages. While your site is not a static informative site and has a lot of functionality behind it like Calendar management, payment gateway, and so on, we spend a lot of time on making sure your site will be highly performant for two important reasons
Here is the performance (using mobile phone data) report of the site we created. There is no other vacation rental direct booking site builder that can beat us on the performance score. You can visit the report in the pagespeed insights
Each site comes with an automatically created and updated sitemap, where we automatically update the XML file when you update something in your site. This is crucial to submit to Google Search Console to see SEO insights and also notify Google that you changed something, so they reindex your site
We said performance is 30% of SEO and AEO ranking variable, and backlink and your site authority is at least 60%. This is the most important feature that we offer, and our competition doesn't. When you create your direct booking site with us, we automatically give multiple backlinks from our high authority domain to your custom domain to boost your domain authority, backlinks, and improve your visibility on search engines, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. If you request, we will write a dedicated blog post about your listing, submit it to our Vacation rentals directory and leaderboard
In our experience, backlinking and making your site visible among billions of sites out there is the most difficult part of having a direct booking site, and we have unique solutions that other platforms won't offer, so in summary, we offer
You can easily integrate your site with Google Analytics by dropping your GA4 ID in the following field
Guests can register and log in to your site. See their upcoming or previous bookings and be in touch with you or an AI agent to ask any questions 24/7.
We are implementing new features for security deposit and other AI integration on the Guest side.
Like Many other platforms, we offer Airbnb and other OTAs calendar sync, a way for you to have dynamic pricing, add special offers for specific date,s and block dates
You can easily edit information that is public to guests and add or remove them
While our competitors offer subscription-based pricing, our model is based on one payment for life. No limit on how many listings you can add to a site or how many guests you can have
While we have a lot of features in our list to work on, you and your guests are the most important part of our platform. We love to hear from you about what we are missing or what you would like us to add next to our platform. We love to hear from you, be part of ShortRentals AI roadmap, and reach out to us at [email protected]