A direct booking website is critical for any successful short-term rental business. Your business can’t afford to rely on listing sites that commonly come with hefty booking fees. Plus, you need the flexibility and control to list rentals in your way.
To boost your bookings, become self-sufficient, and take control of your vacation rental business, you need to rely on your website. And you can’t afford to just have an ugly website that won't convert guests.
You need a beautiful and optimized vacation rental website that you can easily manage. And you need great features like a payment system and a calendar synced with all your channels.
We’ve built an all-in-one property, channel management and automation tool to help property managers scale seamlessly.
You’re probably already convinced you need to accept direct bookings from your website. But what do you need to create a successful booking website?
A user-friendly website is a must-have. Slow loading pages, hard-to-read text, and a lack of images are a nightmare for travellers looking for information.
According to a report from Hubspot, 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive.
If your website’s first impression is mediocre, people will judge your property by association, no matter how beautiful it is in real life.
Your website must be mobile-ready. Travellers are increasingly using their smartphones, tablets, and other devices to make purchases and bookings online.
According to a recent report from ipropertymanagers.com, 50% of all Airbnb users are mobile.
You can't afford to lose 50% of your potential guests because your website doesn’t work on the latest iPhone.
Your website needs robust search engine optimization (SEO) to reach new customers. Search engines like Google scan your business website for specific keywords and use this information to determine your ranking.
Consider which terms people would search for if they were trying to find a vacation rental in your area and add these to your website’s content. For example, if you operate a rental in London, you may want to focus on “Vacation rental in London” or “Short term rental in London”.
You will still promote your listings on websites like Airbnb, VRBO and Booking.com. Keep this in mind as you develop your booking engine. You want to ensure all your channels are connected through one booking engine, so you don’t worry about double-bookings or incorrect prices on each platform.
It is vital to offer a reliable payment option on your website. This is a must-have to gain credibility and run your business. You need to understand how to set this up in a secure way so you gain the trust of your guests, and they feel comfortable entering payment information. Recent government regulations, like GDPR, SCA and DPB are just a few regulations you need to be aware of if you are accepting online payments.
The goal of any booking website should be to get your properties booked. This is your number one goal. You need to ensure your website is user-friendly and makes it easy for visitors to find an available property and book it.
We’ve built an all-in-one property, channel management and automation tool to help property managers scale seamlessly.
So, you are ready to develop your direct booking website. And you know what features and functionality you need to succeed. Now… where to start?
Here are a few questions to ask yourself when creating a direct booking site:
This list can look a bit intimidating. For a website for it to be successful, you need to jump over several hurdles. And it can be very hard to manage by yourself while running the day-to-day business operations.
The team at Uplisting understand you probably aren’t a website expert or developer.
That’s exactly why we created a direct booking engine just for you. No worrying about building it yourself or figuring out how to keep it in sync with all of your other channels.
Spin up your very own custom direct booking pages in minutes with Uplisting. Customers who use our direct booking engine consistently get more bookings and increased revenue.
All you need to do is connect your Stripe account to accept reservations. Everything is hosted by Uplisting, optimised by Uplisting, and monitored by Uplisting.
Guests expect beautiful web pages and intuitive experience. It’s not enough to *just* have a website or regular direct booking pages. Booking pages need to be mobile-responsive, no matter the screen size (desktop, tablet, mobile), straightforward to select dates, book and pay, trustworthy, and feel good.
Curious about how it works? Here’s what you can expect with the Direct Booking Engine:
Listing pages are created automatically as soon as you connect your Airbnb account. Uplisting direct booking pages are:
As always, everything is seamlessly updated and synced through Uplisting to all your other channels. That means no double-bookings, correct prices, payment processing, automated messages, unified inbox, and more.
Uplisting can automatically validate credit cards and securely take payments.
50% of Airbnb traffic in January 2020 was mobile. That’s why Uplisting is completely optimised for mobile with guest-friendly listing pages, booking flows, and high-performing page load speeds.
It’s on Uplisting, so you’ll never get a double-booking; no need to hassle with the technology of making sure it’s in sync with Airbnb, Booking.com and all of the other channels (or lose sleep wondering if you got a double-booking overnight).
We’ve built an all-in-one property, channel management and automation tool to help property managers scale seamlessly.
Are you ready to launch your new booking site with Uplisting? We’ve created some simple steps to get starting right now. Follow the instructions below or view our video the get started today.
* Page loading speeds are critical for optimal conversion rates
For this reason, we want to keep our image files as small as possible without losing quality. We recommend you compress your logo image before uploading it to Uplisting. You can use a service like ImageCompressor to do this easily. Every byte saved helps boost your bookings!
Your logo cannot be:
You can personalise your Direct Booking Engine to use your logo and subdomain.
A subdomain is something other than the usual www at the start of a website URL.
For example, if your company is called London Rental Management, your subdomain may be `london-rental-management`.
Connecting Uplisting to Stripe is simple.
Better experience for your guests, fewer headaches for you and your team. You’ll be set up in minutes with our Direct Booking Pages. Sign up right now, the first two weeks are free!
Check out our guide below to launch your new direct booking website in minutes.
We’ve built an all-in-one property, channel management and automation tool to help property managers scale seamlessly.
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