The STR industry is 15 years behind e-commerce. We're closing the gap.
CraftedStays is the platform behind high-performing direct booking websites — built for how guests book today, and how they'll discover properties tomorrow. We're applying two decades of e-commerce thinking to an industry that's never had it.
Why this company exists.
A founder story, told straight. No mission statements, no fluff.
I was managing several short-term rental properties in San Francisco when I realized something uncomfortable: Airbnb controlled 90% of my revenue. My mortgage was at the mercy of a policy change I couldn't see coming.
So I figured out direct bookings for myself. It worked. And then I started looking at what other hosts had — WordPress sites built by agencies, template builders that didn't understand hospitality, PMS "website tools" that were glorified brochures. None of it was built to actually sell anything.
That's the whole company, in one sentence. Everything we ship — the booking engine, the analytics, the attribution, the schema markup, the AI-native search we filed a patent for — traces back to a simple idea: a direct booking site should function as commerce, not a digital brochure.
Gil Chan
Founder, CraftedStays · Host, Booked Solid Show
Gil spent 15 years building e-commerce infrastructure for some of the world's most recognizable brands before turning his attention to short-term rentals. He became a host himself, hit the ceiling every Airbnb operator hits, and built the platform he wished had existed.
Three ideas that shape everything we ship.
We didn't arrive at these on a whiteboard. They came out of two decades of watching what works in e-commerce — and what's still missing from the vacation rental world.
A direct booking site is commerce, not a brochure.
Every decision in the platform — booking engine, analytics, attribution, cart recovery — is engineered to turn visitors into bookings. If a page can't sell, it shouldn't exist.
Platforms compound. Projects decay.
A WordPress site is frozen the day it ships. A CraftedStays site gets better every week — automatically, for every customer — because every improvement we make deploys to everyone at once.
The next generation of travelers won't Google. They'll ask.
Discovery is moving to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI assistants. We're engineering for that world — structured data, schema, and a patent-pending natural language property search — so your properties stay findable wherever guests look.
Not a pitch. The numbers.
We ship fast, and the platform gets stronger every week. Here's where we are today.
Operators who treat their portfolio like a business.
CraftedStays is built for professional property managers who understand conversion, attribution, and the long-term value of owning their demand. The operators we do our best work with aren't looking for a pretty website — they're looking for infrastructure they can run a real direct booking business on.
A drag-and-drop builder, or a side-project website you set and forget — we're probably not the right fit.
And that's okay. There are good lightweight tools out there. We're built for the operators who are ready to run their direct booking funnel like a real e-commerce business.
Ready to own your demand?
See what a purpose-built direct booking platform actually looks like. Setup takes about 25 minutes.
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