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.
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.
Founder, CraftedStays · Host, Booked Solid Show
Gil Chan spent fifteen years in product at Shopify, Amazon, Square, BigCommerce, and Oracle. His teams built the checkout and commerce infrastructure powering brands like Patagonia, Sephora, Nordstrom, The Home Depot, and Gap.
Ask him to describe the work and he'll say it's about listening hard to customers and then organizing a team to do something about what they hear. That's the part he loves most.
Somewhere along the way, Gil also became a short-term rental host. He kept running into the same problem most operators know by heart. Roughly eighty percent of his bookings funneled through Airbnb and Vrbo. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty cents of every dollar went to platforms he had no control over. He had no real relationship with the guests staying in his properties. When he looked for the same conversion-grade website infrastructure his commerce clients had taken for granted for years, he came up empty. So he started building it.
CraftedStays came out of that. It's the platform Gil wishes he'd had as a host, and the reason he's vocal about how much independent operators give away to OTAs every year. He still tests every release on his own properties before customers ever see them.
Outside of CraftedStays, he's raising two kids with his wife in San Francisco, serving on the executive board of their school's PTA, and hosting the Booked Solid Show.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We ship fast, and the platform gets stronger every week. Here's where we are today.
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.
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.
See what a purpose-built direct booking platform actually looks like. Setup takes about 25 minutes.
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