While onboarding more clients onto CraftedStays, we found that many of them wanted to bring in more content from outside sources onto their direct booking pages. While we have the ability to show reviews in our platform, some customers were already using review services like Revyoos and Reva and wanted to include that into their website. Some of our customers who have built a healthy following wanted to include their Instagram feed using widget services like elfsight and Juicer. Users can now include these elements in their direct booking sites. Simply go to your site creator and add the new HTML section block. You’ll have the ability to add a title to the block and paste the HTML code. We’ve seen some nice uses of this so far with our beta testers. Thank you to our customers that expressed this need.

Our direct booking site serves more than just converting browsers to bookers. As a host, you may want to advertise your cohosting services or provide your guests with more information about the area. To help hosts build a website that represents what they offer and why guests (or even other property owners) may want to choose them, we have introduced Custom Pages.  Now, hosts can add additional pages to their website with the content they want. Our templates will ensure that these pages look beautiful and fit the theme. Furthermore, if you switch themes, these blocks will be updated to accommodate the new theme, so there is no need to rebuild your page. We have included two common block types to start with and will continue to add more to this library based on feedback from our hosts.  This update is now available to all users and templates. For assistance go to this help article. We are excited about this new opportunity for hosts to express themselves using these pages, and we can’t wait to see the block library grow. Thank you for the active community and the continual feedback that allowed us to bring on new features like Custom Pages. 🙏

We’ve been working hard these past few weeks and have made some major improvements on the platform that we wanted to share with you.  Changes in the last few weeks: OwnerRez Partnership Earlier this month we announced our partnership with OwnerRez. Not only can you include their widget on your homepage, you can now sync your properties with CraftedStays (you must have Integrated Sites enabled on OwnerRez). When enabled, any changes that you make to your OwnerRez now not only pushes to your Airbnb/VRBO listing, but will also update your listing on your direct booking site. This also means that if you’re newly onboarding, you can now get setup in as little as 15-minutes.  Improved Onboarding Experience  To help our customers make the most out of our platform, we greatly improved our onboarding experience. When you now log onto your dashboard, you’ll see all the setup steps and see what remains to be completed. Forget to add FAQs, no worries, we’ll show you what’s left. More Customizations We’ve now opened up more of our templates to be customizable. We launched with some great copy to help you get started; but we found that hosts want even greater control over the wording that they used. So now most headlines and copy is now editable by you. Charge low booking fees instead of no booking fees, go ahead and update your copy. Have a more casual voice you use to talk to your guest, use what resonates.  Improved Performance We’ve made a lot of changes behind the scenes to optimize loading time on your images. Simply, we now store multiple versions of your images so that we can optimize image size based on how the customer is viewing the page. Now the site loads much faster. All templates have been updated with this improvement. New Features to Crafted template The Crafted template has been updated to support reviews and long descriptions. Add your reviews on the property page. Click the three dots next to the property. Add any reviews you want to show on your page. On the property edit page in the dashboard, you can now add a “long description”. If you’re syncing OwnerRez, we pull your long description for you. SEO You can now update your SEO information. Don’t worry it’s not that daunting. Go into your Site Settings > SEO. You’re now able to change the title and description of your page that gets sent to Google. This helps guests looking for your site to find you. Spend a moment to update these settings to fit your brand. The major tip here is to use specific terms and descriptions that appeal to your guest avatar when they’re looking for a stay. For instance, vacation rentals in the mountains are generic, instead use Family friendly cabins in the Great Smoky Mountains near Gatlinburg. The more specific you can get, that nails your guest avatar, the better. Use the description to go into more detail. Added bonus is that this text gets used if you ever share your homepage link on social media.  Thanks again for everybody’s support. We’ve gotten lots of great feedback that allowed us to greatly improve the product in a short timeframe. Please continue to provide us feedback and help us spread the word.