Person working on a laptop to build a direct booking website using WordPress for property management.
Direct Bookings

How to Build a Direct Booking Website using WordPress

Looking to build your direct booking site on WordPress? Here’s a detailed guide on how to build your site, what hosting services to use, what plugins and themes you need, and some limitations you should be aware of. Owning a direct booking website is essential for short-term rental operators seeking to reduce OTA fees, build guest relationships, and gain control over their business.While WordPress offers flexibility and scalability, building a site from scratch can be a daunting, time-intensive process. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to build a direct booking site using WordPress. Step 1: Secure Your Domain Name When you build a direct booking site using WordPress, you want to first start off buy making sure that you are using securing a custom domain name. This domain name is where your guests will find your site. In this guide we’ll walk you through using a temporary domain to get your site up and running and then registering the custom domain that you purchased. You can read more about why a custom domain is more effective than a provided sub-domain url. Top Domain Registrar Options How to Register and Configure Your Domain Step 2: Choose and Set Up Your Hosting Provider Top Hosting Provider Options How to Configure Hosting 1. Purchase Hosting: Sign up for a hosting plan and link your purchased domain. 2. Set Up Your Site: Log in to your hosting dashboard and choose “Add Website” or “Set Up Site.” Step 3: Install WordPress Now that your have your hosting provider set up, let’s continue to build a direct booking site by installing WordPress. WordPress is a platform used by many agencies and companies to build flexible websites. Why it was born out of a platform to host your blog, many have now used it to build business sites. Though it has it’s limitations and complexities, it can build a beautiful site with a bit of effort. Installing WordPress 1. Choose your hosting location. This will be dependent on the location of your guests visiting your site. In more advanced options, hosting will be spread across multiple data-centers bue most commercial hosting providers only provide one server location so while not optimal pick the one that’s closest to the majority of your guests. 2. Choose Create new website as your option since we’re starting fresh. If you have an existing site you’re taking over you can copy existing site. Keep in mind that this is not often recommended as this does not copy all plugins and data associated with that wordpress instance. 3. Provide the domain that you have registered. Alternatively you can provide a temporary domain to be used. For this guide, we will set up our domain at the end to get through the critical steps to set up the direct booking site. Select your domain and follow the prompts to configure your WordPress installation: 4. Create a Login for this wordpress account. This is different than you Hostinger account. Hostinger is just the hosting provider (the server where you wordpress site lives). You’ll have a different login for your wordpress site for when you make necessary changes and plug-in upgrades. 5. Complete the installation and access your WordPress using the “Admin Panel” button on the hosting provider dashboard Step 4: Set Up and Configure the Homey Theme Why Homey? Homey is a robust WordPress theme for vacation rentals, offering features like built-in booking tools, customizable property pages, and advanced search filters. It makes it an effective way to build your direct booking site using WordPress without needing to design all the logic that goes into building the site. How to Install the Homey Theme 1. Purchase the Homey theme from ThemeForest. Tip: Opt for the extended license so that you get upgrades for this plug-in. These updates are important as they include security patches. 2. Extract the files from the downloaded zip from Themeforest. 3. Navigate to Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme. 4. Upload the .zip file, install, and activate the theme. Install Required Plugins 2. Activate the Plugin after each installation. 3. Repeat this process for all plugins Import Demo Content 1. Navigate to Appearance → Homey Options → Import Demo Data 2. Select the demo layout that best matches your needs (e.g., single property or multi-property). 3. Follow the prompts to import pre-built pages, menus, and content. Be patient, as it can take up to 15 minutes to generate all necessary files. Step 5: Create and Manage Property Listings Now that we have our structure in place we’ll need to add our properties on our direct booking site. When we downloaded the demo data, it provided us with lots of examples on how to provide our property details. Before getting started it might be helpful to browse through some of the examples. We’ll end up removing these later so that we don’t have placeholder properties on our site. Adding Properties 1. Navigate to Listings → Add New in the WordPress dashboard. 2. Fill in details: 3. Remove all other demo listings from the site. 3. Tip: Remember to manually update listings if you add new properties or change your PMS. WordPress does not sync automatically. Calendar and Pricing 1. Login to your front-end dashboard. You do this by visiting your live site and selecting “admin” in the upper right corner. 2. Select “Edit” on one of your listing and access the Calendar tab 3. Set up availability calendars by selecting Import under the “Sync ICal” dropdown menu. 4. Go to your PMS and find the option to export your ical calendar for each property. They’ll provide you with a URL to sync calendars. 5. Enter your iCal URL into the Feed URL option. Tip: The calendar is pulled every 4 hours by default. This does present the slight risk of double booking if someone books before your site pulls the latest changes. Update Pricing Tip: Dynamic pricing tools (e.g., PriceLabs) do not sync automatically with WordPress plugins,

Uncategorized

Maximizing Bookings by Filling Orphan Days with Targeted Offers

Introduction In the world of short-term rentals, filling calendar gaps—often called “orphan days”—can make a significant difference in revenue and occupancy rates. Orphan days are unbooked nights that sit between reservations, commonly created by guest checkout and check-in patterns. These isolated openings can be challenging to fill due to their proximity to other bookings, but with a proactive marketing strategy, they represent an ideal opportunity to drive additional revenue. Why Orphan Days Matter Orphan days reduce overall occupancy and can chip away at your earnings potential, especially if left unaddressed over time. By targeting guests with exclusive offers for these in-between days, you can boost revenue and help ensure a steady occupancy rate. Using built-in triggers in property management systems like OwnerRez makes it easy to automate these targeted offers and keep your calendar filled. Setting Up Your Triggers Most property management systems, including OwnerRez, allow you to set marketing triggers to target orphan days. In our setup, we create a series of scheduled triggers that send out automated discounts at intervals based on how far out the orphan day is from the current booking: • Four Weeks Before Booking: We offer 15% off on adjacent orphan days to guests booked close to these dates. • Two Weeks Before Booking: We increase the offer to 30% off. • Five Days Before Booking: As the date nears, we increase the discount to 50% to maximize the chances of filling the spot. These triggers can be sent through both OTA channels and direct booking emails, expanding reach and increasing the chances of a booking. Example Templates for Orphan Day Offers Here’s the copy we use, which you can easily tailor for your own properties. Four Weeks Before Booking Hi [Guest’s Name], Hope you’re looking forward to your stay at [Property Name]! We just noticed that the night before (arriving [Date]) and night after (departing [Date]) your reservation is still open. Would you like to stay an additional night for 15% off? Two Weeks Before Booking Hi [Guest’s Name], Hope you’re excited about your upcoming stay at [Property Name]! I checked the calendar again and saw that the night before (arriving [Date]) and night after (departing [Date]) your reservation is still available. If you’d like to extend your stay for 30% off, let me know. Five Days Before Booking Hi [Guest’s Name], I wanted to give you a heads up that we still have the night before (arriving [Date]) and night after (departing [Date]) open and are offering 50% off—if those dates fit your schedule! By implementing this approach, you can maximize bookings, increase revenue, and reduce the impact of orphan days on your occupancy. Closing Thoughts Taking a proactive approach to orphan days doesn’t require a complex setup, but it does require strategic use of your property management software. With these templates and a simple trigger setup, you’re well on your way to maintaining a full calendar and improving your bottom line.

Product Updates

Product Launch – New Site Creator Built for Flexibility

We have completely redesigned our site creator and it is now available to our new and existing customers. Over the past eight months, we’ve worked with many prominent property managers and hosts. These seasoned property managers knew what they wanted from their direct booking site and wanted the flexibility to customize their site with greater control. While we launched in January with beautiful and well-performing templates, we knew our product would evolve greatly if we listened to our customers.  After months of redesign and planning, we designed a brand new creator. It was the result of many customer feedback sessions, iterations with our product and design team, and planning sessions with our engineering team. This new creator had to be flexible, scalable, easy to use, and beautiful. We also aimed to provide our customers with the top-notch experience you’d expect from modern web tools. Today, we’re proud to announce our brand new site creator. It’s beautiful and highly functional, and will be the foundation to many new improvements coming in the next few months. We’re just getting started! With this new site creator, you’re able to: You’ll also see many quality-of-life changes like simplified URL structure within your website and simplified navigation in our dashboard. This new creator is live and is available to all existing and new customers. The Timber and Refined templates have received refreshed updates and are included in the new creator. All other templates will be added to the new creator in the next few weeks.  Existing users still have access to their site and are not forced to migrate to the new creator. We’ve kept all the existing features on the old creator under a new legacy version.  Check out a brief tour

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